Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***********
Reviews
Francis King and George Matthews (eds.), About Turn: The British Communist Party and the Second World War: The Verbatim Record of the Central Committee Meetings of 25 September and 2-3 October 1939, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1990, pp.318, £34.95
In the last year or two of his life Trotsky had several metaphors for the Communist International of Stalin and Dimitrov. He called it a corpse; but the Kremlin was to require this corpse to display a few more twitches of life before finally ordering its dissolution in 1943. Trotsky also called it a cesspit – a dunghill, to use the most direct English rendering. With this cloacal image Trotsky conveyed his profound disgust at the terminal degeneration of the body he had helped to found in 1919, at its ‘doglike servility’, at its transformation into a docile instrument of the Soviet bureaucracy, which in the autumn of 1939 sold it to Hitler “along with oil and manganese”. [1] This book shows in detail – word for word – what went on in the leadership of one section of that dunghill in belated response to the German-Soviet pact and the outbreak of the Second World War.
On 2 September 1939, the day before Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain issued a manifesto urging a “struggle on two fronts”: for a “military victory over Fascism” and for the removal of the Chamberlain government. [2] General Secretary Harry Pollitt was set to work to write a pamphlet, How to Win the War, which came out on 14 September and was hailed by Rajani Palme Dutt, before he knew better and before the pamphlet was withdrawn, as “being one of the finest things that [Pollitt] had produced, so clearly and simply presented”. It was William Gallacher, Communist MP for West Fife, who revealed this statement of Dutt’s to the CC, no doubt to Dutt’s embarrassment; and it is not the least juicy plum in this 50-year-old pudding of a book.
But on 14 September something else happened: the Daily Worker received a press telegram from the Soviet Union saying it was a robber war on both sides. Pollitt suppressed this telegram because it was against the line of the 2 September manifesto. However, at the next day’s meeting of the party’s Political Bureau, Dutt, ever responsive to his master’s voice, said the line would have to be revised. Indeed, Stalin had already given orders to that effect, in a private chat with Dimitrov on 7 September; Dimitrov had handed the word down to the Comintern Secretariat, which had approved his theses on 9 September, instructing the Communist Parties of France, Britain, Belgium and the USA in particular that they must immediately correct their political line. Monty Johnstone points out in his Introduction to About Turn that neither the Executive Committee of the Comintern (which had not held a plenary meeting for four years) nor its Presidium (of which Pollitt was a full and Gallacher a candidate member) was in any way involved in this policy switch. Dimitrov had then briefed D.F. Springhall, the CPGB’s representative at Comintern headquarters. Springhall got back from Moscow on the evening of 24 September with the theses in his head; they were to follow him in a more tangible form soon afterwards.
Waiting for Springhall must have been a trying time for the leading British Stalinists. But the week that followed his brief report must have been agonising. The CC stood adjourned for a week, and in the meantime the Daily Worker’s line on the war was totally unclear. It published material so fence-sitting and so confused that much damage was done to the party’s credibility, even amongst its own members. This resulted from sharp differences between the three-man secretariat (Dutt, Springhall and William Rust) to whom Pollitt had voluntarily relinquished his responsibilities as General Secretary, and the rest of the Political Bureau (Pollitt, Gallacher, J.R. Campbell, Emile Burns and Ted Bramley).
When the CC resumed on 2 October, Dutt complained bitterly of this “complete incoherence worse either than the old line or the new”, told his comrades that “the duty of a Communist is not to disagree but to accept”, and, in a thinly veiled reference to Pollitt, warned that anyone who deserted now would be branded for his political life. Gallacher complained of the “rotten”, “dirty”, “unscrupulous”, and “opportunist” factional methods used by Dutt and his supporters, those “three ruthless revolutionaries”. They had shown “mean despicable disloyalty” and it was impossible for him to work with them. Campbell, ardent defender of the Moscow Trials and pitiless scourge of Trotskyism, said the CPGB would soon be indistinguishable from “the filthy rabble of Trotskyists”. The shipbuilding worker Finlay Hart objected to Dutt’s telling them to “accept or else”. Maurice Cornforth, philosopher-to-be, said he agreed with something he had once heard Pollitt say: the Soviet Union could do no wrong. “This is what we have to stick to”, he observed, adding that the new line didn’t mean cooperation with the Trotskyists, whose line, he was certain, would be “based on anti-Soviet slanders”. Rust said Gallacher saw himself as a kind of elder statesman who attended meetings when he felt like it, while Campbell was presenting British imperialism as a man-eating tiger turned vegetarian. Burns said Dutt’s opening statement had been “peculiarly low and dastardly”. Dutt and his supporters had used “the most vile factional methods”; they wanted as many as possible to vote against the theses so that the could be “represented as the real nucleus of the Comintern to carry the line forward in the British party”. They were attempting to clear themselves with Moscow by explaining how pure they were. Springhall said no comrade who had a conversation with Comrade Dimitrov could fail to learn something from him, and accused Campbell of thinking that the Soviet Union was only concerned to save its own skin.
Harry Pollitt showed himself as reluctant as Campbell to depart from the Popular Front line of the Comintern’s 1935 Seventh Congress. In politics, he said, there was neither friendship nor loyalty. He told Dutt: “You won’t intimidate me ... I was in this movement practically before you were born.” He had never heard a report so bankrupt and devoid of explanation as Springhall’s. Springhall had had no responsibility for drafting the theses: he was just a messenger boy (“what Strang was for Chamberlain”). “I was never an office boy”, said Pollitt. “If there is one thing that is clear it is that the fight against Fascism has disappeared and Fascism has now, because of its non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, taken on a progressive role.” Soviet policy had antagonised important sections of the working class movement. The new line was in essence a betrayal of the labour movement’s struggle against Fascism – a word, he added bitterly, it was becoming unfashionable to mention. He himself wanted to “smash the Fascist bastards once and for all”.
So much for the first day of the resumed meeting. Little that was new was added on the second, final, day. John Gollan, Ted Bramley, Idris Cox and Peter Kerrigan expressed support for the new line, though Bramley wanted to know why there had been so little consultation by the Comintern (a point later re-emphasised by Gallacher); and Kerrigan (“I have always justified the Soviet Union in every action that the Soviet Union has taken”) said he had been flabbergasted when the Red Army marched into Poland. “If ... Comrade Pollitt is not convinced of the correctness of the line we will have to consider arranging for him to have a talk in Moscow”, suggested Cox, in words that still have a rather sinister ring 51 years later. Jimmy Shields, long a party functionary, said that “when the Soviet Union makes a move we should support it, whether it [such support] is considered to be mechanical or not”. The railway worker William Cowe said the Comintern was his “guiding light”. When the vote was taken, only Pollitt, Campbell and Gallacher voted against the new line – though Pollitt later asked, successfully, that Gallacher’s vote be recorded as being in favour.
Here is our closest, most intimate picture of the Stalinist method as it was used in Britain by these fearless fighters for Socialism, these battle-hardened cadres, these veterans of the Lenin School, these tenth-rate bureaucrats whom we watch here jockeying for the privilege of being recognised as Stalin’s trusted lieutenants in Britain. The picture I was given, when I joined the Young Communist League in 1942, and for the next 14 years, was of a party that had always been truly monolithic, where deep friendship and mutual loyalty had always prevailed. Pollitt and Dutt, we were given to understand, went together like Sohrab and Rustam, or port and nuts. The picture that emerges from this book is totally different, and helps to explain why Pollitt would never enter the Daily Worker building so long as Rust was its editor. (Perhaps it also helps to explain why Dutt left his private papers not to the CPGB, as one would have expected, but to the British Library.)
What also emerges, to an extraordinary degree, is the degree of criticism of, and even hostility to, the Soviet Union and the Comintern expressed in unguarded moments by people who, in public and for their own good reasons, were prepared to swallow those doubts and even forget later that they had ever entertained them. Dutt reports and reprobates this, in a striking passage where he speaks of “anti-International tendencies, a contemptuous attitude to the International, the kind of thing that began already from the time of the [Moscow] trials, talk of collapse of the International, talk of the Soviet Union following its interests”. These were “a reflection of enemy outlooks”. Even Rust, according to Gallacher, had complained that the CPGB was becoming the “propaganda department of the Soviet foreign office”.
And here surely is the key to the whole debate. For the British propaganda department of Stalin’s Foreign Office is precisely what they had by now become, after 15 years’ Stalinisation of their party. As T.A. Jackson had so presciently warned in 1924: “Our job is only to carry out all instructions at the double, and to stand to attention until the next order comes.” [3] The depth of the CPGB leaders’ uneasiness about their rôle, here revealed so poignantly and at the same time so farcically, shows Trotsky’s wisdom in advising his supporters, in the following June, to devote more attention to the rank and file of the Communist parties: “On the day that Moscow makes a half turn towards the democracies as a half friend, there will be a new explosion in the ranks of the CP. We must be ready to gain from it. I consider the possibilities in the CP very good despite the transitory radicalness of the CP, which cannot be for long.” [4]
Trotsky, not for the first time, was here over-optimistic about the immediate possibilities; but about Stalinism’s inherent volatility and instability he was absolutely right in the long term. The era of ‘explosions– is of course long over; Stalinism and its organisations are now decomposing before our eyes. Those who seek to profit politically from this process urgently need to learn a lot more about Stalinism’s past. This book makes a useful starting-points. [5]
Peter Fryer
Notes
1. Manifesto of the Fourth International on the Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, New York, Pathfinder Press, 1973, p.210.
2. The full text of this manifesto appears in 1939: The Communist Party of Great Britain and the War, ed. John Attfield and Stephen Williams, Lawrence and Wishart, 1984, pp.147-52.
3. Communist Review, Volume IV (1923-24), p.539.
4. Discussions with Trotsky: 12-15 June 1940, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, p.254. Trotsky was of course referring to the CPUSA, but his advice no doubt had more general application in the 1939-41 period.
5. Unfortunately the editing of this book is far from flawless. There are many fairly obvious mishearings or errors of transcription. The word ‘not’ should clearly come before the words ‘playing its part’ in line 19 on p.68; the word ‘decision’ in the bottom line of p.85 should, I imagine, be ‘discipline’; ‘work’ in line 8 of p.148 should undoubtedly be ‘war’; ‘Dutt’ in line 18 of p.150 seems to be an error for some other name; ‘loosen’ in line 34 of p.148 should perhaps be ‘lessen’; the word ‘Springhall’ should appear in bold type at the beginning of line 3 of p.188; ‘principal questions’ in line 27 of p.188 should probably be ‘principled questions’; ‘clearly’ in line 4 of p.202 should certainly be ‘clearer’; ‘Cox’ in line 6 of p.250 should plainly be ‘Kerrigan’; ‘don’t’ in line 19 of p.266 should surely have been deleted; lines 16-21 on p.292 seem to have strayed in from later in that section. There are similar errors elsewhere, not to mention a number of misprints. Nor are the Biographical Notes wholly reliable: eg Jim Roche ceased to be a CPGB full-timer in 1956, not 1957. To cap it all, the indexes are a disgrace: these lazily compiled and forbidding strings of page numbers virtually unrelieved by sub-headings are of little use to the serious student. For Lawrence and Wishart to charge £34.95 for such a shoddily edited book surpasses mere effrontery.
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Reviews
Alex Callinicos, Trotskyism, Open University Press, 1990, pp.103, £6.99
This short work contains a handy outline of the development of the Trotskyist movement and the first half of it can certainly be recommended, though it is heavily slanted towards the discussion of ideas alone and gives little of the flavour of the activity of their proponents in the labour movement at ground level. It is also slanted towards Britain and America, on the excuse of “the bias of my knowledge towards British and American Trotskyism” (p.3). Since the number of Trotskyists in one Latin American country alone well outnumbers the Trotskyists of Britain and the USA put together many times over, we may well question this affidavit, and our suspicions receive confirmation when out of a list of 16 supposedly prominent Marxist thinkers of today three of them were modestly attributed to the British Socialist Workers’ Party three pages earlier.
Thus the wisdom of the publishers in inviting this book from a representative of so aberrant and peculiarly British a group, which apparently now sees itself as the founder of something which is “generally known as the International Socialist tradition” (p.74) may well be doubted, for the link of the SWP with Trotskyism is very tenuous indeed, rejecting as it does transitional politics, the theory of permanent revolution, and the analysis of Soviet degeneration. Thus, for example, Callinicos appears to believe that it was the second half of the Bolshevik slogan – ‘Bread, Peace and Land’ that constituted its transitional character, as opposed to the first (‘All Power to the Soviets’, in effect calling upon the Menshevik and SR leaders to take power) (p.40). His definition of entrism as “a kind of raiding party for members” (p.34) says volumes for the politics of the SWP, but next to nothing about Trotskyism.
For it is when he turns to the politics of his own milieu, in the last two chapters, that he confirms Lenin’s dictum that a spoonful of tar can spoil a barrel of honey. This is most clearly shown when he tries to justify his previous contention that whereas Shachtman and Castoriades carried out “revisions of orthodoxy”, Tony Cliff’s endeavours marked a “return to classical Marxism” (pp.4-5).
We may well agree with him, for the truth is that state capitalist analyses of the Soviet Union do not originate within the Trotskyist movement at all, but within Second International Social Democracy in general, and in Menshevism in particular. It is true that he very easily disposes of a straw man when he repudiates Perry Anderson’s opinion that the father of ‘state capitalism’ was Karl Kautsky (p.77), pointing out correctly that Kautsky's concept was not the same as Cliff’s at all, hoping in this way to draw a blind over the whole topic. But the fact of the matter is that the credit for this particular form of state capitalism should go back to the Socialist Party of Great Britain, who taught Jock Haston his Marxism in the first place (cf. Against the Stream, p.251) and had promulgated the theory as far back as 1918. For it was Haston who first raised the question of state capitalism within the Revolutionary Communist Party, not only as a purely Russian phenomenon but in global terms, both in the group’s internal bulletin (War and the International, pp.182-5) and in a series of articles in Socialist Appeal (mid-August to mid-September 1947). In fact Cliff’s remit from Mandel when he first came to Britain was specifically to argue against these incipient ‘state capitalist’ heresies, and what happened was that in the course of the dispute the contestants changed sides. Anyone who wishes to make a serious investigation of the whole topic should consult the above sources, as well as the SPGB’s position, which was reissued as a pamphlet in the same year as Cliff first published his own, though we have to admit that Cliff’s logic is inferior to theirs, since they dated Russia's capitalist revolution back to 1917.
Al Richardson
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Book Reviews
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
******************
Reviews
Robert B. McKean, St Petersburg Between The Revolutions: Workers and Revolutionaries, June 1907-February 1917, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1990, pp606
This big book, written by a serious scholar (at the University of Stirling) on the basis of immense research, is a fine contribution to the growing literature on the social history of the Russian Revolution. This social history is not, of course, Trevelyan’s “history with the politics left out”!
McKean provides much information about the working class of St Petersburg – its distribution, composition and so on – in the period he has chosen, between the reactionary ‘coup d’état’ which closed the revolutionary epoch begun in 1905 and the onset of the February Revolution in 1917. In his analysis and commentary he challenges some widely accepted notions. For instance, he finds no evidence for the usual connexion made between the size of industrial enterprise and the degree of workers’ militancy:
Medium-sized engineering factories rather than gigantic enterprises were to the fore in terms of protest, in part precisely due to the fact that their intermediate size facilitated prompt mobilisation of employees.
Again, although the new workers who swarmed into the capital from the countryside as a result of Stolypin’s land policy have often been supposed to be a primitive, ignorant lot, McKean shows that they mostly came from areas with a relatively high level of literacy.
The author’s investigation leads him to the conclusion that the key to St Petersburg’s special rôle in the Russian labour movement is to be found in the concentration here of large numbers of young, male, skilled workers, with the particular importance of the city’s Vyborg District being due to the high proportion of them in its population. The metalworkers were outstanding in this respect – whereas there was a “relative paucity of Socialist cells” in the printing trade, even though this was a highly skilled trade, with the highest rate of literacy.
‘Social history’ is sometimes understood to mean, nowadays, history which plays down the rôle of elites and stresses the self-activity of ‘the masses’. While McKean certainly shows how little actual influence the emigré leaderships of the Socialist parties exerted in the movement on the ground in Russia during most of this period, he highlights the significance of what he calls the ‘sub-elite’, the praktiki, who were active in the factory committees, trade unions, insurance societies, educational clubs and so on. These men (and a few women) appear as the real achievers. They were often without guidance from their nominal leaders abroad. Thus, the author points out, with regard to the remarkable gains made by the Bolsheviks in 1913-14, that Lenin wrote nothing about trade union affairs in this period, and there is no evidence in the archives of any correspondence with Bolshevik trade unionists.
The Bolsheviks' commitment to a national political general strike from the summer of 1913, the electoral strategy in the Tsarist Duma elections, the decision to launch an attack on Menshevik union positions in the spring of 1913 and the resurrection of the slogan of a soviet in October 1915 were all cases where the activists took the lead. Lenin either gave them retrospective sanction or opposed them in vain.
When the local grassroots leaders considered a slogan sent to them from abroad to be inappropriate to their task, they would simply ignore it:
A textual analysis of 47 leaflets and appeals published illegally by Bolshevik militants between January 1915 and 22 February 1917 is most illuminating. Not a single leaflet mentioned the essential Leninist slogan of the defeat of Russia being the lesser evil ...
McKean has made especially thorough use of the records of the Okhrana, the secret police. Their reports supply, he says, “an invaluable corrective” to exaggerations and slanted accounts in contemporary newspapers and later memoirs. In particular they often expose the falsity of claims by Soviet historians that the Bolsheviks were responsible for some strike or demonstration. There was a great deal more cooperation on the ground between members of different Socialist parties and tendencies than official Soviet history would have us believe, and among the Okhrana’s chief concerns was the promotion of splits. It is startling how many agents and informers the police had in the labour movement: this information helps to explain the success of repressive measures taken at certain moments.
Prominent in many strike demands was a call for “polite address”. The constant insults to workers’ human dignity by their employers reflected the crude, “un-European” style of management in many factories – this although some of the most important employers were from the West (French, British, Swedish, etc). To autocracy in the state corresponded autocracy in the workplace. The St Petersburg bosses were notoriously a harder lot than their colleagues in Moscow.
In February 1917, however, they loosened their grip. McKean notes that when the troubles began, no thought seems to have been given to lockouts, with the result that revolutionary workers were able to use factory yards as meeting places, information centres and so on. Some of the industrialists may have sympathised with the movement at this stage. The author stresses the rôle of wartime conditions in making possible the fall of Tsardom. The foolish stubbornness of the military command in refusing to consider civilian needs, which resulted in severe shortages of goods in the cities by 1916, brought about, he thinks, a readiness on the part of sections of the middle classes to go along with the workers in the great demonstrations, in marked contrast to their indifference or hostility to the prewar labour unrest. McKean comes down strongly in support of the view that it was the World War that was crucial in settling the fall of the Romanov regime. He contrasts what happened in February 1917 with the crushing of the strike in July 1914 (sometimes presented as proof that Russia was already “on the brink of revolution” before the war began): in those days “the ancien regime in state and industry still retained sufficient cohesion and confidence in itself and the armed forces’ loyalty to act decisively and brutally”.
The book is, on the whole, well produced but it is a pity that the maps of St Petersburg provided were reprinted from another book, because the nomenclature of the city’s districts shown in them differs from that used in the text. Thus, the reader will look in vain in these maps for the ‘First Town’ and ‘Second Town’ districts often mentioned in the course of the author’s close examination of working class life in the capital.
Brian Pearce
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Reviews
Catherine Merridale, Moscow Politics and the Rise of Stalin: the Communist Party in the Capital 1925-32, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1990, pp328, £47.50
Catherine Merridale has produced a book that is both useful and interesting. It is extremely valuable as a study of the processes at work in the Soviet Union’s largest party organisation at the time of Stalin’s rise to power and this, in itself, fills an important gap in our understanding. The book is also particularly informative in its attempt to focus, not simply on the ‘high politics’ of leadership struggles, but on the workings of the party at the grassroots and the role of local activists there. This has been aided by Merridale’s access to Soviet archives including factory records of major plants, and of the Metal Workers Union.
Existing under the very nose of the apparatus Moscow was always heavily, directly and more consistently influenced by the centre than were other local parties. However, up until 1924 the Trotskyist opposition did have significant support amongst youth in Moscow’s higher educational institutes, although less among workers than in some other areas. Merridale provides some useful documentation on this point. However, many readers of this journal will not agree with Merridale’s characterisations of the politics of the various left oppositions. For example she attacks the Trotsky-Zinoviev group for using the “same extreme language as the Stalin-Bukharin majority, not seeking common ground with their opponents, but seeing them as betrayers of Leninism” (p.23). She falsely claims that “no Bolshevik opposition after 1921 included soviet democracy in its programme” (p.24),while the Platform of the Joint Opposition of 1927 clearly raised just such a call (see Chapter 5). However she does provide us with useful evidence of the continuing support for the left, right up to its outright suppression in 1927.
As an example, the Democratic Centralists, part of the Joint Opposition, had the loyalty of the Klara Zetkin plant, right up to 1927. The Opposition had a considerable base in Sokol’niki, an area that Merridale explains as containing a great concentration of government and state institutions, whilst at one stage it could count on 62 cells in the Krasnaya Presnaya district.
At the time of the fight with the left in the mid and late 1920s the Moscow party apparatus was in the hands of the Bukharinite Uglanov. Merridale’s account of his regime is very illuminating indeed. It comes at a time when certain Soviet and western historians have suggested that the Bukharinites would have been a democratic alternative to the ‘command administrative’ system of both Trotsky and Stalin. She points out that Uglanov was a rigid bureaucratic centraliser who used the apparatus to exclude the New Opposition from political life in the capital, whose chief representative was Kamenev – the author seems to have a softer spot for him than for other opposition leaders. Unlike in Leningrad the New Opposition made no attempt to mobilise rank and file support for their platform. Yet Uglanov attempted to maintain an iron grip on the party organisation on behalf of Bukharin and Stalin.
However, Merridale points out that, once the Stalin-Bukharin bloc started to split, Uglanov saw his own power base shift from under him very rapidly. He was replaced as Moscow Party Secretary by Molotov, and cast into the ranks of the Right Opposition. In her discussion of the activities of the Right Opposition, Merridale makes it abundantly clear that they were simply a conservative part of the apparatus. They made no attempt to organise at the grassroots, but, appearing as the supporters of the existing order, they could command considerable support from the top levels of the government bureaucracy, trade unions and factory directors.
Merridale here highlights the depth of the fissures that existed within the party and governmental apparatus at this time, and she does it very well. Those fissures were to widen. Molotov was replaced by Bauman, who displayed those traits of voluntarism that were at the heart of the development of the Stalinist system. He lost no time in trying to move too rapidly in the campaign of collectivisation, and he was eventually replaced by Kaganovich, one of the most loyal of Stalin’s men. By 1930 the emerging Stalin clique had their hands firmly on the capital city’s party organisation. Yet even they were to have to do battle to oust the Secretary of the most prestigious Krasnaya Presnaya district, Ryutin, who lost his post only in 1932.
But, as we have already said, Merridale’s book is not simply about leadership battles along the road to Stalinism. Her intention is to explore the interrelationship between the emerging Stalinist system and the rank and file. Here, her thesis is summed up in the following way:
What is beyond question, however, is that the rank and file contributed to the implementation of Stalin’s policies after 1928. There is no doubt that their enthusiasm, however brutal its consequences in many instances, was indispensable to the Stalinist ‘great turn’. (p.67)
Here, broadly speaking, she puts herself alongside the school of revisionist historians of the Soviet Union in the West. They have broken with the old totalitarian school that saw the bureaucratic apparatus as monolithic and all-embracing, while the masses were but passive puppets. Before Merridale, others, such as Lynne Viola in Best Sons of the Fatherland (1987), have stressed the degree of popular motivation and enthusiasm that accompanied the ‘Great Turn’. Coming at a time when many Soviet historians are turning to totalitarian theories, this school offers many refreshing insights compared with the dull old Stalinist and Western orthodoxies. It points to the very real enthusiasm shown by a layer of workers for the ‘turn’ in its earliest years, and argues that, at least at this time, party activists were not simply passive dupes.
But the problem that they all have, including Merridale, is in proving that this groundswell actually helped to create the Stalinist system. She points to the highly contradictory nature of the party in the mid and late 1920s. She disagrees with Trotskyists that the Lenin Levy and subsequent mass recruitment drives simply filled the party with passive political illiterates:
To suggest that the new generation were all passive dupes of the General Secretary is to underestimate the interest the average worker had in the progress of the revolution, both in general and in terms of his or her prospects in the new society. Those who did not have this interest tended to stay away altogether. (p.139)
The attempt to create a mass party was indeed fraught with contradictions for the emerging bureaucracy. On the one hand, it was formed on the basis of shop and shift cells. On the other hand, the increase in its proletarian composition was also accompanied by the development of an ever greater network of supervisory committees to oversee the rank and file. However, Merridale documents a degree of grassroots vitality in the late 1920s within a party supervised by the emergent bureaucracy, but organised in the plants and workshops.
Party meetings at the Krasnyi Proletarii factory lasted until 3 or 4am despite proposals from higher up that such meetings be limited to three hours only. Merridale provides examples of lower party organs organising strikes in the late 1920s and in 1930. And there was often conflict in the plants between the party and a management with supposedly supreme powers under edinochalie (one man management).
Yet there is a real danger of drawing too many conclusions from this picture of rank and file activity, however good a corrective it may be to previous accounts. By 1932 most of the accoutrements of a mass party had been dissolved in order to guarantee a more smoothly running machine for the apparatus. Shop and shift cells were abolished. Political education remained a low priority as the agenda of party bodies was normally dominated by questions of production and productivity. Merridale’s discussion of the contradictions between their educational tasks and fulfilment of the plan presented to party officials is fascinating. As the magazine Propagandist described it in September 1930:
Propagandists with other party responsibilities left the preparation of classes until the last moment, reading teaching materials on the tram on the way in. (p.l50)
This is not surprising in an organisation that had ordained subordination to the claims of industrial management:
The party cells must actively promote the fulfilment of the principle of edinochalie in the whole system of industrial management. (quoted p.168)
Such a situation created very real tensions, as Merridale demonstrates. Most high ranking technical personnel were not party members, but were in many cases inherited from Tsarism or the non-party technical intelligentsia. In the giant Serp i Molot (Hammer and Sickle) factory in 1925, only two members of the factory administration and not one foreman were party members. Hence the contradiction between a worker based party and a management whose dictates the workers were not allowed to challenge by the apparatus of that same party. And hence the need for the Stalinist clique finally to transform the party into an apparatus party.
While the book claims to prove that a movement of an enthusiastic rank and file shaped and, more importantly, supported the ‘Great Turn’, it often provides contrary evidence. For instance, in 1929 party election meetings at AMO and Serp i Molot failed even to muster a quorum. Whilst there was support amongst a large section of worker activists for a ‘second revolution’, which involved a ‘workers promotion’ system under apparatus patronage, this was definitely on the wane after 1930. Factory cells again started to give voice to workers’ grievances, and accordingly faced a clampdown on their residual independent rights. Even if the rank and file had been used against the right wing in the bureaucratic apparatus, they now constituted a potential challenge, not simply a support mechanism, for the emerging Stalinist regime. They could be used against the Moscow right because Nepmen, kulaks and their Moscow patron, Uglanov, were deeply unpopular amongst the Moscow workers. NEP meant 25 per cent unemployment amongst the capital’s industrial workers. But when they started to demand some of the fruits of the ‘second revolution’, the bureaucratic apparatus clamped down on them ever more firmly.
The book is a most valuable contribution to our understanding of the rise to power of the Stalin clique. Unfortunately, perhaps because she does not choose to deal with ‘high politics’, Merridale does not really look at the development and make-up of the group around Stalin. We need more such studies. Merridale has shown the range of materials that can be used. She has also shown some of the key themes that need to be. explored. Whilst having a few reservations about some of the book’s conclusions, this study is thoroughly recommended. It is just a great pity that it is so expensive.
Dave Hughes
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Reviews
Geoffrey Roberts, Unholy Alliance: Stalin’s Pact With Hitler, IB Tauris, London, 1989, pp.296, £19.95
This is at the same time both a bad and an important book – quite often for the same reasons. Published on the fiftieth anniversary of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, it is a child of glasnost, being the first Western study of the alliance to have made use of previously closed Soviet archive materials. This alone makes the book worth reading, for, as the author correctly points out, an enforced and near exclusive reliance on non-Soviet documentation has impeded attempts to understand the origins, significance and workings of the Pact. The author believes that his study of newly-available Soviet materials has enabled him to resolve previous doubts and differences over the Pact that were in part a result of this difficulty, and points to a series of conclusions, which he summarises at the beginning of his book. Those of special interest are as follows:
1.Stalin only signed his Pact with Hitler after the failure of his genuine attempts to secure an anti-Nazi alliance with Western bourgeois democracies.
2.Consequently, “the final decision of the Soviet Government to opt for rapprochement with Germany was not made until mid-August 1939” (p.5).
3.Stalin signed the Pact because he feared “Britain and France might abandon the USSR in the face of the coming German invasion of Poland” (p.5).
Before considering whether the author has indeed, on the strength of the evidence he presents, proved his case, something needs to be said about his approach to the subject. Should not a book devoted to such a momentous alliance place the Pact in the broader setting of the history of Russian-German relations? This it does not do, despite their importance not only for the countries in question, but for the history of Europe and indeed the world. For example, the reader is told nothing of earlier agreements by Russia and Prussia/Germany to partition Poland and more generally, in the words of the Pact, to create “respective spheres of interest”. This is surely a glaring omission, as is the lack of any serious treatment of the Marxist and especially Leninist response to the question of German-Russian relations. And it is not as if all this material is in closed archives. As early as 1851, the founders of Marxism were discussing how to “take as much as possible away from the Poles in the West, to man their fortresses ... with Germans on the pretext of defence, to let them stew in their own juice, to send them into battle, gobble bare their land, fob them off with promises of Riga and Odessa and, should it be possible to get the Russians moving, to ally oneself with the latter and compel the Poles to give way”. [1] Real Politik with a vengeance! The controversies surrounding Lenin’s precise relations with the Kaiser’s government during and after the episode of the ‘sealed train’ might also have been worth a mention. [2] Instead Roberts confines himself exclusively to the Soviet period of Russo-German relations. Yet here too there are serious omissions. There is only the most cursory mention of the Russian-Polish war of 1920, and, what is more serious, no reference whatsoever to the secret agreement concluded during the war between German army leaders and the Soviet government (chiefly Trotsky) to partition Poland along the pre-1914 frontier, an alliance that was to involve joint military action between the then advancing troops of the Red Army and units of the rabidly anti-Communist (but also anti-Polish) Free Corps stationed illegally in East Prussia. [3] But since the author’s intention is to present the Stalin-Hitler Pact as a bolt from the blue of an August 1939 sky, his failure to cite its possible precedents is perhaps understandable.
Roberts fares no better in his treatment of German ‘national Bolshevism’. Considering that its prime objective of an alliance with the USSR against the decadent Western liberal plutocracies was consummated by the Pact of 1939, one would have thought that this exotic – but highly symptomatic – political current would have merited more than a single paragraph (p.35). Surely he could have told us what Lenin thought of it, or made at least a passing reference to the outrageous ‘Schlagater’ speech delivered by Karl Radek to the Comintern Plenum of June 1923. Of the two, Lenin’s comments obviously carried greater weight and therefore, for us, have more interest. For example, in December 1920 he referred to a “political mix up in Germany” wherein the “German Black Hundreds [pro-Nazis – RB] sympathised with the Russian Bolsheviks in the same way as the Spartacus League does ...”, adding the telling point that this alignment had become “the basis ... of our foreign policy ...” [4] Another speech, made at the same time (but expunged, for obvious reasons, from editions of Lenin’s Collected Works) was even more explicit, referring to “an independent Poland” as being “very dangerous to Soviet Russia”. Moreover, “the Germans hate Poland and will at any time make common cause with us to strangle Poland ...” [5] Maybe the author’s tendency to idealise the early years of Soviet rule (“diplomacy, even of the propagandist kind initially practised by the Bolsheviks, was eclipsed by revolutionary endeavour”, p.26) partly accounts for such blind spots. The ‘Third Period’ phase of the Comintern again saw the Soviet leadership – now in the hands of Stalin – speculating on the supposed advantages of an alliance with German chauvinism, only this time in the form of unadorned National Socialism. [6] Only by ignoring such evidence – and there is much more – is it possible to sustain the book’s thesis on the origins of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. But even in the area where the author claims a special expertise – the new Soviet materials – his research, which is the most interesting part of the book, is vitiated by a determination to prove, come what may, that the Pact was forced on Stalin by a Western refusal to stand up to Hitler. Stated briefly, Roberts believes that what other historians and analysts have interpreted as signals to Hitler (notably Stalin’s March 1939 speech to the Nineteenth Congress of the CPSU, and the sacking of Stalin’s Jewish Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov two months later) have been seriously misconstrued, and that in fact Stalin was earnestly pursuing a military alliance with the West against Hitler right up to the very eve of the Pact’s signing on 23 August 1939. Yet all the evidence to refute this claim is to be found in one single collection of documents, available to the public since its publication in 1948 by the US State Department. Significantly, much of Roberts’ book is taken up with trying to minimise either the significance or reliability of this documentary collection, culled after the war from the Nazi Foreign Ministry archives. It must be said, whatever the book’s other merits, in this endeavour it fails lamentably. The first document in the collection is dated 17 April, but in fact the final turn had already been made. Even before Munich, Stalin had made clear, through a speech by Litvinov to the League of Nations on 23 September 1938 that the USSR “had no obligation to Czechoslovakia in the event of French indifference to an attack on her ...” and that the USSR consequently had a “moral right” to renounce its pact with the beleaguered Czechs [7], which of course Stalin promptly did, doubtless much to Hitler’s gratification. Hints of a possible alliance between the ostensible enemies quickly ensued. At a diplomatic reception in Berlin on 12 January 1939, Hitler singled out for special and friendly attention the new Soviet Ambassador Merekalov. Early in February, during a dinner party at the home of a German industrialist, General Keitel (executed after the war for atrocities on the Eastern front) discussed with the Soviet Military Attache the possibility of combined action against Poland. [8] Hitler was informed at once. The wheels were beginning to turn. Next came Stalin’s speech of 10 March to the Nineteenth Party Congress, in which he accused the Western Allies of inciting conflict between Germany and Russia. Russia was not going to “pull the chestnuts out of the fire” for anyone. Of all the above events, Roberts mentions but the last – and only then to dismiss its significance as an olive branch to Hitler. Stalin “had little option, in the face of continuing German hostility, but adherence to the aim of creating an anti-Fascist alliance ...” (p.119). But, as we have seen, that hostility was waning. Hitler’s claims on Poland, followed by Western guarantees to maintain its existing frontiers, meant for the Nazis the risk of the dreaded war on two fronts, a prospect that drove Hitler inexorably towards securing his eastern flank by drawing Stalin into a new Polish partition. A Nazi diplomat reported that he could “discern in Stalin’s speech certain signs of a new orientation”. Roberts, despite all that ensued, does not think so. Yet sure enough, in a speech on 1 April, Hitler used the same code, repudiating any desire to “pull chestnuts out of the fire” (these were his actual words) by fighting the West’s battles against Russia. This speech was subsequently circulated by Hitler’s Foreign Minister Ribbentrop to the heads of all the European diplomatic missions. [9] On 12 May Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry issued a directive to the German press to maintain a total silence on relations with the USSR, following it up with another on 31 May warning that “now is not the time for an anti-Soviet campaign”. These moves only make any sense in the context of a Soviet approach, not to the Western Allies, but Hitler.
Roberts, it should be remembered, attributes no significance whatsoever to Stalin’s speech (or Hitler’s response to it, which he passes over) in preparing the ground for the Pact. Yet the documentary evidence totally refutes him. In the early hours of 24 August, during the celebrations that followed the signing of the Pact by Stalin and Ribbentrop, Molotov “raised his glass to Stalin – who through his speech of March this year, which had been well understood in Germany – had brought about the reversal in political relations”. Well understood in Germany ... but not by Roberts, who sees in it an attempt to secure an alliance with the Western Allies against Hitler! (Not to be outdone, Stalin also proposed a toast: “I know how much the German nation loves its Fuehrer; I should therefore like to drink to his health.”) [10] This is not the only document Roberts prefers in this instance to ignore, or in others, to misconstrue. Following hard on the heels of Stalin’s 10 March speech came the Nazi invasion of the remainder of Czechoslovakia on 15 March. Three days later Litvinov delivered to the German ambassador in Moscow a note refusing to recognise the ensuing Nazi occupation as in any way legal. Yet on 17 April the Soviet ambassador called at the German foreign office in order to secure the continued “fulfillment of certain contracts for war material by the Skoda works” [11], which were, of course, situated in Nazi-occupied Czech territory. The report speaks of the Nazi response to the request as being regarded by the Soviets as “a test” of German intentions towards the USSR. The hint being taken, the talk then drifted towards and around the subject of the possibility of a drastic improvement in German-Soviet relations. Merekalov left almost at once to report back to Moscow. How does Roberts treat this encounter? Predictably as a routine diplomatic exchange, and a bid by a new ambassador to advance his career (pp.126-7). He also neglects to point out that the Soviet request to supply the requested war equipment was granted – hardly the action of a regime bent on immediate war with its customer.
Roberts’ next big hurdle is the sacking of Litvinov. It is the one that more than any other brings him down. On 3 May Litvinov, the salesman and, let us grant the possibility, maybe the advocate of a pro-Western, and therefore anti-Nazi orientation, was dismissed from his post as Soviet Foreign Minister. Roberts observes (correctly) that “in the West the most popular explanation had been that Litvinov (a Jew and an opponent of rapprochement with Nazi Germany) was removed to facilitate negotiations with Hitler ...” (p.128). Like many academics (and, it should also be said, Marxists of various persuasions) Roberts suffers from an organic aversion to anything that is either popular or obvious. The truth can’t ever be that simple. The more the evidence and the general consensus seem to point in one direction, the greater the urge to look in another. Something that is widely believed and appears obvious may or may not be true ... but whether it is true or not has nothing to do with either. Lacking any hard evidence to refute the ‘popular’ view, to which we shall return in a moment, Roberts asks us to believe that Litvinov’s removal was partly the result of a routine domestic party purge instigated by Beria, and partly also a “reshuffling” (sic) of diplomatic staff designed to bring forward a “new generation of Soviet diplomats” (p.l29). Rather like the Red Army “reshuffle” of 1937 perhaps? Only Litvinov was more fortunate than his colleagues, merely being placed under house arrest. Insofar as Litvinov’s replacement by Molotov sent out any international signals, says Roberts, they were intended not for Hitler but the Western Allies – “it would put further pressure on the French and British to come to terms” (pp.130-1). Yet no evidence is cited either to suggest that this was the intention, or that its supposed recipients perceived it as such. Rather the contrary. On 4 May 1939 the German embassy in Moscow reported back to Berlin on the sensational sacking of Litvinov, regarded – possibly correctly – as the major enemy of Nazi Germany in the Soviet leadership: “The decision apparently is connected with the fact that differences of opinion arose in the Kremlin on Litvinov’s negotiations” [with the British and French – RB]. There then follows a reference to Stalin’s 10 March speech and then this final comment: “Molotov (no Jew) is held to be ‘most intimate friend and closest collaborator of Stalin’. His appointment is apparently to guarantee that the foreign policy will be continued strictly in accordance with Stalin’s ideas”. [12] The very next day the Soviet Charge in Berlin reinforced this impression in a conversation with a German diplomat, inquiring whether the removal of Litvinov “would cause a change in our [the Nazi] position toward the Soviet Union”. [13] A signal to Britain and France? I find it incredible that Roberts, who has surely read this document, sees fit to pass it over in silence, preferring instead his entirely unfounded explanation of a domestic purge and renewed commitment to an alliance with the Western Allies.
The benchmark for this approach is established on the book’s very first page, when the reader is asked to accept its axiom that until the Pact, the Stalin regime had been “the bulwark of anti-Fascism”. As evidence of the Kremlin’s role as “the citadel of resistance to Fascism and militarism” he cites Soviet arms supplies to Spain and support for sanctions against Italy (p.44), overlooking that, in the latter case, Stalin continued to supply oil to Mussolini for the duration of his invasion of Ethiopia and intervention in Spain. Other judgements also cry out for comment. On page 77 we are told that Stalin’s policy in Spain “was unequivocally directed towards a Republican victory” and that to ascribe any “sinister, machiavellian motives” to it was “largely fantasy”. In order to sustain his case here, Roberts lumps together Soviet and International Brigade forces into a collective total of 40,000 men (p.78), thereby obliterating the vital distinction between the combatants of the brigades and the small and, from a military point of view, largely token Soviet personnel, who were expressly forbidden by Stalin to perform anything other than an advisory and instructional role to the Republican forces. The price the Republic had to pay for Stalin’s aid is so well documented that one can only gasp at the comment, on page 79, that NKVD terror apart, Stalin’s intervention in Spain was an “otherwise creditable episode” in pre-war Soviet foreign policy. Then in a puerile section (of less than two pages) on the reaction of the Comintern to the Pact, the new line is presented as “defeatist” (p.175). That was true (though not in the classic Leninist sense) only of those countries still fighting Nazi Germany, where the line was to make peace on the terms proposed jointly by Stalin and Hitler in October 1939, but not of those countries already conquered by the Nazis. Here the Comintern played a Quisling role, hiring itself out to Hitler in competition with home grown Nazi traitors. This policy met with some startling initial successes, notably in Belgium and Norway. [14]
For German itself, a third policy was adopted, one of a thinly veiled and utterly shameful ‘defencism’, together with demands that anti-Nazi opponents of the Pact be denounced to the Gestapo. Needless to say, this policy was advanced from the safety of neutral Sweden. In the immortal words of Walter Ulbricht, “if Germany were conquered [by Britain and France] the German workers would be treated in the same way” as were the workers in those countries – “the muzzling of the workers’ press, the establishment of concentration camps” [15], the inference being that by defending the Third Reich against the Western Allies, the German workers would prevent the establishment of censorship and concentration camps in their own country. (In fact, it was Hitler’s defeat that brought their abolition, at least in the Western zone. In the East it proved to be business as usual.) Of all Stalinist utterances, this must surely rank as not only the most perfidious, but also the most stupid. Roberts’ failure to recognise or come to grips with such nuances suggests that the Comintern is alien territory. But then so are Stalin-style elections. On page 189 we are informed, dead pan, that in the Baltic states, “elections were held to the new peoples’ assemblies which voted on 21 July to seek incorporation into the USSR, a wish which was duly granted by the Supreme Soviet in early August”, neglecting only to add that in each case the vote was unanimous. No mention is made at all of the hideous deportations and exterminations carried out by Stalin in the territories granted to him by his Nazi allies, the victims of which run into millions. In fact, so greatly appalling was the NKVD terror that there were recorded instances of Jewish refugees from the Nazi zone fleeing, or being driven, back to their near certain deaths under the lash of Stalinist pogroms. (See, for example, Nazi-Soviet Relations, p.128.)
The treatment of Stalin’s military assistance to Hitler during the Pact is likewise very sketchy, filling barely a single page. Mention is made of navigational aid provided by a radio station at Minsk for German aircraft attacking Poland from 1 September, but not of the joint Nazi-Soviet military headquarters stationed at Bialystock which coordinated the final annihilation of Polish armed resistance following Stalin’s stab in the back of 17 September. [16] The security Stalin provided for Hitler’s eastern front, enabling him to strike uninhibitedly in the West against Scandinavia, the low countries and France, is well known (though not evaluated by Roberts). But Stalin also rendered Hitler direct and active military assistance. German warships were equipped in Soviet yards (chiefly Murmansk) and allowed passage via the summer northern route into the Pacific, there to attack Allied shipping. [17] At a crucial moment during the Nazi naval landings in Norway (April 1940), a German tanker arrived from Murmansk, laden with Soviet oil, to refuel Hitler’s warships and landing craft. [18] And all this in addition to substantial, and in some instances indispensable, supplies of raw materials and fuel to the Nazi war machine right up to the invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941.
Just why Roberts chose to write such an astonishing book is, I must confess, something of a mystery. All one can say for certain is that he elected to follow a path other than that dictated by the vast body of evidence available to him. I became convinced of this on reading his review, written for The Independent nearly a year after the appearance of his book on the Pact, of a new Soviet biography of Maxim Litvinov. Naturally, the purge of 3 May figures prominently in the review. But once again, Roberts cannot accept the possibility that Litvinov’s fall could have anything at all to do with changes in Stalin's policy towards Nazi Germany. “The problem with this view is that Soviet policy towards Nazi Germany did not change until that summer.” Once again he assumes what he is obliged to prove. He forces his opinions onto the facts, instead of basing his arguments upon them. The ghost of Beria is invoked once again to explain the elimination of the entire Litvinov team of diplomats. (Where have we heard that before?) As for his successor, Molotov’s “pursuance of Litvinov’s policy of alliance with the West was so successful that by August, the USSR had opened negotiations for a military pact with Britain and France. It was only when these failed that Stalin finally turned to Hitler.”
This is, quite simply, untrue. These negotiations began in Moscow on 12 August. So even if we were to concede Roberts’ arguments that the Pact was born later than all the sources suggest, and that only in “the first two weeks of August” did “Soviet foreign policy begin to make an appreciable shift in favour of an accommodation with Germany” (p.151), it remains to be explained how it was that even as War Minister Voroshilov conducted these “successful” negotiations with British and French military officials in Moscow, a yet more successful Ribbentrop was preparing to fly to the Kremlin to sign his Pact with Stalin. [19] Could it not be that Stalin’s dalliance with Britain and France was a cover (and a spur to Hitler) for the consummation of his Pact with the Nazis? Trotsky certainly thought so, and nothing in this book persuades me that he was wrong.
As far back as the period of the Nazi rise to power, Trotsky considered Stalin’s collaboration with the Nazis in such enterprises as the Prussian Red-Brown Referendum of 1931 [20] evidence of a Kremlin foreign policy aimed at “keeping alive German-French antagonisms”. [21] When the issue of Stalin’s German policy arose at the 1937 Dewey Commission investigation into the Moscow Trials (understandably in view of Stalinist accusations that Trotsky was a Nazi agent), Trotsky recalled how Isvestia greeted the Hitler Nazi regime in Germany ... “the USSR is the only state that is not nourished on hostile sentiments towards Germany ...” It was Hitler who repulsed Stalin, not the other way round. [22] Pressed on this point, Trotsky insisted that “Stalin declared and it was repeated in the press, that ‘we never opposed the Nazi movement in Germany’ ...” [23] All these observations, it should be remembered, were made at the high tide of the ‘People’s Front’ episode, when Litvinov’s pro-Western policy appeared to predominate. They suggest that almost alone amongst serious commentators of the day (and even now historians like Roberts, who with the supposed wisdom of hindsight and access to archives, should know better) Trotsky never took very seriously Stalin’s policy of ‘collective security’ against Nazi Germany, deriding it as a “lifeless fiction” and predicting, even before the conclusion of the Munich agreement, that “we may now expect with certainty Soviet diplomacy to attempt a rapprochement with Hitler ...” [24]
Trotsky pursued his hunch (for he lacked any tangible proof) on 6 March 1939, wondering whether a Stalinist boycott of a New York anti-Nazi demonstration was simply “conservative stupidity and hatred of the Fourth International” (for amongst the rally’s sponsors was the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party) or evidence that orders had gone out from Moscow to “muzzle” all anti-Fascist activities “so as not to interfere with the negotiations between Moscow and Berlin diplomats ... the next few weeks will bring their verification ...” [25] In fact it took four days, for on 10 March Stalin made his first public signal to Berlin. The very next day, Trotsky described the “chestnuts” speech as a sign of Stalin’s “new turn towards reaction”. While unsure as yet of the tempo or prospects of this new orientation, Trotsky nevertheless concluded that on the strength of this speech alone, “Stalin is preparing to play with Hitler”. [26] And that at a time when the Western Allies, taking fright after the consequences of their capitulation at Munich became clear, had begun to court Stalin!
Here too Trotsky’s estimation diverges totally from that of Roberts (not to speak of all Stalinist, and most leftist inclined historians and commentators): “Today all the efforts of the British government are concentrated on concluding an agreement with Moscow – against Germany.“ Hitler, fearing encirclement and a possible war on all fronts, likewise looked to the Kremlin for insurance. As for Stalin, “from the first day of the National Socialist regime” he had “systematically and steadily shown his readiness for friendship with Hitler”.[27] Only when met with hostility did Stalin pass over to “collective security” and its political counterpart, the People’s Front. But even then, it was possible to detect “more intimate notes intended for the ears of Berchtesgarden ...” Consequently, in the scramble for partners, “if at last Hitler responds to Moscow’s diplomatic advances, Chamberlain will be rebuffed ... Stalin will sign a treaty with England only if he is convinced that agreement with Hitler is out of the question”. [28] Roberts’ entire book revolves around the contrary thesis that Stalin turned to Hitler because he felt let down by London and Paris.
Once signed, the Pact was roundly denounced by Trotsky. He failed to find in it any of the virtues detected by some of his more recent epigones. The Kremlin “preferred the status quo, with Hitler as its ally” to any advances for the workers’ movement. As for the rudely discarded ‘People’s Front’, it had proved to be nothing but a “low comedy”. Although unaware of the Pact’s secret protocols, he correctly predicted that “in exchange for Poland, Hitler will give Moscow freedom of action in regard to the Baltic states”. [29] And in view of his earlier and repeated declarations on the subject, he was surely entitled to point out “since 1933 I have been showing and proving to the world press that Stalin is seeking an understanding with Hitler”. Brushing aside apologists for Stalin's ‘treason’ (and they are amazingly still in business today), Trotsky damned the Pact as “a capitulation of Stalin before Fascist imperialism with the end of preserving the Soviet oligarchy”. Not, it should be noted, the “gains of the revolution”. The Pact’s only “merit” was that “in unveiling the truth it broke the back of the Comintern”. [30] Trotsky found “completely absurd” the idea that Stalin’s seizures of territory involved any challenge to Hitler. (Muffled echoes of this argument can still be found in Trotskyist publications.) “It is much more probable that Hitler himself inspired Stalin to occupy eastern Poland and to lay his hands on the Baltic states.” The documentary evidence here proves Trotsky completely correct, as it does also in the case of Stalin’s “shameful war” against Finland. [31] Finally – and here too in defiance of contemporary ‘progressive’ opinion – Trotsky foresaw that Stalin’s diplomacy, far from averting Hitler’s long announced crusade against the USSR, had instead enabled Hitler to eliminate the Polish ‘buffer’ protecting Russia from a Nazi invasion. [32] Perhaps part of the difficulty in assessing Stalin’s reasons for concluding his alliance with Hitler comes from assuming that his motives were purely political. In his uncompleted biography of Stalin, Trotsky argues that “Stalin’s union with Hitler satisfied his sense of revenge ... He took great personal delight in negotiating secretly with the Nazis while appearing to negotiate openly with the friendly missions of England and France ... He is tragically petty”. [33] (Lenin – amazingly late for one normally so shrewd – also discovered spite to be one of his General Secretary’s mainsprings of action.)
Going back over Trotsky’s writings on German-Soviet relations, one cannot but be impressed at the way in which his step-by-step analysis of events is, not only in outline, but often in the smallest details, borne out by documentary materials to which, in contrast with Roberts, he could not possibly have had access. One wonders what he would have been able to achieve with them.
Robin Blick
Notes
1. Engels to Marx, 27 May 1851, K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Volume 38, p.364. Evidently inspired by his notorious theory of ‘counter-revolutionary nations’, Engels describes the Poles as a ‘finished nation’, to be contrasted unfavourably not only with Germans but Russians, whose racial virtues were such that as a result of interbreeding with them, “even the Jews acquire Slav cheekbones”. (ibid., pp.363-4)
2. See for example the documents presented in Zeman, Germany and the Revolution in Russia, OUP, 1958, and Pearson, The Sealed Train, Macmillan, 1975.
3. For this and other instances of early Soviet collaboration with German nationalist forces, see Adam Westoby and Robin Blick, Early Soviet Designs on Poland, in Survey, Volume 26 no.4 (117), Autumn 1982.
4. V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 31, p.300.
5. Westoby and Blick, p.124.
6. For more detail, see Robert Black (Robin Blick), Fascism in Germany, London 1975.
7. Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy (Ed. Jane Degras), Volume 3, p.305, OUP, 1953. On Stalin’s indifference to the fate of Czechoslovakia, see Erich Wollenberg, The Red Army, London, 1940, pp.284-5.
8. A. Rossi, The Russo-German Alliance, London 1950, p.6.
9. Ibid., p.8.
10. Nazi-Soviet Relations, p.76.
11. Op. cit., p.1.
12. Op. cit., pp.2-3.
13. Op. cit., p.3.
14. See F. Borkenau, European Communism, Faber and Faber, 1953, pp.253-7.
15. Quoted in op. cit., p.249.
16. Rossi, op. cit., p.60.
17. Rossi, op. cit., p.96.
18. D. Irvine, Hitler’s War, Macmillan, 1985, p.98.
19. On Stalinin’s double dealing see: Rossi, op. cit., pp.37-8, Documents on Polish-Soviet Relations, Volume 1, London 1961; Wollenburg, pp.290-2.
20. See Black, op. cit., for details and background.
21. Documents of the Fourth International, Pathfinder, 1973, p.25.
22. The Case of Leon Trotsky, Merit, 1968, p.293.
23. Op. cit., p.311.
24. L.D. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1938-39, Pathfinder, 1974, p.29.
25. Op. cit., p.203.
26. Op. cit., pp.216-9.
27. Op. cit., p.350.
28. Op. cit., pp.350-5.
29. L.D. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, Pathfinder, 1973, pp.76-7.
30. Op. cit., pp.81-3.
31. Op. cit., pp.113, 116.
32. Op. cit., pp.79, 97.
33. L.D. Trotsky, Stalin, London 1947, p.415.
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
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Reviews
Robert B. McKean, St Petersburg Between The Revolutions: Workers and Revolutionaries, June 1907-February 1917, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1990, pp606
This big book, written by a serious scholar (at the University of Stirling) on the basis of immense research, is a fine contribution to the growing literature on the social history of the Russian Revolution. This social history is not, of course, Trevelyan’s “history with the politics left out”!
McKean provides much information about the working class of St Petersburg – its distribution, composition and so on – in the period he has chosen, between the reactionary ‘coup d’état’ which closed the revolutionary epoch begun in 1905 and the onset of the February Revolution in 1917. In his analysis and commentary he challenges some widely accepted notions. For instance, he finds no evidence for the usual connexion made between the size of industrial enterprise and the degree of workers’ militancy:
Medium-sized engineering factories rather than gigantic enterprises were to the fore in terms of protest, in part precisely due to the fact that their intermediate size facilitated prompt mobilisation of employees.
Again, although the new workers who swarmed into the capital from the countryside as a result of Stolypin’s land policy have often been supposed to be a primitive, ignorant lot, McKean shows that they mostly came from areas with a relatively high level of literacy.
The author’s investigation leads him to the conclusion that the key to St Petersburg’s special rôle in the Russian labour movement is to be found in the concentration here of large numbers of young, male, skilled workers, with the particular importance of the city’s Vyborg District being due to the high proportion of them in its population. The metalworkers were outstanding in this respect – whereas there was a “relative paucity of Socialist cells” in the printing trade, even though this was a highly skilled trade, with the highest rate of literacy.
‘Social history’ is sometimes understood to mean, nowadays, history which plays down the rôle of elites and stresses the self-activity of ‘the masses’. While McKean certainly shows how little actual influence the emigré leaderships of the Socialist parties exerted in the movement on the ground in Russia during most of this period, he highlights the significance of what he calls the ‘sub-elite’, the praktiki, who were active in the factory committees, trade unions, insurance societies, educational clubs and so on. These men (and a few women) appear as the real achievers. They were often without guidance from their nominal leaders abroad. Thus, the author points out, with regard to the remarkable gains made by the Bolsheviks in 1913-14, that Lenin wrote nothing about trade union affairs in this period, and there is no evidence in the archives of any correspondence with Bolshevik trade unionists.
The Bolsheviks' commitment to a national political general strike from the summer of 1913, the electoral strategy in the Tsarist Duma elections, the decision to launch an attack on Menshevik union positions in the spring of 1913 and the resurrection of the slogan of a soviet in October 1915 were all cases where the activists took the lead. Lenin either gave them retrospective sanction or opposed them in vain.
When the local grassroots leaders considered a slogan sent to them from abroad to be inappropriate to their task, they would simply ignore it:
A textual analysis of 47 leaflets and appeals published illegally by Bolshevik militants between January 1915 and 22 February 1917 is most illuminating. Not a single leaflet mentioned the essential Leninist slogan of the defeat of Russia being the lesser evil ...
McKean has made especially thorough use of the records of the Okhrana, the secret police. Their reports supply, he says, “an invaluable corrective” to exaggerations and slanted accounts in contemporary newspapers and later memoirs. In particular they often expose the falsity of claims by Soviet historians that the Bolsheviks were responsible for some strike or demonstration. There was a great deal more cooperation on the ground between members of different Socialist parties and tendencies than official Soviet history would have us believe, and among the Okhrana’s chief concerns was the promotion of splits. It is startling how many agents and informers the police had in the labour movement: this information helps to explain the success of repressive measures taken at certain moments.
Prominent in many strike demands was a call for “polite address”. The constant insults to workers’ human dignity by their employers reflected the crude, “un-European” style of management in many factories – this although some of the most important employers were from the West (French, British, Swedish, etc). To autocracy in the state corresponded autocracy in the workplace. The St Petersburg bosses were notoriously a harder lot than their colleagues in Moscow.
In February 1917, however, they loosened their grip. McKean notes that when the troubles began, no thought seems to have been given to lockouts, with the result that revolutionary workers were able to use factory yards as meeting places, information centres and so on. Some of the industrialists may have sympathised with the movement at this stage. The author stresses the rôle of wartime conditions in making possible the fall of Tsardom. The foolish stubbornness of the military command in refusing to consider civilian needs, which resulted in severe shortages of goods in the cities by 1916, brought about, he thinks, a readiness on the part of sections of the middle classes to go along with the workers in the great demonstrations, in marked contrast to their indifference or hostility to the prewar labour unrest. McKean comes down strongly in support of the view that it was the World War that was crucial in settling the fall of the Romanov regime. He contrasts what happened in February 1917 with the crushing of the strike in July 1914 (sometimes presented as proof that Russia was already “on the brink of revolution” before the war began): in those days “the ancien regime in state and industry still retained sufficient cohesion and confidence in itself and the armed forces’ loyalty to act decisively and brutally”.
The book is, on the whole, well produced but it is a pity that the maps of St Petersburg provided were reprinted from another book, because the nomenclature of the city’s districts shown in them differs from that used in the text. Thus, the reader will look in vain in these maps for the ‘First Town’ and ‘Second Town’ districts often mentioned in the course of the author’s close examination of working class life in the capital.
Brian Pearce
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Reviews
Catherine Merridale, Moscow Politics and the Rise of Stalin: the Communist Party in the Capital 1925-32, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1990, pp328, £47.50
Catherine Merridale has produced a book that is both useful and interesting. It is extremely valuable as a study of the processes at work in the Soviet Union’s largest party organisation at the time of Stalin’s rise to power and this, in itself, fills an important gap in our understanding. The book is also particularly informative in its attempt to focus, not simply on the ‘high politics’ of leadership struggles, but on the workings of the party at the grassroots and the role of local activists there. This has been aided by Merridale’s access to Soviet archives including factory records of major plants, and of the Metal Workers Union.
Existing under the very nose of the apparatus Moscow was always heavily, directly and more consistently influenced by the centre than were other local parties. However, up until 1924 the Trotskyist opposition did have significant support amongst youth in Moscow’s higher educational institutes, although less among workers than in some other areas. Merridale provides some useful documentation on this point. However, many readers of this journal will not agree with Merridale’s characterisations of the politics of the various left oppositions. For example she attacks the Trotsky-Zinoviev group for using the “same extreme language as the Stalin-Bukharin majority, not seeking common ground with their opponents, but seeing them as betrayers of Leninism” (p.23). She falsely claims that “no Bolshevik opposition after 1921 included soviet democracy in its programme” (p.24),while the Platform of the Joint Opposition of 1927 clearly raised just such a call (see Chapter 5). However she does provide us with useful evidence of the continuing support for the left, right up to its outright suppression in 1927.
As an example, the Democratic Centralists, part of the Joint Opposition, had the loyalty of the Klara Zetkin plant, right up to 1927. The Opposition had a considerable base in Sokol’niki, an area that Merridale explains as containing a great concentration of government and state institutions, whilst at one stage it could count on 62 cells in the Krasnaya Presnaya district.
At the time of the fight with the left in the mid and late 1920s the Moscow party apparatus was in the hands of the Bukharinite Uglanov. Merridale’s account of his regime is very illuminating indeed. It comes at a time when certain Soviet and western historians have suggested that the Bukharinites would have been a democratic alternative to the ‘command administrative’ system of both Trotsky and Stalin. She points out that Uglanov was a rigid bureaucratic centraliser who used the apparatus to exclude the New Opposition from political life in the capital, whose chief representative was Kamenev – the author seems to have a softer spot for him than for other opposition leaders. Unlike in Leningrad the New Opposition made no attempt to mobilise rank and file support for their platform. Yet Uglanov attempted to maintain an iron grip on the party organisation on behalf of Bukharin and Stalin.
However, Merridale points out that, once the Stalin-Bukharin bloc started to split, Uglanov saw his own power base shift from under him very rapidly. He was replaced as Moscow Party Secretary by Molotov, and cast into the ranks of the Right Opposition. In her discussion of the activities of the Right Opposition, Merridale makes it abundantly clear that they were simply a conservative part of the apparatus. They made no attempt to organise at the grassroots, but, appearing as the supporters of the existing order, they could command considerable support from the top levels of the government bureaucracy, trade unions and factory directors.
Merridale here highlights the depth of the fissures that existed within the party and governmental apparatus at this time, and she does it very well. Those fissures were to widen. Molotov was replaced by Bauman, who displayed those traits of voluntarism that were at the heart of the development of the Stalinist system. He lost no time in trying to move too rapidly in the campaign of collectivisation, and he was eventually replaced by Kaganovich, one of the most loyal of Stalin’s men. By 1930 the emerging Stalin clique had their hands firmly on the capital city’s party organisation. Yet even they were to have to do battle to oust the Secretary of the most prestigious Krasnaya Presnaya district, Ryutin, who lost his post only in 1932.
But, as we have already said, Merridale’s book is not simply about leadership battles along the road to Stalinism. Her intention is to explore the interrelationship between the emerging Stalinist system and the rank and file. Here, her thesis is summed up in the following way:
What is beyond question, however, is that the rank and file contributed to the implementation of Stalin’s policies after 1928. There is no doubt that their enthusiasm, however brutal its consequences in many instances, was indispensable to the Stalinist ‘great turn’. (p.67)
Here, broadly speaking, she puts herself alongside the school of revisionist historians of the Soviet Union in the West. They have broken with the old totalitarian school that saw the bureaucratic apparatus as monolithic and all-embracing, while the masses were but passive puppets. Before Merridale, others, such as Lynne Viola in Best Sons of the Fatherland (1987), have stressed the degree of popular motivation and enthusiasm that accompanied the ‘Great Turn’. Coming at a time when many Soviet historians are turning to totalitarian theories, this school offers many refreshing insights compared with the dull old Stalinist and Western orthodoxies. It points to the very real enthusiasm shown by a layer of workers for the ‘turn’ in its earliest years, and argues that, at least at this time, party activists were not simply passive dupes.
But the problem that they all have, including Merridale, is in proving that this groundswell actually helped to create the Stalinist system. She points to the highly contradictory nature of the party in the mid and late 1920s. She disagrees with Trotskyists that the Lenin Levy and subsequent mass recruitment drives simply filled the party with passive political illiterates:
To suggest that the new generation were all passive dupes of the General Secretary is to underestimate the interest the average worker had in the progress of the revolution, both in general and in terms of his or her prospects in the new society. Those who did not have this interest tended to stay away altogether. (p.139)
The attempt to create a mass party was indeed fraught with contradictions for the emerging bureaucracy. On the one hand, it was formed on the basis of shop and shift cells. On the other hand, the increase in its proletarian composition was also accompanied by the development of an ever greater network of supervisory committees to oversee the rank and file. However, Merridale documents a degree of grassroots vitality in the late 1920s within a party supervised by the emergent bureaucracy, but organised in the plants and workshops.
Party meetings at the Krasnyi Proletarii factory lasted until 3 or 4am despite proposals from higher up that such meetings be limited to three hours only. Merridale provides examples of lower party organs organising strikes in the late 1920s and in 1930. And there was often conflict in the plants between the party and a management with supposedly supreme powers under edinochalie (one man management).
Yet there is a real danger of drawing too many conclusions from this picture of rank and file activity, however good a corrective it may be to previous accounts. By 1932 most of the accoutrements of a mass party had been dissolved in order to guarantee a more smoothly running machine for the apparatus. Shop and shift cells were abolished. Political education remained a low priority as the agenda of party bodies was normally dominated by questions of production and productivity. Merridale’s discussion of the contradictions between their educational tasks and fulfilment of the plan presented to party officials is fascinating. As the magazine Propagandist described it in September 1930:
Propagandists with other party responsibilities left the preparation of classes until the last moment, reading teaching materials on the tram on the way in. (p.l50)
This is not surprising in an organisation that had ordained subordination to the claims of industrial management:
The party cells must actively promote the fulfilment of the principle of edinochalie in the whole system of industrial management. (quoted p.168)
Such a situation created very real tensions, as Merridale demonstrates. Most high ranking technical personnel were not party members, but were in many cases inherited from Tsarism or the non-party technical intelligentsia. In the giant Serp i Molot (Hammer and Sickle) factory in 1925, only two members of the factory administration and not one foreman were party members. Hence the contradiction between a worker based party and a management whose dictates the workers were not allowed to challenge by the apparatus of that same party. And hence the need for the Stalinist clique finally to transform the party into an apparatus party.
While the book claims to prove that a movement of an enthusiastic rank and file shaped and, more importantly, supported the ‘Great Turn’, it often provides contrary evidence. For instance, in 1929 party election meetings at AMO and Serp i Molot failed even to muster a quorum. Whilst there was support amongst a large section of worker activists for a ‘second revolution’, which involved a ‘workers promotion’ system under apparatus patronage, this was definitely on the wane after 1930. Factory cells again started to give voice to workers’ grievances, and accordingly faced a clampdown on their residual independent rights. Even if the rank and file had been used against the right wing in the bureaucratic apparatus, they now constituted a potential challenge, not simply a support mechanism, for the emerging Stalinist regime. They could be used against the Moscow right because Nepmen, kulaks and their Moscow patron, Uglanov, were deeply unpopular amongst the Moscow workers. NEP meant 25 per cent unemployment amongst the capital’s industrial workers. But when they started to demand some of the fruits of the ‘second revolution’, the bureaucratic apparatus clamped down on them ever more firmly.
The book is a most valuable contribution to our understanding of the rise to power of the Stalin clique. Unfortunately, perhaps because she does not choose to deal with ‘high politics’, Merridale does not really look at the development and make-up of the group around Stalin. We need more such studies. Merridale has shown the range of materials that can be used. She has also shown some of the key themes that need to be. explored. Whilst having a few reservations about some of the book’s conclusions, this study is thoroughly recommended. It is just a great pity that it is so expensive.
Dave Hughes
**********
Reviews
Geoffrey Roberts, Unholy Alliance: Stalin’s Pact With Hitler, IB Tauris, London, 1989, pp.296, £19.95
This is at the same time both a bad and an important book – quite often for the same reasons. Published on the fiftieth anniversary of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, it is a child of glasnost, being the first Western study of the alliance to have made use of previously closed Soviet archive materials. This alone makes the book worth reading, for, as the author correctly points out, an enforced and near exclusive reliance on non-Soviet documentation has impeded attempts to understand the origins, significance and workings of the Pact. The author believes that his study of newly-available Soviet materials has enabled him to resolve previous doubts and differences over the Pact that were in part a result of this difficulty, and points to a series of conclusions, which he summarises at the beginning of his book. Those of special interest are as follows:
1.Stalin only signed his Pact with Hitler after the failure of his genuine attempts to secure an anti-Nazi alliance with Western bourgeois democracies.
2.Consequently, “the final decision of the Soviet Government to opt for rapprochement with Germany was not made until mid-August 1939” (p.5).
3.Stalin signed the Pact because he feared “Britain and France might abandon the USSR in the face of the coming German invasion of Poland” (p.5).
Before considering whether the author has indeed, on the strength of the evidence he presents, proved his case, something needs to be said about his approach to the subject. Should not a book devoted to such a momentous alliance place the Pact in the broader setting of the history of Russian-German relations? This it does not do, despite their importance not only for the countries in question, but for the history of Europe and indeed the world. For example, the reader is told nothing of earlier agreements by Russia and Prussia/Germany to partition Poland and more generally, in the words of the Pact, to create “respective spheres of interest”. This is surely a glaring omission, as is the lack of any serious treatment of the Marxist and especially Leninist response to the question of German-Russian relations. And it is not as if all this material is in closed archives. As early as 1851, the founders of Marxism were discussing how to “take as much as possible away from the Poles in the West, to man their fortresses ... with Germans on the pretext of defence, to let them stew in their own juice, to send them into battle, gobble bare their land, fob them off with promises of Riga and Odessa and, should it be possible to get the Russians moving, to ally oneself with the latter and compel the Poles to give way”. [1] Real Politik with a vengeance! The controversies surrounding Lenin’s precise relations with the Kaiser’s government during and after the episode of the ‘sealed train’ might also have been worth a mention. [2] Instead Roberts confines himself exclusively to the Soviet period of Russo-German relations. Yet here too there are serious omissions. There is only the most cursory mention of the Russian-Polish war of 1920, and, what is more serious, no reference whatsoever to the secret agreement concluded during the war between German army leaders and the Soviet government (chiefly Trotsky) to partition Poland along the pre-1914 frontier, an alliance that was to involve joint military action between the then advancing troops of the Red Army and units of the rabidly anti-Communist (but also anti-Polish) Free Corps stationed illegally in East Prussia. [3] But since the author’s intention is to present the Stalin-Hitler Pact as a bolt from the blue of an August 1939 sky, his failure to cite its possible precedents is perhaps understandable.
Roberts fares no better in his treatment of German ‘national Bolshevism’. Considering that its prime objective of an alliance with the USSR against the decadent Western liberal plutocracies was consummated by the Pact of 1939, one would have thought that this exotic – but highly symptomatic – political current would have merited more than a single paragraph (p.35). Surely he could have told us what Lenin thought of it, or made at least a passing reference to the outrageous ‘Schlagater’ speech delivered by Karl Radek to the Comintern Plenum of June 1923. Of the two, Lenin’s comments obviously carried greater weight and therefore, for us, have more interest. For example, in December 1920 he referred to a “political mix up in Germany” wherein the “German Black Hundreds [pro-Nazis – RB] sympathised with the Russian Bolsheviks in the same way as the Spartacus League does ...”, adding the telling point that this alignment had become “the basis ... of our foreign policy ...” [4] Another speech, made at the same time (but expunged, for obvious reasons, from editions of Lenin’s Collected Works) was even more explicit, referring to “an independent Poland” as being “very dangerous to Soviet Russia”. Moreover, “the Germans hate Poland and will at any time make common cause with us to strangle Poland ...” [5] Maybe the author’s tendency to idealise the early years of Soviet rule (“diplomacy, even of the propagandist kind initially practised by the Bolsheviks, was eclipsed by revolutionary endeavour”, p.26) partly accounts for such blind spots. The ‘Third Period’ phase of the Comintern again saw the Soviet leadership – now in the hands of Stalin – speculating on the supposed advantages of an alliance with German chauvinism, only this time in the form of unadorned National Socialism. [6] Only by ignoring such evidence – and there is much more – is it possible to sustain the book’s thesis on the origins of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. But even in the area where the author claims a special expertise – the new Soviet materials – his research, which is the most interesting part of the book, is vitiated by a determination to prove, come what may, that the Pact was forced on Stalin by a Western refusal to stand up to Hitler. Stated briefly, Roberts believes that what other historians and analysts have interpreted as signals to Hitler (notably Stalin’s March 1939 speech to the Nineteenth Congress of the CPSU, and the sacking of Stalin’s Jewish Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov two months later) have been seriously misconstrued, and that in fact Stalin was earnestly pursuing a military alliance with the West against Hitler right up to the very eve of the Pact’s signing on 23 August 1939. Yet all the evidence to refute this claim is to be found in one single collection of documents, available to the public since its publication in 1948 by the US State Department. Significantly, much of Roberts’ book is taken up with trying to minimise either the significance or reliability of this documentary collection, culled after the war from the Nazi Foreign Ministry archives. It must be said, whatever the book’s other merits, in this endeavour it fails lamentably. The first document in the collection is dated 17 April, but in fact the final turn had already been made. Even before Munich, Stalin had made clear, through a speech by Litvinov to the League of Nations on 23 September 1938 that the USSR “had no obligation to Czechoslovakia in the event of French indifference to an attack on her ...” and that the USSR consequently had a “moral right” to renounce its pact with the beleaguered Czechs [7], which of course Stalin promptly did, doubtless much to Hitler’s gratification. Hints of a possible alliance between the ostensible enemies quickly ensued. At a diplomatic reception in Berlin on 12 January 1939, Hitler singled out for special and friendly attention the new Soviet Ambassador Merekalov. Early in February, during a dinner party at the home of a German industrialist, General Keitel (executed after the war for atrocities on the Eastern front) discussed with the Soviet Military Attache the possibility of combined action against Poland. [8] Hitler was informed at once. The wheels were beginning to turn. Next came Stalin’s speech of 10 March to the Nineteenth Party Congress, in which he accused the Western Allies of inciting conflict between Germany and Russia. Russia was not going to “pull the chestnuts out of the fire” for anyone. Of all the above events, Roberts mentions but the last – and only then to dismiss its significance as an olive branch to Hitler. Stalin “had little option, in the face of continuing German hostility, but adherence to the aim of creating an anti-Fascist alliance ...” (p.119). But, as we have seen, that hostility was waning. Hitler’s claims on Poland, followed by Western guarantees to maintain its existing frontiers, meant for the Nazis the risk of the dreaded war on two fronts, a prospect that drove Hitler inexorably towards securing his eastern flank by drawing Stalin into a new Polish partition. A Nazi diplomat reported that he could “discern in Stalin’s speech certain signs of a new orientation”. Roberts, despite all that ensued, does not think so. Yet sure enough, in a speech on 1 April, Hitler used the same code, repudiating any desire to “pull chestnuts out of the fire” (these were his actual words) by fighting the West’s battles against Russia. This speech was subsequently circulated by Hitler’s Foreign Minister Ribbentrop to the heads of all the European diplomatic missions. [9] On 12 May Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry issued a directive to the German press to maintain a total silence on relations with the USSR, following it up with another on 31 May warning that “now is not the time for an anti-Soviet campaign”. These moves only make any sense in the context of a Soviet approach, not to the Western Allies, but Hitler.
Roberts, it should be remembered, attributes no significance whatsoever to Stalin’s speech (or Hitler’s response to it, which he passes over) in preparing the ground for the Pact. Yet the documentary evidence totally refutes him. In the early hours of 24 August, during the celebrations that followed the signing of the Pact by Stalin and Ribbentrop, Molotov “raised his glass to Stalin – who through his speech of March this year, which had been well understood in Germany – had brought about the reversal in political relations”. Well understood in Germany ... but not by Roberts, who sees in it an attempt to secure an alliance with the Western Allies against Hitler! (Not to be outdone, Stalin also proposed a toast: “I know how much the German nation loves its Fuehrer; I should therefore like to drink to his health.”) [10] This is not the only document Roberts prefers in this instance to ignore, or in others, to misconstrue. Following hard on the heels of Stalin’s 10 March speech came the Nazi invasion of the remainder of Czechoslovakia on 15 March. Three days later Litvinov delivered to the German ambassador in Moscow a note refusing to recognise the ensuing Nazi occupation as in any way legal. Yet on 17 April the Soviet ambassador called at the German foreign office in order to secure the continued “fulfillment of certain contracts for war material by the Skoda works” [11], which were, of course, situated in Nazi-occupied Czech territory. The report speaks of the Nazi response to the request as being regarded by the Soviets as “a test” of German intentions towards the USSR. The hint being taken, the talk then drifted towards and around the subject of the possibility of a drastic improvement in German-Soviet relations. Merekalov left almost at once to report back to Moscow. How does Roberts treat this encounter? Predictably as a routine diplomatic exchange, and a bid by a new ambassador to advance his career (pp.126-7). He also neglects to point out that the Soviet request to supply the requested war equipment was granted – hardly the action of a regime bent on immediate war with its customer.
Roberts’ next big hurdle is the sacking of Litvinov. It is the one that more than any other brings him down. On 3 May Litvinov, the salesman and, let us grant the possibility, maybe the advocate of a pro-Western, and therefore anti-Nazi orientation, was dismissed from his post as Soviet Foreign Minister. Roberts observes (correctly) that “in the West the most popular explanation had been that Litvinov (a Jew and an opponent of rapprochement with Nazi Germany) was removed to facilitate negotiations with Hitler ...” (p.128). Like many academics (and, it should also be said, Marxists of various persuasions) Roberts suffers from an organic aversion to anything that is either popular or obvious. The truth can’t ever be that simple. The more the evidence and the general consensus seem to point in one direction, the greater the urge to look in another. Something that is widely believed and appears obvious may or may not be true ... but whether it is true or not has nothing to do with either. Lacking any hard evidence to refute the ‘popular’ view, to which we shall return in a moment, Roberts asks us to believe that Litvinov’s removal was partly the result of a routine domestic party purge instigated by Beria, and partly also a “reshuffling” (sic) of diplomatic staff designed to bring forward a “new generation of Soviet diplomats” (p.l29). Rather like the Red Army “reshuffle” of 1937 perhaps? Only Litvinov was more fortunate than his colleagues, merely being placed under house arrest. Insofar as Litvinov’s replacement by Molotov sent out any international signals, says Roberts, they were intended not for Hitler but the Western Allies – “it would put further pressure on the French and British to come to terms” (pp.130-1). Yet no evidence is cited either to suggest that this was the intention, or that its supposed recipients perceived it as such. Rather the contrary. On 4 May 1939 the German embassy in Moscow reported back to Berlin on the sensational sacking of Litvinov, regarded – possibly correctly – as the major enemy of Nazi Germany in the Soviet leadership: “The decision apparently is connected with the fact that differences of opinion arose in the Kremlin on Litvinov’s negotiations” [with the British and French – RB]. There then follows a reference to Stalin’s 10 March speech and then this final comment: “Molotov (no Jew) is held to be ‘most intimate friend and closest collaborator of Stalin’. His appointment is apparently to guarantee that the foreign policy will be continued strictly in accordance with Stalin’s ideas”. [12] The very next day the Soviet Charge in Berlin reinforced this impression in a conversation with a German diplomat, inquiring whether the removal of Litvinov “would cause a change in our [the Nazi] position toward the Soviet Union”. [13] A signal to Britain and France? I find it incredible that Roberts, who has surely read this document, sees fit to pass it over in silence, preferring instead his entirely unfounded explanation of a domestic purge and renewed commitment to an alliance with the Western Allies.
The benchmark for this approach is established on the book’s very first page, when the reader is asked to accept its axiom that until the Pact, the Stalin regime had been “the bulwark of anti-Fascism”. As evidence of the Kremlin’s role as “the citadel of resistance to Fascism and militarism” he cites Soviet arms supplies to Spain and support for sanctions against Italy (p.44), overlooking that, in the latter case, Stalin continued to supply oil to Mussolini for the duration of his invasion of Ethiopia and intervention in Spain. Other judgements also cry out for comment. On page 77 we are told that Stalin’s policy in Spain “was unequivocally directed towards a Republican victory” and that to ascribe any “sinister, machiavellian motives” to it was “largely fantasy”. In order to sustain his case here, Roberts lumps together Soviet and International Brigade forces into a collective total of 40,000 men (p.78), thereby obliterating the vital distinction between the combatants of the brigades and the small and, from a military point of view, largely token Soviet personnel, who were expressly forbidden by Stalin to perform anything other than an advisory and instructional role to the Republican forces. The price the Republic had to pay for Stalin’s aid is so well documented that one can only gasp at the comment, on page 79, that NKVD terror apart, Stalin’s intervention in Spain was an “otherwise creditable episode” in pre-war Soviet foreign policy. Then in a puerile section (of less than two pages) on the reaction of the Comintern to the Pact, the new line is presented as “defeatist” (p.175). That was true (though not in the classic Leninist sense) only of those countries still fighting Nazi Germany, where the line was to make peace on the terms proposed jointly by Stalin and Hitler in October 1939, but not of those countries already conquered by the Nazis. Here the Comintern played a Quisling role, hiring itself out to Hitler in competition with home grown Nazi traitors. This policy met with some startling initial successes, notably in Belgium and Norway. [14]
For German itself, a third policy was adopted, one of a thinly veiled and utterly shameful ‘defencism’, together with demands that anti-Nazi opponents of the Pact be denounced to the Gestapo. Needless to say, this policy was advanced from the safety of neutral Sweden. In the immortal words of Walter Ulbricht, “if Germany were conquered [by Britain and France] the German workers would be treated in the same way” as were the workers in those countries – “the muzzling of the workers’ press, the establishment of concentration camps” [15], the inference being that by defending the Third Reich against the Western Allies, the German workers would prevent the establishment of censorship and concentration camps in their own country. (In fact, it was Hitler’s defeat that brought their abolition, at least in the Western zone. In the East it proved to be business as usual.) Of all Stalinist utterances, this must surely rank as not only the most perfidious, but also the most stupid. Roberts’ failure to recognise or come to grips with such nuances suggests that the Comintern is alien territory. But then so are Stalin-style elections. On page 189 we are informed, dead pan, that in the Baltic states, “elections were held to the new peoples’ assemblies which voted on 21 July to seek incorporation into the USSR, a wish which was duly granted by the Supreme Soviet in early August”, neglecting only to add that in each case the vote was unanimous. No mention is made at all of the hideous deportations and exterminations carried out by Stalin in the territories granted to him by his Nazi allies, the victims of which run into millions. In fact, so greatly appalling was the NKVD terror that there were recorded instances of Jewish refugees from the Nazi zone fleeing, or being driven, back to their near certain deaths under the lash of Stalinist pogroms. (See, for example, Nazi-Soviet Relations, p.128.)
The treatment of Stalin’s military assistance to Hitler during the Pact is likewise very sketchy, filling barely a single page. Mention is made of navigational aid provided by a radio station at Minsk for German aircraft attacking Poland from 1 September, but not of the joint Nazi-Soviet military headquarters stationed at Bialystock which coordinated the final annihilation of Polish armed resistance following Stalin’s stab in the back of 17 September. [16] The security Stalin provided for Hitler’s eastern front, enabling him to strike uninhibitedly in the West against Scandinavia, the low countries and France, is well known (though not evaluated by Roberts). But Stalin also rendered Hitler direct and active military assistance. German warships were equipped in Soviet yards (chiefly Murmansk) and allowed passage via the summer northern route into the Pacific, there to attack Allied shipping. [17] At a crucial moment during the Nazi naval landings in Norway (April 1940), a German tanker arrived from Murmansk, laden with Soviet oil, to refuel Hitler’s warships and landing craft. [18] And all this in addition to substantial, and in some instances indispensable, supplies of raw materials and fuel to the Nazi war machine right up to the invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941.
Just why Roberts chose to write such an astonishing book is, I must confess, something of a mystery. All one can say for certain is that he elected to follow a path other than that dictated by the vast body of evidence available to him. I became convinced of this on reading his review, written for The Independent nearly a year after the appearance of his book on the Pact, of a new Soviet biography of Maxim Litvinov. Naturally, the purge of 3 May figures prominently in the review. But once again, Roberts cannot accept the possibility that Litvinov’s fall could have anything at all to do with changes in Stalin's policy towards Nazi Germany. “The problem with this view is that Soviet policy towards Nazi Germany did not change until that summer.” Once again he assumes what he is obliged to prove. He forces his opinions onto the facts, instead of basing his arguments upon them. The ghost of Beria is invoked once again to explain the elimination of the entire Litvinov team of diplomats. (Where have we heard that before?) As for his successor, Molotov’s “pursuance of Litvinov’s policy of alliance with the West was so successful that by August, the USSR had opened negotiations for a military pact with Britain and France. It was only when these failed that Stalin finally turned to Hitler.”
This is, quite simply, untrue. These negotiations began in Moscow on 12 August. So even if we were to concede Roberts’ arguments that the Pact was born later than all the sources suggest, and that only in “the first two weeks of August” did “Soviet foreign policy begin to make an appreciable shift in favour of an accommodation with Germany” (p.151), it remains to be explained how it was that even as War Minister Voroshilov conducted these “successful” negotiations with British and French military officials in Moscow, a yet more successful Ribbentrop was preparing to fly to the Kremlin to sign his Pact with Stalin. [19] Could it not be that Stalin’s dalliance with Britain and France was a cover (and a spur to Hitler) for the consummation of his Pact with the Nazis? Trotsky certainly thought so, and nothing in this book persuades me that he was wrong.
As far back as the period of the Nazi rise to power, Trotsky considered Stalin’s collaboration with the Nazis in such enterprises as the Prussian Red-Brown Referendum of 1931 [20] evidence of a Kremlin foreign policy aimed at “keeping alive German-French antagonisms”. [21] When the issue of Stalin’s German policy arose at the 1937 Dewey Commission investigation into the Moscow Trials (understandably in view of Stalinist accusations that Trotsky was a Nazi agent), Trotsky recalled how Isvestia greeted the Hitler Nazi regime in Germany ... “the USSR is the only state that is not nourished on hostile sentiments towards Germany ...” It was Hitler who repulsed Stalin, not the other way round. [22] Pressed on this point, Trotsky insisted that “Stalin declared and it was repeated in the press, that ‘we never opposed the Nazi movement in Germany’ ...” [23] All these observations, it should be remembered, were made at the high tide of the ‘People’s Front’ episode, when Litvinov’s pro-Western policy appeared to predominate. They suggest that almost alone amongst serious commentators of the day (and even now historians like Roberts, who with the supposed wisdom of hindsight and access to archives, should know better) Trotsky never took very seriously Stalin’s policy of ‘collective security’ against Nazi Germany, deriding it as a “lifeless fiction” and predicting, even before the conclusion of the Munich agreement, that “we may now expect with certainty Soviet diplomacy to attempt a rapprochement with Hitler ...” [24]
Trotsky pursued his hunch (for he lacked any tangible proof) on 6 March 1939, wondering whether a Stalinist boycott of a New York anti-Nazi demonstration was simply “conservative stupidity and hatred of the Fourth International” (for amongst the rally’s sponsors was the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party) or evidence that orders had gone out from Moscow to “muzzle” all anti-Fascist activities “so as not to interfere with the negotiations between Moscow and Berlin diplomats ... the next few weeks will bring their verification ...” [25] In fact it took four days, for on 10 March Stalin made his first public signal to Berlin. The very next day, Trotsky described the “chestnuts” speech as a sign of Stalin’s “new turn towards reaction”. While unsure as yet of the tempo or prospects of this new orientation, Trotsky nevertheless concluded that on the strength of this speech alone, “Stalin is preparing to play with Hitler”. [26] And that at a time when the Western Allies, taking fright after the consequences of their capitulation at Munich became clear, had begun to court Stalin!
Here too Trotsky’s estimation diverges totally from that of Roberts (not to speak of all Stalinist, and most leftist inclined historians and commentators): “Today all the efforts of the British government are concentrated on concluding an agreement with Moscow – against Germany.“ Hitler, fearing encirclement and a possible war on all fronts, likewise looked to the Kremlin for insurance. As for Stalin, “from the first day of the National Socialist regime” he had “systematically and steadily shown his readiness for friendship with Hitler”.[27] Only when met with hostility did Stalin pass over to “collective security” and its political counterpart, the People’s Front. But even then, it was possible to detect “more intimate notes intended for the ears of Berchtesgarden ...” Consequently, in the scramble for partners, “if at last Hitler responds to Moscow’s diplomatic advances, Chamberlain will be rebuffed ... Stalin will sign a treaty with England only if he is convinced that agreement with Hitler is out of the question”. [28] Roberts’ entire book revolves around the contrary thesis that Stalin turned to Hitler because he felt let down by London and Paris.
Once signed, the Pact was roundly denounced by Trotsky. He failed to find in it any of the virtues detected by some of his more recent epigones. The Kremlin “preferred the status quo, with Hitler as its ally” to any advances for the workers’ movement. As for the rudely discarded ‘People’s Front’, it had proved to be nothing but a “low comedy”. Although unaware of the Pact’s secret protocols, he correctly predicted that “in exchange for Poland, Hitler will give Moscow freedom of action in regard to the Baltic states”. [29] And in view of his earlier and repeated declarations on the subject, he was surely entitled to point out “since 1933 I have been showing and proving to the world press that Stalin is seeking an understanding with Hitler”. Brushing aside apologists for Stalin's ‘treason’ (and they are amazingly still in business today), Trotsky damned the Pact as “a capitulation of Stalin before Fascist imperialism with the end of preserving the Soviet oligarchy”. Not, it should be noted, the “gains of the revolution”. The Pact’s only “merit” was that “in unveiling the truth it broke the back of the Comintern”. [30] Trotsky found “completely absurd” the idea that Stalin’s seizures of territory involved any challenge to Hitler. (Muffled echoes of this argument can still be found in Trotskyist publications.) “It is much more probable that Hitler himself inspired Stalin to occupy eastern Poland and to lay his hands on the Baltic states.” The documentary evidence here proves Trotsky completely correct, as it does also in the case of Stalin’s “shameful war” against Finland. [31] Finally – and here too in defiance of contemporary ‘progressive’ opinion – Trotsky foresaw that Stalin’s diplomacy, far from averting Hitler’s long announced crusade against the USSR, had instead enabled Hitler to eliminate the Polish ‘buffer’ protecting Russia from a Nazi invasion. [32] Perhaps part of the difficulty in assessing Stalin’s reasons for concluding his alliance with Hitler comes from assuming that his motives were purely political. In his uncompleted biography of Stalin, Trotsky argues that “Stalin’s union with Hitler satisfied his sense of revenge ... He took great personal delight in negotiating secretly with the Nazis while appearing to negotiate openly with the friendly missions of England and France ... He is tragically petty”. [33] (Lenin – amazingly late for one normally so shrewd – also discovered spite to be one of his General Secretary’s mainsprings of action.)
Going back over Trotsky’s writings on German-Soviet relations, one cannot but be impressed at the way in which his step-by-step analysis of events is, not only in outline, but often in the smallest details, borne out by documentary materials to which, in contrast with Roberts, he could not possibly have had access. One wonders what he would have been able to achieve with them.
Robin Blick
Notes
1. Engels to Marx, 27 May 1851, K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Volume 38, p.364. Evidently inspired by his notorious theory of ‘counter-revolutionary nations’, Engels describes the Poles as a ‘finished nation’, to be contrasted unfavourably not only with Germans but Russians, whose racial virtues were such that as a result of interbreeding with them, “even the Jews acquire Slav cheekbones”. (ibid., pp.363-4)
2. See for example the documents presented in Zeman, Germany and the Revolution in Russia, OUP, 1958, and Pearson, The Sealed Train, Macmillan, 1975.
3. For this and other instances of early Soviet collaboration with German nationalist forces, see Adam Westoby and Robin Blick, Early Soviet Designs on Poland, in Survey, Volume 26 no.4 (117), Autumn 1982.
4. V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 31, p.300.
5. Westoby and Blick, p.124.
6. For more detail, see Robert Black (Robin Blick), Fascism in Germany, London 1975.
7. Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy (Ed. Jane Degras), Volume 3, p.305, OUP, 1953. On Stalin’s indifference to the fate of Czechoslovakia, see Erich Wollenberg, The Red Army, London, 1940, pp.284-5.
8. A. Rossi, The Russo-German Alliance, London 1950, p.6.
9. Ibid., p.8.
10. Nazi-Soviet Relations, p.76.
11. Op. cit., p.1.
12. Op. cit., pp.2-3.
13. Op. cit., p.3.
14. See F. Borkenau, European Communism, Faber and Faber, 1953, pp.253-7.
15. Quoted in op. cit., p.249.
16. Rossi, op. cit., p.60.
17. Rossi, op. cit., p.96.
18. D. Irvine, Hitler’s War, Macmillan, 1985, p.98.
19. On Stalinin’s double dealing see: Rossi, op. cit., pp.37-8, Documents on Polish-Soviet Relations, Volume 1, London 1961; Wollenburg, pp.290-2.
20. See Black, op. cit., for details and background.
21. Documents of the Fourth International, Pathfinder, 1973, p.25.
22. The Case of Leon Trotsky, Merit, 1968, p.293.
23. Op. cit., p.311.
24. L.D. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1938-39, Pathfinder, 1974, p.29.
25. Op. cit., p.203.
26. Op. cit., pp.216-9.
27. Op. cit., p.350.
28. Op. cit., pp.350-5.
29. L.D. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, Pathfinder, 1973, pp.76-7.
30. Op. cit., pp.81-3.
31. Op. cit., pp.113, 116.
32. Op. cit., pp.79, 97.
33. L.D. Trotsky, Stalin, London 1947, p.415.
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-The KPD and the Solidarity of the Illegals
Click on the headline to link to the “Revolutionary History” Journal entry listed in the title.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Daniel Guerin’s Postscript
Click on the headline to link to the “Revolutionary History” Journal entry listed in the title.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Revolutionary Policy and Falsification
Click on the headline to link to the “Revolutionary History” Journal entry listed in the title.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Leon Trotsky on the Second World War (A Reply)
Click on the headline to link to the “Revolutionary History” Journal entry listed in the title.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Trotsky and the Second World War
Click on the headline to link to the “Revolutionary History” Journal entry listed in the title.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-How Trotsky and the Trotskyists confronted the Second World War
Click on the headline to link to the “Revolutionary History” Journal entry listed in the title.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Monday, September 13, 2010
* “Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International-From The Archives
Click on the headline to link to the Toward A History Of The Fourth International website for the article listed below.
Founding Conference of the
Fourth International
1938
Statutes of the Fourth International
Markin comment:
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls, comrades, that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
Founding Conference of the
Fourth International
1938
Statutes of the Fourth International
Markin comment:
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls, comrades, that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
*For The Folkies From Muskogee And Elsewhere- The Bob Feldman Music Blog On "My Space"-Willaim Kunstler, Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson
Markin comment:
This is great stuff for any music aficionado, especially of folk, social protest, and roots music. I am going to be "stealing" entries off of this site periodically but you should be checking it out yourselves. Kudos, Bob Feldman.
**********
'Kunstler On Your Side" lyrics
Current mood: nostalgic
(chorus)
He was known as a People's Lawyer
Although he got on TV
And when William Kunstler argued
The judge said: "Not guilty!"
(verses)
If you like to sing some folk songs
And you're bothered by the F.B.I.
Then my advice for all you folk fans
Is to have Kunstler on your side.
If you're trapped in Alabama
Where a sheriff took you for a ride
Then my advice for all you folk fans
Is to have Kunstler on your side. (chorus)
If you're fighting against the War Machine
And you're jailed for exposing lies
Then my advice for all you folk fans
Is to have Kunstler on your side.
If you've led a protest march
Where the police beat you 'till you cried
Then my advice for all you folk fans
Is to have Kunstler on your side. (chorus)
If you're charged with "conspiracy"
And "illegally crossing state lines"
Then my advice for all you folk fans
Is to have Kunstler on your side.
If you're revolting in a prison
Against guards that brutalized
Then my advice for all you folk fans
Is to have Kunstler on your side. (chorus)
The public domain "Kunstler On Your Side" biographical protest folk about the now-deceased civil rights attorney was written in the 1980s.
In a 1999 biography of William Kunstler, William M. Kunstler: The Most Hated Lawyer In America, a law school professor named David Langum indicated which kind of private practice clients Kunstler would not represent in the 1980s and 1990s:
"Like all lawyers in private practice, Kunstler also took cases for no more exalted reason than to earn a fee. Political selectivity continued, although a more realistic statement of Kunstler's later position was that given to a reporter in 1994:...He would not have taken on O.J. Simpson..."because it's a wife killing case." Nor would he have represented the hotel mogul Leona Helmsley, who..."although she has the same civil rights as anyone, is a rather detestable character with few redeeming qualities.""
For more information about William Kunstler's life, you might want to check out the new documentary film, "William Kunstler: Disturbing The Universe," or the www.disturbingtheuniverse.com web site.
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'Let The Big Banks Fail' protest folk song lyrics
Category: Music
Let The Big Banks Fail
(chorus)
Let the Big Banks fail
And put the bankers in jail
It’s time to right the wrong
And not save those who committed fraud
(verse)
Wall Street ripped off investors
And made billions from sub-prime loans
Yet when their housing boom turned to bust
To Washington, the bankers did go.
The big bankers they purchased
The Congress and the White House
So Democrats and Republicans
Are eager to bail them out.
(bridge)
They say they have no money to give welfare for the poor
Yet "Lehman-Goldman Sachs" get $700 billion more
They say they have no money to provide jobs and free health care
Yet AIG and Merrill Lynch are given Corporate Welfare. (chorus)
(additional verses)
If a tenant can’t pay his rent
A landlord will evict
But if a Big Bank can’t pay its debt
Its government will give it cash.
If a worker can’t do her job
She’ll get fired for incompetence
But if a banker wrecks his bank
His government gives him a blank check.(chorus)
If a homeowner can’t pay his mortgage
He’ll lose his home and get foreclosed
But if Wall Street can’t pay off its creditors
It gets another big government loan.
If a store loses its customers
It will soon be forced to close
But if Big Banks steal from consumers
They’re given billions in loans. (bridge) (chorus)
They’re all for a free market
When their profits are rolling in
But once they start losing money
The free market ain’t for them.
If you can’t pay your student debts
You’ll get harassed by their government
Yet when Wall Street banks owe people money
The government lets them off the hook. (chorus)
So if you don’t think it’s democratic
For Wall Street’s government to rule over you
Then just take over CNN
With the help of your labor union.
The bankers’ names might be Pritzker
Or Rubin or J.P. Morgan
Yet they all don’t want Revolution
So they can rip off the people again. (chorus)
The public domain Let The Big Banks protest folk song was written in the Fall of 2008 when Wall Street firms like AIG, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup were getting bailed out by the U.S. government--on the pretext that giving corporate welfare grants (and more executive bonuses) to Wall Street would prevent mass layoffs of U.S. workers and another economic depression in 2009. A few days ago I finally got around to recording the Let The Big Banks protest folk song on my cheap cassette tape recorder, but I haven't yet been able to get it converted to mp3 so I can post it onto the internet with its original public domain melody.
Read more: http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music/blog?page=10#ixzz0zMRCCraT
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Saturday, November 01, 2008
Woody Guthrie Revisited (Part 1)
Category: Music
In a July 15, 1946 letter, Woody Guthrie wrote the following:
"I think that I have proved that a folk singer, to sing best what the people have thought and are thinking, is forced to turn his back on the bids of Broadway and Hollywood to buy him and his talents out. I feel like my work in this field will someday be seen as the most radical, the most militant, and the most topical of them all…
"Every folk song that I know tells how to fix some things in this world to make it better, tells what is wrong with it, and what we've got to do to fix it better. If the song does not do this, then, it is no more of a folk song than I am a movie scout…
"When you ask yourself which of the so-called folk singers live up to the real name, you can cross lots of their names entirely off of your list…Ask yourself, does the singer, (artist or poet), take part in the fight to win a better world for the worker? There is only one big fight with a million and one legs to it, the fight of the worker to win his fair share from his owner (boss, etc.). The more the owners allow a singer to be heard around, the less he can sing the tale of the worker's fight. Before your voice can be heard or your face fotographed, you must actually turn into a weapon of the owner against the workers. I know from a hundred cases of my own experience that any work of protest, fight, militance or plan for the worker, was blue penciled, and censored a dozen times. Any word that was too true, too strong, or too loud in criticizing the world owned by the big boss was scratched out by several hands under a thousand reasons."
Coincidentally, among the pages contained in Woody Guthrie's declassified post-1950s FBI file (100-29988) is an April 10, 1951 memorandum from the FBI's New York City office to the FBI Director on the subject "Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, Security Matter," which states that "It is recommended that a Security Index Card be prepared on the above captioned individual." This April 1951 document also categorizes Woody as "Communist," indicates that "49 Murdock Court, Brooklyn, NY" is now Woody's residence address and lists Woody's "business address" as "Free Lance Folk Singer."
For more information about Woody Guthrie's historical contribution to U.S. musical history, you can check out the official Woody Guthrie site at www.woodyguthrie.org.
Read more: http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music/blog?page=11#ixzz0zMSAI3zs
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Saturday, November 08, 2008
Woody Guthrie Revisited (Part 2)
Category: Music
In a July 15, 1946 letter, Woody Guthrie wrote the following:
"It is not just a question of you, as an artist, selling out, and becoming harmless to the owning side. No, you are never actually bought nor bribed till they have decided that they can use you in one way or another to rob, to deceive, to blind, confuse, to misrepresent, or just to harass, worry, bedevil, and becloud the path of the militant worker on his long hard fight from slavery to freedom. Your art helps to preserve, to prolong, to keep alive, and to glorify the essences and the principles of the owning, ruling side. If your art did not add new life to their side, kid not yourself, they would certainly never shake your hand and drop their bloody money down into your lap. And it is the highest form of your owner's joy when he buys you out from the union side (where you) have spent several years of your life getting people to follow, to hear, or to stand for a while and listen to what you have to say, or to live their lives in spirit and in action in the way that you lived your own. This makes you worth lots more to your owner…
"This is the bad part of a capitalist system, this dog eat dog, this spying, tracing, tracking and trailing after one another always under the covers of night and the shades and shadows of day…This is the system which the owners would like to prolong, to keep alive, to prolong as long as they possibly can, because in the wild blindness of it all, they get all of us to fighting against one another, and rob us coming in the fields of production, and going, in the realm of distribution. This is the system I would like to see die out. It killed several members of my family, it gassed several and shell shocked several more in the last world war, and in this world war just past, it scattered lots more. It drove families of my relatives and friends by the hundreds of thousands to wander more homeless than dogs and to live less welcome than hogs, sheep, or cattle. This is the system I started out to expose by every conceivable way that I could think of with songs and with ballads, and even with poems, stories, newspaper articles, even by humor, by fun, by nonsense, ridicule and by any other way that I could lay hold on."
Coincidentally, among the pages contained in Woody Guthrie's declassified post-1950s FBI file (100-29988-5,6,7,8) is a June 2, 1950 memorandum sent to the FBI Director by the FBI's Los Angeles office on the subject "Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, Woody Guthrie, Security Matter," which states:
"Re: El Paso letter to New York dated 2-15-50 in captioned matter, report of Special Agent [censored] dated 4-30-50 at Los Angeles entitled ..Factionalists Sabotage Group,' Internal Security-C:
"On April 18, 1950 CNDI [censored] identified a photograph of GUTHRIE as being the individual to whom he had previously referred to as (WOODY), and who was a member of the Factionalist Sabotage Group. According to CNDI [censored] GUTHRIE from approximately April 15, 1950 to May 15, 1950 resided at the home of [censored] Los Angeles, California, and an individual who has also been identified as a member of the above group.
"On May 15, 1950 CNDI [censored] ascertained that GUTHRIE left Los Angeles on that date and on May 18, 1950 CNDI [censored] was advised by [censored] that GUTHRIE was in El Paso, Texas where he would contact his children and former wife. Reference telbu reflects that GUTHRIE's children resided at 4002 Bliss Street, El Paso, Texas.
"For the information of the El Paso office CNDIS [censored] have furnished this office since [censored] with information concerning a group of approximately thirty men and women, some veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and expelled Communist Party members who are regularly meeting in Los Angeles. According to [censored] this group has a headquarters in Mexico City, Mexico, and one of the group [censored], known to your office, left Los Angeles in December 1949 to work in this headquarters; her residence has been verified in Cuernevaca, Mexico.
"The [censored] of this group, [censored] has advised CNDI [censored] that the ultimate purpose of this group is sabotage against the United States during war with Russia and has outlined to him group policy in recruitment, method of operation, publications, finances, and has advised the informant that his group has a direct contact with the ..Comintern.'
"By letter dated May 15, 1950 in the referenced matter the Bureau requested that individual investigations be opened concerning members of this group and security index cards be considered.
"El Paso is requested to verify the residence of the subject in El Paso through [censored], El Paso County Court House, El Paso, Texas, it being noted that [censored] has previously furnished your office with information regarding GUTHRIE.
"Upon receipt of this verification, Los Angeles will submit a RUC report covering GUTHRIE's activities known to this office."
And a July 21, 1950 memorandum to the FBI Director from the FBI's Los Angeles office on the same subject states:
"Rebutel dated July 14, 1950, entitled ..FACTIONALIST SABOTAGE GROUP, INTERNAL SECURITY C 'Bufile 100-369268'…
"CNDI [censored] on July 4, 1950, advised he had ascertained from [censored], also a member of the referenced group, that the subject was presently residing at 3520 Mermaid Avenue, Brooklyn 24, New York.
"A pending report setting out leads to verify the subject's residence in New York is presently being transcribed and will be forwarded to the New York and El Paso Offices at an early date."
Also included in Woody Guthrie's declassified post-1950's FBI file is an August 3, 1950 document summarizing the articles that appeared in the left-wing Daily People's World in 1948 and 1949 that either mentioned Woody or were written by Woody; and which states that "T-1 advised that he specifically recalls Guthrie having attended" six political meetings between March 26, 1950 and May 6, 1950 that were held at 932 or 932 ½ North Lucile Ave. in Los Angeles. Yet this August 3, 1950 document admits that "[censored] Guthrie [censored] advised that he personally has never, [censored] made any statement relative to sabotage…"
For more information about Woody Guthrie's life and work, you can check out the official Woody Guthrie site at www.woodyguthrie.org .
*****
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Woody Guthrie Revisited (Part 3)
Category: Music
In a July 15, 1946 letter, Woody Guthrie wrote the following:
"I have decided, long ago, that my songs and ballads would not get the hugs and kisses of the capitalistic ..experts,' simply because I believe that the real folk history of this country finds its center and its hub in the fight of the union members against the hired gun thugs of the big owners. It is for this reason I have never really, sincerely, expected nor dimly prayed, nor hoped for a single solitary minute for a penny's worth of help from the hand of our landlord and ruler….
"To the big owners, an artist of any note or fame, that can be said to work or fight over on the union side, is classed by the big boys as a soldier, a technical, or an artistic captain or a general. The money paid to clip off working class artists may start at a measley Ten or Fifteen Thousand, and run up very quick to the sum of, A Hundred, Two Hundred Thousand, or a Half Million long greens. (This is no money at all to the big handlers that toss bales of money back and forth across their tables to the tune of a Million, a Billion, or more, Dollars)….
"It is not only a question of buying you and your art out of circulation, to keep you from stirring up your people against their blind owners; it is, lots of times a question of blocking your hand on every side, or causing you to get all lost and tangled up in a thousand traps of their psychological, emotional, economical, legal and illegal sorts of personal warfare. This will take the form of bribery, social disgrace, exposes', running down your work, discouraging your talents, and insulting you on every turn."
Coincidentally, among the 55 pages contained in Woody's de-classified FBI file (100-29988-5) is a July 15, 1943 Memorandum for E.A. Tamm, regarding "Department of Agriculture Nationwide Production ..It's Up To You'," from D. M. Ladd of the FBI which states:
"I am attaching a program of the production ..It's Up To You,' which was staged at the Department of Agriculture Auditorium in Washington, D.C. for a ten day period commencing on June 22, 1943. The production was attended by Special Agent [censored] and because of the tenor of the production Agent [censored] checked the Bureau file and ascertained that the following named individuals connected with the production of this show are either closely associated with the Communist Party or members thereof: Earl Robinson, Woody Guthrie…
"…In November, 1942 the Baltimore Field Office reported that through the medium of a confidential informant it was learned that a mass meeting was held at the negro Elk's Hall in Baltimore, on which occasion the speakers were James Ford, an official of the Communist Party, USA, and Woody Guthrie. Guthrie is identified as having associated with one John R. Forrest, a song writer…Forrest is the subject of a Bureau file and is closely associated with Communist and Communist infiltrated groups in and around Los Angeles, California. Guthrie has been a resident of both New York City and Los Angeles."
For more information about Woody Guthrie's life and his historical impact on U.S. cultural life, you can check out the official Woody Guthrie website at www.woodyguthrie.org
********
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Woody Guthrie Revisited (Part 4)
In a July 15, 1946 letter, Woody Guthrie wrote the following:
"I have never sung nor made songs just to entertain the upper classes, but to curse their clawing, reckless racketeers, and to warn the nervous ones that live and die by greed....
"Not all of us folk and ballad makers and singers stand where I stand. Not all of them see the world as I see it. Some would rather be a ..character' and to be fotographed and filmed, broadcast and recorded, and paid big money by the big money side. They would rather occupy a certain social position, to be well known, to play the game of publicity gangsters and to enjoy the crowds that clap and yell when you tell them directly or indirectly that this old world is okie dokie, she is all right, she is a nice good place to live on, and if you kick or argue, or make too much noise with your mouth, then you are just a native barnkicker, and a griper, and you are kicked out by your own inability to ..cooperate' with the high moguls…
"If your work gets to be labeled as communist or even as communistic or even as radically leaning in the general direction of bolshevism, then, of course, you are black balled, black listed, chalked up as a revolutionary bomb thrower, and you invite the whole weight of the capitalist machine to be thrown against you…"
Coincidentally, among the 55 pages in Woody Guthrie's de-classified FBI file [100-29988] , is a July 18, 1941 "Memorandum to Mr. Matthew F. McGuire, The Assistant to the Attorney General" from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover which states:
"From a confidential source, information has been furnished this Bureau that one Woodrow W. Guthrie, who is employed by the Department of the Interior, is allegedly a member of the Communist Party. This individual is reported as being at the present time on the West Coast, engaged in the making of a motion picture for the Department of the Interior…"
Also contained in Woody Guthrie's de-classified FBI file is an October 17, 1941 letter to the "Special Agent in Charge, San Francisco, California" from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, "Re: Woodrow W. Guthrie, Internal Security", which states:
"…Guthrie is no longer an employee of another Governmental agency and in the event the files of your field division reflect the desirability of conducting an investigation into his activities and sympathies in order to determine whether they are inimical to the best interests of this Government you are at liberty to do so."
For more information about the historical role that Woody played in U.S. musical history, you can check out the http://www.woodyguthrie.org/ site.
*********
Paul Robeson’s 110th Birthday Anniversary
Category: Music
April 9, 2008 marked the 110th anniversary of Paul Robeson's birth in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1953 Robeson was denied a passport to perform in Europe by the Corporatist Male Establishment's State Department. On July 4, 1952 Paul had given a speech at the Progressive Party's national convention in Chicago in which he said:
"The Negro people are not fooled by the myth of "tremendous progress"--the progress of a few bigshot jobs and appointments, while the great masses of our folk in the South--yes, in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, New York and the West Coast--struggle for every little gain in living wages...Both old parties want to retreat on civil rights...The Democratic dilemma will not be solved by any stepped-up double-talking...The Democrats will discover that the old dodge that "it's Congress..." won't work...In 1952 our campaign is challenging the two old parties..."
And, as a chronology contained in the Paul Robeson Speaks book noted, "with recording companies refusing to issue his records or record new ones and all concert halls, theaters etc. closed to him, Robeson" saw "his income dwindle from a high of over $100,000 in 1947 to about $6,000 in 1952."
In 1972 a New York City-based folksinger/songwriter/activist named Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick recorded on a Folkways record his "Ballad of Paul Robeson," which contained the following verses:
"They tried to stop you from singing
At Peekskill's hallowed Hall
But a hundred thousand people
Demanded your message be told
They took all of your records
From their racist's record racks
But you stood tall and fought
And never did turn back."
Read more: http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music/blog?page=12#ixzz0zMSNIhbV
**********
Read more: http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music/blog?page=10#ixzz0zMRCCraT
This is great stuff for any music aficionado, especially of folk, social protest, and roots music. I am going to be "stealing" entries off of this site periodically but you should be checking it out yourselves. Kudos, Bob Feldman.
**********
'Kunstler On Your Side" lyrics
Current mood: nostalgic
(chorus)
He was known as a People's Lawyer
Although he got on TV
And when William Kunstler argued
The judge said: "Not guilty!"
(verses)
If you like to sing some folk songs
And you're bothered by the F.B.I.
Then my advice for all you folk fans
Is to have Kunstler on your side.
If you're trapped in Alabama
Where a sheriff took you for a ride
Then my advice for all you folk fans
Is to have Kunstler on your side. (chorus)
If you're fighting against the War Machine
And you're jailed for exposing lies
Then my advice for all you folk fans
Is to have Kunstler on your side.
If you've led a protest march
Where the police beat you 'till you cried
Then my advice for all you folk fans
Is to have Kunstler on your side. (chorus)
If you're charged with "conspiracy"
And "illegally crossing state lines"
Then my advice for all you folk fans
Is to have Kunstler on your side.
If you're revolting in a prison
Against guards that brutalized
Then my advice for all you folk fans
Is to have Kunstler on your side. (chorus)
The public domain "Kunstler On Your Side" biographical protest folk about the now-deceased civil rights attorney was written in the 1980s.
In a 1999 biography of William Kunstler, William M. Kunstler: The Most Hated Lawyer In America, a law school professor named David Langum indicated which kind of private practice clients Kunstler would not represent in the 1980s and 1990s:
"Like all lawyers in private practice, Kunstler also took cases for no more exalted reason than to earn a fee. Political selectivity continued, although a more realistic statement of Kunstler's later position was that given to a reporter in 1994:...He would not have taken on O.J. Simpson..."because it's a wife killing case." Nor would he have represented the hotel mogul Leona Helmsley, who..."although she has the same civil rights as anyone, is a rather detestable character with few redeeming qualities.""
For more information about William Kunstler's life, you might want to check out the new documentary film, "William Kunstler: Disturbing The Universe," or the www.disturbingtheuniverse.com web site.
*********
'Let The Big Banks Fail' protest folk song lyrics
Category: Music
Let The Big Banks Fail
(chorus)
Let the Big Banks fail
And put the bankers in jail
It’s time to right the wrong
And not save those who committed fraud
(verse)
Wall Street ripped off investors
And made billions from sub-prime loans
Yet when their housing boom turned to bust
To Washington, the bankers did go.
The big bankers they purchased
The Congress and the White House
So Democrats and Republicans
Are eager to bail them out.
(bridge)
They say they have no money to give welfare for the poor
Yet "Lehman-Goldman Sachs" get $700 billion more
They say they have no money to provide jobs and free health care
Yet AIG and Merrill Lynch are given Corporate Welfare. (chorus)
(additional verses)
If a tenant can’t pay his rent
A landlord will evict
But if a Big Bank can’t pay its debt
Its government will give it cash.
If a worker can’t do her job
She’ll get fired for incompetence
But if a banker wrecks his bank
His government gives him a blank check.(chorus)
If a homeowner can’t pay his mortgage
He’ll lose his home and get foreclosed
But if Wall Street can’t pay off its creditors
It gets another big government loan.
If a store loses its customers
It will soon be forced to close
But if Big Banks steal from consumers
They’re given billions in loans. (bridge) (chorus)
They’re all for a free market
When their profits are rolling in
But once they start losing money
The free market ain’t for them.
If you can’t pay your student debts
You’ll get harassed by their government
Yet when Wall Street banks owe people money
The government lets them off the hook. (chorus)
So if you don’t think it’s democratic
For Wall Street’s government to rule over you
Then just take over CNN
With the help of your labor union.
The bankers’ names might be Pritzker
Or Rubin or J.P. Morgan
Yet they all don’t want Revolution
So they can rip off the people again. (chorus)
The public domain Let The Big Banks protest folk song was written in the Fall of 2008 when Wall Street firms like AIG, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup were getting bailed out by the U.S. government--on the pretext that giving corporate welfare grants (and more executive bonuses) to Wall Street would prevent mass layoffs of U.S. workers and another economic depression in 2009. A few days ago I finally got around to recording the Let The Big Banks protest folk song on my cheap cassette tape recorder, but I haven't yet been able to get it converted to mp3 so I can post it onto the internet with its original public domain melody.
Read more: http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music/blog?page=10#ixzz0zMRCCraT
**********
Saturday, November 01, 2008
Woody Guthrie Revisited (Part 1)
Category: Music
In a July 15, 1946 letter, Woody Guthrie wrote the following:
"I think that I have proved that a folk singer, to sing best what the people have thought and are thinking, is forced to turn his back on the bids of Broadway and Hollywood to buy him and his talents out. I feel like my work in this field will someday be seen as the most radical, the most militant, and the most topical of them all…
"Every folk song that I know tells how to fix some things in this world to make it better, tells what is wrong with it, and what we've got to do to fix it better. If the song does not do this, then, it is no more of a folk song than I am a movie scout…
"When you ask yourself which of the so-called folk singers live up to the real name, you can cross lots of their names entirely off of your list…Ask yourself, does the singer, (artist or poet), take part in the fight to win a better world for the worker? There is only one big fight with a million and one legs to it, the fight of the worker to win his fair share from his owner (boss, etc.). The more the owners allow a singer to be heard around, the less he can sing the tale of the worker's fight. Before your voice can be heard or your face fotographed, you must actually turn into a weapon of the owner against the workers. I know from a hundred cases of my own experience that any work of protest, fight, militance or plan for the worker, was blue penciled, and censored a dozen times. Any word that was too true, too strong, or too loud in criticizing the world owned by the big boss was scratched out by several hands under a thousand reasons."
Coincidentally, among the pages contained in Woody Guthrie's declassified post-1950s FBI file (100-29988) is an April 10, 1951 memorandum from the FBI's New York City office to the FBI Director on the subject "Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, Security Matter," which states that "It is recommended that a Security Index Card be prepared on the above captioned individual." This April 1951 document also categorizes Woody as "Communist," indicates that "49 Murdock Court, Brooklyn, NY" is now Woody's residence address and lists Woody's "business address" as "Free Lance Folk Singer."
For more information about Woody Guthrie's historical contribution to U.S. musical history, you can check out the official Woody Guthrie site at www.woodyguthrie.org.
Read more: http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music/blog?page=11#ixzz0zMSAI3zs
*********
Saturday, November 08, 2008
Woody Guthrie Revisited (Part 2)
Category: Music
In a July 15, 1946 letter, Woody Guthrie wrote the following:
"It is not just a question of you, as an artist, selling out, and becoming harmless to the owning side. No, you are never actually bought nor bribed till they have decided that they can use you in one way or another to rob, to deceive, to blind, confuse, to misrepresent, or just to harass, worry, bedevil, and becloud the path of the militant worker on his long hard fight from slavery to freedom. Your art helps to preserve, to prolong, to keep alive, and to glorify the essences and the principles of the owning, ruling side. If your art did not add new life to their side, kid not yourself, they would certainly never shake your hand and drop their bloody money down into your lap. And it is the highest form of your owner's joy when he buys you out from the union side (where you) have spent several years of your life getting people to follow, to hear, or to stand for a while and listen to what you have to say, or to live their lives in spirit and in action in the way that you lived your own. This makes you worth lots more to your owner…
"This is the bad part of a capitalist system, this dog eat dog, this spying, tracing, tracking and trailing after one another always under the covers of night and the shades and shadows of day…This is the system which the owners would like to prolong, to keep alive, to prolong as long as they possibly can, because in the wild blindness of it all, they get all of us to fighting against one another, and rob us coming in the fields of production, and going, in the realm of distribution. This is the system I would like to see die out. It killed several members of my family, it gassed several and shell shocked several more in the last world war, and in this world war just past, it scattered lots more. It drove families of my relatives and friends by the hundreds of thousands to wander more homeless than dogs and to live less welcome than hogs, sheep, or cattle. This is the system I started out to expose by every conceivable way that I could think of with songs and with ballads, and even with poems, stories, newspaper articles, even by humor, by fun, by nonsense, ridicule and by any other way that I could lay hold on."
Coincidentally, among the pages contained in Woody Guthrie's declassified post-1950s FBI file (100-29988-5,6,7,8) is a June 2, 1950 memorandum sent to the FBI Director by the FBI's Los Angeles office on the subject "Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, Woody Guthrie, Security Matter," which states:
"Re: El Paso letter to New York dated 2-15-50 in captioned matter, report of Special Agent [censored] dated 4-30-50 at Los Angeles entitled ..Factionalists Sabotage Group,' Internal Security-C:
"On April 18, 1950 CNDI [censored] identified a photograph of GUTHRIE as being the individual to whom he had previously referred to as (WOODY), and who was a member of the Factionalist Sabotage Group. According to CNDI [censored] GUTHRIE from approximately April 15, 1950 to May 15, 1950 resided at the home of [censored] Los Angeles, California, and an individual who has also been identified as a member of the above group.
"On May 15, 1950 CNDI [censored] ascertained that GUTHRIE left Los Angeles on that date and on May 18, 1950 CNDI [censored] was advised by [censored] that GUTHRIE was in El Paso, Texas where he would contact his children and former wife. Reference telbu reflects that GUTHRIE's children resided at 4002 Bliss Street, El Paso, Texas.
"For the information of the El Paso office CNDIS [censored] have furnished this office since [censored] with information concerning a group of approximately thirty men and women, some veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and expelled Communist Party members who are regularly meeting in Los Angeles. According to [censored] this group has a headquarters in Mexico City, Mexico, and one of the group [censored], known to your office, left Los Angeles in December 1949 to work in this headquarters; her residence has been verified in Cuernevaca, Mexico.
"The [censored] of this group, [censored] has advised CNDI [censored] that the ultimate purpose of this group is sabotage against the United States during war with Russia and has outlined to him group policy in recruitment, method of operation, publications, finances, and has advised the informant that his group has a direct contact with the ..Comintern.'
"By letter dated May 15, 1950 in the referenced matter the Bureau requested that individual investigations be opened concerning members of this group and security index cards be considered.
"El Paso is requested to verify the residence of the subject in El Paso through [censored], El Paso County Court House, El Paso, Texas, it being noted that [censored] has previously furnished your office with information regarding GUTHRIE.
"Upon receipt of this verification, Los Angeles will submit a RUC report covering GUTHRIE's activities known to this office."
And a July 21, 1950 memorandum to the FBI Director from the FBI's Los Angeles office on the same subject states:
"Rebutel dated July 14, 1950, entitled ..FACTIONALIST SABOTAGE GROUP, INTERNAL SECURITY C 'Bufile 100-369268'…
"CNDI [censored] on July 4, 1950, advised he had ascertained from [censored], also a member of the referenced group, that the subject was presently residing at 3520 Mermaid Avenue, Brooklyn 24, New York.
"A pending report setting out leads to verify the subject's residence in New York is presently being transcribed and will be forwarded to the New York and El Paso Offices at an early date."
Also included in Woody Guthrie's declassified post-1950's FBI file is an August 3, 1950 document summarizing the articles that appeared in the left-wing Daily People's World in 1948 and 1949 that either mentioned Woody or were written by Woody; and which states that "T-1 advised that he specifically recalls Guthrie having attended" six political meetings between March 26, 1950 and May 6, 1950 that were held at 932 or 932 ½ North Lucile Ave. in Los Angeles. Yet this August 3, 1950 document admits that "[censored] Guthrie [censored] advised that he personally has never, [censored] made any statement relative to sabotage…"
For more information about Woody Guthrie's life and work, you can check out the official Woody Guthrie site at www.woodyguthrie.org .
*****
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Woody Guthrie Revisited (Part 3)
Category: Music
In a July 15, 1946 letter, Woody Guthrie wrote the following:
"I have decided, long ago, that my songs and ballads would not get the hugs and kisses of the capitalistic ..experts,' simply because I believe that the real folk history of this country finds its center and its hub in the fight of the union members against the hired gun thugs of the big owners. It is for this reason I have never really, sincerely, expected nor dimly prayed, nor hoped for a single solitary minute for a penny's worth of help from the hand of our landlord and ruler….
"To the big owners, an artist of any note or fame, that can be said to work or fight over on the union side, is classed by the big boys as a soldier, a technical, or an artistic captain or a general. The money paid to clip off working class artists may start at a measley Ten or Fifteen Thousand, and run up very quick to the sum of, A Hundred, Two Hundred Thousand, or a Half Million long greens. (This is no money at all to the big handlers that toss bales of money back and forth across their tables to the tune of a Million, a Billion, or more, Dollars)….
"It is not only a question of buying you and your art out of circulation, to keep you from stirring up your people against their blind owners; it is, lots of times a question of blocking your hand on every side, or causing you to get all lost and tangled up in a thousand traps of their psychological, emotional, economical, legal and illegal sorts of personal warfare. This will take the form of bribery, social disgrace, exposes', running down your work, discouraging your talents, and insulting you on every turn."
Coincidentally, among the 55 pages contained in Woody's de-classified FBI file (100-29988-5) is a July 15, 1943 Memorandum for E.A. Tamm, regarding "Department of Agriculture Nationwide Production ..It's Up To You'," from D. M. Ladd of the FBI which states:
"I am attaching a program of the production ..It's Up To You,' which was staged at the Department of Agriculture Auditorium in Washington, D.C. for a ten day period commencing on June 22, 1943. The production was attended by Special Agent [censored] and because of the tenor of the production Agent [censored] checked the Bureau file and ascertained that the following named individuals connected with the production of this show are either closely associated with the Communist Party or members thereof: Earl Robinson, Woody Guthrie…
"…In November, 1942 the Baltimore Field Office reported that through the medium of a confidential informant it was learned that a mass meeting was held at the negro Elk's Hall in Baltimore, on which occasion the speakers were James Ford, an official of the Communist Party, USA, and Woody Guthrie. Guthrie is identified as having associated with one John R. Forrest, a song writer…Forrest is the subject of a Bureau file and is closely associated with Communist and Communist infiltrated groups in and around Los Angeles, California. Guthrie has been a resident of both New York City and Los Angeles."
For more information about Woody Guthrie's life and his historical impact on U.S. cultural life, you can check out the official Woody Guthrie website at www.woodyguthrie.org
********
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Woody Guthrie Revisited (Part 4)
In a July 15, 1946 letter, Woody Guthrie wrote the following:
"I have never sung nor made songs just to entertain the upper classes, but to curse their clawing, reckless racketeers, and to warn the nervous ones that live and die by greed....
"Not all of us folk and ballad makers and singers stand where I stand. Not all of them see the world as I see it. Some would rather be a ..character' and to be fotographed and filmed, broadcast and recorded, and paid big money by the big money side. They would rather occupy a certain social position, to be well known, to play the game of publicity gangsters and to enjoy the crowds that clap and yell when you tell them directly or indirectly that this old world is okie dokie, she is all right, she is a nice good place to live on, and if you kick or argue, or make too much noise with your mouth, then you are just a native barnkicker, and a griper, and you are kicked out by your own inability to ..cooperate' with the high moguls…
"If your work gets to be labeled as communist or even as communistic or even as radically leaning in the general direction of bolshevism, then, of course, you are black balled, black listed, chalked up as a revolutionary bomb thrower, and you invite the whole weight of the capitalist machine to be thrown against you…"
Coincidentally, among the 55 pages in Woody Guthrie's de-classified FBI file [100-29988] , is a July 18, 1941 "Memorandum to Mr. Matthew F. McGuire, The Assistant to the Attorney General" from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover which states:
"From a confidential source, information has been furnished this Bureau that one Woodrow W. Guthrie, who is employed by the Department of the Interior, is allegedly a member of the Communist Party. This individual is reported as being at the present time on the West Coast, engaged in the making of a motion picture for the Department of the Interior…"
Also contained in Woody Guthrie's de-classified FBI file is an October 17, 1941 letter to the "Special Agent in Charge, San Francisco, California" from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, "Re: Woodrow W. Guthrie, Internal Security", which states:
"…Guthrie is no longer an employee of another Governmental agency and in the event the files of your field division reflect the desirability of conducting an investigation into his activities and sympathies in order to determine whether they are inimical to the best interests of this Government you are at liberty to do so."
For more information about the historical role that Woody played in U.S. musical history, you can check out the http://www.woodyguthrie.org/ site.
*********
Paul Robeson’s 110th Birthday Anniversary
Category: Music
April 9, 2008 marked the 110th anniversary of Paul Robeson's birth in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1953 Robeson was denied a passport to perform in Europe by the Corporatist Male Establishment's State Department. On July 4, 1952 Paul had given a speech at the Progressive Party's national convention in Chicago in which he said:
"The Negro people are not fooled by the myth of "tremendous progress"--the progress of a few bigshot jobs and appointments, while the great masses of our folk in the South--yes, in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, New York and the West Coast--struggle for every little gain in living wages...Both old parties want to retreat on civil rights...The Democratic dilemma will not be solved by any stepped-up double-talking...The Democrats will discover that the old dodge that "it's Congress..." won't work...In 1952 our campaign is challenging the two old parties..."
And, as a chronology contained in the Paul Robeson Speaks book noted, "with recording companies refusing to issue his records or record new ones and all concert halls, theaters etc. closed to him, Robeson" saw "his income dwindle from a high of over $100,000 in 1947 to about $6,000 in 1952."
In 1972 a New York City-based folksinger/songwriter/activist named Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick recorded on a Folkways record his "Ballad of Paul Robeson," which contained the following verses:
"They tried to stop you from singing
At Peekskill's hallowed Hall
But a hundred thousand people
Demanded your message be told
They took all of your records
From their racist's record racks
But you stood tall and fought
And never did turn back."
Read more: http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music/blog?page=12#ixzz0zMSNIhbV
**********
Read more: http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music/blog?page=10#ixzz0zMRCCraT
*For The Folkies From Muskogee And Elsewhere- The Bob Feldman Music Blog On "My Space"-Recalling Post-1973 Chilean Coup Murder of Victor Jara
Markin comment:
This is great stuff for any music aficionado, especially of folk, social protest, and roots music. I am going to be "stealing" entries off of this site periodically but you should be checking it out yourselves. Kudos, Bob Feldman.
*********
Recalling Post-1973 Chilean Coup Murder of Victor Jara
Current mood: rebellious
Category: Music
(If you're a working-class folk music fan or a non-professional folk musician who hasn't had much luck finding a recent copy of Protest Folk Music magazine on the magazine rack in your local corporate bookstore chain outlet, following is an historical item about the murder of Chilean folksinger Victor Jara (that Arlo Guthrie & Adrian Mitchell wrote a great song about in the 1970s), which first appeared in the September 1, 1993 issue of the Lower East Side alternative newsweekly, Downtown, in my "Brief"/(Protest Folk Music) column:
One of the victims of the CIA's Chilean military coup in September 1973 was the Chilean folksinger Victor Jara. In a May 14, 1974 radio interview on WBAI-FM, Joan Jara described what happened to her husband:
"On the 11th of September [1973], Victor was due to sing at the opening of an exhibition about the horrors of civil war and fascism, to take place at the Technical University where Allende was to have spoken. He heard on the radio of the military operations taking place, heard of the bombings of Popular Unity radio stations, heard Allende making his last speech. But answering the urgent call for all workers to assemble at their place of work, Victor left home to go to the university less than two hours before the bombing of the presidential palace. He phoned me twice that day. It was impossible for him to come home again...But he gave me courage and told me he loved me. The rector, now a prisoner on Dawson Island, and several hundred professors and students, were trapped in the university building. The military fired against them all night to prevent anyone escaping. Some who tried to get out after nightfall were killed by machine gun fire.
"The next morning, Wednesday, the 12th of September at 9, the military moved into the university. Students and professors were taken prisoner. Victor was immediately recognized and given special treatment. I have been told by many witnesses...that he sang there in the stadium. That they broke his hands and after two days killed him with machine guns.
"Meanwhile, I waited for news of him at home with my children...A week afterwards, I heard that his body had been recognized at the morgue.
"It was an anonymous body among hundreds of other Chilean workers, students, university professors. Battered, bloody, half naked and riddled with machine gun bullets. I was lucky to have been able to bury my husband. Many disappeared into a common grave.
"The news of Victor's murder spread rapidly. It was reported on television and in a newspaper controlled, of course, by the military, as though it had been a natural death. Now the official version is that Victor was shot resisting arrest with a machine gun in his hand..."
(Downtown 9/1/93)
Read more: http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music/blog?page=10#ixzz0zMQ3CjwC
This is great stuff for any music aficionado, especially of folk, social protest, and roots music. I am going to be "stealing" entries off of this site periodically but you should be checking it out yourselves. Kudos, Bob Feldman.
*********
Recalling Post-1973 Chilean Coup Murder of Victor Jara
Current mood: rebellious
Category: Music
(If you're a working-class folk music fan or a non-professional folk musician who hasn't had much luck finding a recent copy of Protest Folk Music magazine on the magazine rack in your local corporate bookstore chain outlet, following is an historical item about the murder of Chilean folksinger Victor Jara (that Arlo Guthrie & Adrian Mitchell wrote a great song about in the 1970s), which first appeared in the September 1, 1993 issue of the Lower East Side alternative newsweekly, Downtown, in my "Brief"/(Protest Folk Music) column:
One of the victims of the CIA's Chilean military coup in September 1973 was the Chilean folksinger Victor Jara. In a May 14, 1974 radio interview on WBAI-FM, Joan Jara described what happened to her husband:
"On the 11th of September [1973], Victor was due to sing at the opening of an exhibition about the horrors of civil war and fascism, to take place at the Technical University where Allende was to have spoken. He heard on the radio of the military operations taking place, heard of the bombings of Popular Unity radio stations, heard Allende making his last speech. But answering the urgent call for all workers to assemble at their place of work, Victor left home to go to the university less than two hours before the bombing of the presidential palace. He phoned me twice that day. It was impossible for him to come home again...But he gave me courage and told me he loved me. The rector, now a prisoner on Dawson Island, and several hundred professors and students, were trapped in the university building. The military fired against them all night to prevent anyone escaping. Some who tried to get out after nightfall were killed by machine gun fire.
"The next morning, Wednesday, the 12th of September at 9, the military moved into the university. Students and professors were taken prisoner. Victor was immediately recognized and given special treatment. I have been told by many witnesses...that he sang there in the stadium. That they broke his hands and after two days killed him with machine guns.
"Meanwhile, I waited for news of him at home with my children...A week afterwards, I heard that his body had been recognized at the morgue.
"It was an anonymous body among hundreds of other Chilean workers, students, university professors. Battered, bloody, half naked and riddled with machine gun bullets. I was lucky to have been able to bury my husband. Many disappeared into a common grave.
"The news of Victor's murder spread rapidly. It was reported on television and in a newspaper controlled, of course, by the military, as though it had been a natural death. Now the official version is that Victor was shot resisting arrest with a machine gun in his hand..."
(Downtown 9/1/93)
Read more: http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music/blog?page=10#ixzz0zMQ3CjwC
*For The Folkies From Muskogee And Elsewhere- The Bob Feldman Music Blog On "My Space"
Markin comment:
This is great stuff for any music aficionado, especially of folk, social protest, and roots music. I am going to be "stealing" entries off of this site periodically but you should be checking it out yourselves. Kudos, Bob Feldman.
**********
Mike Clark's 1980s Notes on "Women's Coal Mining Songs"
Current mood: thoughtful
Category: Music
In his liner notes to the 1984 Rounder Records album "They'll Never Keep Us Down: Women's Coal Mining Songs," Mike Clark wrote the following:
"Three generations of Appalachian coal mining people are represented by the songs on this album, songs which grow directly out of the experiences of trying to build a union, improve a community, establish equality for women at the work place, or save a valley from the ravages of modern strip mining. Despite the time span of some 50 years from the period when "Which Side Are You On?" was written until 1981 when the most recent of these songs were finished, there is a remarkable consistency to the themes and ideas which are reflected here: a concern for the safety and future of loved ones; an appreciation for the value of family; a hope that a labor union can provide safe working conditions, decent wages and a dignified retirement; a sense of outrage that coal miners must fight so hard for the rights which many other citizens take for granted; and a belief that people working together can make a difference.
"It may be hard for people who live outside the coalfields to comprehend when such a region and such a people should produce a body of music which is, at the same time, so full of anger and exuberance, of determination and love, or sadness and joy. These songs were hewn out of the attempts of people who tried to improve their lives and found themselves facing the naked political and economic might of a vast and complex industrial system. The songs also come from a region where music has traditionally been used to express the hopes and concerns of daily life...
"...There is a key difference between talking in vague, general terms about the enormous power of large corporations and talking in very concrete terms about the abuse of power in a local community. Many of these songs came out of a local situation, a local problem. The songwriter responded to what was happening and it is this clear, personal statement which gives emotional power to the songs and which also helps us to understand and to identify with the people who are trying to change things."
Read more: http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music/blog?page=6#ixzz0zMLTrNJb
This is great stuff for any music aficionado, especially of folk, social protest, and roots music. I am going to be "stealing" entries off of this site periodically but you should be checking it out yourselves. Kudos, Bob Feldman.
**********
Mike Clark's 1980s Notes on "Women's Coal Mining Songs"
Current mood: thoughtful
Category: Music
In his liner notes to the 1984 Rounder Records album "They'll Never Keep Us Down: Women's Coal Mining Songs," Mike Clark wrote the following:
"Three generations of Appalachian coal mining people are represented by the songs on this album, songs which grow directly out of the experiences of trying to build a union, improve a community, establish equality for women at the work place, or save a valley from the ravages of modern strip mining. Despite the time span of some 50 years from the period when "Which Side Are You On?" was written until 1981 when the most recent of these songs were finished, there is a remarkable consistency to the themes and ideas which are reflected here: a concern for the safety and future of loved ones; an appreciation for the value of family; a hope that a labor union can provide safe working conditions, decent wages and a dignified retirement; a sense of outrage that coal miners must fight so hard for the rights which many other citizens take for granted; and a belief that people working together can make a difference.
"It may be hard for people who live outside the coalfields to comprehend when such a region and such a people should produce a body of music which is, at the same time, so full of anger and exuberance, of determination and love, or sadness and joy. These songs were hewn out of the attempts of people who tried to improve their lives and found themselves facing the naked political and economic might of a vast and complex industrial system. The songs also come from a region where music has traditionally been used to express the hopes and concerns of daily life...
"...There is a key difference between talking in vague, general terms about the enormous power of large corporations and talking in very concrete terms about the abuse of power in a local community. Many of these songs came out of a local situation, a local problem. The songwriter responded to what was happening and it is this clear, personal statement which gives emotional power to the songs and which also helps us to understand and to identify with the people who are trying to change things."
Read more: http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music/blog?page=6#ixzz0zMLTrNJb
*For The Folkies From Muskogee And Elsewhere- The Bob Feldman Music Blog On "My Space"
Markin comment:
This is great stuff for any music aficionado, especially of folk, social protest, and roots music. I am going to be "stealing" entries off of this site periodically but you should be checking it out yourselves. Kudos, Bob Feldman.
From Ralph Rinzler's 1980 Notes to "Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People"
Current mood: thoughtful
Category: Music
In his May 1980 liner notes to Hazel Dickens' Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People vinyl album, which Rounder Records distributed, Folk Music Historian Ralph Rinzler of the Smithsonian Institution wrote the following:
"All working musicians are faced with choices continually, and some choose to shape their musical styles and their messages to the tastes of the market--or at least to what they or their agents may perceive to be those tastes. Other artists, like Hazel, have their eyes fixed on other goals. Hazel has been successful in matching her musical styles to her ideas while creating a varied repertoire. She sings many songs which she did not write herself. Some come out of the oldest cut of Anglo-American folksong traditions to have been found in Southern Appalachia. Others are from the more recent country music traditions of the past half-century. She sings these in her own style which combines elements of Southern church singing, country and bluegrass styles of the past 40 years and occasionally she will sing a ballad or song without any instrumental accompaniment drawing on the most archaic of Appalachian vocal traditions. All of these styles she comes by naturally having grown up in a religious and musical mountain family.
"What is unmistakeable, whether she is singing on a picket line, in a concert hall, or at a national convention of the United Mine Workers, is that Hazel has chosen to put herself and her music to work for the benefit of people faced with struggle--for wages, for rights, for their very survival...The people know it...And generations who follow us and who have forgotten the top ten tunes on today's pop and country music charts will know and respect it because hers is art of timeless and enduring values."
Read more: http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music/blog?page=6#ixzz0zML1M9Il
This is great stuff for any music aficionado, especially of folk, social protest, and roots music. I am going to be "stealing" entries off of this site periodically but you should be checking it out yourselves. Kudos, Bob Feldman.
From Ralph Rinzler's 1980 Notes to "Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People"
Current mood: thoughtful
Category: Music
In his May 1980 liner notes to Hazel Dickens' Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People vinyl album, which Rounder Records distributed, Folk Music Historian Ralph Rinzler of the Smithsonian Institution wrote the following:
"All working musicians are faced with choices continually, and some choose to shape their musical styles and their messages to the tastes of the market--or at least to what they or their agents may perceive to be those tastes. Other artists, like Hazel, have their eyes fixed on other goals. Hazel has been successful in matching her musical styles to her ideas while creating a varied repertoire. She sings many songs which she did not write herself. Some come out of the oldest cut of Anglo-American folksong traditions to have been found in Southern Appalachia. Others are from the more recent country music traditions of the past half-century. She sings these in her own style which combines elements of Southern church singing, country and bluegrass styles of the past 40 years and occasionally she will sing a ballad or song without any instrumental accompaniment drawing on the most archaic of Appalachian vocal traditions. All of these styles she comes by naturally having grown up in a religious and musical mountain family.
"What is unmistakeable, whether she is singing on a picket line, in a concert hall, or at a national convention of the United Mine Workers, is that Hazel has chosen to put herself and her music to work for the benefit of people faced with struggle--for wages, for rights, for their very survival...The people know it...And generations who follow us and who have forgotten the top ten tunes on today's pop and country music charts will know and respect it because hers is art of timeless and enduring values."
Read more: http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music/blog?page=6#ixzz0zML1M9Il
*From The 1960s Folk Revival- Forklorist and Ardent Stalinist Irwin Silber Passes Away
Click on the headline to link to a New York Times obituary for Irwin Silber, folklorist and ardent Stalinist (under various political figure and organizations).
Markin comment:
If you do not believe that Irwin Silber was an ardent Stalinist then Google and read some of his anti-Trotskyist diatribes in the old Guardian that he helped edit. To every person their due.
Markin comment:
If you do not believe that Irwin Silber was an ardent Stalinist then Google and read some of his anti-Trotskyist diatribes in the old Guardian that he helped edit. To every person their due.
*For The Folkies From Muskogee And Elsewhere- The Bob Feldman Music Blog On "My Space"- From Richard Farina's 1965 Notes to "Singer Songwriter Project
Markin comment:
This is great stuff for any music aficionado, especially of folk, social protest, and roots music. I am going to be "stealing" entries off of this site periodically but you should be checking it out yourselves. Kudos, Bob Feldman.
*********
From Richard Farina's 1965 Notes to "Singer Songwriter Project" Album
Current mood: contemplative
Category: Music
In his Summer 1965 liner notes to the Singer Songwriter Project vinyl album, Richard Farina wrote the following:
"While you're looking around for the wherefores and antecedents of the new folk-songwriting revival, you might ought to remember that there was still another Dylan and his last name was Thomas. He went down in 1953, part of his wordy nightmare inflection torn loose from an alcoholically liberated brain. And despite the polite picnic of typographically correct little academics at his collossal bedside, he hit the metaphoric ground with a thunder of trumpets...
"...Some of us saw him wolfing ale in mugs with the truckers at The White Horse and belching back a phrase as lilting as the tide he so invoked in Wales. Some saw him in the English Professor's living room...And the rest heard the ranting echo of his wild words, words which no matter how gentle or structured the shape of the poem that contained them, bellowed out at us with the overwhelming implication that art was life, enthusiasm, rage, and freedom. At a time when verse seemed channelled into the sour evening game of the universities, that implication was a breath of potent hope in the faint mouths of those babes who were about ready to capitulate, to offer an apology to parents and institutions before ever daring to use the forbidden word Writer in application to themselves. You could do no better, came his hoarse and beautiful whisper, than speak your own true name.
"...We'd been born into the arbitrary confines of a United States...And each year, came the silent chorus of bored asides, millions of tons of Grade-A bullshit pours forth from our country's collectively twisted head...
"Around the same time a good many of us were getting into folk music. And folk music, through no active fault of its own, fooled us into certain sympathies and nostalgic alliances with the so-called traditional past...But the paradox was implicit...How long would people with contemporary poetic sensibilities be content to sing archaic material for an immediate purpose?...
"The underground reaction, the reaction in the cellars of what you might call Everybody's Own MacDougal Street, was topical and quick. A number of people began adding their own songs to otherwise derivative repertoires and finding astonishing response from their listeners. That the songs were intensely personal in their grievance or celebration was inevitable, but in nearly every case the audience was not only ready for the new compositions but anxious to have its own sensibilities strengthened through such an unaffected medium. The love songs, if they were good, were love songs of the times, implying a recognition of station wagons, thruways, and television sets instead of sketching a cop-out, idealized, pastoral picture. The protest songs lost their earlier occasional subject matter and were ambitious enough to take on concerns like the military-industrial complex which made its money by preparing for a war of blistering absurdity. The satire was quick and to the uneasy point, having gained the best from the psychiatrist's and musician's private vocabularies. And in keeping with the anxiety of societal surroundings, the overall production was prolific, frenetic, uneven, often brilliant, and at times appalling.
"But at least it was being heard, and not buried in literary journals...In the very beginning, of course, there was the usual begging and borrowing, maybe some stealing, and those many times you couldn't tell the Leadbelly from the Guthrie from the Dylan from the Clayton from the Seeger from the Paxton from the Spoelstra from the Ochs from the Andersen from the Murdoch from the Sky from the La Farge from the St. Marie from the Hester from the Wheeler from the Lightfoot from the Cohen from the Camp from the MacColl from the Clancy from the maybe even me and Eric von Schmidt..."
Read more: http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music/blog?page=5#ixzz0zMHrRoaH
This is great stuff for any music aficionado, especially of folk, social protest, and roots music. I am going to be "stealing" entries off of this site periodically but you should be checking it out yourselves. Kudos, Bob Feldman.
*********
From Richard Farina's 1965 Notes to "Singer Songwriter Project" Album
Current mood: contemplative
Category: Music
In his Summer 1965 liner notes to the Singer Songwriter Project vinyl album, Richard Farina wrote the following:
"While you're looking around for the wherefores and antecedents of the new folk-songwriting revival, you might ought to remember that there was still another Dylan and his last name was Thomas. He went down in 1953, part of his wordy nightmare inflection torn loose from an alcoholically liberated brain. And despite the polite picnic of typographically correct little academics at his collossal bedside, he hit the metaphoric ground with a thunder of trumpets...
"...Some of us saw him wolfing ale in mugs with the truckers at The White Horse and belching back a phrase as lilting as the tide he so invoked in Wales. Some saw him in the English Professor's living room...And the rest heard the ranting echo of his wild words, words which no matter how gentle or structured the shape of the poem that contained them, bellowed out at us with the overwhelming implication that art was life, enthusiasm, rage, and freedom. At a time when verse seemed channelled into the sour evening game of the universities, that implication was a breath of potent hope in the faint mouths of those babes who were about ready to capitulate, to offer an apology to parents and institutions before ever daring to use the forbidden word Writer in application to themselves. You could do no better, came his hoarse and beautiful whisper, than speak your own true name.
"...We'd been born into the arbitrary confines of a United States...And each year, came the silent chorus of bored asides, millions of tons of Grade-A bullshit pours forth from our country's collectively twisted head...
"Around the same time a good many of us were getting into folk music. And folk music, through no active fault of its own, fooled us into certain sympathies and nostalgic alliances with the so-called traditional past...But the paradox was implicit...How long would people with contemporary poetic sensibilities be content to sing archaic material for an immediate purpose?...
"The underground reaction, the reaction in the cellars of what you might call Everybody's Own MacDougal Street, was topical and quick. A number of people began adding their own songs to otherwise derivative repertoires and finding astonishing response from their listeners. That the songs were intensely personal in their grievance or celebration was inevitable, but in nearly every case the audience was not only ready for the new compositions but anxious to have its own sensibilities strengthened through such an unaffected medium. The love songs, if they were good, were love songs of the times, implying a recognition of station wagons, thruways, and television sets instead of sketching a cop-out, idealized, pastoral picture. The protest songs lost their earlier occasional subject matter and were ambitious enough to take on concerns like the military-industrial complex which made its money by preparing for a war of blistering absurdity. The satire was quick and to the uneasy point, having gained the best from the psychiatrist's and musician's private vocabularies. And in keeping with the anxiety of societal surroundings, the overall production was prolific, frenetic, uneven, often brilliant, and at times appalling.
"But at least it was being heard, and not buried in literary journals...In the very beginning, of course, there was the usual begging and borrowing, maybe some stealing, and those many times you couldn't tell the Leadbelly from the Guthrie from the Dylan from the Clayton from the Seeger from the Paxton from the Spoelstra from the Ochs from the Andersen from the Murdoch from the Sky from the La Farge from the St. Marie from the Hester from the Wheeler from the Lightfoot from the Cohen from the Camp from the MacColl from the Clancy from the maybe even me and Eric von Schmidt..."
Read more: http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music/blog?page=5#ixzz0zMHrRoaH
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