[D66] Fwd: The century of revolution

[Jugg]

http://mondediplo.com/2017/10/041917

The century of revolution

     By Serge Halimi, mondediplo.com
     View Original
     February 1st, 2000

USSR: Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. At first, the name does not 
refer to a territory, but to an idea — world revolution. Its borders 
will be those of the uprising that has triumphed in Russia, and later of 
those expected to triumph elsewhere. In the top left corner of a huge 
red flag, a hammer and sickle symbolises the new state, the first 
national anthem of which is The Internationale.

The founder of the USSR is internationalist, no question. Lenin spends 
much of his life as a professional revolutionary in exile in Munich, 
London, Geneva, Paris, Krakow, Zurich, Helsinki... And he takes part in 
almost all the major debates of the workers’ movement. In April 1917 he 
returns to Russia, where the Revolution has broken out and the tsar has 
abdicated. As his train is crossing Germany at the height of the Great 
War, he hears The Marseillaise, a song that symbolises the French 
Revolution for many of his comrades. In many respects, this represents a 
more significant reference point in Lenin’s writing than the history of 
tsarist Russia. Doing as well as the Jacobins — ‘the best models of a 
democratic revolution and of resistance to a coalition of monarchs 
against a republic’ (1) — and lasting longer than the Paris Commune are 
his obsessions. Nationalism has no part in it.

The Bolshevik leader later recalled that as early as 1914 his party 
(unlike almost all other European socialists and trade unionists who 
allowed themselves to be drawn in to a sacred union against a foreign 
enemy) ‘was not afraid to advocate the defeat of the tsarist monarchy 
and to condemn a war between two imperialist birds of prey.’ As soon as 
the Bolsheviks came to power, therefore, they ‘offered peace to all 
peoples [and did] everything humanly possible to hasten the revolution 
in Germany and other countries’ (2). Internationalism again.

It was the ultimate paradox (and one which would have serious 
consequences) that a party dedicated to a proletarian dictatorship 
seized the opportunity offered by the sudden collapse of the Romanov 
dynasty and the absence of other serious contenders for power (3) to 
take control of the state in a country where the working class 
represented barely 3% of the population. But that mattered little at the 
start, as support and salvation were expected to come from abroad, from 
more advanced countries with more powerful and politically literate 
proletariats. It would only be a matter of weeks, the Bolsheviks 
thought, months at most: anger was rising in Germany, France, Italy, 
Great Britain, and mutinies proliferating. By October 1917 Lenin could 
barely contain his impatience. The Russian uprising should wait no 
longer as ‘the undeniable symptoms of a great turning point, the eve of 
a revolution on a global scale’ were becoming clear. The Bolsheviks must 
fire the opening salvo. And wait for reinforcements.

(continued)