SOVIET UNION

IVAN KOZHEDUB—In the 1930s, the Komsomol (Young Communist League) was a patron of aviation and, naturally enough, we were all crazy about flying. I remember well the words of my school teacher: ‘Choose the life of an outstanding man as a model, and try to follow his example in everything.’ For me, a boy of 16, and for thousands of other Soviet teen-agers, the famous pilot Valery Chkalov was such a man. The whole world admired his bold long-distance flights in the Tupolev ANT-25, such as his 1936 flight from Moscow to Udd Island, Kamchatka–9,374 kilometers in 56 hours, 20 minutes–or his shorter but more hazardous flight of 8,504 km in 63 hours, 16 minutes from Moscow to Vancouver, Wash., via the North Pole, on June 18-20, 1937. He was also a fearless test pilot, and it was during a test flight that he lost his life on December 15, 1938.

He wore the same draped coat, gray raincoat, and old-fashioned suit. He always wore galoshes in chilly weather. But no one could accuse Mikhail Andreyevich of being dirty. Once at one meeting, Brezhnev even joked: “Why don’t we chip in, comrades, for a new suit for Mikhail Andreevich?” Suslov accepted the criticism of his comrades and the next day came in a new suit.

And for what purposes, you may ask, did he spend his salary as a member of the Politburo? “It’s for charity. I transferred them to orphanages and hospitals. I bought books for the library in my homeland.” He helped build the memorial at Piskarevskoye Cemetery.

The “Global War on Terrorism” is a complex and intricate intelligence construct. The covert support provided to “Islamic extremist groups” is part of an imperial agenda. It purports to weaken and eventually destroy secular and civilian governmental institutions, while also contributing to vilifying Islam. It is an instrument of colonization that seeks to undermine sovereign nation-states and transform countries into territories. 

CALEB MAUPIN—Caleb’s chat has important segments dedicated to the twisted peculiarities of Trotskyism, which he correctly denounces as essentially a form of petit-bourgeois anarchistic ultraleftism that objectively always finds itself on the wrong side of anti-imperialist struggles. Trotsky, who despised the Russian peasantry as a backward and semi-Asiatic mass, always insisted  on the need for a “permanent revolution”, a concept related to classical Marxism assigning the central role of revolution to “white” Western Europe, a proposition refuted by Lenin in his analysis of imperialism.

CALEB MAUPIN—Forerunners of the “color revolutions”, Caleb discusses the CIA-supported Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the Czech “Prague Spring” of 1968, the latter term symbolising the coming in from the frozen cold of communist tyranny. Every nation that heeded the capitalist siren song of the West became a corrupt neoliberal regime, warns Caleb. And each of these regimes were at the time of their birth hailed as great improvements over communism by many people who still define themselves as being anti-imperialist and “on the left”.