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Post by dodger on Sept 16, 2013 10:03:19 GMT
Ninety years ago, the Russian working class shook the world with the Bolshevik Revolution. After it, relations between the classes would never be the same again...
The October Revolution – humanity's greatest achievement
WORKERS, DEC 2007 ISSUE
The capitalist state of affairs has, since its beginnings, been projected as the natural way, the only way. God-given and reinforced by the church, to break away from it was to invite social disaster and chaos. This prevailing attitude of mind was smugly conveyed by the famous 19th-century hymn, All Things Bright and Beautiful in its now rarely-sung later verse:
"The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high or lowly,
And ordered their estate."
The first serious jolt to the complacency of the ruling classes came in 1871 with the uprising of the Paris Commune. At the beginning of 1871, after Emperor Napoleon III of France's unnecessary war with Prussia had resulted in invasion, the Parisian crowds proclaimed a republic. But the people of Paris were busy planning social reforms rather than getting to grips with the main threat – the Versailles government of Thiers. The commune was violently overthrown.
To the ruling class, the Paris Commune was a fleeting alarm. Quite soon, they forgot, thought it an aberration and went back to their old ways. World War One commenced with the conviction of the ruling class that their respective working classes would go down in mutual slaughter for the greater benefit of capital, for the heady growth of its armament companies and for the reconfiguration of its maps of empire.
Why was the Russian October Revolution so different? Above all because it smashed the complacent arrogance of rulers everywhere and brought a new set of factors to the equation of governance. From that date, and for many decades on, the exploiters looked anxiously, nervously, over their shoulders.
The events that took place six months earlier, in the February Revolution, were significant. Petrograd, the capital of Russia at the time and the centre of huge military garrisons too, was taken by workers and peasants in uniform who refused to continue in the Tsar's war. Consequently the Tsar fell, abdicating.
Though the Soviets had the armed force and the support of the masses, yet the power fell into the hands of the bourgeois Provisional Government. A dual power, rare in history, emerged. Although the Soviets in February and March voluntarily ceded the power won by the soldiers and deputies – a position advocated and pursued by the Mensheviks – the Bolsheviks were not prepared to stop at the victory of the bourgeois revolution.
In August 1917 a Party Congress called for preparations to be made for the transfer of power to the working class and peasantry. By early autumn there was a growing financial collapse and the rouble lost 37 per cent of its value in the period August-September 1917. Workers were paid wages in "falling roubles" – money that simply melted away in their hands.
Revolutionary militia on the streets of Petrograd, Russia, 1917.
By October the rouble went into tail-spin, depreciating at headlong speed. Supply of foodstuffs to the cities declined and grain speculators benefited. The government was using armed force against the peasants and backing the big landlords.
In September and October there was a huge upswing in revolutionary strike action with metallurgy and textile workers taking the lead. It began and was strongest in the Bolshevik factories. Demands for the transfer of power to the Soviets began to grow stronger. The Bolsheviks now were returned as the leading force in the overwhelming majority of workers' soviets. Morale in the army was disintegrating and Bolshevik ideas were coming to the fore. The Bolshevik party had great influence amongst the Kronstadt sailors and the Black Sea Fleet.
And the October Revolution produced two of the best, pithiest calls to action ever: "Peace, Bread and Land" and "All Power to the Soviets" – calls which appealed to millions desperate for power to resolve their problems.
The October Revolution overthrew the Russian Provisional Government and gave the power to the Soviets dominated by Bolsheviks. The revolution was led by the Bolshevik party but with the support of the Left Social Revolutionaries, who had links with the peasantry. At this moment, Lenin made sure that everyone remembered the lessons of the Paris Commune. Strategic buildings, communication facilities, banks, the railways, the fleets, etc. all needed to be secured for the people. Troops of revolutionary workers and soldiers began the takeover of government buildings on 24 October. On 25 October the Winter Palace (seat of the Provisional government located in Petrograd, then capital of Russia) was captured.
The success of the October Revolution transformed the Russian state from parliamentarian to socialist in character.
What is its significance?
The rulers always denigrate the October Revolution as a coup d'etat. But the evidence is clear that the working class (2 million for instance in Moscow and Petrograd) eagerly adopted the policies of the Bolsheviks during the course of 1917. The brushing aside of the Provisional Government was a popular move and was the only course of action able to address their ability to survive and progress.
For the first time a country detached itself from the ramifications of a capitalist world and began the process of building a socialist society, largely independently, largely out of its own efforts and resources. It was living proof we do not need capitalists. There is another way.
As against current capitalist society's obsession with celebrity, the October Revolution was the first to put the needs of the mass of workers in central position.
The October Revolution was characterised by its boldness and was an expression of the human spirit that has still not been vanquished.
What events did it set in train?
A coalition of anti-Bolshevik groups including invading armies from the victorious Allies attempted to unseat the new government in the Russian Civil War from 1918 to 1922. It failed. A new army formed from workers' detachments proved itself in this conflict. Imperialism could not inflict defeat on the fledgling state. The Soviet Union was formed in a mood of victory.
Another capitalist response was the sponsorship of fascism and corporatism, in the form of Hitler and Nazi Germany, and of Mussolini in Italy. All of which grew out of fear of the working class, and of the Soviet Union in particular.
In the subsequent epic struggle of World War Two, the Soviet Union smashed fascism, changed the tide in the world in favour of theworking class. The Soviet Union bore the brunt of the war; two thirds of all Germany's military divisions served on the eastern front and there was no second front until 1944 when the Soviet Union had turned the balance of the war irrevocably in their favour. This was all at an immense cost to the Soviet Union with an estimated 24 million dead.
Are there still valid lessons for us from those times?
Bourgeois democracy versus revolutionary – Lenin's formulations. Bourgeois democracy and universal suffrage is not the final culmination of politics. It is a very poor instrument. Sitting back, voting for someone else to represent them, the ancient Greeks listened to debate and then shifted their stones to indicate approval or rejection. Informed participation, constant involvement: the Soviets were the first essay into the arena.
The Soviet Union was not vanquished by capitalism. It withstood everything ranged against it for 73 years. By the 1970s the Soviet Union was producing a fifth of the world's industrial product.From the Paris Commune's 72 days to the Soviet Union's 73 years: noticeable progress for working class power surrounded by adverse, unfriendly powers. Not a coup. A coup doesn't resist all-comers for 70 years. It collapsed from within. Workers were no longer prepared to be a revolutionary class, exerting leadership over its society.
This article is an edited extract from a speech given at a Workers/CPBML meeting in London in November, celebrating the 90th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.
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Post by dodger on Sept 22, 2013 18:04:46 GMT
Brilliant study of the disastrous reporting of the Russian Revolution, 11 Oct 2011
This William Podmore review is from: Liberty and the News (Paperback)
This brilliant collection comprises three linked essays by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Walter Lippmann - Journalism and the Higher Law, What Modern Liberty Means, and Liberty and the News, and a longer study, `A test of the news', by Lippmann and Charles Merz, all published in 1920.
As the authors wrote, `A test of the news' "deals with the reporting of... the Russian Revolution from March, 1917, to March, 1920. The analysis covers thirty-six months and over one thousand issues of a daily newspaper [the New York Times]. The authors have examined all news items about Russia in that period in the newspaper selected; between three and four thousand items were noted. Little attention was paid to editorials."
The authors wrote, "The only question asked is whether the reader of the news was given a picture of various phases of the revolution which survived the test of events, or whether he was misled into believing that the outcome of events would be radically different from the actual outcome."
They noted, "In the two years from November, 1917, to November, 1919, no less than ninety-one times was it stated that the Soviets were nearing their rope's end, or actually had reached it."
In November 1919, a representative of the Czech army said of the government propped up by the British government, "our army has been forced against its convictions to support a state of absolute despotism and unlawfulness which had had its beginnings here under defense of the Czech arms. The military authorities of the Government of Omsk are permitting criminal actions that will stagger the entire world. The burning of villages, the murder of masses of peaceful inhabitants and the shooting of hundreds of persons of democratic convictions and also those only suspected of political disloyalty occurs daily."
Polish forces attacked Russia in January 1919. The Times said, "The Bolsheviki have forced the Poles to take up arms by their advance into Polish territory. ... The Bolsheviki are advancing toward Vilna." But Vilna was not in Poland. There had been no Russian `advance into Polish territory'. But there had been a Polish advance into Russian territory. The authors wrote, "in the guise of news they picture Russia, and not Poland, as the aggressor as early as January, 1919." They noted that by 2 December 1919, Polish armies were more than 180 miles deep in Russian territory: "the repeated threats of a Bolshevist offensive simply served as a smokescreen for Polish aggression."
On 21 January 1920, the Times stated as fact, "The strategy of the Bolshevist military campaign during the coming Spring contemplates a massed attack against Poland, as the first step in a projected Red invasion of Europe and a military diversion through Turkestan and Afghanistan toward India." On 29 January, the Soviet government, with Polish forces still 180 miles inside its borders, again `recognized the independence and sovereignty of the Polish republic' and again invited Polish statesmen to enter into peace talks.
They wrote of, "Fourteen dispatches in the month of January [1920], warning of Red Peril to India and Poland, Europe and Azerbaijan, Persia; Georgia and Mesopotamia." But there followed no invasions of India, Europe, Persia or Mesopotamia. The dispatches, from London, Paris and Washington, were from `British military authorities', diplomatic circles', `government sources', `official quarters', `expert military opinion' and `well-informed diplomats'. Some things don't change.
The authors summed up, "In the large, the news about Russia is a case of seeing not what was, but what men wished to see. ... From the point of view of professional journalism the reporting of the Russian Revolution is nothing short of a disaster. On the essential questions the net effect was almost always misleading, and misleading news is worse than none at all."
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Post by dodger on Oct 20, 2013 14:56:19 GMT
Brilliant introduction to the 1917 revolution, 12 Aug 2010
This Will Podmore review is from: The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, Vol. 1 (History of Soviet Russia) (Paperback)
This is the first volume in Carr's monumental, 14-volume History of Soviet Russia. This brilliant introduction looks at the main lines of future development.
Carr mentions `the bloodless victory of the revolution in October 1917'.
Lenin defined the rule for party membership: "A member of the party is one who accepts its programme, and supports it both materially and by personal participation in one of its organisations." As Plekhanov wrote sensibly, "When we are told that social-democracy ought to guarantee full freedom of opinion to its members, it is forgotten that a political party is not an academy of science. ... Freedom of opinion in the party can and should be limited precisely because a party is a freely constituted union of men of like mind. Once identity of opinion vanishes, dissolution becomes inevitable." Carr sums up, "party members retained their freedom of action until, though only until, the party decision had been taken."
Carr cites a revolutionary who said, "In the struggle which was necessary many guilty persons fell without the forms of trial, and, with them, some innocent. These I deplore as much as anybody and shall deplore some of them to the day of my death. But I deplore them as I should have done had they fallen in battle. It was necessary to use the arm of the people, a machine not quite so blind as balls and bombs, but blind to a certain degree." Who said this? Lenin? Che? No, the great American democrat Thomas Jefferson.
When the Menshevik authorities fired on a workers' gathering, in 1918, Lenin commented, "When we use shootings they turn Tolstoyans and shed crocodile tears over our harshness. They have forgotten how they helped Kerensky to drive the workers to the slaughter, keeping the secret treaties hidden in their pockets."
As Carr notes of the Social-Revolutionaries' attempted coup in May 1918, "the open revolt of the last considerable independent party had driven the regime a long step further on the road to the one-party state."
The separation of powers is only relative in class society. The idea reflected the brief period of triple power in early 17th-century Britain, when the king wielded executive power, the aristocracy ran the House of Lords and the bourgeoisie ran the House of Commons. But with the Commonwealth, the state became unitary. The legislature, the executive and the judiciary were different tools doing the same job, keeping the ruling class in power. This is true of bourgeois as of working class dictatorship. The notion of a separate and independent judiciary is a myth; the Lord Chancellor has legislative, executive and judicial powers; law is always an instrument of state power. (See J.A.G. Griffiths, The politics of the judiciary.)
Carr argues, "The very notion of a constitutional act implied in western thought a law to which the state itself was subject; this conception was incompatible with a doctrine which regarded law as a creation of the state." But this is undialectical: who makes the law? The people create both the state and the law. The people can apply to the state the laws they create.
Carr points out that the phrase `dictatorship of the proletariat' specifies which class rules; it is neutral on the form of government. The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is often wielded through a representative parliament. Dictatorship, in `dictatorship of the proletariat', does not necessarily mean the rule of one or a few.
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Post by dodger on Dec 13, 2013 15:51:48 GMT
Useful, if biased, account of Britain's war against Russia in 1917-20, 13 Dec 2013
This Will Podmore review is from: Russian Roulette: A Deadly Game: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Global Plot (Kindle Edition)
This fascinating book tells the story of how the British state did all it could to destroy the Russian people. It details the British plot to kill Lenin and the entire Bolshevik leadership, a plot in which the British diplomat, Bruce Lockhart, was implicated.
The British state armed and backed Kolchak's army, which included 7,500 Americans and 1,600 British soldiers.
Churchill urged all-out aggression against Russia, and insisted on the use of chemical weapons against the Soviets, saying they were `The right medicine for the Bolshevist'.
Wilfrid Malleson, commander of the East Persian Cordon, led an August 1918 raid into Soviet Turkestan, killing hundreds of Red Army soldiers. His forces tortured prisoners. After a massacre of Shias in Kandahar, his propaganda team distributed thousands of highly inflammatory leaflets fomenting strife between Sunnis and Shias. Malleson boasted, "We were able to make much capital out of this."
Minster of War Alexander Kerensky's failed offensive of June 1917 alone killed 500,000 Russians. So by taking Russia out of the war a year early, the revolution saved millions of lives. The two alliances of empires had killed at least 10 million people and wounded and maimed 20 million in order to crush rival empires: they had no right to criticise the Bolsheviks for changing a government by force.
The book is sub-titled `how British spies thwarted Lenin's global plot'. It should really be sub-titled `how the Russian people defeated the British Empire's attack'.
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Post by dodger on Jan 16, 2014 6:21:20 GMT
Unpopular Coup?
JUDGE FOR YOURSELVES.
A HANDFUL OF WORTHIES, DIPLOMAT MILITARY AND INTELLIGENCE SERVICE GIVE THEIR ASSESSMENT: The US commander-in-chief in Siberia said, "At no time while I was in Siberia was there enough popular support behind Kolchak in eastern Siberia for him to have lasted one month if all allied support had been removed." As the British General Sir Brian Horrocks admitted, "the only reason that the Reds were victorious was that they did have the backing of the people."
As the Committee to Collect Information on Russia acknowledged, "the political, administrative and moral bankruptcy of the White Russians gained for the Reds the active or tacit support of the majority of the Russian people in the civil war." One Russian White fighter later noted, "Our rear was a cesspool. We lost this war because we were a minority fighting with foreign help against the majority."
General Ironsides admitted, "the majority of the population is in sympathy with the Bolsheviki."
Sir Paul Dukes, formerly chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service in Soviet Russia, wrote, "The complete absence of an acceptable programme alternative to Bolshevism, the audibly whispered threats of landlords that in the event of a White victory the land seized by the peasants would be restored to its former owners, and the lamentable failure to understand that in the anti-Bolshevist war politics and not military strategy must play the dominant role, were the chief causes of the White defeats."
Edward Acton gets right to the kernel , the Whites "were never able to mobilize more than a fraction of the number of men who fought for the Reds. Indeed, in a sense the Bolsheviks were saved by the preference of the vast majority of the population, including most of their socialist critics, for the Reds over the Whites. ... any chance the Whites would attract popular support was ruled out by the social policies they adopted. Kolchak's government smashed workers' organizations and attempted to halt and reverse peasant land seizures offering no more than vague intimations of subsequent land reform."
Here a reminder for folk...
Captured British Mark V tank
in Arkhangelsk
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Post by dodger on Jul 15, 2014 10:30:06 GMT
Fine study of the British state's secret war against Soviet Russia, 14 July 2014
This William Podmore review is from: Dances in Deep Shadows: The Clandestine War in Russia, 1917-1920 (Hardcover)
This excellent book details the British state’s secret war against Russia. Occleshaw expose the British government’s hypocrisy: Britain’s Ambassador to Russia, “Sir George Buchanan had given the Bolsheviks an assurance, on instructions from the government, that Britain would not interfere in Russia’s internal affairs.” The War Cabinet said on 3 December 1917, “the policy of the British Government was to support any responsible body in Russia that would actively oppose the Maximalist movement …”
On 23 November 1917, Buchanan sent a telegram to the Foreign Office headed ‘Counter Revolution in Russia’. As Occleshaw remarks, “the assurance Buchanan had given the Bolsheviks that the Embassy was not engaged in any counter-revolutionary plots – that seems to have been entirely insincere …” Major Terence Keyes of the Embassy wrote in December 1917, “Something big was required to raise an army and finance what must develop into a civil war.”
On 6 May 1918, Berckheim, the German Foreign Office’s Liaison Officer at General Headquarters, told the German Foreign Ministry, “The Maximalist government was to be overthrown by the Minimalists [Mensheviks], on the instigation and with the financial support of the French, the English and the Americans.”
Occleshaw comments, “Contemporary Allied propaganda held that the later armed intervention in Russia was caused by the danger of the Allied stores at Archangel and Vladivostock falling into German hands, and historians in the West have frequently parroted this argument. However, it is clear that the stores were used as an excuse to justify the intervention that both the British and French Governments were seeking.”
Between March and May 1918, the French Consul General in Moscow paid two members of the Czechoslovak National Council 9 million roubles. Bruce Lockhart, a British diplomat stationed in Moscow, admitted that he had been ‘in close touch’ with the Council. The British Consul General paid the same people a further £85,000. The Czechs used some of this money to fund several White organisations.
Occleshaw points out, “The affair contradicts Richard Pipes’ assertions that there was nothing that indicated the French were the instigators of the Czechoslovak uprising. Without the generous financial support of the Allies, neither the Czechoslovaks nor the Whites would have been able to rise against the Bolsheviks in the summer of 1918.”
A War Cabinet Committee reviewing the situation in Russia concluded on 13 May 1918 that the British government should ask the French government to use the Czech forces to “stiffen the Japanese as part of an Allied force of intervention in Russia.”
Lockhart reported on 26 May, “Savinkov’s plans for counter-revolution are based entirely on Allied intervention. The French mission has been supporting them and has assured them that intervention is already decided. Savinkov proposes to murder all Bolshevik leaders on night of allies landing and to form a government which will be in reality a military dictatorship.”
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Post by dodger on Jul 19, 2014 10:34:14 GMT
Remarkable study of the Soviet counterinsurgency campaign in the 1940s, 15 July 2014
This Will Podmore review is from: The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands (Paperback)
Statiev notes that in 1917, “The Decree on Land ordered the nationalization of all arable land, its confiscation from landlords and the church, and its distribution among peasants in equal parcels per person as a free lease. This agrarian reform proffered immediate and substantial benefits to many at the expense of few. It secured the consent of most peasants and generated vigorous support among the poorest ones. … After the Bolshevik government gave land to the peasants, the Red Army was always larger than the forces of all its opponents taken together, which shows that even during War Communism, most politically active peasants sided with the Bolsheviks.”
He observes, “Since the early 1920s, OUN [Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists] and its predecessor, the Ukrainian Military Organization, had been financed by the Abwehr, the German intelligence service …” The OUN proclaimed, “Our system will be horrible for its opponents: terror against the enemy – foreigners and their accomplices.” Iaroslav Stets’ko, the OUN’s second in command, urged “the Jews should be exterminated and the expediency of carrying out in Ukraine the German methods for exterminating the Jews.” 98 per cent of Western Ukraine’s Jews were killed.
Ukrainian Insurgent Army [UPA] Commander-in-Chief Roman Shukhevych ordered the killing of East Ukrainians “on shaky grounds or without any grounds, and contemplated their total extermination, including even OUN or UPA members.” Statiev notes, “In 2007, the government of Ukraine posthumously awarded Shukhevych the title ‘Hero of Ukraine’.”
146,610 Latvians, 8 per cent of Latvia’s population (the highest proportion among all the countries that supplied collaborators), fought for the Nazis, three times as many as fought for the Soviets. 50,000 died fighting for the Nazis, ten times the number of those who died fighting for the Soviets. 50-60,000 Estonians fought for the Nazis, five times more than joined the army of independent Estonia. 36,800 Lithuanians fought for the Nazis.
Statiev wrote, “In the Baltic region, too, the police actively helped the Nazis to exterminate nearly all the Jews. At least 20 Lithuanian, 4 Estonian, and 4 Latvian police battalions participated directly in the Holocaust. … In 1941-1942, German collaborators, scores of whom later joined the anti-Communist resistance, killed many more people in every borderland region except Estonia than did the Soviets throughout the entire period of their struggle against nationalists from 1939 to the 1950s.”
“every nationalist resistance killed many more civilians than combatants.” “Each major nationalist group slaughtered or helped the Nazis slaughter far more members of ethnic minorities and local peasants than they killed Soviet soldiers.” Guerrillas in Ukraine inflicted 6,155 deaths in 1944, 6,788 deaths in 1945, and 3,129 deaths in 1946. Guerrillas in Lithuania inflicted 675 deaths in 1944, 3,244 deaths in 1945, and 3,004 deaths in 1946.
Statiev judges of the wartime deportations that “[T]he Soviet purpose was obvious: to cleans the frontier regions of a German ‘fifth column’ …” And as he notes, “A ‘fifth column’ did exist in the borderlands – in fact, a Lithuanian underground group formed in 1940 in Mažeikiai and connected with LAF [the Lithuanian Activist Front] named itself ‘The Fifth Column’. OUN started armed resistance long before the German invasion, whereas the Baltic opposition prepared for an insurrection coinciding with a German attack, and after 22 June, its members who had escaped the police net did rise against the Soviets. … Lithuanian historians found that the resistance network ‘was somewhat impaired by the mass deportations of 14 June 1941’, which ‘disrupted ties between leaders of the underground and even eliminated some key personalities.’ Nijole Gaškaite-Žemaitiene attributes the poor organization of the Lithuanian underground on the eve of the German evacuation to the Soviet repressions during the first occupation. Franz Stahlecker, commander of Einsatzgruppe A, complained that “it was much harder to stage pogroms in Latvia [than in Lithuania], mainly because the Soviets had deported the nationalist leaders.’”
Statiev sums up, “Soviet deportations from the western borderlands were less murderous than the ethnic cleansings conducted by Baltic nationalists in the summer of 1941 and by Ukrainian nationalists in 1943-1944. Having deported 58,852 Jewish refugees from Poland, the government unwittingly saved them from extermination by Nazis and nationalists. So too with Poles exiled in 1940-1941 from Western Ukraine: In 1943-1944, the UPA slaughtered almost 20 percent of the Polish population in Volhynia – a death rate higher than that of Polish deportees, which equalled about 5 per cent.”
He notes that the Soviet Union “put more effort into social reforms than have most other states conducting counterinsurgency.” “repressions against diasporas in the western borderlands were less brutal than was the ethnic cleansing conducted by nationalists.” And, “Soviet leaders showed more restraint in the face of greater menace and more precision in repressions in the borderlands than did the American and Canadian governments when they interned all their citizens of Japanese descent deported from the Pacific coast during World War II.”
He notes, “Earlier British deportations during the Boer War can hardly be qualified as a success: Although the internment of Boer civilians in concentration camps helped to suppress the insurgency, about 16 percent of the inmates died within one year, which was double the death rate of the worst Soviet deportations from the Caucasus in 1944. In order to deprive Boer guerrillas of supplies, the British laid waste their countryside. The Soviets never used this tactic in counterinsurgency, and the number of houses their soldiers burned selectively was a small fraction of the 30,000 farms destroyed by the British.”
By contrast, “The U.S.-sponsored campaign against Marxist guerrillas in Guatemala in the 1980s and 1990s cost 200,000 lives – many more than the number of deaths inflicted by the Soviet counterinsurgency during the entire campaign in the borderlands, an area twice as populous.”
And another comparison, “the Americans in Vietnam inflicted unintended civilian deaths far exceeding the victims of Soviet deliberate brutality.” “no Soviet war crime committed after the reoccupation of the borderlands was so grisly as that perpetrated by a U.S. company commanded by Lieutenant William Calley in My Lai on 16 March 1968, when its soldiers killed about 500 civilians, about two-thirds of them British women and children.”
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