In Agent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy (2020), Ben Macintyre describes the evolution of Ursula Kuczynski, from an incipient revolutionary into a career of one of the most successful Soviet spies before, during, and after World War II.
Time of great conflict & revolution
Between two world wars, fascism was on the rise throughout Europe and Asia. Germany was roiling with street battles between fascists, the German Communist Party, and the Social Democratic Party.
A wide gulf existed between the ultra-rich and everyone else. The Weimar Republic, 1919-1933, was characterized by mass unemployment, economic insecurity, and savage political conflict. In one year alone, 1918-1919, roughly 900,000 Germans died of hunger. In 1920, the Nazi Party was founded. A year later Adolf Hitler became its leader. On January 1, 1919, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht founded the German Communist Party but were captured and assassinated by right-wing German army officers, possibly sanctioned by leaders of the anti-communist Social Democratic Party.
In July, 1921 the Chinese Communist Party was organized in Shanghai. In 1927 a leader of the Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang (KMT), Chiang Kai-shek, broke with the communists. In one day, on April 12, 1927, KMT military forces allied with local criminal gangs, killed 5,000 - 10,000 students and workers loyal to the communists.
The capitalist world after World War I, from Europe to Japan, was dominated by militarists, fascist heads of state, and their financial backers, all of whom espoused various forms of racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, jingoism, militarism, and imperial conquest.
The critical difference between the 1920s-‘30s in Europe and today was the existence of an international communist movement. The result of the Bolshevik revolution in November, 1917, was that the working class, led by the Bolshevik (communist) Party,, held sway in the largest country in the world. And the Bolshevik’s goal was to create an anti-racist society of equality rather than one based on private property and profit
During the 1920s and early 1930s revolutionary communist movements in Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, and China were battling the fascists for state power. The Comintern and the Soviet Union gave material and ideological support to these struggles.
Ursula Kuczynski
Into this political and social cauldron, Ursula Kuczynski was born in 1907 to a middle-class Jewish family in Berlin. When she was sixteen she was beaten by the police in Berlin during a May Day demonstration, learning a lesson she would never forget: politics is at bottom a power struggle, most often decided by mortal combat.
Ursula Kuczynski was a professional spy who ran agents and networks against the fascists in her own country, in Japanese-occupied China, in Poland, Switzerland, and then, during the Cold War period, in Great Britain. She eventually became a Red Army colonel and, among her other espionage successes, ran Klaus Fuchs, the German physicist who enabled the USSR to get the atomic bomb, thus breaking the American monopoly on atomic weaponry.
After the Second World War she continued to spy for Moscow. Often suspected, she was never caught. In 1943 the Director of Soviet intelligence said this about her: “If we had five Sonyas in England, the war would be over sooner.”
Forever a communist
She died in Germany on July 7, 2000, age ninety-three. Her son, Peter, summed up his mother’s long life this way: “There were two important things to her, her children and the communist cause.”
Urusla Kuczynski was also called Ruth Werner, Ursula Beurton, Mrs. Burton, and Ursula Hamburger, but her most enduring name, her spy name, was Sonya.
The book Agent Sonya is fascinating because it contextualizes how from the 1920s to her death nearly eighty years later, a young woman born into a rich family became a radical communist and never relinquished her commitment to fighting fascism and trying to bring a socialist world into being. In February 1950, she chose to live in socialist East Germany rather than England. She believed that, however deeply flawed it was, East Germany was a more humane place than capitalist West Germany, where thanks to the Western Allies Nazi murderers remained in power. Such ideas of lesser-evil politics were a key characteristic of the old communist movement and this weakness led to its failure.
Revolutionary optimism
Even as the GDR was falling apart in 1990, Ursula reaffirmed her basic belief in communist principles. “I have no reason to feel ashamed on moral or ethical grounds.”
Her enemy had always been fascism, and “for that reason I hold my head up high.”
Even as East Germany was about to dissolve, Agent Sonya addressed a huge rally in Berlin telling the crowd not to lose faith: “Go and become part of the Party, work in it, change the future, work as clean socialists! I have courage. I am optimistic because I know it will happen.”
Learning from the victories and mistakes of the old movement, PLP fights directly for communism. We carry with us a revolutionary optimism that reminds us that however dark the current era of class struggle, we have courage because we too know communism is the future.

On  January 15, 2021, Elizam Escobar passed away, a former member of the Liga Socialista Puertorriqueña and of the  Progresive Labor Party (PLP).  Elizam was a great cartoonist and artist whose political commitment was expressed through his art work in CHALLENGE during the early 1970s.  They are of lasting value and a tribute to the communist spirit he showed during those years. We have reproduced one of them here (see cartoon).
Unfortunately, Elizam quit PLP and joined the terrorist FALN independence group. He was arrested in 1980 and spent almost 20 years in prison for planning  terrorist acts to gain Puerto Rican independence. After his release he became a well-known art teacher in Puerto Rico.
A friend remembers him this way:
Elizam and I were roommates for a number of years. I still remember us attending the Saturday morning rallies in New York’s Upper West Side, selling CHALLENGE, the PLP  revolutionary communist newspaper. Back then, we were arrested several times. I remember one particular occasion when the New York Police Department police beat the (crap) out of us - they thought that they could beat us into submission, but our fighting communist spirit was greater! We were placed in two separate cells next to one another.
We were trying to keep our spirits lifted so we started to sing from the TOP OF OUR LUNGS protest songs in Spanish and English. This pissed off New York’s “finest” to say the least! We sang “Bella Ciao”, the “International” and “Mírala que Linda viene la revolución obrera que no da ni un paso atrás!” This infuriated the NYPD and they handcuffed us to the cell bars and beat and pepper sprayed us again!
This is the spirit that I remember of Elizam, bold and militant, a true comrade , fighter and communist who was always ready for combat!  Throughout the struggle in our cells we never stopped singing!
Thanks to Elizam, I met Juan Antonio Corretjer, general secretary of the Puerto Rican Socialist League, fraternal organization of PLP. We both joined PLP in 1971.
Elizam was arrested April 4, 1980 for seditious conspiracy as a member of Las Fuerzas Armada de Liberación Nacional (FALN) and sentenced to 68 years in prison. Elizam served 19 years and 6 months in state and federal prisons. In 1999 he and 10 other combatants of the FALN had their sentence commuted and he served an additional five  years on probation in Puerto Rico .
We can still hear on the PLP-LP Elizam singing loud and proud: “Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao, Ciao,Ciao!”
Long live Communism! La clase obrera no tiene frontera! (The working class has no borders!)

Thousands of workers in Myanmar (also called Burma) have taken to the streets in defiance of the Tatmadaw, the thuggish military that has ruled the country for most of the last 60 years. In a February 1 coup, the Tatmadaw ousted the racist civilian misleader, Aung San Suu Kyi, and her NLD (National League for Democracy) Party. Protesters are demanding her release from prison and a return to democracy. But make no mistake about it, democracy will never liberate the working class from the horrors of capitalism.
Under class society, the ruling class dictates to everyone else. Under capitalism, a capitalist dictatorship rules for maximum profit and power for the few by exploiting the international working class. “Democratic” elections are a sham the liberal bosses use to hide the coercion and violence of their rule. We must fight for a workers’ dictatorship—for communism. Only then will workers have any control over society and their lives.
The current conflict in Myanmar, one of poorest countries in Asia, is between two enemies of the working class. It’s a fight over which group of bosses will rule the country and line their pockets with profits stolen from workers. It’s also a fight over which imperialist power Myanmar will align with—China or the U.S.? What’s happening in this small, impoverished country is part of a worldwide trend toward fascism and world war.
Workers should take no side in fights between bosses. Backing either side leads our class into the arms of the mass-murdering capitalist ruling class. We have a better alternative. Let’s channel the mass militancy workers have shown in the streets, defying curfew and dodging bullets and water cannons, to organize an international communist movement to smash this racist profit system once and for all!
Inter-imperialist rivalry and rising instability
Myanmar is an important puzzle piece in the sharpening rivalry between China and the U.S. The military’s takeover “pits the foreign-policy strategies of the two powers against each other. And it thrusts Myanmar on to the front lines of an increasingly tense geopolitical competition for global leadership” (WSJ, 2/2).
For China, Myanmar is a big part of its Belt and Road Initiative, a strategy to expand China’s influence throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania, the continent dominated by Australia. The Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar Corridor gives China an overland alternative to shipping oil and gas through the vulnerable Strait of Malacca. It also reflects the steep decline of U.S. power in Southeast Asia. “The Chinese government… sees the coup as ‘a moment of opportunity’ to undercut the inroads the United States and other Asian nations made during Myanmar’s halting democratic opening” (NYT, 2/5).
What with the Donald Trump disaster, massive unemployment, and a bungled response to the Covid-19 pandemic by Republicans and Democrats alike, the U.S. is in disarray. It has long since lost its claim to any “moral” superiority. The new Joseph Biden administration may escalate sanctions against the Myanmar generals to try to bring back Suu Kyi, who’d been somewhat friendly with the U.S. while keeping her options open with China.But according to the Wall Street Journal (2/2), “...additional U.S. sanctions will have only marginal impact on the Burmese military....” With China and other Asian trade partners in hand, the Tatmadaw has little to fear from U.S. threats.
In short, U.S. liberal democracy is rapidly losing ground. The January 6 Capitol riot exposed the bosses’ biggest immediate problem, the split within their own class. Before they take on China, where the rulers have the advantage of open fascism, they must get their house in order: a prescription for more open fascism in the U.S.
Ruling class disunity leads to coup
Workers in Myanmar have long lived under brutal military rule. British imperialism “...rearranged the nation’s ethnic and racial hierarchies in order to best extract profit...” (Foreign Affairs, May/June 2020). After achieving independence in 1948, Myanmar’s military held mostly unchallenged power until 2011, when they entered a power-sharing arrangement with Suu Kyi’s civilian party. Mimicking their colonizers’ racist brutality, they orchestrated the genocide against Rohingya Muslims.
Atrocities against the Rohingya included mass killings, “babies thrown to their deaths, mass rapes, whole villages burned to cinders….Thousands of Rohingya have been killed and three quarters of a million driven into a squalid exile in neighboring Bangladesh” (NYT, 12/11/19). To stay in power, Suu Kyi alternately denied the military’s racist atrocities and defended them as a campaign against “insurgents or terrorists” (NYT, 12/11/19). But the two sides fell out when the NLD won recent elections by a landslide, and the military felt their control could be in jeopardy.
Suu Kyi, racist liberal misleader
The open brutality of Myanmar’s military is obvious. But liberal rulers like genocide apologist Suu Kyi are even more dangerous for the working class. Lauded by the world’s liberal bosses for her commitment to “democracy,” Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991.
Like Russia’s Alexei Navalny (see CHALLENGE editorial), Venezuela’s Juan Guaido, and Biden himself, Suu Kyi is part of a global dead-end misleadership. Putting our hopes in any of these liberal bosses will only lead us down the road to supporting the U.S. rulers’ inter-imperialist fight against China to dominate the world’s resources and labor.
Workers have no stake in this fight
The lesson of Myanmar is that there are no good bosses. “Ethnic and religious minority groups who have experienced repeated violence at the hands of the Tatmadaw for decades…saw little change under Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD” (Foreign Policy, 2/10).
But these are not the only choices for the working class! Workers in Asia, from China to Vietnam to Myanmar, have a strong tradition of fighting imperialism under communist leadership. But when workers made the mistake of embracing nationalism, their tremendous sacrifices were squandered by a new group of local bosses. It is time to fight for the real alternative, an international communist party: Progressive Labor Party. PLP is organizing to turn the bosses’ imperialist fights into revolution to liberate the working class. Join us!

This is part one of a three-part series on Hughes.

Langston Hughes was the premier 20th-century poet for the U.S. working class, and particularly Black workers. He spoke to their dreams of a world without racism and the harsh realities of Jim Crow and pervasive segregation. Born in 1901 in Joplin, Missouri, and raised in the Midwest, Hughes spent his early 20s attending colleges, working on ships, and traveling through West Africa and Europe. He became one of the leading artists of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920’s, when writers, musicians, painters, sculptors, actors, historians, sociologists, and activists made Harlem a dynamic center for culture and politics. Even the Depression of the 1930’s could not dampen this creative environment for Black artists, thinkers, and organizers.    
The 1930’s was also the decade when many well-known artists embraced communist ideas in their quest to end the racist inequalities of capitalism. In 1932, Hughes went to the Soviet Union with a group of Black artists and filmmakers to create a film about Black life and racism in the U.S. South. (The project was canceled after Franklin Roosevelt recognized the Soviet Union in the film footage) Later Hughes traveled to Spain for the Baltimore Afro-American, a weekly newspaper, to cover the anti-fascist struggle in the Spanish Civil War. This was the period of his most radical poetry, much of it submitted to New Masses, a weekly edited by members of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). One of his most famous was “Good Morning Revolution,” which Hughes wrote in 1932. It openly calls for a society run by and for the working class. Here are some excerpts:
            Good-morning, Revolution:
            You’re the very best friend I ever had
            We gonna pal around
         together from now on.
            …
            Listen, Revolution,
            We’re buddies, see –
            Together,
            We can take everything:
            Factories, arsenals, houses, ships,
            Railroads, forests, fields, orchards,
            Bus lines, telegraphs, radios,
            (Jesus! Raise hell with radios!)
            Steel mills, coal mines, oil wells, gas,
            All the tools of production,
            (Great day in the morning!)     
            Everything –
       And turn ‘em over
         to the people who  work.
            Rule and run ‘em
         for us people who work.

The political ground shifted in the 1940s, as the CPUSA focused less on communist revolution and more on building an anti-fascist united front to defeat Germany in World War II. Black workers and communists advanced the “Double V” goal—victory against the fascists in Europe and victory against segregation at home. In 1942, Hughes was hired by the Chicago Defender, another prominent Black newspaper. His columns attacked the racist abuse of Black soldiers stationed in the South, which Hughes compared to Nazi Germany. In a February 26, 1944 column, Hughes described a Black soldier just returned to the U.S. from fighting overseas. The soldier suffered from “Jim Crow shock, too much discrimination—segregation-fatigue which, to a sensitive Negro, can be just as damaging as days of heavy air bombardment.”
In August 1943, when a Black soldier was shot and wounded by a cop after a fracas at the Braddock Hotel at West 126 Street, the rumor spread that the soldier had been killed. In the ensuing rebellion, stores were looted and property damage was estimated at up to $5 million. Six thousand National Guardsmen were called in and over 600  people were arrested. (See Dominic J. Capeci, Jr., The Harlem Riot of 1943, Philadelphia: 1977.)
To Hughes, the politics of the incident were clear. In his August 14, 1943, Chicago Defender column addressed to “White Shopkeepers Who Own Stores in Negro Neighborhoods,” Hughes wrote:

The damage to your stores is primarily a protest against the whole rotten system of Jim Crow ghettos, Jim Crow cars, and Jim Crow treatment of Negro soldiers. But, you say, you are not responsible for those Jim Crow conditions. Why should your windows be broken? They shouldn’t. I am sorry they are.  But I can tell you WHY they are broken.

Hughes goes on to cite Black workers’ grievances, from racist unemployment to price gouging and substandard housing.
He ends by observing:

I do not believe in mob violence as a solution for social problems.  But I do understand what it is that makes many young people in Negro neighborhoods an easy prey to that desperate desire born of frustration—to which you contribute—to hurl a brick through a window.

In his book-length poem suite, Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), Hughes included the poem “Harlem,” which expresses visceral sensations of pent-up rage:

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over
like a syrupy sweet
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

In the late 1940s, as the U.S. capitalist rulers vied for world supremacy against the communist Soviet Union, the bosses’ federal government led the charge to investigate and harass members of the Communist Party USA. In January 1949, twelve CPUSA leaders, including Black New York City Councilman Benjamin Davis Jr., went on trial for violating the Smith Act by “advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.” Though Hughes never joined the CPUSA, his communist sympathies were clear. The FBI placed him under surveillance. Writing in the Chicago Defender, February 5, 1949, he declared that the trial was…

The most important thing happening in America today . . . because it is your trial—all who question the status quo—who question things as they are—all poor people, Negroes, Jews, un-white Americans, un-rich Americans are on trial. . . . They are being tried because they say it is wrong for anybody—Mexicans, Negroes, Chinese, Japanese, Jews, Armenians—to be segregated in America; because they say it is wrong for anybody to make millions of dollars from any business while the workers in that business do not make enough to save a few hundred dollars to live on when they get old and broken down and unable to work anymore; they are being tried because they do not believe in wars that kill millions of young men and make millions of dollars for those who already have millions of dollars; they are being tried because they believe it is better in peace time to build schools, hospitals, and public power projects than to build warplanes and battleships.

By the 1950s, the bosses’ blacklisting and FBI harassment led many communists and leftists to retreat from open political organizing. But Hughes kept writing for the Chicago Defender until 1962. His bold and lyrical poetry, notably the two poems of One-Way Ticket (1951) that address lynchings in the South, live on as an inspiration to all who struggle against racism and for the international working class.