By our times, the liberal-social democratic project of emancipation has been exhausted. The modernisation of male-female relation is under way, although this is now related to teh process of commercialisation. The latter has a differentiated impact on certain groups of women.

Can the figure of the sambista be a Brazilian form of what Antonio Gramsci called "socialist bodies"? Is there a "political manifest" in the figure of the sambistas? If this so, how does the sambista represent an organism, which Gramsci called "political party"?

In the summer of 1996 President Boris Yeltsin ordered a new Russian national ideology. Those who undertook the implementation of the ukaz looked back to philosophers long forgotten and to characteristics of the Russian people one could have thought to have been eliminated from society.

The attempt to restructureSoviet society in the late 1980s, known as perestroika, included a good deal of left-wing elements. The paper explores the international context of the degeneration of this process, which have led to one of teh major social disasters of our century.

In recent years we have experienced various extremes in the assesment of the 1919 Soviet Republic of Hungary. a leading Hungarian historian, member of the Academy of Sciences, asks whether it is possible to provide a balanced picture about that very important period of Hungarian history.