On February 15, 1996, I attended a screening of The Three Jewels, said to be the first feature film made in Gaza.
(These are contemporaneous notes to which I returned three decades later; I can remember nothing about the film at all, but...)
...I got talking to Andy Brooks from The New Worker of the New Communist Party. I said ah, you’re a Stalinist. He was a very affable fellow. He said they liked to avoid labels. Stalin made a lot of mistakes he said. I said he killed a lot of people.
“Didn’t everyone?” he replied. Oh boy.
He said that capitalism had failed and that China was successful allowing the peasants to cultivate their own land.
He said too that there had been a lot of corruption in the old Soviet Union but that they hadn’t known about it until the collapse!