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After Stalin’s death in 1953, successive leaders tried to find ways to revitalise the Soviet regime and rethink its promises to the Soviet people. Life within a system no longer based on terror and intense industrial transformation offered citizens strange alternatives.
How, as a Marxist, did he justify the seizure of power and would the October Revolution have been possible without him? How in this centenary year, are these events being commemorated in Putin’s Russia?
South Africa’s Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) and the Afrikaner people it served had, since the 17th century drawn a distinction between white ‘Christians’ and the apparently unconvertible ‘heathen’ peoples around them. Theology legitimised apartheid, but was also instrumental in its end.
To mark the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the dilemmas of modern empire and monarchy will be discussed, firstly in general terms and then specifically in terms of Russia.