At the turn of the millennium, Russia teetered on a precarious geo-political edge. A nation scarred by the wild 1990’s, grappling with whether to cling to the chaotic promises of neo-liberal reform, or reclaim echoes of its ironclad Soviet resolve. The economy was a rotting corpse, being feasted upon by oligarchs, whose loyalty to Moscow’s interests was dubious. Russia had just endured a decade of hyperinflation, privatization scandals, financial collapse in 1998, and the borders of the USSR fractured into 15 squabbling republics with their own regional wars. Enter, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, an enigmatic former KGB officer who reveres Yuri Andropov and Peter the Great as equals. The Yeltsin-era oligarchs dismissively call Putin a ‘grey blur’, unremarkable, unthreatening, yet he was relentlessly ascending.

Putin's climb was a masterclass of political maneuvering, Deputy Mayor in St. Petersburg, where he navigated corruption and reform under Anatoly Sobchak, then director of the FSB in 1998, restoring discipline to the security services, briefly Prime Minister in 1999, and finally acting president on New Year's Eve 1999, when a weary Boris Yeltsin abruptly resigned. Putin’s swift election in March 2000 was sealed by a decisive military campaign in the Second Chechen War, which projected strength and order amid the chaos. Russians woke up, and for the first time in over a decade, they had faith in the future.

One of his earliest and most symbolic acts as president struck at the heart of Russia's fractured identity: the restoration of the Soviet-era state anthem, composed by Alexander Alexandrov in 1944 and long associated with Joseph Stalin's era. The tune, majestic, stirring, unmistakably martial, had been discarded in 1990 by Yeltsin, who replaced it with Mikhail Glinka's wordless ‘Patriotic Song,’ a 19th-century instrumental piece meant to evoke pre-revolutionary Russia without communist baggage. But Glinka's melody never resonated, failing to inspire a nation adrift. In December 2000, Putin pushed through legislation to revive Alexandrov's music, but with fresh lyrics by Sergei Mikhalkov, the very poet who penned the original Soviet words in 1943 and revised them in 1977.

The new verses spoke of a ‘sacred’ Russia, vast and enduring, ‘protected by God,’ blending patriotic fervor with subtle nods to tradition while purging references to Lenin, communism, or the ‘unbreakable union.’ The move ignited fierce debate. Communists cheered the return of a familiar rallying cry; many ordinary Russians, polls showed, favored it for its emotional power.

Yet liberals and Yeltsin loyalists decried it as a step backward, evoking ‘Stalinist repressions’ even if the words were sanitized. The ailing former president Boris Yeltsin, in his first public criticism of his handpicked successor, reacted with quiet dismay. When a reporter asked if he had known of Putin's plans, Yeltsin shook his head. Pressed for his thoughts on the revived anthem, he offered a single, loaded word: ‘Krasnenko’ —reddish, a sly evocation of the Bolshevik ‘Reds’ and a subtle jab at the creeping revival of Soviet shades. In this one act, Putin signaled his vision: not a full return to the past, but a selective reclamation, fusing imperial symbols (like the retained tricolor flag and double-headed eagle) with Soviet strength to heal a divided nation.

It was a masterstroke of symbolism, setting the tone for an era where order, pride, and continuity would trump the raw uncertainties of the Yeltsin years. Russia, under its new helmsman, was charting a course neither fully West nor East, but unmistakably its own.Yet it must be emphasized: the yearning for restored Soviet prestige and stability was not a mere top-down imposition, but a profound grassroots aspiration among ordinary Russians.

As the red banner was solemnly lowered over the Kremlin on December 25, 1991, replaced by the tricolor of a new Russia, the dissolution of the USSR felt like a profound national trauma to many. Just nine months earlier, in the landmark March 17, 1991 referendum, an overwhelming majority had voiced their desire to preserve the union. With an 80% turnout across the nine participating republics, 76.4% of voters (over 113 million people) affirmed the preservation of the USSR as a ‘renewed federation of equal sovereign republics,’ one guaranteeing human rights for all nationalities.

This was no coerced outcome; it reflected a genuine public sentiment that the Soviet Union should evolve and modernize, not evaporate. Russians, along with millions across the multinational state, did not crave a return to ‘Stalinist repression’ or rigid central planning in its harshest form. They yearned for reform: abundant consumer goods on store shelves (ending the chronic shortages of the late Brezhnev era), peaceful détente with the West after decades of Cold War tension, and technological leaps to rival global powers.

Perestroika and glasnost under Mikhail Gorbachev had kindled hope for exactly that, a revitalized socialism with a human face. At first, it appeared the Gorbachev-Yeltsin tandem might deliver. Yet disillusionment set in almost immediately. The Belovezhka Accords, signed in secret by the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus in December 1991, unilaterally declared the USSR dissolved, overriding the referendum's clear mandate without further public consultation.

For millions, this felt like an elite betrayal. The ensuing ‘shock therapy’ under Yeltsin, rapid privatization, price liberalization, and market opening, unleashed hyperinflation (peaking at over 2,500% in 1992), factory closures, unpaid wages, and a plunge in living standards. Pensioners scavenged for food, once-proud industrial workers faced unemployment, oligarchs amassed fortunes through rigged auctions of state assets. This chaos fueled enduring nostalgia. Independent polls by the Levada Center, tracking sentiments since the early 1990s, consistently show a majority regretting the USSR's collapse, peaking at 75% in 2000, dipping to a low of 49% in 2012 amid economic recovery, but climbing again to around 63-66% in recent years.

Respondents cite the loss of a unified economy, social guarantees (free healthcare, education, jobs), and superpower status.

In the wake of economic devastation and national humiliation, Russians turned decisively to the ballot box, overwhelmingly backing candidates who promised to reverse the chaotic course of radical neo-liberal reforms and restore a sense of order, dignity, and social protection. Such as in the December 1993 parliamentary elections, held just months after Yeltsin's violent standoff with the old Supreme Soviet, a crisis that saw tanks shelling the White House in Moscow. Voters delivered a stunning rebuke to the pro-reform forces: Vladimir Zhirinovsky's ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), a bombastic outfit blending populist rage with imperial nostalgia, shocked the world by capturing 22.9% of the proportional vote, emerging as the largest single party bloc with 64 seats.

Zhirinovsky, the fiery showman who had already placed third in the 1991 presidential race with nearly 8% of the vote, railed against corruption, crime, and the loss of superpower status, vowing to protect "ordinary Russians" and reclaim lost territories.Close behind were the resurgent communists, with Gennady Zyuganov's Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) securing about 12% and 48 seats. Pro-Yeltsin blocs like Russia's Choice limped in with just 15.5%.

Two years later, in the December 1995 Duma elections, the tide turned even more decisively leftward. The CPRF, now a disciplined opposition force channeling widespread nostalgia for Soviet-era stability, triumphed with 22.3% of the proportional vote and a total of 157 seats, nearly 35% of the chamber, making it the dominant faction in a parliament increasingly hostile to Yeltsin's agenda.

Zyuganov, a shrewd ideologue who blended Marxist rhetoric with Russian patriotism and admiration for China's gradualist reforms, positioned the CPRF as the voice of the dispossessed: pensioners hit by hyperinflation, workers facing unpaid wages, and citizens yearning for guaranteed jobs, healthcare, and national pride. He criticized "shock therapy" as reckless, reportedly questioning how Russia could compress into mere years what had taken advanced capitalist nations like the United States a century to achieve. Zyuganov advocated a ‘measured’ path, state control over strategic industries, social welfare restoration, and inspiration from Deng Xiaoping's China rather than blind Western imitation.

He also dangled the dream of Eurasian reintegration: not a forced Soviet revival, but a voluntary union of equal republics, echoing the unfulfilled promises of Gorbachev's New Union Treaty while appealing to those mourning the USSR's abrupt dissolution.

By early 1996, with the CPRF commanding parliament and polls showing Zyuganov as the frontrunner, the presidential election loomed as a potential turning point. In the first round on June 16, Zyuganov took 32%, narrowly trailing Yeltsin's 35%. The runoff on July 3 became a fierce referendum on the 1990s: Yeltsin, bolstered by oligarch-funded media blitzes framing the choice as ‘reforms or red revenge,’ eked out victory with 53.8% to Zyuganov's 40.3%.

Allegations of irregularities, media bias, vote manipulation in regions like Tatarstan, and oligarch influence swirled, but Zyuganov ultimately accepted the results.

These electoral surges were unmistakable evidence of the Russian people's profound desperation: a cry for stability amid plunging living standards, for the restoration of state benefits eroded by privatization, for reclaimed superpower prestige in a world where Russia felt diminished, and for renewed faith in a collective future rather than the atomized uncertainties of wild capitalism. The groundswell from below, not elite machination, created the political space for a figure promising disciplined renewal, one who would soon emerge to harness this longing without fully reverting to the communist past.

To communists, nationalists, and ordinary citizens alike, the towering figure of Joseph Stalin resonated deeply in the turbulent post-Soviet years, a symbol not of unalloyed terror, but of unyielding strength in an era when Russia felt weak and adrift. Stalin's own grandson, Yevgeny Yakovlevich Dzhugashvili (1936–2016), a retired Soviet Air Force colonel and fierce defender of his grandfather's legacy, emerged as a vivid embodiment of this reverence.

Living between Russia and his ancestral Georgia, Yevgeny became politically active in the 1990s, positioning himself as a vocal Stalinist. In the 1999 State Duma elections, he featured prominently as one of the leading faces, often listed third on the federal ticket, of the radical ‘Stalin Bloc – For the USSR,’ a coalition of hardline communist groups including Viktor Anpilov's Labor Russia and the Union of Officers.Despite the electoral disappointment, Yevgeny's visibility underscored a broader trend: Stalin's image, officially denounced by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956 and further marginalized under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, was undergoing a profound grassroots rehabilitation. Independent polls by the Levada Center, tracking public opinion since the late Soviet era, reveal Stalin consistently topping lists of Russia's "most outstanding" historical figures.

The Russians were famished for that same ironclad resolve, they wanted their country to be pushed into the future, for a bright and vibrant future to be in the present, no longer a fairy tale promised by faltering and sickly authorities. Stalin's enduring appeal, carried in banners through Red Square and etched in public memory, laid bare a society's profound yearning: not for tyranny's return, but for the certainty of greatness restored.

Vladimir Putin's presidency swiftly delivered on the Russian public's deepest cravings for order, strength, and reclaimed dignity, outpacing Gennady Zyuganov's resurgent Communist Party in electoral landslides that underscored a national pivot toward disciplined renewal over nostalgic revival. In his first term, Putin secured reelection in March 2004 with a commanding 71.3% of the vote, dwarfing the Communist candidate Nikolai Kharitonov's meager 13.7% (Zyuganov sat out the race, endorsing a proxy). Eight years later, returning for a third term in March 2012, Putin captured 63.6%, again relegating Zyuganov to a distant second with just 17.2%.

These margins reflected not rejection of communist ideas per se, but endorsement of Putin's pragmatic fusion of state authority and market stability, delivering what Zyuganov promised without the ideological and historical baggage.

Central to this appeal was Putin's decisive taming of the Second Chechen War. Launched in 1999 amid separatist incursions and apartment bombings by Chechen militants. Even more resonant was Putin's confrontation with the Yeltsin-era oligarchs, widely reviled as ‘social parasites’ who had plundered national wealth through rigged privatizations, showing no loyalty to the motherland while millions sank into poverty. In the 1990s, figures like Boris Berezovsky pulled strings behind Yeltsin's throne, turning the president into what critics called a marionette.

Putin flipped the script dramatically. Shortly after his inauguration, in the summer of 2000, he convened Russia's most powerful tycoons for a pivotal gathering, accounts from participants like banker Sergei Pugachev place it symbolically at Joseph Stalin's preserved Kuntsevo dacha (also known as Blizhnyaya Dacha) on Moscow's outskirts, a site evoking the Soviet leader’s purges and absolute power.

There, amid the unchanged relics of Stalin's office and couch, Putin reportedly laid down the law: keep your amassed fortunes, ‘but stay out of politics and out of my way’. The message was unmistakable, state authority trumped private empires.

A parallel meeting on July 28, 2000, brought 21 oligarchs to the Kremlin, where Putin pledged no reversal of privatizations in exchange for their political neutrality. Most complied, transforming from kingmakers into a school of frightened fish. Defiers faced ruin: Berezovsky, the media and oil magnate who helped engineer Putin's rise, fled to exile in London by 2001 amid embezzlement probes. The starkest example was Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man and head of oil giant Yukos. Convicted of fraud and tax evasion in trials, he spent a decade in prison. Yukos was dismantled, its prime assets absorbed by state-controlled Rosneft, reasserting government dominance over strategic energy sectors.

These moves struck a chord with a public long seething at oligarchic excess, polls consistently showed overwhelming approval for reining in the tycoons. Putin also prioritized rebuilding the Russian military, ravaged by underfunding and defeat in the First Chechen War. Increased budgets, professionalization efforts, and reforms aimed at modernizing forces restored another pillar of national prestige, signaling Russia's return as a formidable power.

In harnessing grassroots demands for justice, security, and strength, without fully dismantling markets, Putin forged a new compact: loyalty to the state in exchange for stability and pride. It was precisely the resolve Russians had hungered for, propelling his own enduring popularity with Russians.
Meanwhile, the reverence for Joseph Stalin has not faded but evolved into bolder, more public expressions, weaving his legacy deeper into the fabric of contemporary Russian identity. No longer confined to Communist Party rallies or academic debates, Stalin's image has appeared in unexpected sanctuaries: Orthodox churches and cathedrals, where frescoes and icons depict him alongside saints.

​Notable examples include controversial paintings showing the blind saint Matrona of Moscow blessing Stalin during World War II, a legend the Russian Orthodox Church deems unverified, or mosaics in military cathedrals placing him beneath the Virgin Mary with Soviet marshals. These depictions, often donor-funded and sparking outrage from church hierarchies and liberals alike, blend sacred iconography with wartime heroism, framing Stalin as a divinely inspired leader who saved Russia from existential threat.

Russians view him as the quintessential embodiment of national greatness, outpolling Peter I (the modernizer) and Pushkin (the cultural icon) in surveys spanning the 2010s and 2020s, with approval of his role reaching record highs around 70%. This revival carries the quiet but unmistakable endorsement of the Kremlin, which sees selective ‘Stalinism’ as a pragmatic tool for statecraft: mobilizing patriotism, justifying strong centralized rule, and equating past victories with present challenges. Since Putin's ascent in 2000, over 100 new monuments to Stalin, busts, statues, and plaques, have been erected across Russia, from regional towns to Moscow's metro stations, with the pace accelerating after 2014 and again post-2022.

The annual May 9 Victory Day parades on Red Square have grown ever more spectacular under Putin, evolving from modest 1990s events into massive spectacles of military might, featuring thousands of troops, advanced weaponry, and overt Soviet symbolism, red banners, hammers and sickles, and occasional Stalin portraits carried by participants. These ceremonies, blending imperial eagles with communist stars, reinforce a narrative of unbroken triumph.

To the average Russian, equating Stalin with Peter the Great feels natural, both are archetypes of resolute leadership that forged greatness from adversity, delivering prestige and security. This synthesis underpins the Kremlin's broader historical reconciliation: portraying the Soviet era not as an aberration, but as one illustrious chapter in a continuous millennium-spanning saga of Russian statehood, tracing back to the legendary Varangian prince Rurik, who in 862 founded the Rurikid dynasty at Ladoga (or Novgorod), laying the foundations of Old Rus'—the cradle of East Slavic civilization. In this seamless tapestry, tsars, commissars, and modern leaders alike are threads in an eternal story of resilience and sovereignty.

The image of Joseph Stalin has once again been optimized for the modern era of Russia, with the launch of Russia’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine, Stalin evokes national defense against existential outside threats. Official narratives characterize the SMO as ‘finishing the fight our grandfathers started,’ a direct continuation of the Soviet Union's 1941–1945 battle against Nazi invasion. This rhetoric portrays the conflict not merely as denazification, eradicating Banderite neo-Nazism rooted in Stepan Bandera's collaborationist legacy, but as a broader defense of Russia's survival against a hostile West. Just as Operation Barbarossa in 1941 aimed at the USSR's annihilation, today's confrontation is depicted as encirclement by NATO powers salivating at Russia's potential downfall, with Ukraine as a proxy battlefield.

This linkage amplifies Stalin's wartime role as supreme commander, overshadowing his repressions while reinforcing themes of sacrifice and unity against fascism. Central to this worldview is the enduring concept of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians as fraternal East Slavic peoples, branches of a historic "triune" nation (Great Russians, Little Russians, and White Russians) whose bonds trace to Rurik’s old Russian state of 862 Rus. The 1991 Soviet dissolution is mourned as an artificial severance of this organic whole, with Ukraine's post-Maidan drift toward the West seen as a tragic mistake. Reintegration, restores what was lost.

As Winston Churchill warned in his June 18, 1940, House of Commons speech amid Britain's darkest hour: "If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future." In Russia's telling, embracing the past, its victories, its strong leaders, its undivided Slavic kinship, secures the future against division and defeat.

By 2020, independent Levada Center polling revealed that 75% of Russians regarded the Soviet era as the ‘greatest time’ in their country's history, a sentiment deepest among older generations who endured the 1990s' chaos, yet pervasive across society as a rebuke to that decade's hardships rather than a plea for communism's full return. The erection of new Stalin monuments has accelerated since 2022, with dozens added amid the conflict, busts in regional towns, reliefs in Moscow's metro, signaling a bolder public embrace of his legacy as victor and unifier. In 2025 alone, 15 Stalin monuments were built across Russia, not including smaller busts or facades which are also plentiful.

As 2026 dawns, Russia's selective reclamation of its Soviet past persists, with Stalin's shadow lengthening not as a call to revive socialism, but as a tool for historical reconciliation, satiating opposition through nostalgic symbols of prestige and unyielding resolve. Depicted as a ‘strong helmsman’ guiding the nation through storms, devoid of Marxist-Leninist or collectivist rhetoric, his image bolsters Kremlin statecraft amid the Special Military Operation's trials. Levada's 2025 poll crowns him history's most outstanding figure for 42% of Russians, while over 120 monuments now stand, including seven unveiled in May 2025 alone, like the Moscow Metro restoration at Taganskaya.

In Churchill's words, avoiding quarrels with the past secures Russia's future—eternal, undivided, and most certainly, great.
 

In 1935, in the midst of an era giving birth to the mass reproducibility of art, the German philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin writes that what “withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.” The uniqueness and authenticity of the original – which forms the fundamental basis of its “aura” – is spoiled when the mechanical reproduction of art is put in place. While such development does have a democratizing potential – one which was put to work by the 20th century world communist movement, which greatly brought culture to the mass of people through these means – in the capitalist West, the mass reproducibility of art and culture has been subsumed under the logic of profit, and hence primarily is found in the culture industry’s “pop” forms of constantly repeated flat “art.”

The logic of mass reproducibility and the loss of authenticity and originality that is conjoined to it is far from being limited merely to culture, of course. One can see the same process at play all across society. I wish to explore here the ways in which it is operative at the level of statesmanship.

With no reference to Benjamin’s work, but employed in a manner which overlaps with it, the term “aura” has become increasingly popular with the youth. “Aura farming” is a concept often employed to describe actions taken (and, of course, recorded) which increase the aura of the subject engaging in it – that is, which enhance their image as unique, original, and cool.

Some might be surprised to see that one of the most common usages of such concepts I have witnessed is in edits made of leaders of the multipolar world like Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-Un, and Ayatollah Khamenei.

With Xi you often see his iconic image riding in the Hongqi parade inspection vehicle, demonstrating the unique military might of the People's Republic of China.

With Putin it could be anything from him holding a puppy to him giving a speech calling out the Janus-faced character of the West’s discourse on human rights.

With Kim it is almost always the masterful edits of him inspecting his ballistic missiles.

And finally, with the Ayatollah Khamenei, his aura stems from a deep ascetic and spiritual presence captured by his lectures or discussions with the Iranian people.

In each case, the presence – the aura – of these great statesmen is felt, even by those from the regions of the world who’ve only been taught to see them as “evil pariahs.”

It is an interesting thought experiment to contrast the aura attached to these leaders with the replaceability of the Western ones. Western leaders, from the US to Europe and their puppets around the Western hemisphere, are thoroughly aura deficient. The edits the White House has recently made trying to make Trump, Rubio, and Hegseth look tough come off as cringe. Their attempt to “aura farm” on eroded soil produces only bad harvests – and the people can plainly see it.

The Western politicians, like the pop culture which predominates them, is mass reproducible. There is no aura in any of them – they are all unoriginal, inauthentic reproductions. Just as their productions of culture– subsumed under the logic of profit – only result in inauthentic and superficial art (postmodern art, the art which Fredric Jameson said embodies the cultural logic of contemporary capitalism), the statesmen produced have the same superficiality, depthlessness, and reproducibility.

While their form might change here and there, their common hollowness of originality remains. They are vehicles whose content is always the same – upholding the US-dominated world capitalist-imperialist order. The perfect metaphor for the Western politician is that of an M&M candy – the outside might have different colors, but internally they are all the same.

Creatively employing the framework developed by Benjamin helps us understand the disparities in aura between the Western leaders and the leaders of the multipolar world. Western leaders are embedded within the system of profit and debt-driven mass reproducibility, and hence, they have no aura. The leaders of the multipolar world, on the other hand, have had to take the revolutionary act – as Slavoj Zizek calls it – to break with the dominant order of U.S. super-imperialism.

This act, or, to put it in the terms employed by Alain Badiou, this event, is a rupture with the fabric of the world of profit-driven mass reproducibility. Hence, it stands with uniqueness, originality, and irreplaceability. This is where the aura comes from – the revolutionary stance, or break, they perform to the established order. Xi, Putin, Khamenei, Kim, Traore, Diaz-Canel, Ortega, Sheinbaum, Maduro, etc. all have aura because of their position – in relation to the dominant social order – as revolutionaries.

The cost of alignment with the dominant order today, then, is aura deficiency. No amount of “hard edits” can overcome this lack. Aura carries with it a presence which manifests itself precisely through a tangible absence. It cannot get easily pinned down, as you could, for instance, a fashion item. This is why it cannot be cheaply reproduced by the imperialists; aura is the terrain of an authentic rupture.

​Aura is a mark of originality and authenticity, and in today’s world, the only statesmen with it are those that have taken the courageous risk, the revolutionary act, to break with the order of global capitalism. The only true way to aura farm today, then, is by being the revolutionary which breaks with the levelled unremarkableness of capitalist pop mediocrity.

Michael Parenti (September 30, 1933–January 24, 2026) is no longer with us, yet his legacy lives on in the sharpened minds and awakened consciences of innumerable comrades throughout generations rather than in marble monuments. Surrounded by family, he softly entered what his son Christian described as "the Great Lecture Hall in the Sky" at the age of 92. This image is appropriate for a man whose life was one never-ending, thrilling lesson on the anatomy of power.
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Parenti was born into a hardworking Italian-American family in New York City, and he carried the bonds and wounds of his upbringing with him like a compass. His earliest teachers were ethnic marginalization and economic precarity, which sowed the seeds of a class consciousness that would blossom into a lifelong, unreserved Marxist critique. With the thoroughness of someone who knew the academy's gates were guarded by individuals he would later expose, he obtained the formal credentials; BA from City College, MA from Brown, and PhD from Yale. But instead of protecting him, academia quickly revealed its true nature. He was deemed too hazardous for tenure tracks due to his outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War, which included a vicious beating by state troopers at a solidarity demonstration at Kent State. Blacklisted, he refused to back down or make concessions. Rather, he opted for the more difficult path: self-reliance, modest living, and direct interaction with workers, students, and organizers in lecture halls, community centers, and union halls away from ivory towers.

Parenti's oratory and prose were weapons of uncommon accuracy; they were sharp, lucid, and infused with a caustic wit that might disarm before it destroyed. He exposed the American pluralistic façade in Democracy for the Few, exposing a system designed to channel public energies into consent rituals while protecting elite privilege and property. He maintained that power flows upward from concentrated capital rather than downward from votes, making elections a controlled spectacle rather than a true struggle.

His media criticisms in Inventing Reality and Make-Believe Media were remarkably ominous of our current information battles. He contended that corporate media serve as ideological shock troops rather than impartial arbiters, creating narratives that legitimize empire, vilify resistance, and hide class conflict under layers of amusement and selective outrage.

However, Blackshirts and Reds may be the piece that most conveys Parenti's intellectual bravery. He ventured to defend the historical record of socialist initiatives against persistent propaganda during a time when anticommunism had solidified into uncontested doctrine. By contrasting the structural brutality of capitalism, colonial plunder, genocides, proxy wars, economic strangulation, with the beleaguered successes of communist nations in literacy, healthcare, gender parity, and poverty reduction, he rejected simple analogies. His perspective was fundamentally materialist: encirclement, sabotage, and invasion were the causes of shortcomings rather than any intrinsic weakness in collectivism. The bedrock underlying liberal convictions shifts as you read it.

Parenti was as relentless in his criticism of imperialism. The Face of Imperialism, To Kill a Nation (about the breakup of Yugoslavia), and Against Empire all connected American interventions to their basic economic logic: resource control, alternative suppression, and unrelenting growth. Privatization campaigns and market victories were concealed by "humanitarian" pretexts; opposition was pathologized as savagery, and Western crimes were forgotten.

His scope encompassed ideological religion (God and His Demons), cultural hegemony (The Culture Struggle), and ancient history (The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome). However, his lectures, those renowned performances were what really brought his theories to life. They transformed complex theory into lively conversation with their dramatic flair, humor, and fierce clarity. Decades later, the "Yellow Parenti" discourse about Cuba's revolution and videos analyzing capitalist logic or media manipulation continue to circulate like digital samizdat, sparking minds.

Gabriel Rockhill's insightful Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, which painstakingly traces how parts of the "theory industry" in the imperial core have been shaped, subsidized, and guided by powerful capitalist interests, foundations, and state apparatuses to domesticate radical thought, highlights the stark contrast between Parenti's authenticity as a Marxist scholar and the frequently hollow edifice of much contemporary Western left intelligentsia. A pattern emerges from Rockhill's archival excavation: some well-known individuals and schools, despite providing incisive critiques of power, continue to live comfortably within elite institutions, their work subtly reoriented toward culturalist concerns, anti-communist reflexes, or democratic illusions that divert attention from militant class struggle and defense of real socialist projects.

For many on the revolutionary left, Noam Chomsky is a prime example of this conflict. Chomsky is praised for his critiques of American imperialism and media propaganda, but his analysis often falls short of a full-fledged Marxist commitment, eschewing systematic class analysis in favor of anarchist-infused moralism while retaining a strong anticommunist stance toward the Soviet Union, and other socialist experiments under siege. His decades-long institutional position at MIT in the midst of the military-industrial-academic complex he criticizes raises ongoing concerns about the material circumstances that allow for such prominence. Claims of unwavering independence are further undermined by rumors of compromising affiliations, most notably documented ties to Jeffrey Epstein's circle. This suggests a man who, despite his academic prowess, navigates elite networks in ways that Parenti resolutely resisted.

Parenti, on the other hand, represented an integrity that went beyond these allowances. Due to his anti-Vietnam activities, he was barred from mainstream academia and opted for proletarian exile over compromise. He did not accept foundation funding or endowed chairs, nor did he temper his support of communism's historical victories in the face of persistent propaganda. His Marxism, which was based on materialist rigor, class primacy, and solidarity with the global South's anti-imperial movements, was a lived practice rather than an intellectual stance. Parenti named names, unapologetically defended beleaguered revolutions, and addressed the working class directly in language devoid of jargon but full of dialectical clarity, while others hedged or abstracted. According to Rockhill, he opposed the "imperial theory industry," which transforms radical energy into benign criticism; instead, Parenti's writings provided movements with instruments for revolutionary change as opposed to never-ending deconstruction.

Parenti's genuineness, which is unbought and unbowed, made him a unique lighthouse: a Marxist whose research benefited the downtrodden rather than the appearances of elite opposition. Parenti's life and body of work continue to serve as a warning and an encouragement to recover Marxism as the science and art of emancipation rather than as cultural capital in an intellectual environment where many "critical theorists" flourish by criticizing everything but the systems that uphold their own privilege.

Parenti's integrity, which is almost archaic reluctance to compromise, was what distinguished him. He stayed unwavering despite being marginalized by institutions, censored but never silenced, and accused of heresy on Yugoslavia and other fronts. He was not seduced by think-tank sinecure, and his message was not weakened in the name of respectability. He was always kind and never condescending, speaking directly to the downtrodden and anchoring Marxism in real-world situations rather than intellectual ideas.

His influence on modern Marxism is immeasurable. Parenti emphasized the importance of class, the materiality of empire, and the need to preserve socialism's historical balance sheet at a time of fractured identities and postmodern evasions. In the midst of triumphalist "end of history" myths, he resurrected rational defense of communism, gave anti-imperialists intellectual armor against propaganda, and modeled revolutionary popular education as a practice of liberation.

Parenti's departure is felt as a hole in clarity in the accolades that are flooding in, from Ben Norton calling him one of the finest thinkers of the U.S. left to Vijay Prashad repeating Christian's heavenly metaphor to activists and intellectuals worldwide lamenting a voice for the working class. However, his writings, books that analyze, lectures that motivate, and concepts that never go out of style, remain.
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As he anticipated, the fight goes on. As he suggested, we begin the process of transcending the system we face by comprehending it. Even if Michael Parenti's voice has faded, we may still hear its echoes. Comrade, rest in power. In the phrases we carry forth, the lecture hall awaits your return.

The global left is mourning the death of Michael Parenti, the influential Marxist scholar, historian, and public intellectual whose work exposed the mechanics of capitalism, imperialism, and ideological power with unmatched clarity. Parenti passed away on January 24 at the age of 92, leaving behind a body of work that shaped generations of scholars, organizers, and anti-imperialist movements across the world.

For decades, Parenti stood apart from mainstream academia and political life, refusing to dilute his analysis or bend his language to liberal respectability. He wrote not to impress institutions, but to arm people with understanding.

Working-class roots, uncompromising politics

Born in 1933 in New York City to a working-class Italian American family, Parenti often said that his political commitments were grounded not in abstraction, but in lived experience. Class was not something he discovered in theory; it was something he grew up inside.

He earned a PhD and taught political science and history, but his outspoken Marxism and anti-imperialism meant he was steadily pushed to the margins of elite academia. Rather than retreat or conform, Parenti chose independence: lecturing widely, writing prolifically, and speaking directly to union halls, community centers, activist spaces, and international audiences.

He lived modestly, avoided think-tank careers and corporate funding, and kept his private life largely out of the public eye. He was a husband and a father, including to journalist and political analyst Christian Parenti, but he never cultivated a public persona rooted in biography. What mattered to him was the work.

Exposing the class nature of "democracy"

Parenti’s most enduring academic contribution was his systematic critique of liberal democracy under capitalism. In his landmark book Democracy for the Few, first published in 1974, he argued that capitalist democracies are not neutral systems open equally to all, but class-structured states in which economic power overwhelmingly determines political outcomes.

He showed how elections, courts, media, and state institutions consistently serve the interests of capital, while popular demands are managed, diluted, or suppressed. Democracy, he argued, is tolerated only so long as it does not threaten property relations.

"Power is not evenly distributed in society," Parenti wrote. "Those who own and control the productive wealth tend to dominate the political life of the nation."

The book became a formative text for students and activists worldwide, prized for its clarity and refusal of liberal illusion.

​Imperialism without disguise

Parenti was equally influential for his work on imperialism and US foreign policy. In books such as Against Empire and To Kill a Nation, he dismantled the idea that Western wars are motivated by humanitarian concern or democratic ideals.

Instead, he traced intervention, sanctions, and regime change to material interests: control over resources, labor, strategic territory, and global markets. He showed how human rights discourse is selectively deployed, how compliant client states are shielded from scrutiny, and how resistance is pathologized as extremism.

One of Parenti’s most quoted observations remains painfully current: "The essential function of imperialism is not to civilize or democratize, but to maintain a global system of inequality."
His analysis helped anti-war and anti-imperialist movements reject moral distraction and focus on structure rather than spectacle.

Anti-anticommunism and historical honesty

In Blackshirts and Reds, Parenti confronted Cold War anticommunism as an ideology rather than an analysis. He did not deny repression or failure in socialist states, but he exposed how capitalist violence is normalized while socialist experiments are judged by impossible moral standards.

He insisted on historical comparison: asking why fascism is treated as an aberration while capitalism’s own mass violence, including colonialism, slavery, sanctions, structural deprivation, is rendered invisible or inevitable.

The book reopened serious discussion of socialism’s achievements in literacy, healthcare, women’s participation, and social welfare, at a time when such discussions were considered politically taboo.

Media, ideology, and manufactured consent

Long before "media literacy" became fashionable, Parenti laid bare the structural bias of corporate media. In Inventing Reality, he explained how ownership, advertising, sourcing, and elite consensus shape what is reported, how it is framed, and which voices are excluded.

He stressed that propaganda does not require overt censorship. It works through repetition, omission, ridicule, and selective outrage, teaching audiences what to ignore as much as what to believe.
This work made Parenti a cornerstone of critical media studies, especially among activists seeking to challenge war narratives and economic myths.

A scholar of struggle, not accommodation

What distinguished Parenti was not only what he argued, but how he lived. He never treated radical politics as a career ladder. He accepted marginalization rather than compromise and continued to speak plainly when euphemism was rewarded.

His lectures, many of which circulated widely online, are remembered for their warmth, humor, and devastating precision. He trusted ordinary people to grasp complex ideas without academic gatekeeping.

In doing so, Parenti helped bridge the divide between scholarship and struggle, restoring confidence in class analysis at a time when it was being hollowed out or replaced by moral abstraction.

An enduring legacy

Michael Parenti did not found a school or cultivate disciples. His influence traveled differently: through dog-eared books, shared lectures, study circles, movement spaces, and quiet moments of recognition when the world suddenly made sense.

At a time of renewed imperial violence, deepening inequality, and ideological confusion, his work remains unsettlingly relevant.

He once wrote: "The first step in the struggle for social justice is to understand the nature of the system we are up against."

For generations of working-class intellectuals, organizers, and scholars across the world, Michael Parenti helped make that understanding possible.

His voice is gone. His clarity remains.

Originally published on Amayadeen.net

Author
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Janna Kadri

By now everyone has read about the US criminal kidnapping of democratically elected Venezuelan President, Nicolas Maduro, alongside the bombing of Caracas, Venezuela. Details are still being released as to how these events were allowed to happen. However, I would like to briefly reflect on three takeaways the Global South – the countries constantly struggling against US-NATO-Zionist imperialism – must learn from these events.

1.
Nukes are integral for sovereignty

This lesson should have already been learned in 2011, when Muammar Gaddafi’s government in Libya was overthrown. In 2003, Gaddafi announced the abandonment of his program to develop nuclear weapons. This allowed for a temporary lifting of U.S. and EU sanctions, and a brief “normalization” of relations. Expecting the “normalization” to have been anything but temporary was a folly. The U.S. empire is not in the business of treating other nations as equals. Its ends are to debt trap, control assets, and loot resources. It does not care for “international law,” nor “human rights,” nor “freedom and democracy” – even though it loves employing these catchwords as a front for regime change.

Would Gaddafi have been overthrown had he not interrupted the development of his nuclear program? Would the US-NATO even have considered overthrowing the Chairman had they sported a nuclear arsenal as a means of deterrence? I don’t think we must speculate here. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), or North Korea as the Americans call it, was on the same Neocon list of “dangerous and evil” countries which needed to be overthrown. Under the plans of the Project for the New American Century, the DPRK could’ve well received the Libya treatment. What was the difference in treatment between the two countries? I think a central component was that by the mid-to-late 2010s, the DPRK had developed the great antidote of full-fledge Western aggression: nuclear weapons.

Libya was overthrown, the tremendous advancements made in this nation – which became amongst the most prosperous in all of Africa – were demolished. Soon after the overthrow, as everyone now knows, things got so bad slave markets were erected around the country. The lesson is clear – without developing your defense system, one cannot deter Western aggression. Until this day, NATO and the U.S. are very careful of how they wage their war on Russia. They could not carry it out with the same boldness they used in Libya. They required a proxy – Ukraine – to not formally be considered the subjects carrying out the act. Had Venezuela sported the weapons system comrade Kim Jong Un shows off, it is unlikely that giant of the Seven Leagues – as José Martí called the U.S. empire – would have been as brazen in their attacks. We cannot forget what Mao taught us – imperialism is a paper tiger. It looks scary but give it a bloody nose and it will run.

2.
‘Stalinism’ was right 

The Western “left,” thoroughly rooted in what I have called a “purity fetish” outlook, has virtually defined itself through its rejection of what it calls “Stalinism.” Such a thing, however, does not actually exist. What does exist is Marxism-Leninism, a framework for successfully waging war against capitalist-imperialism. What the Western “left” have derided as “Stalinism” are the realist practices of protecting and constructing a revolutionary state, one capable of defending itself from enemies both internal and external.

The philosopher Slavoj Žižek, an anti-communist himself, nonetheless makes an astute observation about the willingness of Marxist-Leninists – as well as conservatives – to reject liberal moralism and take responsibility for the difficult actions which have to take place for one’s political project to be defended. As he argues in The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology:

“What a true Leninist and a political conservative have in common is the fact that they reject what one could call liberal leftist irresponsibility, that is, advocating grand projects of solidarity, freedom, and so on, yet ducking out when the price to be paid for them is in the guise of concrete and often “cruel” political measures. Like an authentic conservative, a true Leninist is not afraid to pass to the act, to take responsibility for all the consequences, unpleasant as they may be, of realizing his political project.”

The Western “left” derided Stalin for his brutal treatment of his opposition within the party, ignoring always the context of turmoil in which this often-treasonous opposition chose to challenge the ruling order of the revolutionary state. At a time when unconditional commitment and unity to the protection of the revolution was needed, “doubting was treason,” as the Chavista revolutionaries say today. History has shown that the revolutionary states that survive and thrive are those which are willing to get their hands dirty and be as brutal with internal opposition in times of crisis as is necessary. As Executive Chairman of the American Communist Party, Haz Al-Din, recently argued, “Venezuela proves the most brutal measures of Communist dictatorships to crush internal enemies were 100% justified. Ignore the crocodile tears for ‘victims.’ Hesitate, and they’ll snort/oink victoriously over your country’s corpse.”

Is this not precisely one of the central lessons to take from Venezuela, Bolivia, etc.? Why is bourgeois “democratic” formalism so fetishistically respected? If you have a treasonous opposition calling for the invasion of your country by Zionist forces, how could they possibly walk the streets of your country freely? Why was a Juan Guaidó or a Maria Corina Machado able to freely walk the streets of Caracas, travel abroad and return, when it was so clear that they were nothing but traitors to the homeland of Bolivar – individuals who wanted to return to a time when wealthy white Venezuelans were the privileged house slaves of American imperialism. This does not mean plurality is not allowed, but as Fidel Castro taught – within the revolution everything, outside of it nothing.

3.
We are in the era of civilizational blocs

Today, the nation state is being overcome as the nucleus of geopolitics by the civilizational state. Today geopolitics is determined by civilizational blocs. Only a meta-national civilizational unity of people who were divided artificially into tribal nations by western colonialism can stop the viciousness of a U.S. superimperialism in decline. Now is the time – more than ever before – for Latin America to return to the wisdom of Bolívar, Martí, and other revolutionary heroes that understood the essential character of a united Central and South America to deter U.S. imperialism. In this, the Chavistas, of course, are not to blame. Their whole revolutionary project has this lesson at its heart. Therefore, this third point is aimed at those other nations of the region which foolishly think they can have even a semblance of sovereignty without adopting the revolutionary Bolivarian civilizational unity proposed by the Chavistas. These attacks on Venezuela are attacks on the principle of sovereignty itself, and every country in the hemisphere is in trouble if steps are not taken to seriously construct a Pan-American civilizational and revolutionary unity.

This lesson must also be heeded by our anti-imperialist comrades around the world – from West Asia to Africa. Here – like the Venezuelans – the Alliance of Sahel States has the right idea. As Kwame Nkrumah, Thomas Sankara, and all the great African revolutionaries taught, only through Pan-African unity can the motherland of Africa fully stand on its own two feet and throw off once and for all the shackles of Western imperialism and neo-colonialism. In China, as Professor Zhang Weiwei argues, the state itself is a civilizational state. Other analysts have argued the same about the Russian Federation. In West Asia – as in Latin America and Africa – the imperialists have been successful in dividing peoples who share a common civilizational unity. Such division of this essential civilizational pole must be overcome. In the era of civilization states and meta-state alliances – the nation state is not dead per se, it is simply reincorporated into a new dialectical intercourse where it stands as the secondary aspect, as Mao would call it, of the contradiction between nation and civilization. As a product of this period of transition, national projects must be crafted in harmony with, and cognizant of, the larger civilizational context of unity which must be created or enriched.

The countries of Latin America must take away the correct lessons from these events unfolding in Venezuela. In any moment, they too could be next. If they are alone and divided, they will be weak. At a time when anti-imperialist forces in the region have taken big hits (the loss of the Movement Toward Socialism party in Bolivia, the loss of the left in Honduras, the kidnapping of Maduro, etc.), it is more essential than ever to return to the teachings of the great Pan-American thinkers, who understood that without a broader civilizational unity, national sovereignty will always hang by a thread.

Seeing the events unfold over the last week, these three key points have kept recurring in my mind. These are intended to be comradely opinions and suggestions – not harsh critique and condemnation. My support for the Bolivarian revolution is unflinching, and if I seek to draw out certain lessons that I think could be taken away from difficult moments such as these, it is always in the spirit of seeking to protect the revolution from imperialist aggression and internal traitors, not kicking it when it is down.

I would like to close with a line from the Cuban revolutionary poet Bonifacio Byrne:

If my flag were ever torn into tiny pieces,
if one day it were reduced to fragments,
our dead, raising their arms,
would still know how to defend it.

This line, frequently repeated by Commander Fidel Castro, captures the spirit in which not only the national homeland must be defended, but also the broader context of Our America.