The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  81. Anna Litveiko, in In the Shadow of Revolution.

  82. Sofia Volkonskaia, ‘The Way of Bitterness’, in In the Shadow of Revolution, p.156.

  83. R. Fuelop-Miller, The Mind and Face of Bolshevism (New York, 1965), pp.142–4; von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, pp.156–60; R. Stites, Revolutionary Dreams. Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York, 1989), pp.94–5.

  84. B. Taylor, Art and Literature under the Bolsheviks, Volume I: The Crisis of Renewal, 1917–1924 (London, 1991), pp.56–60.

  85. Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, pp.88–90.

  86. Lenin, PSS, vol. xxxvi, pp.189–200.

  87. K. Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin. Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917–1941 (Princeton, 1978), p.49.

  88. For the debate over Taylorism, see K. Bailes, ‘Alexei Gastev and the Soviet Controversy over Taylorism, 1918–1924’, Soviet Studies 29 (1977), pp.373–94; S. Smith, ‘Taylorism Rules OK?’, Radical Science Journal 13 (1983), pp.3–27.

  89. Lenin, PSS, vol. xxxvi, p.293.

  90. Although in the spring of 1918, Lenin only called for ‘state capitalism’ rather than state control over the economy. Nationalization occurred only gradually.

  91. Lenin, PSS, vol. xlii, p.157.

  92. N. Bukharin and E. Preobrzhensky, The ABC of Communism (Harmonds-worth, 1969), p.444.

  93. A. Gastev, Poeziia rabochego udara (Moscow, 1971), p.19.

  94. Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, pp.156–7.

  95. A. Gastev, O tendentsiiakh proletarskoi kul’tury, cited in Bailes, ‘Alexei Gastev and the Soviet Controversy over Taylorism’, pp.377–8.

  96. E. Zamiatin, We, trans. C. Brown (London, 1993).

  97. For these developments, see M. von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: the Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917–1930 (Ithaca, 1990), ch.1.

  98. Holquist, Making War, pp.232–40.

  99. L. Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism (Ann Arbor, 1971), p.170.

  100. Von Hagen, Soldiers, pp.89–114.

  101. Ibid., p.107.

  102. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation, p.178.

  103. O. Figes, ‘Village and Volost Soviet Elections of 1919’, Soviet Studies 40 (1988), p.43.

  104. Lenin, PSS, vol. xlv, p.389.

  105. See, for instance, D. Raleigh, Experiencing Russia’s Civil War: Politics, Society and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917–1922 (Princeton, 2002), pp.248–51.

  106. Figes, People’s Tragedy, p.649.

  107. O. Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917–1921 (Oxford, 1989), pp.91 ff.

  108. For this argument, see ibid., p.314.

  109. ‘Belaia armiia, chernyi baron’ (1920), lyrics P. Grigoriev. The ‘black baron’ was Baron Wrangel, the White commander.

  110. Cited in S. Smith, The Russian Revolution. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2002), p.95.

  111. Cited in I. Deutscher, The Prophet Armed. Trotsky 1879–1940 (New York, 1965), p.495.

  112. For Bogdanov’s ideas, see Z. Sochor, Revolution and Culture. The Bogdanov–Lenin Controversy (Ithaca, 1988), pp.28–35.

  113. T. Sapronov, Deviataia konferentsiia RKP(b), sentiabr’ 1920 goda. Protokoly (Moscow, 1972), p.161.

  114. Figes, Peasant Russia, pp.329–31, 334, 339, 344.

  115. P. Avrich, Kronstadt, 1921 (Princeton, 1970), ch.5.

  116. I. Getzler, Kronstadt, 1917–1921. The Fate of a Soviet Democracy (Cambridge, 1983), pp.233–4.

  117. Lenin, PSS, vol. xliv, pp.157–8.

  118. E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923 (3 vols.) (London, 1966–71), vol. ii, pp.302–9.

  119. For Lenin’s views of ‘cultural revolution’, see C. Claudin Urondo, Lenin and the Cultural Revolution, trans. B. Dean (Brighton, 1977), pp.79–83.

  120. R. Williams, Artists in Revolution. Portraits of the Russian Avant-Garde, 1905–1925 (London, 1978), pp.158–9.

  121. Taylor, Art and Literature, p.69.

  UNDER WESTERN EYES

  1. B. Brecht, ‘Drums in the Night’, in Collected Plays, trans. and ed. J. Willett and R. Mannheim (London, 1970), vol. i, pp.63–115.

  2. L. Trotsky, Moia zhizn’. Opyt avtobiografii (Berlin, 1930), vol. i, p.285.

  3. Hans Arp, On My Way. Poetry and Essays, 1912–1947 (New York, 1948), p.39.

  4. Grosz’s self-critical account of his conversion to Communism can be found in G. Grosz, The Autobiography of George Grosz: A Small Yes and a Big No, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (London, 1982), pp.91–2.

  5. For these developments, see G. Eley, Forging Democracy. A History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (Oxford, 2002), pp.132–4.

  6. G. Feldman, ‘Socio-Economic Structures in the Industrial Sector and Revolutionary Potentialities, 1917–1922’, in C. Bertrand (ed.), Revolutionary Situations in Europe, 1917–1922: Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary (Montreal, 1977).

  7. See, for instance, H. Lagrange, ‘Strikes and the War’, in L. Haimson and C. Tilly (eds.), Strikes, Wars and Revolutions in an International Perspective. Strike Waves in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge, 1989); B. Bezza, ‘Social Characteristics, Attitudes and Patterns of the Metalworkers in Italy during the First World War’, in Haimson and Tilly, Strikes; E. Tobin, ‘War and the Working Class: The Case of Düsseldorf, 1914–1918’, Central European History 13 (1985), pp.257–98.

  8. For these figures, see D. Blackbourn, History of Germany, 1780–1918. The Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1997), p.366.

  9. D. Kirby, War, Peace and Revolution. International Socialism at the Crossroads 1914–1918 (New York, 1986), p.57.

  10. U. Schneede (ed.), George Grosz: His Life and Work, trans. Susanne Flatauer (London, 1979), p.160.

  11. See P. von Oertzen, Betriebsräte in der Novemberrevolution (Bonn, 1976); E. Kolb, Die Arbeiterräte in der deutschen Innenpolitik 1918 bis 1919 (Düsseldorf, 1962).

  12. For this argument, see S. Berger, Social Democracy and the Working Class in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Germany (Harlow, 2000), p.96.

  13. J. Riddell (ed.), Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite! Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, 1920 (New York, 1991) vol. i, p.8.

  14. K. McDermott and J. Agnew, The Comintern. A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin (Basingstoke, 1996), pp.20–1.

  15. C. Epstein, The Last Revolutionaries. The German Communists and their Century (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), pp.20–2.

  16. H. Mann, Man of Straw (Harmondsworth, 1984).

  17. Karl Kraus in Die Fackel, November 1920, cited in J. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg (London, 1966), vol. i, p. xviii.

  18. For ‘Romantic anti-capitalism’ amongst Marxists and the nationalist right, see Z. Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology. From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (Princeton, 1994), esp. ch.1 on Georges Sorel. For the influence of Sorel and ‘syndicalism’ on Marxists, see R. Williams, The Other Bolsheviks. Lenin and his Critics, 1904–1914 (Bloomington, 1986). For the influence of Nietzsche on Marxism, see B. Rosenthal, New Myth, New World. From Nietzsche to Stalinism (University Park, Pa, 2002), pp.68–93.

  19. See M. Kane, Weimar Germany and the Limits of Political Art: a Study of the Work of George Grosz and Ernst Toller (Tayport, 1987).

  20. M. Löwy, Georg Lukács: From Romanticism to Bolshevism, trans. P. Camiller (London, 1979), p.93. See also A. Arato and P. Breines, The Young Lukács and the Origins of Western Marxism (New York, 1979); M. Gluck, Georg Lukács and his Generation, 1900–1918 (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).

  21. Cited in Löwy, Lukács, p.123.

  22. According to an autobiographical novel by József Lengyel, quoted in Löwy, Lukács, p.152.

  23. B. Kovrig, Communism in Hungary. From Kun to Kádár (Stanford, 1979), p.77.

  24. See G. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. R. Livingstone (London, 1971), pp.173, 313.

  25. T. Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans
. H. Lowe-Porter (Harmondsworth, 1960), p.478.

  26. Cited in J. Cammett, Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism (Stanford, 1967), p.7.

  27. Avanti, 18 December 1917, cited in A. Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, eds. D. Forgacs and G. Nowell-Smith (London, 1985), pp.20–3.

  28. A. Gramsci, ‘Workers’ Democracy’, in L’Ordine Nuovo, 21 June 1919, in Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings, 1910–1920, trans. J. Mathews, ed. Q. Hoare (London, 1977), pp.65–8.

  29. M. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: a History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (London, 1973).

  30. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, vol. i, pp.512–13.

  31. Cited in ibid., pp.792–3.

  32. J. Riddell (ed.), Founding the Communist International: Proceedings and Documents of the First Congress, March 1919 (New York, 1987), pp.19–20.

  33. ‘Manifesto of the Communist International’, in ibid., pp.222–32.

  34. These are broadly the conclusions of Stefano Bartolini, in Bartolini, The Political Mobilization of the European Left, 1860–1980: the Class Cleavage (Cambridge, 2000), pp.537–45.

  35. Lajos Kassák, cited in R. Tökés, Béla Kun and the Hungarian Soviet Republic: the Origins and Role of the Communist Party of Hungary in the Revolutions of 1918–1919 (New York, 1967).

  36. G. Peteri, Effects of World War I: War Communism in Hungary (New York, 1984), ch.1.

  37. T. Hajdu, The Hungarian Soviet Republic, trans. E. De Láczay and R. Fischer (Budapest, 1979).

  38. Tökés, Béla Kun, p.185.

  39. A. Gramsci, ‘Unions and Councils’, L’Ordine Nuovo, 25 October 1919, in Gramsci, Selections, pp.98–108.

  40. See R. Bellamy and D. Schecter, Gramsci and the Italian State (Manchester, 1993), p.24.

  41. E. Weitz, Creating German Communism, 1890–1990: From Popular Protests to Socialist State (Princeton, 1997), pp.179–80.

  42. W. Preston, Aliens and Dissenters. Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), pp.118–50.

  43. B. Brecht, ‘The Decision’, in Collected Plays, trans. and ed. John Willett (London, 1997), vol. iii, pp.61–91.

  44. R. Fischer, Stalin and German Communism: a Study in the Origins of the State Party (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), p.615.

  45. M. Molnár, From Béla Kun to János Kádár. Seventy Years of Hungarian Communism, trans. A. J. Pomerans (New York, 1990), pp.20–1.

  46. V. Lenin, Selected Works [SW] (Moscow, 1977), vol. iii, p.293.

  47. Riddell, Workers of the World, vol. i, pp.299–300.

  48. See Bartolini, Political Mobilization, pp.107, 112–13.

  49. Cited in F. Claudin, The Communist Movement. From Comintern to Cominform (Harmondsworth, 1975), p.63.

  50. For Moscow’s role, see L. Babichenko, ‘Komintern i sobytiia v Germanii v 1923 g. Novye arkhivnye materialy’, Novaia i noveishaia istoriia 2 (1994), pp.125–57.

  51. J. Degras (ed.), The Communist International, 1919–1943. Documents, Vol. 2 (London, 1971), p.154.

  52. I. Stalin, Sochineniia (Moscow, 1946–1951), vol. x, p.51.

  53. The literature is enormous. For views, based on archival sources, that stress central control, see for instance, A. Vatlin, Komintern: Pervye desiat’ let: istoricheskie ocherki (Moscow, 1993); for those that emphasize local politics rather than Moscow, see A. Thorpe, The British Communist Party and Moscow between the Wars (Manchester, 2000). For a useful survey of the historiography, see Labour History Review 61 (2003).

  54. This is argued in K.-M. Mallmann, Kommunisten in der Weimarer Republik. Sozialgeschichte einer revolutionären Bewegung (Darmstadt, 1996).

  55. For these subventions, see H. Klehr, J. Haynes and F. Firsov (eds.), The Secret World of American Communism (New Haven, 1995), pp.23–5; K. McDermott, ‘The View from the Centre’, in T. Rees and A. Thorpe (eds.), International Communism and the Communist International, 1919–1943 (Manchester, 1998), p.33. It has been estimated that the British Communist Party received an initial grant of £55,000 (or £1 million in 1995 money), F. Becket, Enemy Within. The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party (London, 1995), p.12.

  56. For the argument that some European Communists welcomed Soviet control, see McDermott and Agnew, The Comintern, pp.24–5.

  57. For this institution, see R. von Mayenburg, Hotel Lux (Munich, 1978).

  58. V. Dedijer, Tito (New York, 1972), p.98.

  59. B. Lazitch, ‘Les Écoles de Cadres du Comintern’, in J. Freymond, Contributions à l’historie du Comintern (Geneva, 1965), pp.237–41, 246–51; Weitz, Creating German Communism, pp.234–5. See also L. Babischenko, ‘Die Kaderschulung der Komintern’, in H. Weber (ed.), Jahrbuch für historische Kommunismusforschung (Berlin, 1993).

  60. Cited in J. McIlroy, A. Campbell, B. McLoughlin and J. Halstead, ‘Forging the Faithful. The British at the International Lenin School’, Labour History Review 68 (2003), p.110. See also L. Babischenko. ‘Die Kaderschulung der Komintern’.

  61. W. Leonhard, Child of the Revolution, trans. C. M. Woodhouse (London, 1979), p.185.

  62. Ibid., pp.194–5.

  63. Ibid.

  64. McIlroy et al., ‘Forging the Faithful’, pp.112–16.

  65. McDermott and Agnew, The Comintern, pp.73–4.

  66. A. Thorpe, ‘Comintern “Control” of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1920–43’, English Historical Review 113 (1998), p.652.

  67. Weitz argues for the influence of the old Luxemburgist radicalism in Creating German Communism. For puritanism in Britain, see K. Morgan, G. Cohen and A. Flinn, Communists and British Society 1920–1991(London, 2003), pp.123–9.

  68. Ibid., p.235.

  69. A. Kriegel, The French Communists: Profile of a People, trans. E. Halperin (Chicago, 1972), p.107.

  70. For this phenomenon, see S. Macintyre, Little Moscows. Communism and Working-Class Militancy in Inter-War Britain (London, 1980). E. Rosenhaft, ‘Communists and Communities: Britain and Germany between the Wars’, Historical Journal 26 (1983), pp.221–36. On culture, see A. Howkins, ‘“Class against Class”. The Political Culture of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1930–1935’, in F. Gloversmith (ed.), Class, Culture and Social Change. A New View of the 1930s (Brighton, 1980).

  71. Report on factory groups, 1925, cited in Morgan et al., Communists and British Society, p.63.

  72. S. Berger, Social Democracy and the Working Class in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Germany (Harlow, 2000), pp.104–5; K. Schönhoven, Reformismus und Radikalismus. Gespaltene Arbeiterbewegung im Weimarer Sozialstaat (Munich, 1989).

  73. Weitz, Creating German Communism, pp.270–1.

  74. E. Weitz, Popular Communism: Political Strategies and Social Histories in the Formation of the German, French, and Italian Communist Parties, 1919–1948 (Ithaca, 1992), p.11.

  75. For these themes, see Weitz, Creating German Communism, ch.6.

  76. Ibid., p.249. For another view that emphasizes the overlap between Communist and Nazi messages, see Conan Fischer, The German Communists and the Rise of Nazism (New York, 1991).

  77. E. Rosenhaft, ‘Working-Class Life and Working-Class Politics: Communists, Nazis and the State in the Battle for the Streets, Berlin, 1928–1932’, in R. Bessel and E. Feuchtwanger (eds.), Social Change and Political Development in Weimar Germany (London, 1981); E. Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists? The German Communists and Political Violence (Cambridge, 1983).

  78. ‘America’s “New” Civilization’, New York Times, 13 May 1928.

  79. D. Aldcroft, From Versailles to Wall Street, 1919–1929 (London, 1977), p.263.

  MEN OF STEEL

  1. Oktiabr (1928), dir. S. Eisenstein.

  2. S. Eisenstein, ‘Perspectives’, 1929, in Film Essays, ed. Jay Leyda (London, 1968), p.44.

  3. Quoted in Y. Barna, Eisenstein (London, 1973), p.119.

  4. R. Bergman, Sergei Eisenstein. A Life in Conflict (London, 1997), p.131.

  5. D. Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein (Ca
mbridge, Mass., 1993), pp.79–96.

  6. A. Rieber, ‘Stalin as Georgian’, in S. Davies and J. Harris (eds.), Stalin. A New History (Cambridge, 2005), pp.25–6. For the Prometheus legend in Georgia, see D. M. Lang and G. M. Meredith-Owens, ‘Amiran-Darejaniani: A Georgian Romance and its English Rendering’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 22 (1959), pp.463–4.