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Communism

• August 3 -- Socialist China Replaced by "Cutthroat Society"
Joseph Kahn and Jim Yardley use a tragic young suicide as a (tasteless) metaphor for the "money-centered, cutthroat society that has replaced socialist China."

• June 11 -- Gorbachev's "Bold and Brilliant" Perestroika
Thom Shanker interviews Mikhail Gorbachev and gives the Soviet leader the credit for ending the Cold War: "As Mr. Reagan's obituaries uniformly proclaim, the late president won the cold war, but historians agree that the outcome would have been impossible had any man other than Mr. Gorbachev been sitting behind the Kremlin's red-brick walls and across the negotiating table."

• June 11 -- Chewing Over the Reagan Legacy
R.W. Apple praises Reagan's tax-raising "pragmatism" while despairing of his "severe and continuing cutbacks in government services to the poor and vulnerable."

• May 27 -- More Left-Wing Che Clichés
Larry Rohter on Argentina's tiresome Che chic: "Che Guevara is widely remembered today as a revolutionary figure; to some a heroic, Christ-like martyr, to others the embodiment of a failed ideology….for Latin Americans just now coming of age, yet another image of Che is starting to emerge: the romantic and tragic young adventurer who has as much in common with Jack Kerouac or James Dean as with Fidel Castro." Rohter leaves out one group: Those who consider Guevara a bloodthirsty Communist militant.

• April 20 -- "Controversial" to Claim Alger Hiss a Spy?
Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Felicia Lee report on a controversy over Bush's nominee for U.S. archivist Allen Weinstein: "He has long been controversial among historians, in part because of his conclusion in his 1978 book, 'Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case,' that Hiss was indeed a Communist spy." Actually, the only "controversy" about Hiss' guilt these days is among left-wingers.

• March 9 -- Still Missing the Soviet Union
Russia reporter Seth Mydans again notes how much is missed from the days of Communism: "Job security and free vacations disappeared, along with subsidized housing, education, medical care and social services."

• March 5 -- Revkin's Icy Reaction to Soviet Union's Collapse
First polar bears, now ice stations: More victims of the fall of Communism.

• February 23 -- McCarthy-Stalin: Just Two Mean Joes?
Felicia Lee surveys the history of the left-wing magazine Dissent and makes this odd comparison: "Started by a group of New York socialists and intellectuals fed up with what they saw as rampant complacency in American thought, Dissent, a quarterly journal, was devoted to slaying orthodoxies on the right and on the left in an era dominated by Joseph McCarthy and Joseph Stalin."

• February 9 -- Goodie for Gorby
Seth Mydans' story on a Moscow subway bombing plugs a liberal hero: "The glasnost--or openness--that Mikhail Gorbachev brought to the Soviet Union does not run deep."

• February 5 -- Seth Mydans in Stalinland
The last surviving resident of a central Russian village longs for the good old days of the Soviet Union, writes Seth Mydans: "In his younger years, Mr. Bykov was a soldier, a janitor and a plumber, and the world wasn't such a bad place." Bykov grew up under Stalin.

• January 27 -- Communist East Germany's "Social Safety Net"
A fascinating story on state-sponsored doping of Olympic athletes in Communist East Germany includes this dubious line on the fall of the Berlin Wall: "Retired, unemployed, the social safety net of her country no longer available to soften her fall after reunification…."

• January 13 -- Communist East Germany Not All Bad
Richard Bernstein pens "Warm, Fuzzy Feelings for East Germany's Gray Old Days," a playful look at Communist nostalgia in East Germany: "All this has given rise to a sort of East German post-mortem feeling that maybe the East had its good aspects after all, especially a certain economic security and stability, even if your best vacation option was Bulgaria."

• January 13 -- Hot For Communism in the Arctic
Nostalgia for Communism in Arctic Russia: "Victor…said the main problem was the long-gone stability of an earlier era of affordable health care, free higher education and housing, and the promise of a comfortable retirement--things now beyond his reach."

• January 6 -- Times Touts Another Marvelous Marxist
Dinitia Smith talks to "unrepentant" Marxist critic Terry Eagleton in Saturday's Times and lets him defend Marxism against what Smith calls "the familiar litany of crimes."

• December 11 -- Everything's Free Under Communism
Stephen Holden's review of a documentary about the politics of electricity in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia calls the republic a former "constituent of the Soviet Union" and that under Communism power was "free."

• November 3 -- We Miss Communism
"For the vast majority of Russians, life is worse than it was in Soviet times."

• August 26 -- Coddling a Cuddly Communist Historian

• August 22 -- A Communist Photographer With a “Belief in Progress”
Times art critic Holland Carter fawns over a Milton Rogovin photography exhibit, noting the “politically engaged” Rogovin based his “work on a humanistic belief in progress.” Yet the elderly Rogovin was a Communist Party member and remained so even after Josef Stalin’s purges became common knowledge.

• July 7 -- “Conservative” Communists?
“Hong Kong’s Message of Freedom” is a welcome editorial against Communist China’s repression of dissent in Hong Kong, but demonstrates the typical liberal media tactic of figuring out who the bad guys are, then labeling them “conservative.”

• June 25 -- Post-Communist Poland Ends Freedom of Abortion
Reporter Peter Green, who blames poverty in Poland on “the collapse of Communism,” finds another thing to lament about the end of the dictatorship: Fewer abortions.

• June 19 -- Reprieving the Rosenbergs
A Times editorial, “Remembering the Rosenbergs,” marks the 50th anniversary of the execution of the Soviet spies by admitting Julius Rosenberg was an atomic spy -- but then claims the couple were victims of an “injustice” wrought by “anti-Communist hysteria.”

• June 17 -- Bears On Ice
Another victim of the fall of Communism.

• June 10 -- Revoking A Blood-Stained Pulitzer
Will notorious pro-Stalinist Times reporter Walter Duranty finally lose his Pulitzer Prize? The New York Sun reports a new push to revoke Duranty’s 1932 Pulitzer for his Russia coverage.

• June 10 -- “Ashcroft = McCarthy,” Take 17
Bruce Weber’s review of a play about a family of 1950’s Communists in Brooklyn throws John Ashcroft into the mix: “Stalin may inevitably conjure up thoughts of Saddam Hussein, and McCarthyites might spur comparisons to the Ashcroft Justice Department…”

• May 7 -- Pro-Communist Bias…at the Movies!
Joseph Kahn’s “Filming the Dark Side of Capitalism in China” profiles a movie on coal mining in China: “By official count more than 5,000 miners die every year….many more deaths go unreported by private mine owners who operate without proper licenses or safety equipment.” As opposed to the prudent safety practices of the Mao era?

• April 21 -- Just What Russia Needs: More Planning
Sabrina Tavernise misses the Iron Curtain: “In the chaotic changes after the Soviet Union's collapse that widened the gap between rich and poor, early 1990's idealism hardened into sour hopelessness and a sense of futility.”

• March 31 -- Poverty, Bribery, Suicide? Let’s Rebuild The Wall
Just weeks after suggesting the Czech Republic’s inauguration of a conservative president led a teen to suicide, the Times Peter Green blames Poland’s poverty on the collapse of Communism.

• March 12 -- Rightist's Inauguration Leads To Czech Suicide
Reporter Peter Green quoted from a Czech teen's suicide note critical of conditions in the Czech Republic. Green wrote: "Coincidentally or not, Mr. Adamec killed himself the day before the inauguration of the country's new president, Vaclav Klaus, a rightist former prime minister whom many Czechs see as the embodiment of the triumph of money and consumerism over the humanist idealism of his predecessor, Vaclav Havel." See what happens when you vote right-wingers into office?

• March 10 -- Walter Duranty, the Times' Useful Idiot
Russian dictator Josef Stalin may have been poisoned, the Times' Serge Schmemann noted with satisfaction in the "Editorial Observer" section of Monday's edition. But he went on to admonish that Stalin "was not always the same demon in our eyes that he is today," pointing out the Times itself ran a report on Stalin's death that made no mention of the purges or the gulag. But the career of Walter Duranty, Times' man in Moscow during the 1930s, proves the paper's ignorance of Stalinist reality wasn't limited to one obituary.