The Russian Revolution and Its Fate

Stephen May’s Sell Us The Rope is a new novel about the London congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party of 1907. Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Rosa Luxemburg play leading roles in the story. I know: it sounds great. But before you click on ‘Buy Now’ on Amazon, let me tell you a bit more. The book’s premise — that Stalin was a long-term, paid informer for the tsarist secret police (the Okhrana) — made the story especially interesting for me. The fact that it had a positive review in the New York Times — that was icing on the cake. Sadly, this is a very disappointing book. The...

When the Labour Party left was at its height in the early 1980s, the SWP's critique was that this left was doomed by its wish to win elections, which would make it adapt to un-radical opinion. We replied that revolution required winning elections, in workers' councils even if not in parliament. Today the SWP's model of revolution remains one of lots of strikes and demonstrations, plus a "disciplined" party which will eventually be strong enough to defeat the bourgeois state. The issue of how the working class can become organised and aware enough to become a ruling class – through workers'...

There is much to be gained from reading Eric Blanc’s Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire (1882–1917) . But within the valuable information and explanation of what some lesser-studied parties were doing is an argument in favour of what Blanc refers to as “orthodox Marxism” which doesn’t hold. Blanc’s central thesis is simple: up to 1914, there was a classical Marxism of the Second International, exemplified by Karl Kautsky, its most able theorist. At the end of the war, the Russian Revolution provided a “Bolshevik” model, then promoted by the...

Arkadij Maslow was a prominent revolutionary socialist a century ago in Germany.

Larisa Reisner (1895-1926) lived an extraordinary life. She fought for working-class socialism at its high point a century ago, but died just before Stalin snuffed out the workers ’ state she had fought to defend. Cathy Porter’s newly updated Larisa Reisner: A Biography captures Reisner’s passion and sheds new light on her life. EARLY LIFE Larisa Reisner was born on 2 May 1895 in Lublin, then in tsarist Poland. (Both her names are often misspelt with two “ss”.) In 1898, her father Mikhail Reisner was exiled to Siberia for his political activities and for the next five years the family lived in...

In May 1934, Joseph Stalin received a letter from a Scottish communist called Harry Whyte. Whyte was a journalist, working for the USSR ’s English-language paper in Moscow. He was also a gay man whose boyfriend had recently gone missing. His letter opened with a question, whose answer would shape the future of the Soviet gay community: “can a homosexual be considered a worthy member of the Communist Party?” Whyte’s decision to move to the Soviet Union in 1932 had partly been an attempt to escape Scotland’s anti-sodomy laws. The world’s first socialist state had removed all homophobic laws...

The following letter was written to Joseph Stalin by Scottish communist Harry Whyte, in May 1934. Whyte lived in Moscow, and at the time of writing he led the editorial board of the English-language newspaper Moscow Daily News . Whyte was a gay man, and shortly before this letter a man he had been seeing for a while had gone missing. Whyte was born to a working-class family in Edinburgh, in 1907. He left school at 16 to pursue a career in journalism, and in 1927, in the aftermath of the general strike, he joined the Independent Labour Party. In 1931, he left the ILP for the Communist Party of...

This month marks the 100th anniversary of the decision by the Communist International to launch an armed uprising in Germany. The uprising, which took place in October that year, was a dismal failure. It also marked the final attempt by a Communist Party anywhere in Europe to come to power in the same way that the Bolsheviks had done in Russia. The uprising was not something the German working class needed or desired. The Weimar Republic, however imperfect, was a democracy. Workers could vote for the Communist Party or the Social Democrats or any other party they wanted. In the 1920 elections...

I was nauseated by Eric Lee’s unwarranted attack on Clara Zetkin in Solidarity 664 . Zetkin was an outstanding revolutionary socialist, feminist and fighter for working class politics over 50 years, whose mistakes towards the end of her life did not make her a loyal Stalinist. Zetkin’s incredible life (1857-1933) and record deserve to be better known. She joined the German Social Democratic Party in 1878 and became one of its most prominent leaders. They built a mass working class party of one million members, a model followed by the best socialists of that epoch, including the Bolsheviks...

As International Women’s Day approaches (8 March) some mainstream media will run their usual articles about the day and its history. Some may point out that the original name was International Working Women’s Day and that it was decided upon at a 1910 socialist congress in Copenhagen. It may be mentioned that one of the proponents of the holiday was Clara Zetkin, a little-remembered German socialist today who was, at the time, a household name. Among some of the famous revolutionary women of that time, Zetkin stands out. Her friend Rosa Luxemburg was an early critic both of Lenin’s ideas about...