All posts by sz szilu84

Events in Eastern Europe could revitalize leftist scholarship

The failure of the East European (Russian) model is not the failure of the left wing, with the disappearance of the bloodthirsty ghost it is the right wing which looses its arguments. At American universities a new upswing of the left can be expected. The peoples of Eastern Europe long for a welfare social society rather than the model of the existing capitalism.

The original article is in The Chronicle of Higher Education April 1990.

The “two souls” of bolshevism – Interview with Ákos Szilágyi

Szilagyi expounds that bolshevism had two, equally rationally com-mited „souls", two determining trends-one realistic and another one, the romantic. (The two types are personified by Lenin and Trotski.) But neither had anything to do with Stalin: with him and his "irrational realism" a representative of the lumpen strata appeared in power. Szilagyi points to the relationship between the Trotski line and the avantguarde Russian art of the 1920s and the logic of destroying the two together by Stalin.

Do we know where we are heading? Review of the Soviet Union’s current political movements

The analysis tries to review and group the political trends of the multiparty system in the Soviet Union which exists in a very initial form as yet, and it separates the the different phases of the emergence of a multi-party system. It states that the Soviet Communist Party which cannot be classified as a party for quite some time, involves the most different forces and when these are separated, this party will not have a future any more. The main political forces in the Soviet Union, too, include the national-conservative, the liberal-bourgeois and the labour-socialist (and the „vanguard" which is being pushed into the back). The author's sympathy is with the future party of the workers which, however, is still far from being able to mobilise masses of people.