The Russian Revolution and Its Fate

Larisa Reisner a Bolshevik, revolutionary life

Larisa Reisner (1895-1926) lived an extraordinary life. She fought for working-class socialism at its high point a century ago, but died just before Stalin snuffed out the workers ’ state she had fought to defend. Cathy Porter’s newly updated Larisa Reisner: A Biography captures Reisner’s passion and sheds new light on her life. EARLY LIFE Larisa Reisner was born on 2 May 1895 in Lublin, then in tsarist Poland. (Both her names are often misspelt with two “ss”.) In 1898, her father Mikhail Reisner was exiled to Siberia for his political activities and for the next five years the family lived in...

Queer life in the Soviet Union

In May 1934, Joseph Stalin received a letter from a Scottish communist called Harry Whyte. Whyte was a journalist, working for the USSR ’s English-language paper in Moscow. He was also a gay man whose boyfriend had recently gone missing. His letter opened with a question, whose answer would shape the future of the Soviet gay community: “can a homosexual be considered a worthy member of the Communist Party?” Whyte’s decision to move to the Soviet Union in 1932 had partly been an attempt to escape Scotland’s anti-sodomy laws. The world’s first socialist state had removed all homophobic laws...

Harry Whyte letter to Stalin on the "criminal liability of sodomy"

The following letter was written to Joseph Stalin by Scottish communist Harry Whyte, in May 1934. Whyte lived in Moscow, and at the time of writing he led the editorial board of the English-language newspaper Moscow Daily News . Whyte was a gay man, and shortly before this letter a man he had been seeing for a while had gone missing. Whyte was born to a working-class family in Edinburgh, in 1907. He left school at 16 to pursue a career in journalism, and in 1927, in the aftermath of the general strike, he joined the Independent Labour Party. In 1931, he left the ILP for the Communist Party of...

The German October

This month marks the 100th anniversary of the decision by the Communist International to launch an armed uprising in Germany. The uprising, which took place in October that year, was a dismal failure. It also marked the final attempt by a Communist Party anywhere in Europe to come to power in the same way that the Bolsheviks had done in Russia. The uprising was not something the German working class needed or desired. The Weimar Republic, however imperfect, was a democracy. Workers could vote for the Communist Party or the Social Democrats or any other party they wanted. In the 1920 elections...

Letters: Hands off Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg

I was nauseated by Eric Lee’s unwarranted attack on Clara Zetkin in Solidarity 664 . Zetkin was an outstanding revolutionary socialist, feminist and fighter for working class politics over 50 years, whose mistakes towards the end of her life did not make her a loyal Stalinist. Zetkin’s incredible life (1857-1933) and record deserve to be better known. She joined the German Social Democratic Party in 1878 and became one of its most prominent leaders. They built a mass working class party of one million members, a model followed by the best socialists of that epoch, including the Bolsheviks...

The tragedy of Clara Zetkin

As International Women’s Day approaches (8 March) some mainstream media will run their usual articles about the day and its history. Some may point out that the original name was International Working Women’s Day and that it was decided upon at a 1910 socialist congress in Copenhagen. It may be mentioned that one of the proponents of the holiday was Clara Zetkin, a little-remembered German socialist today who was, at the time, a household name. Among some of the famous revolutionary women of that time, Zetkin stands out. Her friend Rosa Luxemburg was an early critic both of Lenin’s ideas about...

Kino Eye: Ninotchka and Italy’s 1946 election

Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939), starring Greta Garbo, was billed as a “romantic comedy”, but the comedy dished up is a rather thin gruel. Garbo plays Ninotchtka, a po-faced Soviet bureaucrat who is sent by her Commissar (Béla Lugossi, looking like Count Dracula in a uniform) to Paris on a mission to sort out three wayward colleagues, who have succumbed to the delights of the City of Light. As indeed does Ninotchka, eventually falling for the charms of the White émigré Count Léon d’Algoult. The film does make, as might be expected, some valid criticisms of the Soviet Union, but those tend to...

Revolutions, socialist and other

Mahalla textile strikers, in the Egyptian revolution of 2011 How can the working class becoming politically aware, organised, cohesive and self-confident enough to become society’s new ruling class, overthrowing the capitalists in favour of collective ownership with democratic self-rule? That is the decisive question about socialist revolution. But Socialist Worker ’s explanation of “revolution” ( by Isabel Ringrose, 4 December ) ducks it in favour of advocating more militancy in general, plus the presence, in the wings, of a fiercely-organised “revolutionary party”. Ringrose deserves credit...

"The People Immortal"

Above: Grossman (on left) in Berlin, 1945 Many readers will no doubt already be acquainted with Vasily Grossman’s much-praised epic novel, Life and Fate which centres on the battle for Stalingrad during the winter months of 1942-43. This new translation of The People Immortal (Maclehose Press, 2022), an earlier novel of his, takes us to the very first months of Operation Barbarossa (the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, commenced 22 June, 1941), when the Soviet army was in retreat in both Ukraine and Belarus. Grossman was a reporter attached to the Red Army and popular among the troops for...

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