Against the Grain – March 21, 2006
How should the left understand the experiment that was the Soviet Union? Moshe Lewin, author of The Soviet Century, talks with host Sasha Lilley about the rise and fall of the USSR.

12:00 PM Pacific Time: Mondays - Wednesdays
Acclaimed program of ideas, in-depth analysis, and commentary on a variety of matters—political, economic, social, and cultural—important to progressive and radical thinking and activism. Against the Grain is co-produced and co-hosted by Sasha Lilley and C. S. Soong.
How should the left understand the experiment that was the Soviet Union? Moshe Lewin, author of The Soviet Century, talks with host Sasha Lilley about the rise and fall of the USSR.
A look at the history of sectarian divisions in Iraq and the role the current US occupation has played in perpetuating communal strife. With Middle East scholar Stephen Zunes and host Sasha Lilley.
Edited by Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez, Women Writing Resistance brings together U.S., Latin American, and Caribbean women connected by their struggles against injustice. Contributor Margaret Randall describes how her experiences in Mexico, Cuba and Nicaragua have informed her understanding of disenfranchisement and human rights.
Trade union organizer Jim Straub talks about the rise of evangelical Christians and the decline of unions in America’s rust belt.
Historian Paula Giddings talks about what the life of African American feminist leader and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells can teach us about race and gender today. With host Sasha Lilley.
A celebration of the third anniversary of this program, with highlights and excerpts from some of the most provocative analysis and commentary presented on Against the Grain over the past year.
It was a cataclysmic event, the first and only successful slave revolution in the Americas. Laurent Dubois has written a book about this stunning eighteenth-century challenge to the order of master/slave relations; he discusses Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution.
Iraq veteran and conscientious objector Aidan Delgado, whose unit was stationed at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad, talks about why he opposes the US occupation.
What happens when indigenous people become pawns in a US-sponsored war? Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz talks about the Miskitu Indians, the Contras, and the Sandinistas of Nicaragua, the focus of much of the third volume of her memoir, Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War.