Curated playlist
Anti-Stalinist left
- Nikita KhrushchevNikita Khrushchev spent four hours in 1956 tearing down Stalin's reputation. He had helped carry out Stalin's purges.
- Albert CamusAlbert Camus thanked his old schoolteacher right after his mother when he won the Nobel Prize.
- Social democracyOtto von Bismarck built the first modern welfare state to defeat the socialists. His welfare plans began in 1883.
- André GideA 1924 defense of his sexuality kept André Gide from ever being nominated to the Académie Française.
- Herbert MarcuseHerbert Marcuse analyzed Nazi ideology for American spies before students made him a hero.
- TrotskyismAn NKVD agent attacked Leon Trotsky in his Mexico City home on August 20, 1940. Trotsky died in a hospital the next day.
- C. L. R. JamesC. L. R. James sent a book on Moby-Dick to every U.S. senator. He wrote it while detained on Ellis Island in 1953.
- Josip Broz TitoTito once wrote to Stalin: stop sending assassins to murder me. He said five had already been caught.
- Leon TrotskyLeon Trotsky escaped Siberia hidden in a load of hay. He later built the Red Army.
- EurocommunismGorbachev's memoirs cite Eurocommunism as a key influence on glasnost and perestroika.
- Slavoj ŽižekSlavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher whom one admirer called the Elvis of cultural theory and whom another label dubbed the most dangerous philosopher in the West. He was born on the 21st of March 1949 and has written over 50 books. He…