Wednesday is the 90th anniversary of Russia's Socialist Revolution

[The title of this painting might be All Power to the Soviets!]

The 90th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution in Russia is this [Wednesday]. The first stage of the 1917 Russian Revolution overthrew Tsarist tyranny and created a bourgeois democratic republic, under Kerensky. That provisional government continued Russia's involvement in World War I, and held back the revolution in other ways, such as by opposing immediate redistribution of land to the peasants, if I remember correctly, and delaying a constitutent assembly to create a popular government. I think things soon got to the point where the Bolsheviks had to act or be repressed by the government, which had begun to reach out to counter-revolutionary forces. The second stage of the Russian revolution, starting on November 7th (and in October by an old calendar Russia was using), was for a democratic and socialist working class government. The revolution was led by the Bolsheviks, who formed the Communist Party of Soviet Union (Bolshevik) and the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, a more peasant-based party. The sickle-and-hammer represents the alliance of the Soviet working and peasant classes, under the leadership of the working class. For an eyewitness account, see Ten Days That Shook the World, by John Reed, an American journalist who I think was influential in the creation of the Communist Party of the USA. Reed and his work in Russia are the subject of the movie Reds , which is interesting and entertaining, but gives the story the obligatory downward trajectory.

The revolution was later betrayed by Khrushchev and his successors, and the pretense of socialism was being dropped by Gorbachev. He was overthrown by Yeltsin before he could follow to the full the Chinese model for liquidating what some would call a form of socialism and others would call state capitalism. Now Vladimir Putin uses Soviet and Great Russian nationalism (such as setting the new Russian national anthem to the music of the Hymn of the Soviet Union and appealing to Russians' memories of being a great power) as [props] to aid his authoritarian control.

The revolution ultimately was lost, but it is important because it was the first lasting working class and socialist revolution. The Paris Commune of 1871 was crushed by the Germans and the bourgeois government after a few months and other revolutions in 1905 and at the end of WWI also did not last. The Russian Revolution's lessons cannot be applied mechanically, but it provides ideas on how and how not to carry out a revolution and to create socialism. It was as far reaching as the British (though it was not called such), American, and French revolutions that gave capitalism its own form of government, and its call echoes now. Several countries claim to be following the Soviet revolution, Venezuela claims to be building socialism (possibly it will, but it looks more like Chavez building a more humane capitalism), Maoist guerillas and activists were part of the revolution that defeated royal dictatorship in Nepal, and there are influential parties and/or guerillas in many countries. A problem that threatens failure is lack of clarity about the lessons of the past, so people don't know what socialism is and are thus fooled by so-called communists who only want a different kind of capitalism, not its swift abolition. Therefore there is debate about when socialism ended in the USSR and whether countries like China, Cuba, and the DPRK (north Korea) have socialist economies or governments. I am still making up my mind, but Alliance's position (similar to the Albanian school of thought) is that the USSR became capitalist soon after Stalin's death, and these other countries were politically revisionist and never socialist to begin with.