Into The Void

Perpetually worried - Keir Starmer stares into the centrist void...

Who remembers Bill Rogers?

He was the quiet one, modestly titling his long lost autobiography Fourth Among Equals - no Caesar Augustus he, one of the joint leaders of the Social Democratic Party, the breakaway from the Labour Party in 1981.

Headed by heavyweight former Cabinet Ministers Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams and Dr David Owen, Rodgers, a former Transport Secretary, was the final member of the "Gang of Four" and was seen as the organiser of the SDP, which boasted new fangled initiatives like letting members join using credit cards and phone banks.

Under its collective leadership, the party initially pitched itself as a left of centre alternative to the overtly socialist leadership of Labour under Michael Foot from 1980 to 1983. Later, however, it  shifted during the sole leadership of Owen to a more rightwards "tough but tender" approach where the emphasis was much more technocratic, with the Doctor loftily holding forth his diagnoses of rampant incompetence on the part of the increasingly creaky Thatcher administrations. Often causing ructions among his Liberal Allies, Owen's pitch was firmly on the Tories' own terms - his "social market" was a conscious decision to operate on their ground, implying, ultimately, that he could be a better Conservative than the slavering followers of the wild-eyed Thatcher as she moved into full Caligula mode.

Ultimately, of course, the Liberal-SDP Alliance ended in utter rancour. After a disappointing result in the 1987 election left the SDP with just 5 MPs, a majority of the membership voted to merge with the Liberals. Owen refused to have anything to do with it and briefly created a "continuing SDP" which was wound up after polling behind the Monster Raving Looney party in a Merseyside by-election in early 1990. The Doctor exited elected politics and ended up aptly as a cross-bencher in the Lords, while Rodgers followed his other Gang members into what became the Liberal Democrats, leading them in the Lords for several years and happily backing the 2010 to 2015 coalition of austerity with the Conservatives.

His relevance today stems from his comments on a BBC "reunion" programme a little while before the European referendum in 2016. Interviewed with Williams and Owen about their reasons for their 1981 adventure (which had been dramatised as a successful London stage play) the now Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank opined that British politics had been "broken" then as it was again but, crucially, in spite of the surging UKIP and previous upswings for the BNP and street demos by the EDL, "politics will get back to normal soon enough."

His Lordship was perhaps expressing hope as much as prediction, but his complacency is readily explicable and not without some merit. For, while the SDP itself collapsed after barely six years' existence, its purpose - to stop an overtly socialist Labour Party being elected to office, was powerfully and successfully achieved.

First under the former leftwing firebrand Neil Kinnock and ultimately under the narcissism of the Blair leadership, Labour reacted to the SDP's brief but damaging insurgency and the accompanying four terms of Conservative governments by shedding its socialism, jettisoning commitments to large scale public ownership and wealth redistribution. In their place came an almost fervent advocacy of market economics, public services outsourced to the supposedly efficient private sector and a relentless focus on courting centrist voters.

By the late 90s "New Labour" Chancellor Gordon Brown was making a virtue of following Tory spending plans and deregulating the financial sector, while Peter Mandelson smooched with the rich and not-so-beautiful, whispering seductively that he was "intensely relaxed" about their being filthy rich. Unions were cowed into partnership agreements with no strike clauses while academics like Anthony Giddens lauded Blair's "Third Way", a faux centrist philosophy of a supposedly conflict-free society.

It was the emergence of inequality on a scale unknown in a century as well as Labour's strategy of taking working class voters for granted during these years that led to a slow but steady leakage of support away from the party and directly into the arms of far right populists like the neofascist BNP and later the revanchist UKIP. For the truth was that it was under these conditions that the working class became detatched from the Labour Party.

Many may have switched to not voting at all, but, alienated from the economic boom sucked up by the wealthy through the first decade of the 21st century and forced to compete with immigrant labour, the lure of xenophobic memes well and truly nurtured by the media was to lead in time to the Brexit vote. "Taking back control" wasn't only about asserting British independence from the EU; it was, perhaps ironically given some of the Leave leadership, a full-on rebuke to the liberal Establishment - which, too late, semi-awoke to the patronsingly labelled "left behind".

Yet the period that saw British politics slide into chaos from the Expenses scandal of 2008, the recession of the same year and the austerity of the following years, fostered not only a revolt on the right of politics - the Left was on the march too, a process that culminated in the breathtaking rise of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership in the autumn of 2015. Simultaneously the party saw its membership rocket to well over half a million members, becoming the largest political organisation in Europe. In spite of two attempts to remove him by recalcitrant rightwing Labour MPs, who remained the majority of the parliamentary group, Corbyn endured through the now-revealed sabotage of party staffers in the 2017 general election to deliver the party's best result in almost two decades, depriving the Tories of their majority at the same time.

Lord Rodgers' hope of a return to normal seemed remote indeed. But, facing the rise of  powerfully ideological forces on both their flanks, the Political Class rallied around a protracted campaign undermining Corbyn again and again, while ceding the Tory Party to the rightist populism of Boris Johnson, which ultimately saw off UKIP and its briefly popular successor, the Brexit Party. That Labour still turned in a 32% vote share last December - higher than Brown or Miliband achieved during their leaderships and, in vote terms, better than Blair himself achieved when he won in 2005 - is little short of a miracle, and proof perhaps that, however devastating the outcome was in terms of seats (a relatively moot point given that our electoral system is as rational as a turn on the roulette wheel), a large movement remains for genuine socialism.

But, just as they made the anti-Corbyn narrative before the election, the Labour right have happily fashioned a new one post-polls. In this, Brexit had nothing to do with the sharp decline in the party's showing after their Brexit speaker, Keir Starmer, persuaded the NEC to over-rule Corbyn and campaign for a second vote on EU membership. In spite of the clear evidence on the doorsteps and in the results that Farage's Brexit Party drew enough support from Labour to deliver dozens of seats to Johnson, especially along the so-called Red Wall, the outcome is blamed entirely on Corbyn. Anything from anti-Semitism to "having too much in the manifesto" (Starmer's argument) has been deployed to explain the outcome. Almost surreally, former leader Ed Miliband has been commissioned to analyse and report on why Labour lost, in spite of the party polling almost a million more votes and a larger vote share than it achieved under his tenure.

In spite of his relatively comfortable victory in the leadership contest, three months in Starmer appears to have lost none of the Labour right's long-brewed vitriol. While his challenges to Boris Johnson during the covid crisis have hit home a few times over the chaotic handling of initiatives like track and trace and the late care homes lockdown, such passion as he has managed to muster has seemed far more focussed on the Left of the party and on Corbyn's legacy in particular.

Still light on any detail, Starmer has backslid on Labour's promises of wealth redistribution, signalled a likley retreat on the groundbreaking Green New Deal and proclaimed the party to be under new management. His Corbynite leadership rival, Rebecca Long Bailey, was ostensibly sacked from her Shadow Education role over an allegedly anti-Semitic tweet (in which she disseminated an Independent newspaper's interview with actor Maxine Peak). But by many accounts the real rift was over her wish to support the teachers' unions opposition to Government attempts to force them back into the classroom while the pandemic was still raging - Starmer, fearful of not being "constructive" wanted to support the government instead.

This week has seen the purge of Corbynism reach new depths with a legal settlement the party's lawyers advised against and now rumours that Starmer plans to expel the former leader himself from the parliamentary party.

Lord Rodgers may yet, it seems, have his wish of a return to "normal". Two parties, two sides of the same capitalist coin, endlessly rotating around a status quo, shoving it first a little one way and then the other to contain and neutralise those on both sides of the divide they straddle.

Containment - but for how long?

The notion that some centrist settlement - the polite comfortable certainties of the Major and Blair years - can be brought back and that, somehow, as if by magic, the very policies and even some of the people who fostered the crises of Britain will yet provide the solution - is beyond risible. Indeed, it is insulting to the victims of a decade of austerity and poverty, lost life-chances and premature death.

The risk of course is this - if there is no vehicle like the Labour Party to provide hope for a fairer society, for a tomorrow that achieves social justice and effectively tackles the environmental crisis, the currents of disillusion will not dissipate: like any tide, they will still gather and push until they find a new direction, one which, as past flirtations with the hard right have shown, will decidely not provide in any way a happy outcome.

Many on the Left fear Keir Starmer is a reincarnation of Tony Blair. Yet in truth he is far more akin the SDP's Dr Owen - almost delighting in a lack of any underpinning vision or ideology, but instead "forensically" scoring points over the contents of Government briefings - as if, this time, the modern Social Democrats rather than breaking away, have stayed and seized control of the Labour machine. An almost Stockholm syndrome-like atmosphere prevails - don't challenge this appalling Government's sociopathic behaviour over covid, its nepotistic dishing out of public contracts to its mates and shameless lack of values. Instead, tell Johnson and Co how you welcome what they're trying to do - just show them how to do it a bit better.

Where is the anger at tens of thousands of needless deaths and the failure to plan for the economic catastrophe that seems to loom ahead? How can we mobilise to campaign for public services when the Leader of the Opposition can't even rouse himself to condemn Tory legislation that, as Corbyn predicted, has now opened the NHS up to overseas ownership and control? Where is the will to fight racism when Starmer's immediate reaction to the toppling of the Bristol slaver's statue was to castigate demonstrators for being inappropriate? What is there to get out on the doorsteps about when the promise is of a pruning of "too many" policies seeking justice in a country where "normal" means 25,000 rough sleepers on the streets each and every night?

Little wonder that the party is reportedly losing many of its members, particularly among the crucial younger and BME demographics - where it overwhelmingly led the Tories last December. Many others seem to be following suit and Labour languishes 4% behind the Tories in recent polls - the mirror image of Corbyn's lead at the equivalent stage in the last parliament.

Starmer has been gushingly praised by the liberal press for his technocratic Question Time inquisitions of the increasingly truculent and lazily out-of-his-depth Johnson. Maybe so, yet as he stares with his seemingly perpetual look of worry across the despatch box, this strangely bloodless Labour leader would do well to check that he is not in truth simply gazing into a great big, gaping centrist void.

Contemplating Normal - Bill Rodgers (left) breakfasts with David Owen and Roy Jenkins.

Land of the UnFree - Eugene Debs and the Struggle for American Democracy

Eugene Debs fought his final Presidential campaign from a prison cell.

It is no secret or surprise to socialists that the American revolution was laced with contradictory aspirations from the very beginning. For every Tom Paine there were ten Burkian conservatives who saw the new nation as epitomising the promise of early bourgeois capitalism and imperialism.

Once the 13 states had freed themselves of the Royal British yoke, private property was enshrined to include the right to own human slaves, taxation for the greater good was derided as a breach of liberty and the invocation of the Common Weal to defend the individual left the USA at odds with its espoused values from the very start – a phenomenon that persists to this very day and the director Oliver Stone has described as “the United States’ unique mixture of idealism, militarism, avarice and realpolitik.”

In the first seven decades of the 19^th century, many Americans pursued what they termed their “Manifest Destiny” – the destruction of Native peoples' cultures and seizure of their lands in the belief that this was God’s Will. In a country rich in natural resources, and unimpeded by archaic social conventions or physical infrastructure, American capitalists were able to seize the technological initiative from older European states and develop their own industrial revolution. Many fortunes were made, reinforcing the sense of the American Dream of individualism, but ignoring the reality of a growing, struggling proletariat. With mass migration often of the poorest sections of European societies used to undercut the wages of existing labour, American capitalism soon developed along the same elitist, unequal lines as the European versions.

But so did opposition to this twisted polity grow. Revolutionary America had supported the French revolution at least initially and the social ideas forged then were as influential in the USA as elsewhere. Tom Paine’s personal involvement in both was an important boost, but other Americans during the 19^th century looked for a better society too. The anti-slavery movement was a key part of this, as were some Christian groups and socialist thinkers, including the poet Walt Whitman, whose espousal of humanitarian equality ran through his widely disseminated writings

Abraham Lincoln and many Republicans, while not embracing socialism as an ideology, invoked socialist ideas in their programmes – the fluidity of US politics may be obscured to some extent by the ideological stance of the parties in recent decades. It’s interesting to note that the American contribution to the international Republican forces in the Spanish civil war was titled the Abraham Lincoln brigade.

Additionally, perversely perhaps as it was an outcome of the conquest of native America that gave the space and resources for it, many socialists established living communes to create socialist societies from scratch across the US territories. As many as 1,200 existed by the 1880s, seeking to exist separately from capitalist society.

However, large scale capital was as prevalent in dominating Washington politics as it was in any European government. In particular, it mobilised to oppose the rising trade union movement. American unions were organised on craft lines and were inherently conservative, focussing on the narrow interests of their members alone rather than wider society or economics. And it was in this environment that Eugene Victor Debs was to first come into activism and agitation for change.

Debs was born in 1855 to French migrants who ran a prosperous, thoroughly bourgeois textile mill in Terre Haute, Indiana. However, he dropped out of public school at the age of 14 and worked on the railways, eventually becoming a night fireman on the run from Terre Haute to Indianopolis and earning a dollar a night. He joined the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen in 1875 and attended the national convention, soon becoming editor of the Fireman’s Magazine and later Grand Secretary of the BLF. He also became active in local politics and served one term as a Democrat on the Indianna State Assembly.

Debs initially took a fairly conventional view of unionism, seeking co-operation and concentrating on services for members. But as time went by, he saw the injustices of the railroad companies, who were among the richest and worst-behaved corporations. After the Burlington strike was brutally broken in 1888, he grew closer to the idea of industrial unions and a more confrontational stance – especially as the two decades from 1975 were seeing the first major recession in the newly industrialised world.

He left the BLF and in 1893 with George Howard as vice-president, Debs established the American Railway Union – the first industrial union in the USA and inclusive of unskilled workers. Unlike the non-striking BLF, the ARU held its first strike in 1894 against the Great Northern Railway and membership rocketed as workers organised across the US railways. Chicago, Illinois, was at the centre.

The Pullman strike was violently suppressed.

This led in the following year to the Pullman Strike, which Debs initially opposed, but embraced when he saw it was the clear demand of the members.

The Pullman corporation used the economic crash of 1894, the Great Panic, to justify cutting wages by 28%. In response, the ARU’s members in Illinois refused to handle Pullman coaches and this was eventually extended until 80,000 rail workers boycotted Pullman.

The press called the action the Debs Revolt and denounced him as an enemy of the human race, not just management. The Government sent the army against the strikers on the grounds that the boycott was interfering with the mail, which was a federal offence. 30 railwaymen were shot dead, thousands were sacked and blacklisted, and Debs was arrested and jailed. He was sent to Woodstock prison for six months.

It was there that Debs began to question the system that had killed workers and imprisoned him.

"...I began to read and think and dissect the anatomy of the system in which workingmen, however organized, could be shattered and battered and splintered at a single stroke. The writings of Bellamy and Blatchford early appealed to me. The Cooperative Commonwealth of Gronlund also impressed me, but the writings of Kautsky were so clear and conclusive that I readily grasped, not merely his argument, but also caught the spirit of his socialist utterance – and I thank him and all who helped me out of darkness into light."

He was visited in prison by Victor Berger, a newspaper editor from Milwaukee in Wisconsin, where there was a rising socialist movement. Berger talked passionately about his socialism and gave him a copy of Das Kapital which Debs described as “providential” and after reading it, he emerged from jail with a transformed view of the world and his mission in it.

Returning to his union duties, he persuaded the ARU to join with the Brotherhood of the Co-operative Commonwealth to establish the Social Democracy of America. This still had a focus on Chicago with 11 of its 50 branches there, but had a reach throughout the Eastern USA. It sought to combine trade union organising and socialist communes with political action. But it quickly became evident that the communes were ill at ease with engaging with mainstream political and industrial life. At its first convention in 1898, it split and Debs and Berger went with the minority to set up the Social Democratic Party, under which title he stood for President in 1900, winning 87,000 votes, 0.6% of the total.

In 1901, the SDP merged with elements of the much older Socialist Labor Party to form the Socialist Party of America, which was to endure until 1972.

The Socialist Party was a broad church initially at any rate. It joined the Second International of global socialist parties and caught and shaped the radical sense of the time, named historically as the Progressive Era, when a wide range of people and thinking coalesced to demand change in the USA. The appalling conditions in factories and big city housing, the rural poverty across the mid-west and the South, the continuing exclusion and exploitation of people of colour, created a powder keg that even some capitalists such as Andrew Carnegie found either morally unacceptable or politically dangerous, or both. Although many reformers did not embrace socialism, socialist thinking and proposals heavily influenced them and even eventually policy-making.

Debs himself was influenced by Marx but also by Whitman, Paine, Wendell Phillips and the later writings of Mark Twain. He often invoked religious imagery in his speeches, referencing Jesus as a working craftsman, but organised religion was of no interest to him – the pulpit always sided with the Masters in his view.

Debs sought peaceful revolution, but accepted that at the point of revolution, some degree of force would be necessary and although he embraced electoral politics, this was more about having a platform to promote and spread socialism than to win legislative power to change society by parliamentary means. He did not see himself becoming President and believed that, when the time came, others would organise the new society. In 1906, he said:

“I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition.”

Although he embraced the broad movement, he was sceptical of the so-called “sewer socialists”, who followed a community politics approach to develop socialism from the ground up via existing institutions, especially at city level. This tactic did enjoy some success. In its time, the Socialist Party won over 1,200 elections, including two members of Congress – Berger and Meyer London – as well as 70 Mayors and 32 state legislators. Berger’s home city of Milwaukee became a particularly centre of socialist government, implementing widespread reform of housing, education and welfare that helped hundreds of thousands of people. But inevitably they had to, or were seen to, compromise with the existing system.

In this context, the decision of the party to join with the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies), headed by Big Bill Heywood, in 1911, was set to divide the party. Heywood debated with Morris Hillquit, a champion of the sewer socialists, in 1911 in New York and the event dissolved into trading personal insults, presaging the 1913 split when the IWW left the party.

But Debs himself, although firmly on the left of the party, managed to transcend many of these divisions and even after various splits maintained productive personal relationships with socialists of all tendencies. He stood for President of the USA five times. His 1912 run was in many ways the most successful, while his final 1920 one was the most striking and poignant.

In 1912, reflecting the turmoil of the progressive era and the rise of socialist thinking and home and abroad, as well as all the contradictions of a now rapidly expanding but inherently grossly unequal and inequitable capitalist system, the Presidential election was a uniquely four-way contest. 

Former Republican President Theodore Roosevelt, uncle of the later Democrat President FDR, formed his own Bull Moose Progressive Party to challenge as a capitalist reformer. Roosevelt openly boasted of stealing what he termed the "reasonable" elements of socialism.

Woodrow Wilson for the Democrats grabbed large parts of the Socialist Party platform including housing and child labour reform, while for the Republicans, incumbent President Taft denounced Debs and his party an unAmerican.

Debs ran a powerful, well-funded campaign across the entire USA. The Socialist Party was at its peak with 150,000 members and the IWW on board. There were well-organised parties across the country, education programmes in place and a dozen daily newspapers as well as some sympathetic journalists and editors in more mainstream journals.

His line was revolutionary. The interests of capital and labour were and always would be in conflict and could never be reconciled. Liberals and progressives might seek to ease the symptoms of the conflict; only socialist would remove the cause by demolishing the capitalist system and starting anew. He opposed regulating corporations – instead, the people should simply seize them.

The resulting vote saw Wilson win with Roosevelt defeating Taft – the best 3^rd party result in history and the worst outcome for a sitting President. For the SPA and Debs, the 901,555 votes and 6% share was the strongest electoral performance for socialists anywhere in the world at that time. 

In the years that followed, the Democrats were to neutralise some of the Socialists' appeal by tackling a few of the worst excesses of capital while the IWW split weakened the party significantly, with a decline of almost a third in membership by 1914.

The First World War brought new challenges – while Wilson initially promised to keep the USA out of the war, his anglophile attitude caused concern among many German immigrant communities, many of which were close to the Socialist Party. Berger himself was of German background and this led to the Socialists opponents tarring their opposition to the war as being pro-Kaiser rather than anti-war.

Debs himself spoke out against the war, but found some influential socialists, including the author Upton Sinclair, arguing for a war for democracy. A party referendum was 90% for neutrality in 1915, but there were clear tensions within the party and some were directed at members of German descent.

However, he did not run for President in 1916 although in many ways fear of war had improved Socialist prospects. He cited exhaustion as his reason, though he stood in his native Indianna for Congress, coming a strong second. Meanwhile, a journalist, Allan Benson, stood for President and polled 600,000 votes – his anti-war platform was founded on no offensive war being legal unless a popular referendum ratified it.  Woodrow Wilson, running on a repeated promise of no war, narrowly won re-election and soon reneged completely on his commitment to peace.

When the time came and Wilson called for war in April 1917, Debs returned to national anti-war campaigning, especially when the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act outlawed anything deemed to interfere with the war effort and a number of socialists were jailed as a result.

Woodrow Wilson, War President

He welcomed the then ongoing Soviet revolution:

“Out of Russia, the land of despotism and dungeons, of exile and death to political agitators flashed the red flame of revolution in the night of Capitalism’s wars.”

Capitalism was, he believed, about to collapse, so “Must we send the workers of one country against those of another because a citizen has been torpedoed on the high seas, while we do nothing about the 600,000 working men that are crushed each year needlessly under our industrial machinery?”

And facing the denunciation of Wilson and Roosevelt and other warmongers clamouring for a so-called patriotic war, Debs said:

“I have no country to fight for; my country is the Earth and I am a citizen of the world. Let the capitalists do their own fighting and furnish their own corpses and there will never be another war on the face of the earth.”

In June 1918, joining a protest outside Canton prison in Ohio where three socialists were being held, Debs denounced the war as one of conquest and plunger where “the Master class has always declared the war and the subject class has fought the battles.”

He was arrested and charged with 10 breaches of the Espionage Act. He pled guilty and on 18 November 1918, a week after the war had ended, he was jailed for 10 years. His sentence began on 13 April 1919 and was marked soon after by a May Day riot in Cleveland.

Debs ran again for President from his prison cell, leading to leaflet asking people to vote for Prisoner 9653 with a photograph of a now increasingly frail man. In spite of the huge crackdown on socialists and anarchists in the two years after the war, with J Edgar Hoover making his virulent anti-communism evident for the first time, Debs saw his vote tally reach over 919,799, the highest vote ever achieved by an American socialist.

He was released by the new President, Warren Harding, who hosted him at the Whitehouse and he returned to a hero’s welcome in Indiana. But he was a broken man and his health never recovered from prison. He wrote on prison reform, but his main activity was being treated for a circulatory disorder and he died of heart failure in Illinois in October 1926 at the age of 70.

The Socialist party itself declined and split almost as soon as Debs was imprisoned – it divided over whether or not to join Comintern and faced severe attacks sponsored by the Government as part of the Red Scare of 1919 to 1921 – thousands were imprisoned, sacked or deported; socialist meetings were broken up by thugs and police; 5 Socialists elected and re-elected to the New York state assembly were expelled by the Republican majority for being “unAmerican”; trumped up charges of violence were brought against activists and some were even lynched – an act the press saw as cleansing of the American soul.

But socialism remained influential with five million striking in 1919 alone. After backing  the independent “Fighting Bob” La Follette’s 1924 campaign for left progressivism which took 17% of the national vote, the Socialist Norman Thomas stood for President several times from 1928 onwards, peaking at 884,000 votes in 1932. Socialist party members were even employed by FDR to help shape the New Deal in response to the rise of populists like Huey Long in the 1930s. 

But the Socialist Party lost support when it first admitted and then split with Trotskyists after disagreements on the Spanish civil war. By 1941 it had declined to a small core and this fell further when it opposed the war against Hitler. Although many American Communists joined it after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, it fought its final Presidential campaign in the same year, polling just 2,044 votes. There was some revival in the 1960s in the civil right movement, but the party was split over whether to seek to influence the Democratic Party or take a more independent stance. In 1972, it renamed itself Social Democrats USA before splitting again into the Democratic Socialists and Social Democrats. With the recent rise in interest in socialism in the USA, it has been largely bypassed by followers of Bernie Sanders and younger people looking for an alternative to neoliberalism - Sanders' use of the terms "socialism" and "revolution" is of course open to some discussion, but his relative success in mobilising a whole swathe of younger people to the concept shows the growing thirst for real change in contemporary American politics.

Debs himself remains a slight quixotic character, representing the optimism of the age as well as the apocalyptic character it took on alongside rampant capitalism and the industrial-scale world war. He was passionate, committed and risked his all for his cause – he fought capital and in response capital denounced him, beat and killed his comrades, threatened and imprisoned him and eventually in effect murdered him. But his words echo through time and are as relevant today as ever. 

As he faced a decade in jail, these are some passages from his speech to the jury at his 1918 trial and committal:

I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills and factories; I am thinking of the women who, for a paltry wage, are compelled to work out their lives; of the little children who, in this system, are robbed of their childhood, and in their early, tender years, are seized in the remorseless grasp of Mammon, and forced into the industrial dungeons, there to feed the machines while they themselves are being starved body and soul....

Your honor, I ask no mercy, I plead for no immunity. I realize that finally the right must prevail. I never more fully comprehended than now the great struggle between the powers of greed on the one hand and upon the other the rising hosts of freedom. I can see the dawn of a better day of humanity. The people are awakening. In due course of time they will come into their own.

When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for relief from his weary watch, he turns his eyes toward the Southern Cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches the Southern Cross begins to bend, and the whirling worlds change their places, and with starry finger-points the Almighty marks the passage of Time upon the dial of the universe; and though no bell may beat the glad tidings, the look-out knows that the midnight is passing – that relief and rest are close at hand.

Let the people take heart and hope everywhere, for the cross is bending, midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.

I am ready to receive your sentence.

Red Star Rising - Art, Culture and Betrayal in the Russian Revolution

End of St Petersburg film (1926)

The Dream of LeonTrotsky...

"Under socialism, solidarity will be the basis of society. Literature and art will be tuned to a different key. All the emotions which we revolutionists, at the present time, feel apprehensive of naming - so much have they been worn thin by hypocrites and vulgarians - such as disinterested friendship, love for one's neighbour, sympathy, will be mighty ringing chords of socialist poetry.... All the arts - literature, drama, painting, music and architecture - will lend this process beautiful form. More correctly, the shell in which the cultural construction and self-education of Communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonised, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe or a Marx. And above this ridge, new peaks will rise." (from "Literature and Revolution")

The aspirations of this key architect of the October revolution were not only ambitious but, to a modern western reader they likely seem surprising, especially the references to physical changes in a post-revolutionary Homo Sovieticus. Yet their very antithesis to the realities of the early 20th century for the mass of Russian serve to illustrate just how barbaric Czarist society was.

For Russia in early 1917 was uniquely different to all the other major European powers that had been at war over the previous two and a half years. Unlike Imperial Germany, it had only a small industrial base - largely owned by either the Czarist state or by foreign investors - amidst an ocean of great rural estates and tens of millions of peasants. Unlike France, it had only a statistically insignificant bourgeoisie class which was completely incapable of demanding or consolidating even a mildly representative government.

And unlike Britain, although he was Queen Victoria's grandson, there was no constitutional limitation at all on the authority of the Czar. Nicholas Romanov ruled by the Divine Will and was answerable only to God; any claim otherwise was a sin against the Creator - the Orthodox Church said so. Indeed, the title Czar was derived via the medieval Christian Byzantine Empire from the Caesars of the Roman Empire and Moscow was deemed to be the Third Rome (after the New Rome of Constantinople, which had succeeded the eponymous one on the River Tiber).

Western propaganda has often sugar-coated the Russian Empire and its ruling class, epitomised by sickly sentimental cinema outings like Nicholas and Alexandria and the BBC 1970s TV drama Fall of Eagles. How awful, we are told, were the fates of the Imperial family and so many of the nobles and fellow-travellers, dispossessed of their lands and at best forced into exile or shot by firing squads or, even worse, forced to work for a living alongside everyone else in the new Soviet state. 

But, in truth, Russia was a dreadfully under-developed society. As well as a political system that subordinated everyone to the Emperor's Will and crushed all dissident political expression, it remained mired in medieval feudalism right up to 1881 when the peasantry was finally released from the bondage of serfdom. This meant that the predominant economic form was agrarian and indeed when Napoleon had invaded in 1812, he found a land with only three cities of any note existing - Kiev in the Ukraine, Moscow in the Slav heartlands and St Petersburg, the sole modern city, deliberately founded by Peter the Great in the extreme west of his domains to occidentalise the Russian elite.

From Peter onwards, the Imperial Government often tried to modernise Russia from the top and so developed state-owned heavy industry from the 1880s onwards, drawing several million peasants off the land and into giant factory complexes and the grinding poverty and disease of 19th century urban life. To link these, railways were built across the Empire, often using prison labour, with the Trans-Siberian line being one of the greatest, and bloodiest, achievements of its time, stretching from Moscow in the centre of European Russia all the way to distant Vladivostock on the Pacific coast.

There was no Empire-wide education system and illiteracy was rife. There were middle class professionals like doctors, lawyers and technical specialists, but they were few in number. There was a larger group of notaries employed around the Empire to run the Imperial bureaucracy, but given their position they were dependent on the state and so posed no challenge. Universities in the cities and larger towns did produce some open-minded students and teachers, but they were  met with suspicion and surveillance by the authorities.

Okhrana secret police 1905

Nervous of any challenge at all, the Czarist government created a secret police bureau - the Okhrana - which employed a huge range of methods to neutralise the opposition. This included setting up police-run trade unions to undermine the labour movement, routinely intercepting mail, torturing suspects and deploying agents provocateurs to infiltrate everything from revolutionary cadres to famine relief charities. Sometimes this reached ludicrous depths - one possibly apocryphal account from the town of Kazan claimed that the local Social Revolutionary Party committee disbanded after its 12 members gradually realised that they were all secret policemen.

This repression extended to imprisoning hundreds of thousands of real and imagined opponents in distant penal colonies in Sibera where a huge proportion perished in appalling conditions. Closer to the heart of the Empire, strikes were routinely crushed by the clubs of the police, and Jewish communities, already largely confined to the south of Ukraine, were singled out for bloody pogroms by the Czar's paramilitary organisation of Christian stormtroopers, the chillingly named Black Hundreds. Indeed, it was the Okhrana agent Matvei Golvinstei who is credited with creating the fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion, subsequently employed by Adolf Hitler to demonise the Jews and justify the Holocaust.

Jewish pogrom victims in Odessa, 1905

So at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Russia was a repressive, under-developed police state ruled by a despot who reneged on the limited political reforms of his grandfather and whose governance was a mix of arrogance, incompetence and sheer sloth. It was the epitome of imperialism, a Prison of the fifty-odd nations its borders encompassed, and its only impetus to modernise stemmed from its desire to match the military strength of its more developed rivals. It well deserved the name given to it by Daniel Beers' book on the Czarist penal system, The House of the Dead.

But…

In this House of the Dead, people still dreamed and schemed of better times. Das Kapital was passed by the Czarist censors who clearly failed to grasp its significance, and it became required reading among opponents of the Czarist system. Anarchism and Marxism became the main strands of thinking among revolutionaries – the absence of any parliamentary outlet or a significant bourgeoisie class meant that liberalism was eclipsed from the outset by more radical beliefs. 

Unsurprisingly, it was in cultural activities that revolutionary feeling was first expressed – sometimes the censors caught it in time, other times not. And in the 19^th century, it was in novels that socialist writers began to bring their hopes of new societies to wider audiences than the small study groups of professional activists.

Russian literature was beset for a long time by turgid novels praising the Slavic nation, wrapping up vaguely mystical concepts of race with Orthodox religion. It was relentlessly conservative in its values  - even if some like Tolstoi challenges the corruption of the moneyed classes, he looked backwards to an imagined community than forward. This changed in 1863 when the writer Nikolai Cheneyshevsky published “What Is To Be Done?” – a novel that inspired Lenin to political activism and famously gave him the title for his own polemic in 1903 when he outlined his view of the Bolsheviks’ strategy. Chernyshevsky was himself in prison when he wrote it but was given permission to send it to his former newspaper employer to publish it.

Cherneyshevsky’s central character is a woman, Vera Pavlovna, who escapes a traditional family and marriage to make her own way in the world. As she makes her way, he introduces her to co-operative societies based on the traditional peasant commune, gender equality and above all the duty of the wealthy intellectual to work for the revolution. This latter theme of an intellectual vanguard bringing enlightenment and liberation to the poor was to feature from then on all the way up to and through the 1917 revolutions and its influence on Lenin’s own thinking was to have a crucial impact on the fate of the revolution.

What Is To Be Done? introduced the concept of the dedicated revolutionary in the form of a character called Rakhmetov. To him, the end justified the means and he was prepared to both inflict and endure great suffering in the cause. He comes from a noble family but lives a life of poverty in order to spread revolutionary thinking to the masses, working as a boatman on the Volga and sleeping on a bed of nails just to prove to himself the extent of his devotion.

Chernyshevsky wrote a number of other political tracts about ideal societies and he even developed thinking on the architecture of self-contained communes that influenced a lot of Soviet planning in the 20^th century. But it was the character of Rakhmetov that had the greatest immediate impact – it led to the founding of the Land and Freedom society. 

This was an organisation of younger middle and upper class revolutionaries who in the 1870s went out among the peasantry to educate them in revolutionary thinking.  It was very paternalistic and failed fairly quickly to engage the masses, but unlike previous groups, it was the first to use violence to pursue its aims and an offshoot of it, Narodnaya Volya, the Peoples Will, went on to assassinate the mildly liberal Czar Alexander in 1881. It was also bound by a tight comradeship and centralism. Among its members was Alexander Ulyanov, brother of Vladimir Illich Ulyanov, later Lenin, who was executed after a failed plot to assassinate the next Czar. Lenin himself praised both the organisation and Chernyshevsky’s book, and he read it many times during his younger days.

Unsurprisingly, just as revolutionary thinking was not monolithic, nor were revolutionary organisations. Very broadly, they divided between the Social Revolutionaries, who advocated a Russian agrarian socialism developed on from Marxism by the exiled noble Alexander Herzen and founded very much on the peasantry. It was like the Peoples Will and Land and Freedom still run by middle class activists – but unlike the Social Democrats, they tended to be people whose work took them among the poorer communities – so doctors, nurses and teachers were often in local SR leaderships, whereas the Marxist Social Democrats founded by the wealthy industrialist Plekhanov and joined by Lenin drew more heavily from lawyers, university lecturers, journalists.

So, very broadly, by the time of the 1905 revolution, the Social Revolutionaries were well established among the rural peasantry, while the Social Democrats were organised among the smaller but economically vital urban working classes. They had ideological differences over the status of peasant smallholders and whether to communalise or collectivize the land; they disagreed as well on tactics – the SDs confined their use of violence to sending Stalin, or Koba as he was known then, out on bank jobs to raise funds; the SRs on the other hand loved nothing more than a good assassination and they even set up the SR Combat Organisation to lead this – and the party’s Maximalist wing rejected the idea of two stage revolutions between bourgeois democratic and proletarian socialist phases, calling instead for immediate revolution.

The failure of the 1905 revolution was a blow to all revolutionaries even though nearly all their leaders from the outset were both surprised by its sudden emergence and sceptical about its success. Lenin and many others were in exile in western Europe at the time and the only prominent returnee was Trotsky, who chaired the St Petersburg Soviet and ended up in prison after a show trial staged by the Czarist state but directed by Trotsky – he even arranged for the defendants to have a group photo taken relaxing in the courtroom. Had TV existed then, who knows how it might have then played out. However, it didn’t and he was sent to jail and then Siberia, before escaping for a second time.

Trotsky and other Soviet members at their 1906 trial

The Social Democrats had themselves ruptured at their 1903 Congress held in Brussels and London between the Bolshevik faction – which means the majority although they were in fact the minority – led by Lenin and the Mensheviks under Martov, which means the minority although they were at first the majority. The nub of the dispute was over Lenin’s proposal for a small, tightly controlled party of full-time revolutionaries and Martov’s vision of a mass party engaged in street demonstrations and strikes.

Among the Bolsheviks, Aleksander Bogdanov had been in Russia throughout the 1905 events and was a rival for the leadership until he was expelled in 1909.  His background was in psychiatry and science, and he was attracted to the logic of Marxist systems and he is now himself seen as an originator of systems theory. Like Chernyshevsky, he used literature to advance his political ideas to a wider audience and in 1907 he used the new medium of science fiction to produce the book Red Star, now largely forgotten but which became one of the best selling novels of pre-first world war Europe.

In this, Bogdanov’s narrator is taken off to Mars in a spaceship by an interplanetary socialist called Menni who introduces him to an egalitarian world where individualism has been largely extinguished, there is no hierarchy, gender is fluid and love is free. The plot centres around an environmental crisis faced by the Martian Soviet and it is a good if different read. 

Alexander Bogdanov

Lenin was not at all impressed but the influence of the novel in exploring how a new world might work and what life could be like for its inhabitants had a deep resonance in contemporary Russia, where the Czar was quickly unravelling the limited concessions given to stem the revolutionary tide of 1905 and 1906.

Still, all these cultural initiatives to challenge the status quo remained the preserve of professional revolutionaries. Many were in exile and those that were still inside Russia did not develop extensive links with trade unions nor did they bring large numbers of workers and peasants into the party. Indeed, in January 1917, Bolshevik membership was a mere 24,000 people.

Lenin himself saw nothing contradictory in this and he was far from alone in his vanguardism. Yet his language was far from comradely towards the workers. In his own What is to be done? he wrote:

"The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively of its own efforts is only able to develop trade union consciousness - i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers and compel the government to pass necessary legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophical, historical and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the properties classes, by intellectuals."

 

Like all elitism, this was very out of step with the reality. In late January 1917, Lenin in Zurich exile told some young revolutionaries that he doubted he would live to see revolution in Russia. Yet when it came about just days later, the Russian Revolution was to be a world away in its form from that he had anticipated.

For a start, it was begun not by the Bolsheviks or Mensheviks or SRs who had been banging on about it for years. Nor was it begun by a bourgeois vanguard. Instead, it was women factory workers, ignoring the demands of the local Bolshevik committee that they stay and work, who marched out on International Women’s Day from the Vyborg district and proceeded into the city centre calling for bread and peace and for the overthrow of the Czar. When troops blocked their way across the bridges on the river Neva, they bravely clambered down to the riverside and walked across the ice. Within three days, joined by huge crowds of workers and soldiers, they swept away the Czar's regime with barely a shot fired and just a handful of deaths.

The hated  professional police literally disappeared, changing out of uniform to run down the street, while peasant conscript troops confined their officers to barracks and released political prisoners from the Fortress of Peter and Paul in St Petersburg. Centuries of autocracy just melted away. All the levers of power, the Court, the judiciary, the secret agents and all the humiliating subservience they demanded vanished in just four or five days.

And this moment unleashed a dramatic change in Russian society, one that felt itself across all classes and all walks of life - for a time, almost like the transformation predicted by Trotsky. The author of Dr Zhivago, Boris Pasternak, later recounted his own feelings via his lead character when he ruminated that:

"Revolution erupted forcibly like a breath held too long. Everyone revived, became transformed, transfigured, changed. Everyone seemed to experience two such upheavals - his own personal revolution and second one, common to all."

This liberation was expressed in many ways from February onwards.

Politically, it led to the creation of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies within hours of the resignation of the last of the Czars Ministers. This council was a recreation of the Soviets that revolutionaries had spontaneously created during the 1905 revolution and while the revolutionary parties all participated, it was joined by people from far outside their orbit. And this model soon expressed itself across much of the Empire.

Parallel to this, former members of the Duma, which the Czar had suspended in 1915, emerged to create a Provisional Government which was populated by liberal and conservative Ministers under Prince Lvov as Prime Minister. Only one social revolutionary, Alexander Kerensky, took part as Minister of War and without the formal support of his party. This was as much as the old regime could muster in defence of some form of continuity and from the outset it was in competition with the soviets as it attempted to defend private property, continue the war and repeatedly asked the country to wait for a Constituent Assembly to be elected to draft a new constitution. 

So the deference of the Empire was gone and this reflected itself in thousands of individual and collective acts against the old ways of things – palaces were requisitioned by crowds of homeless and hungry people. Workers and soldiers began to walk among the bourgeoisie and nobles promenading down Nevsky Prospect in Petrograd, something they would never have previously dared to do. And when the Provisional Government continued with the war, even mounting a new offensive in the spring which collapsed almost before it began, the response was more and more strikes and large demonstrations in the cities demanding peace, land and bread. 

In July, this rising tide led to a Bolshevik demonstration for a transfer of power from the Provisional Government to the Soviets almost running away with itself, much against the wishes of Lenin and Trotsky, and the party was subsequently outlawed and Lenin fled to Finland shaved by Stalin and disguised in a wig.

Briefly, it seemed like a fatal reversal, but at this point the Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks made on their part a huge error – rather than join the Bolshevik demands for a transfer of power, they backed and joined the Provisional Govt and supported its policies on the basis of waiting for the Constituent Assembly, even though elections for it had been repeatedly delayed. Kerensky now took office as Prime Minister and heartily embraced his personal delusion by installing a bust of Napoleon in his office in the Winter Palace in Petrograd.

But Lenin caught the mood of the masses far far more effectively  with his pamphlet the State and Revolution, which outlined a programme for change involving peasant control of the land and workers control of the factories, and peace. Especially after an abortive coup against the Provisional Government by its own military appointee General Kornilov during August, the Bolsheviks, who had rallied the workers against the militarists, saw their representation on local Soviets rise dramatically, gaining outright majorities over the SRs and Mensheviks in Petrograd and Moscow and in many other cities.

So by the time we reach October, or early November under the new calendar, while the storming of the Winter Palace by Bolsheviks under the direction of the party’s Military Revolutionary Committee can be exaggerated in terms of its drama, there can be little doubt that the mood of the majority of the population was firmly in favour of ending the Provisional Government and transferring all power to the Soviets.

Eisenstein's "October" - the looming figure is Provisional Govt leader Kerensky

In less than eight full months, we see the politics of the Empire transformed into the nascent Soviet Union. But it is far, far more than a change in form of government – it is a change in how society works and how people think about themselves and others.  And this is a question for socialists down the ages – how to challenge successfully the deeply embedded mindsets in anyone who has been born and raised in a culture of deference and repression towards the self-autonomy and collectivism of a socialist or communist form of society. It goes far beyond constitutions or even forms of ownership – the Russian State already owned a far larger proportion of industry than most capitalist states – but about how people express themselves, work with each other and think.

This question brought into sharp relief two different strands within the Bolsheviks: those around Lenin who saw the revolution first and foremost as focussing on politics and economics; and those around Lunacharsky and Bogdanov, who believed it needed to challenge much more deeply held social and cultural norms and values. 

Lenin’s view of literature and culture were originally expressed in “Party Organisation and Party Literature” in 1903 and although at that time it was referring to party literature, once a one-party state was established, it was in effect extended to wider society:

"It is not simply that, for the socialist proletariat, literature cannot be a means of enriching individuals or groups; it cannot, in fact, be an individual undertaking, independent of the common cause of the proletariat. Down with non-partisan writers! Down with literary supermen! Literature must become part of the common cause of the proletariat, a cog and a screw of one single, great Social-Democratic mechanism set in motion by the politically conscious vanguard of the entire working class."

In contrast, Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky, who became the Commissar for the education and culture ministry Nakompros from 1917 to 1929, held to a much more libertarian approach and one focussed on enabling the self-expression of the working class. They had collaborated on this in exile and Bogdanov now returned to public life to organise the Proletarian Cultural and Educational Organisations – Proletkult, which was an independent federation of leftwing communists which Lunacharsky granted one third of the national adult education budget – over 9 million roubles to begin with. It grew by 1920 to 85,000 members with 300 multi-media studios operating across the state.

Proletkult conference 1918

Lunacharsky emphasised this independence:

"The people themselves, consciously or unconsciously, must evolve their own culture...The independent action of workers', soldiers' and peasants' cultural-educational organisations must achieve full autonomy, both in relation to the central government and the municipal centres."

Proletkult had its own internal tendencies and contradictions. Many bourgeois artists tried to climb onto easy funding to push their own patronising agenda on the working classes, and taking ballet and orchestras to factories and farms had a mixed reception from the workers, who Trotsky openly declared "usually lacks the most elementary habits and notions of culture in regards to tidiness, instruction, punctuality, etc."

But many in Proletkult took a different view – the absence of a working class culture of music, books and art was because it had been repressed and downtrodden. Proletkult to them offered a means to liberate the inherent potential of the workers. Some took this to the extreme of wanting to burn down libraries and smash up the artifacts in museums to represent a complete break with the past, but Lunacharsky intervened to preserve these.

Proletkult itself and the whole atmosphere that surrounded it unleashed a huge range of creativity.

Art was developed that was the forerunner of agit-prop, with artists such as Alexander Apsit developing revolutionary poster art – this was particularly effective in a society where illiteracy meant that pictures were the most powerful means of bringing ideas to many people.

So you find developed new art styles expressing political slogans like this:

A WORKER SWEEPING CRIMINALS OUT OF SOVIET LAND

DID YOU VOLUNTEER?

The state developed a series of Agit-trains which trundled around the Soviet rail network with these on their side as mobile posters, stopping to show films and plays to workers and peasants who had never seen the like before. There was also the brilliantly named Agitational Ship Red Star, which sailed up and down the Volga. During summer 1919, these methods took the revolutionary message to nearly 3 million people and were crucial in winning over the volunteers who later that year began to turn the tide in the civil war with the White, Black and Green armies.

Much of the cultural activities of both Proletkult and Nakompros were on mass participation: on the anniversary of the revolution from 1919 onwards, huge tableaus involving thousands of workers, peasants and soldiers drew on traditions from the French revolution to bring genuinely popular participation into the events. 

In music, instruments like the thermin were deliberately adopted to break with the past and the Soviet Union can rightly lay claim to be the birthplace of electronic music. One of the more avant garde efforts was Arsenij Avraamov's Symphony of Sirens, which involved thousands of people in the Caspian port of Baku, capital of Azerbaijan, for the Fifth Anniversary of the Soviet Republic on 7 November 1922. This used a huge cast of choirs, the foghorns of the entire Soviet Caspian flotilla, two batteries of artillery guns, a number of full infantry regiments hydroplanes, and all the factory sirens of Baku. Conductors were posted on specially built towers with coloured flags and pistol shots. A central "steam-whistle machine" pounded out "The Internationale" and "La Marseillaise" as noisy vehicles raced across Baku for a gigantic sound finale in the festival square. It was later repeated in Moscow and can be heard in full on Youtube HERE.

Schematic for Symphony of Sirens

Writers also responded to the revolution with new styles of writing. Maxim Gorky had been a massively popular dissident writer under the Empire with his works like Mother and his reputation enabled him to establish the House of Arts as an independent force in literature. This was also sponsored by the Bolshevik Government through Nakompros and for three years it gave lodgings and food to writers to protect them from the privations of the civil war while they developed new revolutionary ways of writing. 

Translations of socialist writers such as H G Wells and Jack London were published by it, while Russian authors like Yvgenny Zemyatin, returned from exile in Newcastle, wrote plays that were intended to shed the verbose sentimentality of traditional Russian literature. By developing Soviet "NeoRealism" in writing - the florid, repetitive language of the Old Days was to be swept away. The Revolution was not just about breaking down the old barriers and extreme inequalities; it was also about a new way of thinking, living and expression - rational, efficient, and all the more powerful for it. One word should convey what in the past a dozen were used to describe; "written with 90-proof ink", as Zemyatin put it.

Similarly, in theatre, although Nakrompos protected traditional performances of Shakespeare, Proletkult Theatre brought avant-garde plays to the stage as well as adaptations of plays and prose by progressive western writers. Platon Kerzhentsev, a playwrite and ally of Bogdanov, headed this section of the movement and encouraged among others the later film-maker Sergei Eisenstein to direct and stage satirical pieces. 

First Workers' theatre

But the fostering of independent thinking and experimentation didn’t last.

Late 1920 into early 1921 saw the end of the civil war as the last of the Whites were expelled from Crimea and Vladivistock fell to the Red Army. The Soviet Union was exhausted and, although the fighting was largely over, the challenges it faced were potentially overwhelming. 

Trotsky, initially opposed by Lenin, argued that rather than demobilising the Red Army, the state itself should be militarised to repair the economy and infrastructure: the “war communism” adopted in 1918 primarily to ensure the Red Army was supplied would continue – so the ban on all parties but the Bolsheviks remained in place, strikes were prohibited, workers strictly disciplined, rationing continued, and any food surplus would be requisitioned from peasants by the central govt. Taylorism, the man-machine management philosophy of Henry Ford, was experimented with at Lenin’s instruction and Alexei Gastev, Head of the Institute of Soviet Labour proposed re-imagining workers as “proletarian units” with designation codes replacing their names.

It was in this environment that within the party, groups like the Left Communists and the Workers Opposition agitated for a return to grassroots democracy, while in the military fortress of Kronstadt soldiers and sailors mutinied and demanded that the Bolsheviks restore free elections to the soviets.

The response within the party was to ban all factions, while infamously Red Army units crossed the ice to retake Kronstadt and suppress the mutiny with over 3,000 mutineers killed in the fighting or executed afterwards.

In the midst of this crackdown, Lenin condemned Proletkult as dominated by petty-bourgeois intellectuals imposing decadent artistic schemes on the working class and in a notice in the party paper Pravda announced that from December 1920 it was to be subsumed into Nakompros. His wife, Nedezda Krupskaya, who was Lunacharsky’s deputy in charge of adult education had always opposed the Proletkult and she was heavily involved in developing cultural and education policy after its effective dissolution.

The change could be seen soon after.

Zemyatin tried to publish his science fiction novel WE in 1921. It is a satire on totalitarianism and Aldous Huxley admitted that it inspired him to write Brave New World. George Orwell denied ever reading it, but if you read We, it is quite obvious that he did.

In any case, WE became the first novel to be officially banned in the Soviet Union by Glavlit, the government body for literary policy. It was not published in the USSR until 1989 and Zemyatin had to get a single copy smuggled to Prague to get it published in his own lifetime. He was subsequently arrested several times but was allowed to go into exile in France after Gorky interceded on his behalf with Stalin.

The Commission for Newspaper Supervision was set up in 1922 as was the Commission to Monitor the Private Book Market. The head of AgitProp, Bubnov, every article and book published by non-party publishers was checked for subversion and authors were categories as revolutionary, Menshevist or Kadetist. Their fate was typified by the arrest of 61 non-party authors in September 1921. Although Gorky secured Lenin’s agreement for their release, the Cheka, the new state security organisation, shot all of them without trial.

And so, as time went by, the authoritarian nucleus at the heart of Bolshevism gradually suppressed much of the freedom of expression that was unleashed in 1917. Lenin’s own cultural tastes were very conservative – he admired Pushkin and classical music, and was baffled by much of the new forms in art and literature. Stalin was to continue this theme of falling back from the mass democracy of February 1917 through the leadership of the vanguard of October to the Red Tsar of the 1930s. 

 In cultural form, this was parallelled by the progression from the mass collective cast of the film The End of St Petersburg through the mix of leaders and people in Eisenstein’s 1927 celebration of the Bolshevik takeover October to the single prince-hero of his 1937 Alexander Nevsky. It was a trend that culminated under Stalin, but the gradual closing down of all but a single strand of party orthodoxy in politics and in culture began earlier and to return to Lenin’s original quote on the powerlessness of the working class in the absence of bourgeois leadership, it is a trend that it is fair to say was inherent in bolshevism from its inception.

Eisenstein's heroic noble Alexander Nevsky

But while we might lament the failure of true socialism in the Soviet Union, it would be wrong to suggest as some do that it was a complete failure or that there was some viable alternative in October 1917. Russian society was as a whole under-educated and under-developed at the time. The other socialist revolutionary parties were hopelessly compromised by their collaboration with the war parties and it was they, not the Bolsheviks, who excluded themselves from the revolutionary governmentt in November 1917. There were real threats from foreign powers and internal rightwing forces who would have shown no mercy at all if they had triumphed. Lenin, Trotsky, Lunacharsky and the other commissars of Sovnarkom faced existential crises for more years than they did not.

So in the end, that they created a society that dragged what had been the backward Empire up to superpower status in barely 20 years, eradicated illiteracy, developed the sciences to the point it was Soviets who were first in space and hugely improved the living conditions of the average Soviet citizen at work, in health and in housing, was an achievement unparallelled in history. It is one which, albeit with many qualifications, we should have some cause to celebrate and to remember the spirit that rose in 1917 and which we can only hope will soon rise again.

"Proletarian creation guarantees the world commune!"

Bibliography
"No Less Than Mystic" - John Medhurst, Repeater Books, 2017
"Trotsky", Edited by Irving H Smith, Spectrum Books, 1973
"Russian Writers and Soviet Society" -  Ronald Hingley, Methuen, 1981

N.b. - the core of this piece was orginally one of several contributions to a Wakefield Socialist History Group meeting on the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution.