Search

The translation into English of Aleksandr Yakovlevich Khinchin's (1894–1959) 1926 paper entitled ‘Ideas of intuitionism and the struggle for a subject matter in contemporary mathematics’ is made available for the first time. Here, Khinchin presented the famous foundational debate between L.E.J. Brouwer and David Hilbert of the 1920s in terms of a search for a mathematics with content. His main aim seems to have been to make intuitionism ideologically acceptable to his audience at the Communist Academy by means of the claim that insofar as Brouwer's intuitionism had a clear ‘subject matter’ and Hilbert's new program was a concession to intuitionism, the alleged victory of intuitionism not only implied the defeat of ‘empty’ formalism, but also showed the compatibility and affinity of Marxism with the newest developments in modern mathematics. This introduction provides a tentative exploration of the issue of what was tactical (or due to ideological pressure) and what was real scientific interest (or due to ignorance) (or what was both) in Khinchin's 1926 paper in the form of a detailed commentary, especially, on the tactical side of his presentation of the positions of Brouwer and Hilbert.

Thousands of people, agents, institutions and scientists from around the globe demonstrated their interest, fought against the mud and the time for not missing a single page of the Historical Archive of Communist Party of Greece (CPG) after a big flood. Fungi are growing in wet paper with accelerating pace. The building of the Central Committee was transformed in a large cleansing laboratory for removing the mud and drying the paper. The most challenging difficulty from the very first days was the volume of the material in need for rescue. In a short interval, the battle against time and fungi took place not to miss a single page. At the same time, the huge inexperience of dealing with catastrophes of such size was prevalent too. The steps were followed according to the bibliography [1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 25, 26]: Placing the ‘muddy’ material into low temperature fridges to cease the accelerating speedy development of the mould, gradual cleansing of the material from the mud and other litter, drying the material, decontamination-sterilization in special closets of 25 m3, space configuration with humidity and temperature conditions defined by the international literature and placement of the dried material, chemical treatment (De-acidification–Neutralization), solidification and restoration with the use of Japanese preservation papers, placement of the material into folders and boxes with antacid – antifungal protection and special environment conditions, computerization and electronic storage (digitalization). The preservation and restoration laboratory that was created is not only providing precautionary and substantial preservation of the archival material but also checking the process of the implemented methods. The slowing-down of its chemical downgrade is the primary target [16, 20, 21]. Securing stable humidity and temperature conditions defined by the international literature was the first big step for the future physicochemical course of the material [1, 4, 6, 13, 27].

On 1 January 1930 the Communist Party of Great Britain's (CPGB) new daily newspaper, the Daily Worker, was published for the first time. It was heralded by the CPGB as a maturing of the British Communist movement, and an opportunity for the Party to spread its message to a much wider audience than previous weekly newspapers would allow. With leading Party members in control of the paper, the Daily Worker was very much a Party newspaper; however, the CPGB wanted it to be much more than an internal bulletin. This paper examines the attempts by the CPGB to create a newspaper that spoke both for and with the voice of the working-classes, whilst also spreading the Party's message. It will ultimately conclude that the CPGB's depiction of it as a paper ‘by the working-classes, for the working-classes’ reflected the Party's efforts at locating its own place within the working-class movement.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Between the Brown and the Red: Nationalism, Catholicism, and Communism in Twentieth-Century Poland: The Politics of Boleslaw Piasecki . By Mikolaj Stanislaw Kunicki . Ohio University Press Polish and Polish-American Studies Series. Athens : Ohio University Press , 2012. xxix + 266 pp. $39.96 cloth; $28.95 paper.Book Reviews and NotesPolitical biography has fallen out of fashion, so Mikolaj Stanislaw Kunicki's fascinating biography of Boleslaw Piasecki is a welcome reminder of how the genre can provide insight into larger political issues. Between the Brown and the Red is also a reminder of the pitfalls of biography, which inevitably struggles to balance the role of the individual with the whirlwind of complex social, cultural, and political forces. While Kunicki is not always successful in striking this balance, the merits of this book far outweigh its shortcomings.Kunicki recounts the career of the Polish right-wing nationalist, sometime fascist, sometime communist, and always Catholic Boleslaw Piasecki. He was a remarkable--and despicable--political opportunist whose public career began in far right student movements of the 1930s and ended with his elevation to Poland's Council of State in the 1970s. As Kunicki convincingly asserts, Piasecki's story reveals "the persistence of the right and of the pluralistic rather than totalitarian nature of East European communism" (181).Piasecki's success came from his ability to position himself as a broker between the Catholic Church, the communist government, and, perhaps, Soviet influence. Piasecki was a devout Catholic, but his relationship with his Church was a contentious one. As the founder and leader of PAX, a lay-Catholic organization that championed an alliance between the Catholic Church and Poland's communist government, Piasecki struggled to retain influence with both institutions. When he championed communism, most notably in his 1956 book Essential Issues , he alienated the Catholic Church and barely avoided excommunication. Without his Catholic credentials, he equally risked losing influence with the Party, which tolerated his Catholicism precisely because it valued his influence with the Church. As he scrambled to retain influence in both worlds, his life became a metaphor for the struggle to balance nationalist, Catholic, and socialist forces in Poland.Piasecki's survival, and his persistent political influence for over forty years, is a testament to both his political savvy and his execrable opportunism. …

This paper discusses the significance of the collection of papers deposited by Dona Torr with the British Communist Party archive, and now held at the National Museum of Labour History in Manchester. Torr was a founder member of the Communist Party, and later a pioneer of 'history from below'. Although she would not have recognized the term, we can see her now as one of a generation of socialist feminists. Torr was certainly an influence on Christopher Hill and Edward and Dorothy Thompson, and through them on Sheila Rowbotham and the Ruskin generation who started History Workshop. Radicalized as much by the Great War as by the campaign for suffrage, Dona Torr became a socialist activist in her late thirties. In common with other middle-class campaigning women of her generation, Torr was able to leave the confines of the domestic sphere. Yet in her public work and in her published writing, there is little sense of personal memory or private emotion. The journey was travelled in one direction, and not returned. For these reasons, Torr's private papers give an important access to a personal story that is not well known. This paper begins with a summary of Torr's public life, before moving on to describe the papers deposited with the archive in Manchester.

First published in 2006 and now reissued in a paperback edition, this useful book, well suited for classroom use, gives us both less and more than its title implies. A collection of Robert Ferrell’s reflections on the Truman administration published from 1972 to 2002, it takes its name from an initial chapter on Cold War revisionists, then segues to chapters on the nuclear bomb, the early Cold War, Korea, and the historiography on Harry S. Truman. Ferrell’s critique of the revisionists is restrained and gentlemanly. He calls the father of the genre, University of Wisconsin historian William Appleman Williams, a friend. He shrinks from describing as Marxist the far-fetched assertion by Williams that the central theme of U.S. foreign policy was a perpetual quest for “Open Door” markets. Indeed Ferrell almost seems to buy Williams’s implausible declaration that the Open Door interpretation was simply an adaptation of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis to the wider world of diplomatic history. In reality it was much more akin to Karl Marx’s interpretation of the dynamics of capitalism than Turner’s evocation of pioneers moving toward the setting sun. Ferrell admits as much by describing Williams, Lloyd Gardner, and other revisionists as “socialists.” By the time he gets around to Gabriel Kolko he finds it impossible to avoid “Marxist” (p. 13). The “C-word” never makes the text, although Ronald Radosh’s autobiographical work, Commies, makes clear that a strong, covert Communist allegiance was central to the upbringing of at least some Cold War revisionists, sometimes characterized as “red diaper babies.” Two chapters on post-World War II U.S. foreign relations—“Diplomacy without Armaments” and “NATO”—are rewarding. In sharp, concise prose, Ferrell describes a diplomatic world in which the United States, with conventional military forces that could accurately be described as impotent, successfully contained Soviet expansionism. What Ferrell does not do—it likely would require a separate article—is explain why the Soviet Army did not simply march into Western Europe. The U.S. nuclear monopoly in the years immediately after the war no doubt had a lot to do with Soviet restraint, even if Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov might protest that his government was not impressed with the bomb. The USSR, moreover, needed to recover from the appalling wartime devastation, including the deaths of some 26 million, widespread destruction, and huge population dislocations. Having to pursue a rough equivalent of the Marshall Plan for his own country, Iosif Stalin moved with deliberation to consolidate his grip on territories the Red Army had occupied by the end of the war. The United States

Many historians usually interpret the Spanish Civil War as a confrontation of great collective movements. Looking back into the trenches of the Iberian Peninsula, they see the organized forces of nationalism, communism, anarcho-syndicalism, and socialism clashing along battle lines as much ideological as military. In these standard accounts, such movements, whatever their sharp political differences, commanded popular support based on an ethos of heroism, sacrifice and devotion to a larger cause.