The Russian Revolution and Its Fate

Eric Lee ( Solidarity 705 ) writes of Boris Savinkov as “a forgotten revolutionary”. “Fascist” would be a better word, I think. In August 1917 Savinkov was a leading figure in the failed attempt by a right-wing general, Lavr Kornilov, to overthrow Russia’s Provisional Government. Leon Trotsky, writing with hindsight, called Kornilov’s a fascist revolt. Kornilov wanted to suppress the soviets, the elected workers’ and soldiers’ councils, and re-stabilise the army for war, but not a straight return to rule by the Tsar. The Provisional Government he aimed to oust was not elected; but it included...

In this way the elemental movements of the mass gradually merge with the conscious revolutionary movement, and the idea that the Zemskii sobor [the Constituent Assembly] must be summoned becomes increasingly popular: the Russian people becomes more and more convinced that it must snatch its fate from the hands of tsarist officials. This is one side of things. On the other side we must ensure that the people, once it has risen against the existing order, should win political rights for itself and not political privileges for its exploiters... Direct universal suffrage is the first and most...

While there have been countless books and articles about V.I. Lenin, whose death in 1924 has been marked in this newspaper and elsewhere, there are some Russian revolutionaries of that time who have long been forgotten. The largest group of non-Bolshevik socialists was never the Mensheviks. It was the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (PSR) — a party so large and popular that it won the greatest number of votes in the only free and fair election Russia ever held, in 1917. It would have dominated the Constituent Assembly and possibly changed the course of the revolution, had that assembly been...

In the competition between Narodnaya Volya and Black Redistribution after 1879, immediate success was all, and all-important. In terms of practical activity, Black Redistribution could do nothing. Its members either fell into inactivity, or defected to Narodnaya Volya. There was historical justice in that, because, as Plekhanov would later stress, Narodnaya Volya had moved ahead of them in the necessary turn to politics. The killing of the Tsar in 1881 did not unleash mass revolution, as some of them had hoped, or even reform. It unleashed a decade of mass reaction and repression. Six...

Sixth in a series of articles around the anniversary of the death of Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) in 1924 “ The Russian proletarian is no novice in the revolutionary movement. You know that it was a worker who blew up the imperial palace in February 1880. The very idea for this action was conceived in a workers’ group” — G V Plekhanov and Vera Zasulich, Letter to the International Socialist Congress, 1891 “ And our proletariat? Did it pass through the school of the medieval apprentice brotherhood? Has it the ancient tradition of the guilds? Nothing of the kind. It was thrown into the factory...

Fourth in a series around the anniversary of the death of Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) in 1924 All populism, in theory, “denied a future to Russian capitalism. The proletariat was assigned no independent role at all in the revolution. It happened accidentally, however, that propaganda designed in its content for the villages found a sympathetic response only in the cities... assembling only the intelligentsia and some individual industrial workers”. (Leon Trotsky, The Young Lenin ) The Workers’ Union of South Russia of 1875 (described in Solidarity 699 ) survived the arrest of its leaders for a...

First of a series of articles around the 100th anniversary around the death of Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin), on 21 January 1924 The October Revolution of 1917 seemed to many observers to be an attempt to stand Marxism on its head. Those who said that included George Valentinovich Plekhanov and Pavel Borisovich Axelrod, the founders of the Russian Marxist movement, and Karl Kautsky, the most authoritative Marxist of the Second International (1889-1914). To others, who supported it, it seemed to have succeeded in turning on its head the Marxism long dominant in some labour movements. Antonio Gramsci...