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Revolutionary greetings to all of you, brothers and
sisters, I am Siegfried and this is Back in the USSR, where we are marking the
100th anniversary of an event which may very well be the most
significant in modern times – the Russian Revolution of 1917 and specifically
the seizure of power by the Bolshevik Party, led by Vladimir Lenin, in what
became known and celebrated as Red October.
The world’s first socialist revolution and a true historical milestone
for countless millions of working and oppressed people all over the world, not
just in Russia. There is a reason why
the young Soviet state had to face invasion by no less than fourteen foreign
armies barely a year after the revolution, because the establishment of a new
society, a new and competing order that stood against the status quo of global
capitalism, could not be tolerated by the powers that be. Just as they could not tolerate the Chinese
Revolution of 1949, the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and any number of other
successful revolutions in Vietnam, Korea, Angola, Grenada, Mozambique,
Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Burkina Faso, Guinea-Bissau, Laos, Yemen, and many others,
all of which owed something to the revolutionary example of 1917. 1917 was a turning point for working class
people, but it was also a turning point for colonized peoples suffering under the
bootheel of European empires, showing them what could be achieved when
oppressed people rise up, take control, and run things for themselves. It was not only about working people
liberating themselves from the control of the bosses, landlords, and capitalist
exploiters, but also about colonized peoples overthrowing the imperialist and
securing their own genuine self-determination.
Tonight is the first of a series of shows where I’m going to attempt to
explain these things and why, one hundred years later, the Bolshevik Revolution
still matters and still inspires millions of people to take action against
oppressors and exploiters the world over.
For 1917 showed that no ruling class is invincible; however brutal, and
however deeply entrenched, it can be overthrown, and that a risen people can
control their own destiny.
(Play Georgi Sviridov “Time Forward”)
One of the most important contributions that the
Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union made was with regard to the worldwide
struggle against colonialism. When the Revolution
triumphed in October 1917, most of the rest of the world was colonized by the
United Kingdom, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United States.
But under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin, the revolution became the
inspiration for countless peoples, not only by showing that a workers’ state
was possible, but also by providing practical, material and later military aid.
The first example was the liberation of the colonies held by Tsarist Russia,
which was known as a “prison house of nations.” The new Soviet Union, by
contrast, would be a federation of different nationalities, each having
guaranteed political, economic, linguistic and cultural rights.
The years following World War I, which had been a
murderous struggle between rival colonial empires, various anti-colonial and
revolutionary uprisings began to occur. In
1919, the people of Egypt and Iraq rose up against British rule, the Koreans
fought Japanese occupation and a revolution in Hungary resulted in the
short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic.
The Congress of the People’s of the East of 1920, or
the Baku Congress, was an attempt by Lenin’s Bolsheviks to build a
revolutionary Marxist movement of the exploited and oppressed peoples in the
colonial world, while at the same time appealing to the advanced countries,
especially in Europe, to lend support to these movements.
Some 1,891 delegates attended the congress from over
25 countries including Turkey, Persia, Egypt, India, Afghanistan, China, Japan,
Korea, Syria, and Palestine.
The final manifesto read in part, “Here in Baku, on
the borders of Europe and Asia, we representatives of tens of millions of
peasants and workers of Asia and Africa in revolt showed the world our wounds,
showed the world the marks of the whip on our backs, the traces left by the
chains on our feet and hands. And we raised our daggers, revolvers and swords
and swore before the world that we would use these weapons not to fight each
other but to fight the capitalists. Believing profoundly that you, the workers
of Europe and Asia, will unite with us under the banner of the Communist
International for common struggle, for a common victory.”
The Communist International, or Comintern, was founded
in 1919 by Lenin as a response to the Second International which had led the
workers into World War I, backing their own imperialist countries against the
unity of the working class. At its second congress in July 1920, the Comintern
gave the anti-colonial struggle wide prominence and this emphasis would help
shape the international communist movement for decades to come.
The Comintern was to play a major role in building
communist parties around the world in both advanced countries as well as
colonized states. Lenin’s uncompromising support for the right of nations to
self-determination, up to and including secession, had a tremendous impact on
the oppressed countries. He is credited with adding to Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels’ slogan, “Workers and oppressed of the world unite!"
The development of the Communist International also
encouraged the emergence of specifically anti-racist American and South African
communist parties that would lead the struggle against segregation and
Apartheid. The American ruling class
even managed to convince itself that the anti-segregation struggle was somehow
caused by a foreign communist plot, even today commentators on CNN and MSNBC
try to blame the Ferguson uprising and Black Lives Matter on Russian “meddling”,
and in the same breath they try to blame Russia for American racism, figure
that one out. It was African-American
communists such as Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, W.E.B Du Bois and others, who
really led the charge against Jim Crow, and in the 1930s the CPUSA even
organized black workers and farm laborers in the deep south and fought against
the Klan at a time when practically every other political party in America
supported segregation. The Communist
Party even supported African-American national self-determination, arguing that
black Americans were the victims of colonialism.
Soviets were formed in Cuba in the 1920s and communist
parties arose in many oppressed countries including South Africa, India,
Indochina, Indonesia, Sudan, Iraq, Vietnam and elsewhere.
The anti-colonial struggle would only gain ground
after World War II as European colonial empires, which had once seemed
invincible, began to crumble. Following
the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany, almost all of Eastern Europe was liberated
from imperialist rule.
In Vietnam after the surrender of Japan, Soviets were
established all across the country and peasants seized the land, beginning the
long road to independence which came 30 years later.
In 1949, the Chinese Revolution shook the world, bringing
700 million people into what was quickly becoming the socialist camp. By 1959,
there were 14 socialists countries encompassing one billion people.
In this period, national liberation struggles swept
the world. Encouraged by armed struggles in Asia, Algeria, Zimbabwe, Mozambique
and other countries led resistance movements that were fiercely challenged by
the corresponding colonizers.
When the first post-colonial countries started to
emerge in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America, the Soviet Union
gave tremendous military and material support to these states. Gamal Abdel
Nasser’s Egypt, Sukarno of Indonesia, and Jawaharlal Nehru of India all
benefited from this policy.
By 1965, Soviet aid to emerging countries surpassed
US$9 billion in both economic and military assistance, according to state
records.
This allowed these countries to carry out somewhat
independent developmental policies that wouldn't have been possible within the
world capitalist market. For the first time, they could trade on more equitable
terms with the Soviet Union which was not subject to the boom-and-bust cycles
of the capitalist system.
This was also true within the socialist camp, where
countries such as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Vietnam, Cuba and
Eastern Europe were the beneficiaries of Soviet economic and military aid. The
United States invasion of Korea was repelled with the direct assistance of the
Soviet Union. The defeat of the U.S. in Vietnam was in large part due to the
military backing of the Soviet Union.
And even though it never became part of the socialist
camp, India’s first steel plant, which was handed over to the Indian
government, was built by the Soviet Union.
When the U.K., France and Israel invaded Egypt in
1956, the Soviet Union assisted the country, which was eventually able to throw
out the colonizers. The USSR would also
support anti-colonial governments in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, while allying
itself with the Palestinian liberation struggle.
The Cuban Revolution of 1959 was seen as a tremendous
threat by the United States even before Fidel Castro declared socialism as the
ruling ideology. The U.S. imposed the all-encompassing economic and political
blockade on the island and in 1961 orchestrated an invasion at the Bay of Pigs,
which was thoroughly defeated by Cuban forces.
The Soviet Union provided both military and economic
aid to the island nation, helping it to consolidate its revolution with
preferential trading terms and military hardware that deterred any more U.S.
invasions.
The strength of the Soviet Union and the socialist
camp as a progressive pole for over 70 years, stayed the hand of imperialism
and helped ensure the independence and development of many countries.
In South Africa, the Soviet Union built a relationship
with the Communist Party and later with the African National Congress led by
Oliver Tambo who said at a conference in Havana, “The Soviet Union, Cuba, many
socialist countries have made it possible for many of the heads of state who
are here today to survive, to win, to become leaders of independent countries.
That was a crime against imperialism. We understand it.”
From the early 1960s, the Soviet Union provided
military aid to the ANC’s Umkhonto we Sizwe and to the People's Movement for
the Liberation of Angola. It also providing military and technical training in
the Soviet Union for independence movements throughout the region.
In 1961, Kwame Nkrumah, the first prime minister of
Ghana went on a tour through Eastern Europe, declaring his solidarity with the
Soviet Union and China. In 1962, the Soviet Union awarded him the Lenin Peace
Prize in acknowledgment of his Pan-African efforts to unite the continent
against continued plunder.
Like many other anti-colonial leaders, Patrice Lumumba
of the Congo found himself in the middle of the Cold War or the global class
struggle. Many leaders didn’t want to face the hostility of the United States
by turning to the Soviet Union for aid. In this vein, the Non-Aligned Movement rose
in the mid-1950s.
Nevertheless, Lumumba did ask the Soviet Union for
help and it was shortly after that, in 1960 that a coup was launched which led
to the execution of the Pan-African leader.
In 1962 the Patrice Lumumba University was founded in
Moscow for students from developing countries. The stated purpose was to give
young people from Asia, Africa and Latin America, especially from poor
families, an opportunity to be educated and to become qualified specialists.
Millions of students were given free education in
engineering, agriculture and other disciplines, over the course of Soviet
history. Even the CIA acknowledged it, “The Soviets are also educating numerous
Latin American and Caribbean students in the USSR, cultivating organized labor,
and profiting from the growth of pro-Marxist sentiments among religious
activists.”
When the Soviet Union was defeated in 1991, it had a
devastating economic impact on the countries that had once received its aid and
assistance. For Cuba it meant a “special period” of austerity. Vietnam was
forced to let in Western capital. For India, it meant opening up to harsh
dictates from the IMF and the privatization of state-owned industries. In
Central America, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front was forced to
compromise, as was the ANC in South Africa and the PLO in occupied Palestine.
The end of the Soviet Union and the Russian Revolution
saw a rise in imperialist aggression worldwide. Iraq, Somalia, Yugoslavia,
Afghanistan, Libya and Syria have all been invaded by the U.S. in the wake of
its demise. The fact that the socialist camp no longer exists as a
counterweight is a tell-tale sign of its importance, not only against
imperialist wars but as an inspiration and a base for socialism and liberation.
Perhaps above all, what the October Revolution of 1917
inspired was internationalism: telling millions upon millions of working class
and colonized peoples around the world that they were not alone, and that
united they could never be defeated.
This poem by African-American communist Langston Hughes speaks volumes.
‘Ballad
of Lenin’ by Langston Hughes.
Comrade Lenin of Russia,
High in a marble tomb,
Move over, Comrade Lenin,
And give me room.
I am Ivan, the peasant
Boots all muddy with soil.
I fought with you Comrade Lenin.
Now I’ve finished my toil.
Comrade Lenin of Russia,
Alive in a marble tomb,
Move over, Comrade Lenin,
And give me room.
I am Chico, the Negro
Cutting cane in the sun.
I lived for you, Comrade Lenin.
Now my work is done.
Comrade Lenin of Russia,
Honored in a marble tomb,
Move over, Comrade Lenin,
And give me room.
I am Chang from the foundries
On strike in the streets of Shanghai.
For the sake of the Revolution
I fight, I starve, I die.
Comrade Lenin of Russia
Rises in the marble tomb:
On guard with the fighters forever – –
The world is our room!
(Play The International in Russian)
(Mention CPC’s 100th Anniversary event in Toronto on
Nov 11)
(Play Brian Becker on “I Mix What I Like”,
“Revolutionary to Democratic Socialism from Vladimir Lenin to Bernie Sanders”)
(Play W.E.B Du Bois “Socialism and the American
Negro”)
