The anti-Putin rally planned for Moscow today will have to defy a state of siege organised by an undemocratic, authoritarian regime that weighs rather than counts the votes cast in presidential elections.
Vladimir Putin may have been “elected” as president of Russia for the third time, giving him six more years in the Kremlin, but his victory is tainted because no one believes he got nearly two-thirds of the vote.
Since replacing the transitional figure of Boris Yeltsin, the ex-KGB man has built a regime that is the political mouthpiece of the oligarchs who carved up the former Soviet Union after it was brought down in 1991.
Human rights and democratic niceties have been cast aside in favour of top-down Kremlin rule that sees journalists killed, free assembly discouraged and public sector workers bussed into pro-Putin rallies.
Today Moscow is surrounded by 12,000 police and troops with Omon riot squads patrolling pavements and underpasses, sometimes three deep. Sub-machine gun carrying troops have encircled the state Duma, Russia’s toothless parliament.
The heavy policing is needed because Putin’s election victory is rejected by large sections of the Russian population.
After the election fraud revealed in December’s parliamentary elections led to widespread demonstrations, the regime put on a big show of electoral transparency by installing webcams in polling stations. But vote rigging, dirty tricks and violations were taking place at other, more decisive, levels.
Lawyers who challenged the December election results discovered that votes were often cast in an orderly fashion and then counted by the local precinct committees. But then, at polling station 1181 for example, when the results were entered into the national database they were some 23% higher than those originally counted. A similar pattern had emerged throughout the country according to mathematicians studying the results.
Radio stations like Ekho Moskvy (Moscow Echo), who have refused to toe the Putin line, are now being threatened with a crackdown. Other news and media outlets are experiencing pressure from the authorities.
And while opponents of the regime, like anti-fraud campaigner Alexei Navalny, are making use of Twitter, the regime is not missing any dirty tricks. A fake Twitter account was created for the US Ambassador Michael McFaul. Russia Today television tried use this to discredit those who challenged the election results.
And what of the other candidates?
The only parties allowed to stand constituted no real alternative to Putin. Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, who came in a distant second with around 18% of the votes, is an unreconstructed Stalinist and nationalist. Liberal Democratic Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky believes in white supremacy and has advocated hitting villages in Chechnya with tactical nuclear bombs. Sergei Mironov, of the A Fair Russia party, has endorsed Putin’s presidency and has no independence from the regime. The only other contender was playboy billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov. No threat to Putin then.
With “alternatives” like that, it’s questionable whether election fraud was even that necessary!
Independent candidates who threatened to be a real alternative were stopped from standing. In one town, Lermontov in the Caucasus, 13 people went on hunger strike late in February to back up their demand to be put on the ballot paper.
There are those who espouse the Kremlin line, denouncing the opposition as largely western influenced and/or the city-dwelling middle-class Twitterati. But the hunger strikers in Lermontov, as well as protesters in other far away places like Kovrov, 264 kilometres from Moscow, show this is not the case.
The movement against the regime is widespread as shown by the 10-mile long ring of people who defied sub-zero temperatures to join hands around Moscow on February 26 in a pre-election show of solidarity against the regime.
The outcome of Sunday’s election was a foregone conclusion. But everyone knows that Putin’s 64% “victory” is contrived from start to finish. His is a tarnished and shaky power. The election will go down in history as illegitimate. How the opposition will now find strength, new leaders, policies and organisations to move forward to a Russian spring is the real challenge.
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
For revolutionary solutions to create a sustainable, not-for-profit economy in place of global capital alongside a real democracy based on People’s Assemblies. Visit our web site at www.aworldtowin.net
Showing posts with label Stalinism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stalinism. Show all posts
Monday, March 05, 2012
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
In praise of Yuri Gagarin
When, on this day 50 years ago, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the earth, it seemed to many observers that the Soviet Union was destined to triumph over – or at least equal – capitalist countries like the United States.
Gagarin’s good looks and film-star charisma helped make him perhaps the world’s first global hero. Crowds gathered in the streets of London and other cities to catch a glimpse of Gagarin after Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sent him on a world tour.
Khrushchev himself had initiated a partial de-Stalinisation of the Soviet Union with his 1956 secret speech. Shocked delegates at a closed session of the country’s Communist Party heard Khrushchev denounce Stalin and his crimes against the people.
It had been a spectacular conversion. Khrushchev was an enthusiastic supporter of Stalin and the pre-war show trials which had destroyed the party’s Bolshevik old guard, the Red Army’s leadership and millions of others. He had backed the disastrous Nazi-Soviet pact which made World War Two a certainty.
But within three years of Gagarin’s pioneering flight in Vostok, Khrushchev had been ousted and replaced by the arch-conservative Leonid Brezhnev. Gagarin himself died in a plane crash aged 34 in 1968. The Soviet Union went back to being a tightly-controlled Stalinist regime.
Instead of Khrushchev’s boast that the Soviet Union would out-perform the United States in economic terms, the new leadership reverted to a classic Stalinist mentality. This assumed that the only way to defeat imperialism was to arm yourself to the teeth.
Revolutionary change in the West was definitely off the agenda (it had been since Stalin’s rise to power) in favour of working for peaceful co-existence if possible and war if not. The nuclear arms race took off in a spectacular fashion as the USSR and the USA built enough inter-continental ballistic missiles to blow up the world many times over.
Moscow’s essentially isolationist policy, the dedication of huge resources to military hardware, was ultimately a significant factor in the eventual demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. Cut off from the advanced technology of the global economy and encircled by capitalist states, the USSR stagnated on many indicators. Suffocated by a parallel world of state and party bureaucracies, economic productivity failed to increase. A distorted accounting system based on reporting to Moscow what it wanted to read only deepened the problems.
A little over 20 years after Khrushchev’s fall from power, a further attempt was made to resuscitate the country through deeper de-Stalinisation. Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika and glasnost opened up the political process for the first time since the early 1920s. But the entrenched Stalinists in the party struck back in an abortive coup, facilitating Boris Yeltsin’s rise to power and an eventual capitalist overthrow.
Nevertheless, Gagarin’s heroic flight reminds us of some essential lessons of 20th century history. The 1917 Russian Revolution, whatever the country’s later horrific twists and turns, did demonstrate that it is possible to develop a country without capitalist ownership and the profit motive. What is not possible is the creation of a socialist economy, one based on common ownership and control, rather than bureaucratic state entities, in isolation from the rest of the world.
Today, Stalinism is gone and the “triumph” of the West has proved illusory. The “end of history” famously forecast by philosopher Francis Fukuyama after the demise of the Soviet Union turned out to be more than premature. Global capitalism is in its deepest-ever crisis and its political system discredited in the eyes of many. Gagarin’s one orbit of the planet broke free of physical laws. It’s up to us to liberate ourselves from oppressive social constraints.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
Gagarin’s good looks and film-star charisma helped make him perhaps the world’s first global hero. Crowds gathered in the streets of London and other cities to catch a glimpse of Gagarin after Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sent him on a world tour.
Khrushchev himself had initiated a partial de-Stalinisation of the Soviet Union with his 1956 secret speech. Shocked delegates at a closed session of the country’s Communist Party heard Khrushchev denounce Stalin and his crimes against the people.
It had been a spectacular conversion. Khrushchev was an enthusiastic supporter of Stalin and the pre-war show trials which had destroyed the party’s Bolshevik old guard, the Red Army’s leadership and millions of others. He had backed the disastrous Nazi-Soviet pact which made World War Two a certainty.
But within three years of Gagarin’s pioneering flight in Vostok, Khrushchev had been ousted and replaced by the arch-conservative Leonid Brezhnev. Gagarin himself died in a plane crash aged 34 in 1968. The Soviet Union went back to being a tightly-controlled Stalinist regime.
Instead of Khrushchev’s boast that the Soviet Union would out-perform the United States in economic terms, the new leadership reverted to a classic Stalinist mentality. This assumed that the only way to defeat imperialism was to arm yourself to the teeth.
Revolutionary change in the West was definitely off the agenda (it had been since Stalin’s rise to power) in favour of working for peaceful co-existence if possible and war if not. The nuclear arms race took off in a spectacular fashion as the USSR and the USA built enough inter-continental ballistic missiles to blow up the world many times over.
Moscow’s essentially isolationist policy, the dedication of huge resources to military hardware, was ultimately a significant factor in the eventual demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. Cut off from the advanced technology of the global economy and encircled by capitalist states, the USSR stagnated on many indicators. Suffocated by a parallel world of state and party bureaucracies, economic productivity failed to increase. A distorted accounting system based on reporting to Moscow what it wanted to read only deepened the problems.
A little over 20 years after Khrushchev’s fall from power, a further attempt was made to resuscitate the country through deeper de-Stalinisation. Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika and glasnost opened up the political process for the first time since the early 1920s. But the entrenched Stalinists in the party struck back in an abortive coup, facilitating Boris Yeltsin’s rise to power and an eventual capitalist overthrow.
Nevertheless, Gagarin’s heroic flight reminds us of some essential lessons of 20th century history. The 1917 Russian Revolution, whatever the country’s later horrific twists and turns, did demonstrate that it is possible to develop a country without capitalist ownership and the profit motive. What is not possible is the creation of a socialist economy, one based on common ownership and control, rather than bureaucratic state entities, in isolation from the rest of the world.
Today, Stalinism is gone and the “triumph” of the West has proved illusory. The “end of history” famously forecast by philosopher Francis Fukuyama after the demise of the Soviet Union turned out to be more than premature. Global capitalism is in its deepest-ever crisis and its political system discredited in the eyes of many. Gagarin’s one orbit of the planet broke free of physical laws. It’s up to us to liberate ourselves from oppressive social constraints.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
Friday, February 04, 2011
Dogma gives Marx a bad name
The merit of veteran Financial Times writer and noted economist Samuel Brittan is that he is not a dogmatist. He may not have all the answers when it comes to today’s crisis. But Brittan believes that summoning the writings or reputations of dead economists to back a policy is hopelessly wrong.
Vince Cable, Liberal Democrat business secretary in the Coalition government, claimed in the January 17 issue of the New Statesman that “Keynes would be on our side”. Two economists promptly called this “foolhardy”. Others, says Brittan, too often cite Karl Marx to justify a view.
“What a reflection all this is on the would-be scientific standing of political economy,” says Brittan who served in Labour as well as Tory governments. He himself was taught by Milton Friedman, the father figure of the monetarist theories of the 1980s implemented by Thatcher and Reagan.
There is indeed no merit in citing what Keynes or Marx (or even Friedman) said at a certain point in history if the aim is to prop up a preconception about today’s world. As Brittan says: “Can one imagine physicists trying to advance their views by showing that they were implicit in some obscure passage in Einstein or Isaac Newton?”
This is true. But any half-decent physicist will know that a modern understanding of the material world would not be possible without the advances made by earlier scientists. Their theories are incorporated into modern physics – not simply rejected as old hat.
So it should be with Marx, a revolutionary communist as well as a political economist. Turning his ideas into a tenet, a dogma to be repeated on suitable occasions, was not the responsibility of bourgeois economists like Brittan. Principal blame for this rests with the Stalinist movement, particularly the bureaucracy of the former Soviet Union. They did this to Lenin too, taking a phrase here and a quotation there to provide a rationale for every twist and turn.
Brittan himself is not averse to throwing out the baby with the bathwater, declaring that if Marx were alive today he would be 193 years old and, therefore, no one could know what he would say. This is indisputable; and the likelihood of Marx returning is not even up for discussion.
What Marx left, however, was a legacy of a philosophical method, an approach to understanding constantly changing reality. Marx himself, in the afterword to the second German edition, could do no better than cite with approval a critical review of Capital in 1872:
“The one thing which is of moment to Marx, is to find the law of the phenomena with whose investigation he is concerned; and not only is that law of moment to him, which governs these phenomena, in so far as they have a definite form and mutual connexion within a given historical period. Of still greater moment to him is the law of their variation, of their development, i.e., of their transition from one form into another, from one series of connexions into a different one. This law once discovered, he investigates in detail the effects in which it manifests itself in social life.”
This dialectical method enabled Marx to reveal the contradictions inherent with the system of capitalist production. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the continuous drive to global expansion, the inevitable formation of monopolies – these and other scientific laws were expounded by Marx. They naturally need verification through a study of today’s conditions. Rescuing Marx from the dogmatists is essential in our preparation to transcend a capitalism that is in its deepest-ever and most threatening crisis.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
Vince Cable, Liberal Democrat business secretary in the Coalition government, claimed in the January 17 issue of the New Statesman that “Keynes would be on our side”. Two economists promptly called this “foolhardy”. Others, says Brittan, too often cite Karl Marx to justify a view.
“What a reflection all this is on the would-be scientific standing of political economy,” says Brittan who served in Labour as well as Tory governments. He himself was taught by Milton Friedman, the father figure of the monetarist theories of the 1980s implemented by Thatcher and Reagan.
There is indeed no merit in citing what Keynes or Marx (or even Friedman) said at a certain point in history if the aim is to prop up a preconception about today’s world. As Brittan says: “Can one imagine physicists trying to advance their views by showing that they were implicit in some obscure passage in Einstein or Isaac Newton?”
This is true. But any half-decent physicist will know that a modern understanding of the material world would not be possible without the advances made by earlier scientists. Their theories are incorporated into modern physics – not simply rejected as old hat.
So it should be with Marx, a revolutionary communist as well as a political economist. Turning his ideas into a tenet, a dogma to be repeated on suitable occasions, was not the responsibility of bourgeois economists like Brittan. Principal blame for this rests with the Stalinist movement, particularly the bureaucracy of the former Soviet Union. They did this to Lenin too, taking a phrase here and a quotation there to provide a rationale for every twist and turn.
Brittan himself is not averse to throwing out the baby with the bathwater, declaring that if Marx were alive today he would be 193 years old and, therefore, no one could know what he would say. This is indisputable; and the likelihood of Marx returning is not even up for discussion.
What Marx left, however, was a legacy of a philosophical method, an approach to understanding constantly changing reality. Marx himself, in the afterword to the second German edition, could do no better than cite with approval a critical review of Capital in 1872:
“The one thing which is of moment to Marx, is to find the law of the phenomena with whose investigation he is concerned; and not only is that law of moment to him, which governs these phenomena, in so far as they have a definite form and mutual connexion within a given historical period. Of still greater moment to him is the law of their variation, of their development, i.e., of their transition from one form into another, from one series of connexions into a different one. This law once discovered, he investigates in detail the effects in which it manifests itself in social life.”
This dialectical method enabled Marx to reveal the contradictions inherent with the system of capitalist production. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the continuous drive to global expansion, the inevitable formation of monopolies – these and other scientific laws were expounded by Marx. They naturally need verification through a study of today’s conditions. Rescuing Marx from the dogmatists is essential in our preparation to transcend a capitalism that is in its deepest-ever and most threatening crisis.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
Monday, May 17, 2010
Take a leaf out of Picasso's book
The view that, deep down, all that human beings are really interested is in looking after themselves is, commonplace and at the same time a truism. Yet it begs the question that in today’s society, individual interests and those of humanity as a whole also coincide.
Today’s correspondence of a super-heated and plundered planet with an explosive economic, financial and political crisis self-evidently cannot be solved on an individual basis, neither by the ruling classes nor by the rest of us.
But the more this becomes apparent, the more a view of humanity as simply creatures of greedy instincts is trundled out again and again. The purveyors of this jaded (but unscientific) notion perform a vital function. Hiding behind a facile cynicism, they conveniently naturally dismiss notions of revolutionary political change.
Previewing a pioneering exhibition opening this week at Tate Liverpool, Professor Alex Danchev (military historian of St Antony’s College who has turned to art history) is given space in that paper of organised cynicism, The Guardian, to conclude that “Pablo Picasso, a painter without peer, lived and died an egotist. A party of one was his ideal station”. Danchev misses no opportunity to stick the knife into the artist, accusing him of “gesture politics” and “posturing”.
Of course Picasso’s very persona was that of an extrovert showman who enjoyed throwing spanners into the works and making provocative and perplexing statements. But that in no way was in contradiction to his impassioned opposition to Fascism and Nazism, and his campaign against war, in particular nuclear war.
Picasso was the most controversial artist of the last century. Along with Georges Braque he revolutionised painting and the way we see the world. His view of the human body and the human condition continue to excite and intrigue. Due in part to the astronomical sums fetched by his work, his artistic prowess remains in the public eye.
But the curators of Picasso: Peace and Freedom have assembled a mass of evidence to show there was less well known side to the man – he was a political animal through and through. His painting
Picasso joined the French Communist Party after the liberation of
In staging this show, Lynda Morris and Christoph Grunenberg have thrown down a political gauntlet. They have assembled a mountain of evidence which challenges the view that Picasso’s politics were in some way secondary to his being as a person and an artist. The breadth and scope of his commitment to a host of causes, including racial equality, the campaign to prevent the execution of the Rosenbergs, against the death penalty and anti-Semitism is indisputable. Picasso has clearly come back to haunt those who seek to defend capitalism and its political institutions.
The depth of Picasso’s beliefs – and his conflicts with Stalinism - should inspire A World to Win’s Taking the Revolutionary Road conference this Saturday. In our Manifesto of Revolutionary Solutions we appeal to creative workers of all kinds to help end the prison of capitalist social relations. The Cold War may be well and truly over, but “the battle for Picasso’s mind” as the CIA dubbed it, goes on.
Corinna Lotz
Secretary
A World to Win
Picasso: Peace and Freedom is at the Tate Liverpool 21 May-30 August.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Taking inspiration from 1989
The amazing sequence of events that marked the year 1989 which culminated in the tearing down of the Berlin Wall on November 8 continues to stimulate debate in its 20th anniversary year.
From the moment in March when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev told the Hungarian leader, Karoly Grosz, that the Brezhnev doctrine of military intervention was now dead, to the rapid and violent downfall of Romanian dictator Ceausescu in December, the speed of events was breathtaking.
Much less well-known is how that historic moment was only made possible by a decision of the Hungarian Communist Party. Early in October it razed down the barbed wire fence that separated Hungary from Austria and refugees from the German Democratic Republic poured through. On October 20, the now renamed Hungarian Socialist Party also agreed to amend its constitution to end its own domination and introduce a multiparty political system.
The meaning and outcome of that year still provokes debate, but what stands out above all is that for the first time since the revolutionary period around 1917, millions of people actually made history. One documentary film maker, has described the mass movements of twenty years ago as a “miracle”.
And indeed, there still is a truly triumphant, awe-inspiring quality to the huge demonstrations and flows of ordinary people in so many countries. Not only were the numbers involved unprecedented, but so was the way momentum built up from country to country. The disenfranchised were suddenly transformed into the empowered, it’s been said of the movement that within a few months led to the tearing down of the Wall. This was truly people’s power in action.
Since that time, the people who experienced the downfall of decades-old Stalinist regimes have seen monumental changes, for better and for worse. Entire countries like the Soviet Union have been broken up and new ones formed. Old hierarchies have vanished. And, last but not least, a new and mostly brutal capitalist economic order has replaced the state-dominated bureaucratic systems which fossilised leaders and their opposite numbers in the West liked to describe as “socialist”.
Gorbachev, the man who gave the greatest impulse to the break-up of the Stalinist bureaucracies in the Soviet Union and east Europe, did not set out to destroy the “socialised” aspects of his country – nor indeed its East European satellites. He simply believed that “we [the Soviet leadership] had no right to interfere in the affairs of our ‘satellites’, to defend and preserve some and punish and ‘excommunicate’ others without reckoning with the people’s will... Those who still blame Gorbachev,” he has written in his memoirs, “are in effect, lacking in respect for their own people, who have gained freedom and made use of it as best they could”.
As one writer has noted in relation to the courage of those who gathered in Leipzig 20 years ago, under the searchlights and cameras of the brutal Stasi secret police, tearing down the curtain was not just the work of movements and ideas; it happened because “courageous men and women resisted apathy and fear”.
The world is undoubtedly deeply changed today. It appears to many that the revolutionary movements of that kind are truly “last century” and could never happen again. But what characterised every single one of these people’s uprisings was that they were largely unforeseen and no one could anticipate either their speed or their outcome.
We live in a world transformed, not only by the political revolutions of 1989, but also by an ongoing communications revolution combined with unemployment and homelessness as economic meltdown continues. The ravages of global warming are present and imminent.
The year 1989 was a year of political, rather than social, revolution. It freed people from the rule of repressive Stalinist bureaucracies. The fact that the outcome – capitalism – did not fulfil the aspirations of those who made the change possible is no one’s fault. It leaves the challenge of making a new step forward to today’s generations.
The need for ending capitalism is greater than ever. What is needed, then as now, is the creation of organisations, networks and movements with the vision and courage to go where no one has gone before in making the revolution of the 21st century.
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
20 October 2009
From the moment in March when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev told the Hungarian leader, Karoly Grosz, that the Brezhnev doctrine of military intervention was now dead, to the rapid and violent downfall of Romanian dictator Ceausescu in December, the speed of events was breathtaking.
Much less well-known is how that historic moment was only made possible by a decision of the Hungarian Communist Party. Early in October it razed down the barbed wire fence that separated Hungary from Austria and refugees from the German Democratic Republic poured through. On October 20, the now renamed Hungarian Socialist Party also agreed to amend its constitution to end its own domination and introduce a multiparty political system.
The meaning and outcome of that year still provokes debate, but what stands out above all is that for the first time since the revolutionary period around 1917, millions of people actually made history. One documentary film maker, has described the mass movements of twenty years ago as a “miracle”.
And indeed, there still is a truly triumphant, awe-inspiring quality to the huge demonstrations and flows of ordinary people in so many countries. Not only were the numbers involved unprecedented, but so was the way momentum built up from country to country. The disenfranchised were suddenly transformed into the empowered, it’s been said of the movement that within a few months led to the tearing down of the Wall. This was truly people’s power in action.
Since that time, the people who experienced the downfall of decades-old Stalinist regimes have seen monumental changes, for better and for worse. Entire countries like the Soviet Union have been broken up and new ones formed. Old hierarchies have vanished. And, last but not least, a new and mostly brutal capitalist economic order has replaced the state-dominated bureaucratic systems which fossilised leaders and their opposite numbers in the West liked to describe as “socialist”.
Gorbachev, the man who gave the greatest impulse to the break-up of the Stalinist bureaucracies in the Soviet Union and east Europe, did not set out to destroy the “socialised” aspects of his country – nor indeed its East European satellites. He simply believed that “we [the Soviet leadership] had no right to interfere in the affairs of our ‘satellites’, to defend and preserve some and punish and ‘excommunicate’ others without reckoning with the people’s will... Those who still blame Gorbachev,” he has written in his memoirs, “are in effect, lacking in respect for their own people, who have gained freedom and made use of it as best they could”.
As one writer has noted in relation to the courage of those who gathered in Leipzig 20 years ago, under the searchlights and cameras of the brutal Stasi secret police, tearing down the curtain was not just the work of movements and ideas; it happened because “courageous men and women resisted apathy and fear”.
The world is undoubtedly deeply changed today. It appears to many that the revolutionary movements of that kind are truly “last century” and could never happen again. But what characterised every single one of these people’s uprisings was that they were largely unforeseen and no one could anticipate either their speed or their outcome.
We live in a world transformed, not only by the political revolutions of 1989, but also by an ongoing communications revolution combined with unemployment and homelessness as economic meltdown continues. The ravages of global warming are present and imminent.
The year 1989 was a year of political, rather than social, revolution. It freed people from the rule of repressive Stalinist bureaucracies. The fact that the outcome – capitalism – did not fulfil the aspirations of those who made the change possible is no one’s fault. It leaves the challenge of making a new step forward to today’s generations.
The need for ending capitalism is greater than ever. What is needed, then as now, is the creation of organisations, networks and movements with the vision and courage to go where no one has gone before in making the revolution of the 21st century.
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
20 October 2009
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
Marking the revolt against Stalinism
Twenty years ago today, the Hungarian government, under pressure from anti-Stalinist demonstrators, announced that it was opening its borders with Austria. Tens of thousands of East Germans flooded into Budapest, on their way to Western Europe. This human tidal wave led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall later that year and the reunification of Germany in 1990.
Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, a crack appeared in the seemingly impenetrable rule of another Stalinist regime. In China, hundreds of thousands of students and workers were marching through Beijing, Shanghai, Chonquing and other big cities. They were inspired by the fearless sit-in begun by students in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing two weeks earlier.
The students began a sit-in to mourn party secretary-general Hu Yaobang, who had recently died, at the Monument to the People’s Heroes at the centre of the square. Within days, the demonstrations spread to more than 400 cities. Martial law was declared on May 20 by a split Politburo. By June 3, the 27th Army was firing on demonstrators in the square. This was the extraordinary moment when a man in a white shirt confronted a tank column on the Avenue of Eternal Peace.
Even as you read this, the Chinese government is clamping down on bloggers and journalists, petrified at unrest on the anniversary of the brutal crackdown in which around 3,000 people lost their lives as troops fired on demonstrators. Café Sentido reports : “As the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacres approaches, the event itself remains taboo in China, forbidden from discussion on state-run television and even banned from results pages on search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN, operating inside China.”
The Chinese government was one of the very few Stalinist regimes to survive the global revolutionary events of 1989. Elsewhere bureaucracies were breaking up. Mikhail Gorbachev’s withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Eastern Europe at the beginning of 1989 had marked the dawn of a new era for the Soviet Union and the countries it dominated politically and militarily. In Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia dictatorships toppled like ninepins.
A new generation has sprung to life since that year that shook the world. Then the media crowed about the “end of communism”. But now capitalist triumphalism is a thing of the past. The global economy is in its deepest crisis and the arrogance that followed the end of the Soviet Union has given way to a patent loss of confidence amongst the ruling classes.
The hope that the masses who made 1989 happen would turn their energies against the capitalist system was premature. Many were dazzled by the consumer capitalism that they experienced, then in full swing. But the glitter of McDonald’s, BMW and game players is losing its shine as millions are thrust into unemployment, bankruptcy and repossession. In China, the Stalinist-imposed ruthless brand of capitalism is falling apart and the authorities are fighting a losing battle to stay in control over increasingly angry masses.
The regimes that fell in 1989 hid their true identity behind socialist phraseology while they carved out special privileges for themselves. Just as the students and workers of 1989 unmasked them, the challenge for today’s generation is to dismantle the political system that pretends to rule in our interests today. A recent YouGov poll revealed that in 1989, 35% thought that politicians were generally “good people”. Only 17% believe that today. And, confidence in the police has fallen from 70% down to 46%. Draw your own conclusions.
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, a crack appeared in the seemingly impenetrable rule of another Stalinist regime. In China, hundreds of thousands of students and workers were marching through Beijing, Shanghai, Chonquing and other big cities. They were inspired by the fearless sit-in begun by students in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing two weeks earlier.
The students began a sit-in to mourn party secretary-general Hu Yaobang, who had recently died, at the Monument to the People’s Heroes at the centre of the square. Within days, the demonstrations spread to more than 400 cities. Martial law was declared on May 20 by a split Politburo. By June 3, the 27th Army was firing on demonstrators in the square. This was the extraordinary moment when a man in a white shirt confronted a tank column on the Avenue of Eternal Peace.
Even as you read this, the Chinese government is clamping down on bloggers and journalists, petrified at unrest on the anniversary of the brutal crackdown in which around 3,000 people lost their lives as troops fired on demonstrators. Café Sentido reports : “As the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacres approaches, the event itself remains taboo in China, forbidden from discussion on state-run television and even banned from results pages on search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN, operating inside China.”
The Chinese government was one of the very few Stalinist regimes to survive the global revolutionary events of 1989. Elsewhere bureaucracies were breaking up. Mikhail Gorbachev’s withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Eastern Europe at the beginning of 1989 had marked the dawn of a new era for the Soviet Union and the countries it dominated politically and militarily. In Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia dictatorships toppled like ninepins.
A new generation has sprung to life since that year that shook the world. Then the media crowed about the “end of communism”. But now capitalist triumphalism is a thing of the past. The global economy is in its deepest crisis and the arrogance that followed the end of the Soviet Union has given way to a patent loss of confidence amongst the ruling classes.
The hope that the masses who made 1989 happen would turn their energies against the capitalist system was premature. Many were dazzled by the consumer capitalism that they experienced, then in full swing. But the glitter of McDonald’s, BMW and game players is losing its shine as millions are thrust into unemployment, bankruptcy and repossession. In China, the Stalinist-imposed ruthless brand of capitalism is falling apart and the authorities are fighting a losing battle to stay in control over increasingly angry masses.
The regimes that fell in 1989 hid their true identity behind socialist phraseology while they carved out special privileges for themselves. Just as the students and workers of 1989 unmasked them, the challenge for today’s generation is to dismantle the political system that pretends to rule in our interests today. A recent YouGov poll revealed that in 1989, 35% thought that politicians were generally “good people”. Only 17% believe that today. And, confidence in the police has fallen from 70% down to 46%. Draw your own conclusions.
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
Monday, February 16, 2009
In praise of Russian revolutionary art
Tate Modern’s exhibition of art from the Russian Revolution has received ecstatic critical acclaim. And rightly so. The two artists in the spotlight, Alexander Rodchenko and Liubov Popova, made paintings and art works which retain their excitement nearly 100 years later.
By limiting the scope of the display to the years 1917-1929 and to the contribution of only two artists, we can appreciate their particular contribution – their freedom and breadth of vision. Initially inspired by Picasso and Braque’s Cubist revolution (in painting), Russian artists took up the baton of abstraction and ran with it. They were lifted up and borne by the triumph of the October socialist revolution of 1917
Rodchenko and Popova and their fellow artists saw even greater possibilities in something that had been confined to artistic creation, and made it part of a social political transformation. The scale of this movement was vast, encompassing all the arts. It became part of a cultural sea change which swept through the young Soviet Union.
A major difference between Paris and what was happening in Russia was the involvement of women artists at the highest level. In this show, Popova is revealed as temporarily greater than Rodchenko in her abilities, although he outlived her by 32 years. And, how unprecedented that of the five artists in the famous 5 x 5 = 25 exhibitions held in Moscow in 1921, three were women.
“The Bolshevik Revolution aimed to transform an entire civilisation, and artists were among the first to show their support,” says the Tate’s handy guide. Contrary to the often churned out prejudice that “revolutions suppress creativity”, here we can see the imagination take off. And from abstract art, Rodchenko and Popova and their colleagues Exter, Vesnin and Stepanova moved seamlessly to designs for textiles, theatre, posters and as well as making photographs and films as they sought to use their talents to transform every day life.
This was not some fantasy world but part of state-sponsored initiatives to lift the country out of back-breaking primitivism. Rodchenko’s design for the cover of Leon Trotsky’s Questions of Everyday Life is on view in Room 9. In this book, the co-leader of the Russian Revolution argued for the emancipation of women from domestic slavery and the introduction of socialised childcare.
The Bolshevik government under Lenin and Trotsky appointed Anatoly Lunacharsky as the first Soviet People’s Commissar for Enlightenment, Narkompros. The aim was to encourage artistic diversity and to avoid endorsing any single artistic current or style however “left” it might be. Talented artists such as Kandinsky, Chagall, Tatlin and El Lissitsky were appointed directors of art training in colleges around the country.
In the closing section of the show, the curators note Constructivism was “marginalised” as the Stalinist doctrine of Socialist Realism became the sole approved artistic style of the Soviet Union. One poignant vintage photograph shows Rodchenko together with the young composer Dmitri Shostakovich seated at his piano alongside theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold and the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.
All four were to have grievous relations with Stalinism in times to come. Their subsequent fate and that of the revolution as a whole does not come within the scope of the exhibition’s timeframe. But those events, terrible as they were, do not detract from the brilliance and glory of that moment after the revolution that was to change the world artistically speaking, as well as socially. The need for contemporary creative and political revolutionary vision, in the spirit of Rodchenko and Popova, goes without saying.
Corinna Lotz
Secretary, A World to Win
By limiting the scope of the display to the years 1917-1929 and to the contribution of only two artists, we can appreciate their particular contribution – their freedom and breadth of vision. Initially inspired by Picasso and Braque’s Cubist revolution (in painting), Russian artists took up the baton of abstraction and ran with it. They were lifted up and borne by the triumph of the October socialist revolution of 1917
Rodchenko and Popova and their fellow artists saw even greater possibilities in something that had been confined to artistic creation, and made it part of a social political transformation. The scale of this movement was vast, encompassing all the arts. It became part of a cultural sea change which swept through the young Soviet Union.
A major difference between Paris and what was happening in Russia was the involvement of women artists at the highest level. In this show, Popova is revealed as temporarily greater than Rodchenko in her abilities, although he outlived her by 32 years. And, how unprecedented that of the five artists in the famous 5 x 5 = 25 exhibitions held in Moscow in 1921, three were women.
“The Bolshevik Revolution aimed to transform an entire civilisation, and artists were among the first to show their support,” says the Tate’s handy guide. Contrary to the often churned out prejudice that “revolutions suppress creativity”, here we can see the imagination take off. And from abstract art, Rodchenko and Popova and their colleagues Exter, Vesnin and Stepanova moved seamlessly to designs for textiles, theatre, posters and as well as making photographs and films as they sought to use their talents to transform every day life.
This was not some fantasy world but part of state-sponsored initiatives to lift the country out of back-breaking primitivism. Rodchenko’s design for the cover of Leon Trotsky’s Questions of Everyday Life is on view in Room 9. In this book, the co-leader of the Russian Revolution argued for the emancipation of women from domestic slavery and the introduction of socialised childcare.
The Bolshevik government under Lenin and Trotsky appointed Anatoly Lunacharsky as the first Soviet People’s Commissar for Enlightenment, Narkompros. The aim was to encourage artistic diversity and to avoid endorsing any single artistic current or style however “left” it might be. Talented artists such as Kandinsky, Chagall, Tatlin and El Lissitsky were appointed directors of art training in colleges around the country.
In the closing section of the show, the curators note Constructivism was “marginalised” as the Stalinist doctrine of Socialist Realism became the sole approved artistic style of the Soviet Union. One poignant vintage photograph shows Rodchenko together with the young composer Dmitri Shostakovich seated at his piano alongside theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold and the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.
All four were to have grievous relations with Stalinism in times to come. Their subsequent fate and that of the revolution as a whole does not come within the scope of the exhibition’s timeframe. But those events, terrible as they were, do not detract from the brilliance and glory of that moment after the revolution that was to change the world artistically speaking, as well as socially. The need for contemporary creative and political revolutionary vision, in the spirit of Rodchenko and Popova, goes without saying.
Corinna Lotz
Secretary, A World to Win
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Solzhenitsyn's place in history
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who is being buried in Moscow today, was the most indomitable of the post-war opponents of the Stalinist terror machine in the Soviet Union, who paved the way for countless others.
The 1962 publication of Solzhenitsyn’s, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was an extraordinary event both in the Soviet Union and throughout the world. Its unembellished depiction of life in a Siberian prison camp made its reality spring to life for millions of readers.
Despite his youthful enthusiasm for Marxism and distinguished service in the Red Army where he was twice decorated for gallantry, Solzhenitsyn was arrested in 1945 by Stalin’s secret police. He was sentenced without trial to eight years in labour camps and permanent internal exile for having criticised Stalin’s conduct of the war in a letter to a friend.
The publication of Ivan Denisovich was possible only due to the personal intervention of Stalin’s successor as secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev and the courageous support of Alexander Tvardovsky, editor of the literary journal Novy Mir. It was an immediate sensation in the USSR.
But although it was studied in Soviet schools and three more of his books were published in 1963, two years later the author became a non-person. Khrushchev had been ousted in 1964, and the terrifying power of the secret police was reimposed.
Solzhenitsyn’s manuscript of his epic account of Stalinist repression, The First Circle, and archives were confiscated by the police. He appealed unsuccessfully to the Writers Union to defend literary freedom in 1967 but was instead expelled from membership. While forced into silence in his homeland, his books Cancer Ward and The First Circle appeared abroad. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, but could not travel to Stockholm to accept it.
Stig Fredrikson, a Swedish journalist living in Moscow, helped him smuggle out the works he continued to write in secret. Fredrikson explained later how the author had hidden copies of the manuscript with a few trusted friends. One woman in Leningrad, had a copy of his account of Stalinist labour camps, The Gulag Archipelago. “She had buried it in the ground, but somehow the KGB found out,” Fredrikson wrote later. “They interrogated her for days and nights until she confessed where she had hidden it. She was then released but went home and hanged herself. She felt that she had betrayed Solzhenitsyn's confidence in her.”
Because of his status as a symbol of resistance, the authorities could not arrest Solzhenitsyn, so they expelled him from the Soviet Union in 1974 and stripped him of his citizenship. The cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko gave him support at this time. He was invited to live in the United States, where he spent the next 19 years on an isolated farm in Vermont, working on a history of the Russian Revolution, The Red Wheel.
From opposition to Stalinism he moved to an increasingly nationalist, backward looking view of history. He was an outspoken critic of US consumer society, but at the same time yearned for a return to pre-revolutionary Russia. In a long manifesto published in 1990, he envisaged a purely Slav Russia with a key role for the Orthodox Church.
By now Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost made it possible for his books to be published in the Soviet Union and Solzhenitsyn returned to his homeland in 1994. Gorbachev paid tribute to the writer yesterday, saying: “He was a great man, who was amid the first to raise voice against Stalin’s regime in defence of people that fell victims to it.”
Although Solzhenitsyn denounced the corruption and incompetence of post-Soviet Russian rulers, especially Yeltsin, his political trajectory to deeply backward Russian nationalism dovetailed with Putin’s increasingly autocratic rule. He accepted an award from Putin last summer, a ruler who, in the words of an exiled Russian journalist, “has revived the long-forgotten category of the political prisoner, and of the forcible confinement of critics in psychiatric clinics”.
But whatever his later evolution, nothing can detract from Solzhenitsyn’s contribution to the exposé and eventual fall of Stalinism.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn. December 11, 1918-August 3, 2008
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
The 1962 publication of Solzhenitsyn’s, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was an extraordinary event both in the Soviet Union and throughout the world. Its unembellished depiction of life in a Siberian prison camp made its reality spring to life for millions of readers.
Despite his youthful enthusiasm for Marxism and distinguished service in the Red Army where he was twice decorated for gallantry, Solzhenitsyn was arrested in 1945 by Stalin’s secret police. He was sentenced without trial to eight years in labour camps and permanent internal exile for having criticised Stalin’s conduct of the war in a letter to a friend.
The publication of Ivan Denisovich was possible only due to the personal intervention of Stalin’s successor as secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev and the courageous support of Alexander Tvardovsky, editor of the literary journal Novy Mir. It was an immediate sensation in the USSR.
But although it was studied in Soviet schools and three more of his books were published in 1963, two years later the author became a non-person. Khrushchev had been ousted in 1964, and the terrifying power of the secret police was reimposed.
Solzhenitsyn’s manuscript of his epic account of Stalinist repression, The First Circle, and archives were confiscated by the police. He appealed unsuccessfully to the Writers Union to defend literary freedom in 1967 but was instead expelled from membership. While forced into silence in his homeland, his books Cancer Ward and The First Circle appeared abroad. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, but could not travel to Stockholm to accept it.
Stig Fredrikson, a Swedish journalist living in Moscow, helped him smuggle out the works he continued to write in secret. Fredrikson explained later how the author had hidden copies of the manuscript with a few trusted friends. One woman in Leningrad, had a copy of his account of Stalinist labour camps, The Gulag Archipelago. “She had buried it in the ground, but somehow the KGB found out,” Fredrikson wrote later. “They interrogated her for days and nights until she confessed where she had hidden it. She was then released but went home and hanged herself. She felt that she had betrayed Solzhenitsyn's confidence in her.”
Because of his status as a symbol of resistance, the authorities could not arrest Solzhenitsyn, so they expelled him from the Soviet Union in 1974 and stripped him of his citizenship. The cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko gave him support at this time. He was invited to live in the United States, where he spent the next 19 years on an isolated farm in Vermont, working on a history of the Russian Revolution, The Red Wheel.
From opposition to Stalinism he moved to an increasingly nationalist, backward looking view of history. He was an outspoken critic of US consumer society, but at the same time yearned for a return to pre-revolutionary Russia. In a long manifesto published in 1990, he envisaged a purely Slav Russia with a key role for the Orthodox Church.
By now Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost made it possible for his books to be published in the Soviet Union and Solzhenitsyn returned to his homeland in 1994. Gorbachev paid tribute to the writer yesterday, saying: “He was a great man, who was amid the first to raise voice against Stalin’s regime in defence of people that fell victims to it.”
Although Solzhenitsyn denounced the corruption and incompetence of post-Soviet Russian rulers, especially Yeltsin, his political trajectory to deeply backward Russian nationalism dovetailed with Putin’s increasingly autocratic rule. He accepted an award from Putin last summer, a ruler who, in the words of an exiled Russian journalist, “has revived the long-forgotten category of the political prisoner, and of the forcible confinement of critics in psychiatric clinics”.
But whatever his later evolution, nothing can detract from Solzhenitsyn’s contribution to the exposé and eventual fall of Stalinism.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn. December 11, 1918-August 3, 2008
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Ten days that shook the world
Ninety years ago today, a remarkable series of events began in Russia that would change the course of the 20th century. The first anti-capitalist, workers’ revolution in history was set in motion. Immediately, the new government offered an armistice, carrying out its pledge to withdraw from the slaughter of the First World War.
At 10am on November 7, 1917, the Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC) of the Petrograd Soviet announced the disbanding of the Provisional Government which had taken power after the overthrow of the Tsar earlier in the year but which had continued the war. The MRC’s proclamation, drawn up by Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik Party, read:
At 10am on November 7, 1917, the Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC) of the Petrograd Soviet announced the disbanding of the Provisional Government which had taken power after the overthrow of the Tsar earlier in the year but which had continued the war. The MRC’s proclamation, drawn up by Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik Party, read:
“The Provisional Government has been deposed. State power has passed into the hands of the organ of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies - the Revolutionary Military Committee, which heads the Petrograd proletariat and the garrison. The cause for which the people have fought, namely, the immediate offer of a democratic peace, the abolition of landed proprietorship, workers' control over production, and the establishment of Soviet power - this cause has been secured.
Long live the revolution of workers, soldiers and peasants!”
The MRC, under the direction of the Bolshevik leader Trotsky, had carried out an insurrection in Petrograd (now St Petersburg), storming the Winter Palace and arresting the government. The next day, Lenin was elected as the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars by the Russian Congress of Soviets which gathered in Petrograd. Soviet power then spread across Russia. Liberal and monarchist forces, “the Whites” immediately went to war against the Bolshevik’s Red Army, backed by capitalist powers around the world, including Britain.
For a period, the revolution flourished despite the deprivations of the civil war. Revolutionaries from around the world flocked to Russia to join an international movement aimed at overthrowing capitalism in each country. But the failure of the 1918-1919 German Revolution and Lenin’s untimely death in January 1924 became key factors in the rise of a reactionary bureaucracy headed by Stalin. Trotsky and the Left Opposition struggled hard for an alternative, democratic socialist course, but were defeated by the end of the 1920s. The subsequent destruction of the Bolshevik Party, the murder of its leaders in show trials and the perversion of its policies and aims were among the greatest crimes of the 20th century.
A superficial reading of the subsequent history of the 1917 revolution – promoted and perpetuated by the capitalist media and right-wing historians like Orlando Figes – frequently lumps together Bolshevism with Stalin’s reign of terror. In this way, they bury the unique achievements of the revolution and the masses and leaders who made it possible. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 is often labelled the “end of communism”.
For a period, the revolution flourished despite the deprivations of the civil war. Revolutionaries from around the world flocked to Russia to join an international movement aimed at overthrowing capitalism in each country. But the failure of the 1918-1919 German Revolution and Lenin’s untimely death in January 1924 became key factors in the rise of a reactionary bureaucracy headed by Stalin. Trotsky and the Left Opposition struggled hard for an alternative, democratic socialist course, but were defeated by the end of the 1920s. The subsequent destruction of the Bolshevik Party, the murder of its leaders in show trials and the perversion of its policies and aims were among the greatest crimes of the 20th century.
A superficial reading of the subsequent history of the 1917 revolution – promoted and perpetuated by the capitalist media and right-wing historians like Orlando Figes – frequently lumps together Bolshevism with Stalin’s reign of terror. In this way, they bury the unique achievements of the revolution and the masses and leaders who made it possible. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 is often labelled the “end of communism”.
But the truth is that Stalinism was counter-revolutionary and essentially anti-communist. Lenin and Trotsky always insisted that socialism could never be built in an isolated way in a single country and the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy, which usurped political power from the masses and created a totalitarian state, is proof of this. Gorbachev’s attempt to restore Soviet democracy and restructure the economy, heroic effort though it was, could not undo decades of backwardness or overcome the resistance of die-hard Stalinists. Their failed coup of August 1991 precipitated the collapse of the USSR later that year.
First under Yeltsin and now under Putin, Russia has reverted to a capitalism where oligarchs, who effectively stole the state assets built up during the 90 years of the USSR, hold sway. Yet while the socialist property relations established by the October Revolution have been legally abolished, the legacy of revolution lives on in other forms.
The courage and audacity of the revolutionary masses, and the ability of the Bolshevik Party to seize the time, have gone down forever as a landmark in history, proving that such a change could be made and that decisive leadership was the key. The decision to withdraw Russia from the conflict, helped to bring World War I to an end and inspired millions around the world. The Red Army’s ability to defeat the Nazi war machine in World War II – which was more significant than the fighting on the Western front - was due to the economic achievements of the revolution. The glasnost period of the 1980s opened up a new understanding of the phenomenal opposition to Stalinism.
Let American Communist John Reed, who set down the first major account of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days that Shook the World, have the last word: “It is fashionable,” he wrote in 1919 “… to speak of the Bolshevik insurrection as an ‘adventure’. Adventure it was, and one of the most marvellous mankind ever embarked upon, sweeping into history as the head of the toiling masses, and staking everything on their vast and simple desires… No matter what one thinks of Bolshevism.”
As the global economy lurches into its worst crisis since the Wall Street crash of 1929, against a background of climate chaos and military tensions, new political conditions are emerging. The need for humanity to open a new, non-capitalist chapter in history is as urgent a challenge now as it was for the Bolsheviks in 1917.
Corinna Lotz
AWTW secretary
First under Yeltsin and now under Putin, Russia has reverted to a capitalism where oligarchs, who effectively stole the state assets built up during the 90 years of the USSR, hold sway. Yet while the socialist property relations established by the October Revolution have been legally abolished, the legacy of revolution lives on in other forms.
The courage and audacity of the revolutionary masses, and the ability of the Bolshevik Party to seize the time, have gone down forever as a landmark in history, proving that such a change could be made and that decisive leadership was the key. The decision to withdraw Russia from the conflict, helped to bring World War I to an end and inspired millions around the world. The Red Army’s ability to defeat the Nazi war machine in World War II – which was more significant than the fighting on the Western front - was due to the economic achievements of the revolution. The glasnost period of the 1980s opened up a new understanding of the phenomenal opposition to Stalinism.
Let American Communist John Reed, who set down the first major account of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days that Shook the World, have the last word: “It is fashionable,” he wrote in 1919 “… to speak of the Bolshevik insurrection as an ‘adventure’. Adventure it was, and one of the most marvellous mankind ever embarked upon, sweeping into history as the head of the toiling masses, and staking everything on their vast and simple desires… No matter what one thinks of Bolshevism.”
As the global economy lurches into its worst crisis since the Wall Street crash of 1929, against a background of climate chaos and military tensions, new political conditions are emerging. The need for humanity to open a new, non-capitalist chapter in history is as urgent a challenge now as it was for the Bolsheviks in 1917.
Corinna Lotz
AWTW secretary
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