‘A Party of the Extreme Left’

2019 ◽  
pp. 169-206
Author(s):  
John Mulqueen

The Irish minister for justice, Patrick Cooney, in 1976 identified two threats to the state: the ‘Sino-Hibernian’ Official republican movement and the Provisional IRA. ‘Harsh laws’ to counter subversion would be widely welcomed, he claimed. The Official movement’s leadership now openly endorsed the Soviets’ agenda. This chapter focuses on the Official IRA’s determination to build a political party that stayed close to the Soviet Union but opposed its support for the Provisionals’ ‘prison war’ – the campaign to restore ‘political status’ for newly-convicted paramilitary prisoners. Now advocating ‘peace, work and class politics’ as the solution to the northern crisis, the Official movement’s political creation, Sinn Féin The Workers’ Party (SFWP), abandoned the traditional left-wing republican ‘anti-imperialist’ position. Ironically, this involved the party analysing the situation in the north along the same lines as the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher.

Author(s):  
Alexandra Gerena Cubbon

Winston Churchill was British Prime Minister twice during his eventful political career. Churchill initially served the British Empire as a soldier in the Caribbean, India, and Africa during the imperial wars of the 1890s. His political service began in Parliament in May 1904 when he joined the Liberal Party and became undersecretary at the Colonial Office (1905). Prime Minister Herbert Asquith promoted Churchill to the Home Office and, in 1911, appointed him First Lord of the Admiralty. After briefly resigning from politics, Churchill returned in 1917 as an ardent anti-communist, joining the Conservatives in 1924, the year he became Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was again appointed First Lord of the Admiralty following the outbreak of World War II and became Prime Minister for the first time in May 1940. As Prime Minister during the war, Churchill relied on vigorous nationalist rhetoric to rouse his compatriots against Germany. Although defeated in the general election of 1945, he continued to speak and publish, delivering his famous "iron curtain" speech at Fulton College in Missouri on March 5, 1946. A lifelong anti-communist, he used this particular speech to emphasize the ideological gulf between the democratic, liberty-embracing West and the Soviet Union. Churchill again served as Prime Minister from 1951 until 1955.


2016 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. E7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rohaid Ali ◽  
Ian D. Connolly ◽  
Amy Li ◽  
Omar A. Choudhri ◽  
Arjun V. Pendharkar ◽  
...  

From February 4 to 11, 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States, Soviet Union Premier Joseph Stalin, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met near Yalta in Crimea to discuss how post–World War II (WWII) Europe should be organized. Within 2 decades of this conference, all 3 men had died. President Roosevelt died 2 months after the Yalta Conference due to a hemorrhagic stroke. Premier Stalin died 8 years later, also due to a hemorrhagic stroke. Finally, Prime Minister Churchill died 20 years after the conference because of complications due to stroke. At the time of Yalta, these 3 men were the leaders of the most powerful countries in the world. The subsequent deterioration of their health and eventual death had varying degrees of historical significance. Churchill's illness forced him to resign as British prime minister, and the events that unfolded immediately after his resignation included Britain's mismanagement of the Egyptian Suez Crisis and also a period of mistrust with the United States. Furthermore, Roosevelt was still president and Stalin was still premier at their times of passing, so their deaths carried huge political ramifications not only for their respective countries but also for international relations. The early death of Roosevelt, in particular, may have exacerbated post-WWII miscommunication between America and the Soviet Union—miscommunication that may have helped precipitate the Cold War.


2010 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 425-441
Author(s):  
Margaret Siriol Colley

AbstractA short biography of Gareth Jones, Foreign Aff airs Adviser to British Prime Minister Lloyd George and an early visitor to the Soviet Union, who exposed the Ukrainian famine and daily life under communist rule, Fragments of his letters and a 1930 article in the New Chronicle are included.


Author(s):  
John Mulqueen

This book focuses on the strand of the Irish republican left which followed the ‘alien ideology’ of Soviet-inspired Marxism. Moscow-led communism had few adherents in Ireland, but Irish and British officials were concerned about the possibility that communists could infiltrate the republican movement, the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Another concern arose for British and American observers from 1969: would the Soviets resist the temptation to meddle during the Northern Ireland Troubles and cause trouble for Britain as a geo-political crisis unfolded? The book considers questions arising from the involvement of left-wing republicans, and what became the Official republican movement, in events before and during the early years of the Troubles. Could Ireland’s communists and left-wing republicans be viewed as strategic allies of Moscow who might create an ‘Irish Cuba’? The book examines another question: could a Marxist party with a parliamentary presence in the militarily-neutral Irish state – the Workers’ Party (WP) – be useful to the Soviets during the 1980s? This book, based on original sources rather than interviews, is significant in that it analyses the perspectives of the various governments concerned with subversion in Ireland. This is a study of perceptions. The book concludes that the Soviet Union had been happy to exploit the Troubles in its Cold War propaganda, but, excepting supplying arms to the Official IRA, it did not seek to maximise difficulties whenever it could in Ireland, north or south.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (5) ◽  
pp. 16-23
Author(s):  
Boris Guseletov ◽  

The article analyzes the phenomenon of the emergence and development of a new pan-European political Party of the European left in the political arena. Its forerunner was a Forum of the new European left, formed in 1991, close to the Communist and workers’ parties and the group «European United Left – Nordic Green Left» in the European Parliament, which emerged in 1995 through the merger of «Confederal Group of the European United Left» faction of environmentalists «Left-wing Green of the North». Many experts viewed these parties as a vestige of a bipolar world, and believed that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, they should finally disappear from the political arena of Europe, giving up the left flank to the socialists and social Democrats. However, European Communists and left-wing radicals demonstrated incredible political vitality and in the tenth years of the twentieth century in a number of EU countries (Greece, France, the Czech Republic) managed to bypass their opponents on the left flank. In 2004 a pan-European party of the European left was created, which is characterized by a commitment to unorthodox Communist and environmental values and a moderately eurosceptic view of the EU’s development prospects. In the last European elections in 2019, this party lost some ground, but nevertheless managed to maintain its small faction in the European Parliament. So today it is difficult to speak about prospects of the European left, although the strength of parties in Germany, Greece, Spain, France and other countries, as well as the weakening of the party of European socialists, gives us reasonable confidence in the fact that the radical left will be able to maintain its presence on the political stage of Europe in the next 10-15 years. The author of the article tried to identify the causes of this political force and its future prospects.


2019 ◽  
pp. 139-168
Author(s):  
John Mulqueen

In 1974 the Russian embassy opened in Dublin and the Irish foreign minister visited the Soviet Union in 1976. The American ambassador to Ireland used a Cold War prism when he expressed concerns that the Soviets in Dublin might pose an espionage threat to NATO. This chapter focuses on the increasingly pro-Soviet Official republican movement and its relationship with the Russian embassy in Dublin. Northern Ireland’s Troubles in the mid-1970s constituted the most pressing security issue for those concerned with Irish affairs, and inter-republican violence, involving the Official IRA, contributed to the crisis. The Northern Ireland Office (NIO) perceived the left-wing republican movement as being linked with Moscow-backed ‘terrorist organisations’ worldwide. The northern secretary, Merlyn Rees, described the increasingly peripheral Official movement as posing the most serious subversive threat because it had a ‘coherent philosophy’, unlike the Provisional IRA.


2017 ◽  
Vol 922 (4) ◽  
pp. 48-57
Author(s):  
V.L. Kashin ◽  
N.L. Kashina

Biographic information about the veteran of geodetic service of the Soviet Union Tamara Aleksandrovna Prokofieva is provided in this article. On January 1, 2017, she turned 96 years old. T. A. Prokofieva’s biography is in many respects similar to destinies of her age-mates who met the Great Patriotic War on a student’s bench. In 1939 she entered the Moscow Institute of Geodesy, Aerial Photography, and Cartography. Since then all her life was connected with geodesy. In this article we use Tamara Aleksandrovna’s memories of a communal flat of the 1930s, peripetias of military years, of the North Caucasian and Kazakh aero geodetic enterprises where she worked with her husband Leonid Andreevich Kashin who held a number of executive positions in geodetic service of the USSR in the post-war time.


Author(s):  
Ivan V. ZYKIN

During the years of Soviet power, principal changes took place in the country’s wood industry, including in spatial layout development. Having the large-scale crisis in the industry in the late 1980s — 2000s and the positive changes in its functioning in recent years and the development of an industry strategy, it becomes relevant to analyze the experience of planning the spatial layout of the wood industry during the period of Stalin’s modernization, particularly during the first five-year plan. The aim of the article is to analyze the reason behind spatial layout of the Soviet wood industry during the implementation of the first five-year plan. The study is based on the modernization concept. In our research we conducted mapping of the wood industry by region as well as of planned construction of the industry facilities. It was revealed that the discussion and development of an industrialization project by the Soviet Union party-state and planning agencies in the second half of the 1920s led to increased attention to the wood industry. The sector, which enterprises were concentrated mainly in the north-west, west and central regions of the country, was set the task of increasing the volume of harvesting, export of wood and production to meet the domestic needs and the export needs of wood resources and materials. Due to weak level of development of the wood industry, the scale of these tasks required restructuring of the branch, its inclusion to the centralized economic system, the direction of large capital investments to the development of new forest areas and the construction of enterprises. It was concluded that according to the first five-year plan, the priority principles for the spatial development of the wood industry were the approach of production to forests and seaports, intrasectoral and intersectoral combining. The framework of the industry was meant to strengthen and expand by including forests to the economic turnover and building new enterprises in the European North and the Urals, where the main capital investments were sent, as well as in the Vyatka region, Transcaucasia, Siberia and the Far East.


1978 ◽  
Vol 17 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 739-757 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vijay Sen Budhraj

At a Press conference held soon after assuming office as Prime Minister on 24 March 1977, Morarji R. Desai said that his Government would follow a policy of “proper non-alignment”. He also said that his Government would not wish to have any “special” relations with any one country. Obviously he had the Soviet Union in mind when he made this observation; for it is often asserted that the 20-year Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Co-operation between India and the Soviet Union signed in August 1971 had established “special” relations between the two countries. Commenting on this treaty, the new Prime Minister said that if it meant that India should not have friendship with other countries, then it would have to change. “At least we will not act upon it in that manner.”1 Again, four days later, addressing the first joint session of the sixth Parliament, the Acting President stated that the new Government would “follow a path of genuine non-alignment”. This article is an attempt to explain what led to the establishment of “special” relations, why there were hints about a change in these relations when those whom Indira Gandhi had jailed replaced her in office in March 1977, and what actually happened thereafter. It is also an attempt to explain why the Janata Government continued the policy of friendship with the Soviet Union and to assess the elements of continuity and change in Indo-Soviet relations.


2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 16-17
Author(s):  
Fuad Ismayilov

Azerbaijan is a nation with a Turkic population which regained its independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It has an area of approximately 86 000 km2. Georgia and Armenia, the other countries comprising the Transcaucasian region, border Azerbaijan to the north and west, respectively. Russia also borders the north, Iran and Turkey the south, and the Caspian Sea borders the east. The total population is about 8 million. The largest ethnic group is Azeri, comprising 90% of the population; Dagestanis comprise 3.2%, Russians 2.5%, Armenians 2% and others 2.3%.


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