1917: Revolutionary Russia And The Dream Of A New World

Well packed, arrived as promised - great book.

An extraordinarily clear account of the Russian Revolutionary year of 1917 that locates the revolution within a wider crisis of capitalism and shows how it was a mass uprising of the poor, oppressed and exploited. Sherry focuses on the mass participation, the inherent democracy of the Revolution and the central role of the Bolsheviks' in shaping and leading this movement. Sherry also looks at what happened after - why Stalin was able to destroy the gains of the Revolution and how the capitalist powers organised to deprive the revolution of its oxygen. One hundred years after events it describes there are few better books for getting to grip with the history.

This excellent book tells the real story of the Russian Revolution of 1917. In particular, it shoots down the false claim made by anti-Marxist historians that Lenin’s Bolshevik Party seized power against the wishes of the majority, and that this led directly to the horrors of Stalinism.The bureaucratic tyranny of the Stalinist regime in Russia from the mid 1920s onwards, and of the later, similar regimes in Eastern Europe, China etc had/has nothing to do with genuine Marxism. These so-called “communist” states were/are actually state capitalist systems controlled by a ruling class of bureaucrats who betrayed the democratic aims of the 1917 Russian Revolution.So what happened in 1917? The February Revolution of 1917 got rid of the Tsar, but it brought to power the Provisional Government, which continued to take part in the bloodbath of World War One. Lenin argued for a new revolution, which eventually took place in October.Lenin did not want to seize power in a coup by a small group. He wanted to win over the majority of the exploited and for THEM to take power. When Marx and Lenin talked about the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, they did not mean that Marxists would rule OVER the working class, they meant rule BY the working class. This workers’ state would then gradually be replaced by a classless society in which the state would “wither away”.Marx’s model for a democratic workers’ state was the short-lived Paris Commune, where all officials were elected, subject to recall at any time, and paid only an average worker’s wage; and where the army and police were replaced by a workers’ militia. Lenin’s idea was that the soviets (workers’ councils) would also follow this highly democratic model. This book shows how democratic the soviets were in their early days.October would only have been just a "coup" if the Bolsheviks had taken power without majority support. In fact they only took power when they had won a majority on the soviets, with the previous majority of SRs and Mensheviks having been voted out. Even the Menshevik Martov admitted that the workers were solidly behind the Bolsheviks by October.Lenin’s idea was that the Bolshevik party should compete with other parties on the soviets. The fact that the soviets later ended up as being a one-party system was a sign of the FAILURE of the revolution: it was not what Lenin had intended.Lenin expected the Russian Revolution to spark off revolutions in other countries. (Indeed there was a failed revolution in Germany.) But the isolation of the Russian Revolution, the horrors of the Civil War initiated by the “Whites” and intervention by foreign powers in support of the White armies combined to destroy the foundations of the new regime.It is claimed by anti-Marxist historians that Leninism led directly to Stalinism. But Stalin actually had to DESTROY the last vestiges of genuine Leninism in order to consolidate his counter-revolution. Incidentally, given that it was the isolation of the Russian Revolution which ultimately led to its demise under Stalin, it was not the politics of Lenin's Bolsheviks which led to Stalinism, it was the LACK of mass Leninist parties in other countries.After Lenin’s death Trotsky kept alive the genuine Marxist idea that socialism means workers’ democracy, but unfortunately he clung to the idea that Russia had become a degenerated workers’ state, whereas in fact it had become under Stalin a bureaucratic state capitalist regime.Marx argued that a revolution was necessary in order to achieve socialism for two reasons: firstly, because the ruling class would not give up power peacefully; and secondly, because it was by going through the experience of class struggle that the working class’s ideas would change on a mass scale and the majority would be won over to socialist ideas and become “fitted to found society anew.” Sherry’s book shows precisely this changing of ideas on a mass scale.Finally, I want to mention another important theme of this book: namely the often-overlooked major part that women played in the revolutionary process in 1917. Just to give one example, Sherry includes this quotation from Trotsky:“The February revolution was begun from below, overcoming the resistance of its own revolutionary organisations, the initiative being taken of their own accord by the most oppressed and downtrodden part of the proletariat – the women textile workers.”Phil Webster.