John Rose - Revolutions Thwarted: Poland, South Africa, Iran, Brazil and the legacies of Communism

John Rose, who died recently, was a veteran socialist of the 1968 generation. I reviewed his excellent book The Myths of Zionism many years ago on this 'blog and like many socialists I learnt much from his pamphlet Israel: The Hijack State. In the 2010s Rose began working on a project to critically examine the revolutionary socialist ideas that had been so central to his activist life. In the introduction to this book he writes that he was motivated to examine a fundamental question, "why was the Marxist left in such a precarious state, especially when the proverbial crisis of capitalism... was so serious?" He decided to put his "1968 assumptions" to an "independent test" by studying three failed revolutionary upheavals (a fourth was later added). 

These studies, on Poland in the early 1980s, Iran in 1979, Brazil in the 1980s and 1990s and South Africa at the end of Apartheid, were all examples of mass workers action that had the potential to spill over into working class revolution. With the possible exception of Iran, which saw workers' councils in a small number of highly organised areas of workers' strength, none of them did. Comparing these events, with the high points of revolutionary activity in the early 20th century, form the main purpose of the book. Despite the book originating in a Phd study Rose writes not out of pure academic interest, but with the ambition of revolutionary emancipation. It is a remarkable work.

The book opens, however, not with 20th century revolution, but with 1848 and The Communist Manifesto, "one of modernity's greatest historical documents". The Manifesto, writes Rose, "provides strategic and tactical guidelines for accomplishing the ultimate goal of a classless society". Rose traces the development after 1848, not just of revolutionary ideas, but also of organisation. Crucially, he notes that while Marx and Engels did not fully develop their thoughts on revolutionary organisation, others did. Gramsci, for instance, noted how his revolutionary newspaper in 1918-1920 "worked to develop certain forms of new intellectualism"... individuals whose strength was not simply "eloquence" but "in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organiser". Such individuals were, Gramsci writes, "elites of intellectuals of a new type who arise directly from the masses through remaining in contact with them".

While Rose fully explores other aspects of revolutionary thought, particularly Marx and Engels' key concept that the emancipation of the working class will "be the act of the working class" themselves. The importance of revolutionary worker "intellectuals" remains central to his argument. It was individuals like these, Rose concludes, who made the Russian Revolution: "Lenin's purposive workers: worker leaders, 'genuine heroes... with a passionate drive toward knowledge and toward socialism' [Lars Lih]" Why is this important? That, in essence, is the argument of the second part of the book.

In examining the four "thwarted" revolutions of Iran, Poland, South Africa and Brazil, Rose explores two things. Firstly the ongoing relevance of the Marxist approach to social change. The moments when mass action by workers begins to spill over into the demand for "self management" a slogan that Rose describes as one of 1968's greatest slogans. This self-management is evident in a number of examples. Rose quotes from his interview with one of the Solidarity activists from Poland who describes a key moment in the strike wave:

There was a nuclear bomb shelter in the basement. I used this shelter because I was formally leader of a trade union... I organised a strike committee for this March mobilisation for all offices, all workshops around the old market. I even prepared food for three months. So I had everything prepared for these strikes... It was a classical dual power situation. There was still a state with military apparatus and police... But the real power, day by day, went to workers' factory councils.... we organised a plebiscite in the biggest factories in Wroclaw about who has the power to choose the director, manger, the Party or workers' councils? And in every factory we won this plebiscite.

If that was the situation in Poland, in some parts of the Iranian Revolution power went even further. One account, quoted by Rose says:

The oil industry is virtually controlled by dozens of independent workers' komitehs, committees, which, though loyal to the central government, are nevertheless participating in all the decisions related to production and marketing... the komitehs have unquestionably demonstrated that they can run the oilfields and the refineries without the top rank Iranian managers and without the expertise of some 800 foreign technicians.

But as Rose shows at crucial points in all four of these risings the left failed the test. This was, it must be stressed, not just about whether or not the left supported workers' action or retreated at the wrong point (a particular issue in Poland), but also whether or not key questions such as oppression were taken seriously. In Iran, for instance, the left failed to support women's fight for their rights, seeing it as a distraction. Comparing the German Revolution of 1919 with Iran in 1979 Rose writes:

The German communists in 1919 had one tremendous advantage over their Iranian counterparts... Both shared the experience of taking part in revolutionary upheavals, toppling tyrannies, as a result of decisive collective workers' action. Both shared the experience of witnessing and participating in very advanced experimental forms, though at different stages of development, of organised workers attempting to establish democratic forms of workers' control of production... But the German left had at least secured elementary democratic and constitutional rights, which allowed the German Communist and the independent workers' movement time to recover from the defeat.

He continues, that the 

tragedy of the Iranian left is that not only was this decisive advantage denied to them; the Iranian left itself has to share some of the responsibility for this failure. The struggle for popular democracy, including the defence of women's rights and the independent press in 1979 was just as important as defending the workers' shoras and the new regime's anti-imperialist stance. 

But the left was unable to engage in the sort of tactical twists and turns that Lenin's Bolsheviks used throughout 1917 to consolidate their position in the minds of the masses. The problem was politics, or the lack of political clarity. In Iran, Rose argues that "the Stalinist mind-set not only ruled out such essential tactical and strategic flexibility, it altogether downplayed the importance of the struggle for popular democracy". Those leading the movements, in all four case studies, too often shared a political allegiance or set of ideas that saw mass struggle as secondary. It was always their downfall.

But it wasn't simply the lack of a clear political line, or a distortion of strategy. It was also the failure of the sort of revolutionary organisation with large numbers of Gramsci's intellectual activists within the working class. Activists who could think about strategy and fight for mass action, at the same time as building an independent movement. That's not to say that individuals like this did not exist. Rose interviews several of them, and he notes that the best of these "the regimes most feared because of their widespread influence" and they tried to silence them. But he concludes, for Iran:

The problem of how to revitalise that vision [of socialism] in the shadow of Soviet Communism and its Iranian apologists was never resolved. The same applied in Poland, South Africa and Brazil. It also meant that the nascent worker intellectuals were unable fully to develop their political abilities.

It is a problem that contemporary socialist organisation must grapple with. Indeed Joseph Choonara has recently written a piece on how revolutionary parties can develop cadre. While the International Socialist Tradition, of whom John Rose was part, have rightly always understood the problem of the Stalinist politics of the State Capitalist regimes and the Communist Parties who acted in their name, Revolutions Thwarted demonstrates how lasting and extensive that influence was. Rose concludes:

This... underestimates the impact of the collapse of Soviet Communism and the growing doubts about its viability that preceded it. Criticisms of the Soviet Union... easily flowed over into a demoralising sense that the original socialist revolution in Russia 1917 was itself flawed... the independent workers' movements in the four countries... were... dogged by the experience of Soviet Communism and lacked confidence to develop sustainable ideological responses which would revitalise a communist project centred on their own self-activity.

The conclusion can only be to build the sort of intellectually dynamics, revolutionary socialist organisation that was lacking in these movements in Polish, Brazilian, Iranian and South African history. The sort of organisation that John Rose dedicated his life to building. Revolutions Thwarted is, in many ways, one of the most important books to come out of the International Socialist tradition in the last ten years. Its a book that reasserts the core politics of classical Marxism, puts workers' self emancipation at its heart, and is not afraid to be self-critical and honest. Its one that a generation of socialists ought to read to arm us for the struggles to come.

Related Reviews

Rose - The Myths of Zionism
Molyneux - Marxism and the Party
Cliff - State Capitalism in Russia

Alexander Rabinowitch - The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd

Alexander Rabinowitch is an interesting historian. From a Russian émigré family, he grew up listening to stories about how the revolutionaries had expelled them. Visitors to his family home in the US included figures as important as Kerensky, the former leader of Russia's Povisional Government during the 1917 revolution. Rabinowitch became a historian, and while a young man, as part of his research he travelled to Russia in the 1960s to research Lenin. Expecting to find evidence that Lenin was a dictator in waiting who brokered no argument, Rabinowitch actually found the opposite. What he discovered was that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were riven by debate and discussion, even in the weeks and days before the revolution, and that far from a monolithic organisation, the Bolshevik Party "was both responsive and open to the masses" in that revolutionary year. In his introduction Rabinowitch writes:

For all the lively debate and spirited give-and-take that I find to have existed within the Bolshevik organisation in 1917, the Bolsheviks were doubtless more unifed than any of their major rivals for power. Certainly this was a key factor in their effectiveness. Nonetheless, my research suggests that the relative flexibility of the party, as well as its responsiveness to the prevailing mass mood, had at least as much to do with the ulimate Bolshevik victory as did revolutionary discipline, organisational unity, or obedience to Lenin.

It is a remarkable conclusion for historian who is not also a Leninist, or at least a revolutionary, and it is to Rabinowitch's credit that he did not allow his own prejudices to block his conclusions.

The book is not an account of 1917, though it does begin with a good overview of the background and the first few months of the revolution. The focus is the "coming to power of the Bolsheviks" and this means Rabinowitch begins with the crucial turning point of the revolution, the summer of 1917. July 1917 saw a mass revolutionary impulse, and how to respond to this caused enormous debate within the Bolsheviks. The author details the various disagreements - which essentially focused on whether or not to call for insurrection and support the Petrograd workers as they demanded a Soviet government. Lenin argued it was premature, though it is clear that not all the Bolsheviks agreed. The confusion over this, and the eventual repression saw the right-wing able to turn their guns on the Bolsheviks. Leading figures like Lenin went into hiding, hundreds of Bolshevik cadre were imprisoned and repression was high. In the aftermath things looked bleak. But the threat of a far-right coup against the revolution, and crucially, also against Kerensky, under the figurehead of the fascist general Kornilov, enabled the Bolsheviks to place themselves at the heart of a mass movement to defend the revolution. 

The United Front approach of the Bolsheviks here, allowed them to recover crucial ground and place themselves back in the revolutionary leadership. But as Rabinowitch explains, the success of the revolution from this point onward was not automatic, contrary to the Stalinist myths of the infallibility of Lenin and his party:

The entire history of the party from the February revolution on suggested the potential for programmatic discord and disorganised activity existing within Bolshevik ranks. So that whether the party would somehow find the strength of will, organizational disciple, and sensitivity to the complexities of the fluid and possibly explosive prevailing situation requisite for it to take power, was, at this point, still very much an open question.

But in the aftermath of the attempted coup by Kornilov, what mattered was not simply Lenin winning the rest (or the majority) of the Bolsheviks to his correct position. Lenin himself, as well as the wider Bolsehvik cadre, had to find their way forward. In some of the most fascinating sections Rabinowitch details how Lenin moves towards a position of calling for "All Power to the Soviets". But this "new moderation was not accepted without opposition". 

Lenin and the Bolsheviks were uniquely attuned to the way the masses were thinking and moving. It was flexibility around this that gave them their greatest power. Rabinowitch details, for instance, how the Bolsheviks didn't just adapt to the mood, they tried to shape it. As the hour of insurrection draws closely this interrelated process gets more and more intense. Even until the very last moment of the revolution, Lenin is waging war inside the Party to win the argument of revolution. Given that The Bolsheviks Come to Power is a work of non-fiction, readers may be surprised to find themselves a little carried away by the intensity. Here, for instance, is Rabinowitch's account of how the decision to go for insurrection and the overthrow of the Provisional Government immediately before the meeting of the All Russia Congress of Soviets:

There is very little hard evidence regarding the circumstances of this decision. Latsis later wrote that 'towards morning on the famous night when the question of a government was being decided and the Central Committee wavered, Illich [Lenin] ran to the office of the Petersburg Committee with the question: "Fellows, do you have shovels? Will the workers of Piter [Petrograd] go into the trenches at our call?" Latsis recorded that the response was positive, adding that the decisiveness of Lenin and the Petersburg Committee affected the waverers, allowing Lenin to have his way. 

While Rabinowitch is supremely sensitive to the way that the Bolsheviks' were linked to the masses, he also understands that Lenin was the key revolutionary thinker. The decision to go for insurrection, Rabinowitch writes, is one of "few modern historical episodes [which] better illustrate the sometimes decisive role of an individual in historical events". 

That said, in his close study of these events, it is noticeable how Lenin was not always able to shape events on a hour by hour basis. For instance, I was struck by how, during the Kornilov coup, Lenin was too far away in hiding to have a real impact. Straining at the leash to come to Petrograd from hiding, much of his instructions arrived too late to have a significant impact.

But whatever Lenin's abilities, it was the party he had striven to build that was crucial in October 1917, and revolutionaries today, ought to learn this lesson now. Rabinowitch puts it very well.

That in the space of eight months the Bolsheviks reached a position from which they were able to assume power was due... to the special effort which the party devoted to winning the support of military troops in the rear and at the front; only the Bolsheviks seemed to have perceived the necessary crucial significance of the armed forces in the struggle for power. Perhaps even more fundamentally, the phenomenal Bolshevik success can be attributed in no small meaure to the nature of the party in 1917. Here I have in mind neither Lenin's bold and determined leadership, the immense historical significance of which cannot be denied, not the Bolshevik's proverbial, though vastly exaggerated, organisational unity and discipline. Rather, I would emphasize the party's internally relatively democratic, tolerant and decentralised structure and method of operation, as well as its essentially open and mass character - in striking contrast to the traditional Leninist model.

It was this that enabled Lenin to shift the Party in the crucial moments of 1917, and it was this Party that enabled the revolutionary workers' and their organisations to take power. The alternative would have been fascism and further war. 

Alexander Rabinowitch's remarkable book was first published in the early 1970s. It deserves a reading today. Leninists might find things to quibble about. But in its detail of the events of 1917, and its exploration of the arguments at all levels of the Bolshevik Party, even those who have read much about the Russian Revolution will find much of interest. It is a fascinating insight into how a mass revolutionary organisation operated during the only successful workers' revolution in history and its conclusions are even more powerful given they are written by someone who comes from outside the revolutionary tradition.

Related Reviews

Bryant - Six Red Months in Russia
Trotsky - The History of the Russian Revolution
Sherry - Russia 1917: Workers' Revolution and the Festival of the Oppressed
Lenin - The State and Revolution
Rodney - The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World
Smith - Red Petrograd

Louise Bryant - Six Red Months in Russia

Louise Bryant arrived in Petrograd in late September 1917. She went as a journalist to cover the Russian Revolution for radical US newspaper The Masses tasked with reporting from a "woman's point of view". Her articles are gathered together in Six Red Months in Russia and give an inspiring insight into the period between the Kornilov Coup and the first months of Soviet Power after the October Revolution. 

Bryant went to Russia, alongside her partner John Reed, as a convinced socialist. But there is no doubt that her experiences there further transformed her outlook. She writes with sympathy and passion. Her bravery on the front lines, during the insurrection and travelling alone through Russia are examples of the best of journalism. 

While the book is notable for its interviews or portraits of key figures like Kerensky and Kollontai, the most interesting and touching parts are those that deal with events of the Revolution and small moments that illuminate the wider transformation of society. There's a notable account of a Revolutionary Tribunal. This is far from the bloodthirsty events of bourgeois imagination, rather they demonstrate how mass democratic participation allows for justice to take place. For an hour, after a worker is convicted of stealing from a newspaper seller, the audience agrees that he must give his galoshes to the victim. The victim is pleased - she has none to wear while selling papers and the guilty man is pleased as his conscience is cleared!

There are, of course, more world shattering events to describe. Bryant describes the storming of the Winter Palace, notable mostly for the discipline with which revolutionary troops ensured that looting did not take place. She was there for the meetings of the Provisional Council of the Russian Republic and its dissolving by troops, very much without a whimper. Her account of the meetings of the All Russia Soviet are fascinating as she describes the passionate contributions from delegates from across the country, discussing their demands and concerns.

Bryant is primarily concerned with justifying the Revolution to her US audience. Repeatedly she counters anti-Soviet propaganda, denying the lies that declare that barbarity has falled. She frequently has to challenge the idea that the revolutionaries are pro-Germany. In fact this leads to one of the slight contradictions of the book, because she is very concerned that her readers see the Russian revolutionaries as potential allies of America. It almost feels like she's ignoring the great elephant in the room - US imperialism. I suspect her views on this changed quickly when US troops began their military counter-revolutionary campaigns alongside the White Armies. 

The book will perhaps be best enjoyed by those who know already the outlines of the revolutionary year of 1917. Bryant's anecdotes and accounts illuminate the wider dynamics very well. Here she writes about a priest refusing to pay a fare on a street car, claiming exemption as a "man of God":

Immediately the passengers became excited. They were mostly peasants and they began to argue hotly. A man of God, they claimed, was no different from any other man - all were equal since the revolution. But the priest was stubborn and not until the crowd threatened to take him to the Revolutionary Tribunal did he consent to pay, grumbling.

Bryant writes about crime and prisons a fair bit, not least to argue that the Revolution, at least in 1917, was remarkably lenient. Counter-revolutionaries are repeatedly allowed to go free, as the revolutionaries are keen to avoid punishment. During the winter the cells are better heated than the journalists' hotel rooms. A joke by Bryant about this to the Bolshevik guards, who have all experienced imprisonment, gets the dour response that loss of liberty is the worst punishment possible.

Bryant's eye for detail and humour and her ability to capture events in short articles makes this an excellent, if not well known, addition to accounts of 1917. Her frequent focus on women highlights the contributions of many, and reminds the reader of the enormous strides forward made in the early years of the revolution in terms of emancipatory politics. The participation of women in the struggle and the fighting is celebrated, as well as the role of key female figures of the revolution. But Bryant also tells the story from the other side, interviewing the wealthy families still present in Petrograd and discussing the work of spies and counter-revolutionaries. Frankly its a marvellous book that really illuminates how October 1917 was a revolution off and by the most ordinary of people. As Bryant returns home her last article shows how much she has been changed: "I was homesick for my own country, but I thought of the German advance and my heart ached. I wanted to go back and offer my life for the revolution."

Related Reviews

Hallas - The Great Revolutions
Sherry - Russia 1917: Workers' Revolution and the Festival of the Oppressed
Murphy - Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory
Rappaport - Caught in the Revolution
Trotsky - The History of the Russian Revolution

Duncan Hallas - The Great Revolutions

Duncan Hallas was a leading activist and Trotskyist in post-war Britain. He was part of the networks that became the International Socialists and then the Socialist Workers' Party. While I only met him a few times as a much younger activist, even today longer standing comrades talk about him as a great agitator. He was, by all accounts, a tremendous speaker and writer, with a depth of knowledge and experience that allowed him to put across complex ideas in accessible ways. There are many on the left today who'd benefit from learning Hallas' ability to talk to workers.

The Great Revolutions is a new book made up of a series of articles that Hallas wrote for Socialist Worker in 1973. Then the British working class was on a high, having just defeated a Tory government the previous year and many activists thought that the high levels of struggle would continue under Labour. Sadly this was not to happen. But these levels of struggle no doubt led to the editors commissioning Hallas to write this series of pieces on "Great Revolutions", stretching from the English Civil War and the American Revolution, through the French Revolution, 1848, the Paris Commune and finally the Russian Revolutions.

These are short, agitational pieces designed to educate readers in the basics of events. But don't let brevity imply simplicity. Hallas' ability to get across complex events in the minimum of words and without academic fluff is definitely on display here. In fact, what is on display, is nothing short of a brilliant grasp of the Marxist method. Hallas shows how different class forces rise and fall in relation to wider social, economic and politic situations. This is particularly obvious in the discussion of the French Revolution, when Hallas clearly explains how different forces are able at different points during the Revolution to impose their ideas, but that it takes struggle from below to push the process forward. Hallas writes about the American Revolution thus:

The developing capitalist class in America, for that was what the revolutionary leaders represented was not oppressed by a semi-feudal monarchy. That had been destroyed in Britain in the seventeenth century revolutions. It was oppressed by the 'colonial system' operated in the interests of British capitalists.

This approach allows Hallas to explore, albeit briefly, why the revolution could be labelled as being about freedom, while oppressing so many others. Why it was led by slave traders yet waved the flag of liberty. The interplay between revolution in American and then the French Revolution is fascinating and Hallas shows how the ideas developed across the Atlantic.

While the book is brilliant and is a wonderful grand sweep of revolutionary history, I did have a couple of gripes. I thought it notable that Hallas, in his discussion of the Americas, did not reference the Native Americans or their struggles. He notes that one of the reasons the poor masses supported the revolution was that they were "prevented from getting land of their own". But he doesn't mention that getting this land would lead to genocide by the American state, nor does he have space to mention how the Native Americans were used as a military pawn by the British against the colonial forces. Simiarly I thought that the omission of the Haitian Revolution was strange. Its impact on the French Revolution, on the battle against slavery and ideologically in terms of notions of freedom was immense, and it warranted inclusion. 

These absences noted, there's still an immense amount to learn here. Credit is certainly due to those who were reading through back issues of revolutionary newspapers, found these articles and decided to get them published. I'm finish by noting Hallas' masterful two part discussion of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 which ought to be read by every young socialist in 2024. Let's hope this book gets into their hands.

Related Reviews

Hallas - Trotsky's Marxism

V.I.Lenin - The State and Revolution

Lenin's State and Revolution is a remarkable work. It is likely the only book of Marxist theory that was written during a revolution that deals with the fundamental political questions of that revolution. It was written while Lenin was in temporary exile in Finland having fled a temporary burst of anti-Bolshevik reaction on the part of the Provisional Government in the late Summer of 1917. It bears the hallmark of intense engagement with Marx's writing on the State and the pressure of revolutionary organising.

As the title suggests the key question of the book is the state and Lenin looks at Marx's writings on two revolutionary moments - the 1848 revolution and the Paris Commune to understand the tasks of the revolutionary movement in 1917. My Penguin edition has a sneering introduction by the historian Robert Service who mocks Lenin's politics and writing in State and Revolution. Service claims that no one would have read and understood S&R in 1917 as it required an engagement with classical Marxist texts that few would have even heard about. What Service doesn't comprehend is that Lenin is clearly writing the book in order to clarify his own ideas, in order to win them within the Bolshevik party. 

As such Lenin repeatedly tackles the key question of the role of the state from different directions. He begins with Marx and Engels assertion that the state is the "product of the irreconcilability of class contradictions" and "arises where, when and to the extent that class contradictions objectively cannot be reconciled". This leads him into a critique those in the Russian Revolution who think that classes can be reconciled by the state itself, and in turn to Karl Kautsky's "distortion of Marxism" which denies that "the state is an organ of class rule." 

Lenin's discussions on the Paris Commune cannot be reduced simply to understanding the role of the state and emphasising Marx's argument that the state must be smashed. He also explores it fo context on what a workers' state must do - i.e. be "not a parliamentary but a working institution", tackling the parliamentarians who would get elected but leave the real business of the state to others, "behind the scenes" without accountability or control. Lenin writes:

The Commune replaces the venal and rotten parliamentarianism of bourgeois society with institutions in which freedom of opinion and discussion do not degenerate into deception, for the parliamentarians themselves have to work, have to execute their own laws, have to test their results in real life and to answer directly to their electors. Representative institutions remain, but parliamentarianism does not exist here as a special system, as the division of labour between the legislative and the executive, as a privileged position for the deputies. We cannot imagine democracy, even proletarian democracy, without representative institutions, be we can and must imagine democracy without parliamentarianism if our criticisms of bourgeois society are not mere empty words for us, if the aspiration to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie is our serious and sincere desire.

Since the state is a antagonistic institution of class rule, the workers' state is the same. Suppressing the old ruling class and the capitalists, in the interest of the majority of society (workers and peasants in the case of Russia). Here Lenin argues for the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" - the idea that in the aftermath of revolution, the reality of the socialist state is one that oppresses the counter-revolutionary minority - the old capitalist class. This concept is one that Service finds particularly repugnant. But for Marx, and Lenin, the state must whither away alongside the class antagonisms themselves. Only then can people live and become "accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social intercourse... without compulsion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for compulsion which is called the state."

Lenin's polemic, at it's heart, is a powerful working through of the Marxist theory of the state written in the midst of revolution. It is easy to bemoan what is missing - the chapters on the "Russian experience" of 1905 and 1917 were never written and one can only imagine how they might have been useful to generations of revolutionaries since 1917. But don't let this prevent you reading it - there is so much here that can guide us today. Recently I read an interview with two Sudanese socialists grappling with the same concepts that were posed to Lenin in 1917 by the actuality of revolution. In their interview they both quoted liberally from State and Revolution. No greater tribute to this work can be made.

Related Reviews

Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky
Lenin - Will the Bolsheviks Maintain Power?
Lenin - The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution 1905-1907
Marx - The Civil War in France

Kevin Murphy - Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory

In the aftermath of the disintegration of the Soviet Union archives opened up allowing historians much easier access to a mass of material that had been collected during the Revolution and post-Revolutionary eras. Kevin Murphy's fascinating book is the result of a close study of the material pertaining to a single metalworking factory in Moscow in the 20th century. The detail is based on reports from police spies, radical newspapers, factory bulletins and personal memoires. It's a rich study of how the process of revolution, and then counterrevolution, was experienced by ordinary working people.

For revolutionary socialists the most fascinating part of the book will undoubtedly be the sections dealing with the factory workers during 1917, the year of the revolution. Due to weaknesses in organisation the Bolsheviks were less strong in Moscow than in Petrograd, and this is reflected in the politics and allegiance of the workers in the factory. In particular the Social Revolutionaries [SR] are elected as delegates from the factory. Nonetheless the workers take a full part in the revolution, striking, joining protests and forcing massive demands from their management. Murphy reproduces a 16 point list of workers' demands that demonstrate both the confidence of the workers and how economic and political issues are coming to the fore for ordinary people. The first demands if for a "permanent space" for factory meetings, lectures and "cultural-educational activities". The second is for the night-shift to only do a seven hour shift, but be paid for an eight hour day. There are demands that cover health issues - baths and steam rooms, ventilation, toilets and so on, sick pay, maternity leave and pay, and holidays. 

As Murphy comments:

The variety, clarity and force of demands demonstrate workers' increased confidence and organisation. The need for a regular meeting place shows that the employees' top priority was the strengthening of their own organisation and the special demands raised in the interest of women illustrate workers' willingness to be more inclusive. While revolutionary egalitarianism was an important factor in this process, a practical consideration also drove such demands: the prerevolutionary demographic trend toward a more diverse workforce continued, and by May 1917, the concerns of 439 women simply could not be ignored.

As the revolution progressed there were intense political arguments with Bolshevik workers' fighting to win the support of the wider factory. We get a glimpse of the intensity of some of these debates. In late June, SR leaders spoke on "War until Victory". A Bolshevik Rosa Zemliachka, responded "Comrades! Many voices have rung out for continuing the war. Therefore whoever wants war should immediately sign up as a volunteer for the front lines." Murphy says that "after prolonged silence, the SR leaders left the tribune in defeat." Such political principals and systematic attempts to win workers in the factory led to success for the Bolsheviks, as Murphy explains:

The Bolsheviks did not just react to events: instead the party provided leadership for the movement. After sending in several talented organisers, the Bolsheviks fought for - and won - the ideological argument for revolution and Soviet power, as they did among workers throughout the empire.

But Murphy's meticulous study of the source material also demonstrates how, as the international revolution failed to materialise and Russia was isolated the rise of a Stalinist bureaucracy led to a break with the revolutionary ideals of the past. The Civil War decimated the factory both in terms of workforce and its ability to work. For most workers it became a case of "personal survival", and as the counterrevolution triumphed workers were unable to fight for their own collective interests. During the NEP era workers did manage to keep up pressure over pay and conditions, but by 1927/1928 Stalin's solid grip of power meant that workers' were once again being driven solely for the surplus value their labour could create and dissent was crushed. There are two markers for this that I'll note. Firstly the position of women was forced backward into an subordinate one and most of the gains of the revolution were destroyed. 

Murphy documents this process:

By mid-NEP, however, party leaders at the factory level perceived the special emphasis on women's issues as an obstacle to the pursuit of their main priority. Pressured from above to meet production quotas, management and the party apparatus started to view the female workforce strictly in productivist terms and, therefore, as as problem.

But Murphy is careful to emphasis the way the women in the factory played an active role in the revolution movement that is "hidden from history" and celebrates that this took place "in a society devastated by seven years of war and foreign intervention". 

The second marker is the repression of dissent, both within the Communist party and the systematic destruction of the norms of democracy in factory meetings. The participatory (if frequently raucous) meetings of the revolutionary era are replaced by shouting down and demonization of opponents. By the late 1920s, "personal survival... had eclipsed the politics of collective action". By the 1930s the ability to collectively organise had been destroyed. The accounts from this era - of hunger, coercion and so on are painful to read, contrasting as they do with the hope of the revolutionary epoch.

By 1932 the relationship between rulers and ruled had become firmly entrenched and there would be no return to workers' militancy. The dull drone of uninterrupted productivity drives and the seemingly endless demands for more sacrifice and austerity were not ephemeral phenomena, but now comprised the basic features of the Stalinist system. The revolutionary era, during which workers had repeatedly and confidently asserted their collective power, had now come to a decisive end.

By placing the experience of workers at the point of production at the heart of the story Kevin Murphy's book is a singular account of the highest point of workers struggle in history. It is also essential in helping understand the Stalinist counterrevolution as it felt in the factory. The archives that made is possible must hold endless more fascinating material. As I write, Putin's war machine drives Russian imperialism further into Ukraine. In the run up to that war Putin made clear that he saw the Lenin era as the origins of the Ukraine problem - this work shows how different the ideas and hopes of ordinary Russians in the Revolutionary era were far from the interests of Putin and his regime. Let's hope the spirit revives.

Related Reviews

Sherry - Russia 1917: Workers' Revolution and the Festival of the Oppressed
Smith - Red Petrograd
Serge - Year One of the Russian Revolution
Trotsky - The History of the Russian Revolution

Tony Cliff - State Capitalism in Russia

If you are a socialist who spends enough time on social media it is very clear that there is a resurgence of what might be called neo-Stalinism - a celebration of the Soviet Union as a Communist society. This can manifest in something like a cult of Stalin and an absolute denigration of critics of the Soviet Union from the left - in particular vehement attacks on Trotskyism. For most of my political life this has not been a feature of any but the saddest of socialist sects. The period since the collapse of the Soviet bloc has seen the Trotskyist left try to rescue the real legacy of the Russian Revolution, and the right attempt to denigrate 1917 by suggesting that Leninism led directly to Stalinism.

However Trotskyism itself arose out of sharp ideological battles with the then dominant Communist Parties. From the 1930s, small groups of revolutionaries struggled to understand the nature of the Soviet Union and how this related to the fight for workers' power. These battles however were not just external, they were integral to the Trotskyist movement and, especially after Trotsky's death, revolutionaries argued among themselves about what sort of society the Soviet Union was. The socialist tradition that I belong to, saw Russia, not as Communist, nor as a type of workers' state, but rather as State Capitalist.

Annoyed by neo-Stalinism, I returned to Tony Cliff's classic work of Marxism, State Capitalism in Russia, in order to revisit debates and arguments about the nature of Stalinism. State Capitalism in Russia as a book evolved out of some earlier works. The one discussed here is Bookmarks' 1988 edition, published as the East European regimes were collapsing with an introduction and post-script by Chris Harman.

Cliff begins by discussing the extent to which Russia under Stalin was a break with the revolutionary society that sprang out of the Russian Revolution. Cliff demonstrates with a multitude of examples and statistics the immense gulf that there was between the two, and how this gradually developed through the 1920s. In September 1929, for instance, he quotes the Communist Party Central Committee resolving that workers' committees:

may not intervene directly in the running of the plant or endeavour in any way to replace plant administration; they shall by all means help to secure one-man management, increase production, plant development , and thereby, improvement of the material conditions of the working class.

It is a very different idea from the sense of workers' power at the heart of the Bolsheviks' arguments in 1917. Cliff finds many examples. These include the removal of safeguards for women's labour, the vast number of slave labourers in labour camps, the introduction of "turnover taxes" that Cliff argues "being an indirect, retrogressive tax, openly contradicts the original programme of the Bolshevik Party" and the "subordination of man to property" by the new economic regime whereby "it becomes clear that, in Stalinist Russia, the individual is rated much lower than property".

In Cliff's analysis of the transformation of property relations under capitalism, he juxtaposes the punishment for crimes against property and persons. I was reminded of how English capitalism introduced the Black Act to do something similar in the 18th century. Cliff comments that:

This religion of property-worship subjects even the weakest members of the community - children - to it. As we have seen, the maximum punishment of kidnapping a child, is a mere three years' imprisonment, whereas the punishment meted out to a child for stealing is much greater.

Some, of course, could steal. Cliff shows how economically and politically a new class of bureaucrats developed whom he argues drove the restoration of capitalist relations in Russia, encouraging the accumulation of wealth for the sake of accumulation. The first half of the book is a powerful depiction of how the Soviet Union broke from the past, the second half is a powerful use of the Marxist method to understand the new regime. Cliff writes:

The statistics at our disposal show conclusively that although the bureaucracy enjoyed a privileged position in the period preceding the Five-Year Plan, it can on no account be said that in the majority of cases it received surplus value from the labour of others. It can just as conclusively be said that since the introduction of the Five-Year Plans, the bureaucracy's income consisted to a large extent of surplus value.

Cliff points to the coercive nature of the relations between bureaucracy and worker. He notes how the industrialisation of Russia took place at a phenomenal rate, but this is comparable than the industrialisation of (say) England as capitalism developed. The key thing however are the social relations that underpin this development, and Cliff points to the human misery that has resulted in Russia from the way in which this industrialisation was driven. Cliff explains that: 

Every form of social production needs the co-ordination of the different people participating in it; in other words, every form of social production needs disciple. Under capitalism this discipline confronts the worker as an external coercive power, as the power which capital has over him. Under socialism discipline will be the result of consciousness, it will become the habit of a free people. In the transition period it will be the outcome of the unity of the two elements - consciousness and coercion.

Cliff continues that the difference in Russia is that there is no indication that the coercion element of Russian society is declining in favour of the consciousness element. As a workers' state developed you should see coercion "subordinated to elements of consciousness until such a time as social solidarity, harmonious relations between people and education will render coercion in the process of production completely superfluous.

So what sort of society was Russia after the First Five Year Plan if it wasn't a workers' state? It was at that point that 

the bureaucracy sought to create a proletariat and to accumulate capital rapidly. In other words, it was now that the bureaucracy sought to realise the historical mission of the bourgeoisie as quickly as possible. A quick accumulation of capital on the basis of a low level of production, of a small national income per capita, must put a burdensome pressure on the consumption of the masses, on their standard of living. Under such conditions, the bureaucracy transformed into a personification of capital, for whom the accumulation of capital is the be all and end-all here, must get rid of all remnant of workers control, must substitute conviction in the labour process by coercion, must atomise the working class, must force all social-political life into a totalitarian mould.

Cliff explains

Russia presents us with the synthesis of a form of property born of a proletarian revolution and relations of production resulting from a combination of backward forces of production and the pressure of world capitalism.

This last point is crucial. Under capitalism the drive to accumulation wealth for the sake of it, is caused by the competition between blocks of capital. In the Russian economy this didn't exist, but production in the Soviet Union was driven by competition with an externality - the Western economies. In particular this was military competition and Cliff shows how this transformed the Russian economy, driving accumulation. From a Marxist point of view, Cliff argues: 

The Stalinist state is in the same position vis-à-vis the total labour time of Russian society as a factory owner vis-à-vis the labour of his employees. In other words, the division of labour is planned. But what is it that determines the actual division of total labour time in Russian society? If Russia had not to compete with other countries, this division would be absolutely arbitrary. But as it is, Stalinist decisions are based on factors outside of control, namely the world economy, world competition. From this point of view the Russian state is in a similar position to the owner of a single capitalist enterprise competing with other enterprises.

He continues:

The fact that the Russian economy is directed towards the production of certain use values does not make it a socialist economy, even though the latter would also be directed towards the production of (very different) use values. On the contrary, the two are complete opposites. The increasing rate of exploitation, and the increasing subordination of the workers to the means of production in Russia, accompanied as it is by a great production of guns but not butter, leads to an intensification, not a lessening of the oppression of the people. The law of value is thus seen to be the arbiter of the Russian economic structure as soon as it is seen in the concrete historical situation of today – the anarchic world market.

Thus the nature of State Capitalist Russia arose out of the reality of proletarian revolution, and the isolation of Russia within a sea of capitalism following the failure of revolution elsewhere. The export of the State Capitalist regime to Eastern Europe did not end that isolation, because it did not create new workers' states from below, but was a top down process. The Soviet Union then became a new imperialist power, its economic priorities and nature determined by global competition.

Why is any of this important? The Soviet Union has, after all, long since vanished. There are two reasons. Firstly, as Chris Harman argued, State Capitalism was the theory that fuelled revolutionary practice. It demonstrated that revolutions had to be built from below, and arise out of the self emancipation of working people. They could not be exported from other states. Secondly it shows that Stalin was not a hero, but the living embodiment of a particular class interest that crushed working people in the interest of the bureaucratic class - certainly not a hero. Finally, State Capitalism in Russia demonstrated the power of Marxism and the Marxist method for understanding concrete situations. The book is a powerhouse of argument, bringing statistics, historical documents and revolutionary politics together. It is a testament to Tony Cliff's clarity of thought, and remains something that ought to be continue to be read by revolutionaries today - even those who have fallen into the trap of Stalinism's crude politics.

Related Reviews

Birchall - Tony Cliff: A Marxist for His Time
Cliff - Trotsky: Towards October
Cliff - Trotsky: The Sword of Revolution
Cliff - Lenin: All Power to the Soviets
Cliff - Lenin: Revolution Besieged
Tony Cliff & Donny Gluckstein - Marxism and Trade Union Struggle, The General Strike of 1926

Alexandra Kollontai - Writings from the Struggle: Selected & Translated by Cathy Porter

Alexandra Kollontai was a fascinating revolutionary. Born into a wealthy Russian liberal family, she came to embrace revolutionary Marxism and was active in both the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. During the Russian Revolution she was a leading Bolshevik agitator, active on their Central Committee, and became a trusted figure in the immediate post 1917 Soviet government. Never afraid to raise her differences of opinion and go her own way she did, on occasion, disagree fundamentally with Lenin and this led to a rift between them. A distinguished old Bolshevik, she survived Stalin's purges and murders of former comrades and served the Soviet Union as a diplomat - which perhaps explains her survival.

Cathy Porter's biography of Kollontai, recently updated and reissued - remains the single best account of her life. Now Porter has released this collection of articles and extracts by Kollontai, and they are a breathtaking insight into her ideas and the early socialist movement. Kollontai wrote leaflets, pamphlets and articles that agitated for socialist ideas - in Russia and in German exile. There are many different examples here, which showcase Kollontai's talents. But she also wrote on subjects that were rarely discussed within the socialist movement - sexuality, love and interpersonal relations. 

I enjoyed Porter's editing here, because she weaves Kollontai's work into the story of her life. Each piece is part of the wider narrative and I found it made them more accessible. All of the chosen pieces by Kollontai are fascinating, though several stand out. As someone with an interest in the German left, I was fascinated to read Kollontai's diary-like account of the outbreak of World War One and the capitulation of the German revolutionary left to its nationalist government. 

I rush to the party headquarters to ask how soon the International can be convened. Haase, the leader of the socialist group in the Reichstag, is there on his own. "Are you joking?" he says. "War is inevitable. People have gone mad, there's nothing we can do!" At the Women's Bureau, I ask Luise Zietz of the party Executive what instructions they have received... She looks at me coldly. "We've protested and demonstrated, but we must do our duty when our country is in danger," she says, and I look her in the eye and realise I am not longer a comrade but a Russian...  

With the help of Karl Leibneckt, she and her son and other Russian socialists are able to leave Germany. In Leibneckt and Rosa Luxembourg, and soon Lenin, her despair quickly turns to anger and agitation. Meeting Luxemburg a month after war broke out Kollontai describes Luxemburg's outlook: "She hasn't lost touch with the workers, and says most are against the war. Her clearsightedness is heartening, and her merciless sarcasm puts much in its proper place."

During the war Kollontai writes some of her most powerful and influential articles. A 1916 pamphlet "Who Needs the War" is read by an estimated 7 million German and Russian soldiers. Reading it in this collection its lost none of its anger and power. In fact its the enduring nature of her writing that makes much of it so exciting to read today. Kollontai's 1906 pamphlet "Who are the Social Democrats and What do they Stand For" is a brilliant introduction to revolutionary politics. It was reprinted in the midst of the Russian Revolution and used internationally to explain the politics of the Bolsheviks. Some of it could be reused today in many parts of the world to put the case for socialism, with little or no changes:

Under the capitalist system, factories produce ever greater quantities of goods in the fight for profits. Then as industries gain new world markets, nations are drawn into wars with each other to steal more colonies from which to extract unimaginable wealth. Each major capitalist power seeks a world monopoly for its goods. Imperialist wars for markets and colonies will continue so long as the capitalist system exists. And the deadlier these wars are, the more clearly workers will see that they must take the economy into their hands if humanity is to survive. The day is fast approaching when these capitalist crises and imperialist wars will force us to choose whether we perish, or we overthrow the bourgeoisie to step over the threshold into socialism.

Later she continues on the power of the working class:

As the proletariat grows larger, industry is run by ever fewer capitalists. Most workers have never so much as glimpsed their employers. Modern production methods are making the gentlemen entrepreneurs' role in the factories increasingly irrelevant, and most are run now by foremen, managers and engineers. The less spiders there are, the easier to destroy their webs. If the bosses should all drop dead one fine day, the world would barely notice. Whereas when workers decide to strike, life comes to a stop, as happened in 1905, when strikers brought the autocracy to its knees.

But Cathy Porter shows that Kollontai was more than a polemicist. In fact she is a deeply thoughtful and original thinker. Her writings on sex and relationships were often too much even for the revolutionaries, as they saw them as a distraction. Though Kollontai saw them more in the context of winning women to the revolutionary movement by talking about the sort of future that they might have under a socialist society. This is a future where women have been liberated from the drudgery of life through the socialisation of child care and food preparation. Kollontai was attacked by some who thought that the "Bolsheviks would take away their children", but this is crude and far from Kollontai's real ideas. Two pieces in this collection illustrate this well, one an essay from 1913 "The New Woman". Porter explains the significance, "people's longing for more fulfilling sexual relationships could only be realised when they were free from the alienation born of capitalist property relations." The New Woman piece explores this by examining in detail the changing way that women were depicted in Russian literature and then contrasting this with the reality of working class life.

A second example is a short story Three Generations published in the aftermath of 1917. In it she depicts the contrasting experiences of two women from the revolution, a woman and her daughter, the latter of whom is enjoying multiple sexual encounters with different partners. Her mother is perplexed. Innovatively Kollontai places herself in the story, and the reader can see this both as a description of life after 1917 in a rapidly changing world and one were Kollontai is also working through the meaning of 1917 for working class women. It's a fascinating and thoughtful conclusion to a collection of essays that everyone interested in revolutionary thought should read. Cathy Porter's work in putting this together should be celebrated and I highly recommend the book.

Related Reviews 

Porter - Alexandra Kollontai: A Biography
Davis - A Rebel's Guide to Alexandra Kollontai
Allen - Alexander Shlyapnikov 1885-1937: Life of an Old Bolshevik

  

Leon Trotsky - Terrorism and Communism

It is fair to say that Terrorism and Communism is not one of Leon Trotsky's greatest works. That stems to my mind from the conditions in which it was written. First published in 1920 it was written in the during the hellish fighting that marked the Civil War in Russia. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917 counter-revolutionary White Armies of former Tsarist loyalists and Imperial troops from a dozen nations invaded Russia to attempt to destroy the Revolution.

Trotsky wrote Terrorism and Communism in part as he led the fight of the Red Army against the Whites. The tension, stress and heart-ache come through on every page of this polemic as he counters those socialists, in particular Karl Kautsky the leading German socialist and former revolutionary, who are effectively siding with the counter-revolutionary armies.

Kaustky argued that the Bolshevik's were wrong to seize power, that the new society was undemocratic, and that the masses in Russia were incapable of running society. His alternative view was that Russian society should have had time to develop it's economy and its democracy and experience a latter transition to socialism. Trotsky dismisses Kautsky as Utopian. The capitalist class aren't willing to give up their wealth, and in fact had engaged in a murderous war to protect it.

As for the bourgeoisie of the victorious countries, it has become inflated with arrogance, and is more than ever ready to defend its social position with the help of the bestial methods which guaranteed its victory. We have seen that the bourgeoisie is incapable of organizing the division of the booty amongst its own ranks without war and destruction. Can it, without a fight, abandon its booty altogether? The experience of the last five years leaves no doubt whatsoever on this score: if even previously it was absolutely utopian to expect that the expropriation of the propertied classes – thanks to “democracy” – would take place imperceptibly and painlessly, without insurrections, armed conflicts, attempts at counterrevolution, and severe repression, the state of affairs we have inherited from the imperialist war predetermines, doubly and trebly, the tense character of the civil war and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Kautsky himself was no longer the socialist leader he once was,

The imperialist war, which killed every form of vagueness and brought mankind face to face with the most fundamental questions, exposed all the political bankruptcy of Kautsky. He immediately became confused beyond all hope of extrication, in the most simple question of voting the War Credits. All his writings after that period represent variations of one and the same theme: “I and my muddle.” The Russian Revolution finally slew Kautsky. By all his previous development he was placed in a hostile attitude towards the November victory of the proletariat. This unavoidably threw him into the camp of the counter-revolution. He lost the last traces of historical instinct. His further writings have become more and more like the yellow literature of the bourgeois market.

Much of the book is a defence of Marxism and the revolutionary practice of Bolshevism in the face of Kautsky's criticism. There's an intriguing chapter on Marx and the Paris Commune where Trotsky shows precisely how Kautsky had abandoned his Marxism.

But for me the most interesting parts were those were Trotsky, speaking as a leading figure in the Revolution defends the practices of the Revolutionary government. For instance, he defends something that Kautsky is unable to contemplate - compulsory labour. Here is Trotsky:

The very principle of compulsory labour service is for the Communist quite unquestionable. “He who works not, neither shall he eat.” And as all must eat, all are obliged to work. Compulsory labour service is sketched in our Constitution and in our Labour Code. But hitherto it has always remained a mere principle. Its application has always had an accidental, impartial, episodic character. Only now, when along the whole line we have reached the question of the economic re-birth of the country, have problems of compulsory labour service arisen before us in the most concrete way possible. The only solution of economic difficulties that is correct from the point of view both of principle and of practice is to treat the population of the whole country as the reservoir of the necessary labour power – an almost inexhaustible reservoir – and to introduce strict order into the work of its registration, mobilisation, and utilisation.

Trotsky shows how compulsory labour isn't the draconian forced labour that Kautsky and others imply, but it is a system that does direct labour and on occasion, has to use compulsion. But, he points out, this is in the context of the great urgency caused by the economic destruction of Russia by the counter-revolutionary forces. What is interesting, and Trotsky emphasises the point, is that by and large workers (especially former soldiers) tend to be willing participants in the process - this is, of course, because they are part of an entirely new social formation. It's this latter point that Kautsky is unable to grasp - that something fundamental had changed in Russia after 1917 and that the old ways of doing things no longer fitted.

My edition of the book (Verso 2017) contains a useful, if idiosyncratic foreword by Slavoj Žižek. Žižek argues that while it is easy to crudely argue that this book demonstrates a continuum from Lenin and Trotsky to Stalin, in fact Trotsky's method in the book (and Bolshevik practice) is the exact opposite. Žižek makes a note about the "democracy" that Kautsky is obsessed with.

In such dynamic times where the situation is 'open' and extremely unstable, the role of the Communists is not to passively 'reflect' the opinion of the majority, but to instigate the working classes to mobilise their forces and thus to create a new majority.

It's precisely this dynamic that Kautsky cannot grasp, which ends up with him in the Bourgeois camp.

Sadly this isn't Trotsky's best work, in part because it is so polemical and it is very much of the moment. Trotsky is writing at the lowest moment of the counter-revolution and the Revolutionary government is, at times, close to being destroyed. Trotsky's arguments reflect that situation.

That's not to say however that the book is not worth reading. On the contrary, for those attempting to understand the fate of the Russian Revolution, this is powerful argument from one of the leading Bolsheviks in defence of the Revolution whose faith in the revolutionary masses remained undiminished.

Related Reviews

Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky
Kautsky - The Agrarian Question - Volume 1
Cliff - Revolution Besieged

Helen Rappaport - Caught in the Revolution

The Russian revolutionary year of 1917 was a world historical event that has been the subject of countless books at articles. Some of the most important works have been those that focus on the revolutionary process, bringing to life the events that took place and the role of ordinary people; workers, peasants and soldiers in making the revolution. Chief among these for those of us on the left are Leon Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution and US socialist journalist John Reed's eyewitness reportage Ten Days that Shook the World.

Less well know however are the countless reports, books and memoirs made by another group of eyewitnesses in Petrograd - the foreign communities that were there, often as part of Western diplomatic missions or representatives of foreign business interests. Some of these left detailed accounts, photographic records and even films of 1917 and many of them form the basis for Helen Rappaport's book written for the centenary year.

As a result much of the eyewitness accounts in this book will be completely new to those of us who have read lots of books about the Russian Revolution. Unfortunately those who know little about 1917 or pick up this in the hope of learning about this important event will be given a distorted view of the Revolution, mainly written by those who did much to try and stop it proceeding.

The book is at it's best when it gives a sense of the mass involvement in the Revolution. The first chapters deal with the outbreak in February, with numerous individuals swept up in the mass protests and demonstrations as strikes exploded in factories across Petrograd. The accounts of these demonstrations, pouring through the city streets, dragging these watchers with them and then confronting the state's forces - principally the Cossacks - are breathtaking to read. They give a real sense of the spontaneity, the confidence of the protesters, and the speed with which the old order was brought to its knees. The collapse of the old order is fascinating to watch through the eyes of Rappaport's commentators, not least because the majority of them are individuals who had, a few week's earlier, been enthralled to be invited to the Tsar's balls and lavish parties.

Here in lies the problem. Rappaport's eyewitnesses are precisely the class that feared genuine revolution. Most are pleased by the prospect of a "democratic" transition in Russia, but they, are universally keen to ensure that the new Russia maintains its old commitments - principally it's involvement in World War One. They fear the radicalisation of the Revolution precisely because they fear it will pull Russia out of the War and challenge their wealth and privilege.

This is very noticeable when it comes to the reports of General Kornilov's attempted coup against Kerensky. The diplomats, their wives, friends and acquaintances all want Kornilov to succeed, precisely because he will put an end to the Bolsheviks. As Florence Harper, a Canadian journalist in Petrograd wrote after Kornilov's defeat, "I was filled with blind rage. We all knew it was the last chance., The Bolsheviki were armed; the Red Guard was formed. The split was definite; Kerensky was doomed."

The problem is that Rappaport share's these prejudices. She begins by arguing that the October Revolution was a coup, and repeatedly portrays the Bolsheviks as a bloodthirsty minority who somehow trip the mass of the population into following them. Of course, given their politics and class position, those who she relies on for eyewitness accounts, tend to highlight the bloodshed, violence and killing that takes place. But rarely do they (or Rappaport) mention the poverty and hunger that drives the Revolution. Violence is solely blamed on bloodthirsty revolutionaries, and never on the oppressed who are sick to death of being exploited and treated like dirt. Given the reality of Russian society prior to 1917 it's no surprise that so many policemen were killed - but its mostly blamed on blood-lust.

Throughout 1917 Russia's continued involvement in the War helped radicalise the revolution. But rather than seeing this as a result of a country sick to death of death and suffering at the front, and privation at home, Rappaport blames this on the agitation of Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

Sadly, and this again is a consequence of her chosen source material, what is almost completely missing from this account is a sense of what the masses were doing, saying and thinking. Did none of the journalists Rappaport quote join in a meeting of the soldiers or workers? The only mass conference discussed here is one organised by Kerensky, which most of the eyewitnesses thought was dull - but why would it be anything else given it was mostly pompous establishment figures denouncing the revolutionaries. On occasion we get a glimpse of what ordinary people wanted (such as two servant girls demanding two hours off every day so they can go to the cinema). But all too frequently the eyewitnesses denounce these individuals, or the masses in general as ill-educated fools who know and understand little about events around them. The book cried out for the authentic voice of the working class Russian - not just descriptions of mass protests, but the sense of what was happening in the workplaces and barracks. Readers will have to look elsewhere for that.

Sadly this book is ruined by the anti-Bolshevik outlook of its author and the eyewitnesses she quotes. While there are occasional glimpses of wider political events, the book fails to give a real sense of the Revolution as being made by ordinary people. As such we lose the essence of the Revolution and the book becomes little more than another attack on 1917, such as those written by many of Helen Rappaport's eyewitnesses when they returned to their privileged lives back home.

Related Reviews

Smith - Red Petrograd
Rodney - The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World
Trotsky - The History of the Russian Revolution
Trotsky - Lessons of October
Sherry - Russia 1917: Workers' Revolution and the Festival of the Oppressed
Smith - Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis 1890-1928
Lenin - Will the Bolsheviks Maintain Power?
Serge - Year One of the Russian Revolution
Serge - Revolution in Danger: Writings from Russia 1919-1921

Walter Rodney - The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World

Walter Rodney was a leading revolutionary intellectual of anti-colonial and revolutionary movements in Africa and the Caribbean. Born in 1942, by the 1960s he was a leading radical voice in the emerging Black Power movements. His academic work in Jamaica's University of the West Indies was marked by attempts to relate to wider audiences than students and when the authorities banned him from ever returning to the country, riots exploded as thousands demonstrated in his support. Following this Rodney returned to Tanzania where he taught at the University of Dar es Salaam. This book is the first publication of Rodney's writings about the Russian Revolution based on a series of lectures he gave in Tanzania which attempted to understand the 1917 events through the experience of post-colonial Africa.

The first thing that should be said is that the editors and publishers have done a brilliant job in producing this book. It's clear from the introduction that this is the result of years of work in archives and the editors, together with Rodney's family, should be applauded to making this work available. Because the work remained unfinished in the form that Rodney would have liked due to his assassination in 1980 there are of course omissions. But it is clear that the author wanted this book to be available to a wide audience. Thankfully that is now possible.

The book begins with an over-view of the Russian Revolution and most importantly the economic and political context for 1917. Rodney also provides a detailed commentary on the historiography of the Russian Revolution, highlighting for instance, where authors who are critical of events are often linked to political forces (such as the Hoover Institution for War and Peace) hostile to the Soviet Union and radical movements in general. Rodney quotes one hostile account by Harold Fisher, which said that the Soviet "Communist movement...threatens our liberties and those of other free people". Rodney continues:

The reader would need to ask whether he or she is included in Fisher's collective "our," and whether he or she wants to be included, bearing in mind that the "free people" to whom he refers include the oppressed masses of Spain, Portugal, Greece and Latin America, plus (in 1955) all the colonised and exploited people of Africa and Asia and all the oppressed black people within in the United States! 

Rodney here notes that the "views of the Russian Revolution" are often shaped by prevailing political discourse and ignore some of the very factors that made the Revolution possible. But he is also writing about the Revolution in order to strengthen the anti-colonial movements of what today we would call the Global South. These movements took place in the context of historical colonial exploitation or in underdeveloped economies, economies that Rodney argues had been depleted of their wealth, resources and population by Western capitalism. So Rodney is keen to highlight the parallels between Russian in 1917 - with a huge peasantry and relatively small, but powerful working class - and countries like Tanzania where he was working. So this book, far more than most on the Russian Revolution, studies the peasantry. But Rodney does not ignore the central role of the working class. In fact, he follows Trotsky and celebrates the leadership of those workers:

Yet he [Trotsky] attacks the theory of a spontaneous and impersonal revolution as a liberal fiction... Both sides had been preparing for it for years. The fact that one cannot discover the identity of the leaders makes the revolution nameless, but not impersonal. The outbreak must be seen in the context of the generally propagandised condition of the workers, hence the 'conscious and tempered workers educated for the most part by the party of Lenin [Trotsky's words].

Reading this I got a real sense of Rodney trying to understand the Russian Revolution for the purpose of emulating its movements. The chapter, "On the 'Inevitability' of the Russian Revolution" is clearly about teaching a Marxist understanding of social movements - arising out of historical contradictions, but being rooted in a concrete situation . Thus for Rodney the revolution of February 1917 was "made possible" because of the "long-term forces that had been operating within feudalism" but it wasn't inevitable.

All this said there are some aspects to the book I disagreed with. Firstly I noted a few errors - Rodney writes that Trotsky returned to Russia at the outbreak of war, but he actually arrived back in 1917 just before Lenin. Rodney (or perhaps the editors) gets confused about the date of writing and publication of Trotsky's seminal History of the Russian Revolution. In writing that it was written during discussions at Brest-Litovsk the author/editors are confusing this with the earlier and shorter History of the Russian Revolution to Brest-Litovsk, which Trotsky wrote as a polemic for German soldiers and was published much earlier. This is important as the later multi-volume book was part of Trotsky's arguments about the legacy of the Revolution. These errors should be corrected for any second edition.

More importantly in Rodney's defence of the Revolution he fails to accept that there was a break between events of 1917, the early 1920s and the Soviet Union in the late 1920s onward. He sees continuity when it is essential to see the break. Rodney defends Stalin (though not completely) arguing that his errors were not the result of personal behaviour but that of the whole organisation, and dismisses Trotsky's criticisms of Stalin as being more about "personal character assassination". At times this leads to real problems of analysis. Rodney writes, for instance, that "By 1936, Stalin was the only one left in Russia from that original group [Bolshevik Old Guard]." He omits to mention that Stalin had had most of the Old Bolsheviks executed or imprisoned. For Rodney "Socialism in One Country" was not the invention of Stalin, but the reality of Russia's isolation. But this is to misunderstand what Stalin was doing - his industrialisation programmes were a conscious turn away from the strategy of international revolution that Lenin and the Bolsheviks promoted. This meant that on Stalin's orders the Communist International, which was intended as being a tool to encourage international revolution, became a tool for Russia foreign policy. Thus Rodney is wrong to write:

The failure of revolutions to take place in Western Europe was a function of imperialism, which strengthened their bourgeoisie and disarmed the workers. Stalin and The Russian Communist party and the Comintern had no control over that.

In fact the opposite is true. It Rodney's eagerness to defend the Revolution from its critics, he ends up ignoring many of the problems of the Soviet Union under Stalin and his heirs. This is not to say that Rodney thinks Stalin a saint - far from it. But he does not acknowledge that the Soviet Union of the 1930s was not the revolutionary nation of the early 1920s. He does come close though:

Caught up in contradictions with capitalist powers, the Soviet Union has to strengthen its state apparatus. And in doing so, it is behaving so much like a capitalist state that it is demanding from China land areas once held by the former Tsarist state and it is invading other countries, as in Czechoslovakia.

I think there are two reasons for these errors. First is that Rodney follows Lenin in arguing that there is a labour aristocracy in the West, bought off by the benefits of Imperialism. Ironically however he then ignores that these workers were the ones that triggered the revolutionary movements in Germany and were the core of the Revolution in Russia. Secondly I think Rodney is reacting against the role of US Imperialism in the Global South. It is not surprising in any way that a revolutionary would hate the legacy of colonialism and the new Imperialism that was being deployed in Africa, Asia and Latin America by the United States. But Rodney fails then to see that the role of the Soviet Union has become Imperialist too.

While noting these disagreements, I also have to agree with Walter Rodney's family members who write in their acknowledgements that "This book provides an 'African Perspective' for understanding the Russian Revolution... Readers are reminded that this work needs to be examined in the context of the world as it existed at that time and in the context of who Rodney was at that time, a twenty-eight year old enigmatic historian and scholar-activist, engaging, learning and earning his stripes". Had he not been assassinated there is no doubt that Rodney would have continued to be part of the growing movements in Africa and elsewhere against Imperialism and Colonialism. This book, in its final form, would have been developed and built upon, and while it has its problems it is also a fascinating study of 1917 from a different perspective to that which we normally get in Europe. I do hope it gets a wide readership and sparks further debates on what we can do in the 21st century to liberate humanity from the insanity of capitalism.

Related Reviews

Trotsky - The History of the Russian Revolution
Sherry - Russia 1917: Workers' Revolution and Festival of the Oppressed
Smith - Russia in Revolution
Serge - Year One of the Russian Revolution
Baku - Congress of the Peoples' of the East

Leon Trotsky - The History of the Russian Revolution

I chose to re-read Leon Trotsky's The History of the Russian Revolution over November 2017, exactly one hundred years since the all to brief triumph of the Revolution it discusses. Doing so allowed me to reflect on what that Revolution meant, but also how it has been portrayed, interpreted and understood since.

You don't have to read much of Trotsky's book to see how inadequate the coverage of 1917 has been for the centenary. Trotsky's work is a masterpiece of literature, powerful writing combined with a Marxist clarity that gives an unrivalled historical perspective on the events of the Revolutionary year. As a result The History of the Russian Revolution reads like a novel, in fact its very structure feels at times like a fictional account as the author builds tension towards the climatic seizure of power. The book teams with passages that are quotable, but take this section describing the situation as power decisively shifts away from the "compromisers" and towards the Bolsheviks:

Kerensky... was confidently calculating that in case of danger the Central Executive Committee, in spite of all family misunderstandings, would come to his aid in time. It was so in July and in August. Why should it not continue so? But now it is no longer July and no longer August. It is October. Cold and raw Baltic winds from the direction of Kronstadt are blowing through the squares and along the quays of Petrograd.

Junkers in long coats to their heels are patrolling the streets, drowning their anxiety in songs of triumph. The mounted police are riding up and down, prancing, their revolvers in brand-new holsters. No. The power still looks imposing enough! Or is this perhaps an optical illusion? At a corner of the Nevsky, John Reed, an American with naïve and intelligent eyes in his head, buys a brochure of Lenin’s entitled 'Will the Bolsheviks Be Able To Hold the State Power?' paying for it with one of those postage stamps which are now circulating in place of money.

These two paragraphs demonstrate a couple of things about Trotsky's book. First is the way he manages to get across a real sense of the balance of class forces and how they shift and change throughout 1917. Secondly is the way that Trotsky builds tension and drama - the raw winds blowing from the base of the revolutionary sailors at Kronstadt towards Petrograd aren't just about the weather, and secondly Trotsky's ability to build narrative tension as the crisis deepens in Russia.

But it is Trotsky's historical account that is most important. Despite portraying himself in the third person (a writer's master stroke in my opinion) Trotsky eschews any attempt at an independent historical narrative - this is polemic. But it is polemic for two reasons - the first, and most obvious is that it is designed to arm and give confidence to socialists who are trying to build revolutionary organisation and look to the Russian Revolution for inspiration.

Closely linked to this is Trotsky's battle with Stalin. The History of the Russian Revolution was written towards the end of the 1920s and finished in 1930 and comes immediately after Trotsky's defeat by Stalin and his exile. Thus the book has to be understood as reassertion of Trotsky's principle political arguments against Stalin, in particular Trotsky's argument that "socialism in one country" was impossible. Thus some of the most important sections of the book do not actually deal with 1917 but with the historical context of Russia's economic development to the revolutionary years.

Trotsky explicitly sets this out in several appendices which he hopes that a tenth or hundredth of his readers will read in addition to the main account. Trotsky was setting out on his new task of finding handfuls of supporters who could rebuild the international socialist movement. His focus on the role of the Bolsheviks' here and how they related to the mass movements on the streets is a key part of the story and his polemic.

But the majority of readers will, as Trotsky acknowledged, read this book for its unrivalled historical account of 1917. It is a long and detailed book, which seems to have penetrating insights on every page. But it's length shouldn't intimidate - Trotsky's writing is clear, passionate and at times very funny. Take his hilarious thumb nail portraits of the Russian generals who would go on to form the basis of the counter-revolutionary White Terror:

An army is always a copy of the society it serves – with this difference, that it gives social relations a concentrated character, carrying both their positive and negative features to an extreme. It is no accident that the war did not create one single distinguished military name in Russia. The high command was sufficiently characterised by one of its own members: “Much adventurism, much ignorance, much egotism, intrigue, careerism, greed, mediocrity and lack of foresight” – writes General Zalessky – “and very little knowledge, talent or desire to risk life, or even comfort and health.” Nikolai Nikolaievich, the first commander-in-chief, was distinguished only by his high stature and august rudeness. General Alexeiev, a grey mediocrity, the oldest military clerk of the army, won out through mere perseverance. Kornilov was a bold young commander whom even his admirers regarded as a bit simple; Kerensky’s War Minister, Verkhovsky, later described him as the lion heart with the brain of a sheep. Brussilov and Admiral Kolchak a little excelled the others in culture, if you will, but in nothing else. Denikin was not without character, but for the rest, a perfectly ordinary army general who had read five or six books. And after these came the Yudeniches, the Dragomirovs the Lukomskies, speaking French or not speaking it, drinking moderately or drinking hard, but amounting to absolutely nothing. First time readers might be surprised that some of the most fascinating chapters are those that deal not with the revolution but with the ruling class that was overthrown - Trotsky showing why their regime was ripe for collapse.

But ultimately this is a description of a year of revolutionary upheaval that involved millions of people in action. Trotsky never loses sight of that key fact - that the revolution was made by ordinary men and women, and he celebrates this fact at every stage. In fact by focusing on the ideas, slogans and demands of the factories and streets Trotsky is able to get to the heart of why the Bolsheviks were able to lead the working class to victory. This is a celebration of mass democracy, participation and revolutionary dynamism.

No other author does it as well as Trotsky's history and no one trying to understand 1917 can avoid reading this book. I first read this as a young socialist some 25 years ago. Re-reading it again a quarter of a century later I was struck by how fresh it felt, but also, how much of it I had retained and learnt from. Perhaps that's Trotsky's true legacy.

In the course of 2017 I've read or re-read a number of books related to the Revolutionary Year of 1917. Those reviews can be found here.

Related Reviews

Trotsky - On Britain
Trotsky - Lessons of October
Trotsky - 1905
Trotsky - An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe
Cliff - Trotsky: Towards October