Problems of Peace and Socialism
Encyclopedia
Problems of Peace and Socialism , often referred to by the name of its English-language edition World Marxist Review (WMR), was a joint theoretical and ideological journal of communist and workers parties around the world. It existed for 32 years, until closed down in June 1990. The offices of WMR were based in Prague
, Czechoslovakia
. Each edition of the journal had a circulation of above half a million, being read in some 145 countries. At its height, WMR appeared in 41 languages, and editors from 69 communist parties around worked at its office in Prague. The master copy of the journal was its Russian-language edition Problemy Mira i Sotsializma.
The idea of launch the WMR as the joint ideological monthly publication was raised at the 1957 International Meeting of Communist and Workers Parties. The first issue came out in September 1958. At the start, WMR was published in Russian
, Hungarian
, German
, Polish
, Chinese
, Albanian
, Vietnamese
, Bulgarian
, Romanian
, Korean
, Czech
, Mongolian
, English
, French
, Spanish
, Italian
, Dutch
, Swedish
and Japanese
.
In some ways WMR represented a continuation of the Cominform
organ For a Lasting Peace, for People's Democracy. WMR was supposed to play an important role in formulating a joint political line of the communist parties of the Socialist Bloc. However, it never really came to fill the function of begin an intra-Bloc organ, but was rather used by non-ruling communist parties.
In the wake of the Sino-Soviet split
, the Albanian edition was canceled in 1962, followed by the Chinese and Korean editions in 1963. Meanwhile, a Greek
edition was started in Cyprus
in 1962, a Portuguese
in Brazil
in the same year and a Sinhala edition was launched in Ceylon in 1965. During the same period, new distribution centres were set up in Switzerland
, Uruguay
, Mexico
, Chile
and Argentina
.
The costs for the printing of the journal were mainly covered by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
. Communist parties from East Germany, Poland
, Czechoslovakia
, Hungary
, Romania
, Bulgaria
and Mongolia
also contributed. Around half of the 400 strong staff were from the Soviet Union.
The journal was to gain notoriety as the incubator of perestroika
. Several of Mikhail Gorbachev
’s top advisors on his reforms (such as Gennadi Gerasimov
, Georgy Shakhnazarov
, Yevgeny Ambartsumov, Anatoly Chernyaev, Georgy Arbatov
, Aleksandr Tsipko, Yegor Yakovlev
, Ivan Frolov, among several others) had worked at the journal in Prague.
, Alexander Dubček
, Milovan Đilas and Andrei D. Sakharov began to be published.
By the time the journal was closed down, its staff had been reduced to 40. The remaining staff were mainly Czech employees, who took care of the building. Towards the end, most of its financial backers withdrew their subsidies. As of 1990, only the Soviet and Mongolian parties retained their subsidies.
In 1990, the Roman Catholic church
reclaimed the building where the WMR editorial office had been located.
The last editor, Molnar, tried to negotiate remodeling the Peace and Socialism International Publishers venture into a broader leftwing
publishing house. The company was to be renamed 'Patria'.
In 1986 Aleksandr M. Subbotin, who was also a member of the Auditing Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
, became editor of WMR.
Towards the final phase of WMR Lubomir Molnar became new editor. Molnar, a Czechoslovak diplomat, was the first non-Soviet editor.
Prague
Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...
, Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
. Each edition of the journal had a circulation of above half a million, being read in some 145 countries. At its height, WMR appeared in 41 languages, and editors from 69 communist parties around worked at its office in Prague. The master copy of the journal was its Russian-language edition Problemy Mira i Sotsializma.
The idea of launch the WMR as the joint ideological monthly publication was raised at the 1957 International Meeting of Communist and Workers Parties. The first issue came out in September 1958. At the start, WMR was published in Russian
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
, Hungarian
Hungarian language
Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....
, German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, Polish
Polish language
Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...
, Chinese
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
, Albanian
Albanian language
Albanian is an Indo-European language spoken by approximately 7.6 million people, primarily in Albania and Kosovo but also in other areas of the Balkans in which there is an Albanian population, including western Macedonia, southern Montenegro, southern Serbia and northwestern Greece...
, Vietnamese
Vietnamese language
Vietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam...
, Bulgarian
Bulgarian language
Bulgarian is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic linguistic group.Bulgarian, along with the closely related Macedonian language, demonstrates several linguistic characteristics that set it apart from all other Slavic languages such as the elimination of case declension, the...
, Romanian
Romanian language
Romanian Romanian Romanian (or Daco-Romanian; obsolete spellings Rumanian, Roumanian; self-designation: română, limba română ("the Romanian language") or românește (lit. "in Romanian") is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova...
, Korean
Korean language
Korean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...
, Czech
Czech language
Czech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers; it is the majority language in the Czech Republic and spoken by Czechs worldwide. The language was known as Bohemian in English until the late 19th century...
, Mongolian
Mongolian language
The Mongolian language is the official language of Mongolia and the best-known member of the Mongolic language family. The number of speakers across all its dialects may be 5.2 million, including the vast majority of the residents of Mongolia and many of the Mongolian residents of the Inner...
, English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
, Dutch
Dutch language
Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
, Swedish
Swedish language
Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
and Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
.
In some ways WMR represented a continuation of the Cominform
Cominform
Founded in 1947, Cominform is the common name for what was officially referred to as the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers' Parties...
organ For a Lasting Peace, for People's Democracy. WMR was supposed to play an important role in formulating a joint political line of the communist parties of the Socialist Bloc. However, it never really came to fill the function of begin an intra-Bloc organ, but was rather used by non-ruling communist parties.
In the wake of the Sino-Soviet split
Sino-Soviet split
In political science, the term Sino–Soviet split denotes the worsening of political and ideologic relations between the People's Republic of China and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics during the Cold War...
, the Albanian edition was canceled in 1962, followed by the Chinese and Korean editions in 1963. Meanwhile, a Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
edition was started in Cyprus
Cyprus
Cyprus , officially the Republic of Cyprus , is a Eurasian island country, member of the European Union, in the Eastern Mediterranean, east of Greece, south of Turkey, west of Syria and north of Egypt. It is the third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea.The earliest known human activity on the...
in 1962, a Portuguese
Portuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
in Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
in the same year and a Sinhala edition was launched in Ceylon in 1965. During the same period, new distribution centres were set up in Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
, Uruguay
Uruguay
Uruguay ,officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay,sometimes the Eastern Republic of Uruguay; ) is a country in the southeastern part of South America. It is home to some 3.5 million people, of whom 1.8 million live in the capital Montevideo and its metropolitan area...
, Mexico
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
, Chile
Chile
Chile ,officially the Republic of Chile , is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow coastal strip between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far...
and Argentina
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...
.
The costs for the printing of the journal were mainly covered by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...
. Communist parties from East Germany, Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
, Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
, Hungary
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
, Romania
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
, Bulgaria
Bulgaria
Bulgaria , officially the Republic of Bulgaria , is a parliamentary democracy within a unitary constitutional republic in Southeast Europe. The country borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east...
and Mongolia
Mongolia
Mongolia is a landlocked country in East and Central Asia. It is bordered by Russia to the north and China to the south, east and west. Although Mongolia does not share a border with Kazakhstan, its western-most point is only from Kazakhstan's eastern tip. Ulan Bator, the capital and largest...
also contributed. Around half of the 400 strong staff were from the Soviet Union.
The journal was to gain notoriety as the incubator of perestroika
Perestroika
Perestroika was a political movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during 1980s, widely associated with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev...
. Several of Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is a former Soviet statesman, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, and as the last head of state of the USSR, having served from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991...
’s top advisors on his reforms (such as Gennadi Gerasimov
Gennadi Gerasimov
Gennadi Ivanovich Gerasimov Gennadi (or Gennady) Ivanovich Gerasimov Gennadi (or Gennady) Ivanovich Gerasimov (Russian, Геннадий Иванович Герасимов, (1930, Yelabuga – 14 September 2010, Moscow) was the Russian ambassador to Portugal from 1990 to 1995. Previously he was foreign affairs spokesman...
, Georgy Shakhnazarov
Georgy Shakhnazarov
Georgy Khosroevich Shakhnazarov was a Soviet-Armenian politician and political scientist. He was one of the half-dozen aides closest to Mikhail Gorbachev both while he was Soviet leader and after his fall from power at the collapse of the Soviet Union...
, Yevgeny Ambartsumov, Anatoly Chernyaev, Georgy Arbatov
Georgy Arbatov
Georgy Arkadevich Arbatov was a Soviet and Russian political scientist who served as an adviser to five General Secretaries of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and was best known in the West during the Cold War era as a representative for the policies of the Soviet Union in the United...
, Aleksandr Tsipko, Yegor Yakovlev
Yegor Yakovlev
Yegor Vladimirovich Yakovlev was one of the founders of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin's policy of glasnost, and one of the most respected Russian journalists....
, Ivan Frolov, among several others) had worked at the journal in Prague.
Final period
Towards the end of 1989, there were sharp changes in the editorial policy at WMR. Articles written by writers like Zbigniew BrzezinskiZbigniew Brzezinski
Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski is a Polish American political scientist, geostrategist, and statesman who served as United States National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981....
, Alexander Dubček
Alexander Dubcek
Alexander Dubček , also known as Dikita, was a Slovak politician and briefly leader of Czechoslovakia , famous for his attempt to reform the communist regime during the Prague Spring...
, Milovan Đilas and Andrei D. Sakharov began to be published.
By the time the journal was closed down, its staff had been reduced to 40. The remaining staff were mainly Czech employees, who took care of the building. Towards the end, most of its financial backers withdrew their subsidies. As of 1990, only the Soviet and Mongolian parties retained their subsidies.
In 1990, the Roman Catholic church
Roman Catholic Church
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with over a billion members. Led by the Pope, it defines its mission as spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, administering the sacraments and exercising charity...
reclaimed the building where the WMR editorial office had been located.
The last editor, Molnar, tried to negotiate remodeling the Peace and Socialism International Publishers venture into a broader leftwing
Left-wing politics
In politics, Left, left-wing and leftist generally refer to support for social change to create a more egalitarian society...
publishing house. The company was to be renamed 'Patria'.
Editors
Aleksey Rumyantsev was the first editor, and served in the position until 1964. After Rumyantsev, G. P. Frantov (rector of the Academy of Social Sciences) took over the editorship.In 1986 Aleksandr M. Subbotin, who was also a member of the Auditing Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...
, became editor of WMR.
Towards the final phase of WMR Lubomir Molnar became new editor. Molnar, a Czechoslovak diplomat, was the first non-Soviet editor.