Tuesday 16 January 2018

Back in the USSR October Revolution 100th Anniversary Show

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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”)


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