Happy 70K Members, comrades!

In time to celebrate, I’ve finished subbing another Soviet film.

This is Sergei Yutkevich’s 1940 film, Yakov Sverdlov: Pages From the Biography.

This film is a biographical drama that sheds light on a key revolutionary of the early days of the Bolsheviks and the Revolution, Yakov Sverdlov.

Sverdlov was a young and early supporter of the Bolsheviks, joining the RSDLP in 1902 and aligning with Lenin and the Bolsheviks. He was a key agitator and organizer that was subjected to constant imprisonment and exile, and played a key role in the revolutionary government during the Russian Civil War when he was appointed in 1917 as Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Congress of the Soviets, working as the Head of Government ministries and later Chairman of the Secretariat of the Communist Party in 1918.

Sverdlov died on March 16th, 1919 at age 33 after contracting Spanish flu on a trip to Ukraine. He worked until the last 2 days of his life.

Sadly, I can only find the 1965 version that removed all Stalin scenes. But it is still a good watch nonetheless.

Here’s one of my favorite scenes, the portrayal of dissolving the Russian Constituent Assembly after it refused to recognize the authority of the Soviets.

Watch the full film on YouTube below

Yakov Sverdlov (1940) Eng Sub (1965 Revision)

https://x.com/dropsitenews/status/2065526500640645566

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel unveiled a sweeping set of economic reforms Friday, casting them as Cuba’s path through the crisis driven by a “criminal energy blockade” by the United States that has left the island nearly without fuel.

Only 1 oil tanker has reached Cuba in the past 5 months, Díaz-Canel said, a collapse that traces to January, when the U.S. captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and cut the flow of Venezuelan oil, then threatened tariffs on any country that supplied Cuba.

Havana now endures blackouts of up to 15 hours a day. Among the most devastating consequences of the U.S. policy is that the Cuban government has been forced to postpone tens of thousands of surgeries for its citizens.

The Cuban President today named national defense as the first priority, citing preparations under Cuba’s “Whole People’s War” doctrine. The full 2026 reform program includes:

🔹Enterprise & Markets
🔸 Overhaul the economic management system, easing the conflict between central planning and incentives for production
🔸 Grant state enterprises autonomy to set their own wages, dimensions, clients, and suppliers, use their profits freely, and enter the currency market directly
🔸 Loosen rules on non-state businesses, narrowing banned activities and widening shareholding
🔸 Fast-track approval of stalled private and state MSMEs (mipymes)

🔹 Decentralization & the State
🔸 Expand municipal autonomy, letting provinces import, export, attract foreign investment, and manage hard-currency income on their own
🔸 Restructure and shrink the state, cutting ministries and posts via a public draft law to reduce bureaucracy

🔹 Trade & Investment
🔸 Make foreign trade more dynamic, dropping mandatory intermediaries and favoring importers of raw materials over finished goods
🔸 Incentivize foreign direct investment, plus a new role for Cuban-diaspora and resident-Cuban investors as economic actors

🔹 Agriculture & Food
🔸 Reform land use, giving land to those who will farm it, cutting idle plots, and opening input and currency markets to producers across all sectors
🔸 Pursue food self-sufficiency by streamlining bureaucracy for agricultural production

🔹 Fiscal, Monetary & Social
🔸 Shift fiscal policy so the budget no longer finances state-enterprise inefficiency
🔸 Redesign monetary policy and the foreign-exchange market, and strengthen the banking system
🔸 Reform wages in the budget sector and move from subsidizing products to subsidizing people

🔹 Energy & Transport
🔸 Expand renewable energy and electric mobility, including local EV assembly, to cut dependence on imported fuel
🔸 Ease vehicle import limits, favoring solar-charged electric vehicles

🔹 Tourism, Commerce & Labor
🔸 Revive tourism through new operators beyond the big foreign chains that have pulled out
🔸 Modernize domestic commerce with electronic invoicing and digital platforms
🔸 Protect young skilled workers with better pay and incentives to curb emigration

I really don’t know how this isn’t a self report

https://life . ru/p/1099197

Ru domain, so had to break apart the URL. copy and delete spaces when you paste

Read this article to learn about the 1956 Georgia Uprising of Stalin supporters that protested Khrushchev’s Secret Speech against Stalin that had recently leaked to the public.

The period of unrest occurred across Tbilisi, Sukhumi and Gori (Stalin’s hometown) and lasted for 6 days.

March 1956, the streets of Tbilisi, Georgia, became the stage for a major uprising against the Soviet leadership. The immediate trigger was Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing Stalin, delivered at the 20th Party Congress just weeks earlier.

For many Georgians, Stalin was not a tyrant but a fellow countryman and a symbol of Soviet power. The first demonstrations on March 4 and 5 were relatively calm, with crowds honoring Stalin on the third anniversary of his death. But the mood quickly radicalized. By March 9, the number of protesters had grown to an estimated 40,000 or more. Slogans shifted from praise of Stalin to proclaimed demands for Georgian independence, the withdrawal of Soviet troops, and a rejection of Khrushchev’s authority.

The authorities responded with force. Troops and armored vehicles were deployed, and orders were given to clear the central square. According to official Soviet records, 39 people convicted, 22 killed and 47 injured.

The events of March 1956 revealed the fragility of the post-Stalin leadership and foreshadowed the national movements that would eventually help unravel the Soviet Union.

141 years ago, on June 3rd, 1885 (old calendar 22 May) Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov was born - an outstanding figure of the Communist Party and the Soviet state, a revolutionary and a Bolshevik. He became a member of the Communist Party in 1901. He served as the Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee from November 1917 to March 1919.

He was born in Nizhny Novgorod into a family of a craftsman-engraver. In 1900, before completing the 5th grade of the Nizhny Novgorod gymnasium, he began working as an apprentice in a pharmacy. From 1901, he began conducting illegal revolutionary work as an active member of the Nizhny Novgorod Committee of the RSDLP. In 1902, he was arrested for the first time for participating in a demonstration. From that time, he became a professional revolutionary. After the Second Congress of the RSDLP (1903), Sverdlov unwaveringly supported the positions of V.I. Lenin and became one of the founders of the Bolshevik organization in Nizhny Novgorod.

From February 1905, he led the workers' struggle in Kazan, and from September 1905, as a representative of the party's Central Committee, he played a significant role in uniting the party organizations of the Urals. Sverdlov's selfless revolutionary work was repeatedly interrupted by arrests and exile. In total, he spent about 10 years in prisons and exile, repeatedly making daring escapes. At the Prague Conference in 1912, he was elected to the party's Central Committee in absentia and was included in the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee, which directly led the revolutionary work in Russia.

Between arrests (late 1912 - early 1913), he worked in Pravda and participated in the leadership of the Social Democratic faction of the Fourth State Duma. After the February Revolution, he returned to Petrograd from the Turukhansk region, where he had been in exile. At the VII (April) All-Russian Party Conference, he was elected a member of the party's Central Committee. As a member of the Party Center for the leadership of the uprising, he actively participated in the preparation and conduct of the October Revolution.

Yakov fell ill after a visit to Ukraine and Oryol, a city south of Moscow, during a wave of the Spanish Flu pandemic.

While traveling from Kharkiv back to Moscow on March 7, 1919, Sverdlov departed his train to deliver a ten-minute speech to a meeting of railway workers in the city. Upon his return to Moscow on March 8, he was already feeling unwell. Despite this, he continued to work, attending meetings of the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom).

He finally took to his bed on March 11 as the illness progressed.

On the 14th of March 1919, Sverdlov lost consciousness, and on the 16th he died at the age of 33.

He did not live to see the establishment of the USSR.

FULL DOCUMENTARY HERE

Leaders and representatives across the world pay their respects to Comrade Stalin at his lying-in-state, March 6-9, 1953.

THE GREAT FAREWELL (1953) | FULL DOCUMENTARY

(Stalin's Funeral)

Original title: Великое прощание (Velikoye proshchaniye)

Year: 1953

Studio: Central Studio for Documentary Films (ЦСДФ)

Color / Black & White

A Soviet state documentary chronicling the lying-in-state and funeral of Iosif Stalin, 6–9 March 1953. The film records the mass grief of the Soviet working class and peasantry, the honor guard of allied nations, the Red Square procession, and the interment at the Lenin Mausoleum.

Aram Khachaturian’s score shapes the film into a requiem for the leader of the first socialist state. More than a record of mourning, the work is a document of proletarian state power at the moment of its gravest internal crisis.

CREW

Directors:

Grigori Aleksandrov, Sergey Gerasimov, Ilya Kopalin, Mikheil Chiaureli, Elizaveta Svilova, Irina Setkina

Screenwriters: Directorial Collective

Literary script by Alexey Surkov

Chief Cinematographers:

Ivan Beliakov, Ruvim Khalushakov, Vladimir Lavrov, and over 200 cameramen from across the USSR

Composer: Aram Khachaturian

Assistant Director: Semiramida Pumpyanskaya

Happy Saturday

Today marks Victory Day.

In the early hours of May 9th, 1945, the Soviet Union proclaimed to its people that the German government signed its instrument of surrender.

27 million Soviet people died in the war against Nazism.

8.66 million military deaths.

17.8-19 million civilian deaths.

Over 3 million deaths were registered members of the Communist Party.

Everyone alive today owes a great debt to the Red Army.

Full Uncensored Film Here

Comrade Stalin receives news of Lenin’s health following Fanny Kaplan’s assassination attempt, and develops a plan to push the Whites out of Tsaritsyn.

Full Uncensored Movie Here

We do not honor him as a prophet, but as the foremost scientist of revolution, whose method remains the sharpest weapon of the international proletariat.

As a young journalist at the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx confronted the material reality of state censorship and the poverty of the Moselle peasants, propelling him toward the study of political economy.

Expelled from Germany and France, he settled in London, where he spent decades in the British Museum Reading Room, Seat G7, dissecting the anatomy of capital.
Sustained by his wife Jenny von Westphalen and comrade Friedrich Engels, he produced works that would change the world.

The Communist Manifesto of 1848 was a declaration of war. It openly declared that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles and called the proletariat to overthrow the bourgeoisie. Its closing command,

"Workers of the World, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to win."

Remains our marching order.

Then came Das Kapital, the definitive critique of political economy. Marx laid bare the secret of capitalist production: surplus value. He revealed that the worker sells not labor, but labor-power, and the difference between the value created and the cost of subsistence, that unpaid surplus labor, is the source of all profit.
He demonstrated that capitalism must centralize capital, immiserate the proletariat, and produce recurring crises of overproduction. Capitalism creates its own gravediggers: the organized working class, disciplined and unified in the factory itself.

Marx's foundational discovery was the materialist conception of history. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not consciousness that determines being, but social being that determines consciousness. When productive forces come into conflict with existing relations of production, an epoch of social revolution begins. This was not fatalism. It was the science of revolutionary praxis.

The point is not merely to interpret the world, but to change it.

Marx organized the First International and waged relentless war against anarchists and reformists.
From the Paris Commune, he drew the great lesson: the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes. The bourgeois state must be smashed.

Today, in an era of imperialist war, billionaire oligarchy, and planetary crisis, Marx's analysis is more potent a weapon to the ruling class than ever.

His legacy is not a collection of dogmas. It is the science of revolution. It lives in every strike, every act of resistance to imperialism, every brick laid in constructing a new society.

Marx lived. Marx lives.

Onward to the victory of the international proletariat.

"The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces and the more his production increases in power and extent. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more goods he creates. The devaluation of the human world increases in direct relation to the increase in value of the world of things.

Labour does not only create goods; it also produces itself and the worker as a commodity, and indeed in the same proportion as it produces goods. This fact simply implies that the object produced by labour, its product, now stands opposed to it as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour which has been embodied in an object and turned into a physical thing; this product is an objectification of labour. So much does the performance of work appear as devaluation that the worker is devalued to the point of starvation. So much does objectification appear as loss of the object that the worker is deprived of the most essential things not only of life but also of work. Labour itself becomes an object which he can acquire only with the greatest effort and with unpredictable interruptions. The more objects the worker produces the fewer he can possess and the more he falls under the domination of his product, of capital. All these consequences follow from the fact that the worker is related to the product of his labour as to an alien object.

The worker puts his life into the object, and his life then belongs no longer to himself but to the object. The greater his activity, therefore, the less he possesses. What is embodied in the product of his labour is no longer his own. The greater this product is, therefore, the more he is diminished. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, assumes an external existence, but that it exists independently, outside himself, and alien to him, and that it stands opposed to him as an autonomous power.

The life which he has given to the object sets itself against him as an alien and hostile force."

— Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, "Estranged Labour" section.

"It is true that labour produces wonderful things for the rich — but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces — but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty — but for the worker, deformity. It replaces labour by machines, but it throws one section of the workers back to a barbarous type of labour, and it turns the other section into a machine. It produces intelligence — but for the worker, stupidity, cretinism."

— Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, "Estranged Labour" section.

"He does not fulfil himself in his work but denies himself, has a feeling of misery rather than well-being, does not develop freely his mental and physical energies but is physically exhausted and mentally debased. The worker, therefore, feels himself at home only during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless. His work is not voluntary but imposed, forced labour. It is not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means for satisfying other needs."

— Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, "Estranged Labour" section.

"If we then disregard the use-value of commodities, only one property remains, that of being products of labour. They are all together reduced to the same kind of labour, human labour in the abstract. They are merely congealed quantities of homogeneous human labour-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure. As crystals of this social substance, which is common to them all, they are values — commodity values."

— Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter I: "Commodities."

"Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being — a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man — the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution."

— Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, "Private Property and Communism" section.

its not me saying it its Mr. Jones sir

Let’s share our memes, comrades!