The Russian Revolution and Its Fate

Socialists and Islam: Enlightenment by force

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

First person: A political odyssey

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

The Weekly Worker Group's (CPGB)Turkish Mentors

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

The triumph and defeat of Narodnaya Volya

Click here for the series on The Roots of Bolshevism of which this article is part John O'Mahony continues his series of articles on the roots of Bolshevism "The Russian proletarian is no novice in the revolutionary movement. You know that it was a worker who blew up the imperial palace in February 1880. The very idea for this action was conceived in a workers' group." G V Plekhanov and Vera Zasulich, Letter to the International Socialist Congress, 1891 "And our proletariat? Did it pass through the school of the medieval apprentice brotherhood? Has it the ancient tradition of the guilds...

The Bolsheviks and Islam part 3: Islamic communism

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

Bolsheviks and Islam part 2: Sharia law

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

The origins of Bolshevism: The first workers' unions

Click here for the series on The Roots of Bolshevism of which this article is part John O'Mahony continues his series of articles "The question of the city workers is one of those that it may be said will be moved forward automatically by life itself to an appropriate place, in spite of the a priori theoretical decision of the revolutionary leaders". G V Plekhanov, in the journal of Zemlya i Volya The history of the beginnings of a labour movement in Russia is a subordinate part of the history of populism. The first Russian labour movement was a populist movement. It was initiated by populists...

The Bolsheviks and Islam

Gerry Byrne begins an examination of the relationship between the Russian Bolshevik Party that made the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the Islamic subject states of the Tsarist empire they inherited. What, if anything, can it teach us about socialists' relationship to Islam today? "Rewriting history" is generally seen as the province of Stalinism, the falsification of documents and historic records to retrospectively justify a policy turn or to distance oneself from current political enemies. But there is another, subtler way that history can be rewritten, by selective quotation and failure to...

The origins of Bolshevism: Russia's real exceptionalism

Click here for the series on The Roots of Bolshevism of which this article is part John O'Mahony continues his series of articles On the eve of the abolition of Russian serfdom, in 1861, many of the jobs which in Western Europe were performed by wage labourers - by legally free women, men and children who sold their labour power for specific periods of time to those who owned the means of production, the mills, mines, quarries, factories, etc. - were in Russia performed by unfree labour. One worker in three was a serf. Of 565,000 workers in 1860, the year before the emancipation of the serfs...

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