shakedown.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
A community for live music fans with roots in the jam scene. Shakedown Social is run by a team of volunteers (led by @clifff and @sethadam1) and funded by donations.

Administered by:

Server stats:

261
active users

#Soviet

6 posts5 participants0 posts today

Today in Labor History July 6, 1918: Uprising against the Bolsheviks by the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR) during the Russian Civil War. One of their goals was to restart the war against Germany, which was helping suppress revolutionary activity in neighboring Ukraine and Finland. They also were frustrated by Bolsheviks’ move away from Revolutionary Socialism and toward “opportunistic service to the state." Maria Spiridonova, who spent years in prison under the Czar, and later under the Bolsheviks, was one of the leaders of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. She was also a member of the Shesterka ("Six")—6 women SR terrorists who were sent to Siberia. The failure of the SR Uprising facilitated the Bolsheviks consolidation of power and contributed to their creation of a one-party state in the USSR.

A #Russian propagandist states that he has “looked into it” and found that the country of #Azerbaijan is a fiction, invented during the #Soviet era. 👀 👉 linkedin.com/posts/marijnmarku

#Russia is so near bankruptcy that they have to re-use scripts from earlier and still ongoing invasions! 😂

www.linkedin.com🎙 Russian propagandists like Mardan now claim that #Azerbaijan never existed. | Marijn Markus🎙 Russian propagandists like Mardan now claim that #Azerbaijan never existed. The same kind of rhetoric that Moscow uses to justify invading #Ukraine - claiming the nation and people are in fact just confused russians 🤡 "I went and looked into it — where is this #history of 'Great Azerbaijan' that was supposedly interrupted by the Russian Empire’s military intervention? I found nothing. There was no Azerbaijan. And I couldn’t even find an ethnic group called Azerbaijanis. In fact — with all due respect — it seems that the very ethnic identity we now know as 'Azerbaijanis' was, apparently, also invented by the Soviet authorities." Meanwhile back in reality, major diplomatic clash has erupted between Azerbaijan and Russia: Russia is losing its influence and control in Asia. ☝️ Classic Kremlin playbook. Deny the past. Erase identities. Rebrand nations as Soviet fictions. Next up: Was Russia even real before Putin? "Russia is not a country, but a KGB operation that went out of control." - Vladimir Bukovsky, Russian dissident

Part and parcel of #AmericanCarnage2.0 is relinquishment of the #UnitedStates leadership role against #Soviet and then #Russian tyranny. #Ukraine heroically shoulders that burden now, ironically on #July4th. 💪 🇺🇦

With news that #NorthKorea is sending 30,000 troops to assist fellow #terrorist state #Russia in their criminal invasion of Ukraine, the world is watching to see if #SouthKorea is also emasculated by cowardly inaction. 👀 🇰🇷 cnn.com/2025/07/02/europe/nort

#Resist tyranny, #StandWithUkraine.

CNN · North Korea to send as many as 30,000 troops to bolster Russia’s forces, Ukrainian officials sayBy Nick Paton Walsh

Interesting little history about the time the Soviets sent a couple of their Jews to visit our Jews. I skipped to the end for the perfect pull quote. :ablobcatwave:

"The paper’s final mention of the event was a snippet recalling that, when asked about the #Soviet position on #Palestine, Michoels and Feffer responded, “#Stalin will always be on the side of ‘yosher.’”

Coming into #Yiddish from #Hebrew, “yosher” means upright and is used in an ethical sense. It’s a haunting pronouncement, in light of the tragic epilogue.

In 1948, having hardened his views concerning #Jews and #Jewish culture, Stalin ordered the death of Michoels.

Four years later, Feffer was executed for “counterrevolutionary crimes” along with other Jewish intellectuals, all active in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, on what became known as the Night of the Murdered Poets."

jweekly.com/2025/07/02/when-th

J. · THE ARCHIVES | When Soviets sent Jewish comrades to rally S.F.The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was formed in the USSR in 1942 to solicit international Jewish support for the forces battling Nazi Germany.

three former political prisoners of the Soviet regime share about their fight for universal human rights

Yosyf Zisels, a Ukrainian Jew describes the significance of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group (UHG). he spent 6yrs in labor camps in the late 1970s for participating in the human rights movement

“The UHG was founded in 1976 by just 10 brave people who understood that this initiative would land them in prison. Regardless, they decided to move forward in pursuit of personal, national, and pan-European interests”

#soviet #history #resistance
globalvoices.org/2025/06/27/so

Global Voices · Solidarity of the enslaved: Ukraine’s history of dissidence   Former political prisoners explain the different ways the dissident movement within the Soviet bloc (1922–1991) took shape.

Today in Labor History June 30, 1960: Congo won independence from Belgium after years of brutal colonial rule which slaughtered up to 10 million people, or half its entire population. However, imperial powers continued to exploit the people of Congo, even after independence. In 1961, the CIA orchestrated a coup that tortured, murdered, and overthrew its first democratically elected president, Patrice Lumumba, after a failed coup against him by Mobutu Sese Seku, who would later become dictator from 1971 until 1997.

President Eisenhower authorized the assassination because of Lumumba’s ties with the Soviet Union. The U.S., and its European allies, wanted control over Congo’s resources, particularly its rich uranium deposits, both to fuel their civilian and military nuclear programs, and, in particular, to keep them out of the hands of the Soviet Union, which was allied with Lumumba. The wonderful 2024 documentary “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” does a really great job of uncovering the concealed history of the 1961 assassination of Lumumba and the coup d’etat in Congo. But it’s really about so much more: Cold War machinations, propaganda, and covert operations; the superpowers’ jockeying for control of puppet regimes and spheres of influence in the global south; the Pan-African movement; racism in the U.S., the Civil Rights movement, and the repression against it; and, of course, jazz music, including tons of interviews and live footage of Lumumba, Ghanian president and revolutionary Kwame Nkrumah, activist and writer Andree Madeleine Blouin, Malcolm X, Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Miriam Makeba, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, surrealist artist Rene Magritte. There’s even a “slumber party” with Fidel Castro at Malcolm X’s home, in New York, after the U.S. authorities convince all the hotels in New York to refuse Castro a place to sleep during a UN conference, and he attempts to camp out on the sidewalk with his contingent.

One of the people the CIA used in its early attempts to assassinate Lumumba was chemist Sidney Gottlieb, who ran the agencies secret MKULTRA mind control program. Gottlieb tried, but failed, to kill Lumumba with poisoned toothpaste. He also tried, and failed, to assassinate Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar and with radioactively poisoned shoes. MKULTRA was a continuation of Nazi mind-control experiments, which utilized mescaline against Jews and Soviet prisoners, hoping it could be exploited as a “truth” serum. The program gave hallucinogenic drugs, like LSD and Mescaline, to 7,000 unwitting U.S. war veterans, as well as many Canadian and U.S. civilians.

Today in Labor History June 27, 1905: The mutiny on the Russian battleship Potemkin began. Tensions were already high because of recent loses in the Russo-Japanese war and the presence. Furthermore, the crew was made up of recent recruits and the officers were relatively inexperienced. The mutiny began when sailors refused to eat the borscht that was served to them because of the meat was crawling with maggots. The ship’s 2nd in command threatened to shoot the men if they didn’t eat it. When he did shoot one of the mutineers, the crew attacked him and other officers, promptly killing nearly half the officers on board. They then decided to sail to Odessa to join the General Strike that was going on there. After that, they escaped to Romania where they obtained political asylum. The mutiny is considered an important step toward the Russian Revolution. It was depicted in Serge Eisenstein’s classic film, “The Battleship Potemkin.”

Today in Labor History June 27, 1869: Anarchist, feminist and labor activist Emma Goldman was born in Lithuania. She helped plot the assassination of steel magnate, Henry Clay Frick, with her lover and comrade Alexander Berkman. Frick was fiercely anti-union and hired hundreds of Pinkertons to suppress the Homestead steel strike in 1892. In a gun battle, the Pinkertons killed nine strikers. Seven Pinkertons died, as well. Later that year, Berkman carried out the assassination attempt, but failed, and spent many years in prison. It was supposed to be an attentat, or propaganda by the deed. Like many anarchists of that era, they believed that their violent action would inspire working people around the world to rise up against capitalism and its leaders, like Frick. After that, Goldman publicly spoke out against attentats, because they weren’t inspiring the masses into action, but they were increasing state repression against their movement.

The state did imprison Goldman numerous times for other offenses, like “inciting to riot,” war resistance, and illegally distributing information about birth control. They even arrested her in 1901, in connection with the assassination of President McKinley, though she had nothing to do with it. They eventually released her and executed a mentally ill, registered Republican named Leon Czolgosz for the crime. In December, 1919, they deported her and Berkman to Russia. She had initially been supportive of the Bolshevik revolution and was excited to be there to witness its fruits, but denounced them after the massacre of more than a thousand sailors during the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921. Soon after, she and Berkman left Russia, completely disillusioned. However, in Germany and England, leftists were offended by her denunciations of the Soviet Union. Berkman died in 1936. That same year, she travelled to Spain to support the anarchists during the Civil War. She died a few years later in Toronto, at the age of 70.

"If you’ve ever wondered what it was like to work as a #Jewish #districtattorney in #Soviet #Ukraine during the post-#Stalinist era, now’s your chance to find out. Marat Grinberg, a scholar of #Russian and #Jewish #literature, #culture and #film at Reed College, has expertly translated the #memoirs of his grandfather, Mikhail Goldis (1926-2020), who worked as a district attorney and #detective in Ukraine for three decades and wrote his memoirs in the U.S. in the early 1990s.

The book is comprised of chapters devoted to different cases that Goldis is expected either to solve or preside over. In most instances his voice is technical; he plays the part of an observer rather than a critic. It’s clinical in some instances rather than passionate, but every scene to which he bears witness and every conversation in which he engages is worthy of attention."

jewishjournal.com/culture/arts

Jewish Journal · “A Kind of Jew They Didn’t Know Existed”A Review of Marat Grinberg’s “Memoirs of a Jewish District Attorney from Soviet Ukraine”

72 years later, this image still seems to resonate.

'In America - At This Restaurant Only One Person Is Served' (Krokodil # 4, 1953) by Yuliy Ganf. The solider at the table being well fed is labeled “war” and the neglected tables are labeled 'Education', 'Health Care', 'Libraries' and 'Art'.

Today in Labor History June 7, 1896: Anarchists supposedly set off a bomb during a Corpus Christi parade in Barcelona, Spain. As a result, a dozen people died and thirty were wounded. No one knows who actually set off the bomb, but the government blamed anarchists, who had set off numerous bombs over the previous four years. Consequently, the government went on a witch-hunt, arresting and torturing dozens of anarchists in the infamous Montjuich Prison. However, many leading anarchists denied the accusations and said they would never have set off a deadly bomb in a working-class community like this. They reserved their attacks for members of the ruling class. Nevertheless, the government tried and executed five anarchists, all of whom proclaimed their innocence. They sentenced 67 others to life in prison. Worldwide protests erupted in response. Montjuich Prison was graphically depicted in the opening scene Victor Serge’s epic novel, Birth of Our Power, which he wrote while imprisoned in the Soviet Union for his opposition to Stalin.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #anarchism #spain #barcelona #bombing #prison #torture #VictorSerge #soviet #russia #stalin #writer #author #books #fiction #novel @bookstadon

Continued thread

Not only has Germany not learned from its #Nazi and bellicose history, it is actively falsifying it by infringing upon long-standing traditions of memory culture with the aim of downplaying the role of the #Soviet Union in defeating German fascism.

Authorities in the capital #Berlin also banned the display of the Russian and Soviet flags and symbols at the city’s three Soviet memorial sites, a move condemned by the Russian embassy as a "manifestation of historical revisionism."

Berlin’s unwavering support for "#Israel" as it freely perpetrates a genocide, and the liberal flow of German-manufactured weaponry to Ukraine, which is now being bolstered by boots on the ground in neighbouring Lithuania have one thing in common: They both show how a once remorseful post-World War II Germany (at least in outward expression) has become too big for its britches again and is increasingly endangering regional and world peace.

Nothing learned, nothing gained, #Germany is at it again.

Replied in thread

@yogthos Communists did house everyone. The world made fun of the "ugly" cement apartment buildings Khrushchev built.
This article is truthful.
Life inside a Kiev Khrushchyovka: #Soviet architecture in #Ukraine.
Now how do they live?

aljazeera.com/gallery/2019/2/2

Al Jazeera · Life inside a Kiev Khrushchyovka: Soviet architecture in UkraineBy Al Jazeera

Today in Labor History June 4, 1919: Trotsky banned the 4th Ukrainian Congress of Free Soviets with his Order #1824. He also sent troops to destroy the Rosa Luxemburg Commune near Provkovski, and declared the Ukrainian anarchist insurgent Nestor Makhno an outlaw. The Free Territory within Ukraine, also known as Makhnovia (after Nestor Makhno) lasted from 1918 to 1921. It was a stateless, anarchist society and it was defended by Makhno’s Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army (AKA the Black Army). Roughly 7 million people lived in the area. The peasants who lived there refused to pay rent to the landowners and seized the estates and livestock of the church, state and private landowners, setting up local committees to manage them and share them among the various villages and communes of the Free State.