Kristen Ghodsee reads the third section of Alexandra Kollontai's 1915 essay about World War I–"Who Needs the War?"–and looks for lessons applicable to the present day.
This translation is from a 1984 collection of Kollontai's writing published by Progress Publishers in the Soviet Union, which claims that the essay was written while Kollontai was in exile in Norway. She sent it to Vladimir Lenin (then in exile in Switzerland) who also edited it before publication. The final pamphlet was first published in 1916. It went into multiple editions and was distributed widely across Europe and Russia.
Ghodsee also discusses the 2024 presidential election in the United States, and offers a message of hope in the event of a Trump victory.
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Kristen Ghodsee discusses utopia and social dreaming on "What Could Go Right?"
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Kristen R. Ghodsee is the award-winning author of twelve books and a professor and chair of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
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