The Russian Revolution and Its Fate

1917 was a revolution, not a coup

The British Trotskyist group Socialist Resistance has published a book, October 1917 — Workers in Power (Merlin 2016), which defends the key decisions of the Bolsheviks, while making some reasonable criticisms of the regime created after the civil war. The collection of essays is useful in many respects, but feels somewhat stale and has a number of notable gaps. A centre-piece of the book is Ernest Mandel’s essay, October 1917: Coup d’etat or social revolution? Mandel, who died in 1995, did a good job explaining why the Bolsheviks had won majority support among workers (and indeed wide...

Don’t mourn, organise!

Left-wing melancholia aptly sums up the psychology of many socialists of a certain age, beaten down by decades of defeat and sanguine about the resources of hope in the present. Enzo Traverso brings this issue to the foreground in his recent book, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (2017). Traverso is a professor at Cornell University and politically close to the Fourth International of Mandel, Bensaid and Löwy. Yet this new book – as befitting the subject matter – is a bitter disappointment. Traverso’s ambition is to rethink the history of the left through the prism of...

Letter: Remember the opposition to Stalin

Andrew Coates is an astute critic of the state of the international left, so I’m grateful for his review of the book, The Russian Revolution: When the workers took power. Andrew is right to identify the Bolshevik party as the main locus of the book, since it was this party that made the difference in 1917 (compared with revolutionary situations in Germany, Italy and elsewhere) and it the Bolshevik model that is most relevant for revolutionary socialists today. Andrew raises important questions about the party and about democracy after the revolution. The book is mostly about 1917 and the...

1917 and problems of democracy

Review of The Russian Revolution: When the workers took power by Paul Vernadsky The historian of the French Revolution, François Furet, wrote in 1995 wrote that that after the fall of the USSR, the October Revolution had ended its journey. Unlike the first French Republic, Soviet power, and Lenin, “left no heritage”. Over 800 pages later the critic of the Jacobins concluded that while it was hard to “think” of another kind of society, democracy manufactured the need for a world beyond “Capital and the Bourgeoisie”. If the figure of the Bolshevik party had disappeared, the “idea of communism”...

The Left in Disarray: study guide

1. Stalinist roots Read: Introduction and first part of "Stalinism has not been buried yet", pages 8 to 73. Background or further reading: Russian Revolution book, chapter 10. Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed. Quotes to discuss: "Philby stuttered... 'Whatever Stalin does - that is the left!'... It is a statement that sums up an entire epoch in the history of the world and of the left" - p.20 "In the summaries of the proper revolutionary communist approach which Trotsky wrote in the 1930s, the demand to be truthful... is always central. The fact that such a 'demand' had to be made and that it was...

Learning lessons from the Bolshevik feminists

Katie Turton reviews Women’s Liberation and the Russian Revolution in When Workers Took Power by Paul Vernadsky This is a wide-ranging chapter which highlights the significant role women played in the historic events of 1917 in Russia. It explores the development of a Bolshevik women’s movement, in the wider context of liberal and socialist campaigns for women’s rights. It offers a detailed discussion of Kollontai’s views and activities as one of the leading lights among Bolsheviks campaigning for women’s emancipation, taking account of not only her social policies but also her beliefs on...

“1917 was progressive... yet reactionary”!

Steve Smith, professor of history at Oxford University has published what is likely to be one of the most widely read books on the Russian revolution this centenary year — Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890 to 1928. The book is impeccably referenced and in places, informative. Smith has all the credentials to produce a great history. His book Red Petrograd (1983) was a pioneer “history from below”, examining the factory committees and workers’ control during 1917-18. He also wrote The Russian Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (2002), along with other valuable works. Yet Russia...

The political journey to Trotskyism

I always had a strong underlying humanist bias. I tended not to view things not just from an ideological viewpoint, as was the rule in the SPA [Socialist Party of Australia, a “hardline” pro-USSR split-off from the Communist Party of Australia]. My moral break from authoritarian state-capitalism, or Stalinism, which still infects the Australian left and the Australian trade union movement to a much larger degree than people realise, took a long time. I would say it took from 1979, when I joined the SPA, to the final break in about 1994. The last five years has been my great political growing...

Early years in the movement

Looking back, the watershed moment of the modern Australian labour movement was really 1975. The Governor-General sacked the reforming Labor government and put in the conservatives under Malcolm Fraser to govern instead. Workers organised a huge surge of strikes and demonstrations in response; but the union leaders limited and deflected the movement. After that, the left-wing ferment of Australia’s early 1970s subsided quite fast, thought the trade union movement remained strong. You would have been in your early teens then. Do you remember what you made of it? I remember my father being...

Why we need more Bolsheviks today

Few except the most conservative deny the emancipatory grandeur of mass action in the October 1917 Russian revolution. Common, however, is the claim that there was too much “party” in the revolution — the Bolsheviks were too organised, too ruthless, too pushy, and that led to Stalinism. This article seeks to refute that claim. October 1917 is often described as a “Bolshevik coup”, suggesting that the Bolsheviks took advantage of momentary excitement and disorder to seize an existing machine of power. In fact, in the weeks after 25 October 1917, the Bolshevik (and then Bolshevik/ Left SR...

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