The Russian Revolution and Its Fate

Lousy night in Georgia

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...

Letter: Georgia and the Russian civil war

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...

Getting Russia wrong: Beevor’s history

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...

Sylvia Pankhurst and "the first of its kind"

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 tragedy of Paul Robeson

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...

Putin vs Lenin

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...

Permanent revolution and working-class politics

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.

Kino Eye: Early Soviet film posters

Something different this week. If you perused the Guardian website on 14 January, you may have noticed an item on Soviet film posters up to about the mid-twenties. It is well worth checking out. These are among some of the finest examples of graphic art in the twentieth century. Inspired by Constructivism, incorporating elements of dynamism, montage and a striking use of colour, these posters are a stirring accompaniment to the films of the period, the famous like Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (not on the website) and others such as Miss Mend , directed by Boris Barnet (1926). The...

More on our half-price book offer

The coming weeks of fewer labour-movement meetings and activities are a good time to read our longer books, and within our general half-price offer we’re doing a special deal on The Fate of the Russian Revolution volume 1 and The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism : both large books for £10 post free. If you’ve already read those, or want something easier, the half-price offer also makes many shorter texts more available. Socialism Makes Sense is an attempt to allow anti-socialist ideas full voice and then refute them in favour of the idea of socialism which was advocated by the mass socialist...

Use the coming weeks to study

The coming weeks, as labour movement activity dwindles in the second half of December and in early January, are a good time to catch up on reading. Workers’ Liberty is running a half-price offer on all our older books, aiming to redress the backlog in circulation caused by the lack of in-person political meetings over the last two years. We also offer special deals if you buy a few books — for example, both The Fate of the Russian Revolution volume 1, and The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism , for £10 post free. It’s an especially good time to read the longer books, more difficult to work...

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