Jeremy Scahill’s new book Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army will prove to be a much needed expose of the Bush Administration’s privatization of the military. Not only are there an estimated 100,000 mercenaries in Iraq, pushing the American military presence far beyond what most are aware, but Blackwater is the vanguard spear for the Bush Administration’s policy in the Caspian Sea region. The “Great Game” is back on. Why? It’s oil of course. For more on Blackwater and its role in the Caspian listen to him on today’s Democracy Now! You can also get a taste of the book in his recent article in the Nation.

New York University has received an archival goldmine. The Communist Party USA has donated their archive of 12,000 cartons of material that includes internal directives and memos, communiqu?s from Moscow, photographs, letters, programs, pamphlets, and even some artifacts, like Joe Hill’s handwritten will, which he composed in verse just before his execution in 1915. It’s an amazing collection that will surely give insight in the CPUSA’s history, its relationship to Moscow, and its place in American labor and civil rights movements.

Every box offers up a different morsel of history. One contains a 1940 newsletter from students at City College in New York criticizing Britain for betraying the Jews in Palestine; another has a 1964 flyer from the Metropolitan Council on Housing urging rent strikes “to oppose the decontrol of over-$250 apartments.” There are the handwritten lyrics to Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!”; a letter from W. E. B Du Bois in 1939 denying he took money from Japan for propagandizing on its behalf; and detailed complaints of police brutality against African-Americans.

Piles of prison correspondence from activists or party members show the human hand behind the rhetoric. “My dear wife Lydia,” Minor writes in pencil after being arrested in 1930 during a labor rally in Union Square in Manhattan. “That little half-hour today seemed the shortest of my whole lifetime. And so indescribably sweet!”

One intriguing file contains the notes and drafts of CP cartoonist and journalist Robert Minor. Minor covered the Russian Civil War. According to the NY Times, Minor provided “a clear-eyed and lyrical account” of Lenin in a 1918 interview.

Lenin was fascinated by America, calling it a “great country in some respects,” and shot question after question at Minor: “ ‘How soon will the revolution come in America?’ He did not ask me if it would come, but when it would come.” Minor, who had not yet joined the party, found Lenin a bewitching figure. “When he thunders his dogma, one sees the fighting Lenin. He is iron. He is political Calvin,” Minor says in his typewritten notes. “And yet, Calvin has his other side. During all the discussion he had been hitching his chair toward me,” he writes. “I felt myself queerly submerged by his personality. He filled the room.”

As he leaves the Kremlin, Minor notices two men drive up in limousines. “A few months ago they were ‘bloodthirsty minions of predatory capital,’ ” he writes, “But now they are ‘people’s commissaries’ and ride in the fine automobiles as before, live in the fine mansions.” They rule “under red silk flags to protect them from all disorders. They have learned the rose smells as sweetly under another name.”

One does hope, as CUNY Professor John P. Diggins suggests, that the archive will inspire a slew of new dissertations to provide a much deeper and colorful picture of American radical movements.

A few weeks ago, the Russian body politic heard from the Liberal-Left when about 3000 supporters of Other Russia clashed with police in St. Petersburg. Now the Right is planning a march for April 8^th titled, “Imperial March.” The march is being organized by Alexander Dugin. The organizers boast that 1500 participants will attend. This list includes a virtual who’s who of the Russian far right: writers Alexander Prokhanov and Maxim Kalashnikov, television host Mikhail Leontyev, the National Bolshevik Front (a breakaway group from Eduard Limonov’s organization), the Ukrainian party Russian Bloc and the Ukrainian Labor Conference. As Kommersant explains:

“Among the people, there is great disappointment with the Orange, but the Orange are now raising their heads, as the recent March of Those Who Disagree in St. Petersburg showed,” Zarifullin said. “We need an imperial project that supports Putin. We don’t want a Maidan in this country.” Zarifullin made it clear that he considers pro-Kremlin groups such as Our, the Youth Guardian of a United Russia, Young Russia and the Local allies.

“We are also fighting the Orange revolutions,” Youth Guardian organizer for the Central Federal District Alexey Shaposhnikov said, “but they can be fought differently.”

“They, of course, will receive a permit to march,” observed Yulia Malysheva, leader of Mikhail Kasyanov’s People’s Democratic Union of Youth. “They are a completely Kremlin project, Putin-Jugend. I hope they have the brains not to dress up like Santa Claus this time,” she added, referring to an action by government supporters the day after the first March of Those Who Disagree.

National Bolshevik leader Eduard Limonov asked rhetorically “Who needs them? They are corrupt and disgraceful. Three strange men with beards will show up and march together.”

Orange Revolution. That is so 2004. Like the Other Russia march, I’m sure that the Imperial March will be little more than a fart in the wind. Though I won’t be surprised at all if the Western media doesn’t use the it as an opportunity to douse its readers with cries that Russian fascism is right around the corner.