communist Archives

July 10, 2023 wezg

Review: Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia To Confront The West – by Keir Giles

I am a new member of Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, in London. On a recent visit, I made use of the vast resources of a very well-stocked library at Chatham House and this book is the

June 18, 2023 wezg

Guerrilla Heroico

The Cuban Revolution was an earth-shattering event with huge consequences internationally, not just in Latin America, but further afield. I felt the impact myself whilst travelling across Scandinavia in 2005. I’d run out of clean underwear and, while scanning the

May 27, 2023 wezg

Happy 100th Birthday Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger is a political heavyweight. Of that there can be no doubt. Even the harshest of this US politician-come-guru, Henry Kissinger’s critics will have to admit that he is just that – a veteran in the ring of international

May 8, 2023 wezg

Review: The Origins of Totalitariansm – by Hannah Arendt

This book is quite old, first published in 1951, it dates from a period when the totalitarian reality of Hitler and Stalin were very much fresh in the mind. Hannah Arendt was a German Jew and this work is both

March 23, 2023 wezg

Review: Red Horizons – The True Story of Nicolae & Elena Ceausescus’ Crimes, Lifestyle, and Corruption – by Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa

I was just chatting away to Ionutz a security nurse in the local mental hospital and he’s Romanian. I passed through Bucharest a few years ago en route to Istanbul on a train journey traversing Eastern Europe. Romania seemed quite

March 19, 2023 wezg

Review: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Under the premiership of Nikita Khrushchev there was a post-Stalin easing of oppression emerging from the Kremlin and a Cold War ‘Victorian’ Ice Age thaw for writers allowed this remarkable, unique, little tale to unbelievably evade the censor and make

March 19, 2023 wezg

Review: The Master and Margarita – by Mikhail Bulgakov

I read a lot of Russian literature and am becoming a bit of an aficionado. This book was first recommended to me by an ex-girlfriend from Serbia and it’s taken me a while to actually get around to completing it

February 4, 2023 wezg

Review: Our Man in Havana – by Graham Greene

Graham Greene delivers here a classic espionage novel, fiction, set in Cuba around the time of the revolution, Greene writes in his knowledgeable subject area of expertise a comedy account of a chance vacuum salesman being recruited by Mi6 as

February 4, 2023 wezg

Review: War and Peace – by Leo Tolstoy

‘War and Peace’ needs no introduction. It holds its place in the minds of contemporary society as a literary classic. One cannot pick up a newspaper article on great books without a passing mention of Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece. Like other

January 14, 2023 wezg

Review: The Dragons and the Snakes – How The Rest Learned to Fight The West – by David Kilcullen

This is one of the very best books I have ever read. It is up to date material and full of cutting edge military theory and ideas and I believe is critical essential reading for any politician or military personnel,

January 14, 2023 wezg

Review: The Dragons and the Snakes – How The Rest Learned to Fight The West – by David Kilcullen

January 12, 2023 wezg

Review: The Motorcycle Diaries – by Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara

I’ve read three of Che Guevara’s other books, the theory on guerrilla warfare and the diaries of his campaigning in the revolutions of Cuba and Bolivia. The Motorcycle Diaries precede these other critical works and document Che’s travels across Latin

December 8, 2022 wezg

Review: Life After Dark – A History of British Nightclubs & Music Venues – by Dave Haslam

I got excited when this book arrived on my doorstep. At first glance it has all the key ingredients for a great book. Hacienda DJ author, history of British nightclubs – I expected lots of gory detail and exciting anecdotes

December 8, 2022 wezg

Review: Red Notice – How I Became Putin’s No.1 Enemy – by Bill Browder

There is irony in this tale as Bill Browder was following in his grandfather’s footsteps in some ways but was also radically poles apart. Browder’s grandfather had stood for Presidential election in the USA on a Communist ticket. Bill Browder

November 19, 2022 wezg

Review: Russians Among Us – Sleeper Cells & The Hunt for Putin’s Agents – by Gordon Correra

I’ve read Gordon Correra’s previous work in espionage literature and for this reason I was drawn to seek out this new offering. In the current climate of the Russian invasion of Ukraine under ex KGB spy, Vladimir Putin, I felt

November 19, 2022 wezg

Review: Memoirs – by Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev was one of the most influential and critical figures of the twentieth century. When I was growing up in the 1980s he was part os a set of international world leaders that seemingly had much more influence over

October 14, 2022 wezg

Review: A Great Perhaps? Colombia: Conflict and Convergence – by Dickie Davis, David Kilcullen, Greg Mills and David Spencer

David Kilcullen has had a few books included on my shelf recently. As a military expert on Guerrilla Warfare, I was thrilled to find this new book on the Colombian Civil War which he coauthors with a group of specialists

October 14, 2022 wezg

Review: A Great Perhaps? Colombia: Conflict and Convergence – by Dickie Davis, David Kilcullen, Greg Mills and David Spencer

October 14, 2022 wezg

Review: Hidden Hand – How The Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping The World – by Clive Hamilton & Mareike Ohlberg

As a committed sinophile, this recently written book seemed a necessity. As China continues its rise to being the most dominant national force economically on the planet, it is quite difficult to obtain meaningful and relevant and unbiased factual information

October 6, 2022 wezg

Review: Stasiland – Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall – by Anna Funder

The Stasi were the brutal secret police in the GDR (German Democratic Republic) or East Germany. After the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, East and West Germany once again became reunited.

March 15, 2021 wezg

Review: Prison Writing of Latin America by Joey Whitfield

Joey is a teacher of mine at MLANG in Cardiff University. This is his first book. It explores prison writing in Latin America and looks at abolitionism of the penal system and draws on some really rather delicate themes that

March 11, 2021 wezg

Review: Even Silence has an End – My six years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle – by Ingrid Betancourt

November 9, 2018 wezg

Review: Mao Tse-tung on Guerrilla Warfare

Having covered Che Guevara’s thoughts on Guerrilla Warfare I was keen to visit those of Chairman Mao. After guiding the Communist Party on its 6000 mile Long March across China, Mao Tse-tung united with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces in order

January 12, 2018 wezg

Review: Memoirs of a Revolutionary – by Victor Serge

This is one of the most remarkable books I have ever read, a first witness account of some of the most important world events of the first half of the twentieth century, a rich period for revolutionary events and the

October 19, 2017 wezg

Review: Marxism and the French Left – by Tony Judt

This is an in depth study of socialism in France. The book is broken up into a series of long chapters, each covering a critical period of the political left in France. The emergence of working class political culture in

December 5, 2016 wezg

Account For The Nationalist Victory In The Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil War lasted for three years from 1936 to 1939 and was ultimately won by the Nationalists. This victory was far from certain at various points of the conflict and this essay shall explore the many factors that

January 12, 2015 wezg

Guerrilla Heroico

Discuss how textual and visual representations of the Rebel Army during and after the Cuban Revolution contributed to the myth of the heroic guerrilla in Latin America. The original iconic 1968 stylized ‘Guerrilla Heroico’ Che Guevara imagecreated by Jim Fitzpatrick,

January 12, 2015 wezg

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