The Russian Revolution and Its Fate

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...

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...

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...

Eric Lee predictably and wrongly seizes on my recent review on the Russian civil war to rehash fairy tales about Georgia’s Menshevik government ( Solidarity 642 , 27 July 2022). Lee’s apologetics ignore the reality of the period – include materials from his own book, The Experiment (2017). Rather than put the Russian civil war in its international context, he prefers the fantasy oasis of social democracy in one country. In October 1917, the Bolsheviks led the working class to make a socialist revolution in Russia. They led a revolutionary workers’ government. The Bolsheviks faced White...

I have not yet read Antony Beevor’s new book on the Russian revolution and civil war so I cannot comment on Paul Vernadsky’s review ( Solidarity 641 ). But allow me to point out one error he makes. “Beevor’s only merit is to blurt out some truths about foreign intervention in the Russian civil war that have been downplayed in many recent histories,” he writes. He gives an example: “The Menshevik government in Georgia ‘received help from the Germans’ in 1918 and then turned to the Allies.” The German involvement in Georgia, which lasted for about five months, had absolutely nothing to do with...

Sir Antony Beevor is court historian for the nervous haute bourgeoisie. His commanding prose will no doubt comfort those who fear the wrath of the rabble. For the more discerning, Beevor writes history to warn today’s hapless rulers against repeating their predecessors’ mistakes. Beevor is apparently the best-selling historian of our time, hailed for weighty tomes about the Second World War. His new book, Russia: Revolution and Civil War , 1917-1921 , is perhaps the most miserable account of the Russian revolution published in recent times. It is history-from-above at its worst — the unstated...

A new pamphlet from Workers’ Liberty, Sylvia, can be bought online here (£3 single copies, five copies for £11). It tells the story of the political journey of Sylvia Pankhurst, the member of the suffragette Pankhurst family who moved to working-class organising and revolutionary socialism while her sister Christabel and mother Emmeline moved to support for World War One and for Toryism. Sylvia’s Workers’ Suffrage Federation were the sharpest and boldest supporters in the British left of the workers’ revolution in Russia in October 1917. Their paper Workers’ Dreadnought of 17 November 1917...

The question of who black American actor, singer and activist Paul Robeson was in anything beyond general outline hovered at the edge of my mind for several years. Earlier this year I googled for a book and found Australian journalist Jeff Sparrow’s No Way But This: In Search of Paul Robeson . I recommend it. It’s not a straight biography. Sparrow travelled to various parts of the US, Spain, London, South Wales and Moscow to engage with episodes and aspects of Robeson’s life (1898-1976), and a lot of No Way But This consists of his conversations with experts and activists in those places. At...

Vladimir Putin has been extremely explicit and vocal in condemning the Bolsheviks’ policy of national self-determination and their policy for Ukraine in particular. Condemnation of the Bolsheviks is central to his absurd argument that there is essentially no Ukrainian nation, that it is a somehow an artificial construction. As has been widely noted, Putin regrets the collapse of the USSR. But it is the Russian empire the Stalinist USSR represented, not “communism” and certainly not the Russian revolution, that he views positively. For the obvious reasons, Putin is against workers' struggle and...

The articles reprinted here, from a dispute in the Irish Workers’ Group (IWG) in 1967-8, are important for seeing how the term “permanent revolution” has been used in certain ways to rationalise a world-view on the radical left, and how the political trend represented today by Solidarity and Workers’ Liberty dug our way out of those misuses.