Putin’s electoral victory will lead to be social resistance in the coming years, writes Andy Yorke Read more...

The Arab Spring has developed into a Russian Winter. Despite icy temperatures and snow, 50,000 people packed into Bolotnaya Square, Moscow on 7 December in the largest protest yet seen in the city against the “once and future President” Vladimir Putin and his "managed democracy". It was a fitting conclusion to a year that began with the protests and uprising in Tunisia that have since spread around the world. Read more...

In 1917 the working class took power in Russia with remarkably little resistance from the bosses. But shortly afterwards the capitalists regrouped and gathered support from the imperialist powers to wage a bloody war on the young communist regime that became known as the Russian Civil War. Ninety years ago in 1919 was a key turning point when the Red Army turned the tide on the reactionary Whites. Jens-Hugo Nyberg takes the opportunity to recount these events and consider the lessons for defending future workers’ revolutions. Read more...

The League for the Fifth international has entered into collaboration with a Russian language Trotskyist bulletin called Movement Towards Socialism. Read more...

The tensions over gas supplies between Russia and the Ukraine reveal deeper problems which are getting worse, argues Mike Tate Read more...

The Russian workers, particularly those in Petrograd, had suffered a very real setback after the mass street demonstrations of the July Days (3-4 July according to the Julian calendar). Although the Bolsheviks had opposed any attempt to seize power as premature, given the balance of class forces across Russia, they had demonstrated at the head of the armed masses. Now as the demonstrators dispersed, recovering from its fright, the Provisional Government went onto the offensive. The bourgeois press accused the Bolsheviks of leading a failed putsch, slandered their leaders, like Lenin and Zinoviev, as “German agents” attempting to sabotage the Russian military offensive then underway. Read more...

June: Russian president Vladimir Putin denounced the plans for the US missile defence system to site key radar and anti-missile batteries in Poland and the Czech Republic, stating in response Russia would be forced to target these facilities. Read more...

Russia on the eve of 1917 was a country dominated by the Tsar and a feudal aristocracy.
In 1914, the Russian empire, allied with France which was its main source of the huge loans keeping its creaking system afloat, entered the First World War against Germany and Austria-Hungary. France had high hopes that the Tsar’s huge peasant army, “the Russian steamroller”, would crush the German armies in the east, enabling it to break through in the west. Read more...