Josef Stalin
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. . . and More in the New Year
Traveling to Los Angeles recently, I saw one young woman wearing a Che Guevara shirt and another clutching a handbag decorated with Mao’s face. The high-end toy and gizmos store near my office sells an expensive statue of Joseph Stalin; maybe it’s ironic in intent, but still. In other words, Marxism may have gone down…
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The Year in Retro Commie Chic
The phrase “retro commie chic” was likely coined by Glenn Collins of the New York Times. Collins’ article about Greenwich Village’s K.G.B. Bar appeared in 1998; in the years since, the place has become a literary hub. According to a dining guide put out by New York magazine, “Today, the red menace congregates here—if graduate-level…
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The Liberals, I — Bruce Bliven
Here at Painting the Culture Red, a major part of our mission is to explore what liberals thought of the Soviet Union. Opinion on the Left was not monolithic. (Future posts will make this clear.) But let’s start with liberals who viewed that nation and its leader as democracy’s best hope. The New Republic has…
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The Drama of Galileo — and of Losey, Eisler, and Brecht
“I believe in the gentle force of reason; in the long run, no one can resist it. Nobody can watch me drop a pebble and say it doesn’t fall. Nobody can do that. The seduction of truth is too strong.” So says Galileo Galilei in Bertolt Brecht’s The Life of Galileo. The staged biography by the…
Painting the Culture Red 