Sunday 19 November 2017

Back in the USSR's Great October Socialist Revolution 100th Anniversary Show

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You’re listening to Back in the USSR here on 93.3 FM CFRU, I am Siegfried.  And I admit that I was absent last week, and if you were listening in you would have heard a show I did in 2015, a very important show decrying the conservative militarism and celebration of imperialism that surrounds Remembrance Day in this country.  But I was not sorry to be absent, for last Saturday I attended what I can only describe as one of the most moving and significant events that I have ever attended in my whole life.  Last Saturday, November 11, while the Canadian government did its thing and trotted out its usual parade of sentimentality and lies about the First World War, a war between empires over colonies in which working class people paid the price and were butchered in their millions on the battlefields of France, Flanders and Russia, the Communist Party of Canada and its allies instead paid tribute to the 100th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917. 

It was a packed house, and the mood was celebratory as we proud and conscious proletarians remembered our greatest victory, a true victory for the people, that ushered in a century of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggles around the world, and which rose from the darkness of World War I like a red phoenix to light a new path forward for humanity – showing, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that working class and oppressed people everywhere can fight against their oppressors and become masters of their own destiny.  That is what we celebrated last weekend, with our speeches, our musical performances, our dancing, and everything we did.  While the ruling class in this country celebrated war and sacrifice for “our home and native land” (aka “our colonial home ON stolen native land”), we celebrated revolutionary liberation, international solidarity among peoples, and peace between nations.

The Canadian ruling class still tells us we should be proud that young men went out to fight and die for the colonial expansion of the British Empire and that this is how we should define ourselves as a nation.  These apologists for empire and colonialism tell us that the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was evil, totalitarian, and anti-democratic.  Many people in this country have grown up with these lies and believe them with all their hearts.  But just because a lie is believed by many, does not make it true.  Just because Canadian schools do not teach their students the real history of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist revolutionary movements, doesn’t mean that they never existed and do not still exist today in this age of neoliberalism.  Red October really did happen, and because it happened, the world would never be the same again and the writing was on the wall for the empires that had led the world into war in 1914, because the people were waking up.  All over the world, not just in Russia, working class and oppressed people were waking up, fighting back, and taking control – and the worst nightmares of the bankers, arms dealers, war profiteers, sweatshop owners, colonial plantation elites, aristocrats and robber barons were coming true.

(Play Georgi Sviridov “Time Forward”)

In the last show I did this month, I discussed the significance of the October Revolution of 1917 with regard to the great anti-colonial struggles of the 20th Century and how the Soviet Union inspired and supported many of these movements against empire.  Today I’d like to look a little more at the history of the revolution itself and the material conditions in Russia that led to the downfall of Tsarism and ultimately the downfall of Russian capitalism in 1917.

First of all, it’s important to understand that Russia in 1917 was a capitalist country.  For while the legacy of feudalism still loomed large, the aristocracy still had considerable power, and the majority of the population was still made up of peasant farmers, the profit motive and industrial production were clearly in command by the time the first abortive Russian revolution took place in 1905.  When serfdom ended in Russia in 1861 there were only 3.25 million urban industrial workers in the empire, less than 5% of the population, but in the next thirty years their numbers doubled and in the first decade of the 20th Century they would double again.  The proletariat would be by far the fastest growing segment of Russia’s population by the time the First World War broke out in 1914.  Many of these workers were former peasants who had fled to the cities in search of work, and again this was the result of capitalism.  After serfdom collapsed in 1860s, peasants were increasingly unable to survive in an economy dominated by cash transactions, farming small plots of land with crude hand tools and having to pay off massive debts which they owed to their former masters along with heavy taxes to the Tsarist government.  Many poorer peasants had no choice but to sell their land and move to the city, while wealthier peasants bought up the land of their neighbors and became landlords.

Once in the cities, former peasants were forced into the slums of industrial cities like St Petersburg, Moscow, Ivanovo-Voznesensk and others, struggling to pay rent on what were often tiny rooms which whole families had to share.  In the last decade of the 19th Century, every one of Russia’s heavy industries – iron, steel, coal, oil, railroads, machine tools, and chemicals – doubled or tripled its output and then doubled it again by 1905.  Foreign investors poured money into industrial and commercial ventures and British and French firms even moved to Russia to exploit the cheap labor of its proletarians.  For factory workers in Russia had no job security, no legal protections to speak of, no safety regulations, no minimum wage, no pensions, no social security, and no protections against child labor, which was widespread, even among kids as young as three who worked in the plants alongside their mothers.  In the matchworks of Vladimir, six out of every ten workers was under the age of fifteen and these child workers could expect to make less than one ruble a month.  Women often had to give birth on the factory floor because there was no maternity leave, women who typically made less than 1/3rd of the wages men earned.  Fourteen, sixteen, and even eighteen hour days were the norm.

It was from the ranks of these factory workers that the core of the Russian revolutionary movement would be built.  In the face of these horrible conditions, proletarians supported each other, taught each other how to read, went on strike together and organized a militant labor movement together.  People like Fedor Samoilov, who worked at a textile plant in Ivanovo, and Ivan Babushkin who worked at an arms foundry in St Petersburg, would become radicalized by their own hard experiences and go on to join the Bolshevik Party.  But it was not just working men who became radicalized, by 1907, 20% of the leadership of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party were women, and of the 20%, more than 90% belonged to the Bolsheviks.  The Russian labor movement, consisting almost entirely of illegal worker’s leagues and trade unions, grew to the point where it was able to practically shut down the entire country with a general strike in 1905, which very nearly brought the Tsarist government to its knees. 

In the face of the increased hardship that the 1905 Russo-Japanese War brought to the masses of the Russian people, practically every industrial city in the empire revolted and the collapse of the regime was only prevented by loyalty of the army, which killed hundreds, if not thousands of striking Russian workers, and by concessions to the liberal-minded elite, including the creation of a parliament and a written constitution.  None of this eased the plight of ordinary Russian workers, to say nothing of the plight of the peoples colonized by the Russian Empire in Central Asia and the Caucasus region. 

By the time the workers and peasants of Russia were drafted and sent off to die in their millions in a First World War that they did not want or understand, there was already a strong revolutionary tradition in the country and a powerful history of working class resistance that, in response to the horrors of an imperialist war, would blossom in 1917.  This time the peasant soldiers in the army did not shoot at the striking workers, many of them women, who marched in the streets of St Petersburg on International Women’s Day, February 1917, to demand bread and an end to war.  This time, they shot their own officers and joined the demonstrations.  With this mutiny, the Tsar was doomed, and when the new provisional government of Russian elites tried to continue the war in defiance of the people’s wishes, the stage was set for the triumph of the Bolsheviks in the Great October Socialist Revolution.

Worker’s soviets, councils that represented working people across whole cities and regions, and which had first appeared during the 1905 general strike, were joined by mutinous soldiers and became an armed force in defiance of the state.  This level of working class organization would be combined with the leadership of Lenin’s Bolshevik Party, which ultimately pushed these soviets to seize power and create a whole new revolutionary order that would change the world.  The Great October Socialist Revolution did not emerge out of thin air, but was the product of decades of organizing, resistance, and struggle by working people against their exploiters.  It was born of a working class movement that produced leaders, who, in Lenin’s words, were not “trade union secretaries,” but “tribunes of the people”, able to envision a future where workers did not merely bargain with their exploiters, but removed them entirely and seized power.  The transformation of militant trade unions into soviets capable of unifying all workers under one banner showed the way to a future in which the downtrodden became masters of society.

This struggle would give rise to the world’s first socialist state, a state that would emancipate workers, emancipate women, grant self-determination to oppressed nations, fight against empire worldwide, defeat fascism, and make the exploitation of workers a crime.  While at the same time unleashing the talents of a population that had been, one generation before, made up mostly of illiterate peasants – now they were scientists, engineers, teachers, builders, writers, composers.  A country which had been locked in the depths of poverty and ignorance, would become the second most developed country on the planet following World War II.  For the colonized peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the Great October Socialist Revolution showed what could be achieved.

Long live Great October on its Centenary! Long live Lenin, the leader of the world proletariat! Long live the socialist revolution!
(Play “Lenin is Young Again”)

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