The Russian Revolution and Its Fate

Click here for the series on The Roots of Bolshevism of which this article is part "The task of our revolutionary intelligentsia therefore comes, in the opinion of the Russian Social Democrats, to the following: they must adopt the views of modern scientific socialism, spread them among the workers and, with the help of the workers, storm the stronghold of autocracy. The revolutionary movement in Russia can triumph only as the revolutionary movement of the workers. There is not and cannot be any other way out for us." George Valentinovich Plekhanov, speaking at the Founding Congress of the...

Click here for the series on The Roots of Bolshevism of which this article is part By John O'Mahony The 'Tsar Liberator', Alexander II, was on the eve of his death ready to make some concessions to the reform-minded liberals. The work of the Narodnaya Volya assassins put an end to reform from above for a generation. In the 1880s and 90s, the Tsarist regime was a frozen ice-cap on top of Russian society. Underneath that inert political regime, Russian capitalism expanded. Market relations became dominant in more and more of Russian life. The working class grew with the growth of industry. Great...

Click here for the series on The Roots of Bolshevism of which this article is part In previous issues of Solidarity, we have outlined in some detail the history of revolutionary populism in 19th-century Russia. We will later discuss the development of the early Marxist critique of this populism and examine the process in which Marxism came in the 1880s and 1890s, in part, to displace populism. This brilliant and concise account by Leon Trotsky, written in the 1930s, of the history we have covered sums up. It has been abridged from Trotsky's account, in The Young Lenin. The movement of...

Gerry Byrne concludes her series of articles about Bolsheviks and Islam "By 1924, the Bolsheviks had turned their attention to Central Asia and the liberation of women there. Their approach combined propaganda about the benefits to women of the soviet law, and encouragement to participate in politics and production, with practical material benefits, education, training, social and medical care. "In the absence of native activists, it was the most dedicated and courageous members of Zhenotdel [Department of Working Women and Peasant Women] who donned the paranja [veil] in order to meet with...

Bob Carnegie describes his political itinerary, from young cadre of the Stalinist movement through Maritime Union official to anti-Stalinist revolutionary. I always had a strong underlying humanist bias. I tended not to view things not just from an ideological viewpoint, as was the rule in the SPA [Socialist Party of Australia, a 'hardline' pro-USSR split-off from the Communist Party of Australia]. My moral break from authoritarian state-capitalism, or Stalinism, which still infects the Australian left and the Australian trade union movement to a much larger degree than people realise, took a...

It will be helpful first to outline the general ideas that formed the basis of the peculiar variant of Stalinism propounded by the group which today calls itself the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and publishes the Weekly Worker. The group was originally called The Leninist. All its distinctive ideas on Stalinism were picked up from a faction of the Communist Party of Turkey, Workers' Voice, which separated from the Moscow-recognised party at the beginning of the 1980s. Its views were put out in English-language pamphlets and an English-language monthly, "Turkey Today". Workers' Voice...

Click here for the series on The Roots of Bolshevism of which this article is part John O'Mahony continues his series of articles on the roots of Bolshevism "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...

Click here for Part 1. Click here for Part 2. Gerry Byrne continues an examination of the relationship between the Russian Bolshevik Party that made the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the Islamic subject states of the Tsarist empire they inherited. What, if anything, can it teach us about socialists' relationship to Islam today? "All Muslim colonised peoples are proletarian peoples and as almost all classes in Muslim society have been oppressed by the colonialists, all classes have the right to be called 'proletarians'. ...Therefore it is legitimate to say that the national liberation movement...

John O'Mahony continues his series of articles on the roots of Bolshevism

Click here for Part 1. Click here for Part 3. Gerry Byrne continues an examination of the relationship between the Russian Bolshevik Party that made the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the Islamic subject states of the Tsarist empire they inherited. What, if anything, can it teach us about socialists' relationship to Islam today? The issue of Sharia law, religious education and the veil is a highly charged one currently, so for socialists to be able to point to the actions of the first workers state on the issue can be a powerful argument in support of whatever position they put. But here, as I...