Leigh Claire La Berge is Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and author of
Sabo-Tabbies: In which the role of cats in communicating revolutionary thought is considered, from Wobbly Ralph Chaplin’s famous black “sabo-tabby” or sabotage cat to Vladimir Lenin’s use of felines in Materialism and Empirio-criticism; in which Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin discuss imperialism with Luxemburg’s cat, Mimi; and in which “whores and cat-loving communists,” including Luxemburg, are assassinated in Berlin by the proto-fascist Freikorps after the failed revolution of 1918; Lev (Lion) Trotsky is called a tiger; Sergei Eisenstein dots his first feature film, Strike!, with cats.
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