OPINION: Celebrating the Russian Revolution

On the 80th Anniversary of the Petrograd Rising should we celebrate the Russian Revolution. By Paul Foot

'Across the horizon spread the glittering lights of the capital, immeasurably more splendid by night than by day, like a dike of jewels heaped on the barren plain.

'The old workman who drove held 'the wheel in one hand, while with the other he swept the far-gleaming capital in an exultant gesture.

'''Mine!'' he cried, his face all delight.

"All mine now! My Petrograd!" ,

JOHN REED, the passenger in that lorry, must be one of the luckiest journalists in history. He was an American socialist who travelled to Russia in 1917 to find out about the developing Bolshevik Party. He spoke good Russian. He was in Petrograd in October when the Bolsheviks led the working people of Russia in a revolution which dismantled the entire economic system. John Reed told the story of the revolution in Ten Days that Shook the World.

I have a first English edition of the book, which is not like most first editions: It is printed in a dirty grey cloth cover and published by the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1926. I bought it for 1/6 (7 1/2 p) in a long-since deemoslished second-hand bookshop . at Anderston Cross, Glasgow, at a time when I was impatiently starting a training period before 'going into politics'. The 'politics' were the politics of the newsspapers and. television: the politics of a small group of well-spoken and someetimes even well-meaning men and women

whose job and career it is to do things 'on behalf of' others. Politics was a profession, just like the law or accounttancy. Its qualifications were a gift of the gab, a facility for administration and a good deal of vanity. Political apprentices were encouraged to develop a series of 'principles' and a 'conscience'.

John Reed's book smashed all that to pieces. It introduced me, for the first time - and that after 24 years of exxpensive education - to the masses: not the 'mob' of school history books, not the 'electorate' evoked by politicians to confirm their prejudices, but the masses in motion, tearing aside centuries of apathy and subservience and reaching for aspirations which most of them had never before imagined.

THE ELATION of the old lorry driver in John Reed's book was reflected an over Russia in hunndreds of thousands of working .. people. In the first two and a half years after the revolution, Russia faced economic ruin as never before or since. Trade on every frontier was cut off.

Armies invaded from every side.

Production and productivity were halved and halved again, as workers left for the front and the supply of materials dried up. Arthur Ransome, a gentle aristocratic journalist on the Manchester Guardian, who later made a fortune writing childdren's adventure stories, was one of the few British journalists to travel through Russia in those years. In his book - Six Weeks in Russia in 1919 - he details the astonishing shortages and chaos in the Russian economy.

Yet, he reveals, progress was made, and progress of the most exciting charracter he had ever witnessed, or ever would witness. There had been a decisive shift towards equality and against poverty (which, we are always told, is impossible unless the 'national cake' grows). The infant mortality rate was halved. Free school meals were provided in all city schools.

There was, among a previously phillistinic and illiterate people, a great hunger for books and learning of every kind. In October 1917, there were 23 libraries in Petro grad and.3D in Moscow. In October 1918, despite dreadful shorttages of paper arid prin ting facilities, there were 49 in Petrograd and 85 in Moscow. In Moscow there were 369 educational institutions in October 1917. By the end of 1918, there were 1,357.

WHEN HE visited the Great State theatre in 1918 to see the opera Samson and Delilah, Ransome found: 'The Moscow plutocracy of bald merchants and bejewelled fat wives had gone ... The whole audience was in the monotone of everyday clothes. There were many soldiers and numbers of men who had obviously come straight from their work.' At the Moscow Art Theatre at the same time, Dickens' 'The Cricket in the Hearth' was playing to packed audiences of workers and soldiers.

Perhaps the most remarkable developpment was the change in working women, enslaved for years by a bigoted Church and a masculine moral law. In many areas, women ran the soviets (workers' councils) and the dark religious laws banning abortion, contraception and divorce were swept aside. Religion itself was not abolished or banned. But people started to have faith in themselves, not in Gods, and the say-so of unelected priests no longer put a stop to debate or discussion.

In March 1920, Ransome travelled with one ofthe Communist leaders, Karl Radek, toa conference in Jaroslavl. One evening, late, he went with Radek to 'a big, one-story wooden shanty'.

'Every seat was occupied by railway workers and their wives and children. The gangways on either side were full of those who had not found room on the benches. We wriggled and pushed our way through the crowd, who were watching a play staged and acted by raillwaymen themselves ... '

After the first act, Radek spoke.

According to Ransome: 'He led off by a direct and furious onslaught on the raillway workers in general, demanding work, work and more work . . . Instead of giving them a pleasant and interesting sketch of the international position, which, no doubt, was what they expected he took the opportunity to tell them exactly how things stood at home. And the amazing thing was that they seemed '. to be pleased. They listened with extreme attention, wanted to turn out someone

who had a sneezing fit at the far end of the hall, and nearly lifted the roof off with cheering when Radek had done.

'I wondered what sort of a reception a man would have who in another country interrupted a play to hammer home truths about' the need of work into an audience of working people who had gathered solely for the purpose of legitimate recreation. '

With stories like this, Arthur Ransome told the real story about the 'Communist Dictatorship ': 'of the reality of the Communist Dictatorship I have no sort of doubt' he wrote. 'But its methods are such as tend towards the awakening of a political consciousness which, if and when normal conditions are attained, will make dictatorship of any kind immpossible'.

WHEN RANSOME wrote his· book there were still 600,000 industrial workers who were members of the Communist Party and who had played their part in the Russian revolution. This huge political army more than a fifth of the entire adult working class - took their decisions after protracted debate.

If, in Ransome's words, 'normal connditions' had been 'attained', this proofoundly democratic process would have been widened to include more working people. But 'normal conditions' were not attained, for one simple reason. The working-class which made the Russian revolution was destroyed.

Many of them (more than a third) were killed in the 1917-1921 wars. They were the advance guard on every front, and died in huge numbers. At least a million left the cities and their jobs to search for food in the ,countryside, as food supplies to the cities were cut off. Only a handful remained in the cities - . and almost all of these became adminisstrators. The elite of the revolution was left, but the class which had created it was annihilated. Into its place came a new working class which had not created the revolution, and which did not share its aspirations and which was susceptible to the chauvinism, sentimentality and tyrannous bluster of Josef Stalin. .

Stalin insisted that 'loyalty to the Party' meant not, as originally, loyalty to decisions democratically taken, but loyalty to decisions taken by bureaucrats in the Kremlin, that 'loyalty to the revoolution' meant not, as originally, loyalty to working people everywhere, but loyalty to Great Russia, which was competing with other countries in the world.

THE STALIN dictatorship did not, as is so often pretended, arise automatically from out of the Russian revolution. On the contrary. To succeed, the dictatorship had to pulverise every vestige of the revolution. Every single member of the 1917 Bolshevik Praesidium was slaughtered by Stalin, along with tens of thousands of revoolutionary workers. The laws for women's liberation were repealed. Equality and rank and file control in the Communist Party and the soviets were replaced by all-powerful Kremlin appointees. Only the language and the myths of the revoolution were maintained successfully to deceive millions of people inside and outside Russia that communism and socialism are the same as a bureaucratic state capitalism, and that a risen people is the same as an oppressed one. .

Yet all Stalin's terror cannot hide the truth of what happened in Russia in 1917 nor stop people fighting for another 'awakening' like that one. The people who support a social system founded on the rights of people with property to rule those without it are constantly urging us to 'recognise the limitations' of the masses. Only a few, they argue, can make decisions. Only a few can govern. Only a few can appreciate or expand the wonders and beauties of life.

THE RUSSIAN revolution is . history's great proof of the oppposite: that we have the resources now for all to enjoy leisure; that all can and should take part in the decisions which affect them; that those decisions are incomparably fairer and more proogressive when they do; and that the wonders and beauties of life can become incomparably more wonderful and beautiful when everyone is allowed to enjoy them, and expand them.

But the Russian revolution is not the only proof of such things. There is proof all around us, every day. For a start, every time men or women go on strike, they change. The more the strike is run by rank and file workers, the more unrecognisable they become from the stereotyped zombies they were when at work.

The working people of Dublin, for instance, have a history of brutalisation, apathy, despair and deprivation as in perhaps no other city in the world. The diaries of comfortable Victorian travelllers like Charles Kingsley are full of abuse . for the Dublin workers. Yet in the great dock strike of 1913, things happened in the city which would have astounded and terrified Kingsley. Thousands of working people caught a glimpse of what life can be like when their resources and abilities are unleashed and welcomed. People who for years had been consigned to the rubbish bin of society, to the brothel or the alcoholic ward, made decisions incomparably fairer and more humane then any taken by a puritan Protestant employer or by a celibate priest.

In much smaller and less obvious ways, this is going on all the time: a constant reminder that we are all living less than half the lives we should be living, and that a dramatic and lasting change in ourselves, our abilities and our aspirations is not only possible but neccessary. The Russian revolution was the only time in history when all the little struggles for human emancipation came together in a single, united, and (for a tragically short time) successful effort. It should be celebrated, if only in the hope that the next revolution will not be defeated so swiftly.

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Paul Foot is a British journalist and a member of the Socialist Workers' Party.