The Russian Revolution and Its Fate

A deviation from the road

“The force of things and the behaviour of men have contradicted all Lenin’s optimistic forecasts, his hopes in a superior democracy as much as his semi-libertarian ideas expressed in the State and Revolution and other writings of the same period, at the dawn of the revolution. Nothing in the individual theses of Trotsky has stood the test any better, in particular his wordy and abstract theory of the ‘permanent revolution’.” — Boris Souvarine, Stalin. A Critical Survey of Bolshevism, 1939. The labour movement is striving “to renew and reconstruct itself in politics”, writes Sean Matgamma in...

Georgi Plekhanov

Before the year 2018 reaches its end, the 100th anniversary of the death of Georgi Plekhanov should be noted and remembered. He is sometimes referred to as the “father” of Russian Marxism, and for good reason. Plekhanov was the most important figure in the early Russian Marxist movement, a major theorist and voice in the Second International; and, as a member of the editorial board of Iskra, a collaborator with Lenin in the first years of the twentieth century. Plekhanov and Lenin were to go their separate ways. By the time of the October Revolution in 1917 Plekhanov had moved considerably to...

No party like the Bolshevik party

In Defence of Bolshevism, the new book from Workers' Liberty, had its launch at a lively meeting in central London on 12 October. Edited by Sean Matgamna, the collection of texts by American Trotskyist Max Shachtman represents one of the greatest polemics in the Marxist tradition. It is the defence of a revolutionary socialist consciousness being developed in the working class as the irreplaceable pre-condition for the self- emancipation of the working class. Crucially, it describes the only type of party fit for the purpose of seeding, nurturing and growing this consciousness in the working...

Zinoviev and Zinovievism

Grigori Zinoviev was a leader of the Bolshevik party who in 1926-7 became co-leader, with Leon Trotsky, of the Left Opposition against the Stalinist counter-revolution. However, when president of the Communist International, especially in 1924-5, he had done much which would undermine the Left Opposition's fight. He capitulated to Stalin soon after the Left Opposition was expelled (and its leaders exiled to remote parts of the USSR) in December 1927. Stalin never allowed Zinoviev to regain a leading position. In 1936 Zinoviev was subjected to a Stalinist show trial and shot. He had joined the...

The Russian revolution: the story of 1917

From The Russian Revolution: when workers took power In October 1917 the Russian working class, led by the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP, Bolshevik party), took power through their mass, democratic soviets (councils). The workers constituted their own state based on the collective and democratically-organised armed force of labour, allied with rank-and-file soldiers, mostly peasants in uniform. The Bolshevik party established a workers’ government that carried out exactly what the workers and peasants demanded: an end to the war, land to those who worked it, a shorter working...

Soviets, workers' democracy, and workers' control

"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...

The Communist Manifesto and the Russian Revolution

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...

Pulling it down: No gods, no cults

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...

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