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The Soviet Union's ‘nationalities problem’ was one of the fundamental hurdles that Mikhail Gorbachev failed to clear in his attempt at systemic transformation of the USSR. Less understood, and far less studied, was Gorbachev's ‘federalism problem’. The institutional weaknesses of Soviet ‘federalism’ presented serious obstacles to would‐be reformers of the political system as well as to opponents of reform. After 70 years of Soviet rhetoric, there was deep confusion over just what terms like ‘federal’ or ‘sovereignty’ really meant. Efforts to construct a ‘renewed’ USSR and a new Russian Federation were deeply constrained by Soviet institutions and concepts.

This chapter sketches key contexts (both global-political and scholarly) for the research presented by this book. By way of introduction to the individual chapters in the book, a number of connecting preoccupations are identified: debates over artistic experiment and populism, and over the handling of cultural difference; the diverse motivations for communist organisations to become involved in music, and their anxieties about such an involvement; attempts made to evade the grasp of political and economic structures (state and commerce especially) that communists typically opposed; and experimentation in alternative forms of musical practice that were imagined better to reflect communist ideology. The irreducible plurality of positions staked out by communist musicians and groups is emphasised.

This chapter begins by discussing misconceptions about the Soviet Union that stem from the substitution of a struggle of leaders for power. It explains Marxism and Leninism ideologies. It stresses that personal dictatorship, occasionally modified by a narrow oligarchy of a few, became the standard form. It discusses that the Soviet Union became divided into fifteen union republics and, within them, over a hundred smaller subdivisions, based again on the ethnic principles. It clarifies that during some seventy-five years of Communist rule, the Soviet people, particularly Russian people believed in Marxism and Leninism, to different depths and degrees of comprehension.

Since his death in the 1950s, most of the narratives of Harold Laski’s anti-imperialism have been mostly biographical rather than scholarly. Chroniclers and historians alike often found his genius and contribution amongst his protégés such as Krishna Menon, H.O. Davies, and other post-colonial leaders. In addition, explorations of his political theories paid little attention to his contributions to critiques on imperialism; in fact, his critics often interpreted Laski’s stand on imperialism as unoriginal. This chapter analyses two of Laski’s works on imperialism: a 1932 chapter entitled ‘Nationalism and the Future of Civilisation’ and a 1933 chapter called ‘The Economic Foundations of Peace’. The first section of the chapter analyses his theory of sovereignty and his critique of the ideological ‘habits’ that condition liberal society. The second section contends that Laski’s theory of sovereignty resulted in his framing of imperialism within Leninist terms as a dialectical relationship between the habits of sovereignty and the habits of imperialism. The chapter suggests that Laski’s thinking on imperialism resembles less a truncated Leninism than it does a critical analysis of the way ideology can obscure domination and disciple subjects. It also reveals Laski’s contradictions due to his political activism and commitment to democracy.

Cuba always had a small but influential Marxist-Leninist movement. It was, however, highly dependent on the U.S. Communist Party for ideas and funds. This propensity to dependence continued as U.S. invasions and embargoes pushed the Castro regime into a tight alliance with the USSR and later with Venezuela. Because the economy has not prospered, large numbers of influential organic intellectuals are now advocating serious changes in the economic model. This, plus changes in U.S. attitudes toward associations with Cuba, appear to be harbingers of improved relations, which should make future changes in the ideological and economic orientation of Cuba possible.

With Marxist-Leninist ideas and plans shaped in England and Trinidad, a small group of intellectuals calling themselves the New Jewel Movement began to oppose the erratic regime of Eric Gairy in Grenada. Knowing that they had no chance of an independent electoral victory, they joined a broad popular coalition of parties opposed to Gairy. Their plan was to position themselves for a swift coup d’état, and it succeeded magnificently. With Cuban and Soviet help, they began to establish a fully militarized state and society. As the economy (heavily indebted because of the building of a major airport) began to fail, the Marxist Party split between a Stalinist, militarist wing, led by Bernard Coard, and a group more open to moderation and negotiation with the United States, led by Maurice Bishop. In an open clash, Coard’s heavily armed faction imprisoned and executed the popular Bishop and many of his cabinet members. An American invasion put an end to any plans to establish a military dictatorship.

This chapter discusses how the meshing of the African-American culture of opposition and a Stalinist version of Marxism-Leninism contributed to the growth and survival of the Communist Party in Alabama. It first explores how a Maxist pedagogy in Birmingham and rural Alabama altered black working people's self-definition and pre-existing worldview. It then turns to the traditions of resistance blacks brought to the Party, examining how these modes of opposition affected collective and individual action and dialectically fused with Left culture. Finally, the chapter deals with the complexities and ambiguities of black radical opposition by looking at conflict within the black community and Communists, clergy, and black middle class spokespersons.

Chapter 1 reaffirms the historical importance of political prisoner and martyr Saïda Menebhi, who died in prison after her hunger strike in 1977. However, unlike previous studies that emphasize Menebhi’s biography, my analysis also focuses on her writings, particularly the inscription of the people and the revolution in her poetry and unfinished essay on female prostitution. In doing so, the chapter uncovers the nego-feminist strategies Menebhi used to circumvent restrictive sociocultural gender norms of the 1970s and feminize and localize the internationalist and seemingly genderless Marxist-Leninist ideology. The chapter also identifies aspects that make Menebhi a trailblazer who provided Moroccan women with a narrative and a political model for the construction of a feminine testimonial voice and feminist aesthetics.

The first section of this chapter describes Stalin and Soviet foreign policy, including ideology and criminality. Like German war aims, those of the Soviet Union in the Second World War were largely decided by one man operating within an ideology, though Soviet Marxism–Leninism was less the leader’s own construct than German Nazism was Hitler’s. The second section examines themes of caution and continuity in Russian/Soviet aims in two areas of direct concern: the regions of the Danube delta and the Straits between the Black Sea and the Aegean and the Mediterranean, and of the Baltic and Scandinavia. Succeeding sections consider Soviet aims in central Europe (including Germany and Poland) and how the Soviet Union visualised its postwar relationships with its two great wartime allies, Britain and the United States.

This chapter investigates imperial intelligence gathering about ideologically driven unrest. Islamic piety and atheistic Marxism-Leninism may seem poles apart, but, from the perspective of intelligence analysts, they had much in common. Both attracted committed adherents who abhorred Western materialism and imperialist social theories. It was this internationalist dimension to Islamism and Communism that preoccupied the security services of France and Britain because it suggested that, whatever the relative local weaknesses of pan-Islamist and Comintern-organized anticolonial groups, their real strength lay elsewhere: in their appeal to colonial subjects to unite across imperial frontiers in opposition to European control. The estimates made by imperial intelligence communities about the nature of the enemies they faced must also be taken into account. It is for this reason that the article begins by considering how opponents of Britain and France's Middle Eastern imperial ventures were viewed, first in popular culture, and second in terms of stereotype.

This chapter is a critique of the militant. In particular, it seeks to understand the ways militancy effectuates processes of political passion and a certain unworking or deterritorialisation of the self in relation to political organisations and the wider social environment within which militants would enact change. To this end, the chapter traces a diagram or abstract machine of militancy – a diagram comprised of Guattari's cartography of Leninism and the model of struggle set out by the Russian nihilist Sergei Nechaev. It then explores a particular concrete animation of these abstract militant functions in the Weatherman organisation in the United States at the turn of the 1970s. The chapter sketches the principle outlines of an a-militant diagram, or dispersive ecology; of political composition that draws together Marx's figure of the party; Jacques Camatte's critique of the political ‘racket’; and Deleuze and Guattari's approach to the problem of the group and its outside.

The quotations opening this chapter provide glimpses of a worldview in operation. They suggest how deeply the secret police officers believe in Marxism-Leninism, and how this belief was wrapped up in strong identifications with institutions, most notably the party, the state GDR, and the Stasi. They reflect the success of the SED to create the kind of monolithic intentionality it envisioned for the country as a whole. This chapter is the story of officers' understanding in the making where “in the making” means both—becoming and remaining once become. It shows how socialism in the guise of an idea, a person, an institution, or a setting began to be appealing to these men, and how this appeal becomes compelling through the mutually supporting work of resonances, recognitions, and corroborations. This is done by drawing on the life of one officer, while juxtaposing his development to a more general consideration of others' experience. The officer chosen to allegorize the group over a particular period of time is selected not for reasons of representativeness in a demographic sense—the use of that notion is often just the admittance that one knows little about the relevant processes—but for reasons of highlighting particularly important dynamics of validation.

This concluding chapter discusses the socialist framework that undergirded Soviet society. Marxism–Leninism–Stalinism divided the world into objective and subjective phenomena. History was seen as a series of massive processes that were objective and inexorable. How these massive changes were experienced by individuals was simply subjective, a mere byproduct of these processes. The war served both to highlight and to undermine this logic of history: Soviet victory had always been touted as inevitable, but what individual soldiers did seemed to matter very much in its outcome. In place of a Marxist narrative of “objective” and “subjective” experience, the chapter explains that the book has been a story of objects and subjects—things and people. Specific subjectivities, or senses of self, formed around the use of specific objects, as Red Army soldiers came to identify themselves with the weapons they wielded, invest meaning in rituals both mundane and extraordinary, and inhabit the idiosyncratic ranks of the army and its cities of earth.

This chapter discusses the attempt to develop an independent, more original and imaginative Marxism-Leninism adapted to Spanish circumstances, which was carried on by Joaquin Maurin and the Bloque Obrero y Campesino (Worker-Peasant Bloc or BOC), formed in Barcelona in March 1931. The name of the new group stemmed from the original Comintern ploy of 1923 to form a Groupe Ouvrier et Paysan (Worker and Peasant Group) as an electoral front for the French Communist Party. The BOC set itself the goal of forming “a Great Worker-Peasant Party,” with the political nucleus formed by the independent Catalan Communist FCC-B, while the BOC was to form a broader mass organization. Maurin and his colleagues argued that this was the most useful strategy, since direct Bolshevization on the basis of the party alone had failed in both France and Spain.

In this chapter, the author reflects on his travel to the forests around Eberswalde, an industrial town located some twenty-five miles northeast of Berlin, in 1990. His purpose was to conduct research on the decline of forests in East Germany, where bureaucrats had a reputation for prim coldness and intolerance of dissent, while finance and trade officials resorted to shrewd business practices. Marxism-Leninism and the leadership of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany were blamed for the forest decline, with their aggressive management combined with industrial and farm pollution pushing the forested ecosystem to the brink of economic and ecological collapse. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, West Germans reached out to their eastern counterparts untainted by hypermaterialist socialist forestry. The church foresters for the Protestant Church in Brandenburg and the Catholic Church in Saxony played a key role in the states' return to ecologically based forest management and the rebuilding of the Forest Service.

In this chapter, the author narrates his trip to East Germany in the early days after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. He made observations of marshes, forests, and wetlands as well as the old Prussian “sand and pine” landscape east of the Elbe River. There were reports of a crisis in the eastern forest attributed to the four decades of conflict between Marxism-Leninism and the natural landscape. Forest management under the rule of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany is a testament to its competence and power. In the early years of the nineteenth century, Germany's forest landowners enclosed their forests, which prevented the peasants from foraging for fallen wood and gathering honey, collecting mushrooms, taking small game, and pasturing their livestock on oak and beech mast. Peasants opposed the closing of the forest commons and even won the support of the young Karl Marx. East Germany's forest decline was compounded by weak political geography and ecological and material deficits.