The Russian Revolution and Its Fate

"Soviet" is the Russian word for council. In 1905 and in 1917 the Russian workers, in great social rebellions against the Tsarist regime, created "workers' councils" of delegates which not only coordinated struggles but, especially in 1917, took over functions of government. The Russian workers' revolution of October 1917 had to create a new machinery of government. The old machinery of government had been broken up, and whatever fragments remained were mostly hostile. The Soviets took over the job of governing. Then and now, Marxists saw the soviets - with frequent election and recall at any...

O, sing me not that song again My lovely Nora, dear, The strong, the proud defiant strain It breaks my heart to hear. Charles J Kickham(*) 150 years on from the Communist Manifesto, the spectre that haunts the collective imagination of Europe and the world is not the looming prospect of communism, but the experience of "communism", that is, Stalinism. Ours is an age of disillusionment. We live in the time after the fall of "utopia". Not only is "utopia" discredited and abandoned, so also - and the two are connected - is much that went to make up the old liberal commitment to social progress...

See here for a photo-essay about toppling statues. In his piece in the anthology The God That Failed the anti-Stalinist socialist Ignazio Silone tells of a conversation in Moscow with Lazar Schatzky, a leader of the Russian Communist Youth. They were in Red Square, not far from the tomb of Lenin, in the late 20s: “[I] pointed to the tomb, which was still made of wood at that time, and before which we used every day to see an interminable procession of poor ragged peasants slowly filing… ‘You must admit with me that this superstitious cult of his mummy is an insult to his memory and a disgrace...

The Russian Revolution has had all sorts of things grafted onto the image it projects to us. But what was it in reality? In the revolution, the workers and the farmers — and the soldiers who were mainly peasants — revolted against the ruling classes and the war. This was a tremendously democratic movement. It was a movement that created soviets, that is workers’ councils. No powerful state made the revolution. It was the people, the workers, the red guards in St Petersburg and Moscow, the factory militias. What they thought they were doing was liberating themselves from all future class rule...

Paul Vernadsky in his review of my book, The Experiment: Georgia’s Forgotten Revolution 1918-21 ( Solidarity 453), is right to highlight the importance of this period for today. And he comes to the heart of our disagreement at the very end of his essay when he refers to the idea that “an impoverished, backward society cannot skip historical stages”. He calls this “Menshevik dogma”. No, Paul, that’s not “Menshevik dogma”. That’s Marxism. But leaving aside whether that’s more Martov or Marx, that phrase has proven to be absolutely true. The last century showed us many examples of attempts by...

Paul Vernadsky reviews The Experiment: Georgia’s Forgotten Revolution 1918-21 by Eric Lee. Eric Lee’s mischievous new book, argues that the Georgian Menshevik republic was an alternative to the Bolshevik-led workers’ government, which came to power in October 1917. This is absolute fantasy, which confuses discussion of working-class politics at the time and the importance of the Russian revolution for today’s class struggles. Russia annexed Georgia in 1798 and the Transcaucasia region remained a largely underdeveloped part of the tsarist empire until the discovery of oil in the late nineteenth...

At the dawn of November 7th the men and women employed at the party’s printing works came to the Smolny and informed us that the Government had stopped our chief party paper and also the new organ of the Petrograd Soviet. The printing works had had their doors sealed up by some Government agents. The Military Revolutionary Committee at once countermanded the order, took both papers under its protection, and placed the high honour of protecting the freedom of the Socialist Press from counter-revolutionary attempts on the valiant Volhynian Regiment. After this, work was resumed and went on...

When Britain invaded Russia’ was one of the more interesting of the BBCs output about the Russian Revolution. It covers the allied invasion of Russia during the Civil War. Not just Britain but 14 nations invaded joining the counter-revolution. Two things struck me about the programme, both the utter desperation that seemed to fill the imperialist powers as they rushed to get war-weary troops to take up positions across Russian territory. The British advanced from Arkhangelsk alongside French troops. Their equipment was severely lacking, they weren’t able to light fires to stop them drawing...

Barry Finger reviews The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism: the Fate of the Russian Revolution volume two, edited by Sean Matgamna (Workers’ Liberty, 2015). ­Revolutionary socialism at its liveliest is always a vast theatre of ideological battlegrounds, a Permanent War of Questions, as Julius Jacobson — a one-time follower of Max Shachtman — so aptly put it. For those, and there were precious few, who still valiantly retained the capacity, the sitzfleisch as well as the activists’ militant vigour, in the years leading up to and through the Second World War, to think through and refine volumes...

In the early hours of 24 October the soviet seizure of power began. This was not a response to the government’s ill-conceived decision to launch punitive action against the Bolsheviks. The blueprint had already been drawn up by the Military Revolutionary Committee; insurrectionary forces were to seize the Marinskii Palace and disperse the pre-parliament. Then the Winter Palace was to be surrounded, ministers arrested and the Provisional Government overthrown. Red Guards and pro-soviet soldiers were mobilised to control the bridges over the river and key buildings such as railway stations were...