Is the Russian Revolution a Bourgeois Revolution? A Keen Analysis of the Situation in Soviet Russia

Members of the bourgeois in Petrograd in 1919 in the line to compulsory labour services (1919) via Wikimedia.

Is the Russian Revolution a Bourgeois Revolution? A Keen Analysis of the Situation in Soviet Russia by Karl Radek

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Karl Radek photographed in Berlin, 1919. Radek travelled
in the sealed train across Germany with Lenin in 1917, but
remained in Stockholm. He was an Austrian citizen
and would not have been allowed entry to Russia.

This photograph of Karl Radek from 1919 depicts the quintessential communist intellectual (see right). I am convinced he set the fashion for left-wing university students through the ages! This pamphlet is an attempt to counter critics of the Bolsheviki. Trotsky says it best, in effect, that Russia was not ready for "socialism, the lowest form of communism", and it could only set up a level somewhat lower than that. The Internationale was meant to break out in France, be advanced by Germany, and then be established by England. But instead, it all began in Russia. By 1921, it was clear that there was no real dictatorship of the proletariat, and the Bolsheviki were becoming the new ruling elite. I was hoping for more from Radek, but it would seem that Trotsky was the real intellectual of the Soviet Union. That Radek was part of the bureaucracy while Trotsky was not speaks volumes. Yet even Radek would succumb to Stalin's tyranny. It really is a tragic story but as I delve more into the original documents, I am pleased to see that my education is holding up. It is a mere facsimile of the primary documents, but it would seem to be helpful to grasp the basic story before diving into Bolshevik ephemera!

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Lenin on the Train

Lenin carpet, In the National Museum (formerly Lenin Museum) in Bishkek (2007) via Wikimedia.

Lenin on the Train by Catherine Merridale

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was an interesting history of the Russian Revolution and Lenin's trip from exile in Switzerland via train through Germany and on to Petrograd. The work covers (loosely) the time period from February (Julian Calendar) 1917 and the overthrow of the Tsar, and culminating in the Bolshevik's overthrow of the Provisional Government, led by Lenin, in October (Julian) 1917. This is quite a scholarly work with excellent referencing and suggestions for further reading. The level of detail filled in so many blanks in my historical knowledge by focusing rather narrowly. I was grateful for this focus, but I was also left with no clear end-point for the historiography. No sooner had Lenin's train arrived and he suddenly appeared in the mausoleum in the present day having his suit tailored (after killing millions of people). This sets the work up nicely for a historical sequel, but given the level of detail up until Lenin's arrival, the subsequent lack of detail was somewhat disappointing. Nevertheless, I found it hard to put this book down, and I learnt many new things. In particular, whenever I have read inside cover biographies of W. Somerset Maugham, I discovered he worked in propaganda during the Great War. But I did not know how involved he (or Hugh Walpole for that matter) was involved in Britain's spying on the Russians at the time. I also discovered that much of Maugham's backstory is sitting on my bookshelf in the as-yet unread Ashenden. Walpole's book, The Dark Forest, is about this time period and was mentioned in Hemingway's short story The Three-Day Blow, which I read just before this book. I discovered Merridale's work as a result of an interesting Twitter project where Lenin's revolution, one hundred years later, is being covered day-by-day via tweets. See: "Relive the Revolution". Now, I really do not like Twitter but if it could be more often like this I would be hooked! I recall discovering this book after I had discovered Russia Today, a Russian English-language news service. RT's animation of Lenin's journey provides a helpful recap of the book's chronology, see: #Lenintracker, it is a blast! So an interesting journey comes to a close, 100 years ago for Lenin, and just today for me. My next steps will be to read Maugham and then some Hugh Walpole. Moreover, I shall dig up some G.K. Chesterton, who, incidentally, was not only mentioned by Hemingway in The Three-Day Blow, but was also connected with Maxim Gorky and wrote the foreword to Creatures That Once Were Men. A fruitful experience overall, even if a review of this book in The Spectator reckons that the twentieth century would have turned out better if Lenin was left, cranky, and without a train, in the Swiss Alps.

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The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories

Mount Kilimanjaro (1938) via Wikimedia CC BY-SA 3.0

The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories by Ernest Hemingway

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is drawn from other works and I have read all of the stories several times before either online or in other collected works. Rather than read in awe of the master, this reading had me feeling sorry for the depressing note to all things. While this makes the short stories art, it also hints at a fragility, but not of manhood, as Hemingway's critics often suggest, but of the absurd. And yet Hemingway had no time for the absurd, or at least, Malcolm Cowley with:

...a stupid look on his potato face talking about the Dada movement...

Yet here, in this collection, I couldn't help but think of the meaninglessness of life and Hemingway's enunciation of the absurd, building over and over in a collection put together, not by Hemingway, but by others. I suspect this is worth looking into further and a few re-reads of Hemingway's major works might benefit from a view through this lens.

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