Fall 2024

There is at least one highly desirable result of the new turn in China—the “new Chinese man” has suddenly disappeared. He must be communing somewhere with the “new Soviet man” who took somewhat longer making an exit from the stage …

Now I know why I flunked the test given by Vivian Gornick at lunch in a Chinese restaurant. It turned out that she was screening me for an interview to be used in a book she was writing on the …

Roosevelt and Churchill 1939-1941: The Partnership that Saved the West, by Joseph P. Lash. New York: W. W. Norton. 528 pp. For some time, especially during the baleful years of the Vietnam War, there seemed to be little interest in, and …

Perhaps the saddest aspect of socialist history has been the frequent evocation of a right-wing reaction through extremism on the left. No fiercer battles were fought in pre-Hitler Germany than those between Communist Red Front fighters and brownshirted Nazis. But …

The Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Councils, 1905-1921, by Oskar Anweiler. Translated from the German by Ruth Hein. New York: Pantheon Books. 324 pp. Whatever happened to the soviets under which, as Lenin described them, “the masses themselves …

The Rise and Fall of American Communism, by Philip Jaffe. Introduction by Bertram D. Wolfe. New York: Horizon Press. By a quirk of history Stalin chose the American Communist party, surely one of the least significant parties in the scheme …

The military rulers of Portugal have decked their regime in ideological trappings that recall bygone times. They have warned the newly legalized parties of Portugal that “bourgeois democracy” is suspect, while “socialist democracy” is the real McCoy. This makes even …

Some rather hard-headed observers, not ordinarily given to the strategy of appeasement as a means of achieving peace, have been heard to argue recently that increasing contacts with the Soviet Union, especially expanded trade, will encourage the Soviets to assume …

THE CZECHOSLOVAK POLITICAL TRIALS, 1950-1954, edited by Jiri Pelikan. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 360 pp. $10.95. During that remarkable spring of 1968 when most Czechoslovak Communists were striving toward a “socialism with a human face,” the Party leadership set up …

Both President Nixon and Chairman Mao have confessed to failure. While neither has admitted to bankruptcy of past policies, both have executed 180-degree turns. Our line and their line have changed again. This turning point in the relations among world powers …

We didn’t need the Pentagon Papers to find out that the war was wrong. It was wrong when the French fought to retain their control of Indochina, and when President Truman gave them military aid for their colonial war. It was …

After the 1956 upheavals in the Communist world, and with the open outbreak of conflict between the Soviet and Chinese regimes, it became difficult to maintain the old belief that Communism was unvaried and unchanging. Yet, no matter how much …

There’s a beguiling quality to the style of Fidel Castro. Surely we have never known another Communist chieftain like him. Here is a leader in the Soviet Union’s “family” of nations, hailed in Moscow each May Day, who yet lashes …