1.
Trotskyism
–
Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by Leon Trotsky. Trotskyists are critical of Stalinism, as they oppose Stalins theory of Socialism in One Country in favor of Trotskys theory of Permanent Revolution, Trotskyists also criticize the bureaucracy that developed in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Vladimir Lenin and Trotsky were close both ideologically and personally during the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, and some call Trotsky its co-leader, Trotsky was the paramount leader of the Soviet Red Army in the direct aftermath of the Revolutionary period. Trotsky originally opposed some aspects of Leninism, later, he concluded that unity between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks was impossible, and joined the Bolsheviks. Trotsky played a role with Lenin in the revolution. Assessing Trotsky, Lenin wrote, Trotsky long ago said that unification is impossible, Trotsky understood this and from that time on there has been no better Bolshevik. Trotsky was exiled from the USSR to Alma Ata in Kazakhstan on 31 January 1928 under Stalins orders, almost all of the Partys Trotskyists were executed in the Great Purges of 1937–1938 effectively removing all of Trotskys internal influence on the USSR. In contemporary English language usage, an advocate of Trotskys ideas is called a Trotskyist. In the 1920s they called themselves the Left Opposition, although todays left communism is distinct, the terminological disagreement can be confusing because different versions of a left-right political spectrum are used. Anti-revisionists consider themselves the ultimate leftists on a spectrum from communism on the left to imperialist capitalism on the right, but given that Stalinism is often labeled rightist within the communist spectrum and left communism leftist, Anti-revisionists idea of left is very different from that of left communism. Trotsky was extremely critical of the Stalinist USSR for suppressing democracy, in 1905, Trotsky formulated a theory that became known as the theory of Permanent Revolution. It is one of the characteristics of Trotskyism. Until 1905, Marxism only claimed that a revolution in a European capitalist society would lead to a socialist one, according to the original theory it was impossible for such to occur in more backward countries such as early 20th century Russia. Russia in 1905 was widely considered to have not yet established a capitalist society, the theory of Permanent Revolution addressed the question of how such feudal regimes were to be overthrown, and how socialism could be established given the lack of economic prerequisites. Trotsky argued that in Russia only the class could overthrow feudalism. Furthermore, he argued that the Russian working class would not stop there and they would win its own revolution against the weak capitalist class, establish a workers state in Russia, and appeal to the working class in the advanced capitalist countries around the world. As a result, the working class would come to Russias aid. Revolutions in Britain in the 17th century and in France in 1789 abolished feudalism, Trotsky argued that these revolutions would not be repeated in Russia
Trotskyism
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The leaders of the Trotskyist
Left Opposition in Moscow, 1927. Sitting:
Leonid Serebryakov,
Karl Radek,
Leon Trotsky, Mikhail Boguslavsky, and
Yevgeni Preobrazhensky. Standing:
Christian Rakovsky, Yakov Drobnis, Alexander Beloborodov, and Lev Sosnovsky.
Trotskyism
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Trotsky (raising hand) with troops at the Polish front, during the
Polish-Soviet War, 1919.
Trotskyism
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Leon Trotsky in exile in Siberia 1900
Trotskyism
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Lenin speaking at a meeting in Sverdlov Square in Moscow on 5 May 1920. Original photo with Trotsky and Kamenev standing on the steps of the platform. Later, this photo was censored, under Stalin's orders, to
remove Trotsky and Kamenev.
2.
Leon Trotsky
–
Trotsky initially supported the Menshevik Internationalists faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He joined the Bolsheviks just before the 1917 October Revolution, and he was, alongside Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin, Sokolnikov and Bubnov, one of the seven members of the first Politburo, founded in 1917 to manage the Bolshevik Revolution. He was a figure in the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War. As the head of the Fourth International, Trotsky continued to oppose the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union from exile, on Stalins orders, he was assassinated in Mexico in August 1940 by Ramón Mercader, a Spanish-born Soviet agent. Trotskys ideas formed the basis of Trotskyism, a school of Marxist thought that opposes the theories of Stalinism. He was written out of the books under Stalin, and was one of the few Soviet political figures who was not rehabilitated by the government under Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s. It was not until the late 1980s that his books were released for publication in the Soviet Union and his parents were David Leontyevich Bronstein and his wife Anna Lvovna. The family was of Jewish origin, the language they spoke at home was Surzhyk, a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian. Trotskys younger sister, Olga, who grew up to be a Bolshevik. Many anti-Communists, anti-semites, and anti-Trotskyists have noted Trotskys original surname, some authors, notably Robert Service, have also claimed that Trotskys childhood first name was the Yiddish Leiba. The American Trotskyist David North said that this was an apparent attempt to emphasize Trotskys Jewish origins but, contrary to Services claims and he says that it is highly improbable that the family was Jewish, as they did not speak Yiddish, the common language among eastern European Jews. Both North and Walter Laqueur in their books say that Trotskys childhood name was Lyova, when Trotsky was nine, his father sent him to Odessa to be educated in a Jewish school. He was enrolled in a German-language school, which became Russified during his years in Odessa as a result of the Imperial governments policy of Russification. As Isaac Deutscher notes in his biography of Trotsky, Odessa was then a cosmopolitan port city. This environment contributed to the development of the young mans international outlook, although Trotsky said in his autobiography My Life that he was never perfectly fluent in any language but Russian and Ukrainian, Raymond Molinier wrote that Trotsky spoke French fluently. Trotsky became involved in activities in 1896 after moving to the harbor town of Nikolayev on the Ukrainian coast of the Black Sea. At first a narodnik, he initially opposed Marxism but was won over to Marxism later that year by his future first wife, instead of pursuing a mathematics degree, Trotsky helped organize the South Russian Workers Union in Nikolayev in early 1897. Using the name Lvov, he wrote and printed leaflets and proclamations, distributed revolutionary pamphlets, in January 1898, more than 200 members of the union, including Trotsky, were arrested
Leon Trotsky
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Trotsky in 1921
Leon Trotsky
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8-year-old Lyova Bronshtein, 1888
Leon Trotsky
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Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, 1897
Leon Trotsky
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Leon Trotsky with his daughter Nina in 1915
3.
Fourth International
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Thus, Trotskyists founded their own, competing Fourth International. Today, there is no longer a single, cohesive Fourth International, ideologically, Maoists, left communists, and anarchists all consider Trotskyism, and thus also the Fourth International, to be ideologically bankrupt and impotent. Quite a few of these carry the label Fourth Internationalist either in their organisations name, major political position documents. It has not succeeded in capitalizing on the renewed interest in socialism, the FI suffered a major split in 1940 and an even more significant split in 1953. A partial reunification occurred in 1963, but the international never recovered enough to re-emerge as a single transnational grouping, Trotskyists regard themselves as working in opposition to both capitalism and Stalinism. This theory was advanced in opposition to the held by the Stalinists that socialism in one country could be built in the Soviet Union alone. Furthermore, Trotsky and his supporters criticised the increasingly totalitarian nature of Joseph Stalins rule. They argued that socialism without democracy is impossible, thus, faced with the increasing lack of democracy in the Soviet Union, they concluded that it was no longer a socialist workers state, but a degenerated workers state. Trotsky and his supporters had been organised since 1923 as the Left Opposition and they opposed the bureaucratisation of the Soviet Union, which they analysed as being partly caused by the poverty and isolation of the Soviet economy. Prior to 1924, the Bolsheviks international perspective had been guided by Trotskys position, Trotsky argued that Stalins theory represented the interests of bureaucratic elements in direct opposition to the working class. Eventually Trotsky was sent into exile and his supporters were jailed. The Left Opposition, however, continued to work in secret within the Soviet Union, Trotsky was eventually exiled to Turkey. He moved from there to France, Norway, and finally to Mexico and he was assassinated on Stalins orders in Mexico, by Ramón Mercader, a Spanish-born Soviet agent in August 1940. A political international is an organisation of political parties or activists with the aim of co-ordinating their activity for a common purpose, after the International Workingmens Association disbanded in 1876, several attempts were made to revive the organisation, culminating in the formation of the Socialist International in 1889. This, in turn, was disbanded in 1916 following disagreements over World War I and this was organised on a democratic centralist basis, with component parties required to fight for policies adopted by the body as a whole. By declaring themselves the Fourth International, the World Party of Socialist Revolution, the Trotskyists were publicly asserting their continuity with the Comintern and their recognition of the importance of these earlier Internationals was coupled with a belief that they eventually degenerated. Trotsky believed that its formation was all the more urgent for the role he saw it playing in the impending World War, in the early 1930s, Trotsky and his supporters believed that Stalins influence over the Third International could still be fought from within and slowly rolled back. They organised themselves into the International Left Opposition in 1930, which was intended to be a group of anti-Stalinist dissenters within the Third International, Stalins supporters, who dominated the International, would no longer tolerate dissent
Fourth International
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The Fourth International magazine
4.
Marxism
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It originates from the mid-to-late 19th century works of German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. As the contradiction becomes apparent to the proletariat through the alienation of labor, Marxism has since developed into different branches and schools of thought, and there is now no single definitive Marxist theory. Marxism has been adopted by a number of academics and theorists working in various disciplines. Critics have taken issue with particular Marxist claims or accused Marxism as a whole of being inconsistent, refuted based on new information. The Marxian analysis begins with an analysis of the material conditions, the economic system and these social relations form a base and superstructure. As forces of production, most notably technology, improve, existing forms of social organization become inefficient, from forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution and these inefficiencies manifest themselves as social contradictions in society in the form of class struggle. Under the capitalist mode of production, this struggle materializes between the minority who own the means of production, and the vast majority of the population who produce goods, the socialist system would succeed capitalism as humanitys mode of production through workers revolution. According to Marxism, especially arising from crisis theory, socialism is a historical necessity, in a socialist society private property, in the form of the means of production, would be replaced by co-operative ownership. A socialist economy would not base production on the creation of private profits, Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand. The historical materialist theory of history analyses the causes of societal development. All constituent features of a society are assumed to stem from economic activity, the base and superstructure metaphor portrays the totality of social relations by which humans produce and re-produce their social existence. According to Marx, The sum total of the forces of production accessible to men determines the condition of society and this relationship is reflexive, at first the base gives rise to the superstructure and remains the foundation of a form of social organization. As Friedrich Engels clarified, The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, accordingly, Marx designated human history as encompassing four stages of development in relations of production. Primitive Communism, as in tribal societies. Slave Society, a development of tribal to city-state, aristocracy is born, feudalism, aristocrats are the ruling class, merchants evolve into capitalists. Capitalism, capitalists are the class, who create and employ the proletariat. According to the Marxist theoretician and revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, the content of Marxism was Marxs economic doctrine
Marxism
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Karl Marx
Marxism
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One of the 20th century's most prominent Marxist academics; the Australian archaeologist
V. Gordon Childe
5.
Leninism
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Functionally, the Leninist vanguard party was to provide the working class with the political consciousness and revolutionary leadership necessary to depose capitalism in Imperial Russia. As a political-science term, Leninism entered common usage in 1922, two years later, in July 1924, at the fifth congress of the Communist International, Grigory Zinoviev popularized the term Leninism to denote vanguard-party revolution. In the pamphlet What is to be Done, in the pamphlet Freedom to Criticise and Unity of Action, Lenin said, Full, inner-party democratic debate was Bolshevik Party practice under Lenin, even after the banning of party factions in 1921. Although a guiding influence in policy, Lenin did not exercise absolute power, under Stalin, the inner-party practice of democratic free debate did not continue after the death of Lenin in 1924. Democracy for the exploiters will be, in one or another form, is a question of the specific national features of this or that capitalism. In the soviet political system, the party would be one of many political parties competing for elected power. Nevertheless, the circumstances of the Red vs, to feed the populaces of town and country, Lenin instituted War Communism as a necessary condition—adequate supplies of food and weapons—for fighting the Russian Civil War. Lenin regarded the appearance of new socialist states in the countries as necessary to the strengthening Russias economy. In that, he was encouraged by the German Revolution of 1918–1919, the Italian insurrection and general strikes of 1920, and industrial unrest in Britain, France, and the U. S. Lenin vs. To that end followed proposals reducing the powers of Party posts. Lenin advised Trotsky to emphasize Stalins recent bureaucratic alignment in such matters, despite advice to refuse any rotten compromise, Trotsky did not heed Lenins advice, and General Secretary Stalin retained power over the Communist Party and the bureaucracy of the soviet government. In the course of instituting government policy, Stalin promoted the doctrine of Socialism in One Country, hence, revolutionary workers should politically ally with peasant political organisations, but not with capitalist political parties. The Oppositionists Until exiled from Russia in 1929, Leon Trotsky helped develop and led the Left Opposition with members of the Workers Opposition, the Decembrists, the Stalinist economic policy vacillated between appeasing capitalist kulak interests in the countryside, and destroying them. Initially, the Stalinists also rejected the national industrialisation of Russia, in both cases, the Left Opposition denounced the regressive nature of the policy towards the kulak social class of wealthy peasants, and the brutality of forced industrialisation. Trotsky described the vacillating Stalinist policy as a symptom of the nature of a ruling bureaucracy. The anti–Trotsky campaign culminated in the executions of the Moscow Trials, in political practice, Leninism, despite its origin as Communist revolutionary praxis, was adopted throughout the political spectrum. In Singapore, the Peoples Action Party was organised Leninist political party featuring internal democracy, the PAP initiated single-party dominance in the government and popular politics of Singapore. In Marxist philosophy, the term Left communism identifies a range of the Communist political perspectives that are the left-wing among Communists, Left communism criticizes the political ideas that the Bolshevik Party practiced at certain periods of their history as a revolutionary vanguard party
Leninism
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The Russian revolutionary and later Soviet premier Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov) in 1920.
Leninism
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Leninism codified: the intellectual
György Lukács, the
philosopher of Leninism, c. 1952.
Leninism
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Leon Trotsky (ca. 1929)
6.
October Revolution
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It took place with an armed insurrection in Petrograd on 25 October 1917. During this time, urban workers began to organize into councils wherein revolutionaries criticized the provisional government and this immediately initiated the establishment of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, the worlds first self-proclaimed socialist state. The revolution was led by the Bolsheviks, who used their influence in the Petrograd Soviet to organize the armed forces, Bolshevik Red Guards forces under the Military Revolutionary Committee began the takeover of government buildings on 24 October 1917. The following day, the Winter Palace, was captured, the long-awaited Constituent Assembly elections were held on 12 November 1917. The Bolsheviks only won 175 seats in the 715-seat legislative body, coming in second behind the Socialist Revolutionary party, the Constituent Assembly was to first meet on 28 November 1917, but its convocation was delayed until 5 January 1918 by the Bolsheviks. On its first and only day in session, the body rejected Soviet decrees on peace and land, as the revolution was not universally recognized, there followed the struggles of the Russian Civil War and the creation of the Soviet Union in 1922. At first, the event was referred to as the October coup or the Uprising of 25th, in Russian, however, переворот has a similar meaning to revolution and also means upheaval or overturn, so coup is not necessarily the correct translation. With time, the term October Revolution came into use and it is also known as the November Revolution having occurred in November according to the Gregorian Calendar. The Great October Socialist Revolution was the name for the October Revolution in the Soviet Union after the 10th anniversary of the Revolution in 1927. The February Revolution had toppled Tsar Nicolas II of Russia, however, the provisional government was weak and riven by internal dissension. It continued to wage World War I, which became increasingly unpopular, a nationwide crisis developed in Russia, affecting social, economic, and political relations. Disorder in industry and transport had intensified, and difficulties in obtaining provisions had increased, gross industrial production in 1917 had decreased by over 36% from what it had been in 1914. In the autumn, as much as 50% of all enterprises were closed down in the Urals, the Donbas, at the same time, the cost of living increased sharply. Real wages fell about 50% from what they had been in 1913, russias national debt in October 1917 had risen to 50 billion rubles. Of this, debts to foreign governments constituted more than 11 billion rubles, the country faced the threat of financial bankruptcy. In these months alone, more than a million took part in strikes. Workers established control over production and distribution in many factories and plants in a social revolution, by October 1917, there had been over 4,000 peasant uprisings against landowners. When the Provisional Government sent punitive detachments, it only enraged the peasants
October Revolution
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Red Guards at Vulkan factory in 1917
October Revolution
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Bolshevik (1920), by
Boris Kustodiev
October Revolution
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A scene from the July Days. The army has just opened fire on street protesters.
October Revolution
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Cruiser
Aurora
7.
Anti-Stalinist left
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Associates and followers of Leon Trotsky were organised in the Left Opposition within the Communist parties before they were purged in the Moscow Trials in the 1930s. Subsequently, his followers formed the Fourth International in opposition to the Stalinist Third International, Trotsky saw the Stalinist states as deformed workers states, where a political structure gave most workers very little power in decision making. Less orthodox Trotskyists and other critics of Stalin have seen it as a new form of class state, the communist left was initially enthusiastic about the Bolshevik revolution, but lines of tension between the communist left and the leadership of the Communist International opened up very soon. Left communists such as Sylvia Pankhurst and Rosa Luxemburg were among the first left-wing critics of Bolshevism, Left communists see communism as something that can only be achieved by the proletariat itself, and not through the dictatorship of a vanguard party acting on its behalf. A reformist communism, and a branch of Maoism, however it is criticised by traditional Maoists. In order to encourage and promote the advancement of the productivity by creating competition and innovation, but at the same time, private ownership is allowed and encouraged in industries of finished goods and services. According to the Dengism theory, private owners in those industries are not bourgeois, because as Marx teaches, bourgeois owns land and raw materials. Therefore, in a Dengist country, private owners are called minyinqiyejia. The Peoples Republic of China was the first country which adopted this belief and it boosted its economy and achieved the China Miracle. It has increased the Chinese GDP growth rate to over 8% per year for 30 years, due to the influence of Dengism, Vietnam and Laos have also adopted this belief, which allowed Laos to increase its real GDP growth rate to 8. 3%. Cuba is also starting to embrace this idea, dengists also take a very strong position against any form of personality cults which appeared in the Soviet Union during Stalins rule and the current North Korea. However, the relations between the anarchists and the Bolsheviks soured in Soviet Russia, anarchists and Stalinist Communists were also in armed conflict during the Spanish civil war. Anarchists are critical of the statist, totalitarian nature of Stalinism, a significant current of the democratic socialist movement has defined itself in opposition to Stalinism. This includes George Orwell, H. N. Brailsford, Fenner Brockway, there were also a number of anti-Stalinist socialists in France, including writers such as Simone Weil and Albert Camus as well as the group around Marceau Pivert. In America, the New York Intellectuals around the journals Partisan Review, another major split in the international Communist movement was that between Stalin and the Right Opposition. In several countries parallel Communist parties were formed that either were rejected by the Comintern or distanced themselves from it and their criticism did in some ways become similar to positions raised by the Trotskyists, but as a tendency they were far less coherent. The Right Opposition developed contacts with groups that did not fit into either the international Social democracy or Comintern. This tendency largely died out at the time of the Second World War, in other cases dissident Marxist trends developed outside of the established Communist movement, such as the Anushlian Marxists in India
Anti-Stalinist left
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A
Diego Rivera mural (
Man, Controller of the Universe) depicts Trotsky with Marx and Engels as a true champion of the workers' struggle.
8.
Permanent revolution
–
Permanent revolution is a term within Marxist theory, established in usage by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels by at least 1850 but which has since become most closely associated with Leon Trotsky. The use of the term by different theorists is not identical, Trotsky put forward his conception of permanent revolution as an explanation of how socialist revolutions could occur in societies that had not achieved advanced capitalism. Part of his theory is the impossibility of socialism in one country. Second, that the proletariat can and must, therefore, seize social, economic, Marx first used the phrase in the following passage from The Holy Family. He wrote, Napoleon presented the last battle of revolutionary terror against the society which had been proclaimed by this same Revolution. He decided to recognise and protect this basis and he was no terrorist with his head in the clouds. Yet at the time he still regarded the state as an end in itself and civil life only as a treasurer. He perfected the terror by substituting permanent war for permanent revolution and he fed the egoism of the French nation to complete satiety but demanded also the sacrifice of bourgeois business, enjoyments, wealth, etc. whenever this was required by the political aim of conquest. His scorn of industrial hommes daffaires was the complement to his scorn of ideologists, in his home policy, too, he combated bourgeois society as the opponent of the state which in his own person he still held to be an absolute aim in itself. Thus he declared in the State Council that he would not suffer the owner of estates to cultivate them or not as he pleased. Thus, too, he conceived the plan of subordinating trade to the state by appropriation of roulage, French businessmen took steps to anticipate the event that first shook Napoleons power. Paris exchange-brokers forced him by means of an artificially created famine to delay the opening of the Russian campaign by two months and thus to launch it too late in the year. According to Marx, he did this by suppressing the liberalism of bourgeois society, and he did it because he saw the state as an end in itself, thus, he substituted permanent war for permanent revolution. The final two sentences, however, show that the bourgeoisie did not give up hope, but continued to pursue their interests. This tells us that, for Marx, permanent revolution involves a revolutionary class continuing to push for, by 1849, Marx and Engels were able to quote the use of the phrase by other writers, suggesting that it had achieved some recognition in intellectual circles. Marxs most famous use of the permanent revolution is his March 1850 Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League. His audience is the proletariat in Germany, faced with the prospect that the petty-bourgeois democrats will for the moment acquire a predominant influence – i. e. temporary political power, in the remainder of the text, Marx outlines his proposal that the proletariat make the revolution permanent. Such a unity would be to their advantage alone and to the disadvantage of the proletariat
Permanent revolution
–
An edition of The Permanent Revolution, published by
Socialist Resistance
9.
World revolution
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World revolution is the Marxist concept of overthrowing capitalism in all countries through the conscious revolutionary action of the organized working class. The end goal of such internationally oriented revolutionary socialism is to achieve world socialism, particularly in the years 1918-1919, it seemed plausible that capitalism would soon be swept from the European continent forever. Given the fact that European powers controlled the majority of Earths land surface at the time, such an event could have meant the end of not just in Europe. With the prospect of world revolution so close at hand, Marxists were dominated by a feeling of overwhelming optimism, the European revolutions were crushed one by one, until eventually the Russian revolutionaries found themselves to be the only survivors. After those events and up until the present day, the situation never came quite so close to a world revolution again. However, none managed to finish in first and form a government, communist parties in Eastern Europe, meanwhile, though they did win elections at around the same time, Western media criticized the lack of liberal democratic elements in their rise to power. Many groups, however, such as the Progressive Labor Party, still pursue the goal of worldwide communist revolution. Communist revolution Proletarian internationalism Revolutionary wave Stateless communism Social Patriotism Workers of the world, unite
World revolution
–
"Comrade Lenin Cleanses the Earth of Filth" (1920).
10.
James P. Cannon
–
James Patrick Jim Cannon was an American Trotskyist and a leader of the Socialist Workers Party. Born on February 11,1890 in Rosedale, Kansas, he joined the Socialist Party of America in 1908 and he was personally trained by Big Bill Haywood, a top IWW leader, and was an IWW organizer throughout the Midwest from 1912 through 1914. He was national chairman emeritus of the SWP when he died in Los Angeles on August 21,1974, Cannon opposed World War I from an internationalist position and rallied to the Russian Revolution of 1917. The Bolshevik victory in Russia served to radicalize the Socialist Party of America and he was an active participant in the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party, an organized faction which sought to transform the SPA into a revolutionary socialist organization. He was, however, a part of the CLPs leadership from its earliest days, serving as District Secretary of the CLP for the states of Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska from the time of founding. He worked variously as the St. Louis District Organizer of the UCP in the summer of 1920 and as editor of the labor newspaper, The Toiler. This brought Cannon to New York City, where he was able to sit on the meetings of the Central Executive Committee. After merger of the UCP with the remaining CPA organization, headed by Charles Dirba, Cannon was named the first Subdistrict Organizer of the organization for Duluth. He stayed on there as a delegate of the American party to the 4th World Congress of the Comintern, back in America, Cannon was a member of the Executive Committee of the Friends of Soviet Russia from 1922. He was also a candidate of the WPA for the United States Congress from the New York 10th District in 1922, Cannon remained on the CEC of the WPA throughout this period. On January 19,1924, Cannon was named Assistant Executive Secretary of the Workers Party of America, working under his faction rival, Ruthenberg. He was the WPAs candidate for Governor of New York in 1924, later in the decade, Cannon broke to an extent with Foster, heading up instead the partys legal defense arm, International Labor Defense. This organization served as a base for Cannon and his associates. Cannon was the Workers Partys candidate for Congress in the New York 20th District in 1928, while in Russia in 1928, Cannon read a critique of the direction of the Communist International written by Trotsky which the Comintern had mistakenly circulated. He was convinced of the arguments, and attempted to form a Left Opposition within the Workers Party and this resulted in his expulsion on October 27,1928, together with his co-thinkers Max Shachtman and Martin Abern. Outside of the Communist Party, Cannon, Shachtman, and Abern founded a new political party, concretely this meant that they no longer considered the Communist League to be a faction of the Communist Party but rather considered it the nucleus of a future revolutionary party. It also meant that they were far more inclined to look at working with other sections of the reviving socialist, Cannon played a major role in this dispute directing the work of the Communist League on a daily basis, along with Shachtman. In December 1934 the Communist League of America merged with pacifist A. J. Mustes American Workers Party to form the Workers Party of the United States, throughout 1935 and into 1936, the Workers Party was deeply divided over the so-called French Turn
James P. Cannon
–
James P. Cannon
James P. Cannon
–
Cannon and
Felix Morrow, with a bust of Trotsky.
11.
Peter Taaffe
–
Peter Taaffe is a British political activist and journalist. Taaffe was the editor of the Trotskyist Militant newspaper in 1964. In an interview for the BBC Radio 4 programme The Partys Over, Taaffe gave a few biographical details, I came into contact with Socialist Fight in 1960 writes Taaffe. Socialist Fight was the newspaper of a group of mainly industrial militants in Liverpool going by the name of the Revolutionary Socialist League. Taaffe does not subscribe to the view that the struggles of small groupings are of no historical significance and these were the ideas to which Taaffe subscribed. Ted Mooney and I played leading roles, together with Harry Dowling and Dave Galashan, in organising a strike in one factory, English Electric. About 20,000 of the 70,000 engineering apprentices downed tools in total, by this time the second issue of the Militant had come out. Peter Taaffe, who lived in Liverpool at that time, was appointed editor and he recalled this time in the Radio 4 programme, The Partys Over, In 1965 Taaffe was able to move to London. He became full-time national secretary as well as editor of Militant, despite a shortage of money. Once or twice spending sleepless nights in the entrances of subways, eventually, the group became known by the name of the paper, and was either referred to as Militant or the Militant tendency. Many of Peter Taaffes major signed articles in Militant during the first few years were on topics, the Congo, Dominica, Latin America, Vietnam, Rhodesia. In Issue 16, in May 1966, perhaps to coincide with the working class celebrations on May Day. In September 1965, Militant in issue no.9 ran a front page article by Taaffe under the banner headline, demands of this nature in Militant follow the Transitional Program written by Leon Trotsky, pushing beyond what the bourgeois state was willing to concede. By the 1980s the Militant tendency had become the most prominent Trotskyist organisation in Britain, two books by Peter Taaffe, The Rise of Militant and Liverpool – A City That Dared to Fight describe this period. The Labour Party under Michael Foot moved to purge Militant from the party, in 1983, Peter Taaffe, along with the other four members of the Militant newspapers editorial board, were expelled from the Labour Party. A year later, speaking at the Wembley Conference Centre to several thousand supporters celebrating 20 years of the Militant newspaper, Taaffe went on to predict an enormous recoil towards the left within the Labour Party. But this prognosis was overtaken by the changes which took place in the Labour Party. In 1988, Taaffe began assessing with the Scottish Militant members the prospects of activism against the governments Poll tax legislation, but for Taaffe and the leadership of the Militant, the prospects for Militant in the Labour Party were poor
Peter Taaffe
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Peter Taaffe
12.
Tony Cliff
–
Tony Cliff was a Trotskyist activist. Born to a Jewish family in Palestine, he moved to Britain in 1947, a founding member of the Socialist Review Group, which eventually became the Socialist Workers Party, in 1977 Cliff became effectively the leader. He had two brothers and a sister, however, he did join the socialist-Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair, and soon became not only a Trotskyist in 1933, but also a confirmed opponent of Zionism. Along with other Hashomer Hatzair members, he joined the illegal Palestine Revolutionary Communist League, during World War II Gluckstein was imprisoned by the British authorities. After his release he moved to Britain in 1947, but was never able to become a citizen, to the end of his life he spoke English with a distinct Israeli accent. He was for a while deported to the Republic of Ireland and was permitted to take up British residency due to the status of Chanie Rosenberg, his wife. Living in London he again became active with the Revolutionary Communist Party, on the break-up of the RCP his supporters joined Gerry Healys group The Club although, having been deported to Ireland, Gluckstein himself did not. In 1950 he helped launch the Socialist Review Group which was based around a journal of the same name and this was to be the main publication for which Gluckstein wrote during the 1950s, until it was superseded by International Socialism in 1960, eventually ceasing publication altogether in 1962. Owing to his lack of established residency rights in Britain and during his exile in Ireland the name Roger or Roger Tennant was used as a pseudonym. The first edition of his book on Rosa Luxemburg in 1959 was possibly the first use of the pen name Tony Cliff. Cliff remained a member until his death in 2000. He was central to the various reorientations carried out in the SWP from time to time to react to changes in the situation of the working class, a fierce debate ensued, which Cliffs side eventually won. Cliffs biography is, as he remarked, inseparable from that of the groups of which he was a leading member. Shortly before his death he underwent a surgical operation on his heart. Cliff was a revolutionary socialist in the Trotskyist tradition attempting to make Lenins theory of the party effective in the present day, much of his theoretical writing was aimed at immediate tasks of the Party at the time. This theory was not at the time as iconoclastic as it came to appear later, the Fourth International held until 1951 that the glacis states had remained capitalist even while the FI maintained the position that Russia was a degenerated workers state. However within months he would adopt the viewpoint that both Russia and the glacis were workers states, Cliff had little or no time for any activities not directly linked to the needs of building his party. He did not drink or smoke, or socialise very much, Cliffs wife, Chanie Rosenberg, was herself an active member successively of the SRG, IS and SWP, in which she remains active
Tony Cliff
–
Tony Cliff in 1986
13.
Gerry Healy
–
The part of the Trotskyist movement associated with Healy between 1950–85 was at times the largest in Great Britain during this period. Born in Ballybane, Galway, Ireland, to Michael Healy, a farmer and he soon joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, but then left to join the Trotskyist Militant Group in 1937. He then left to one of the founders of the Workers International League, led by Ted Grant, Jock Haston. Healys period in the WIL was difficult and he threatened to resign several times and was expelled and readmitted. They encouraged Healy to form a faction and to take that group into the Labour Party, in 1950, he was rewarded as the RCP voted to dissolve itself into his faction which became known as The Club. In 1953, Healy joined the wing of the Fourth International lead in part by James P. Cannon after the FI split into two competing wings. Healys wing was the International Committee of the Fourth International of which he became a leader of, along with James P. Cannon and Pierre Lambert. This qualitatively changed the ability of Healys group to carry out activity, the SLL became the Workers Revolutionary Party in 1973. In 1974, some 200 members around Alan Thornett, then a leading militant in the industry at Cowley, were expelled from the party. Part of this group would form the Workers Socialist League, from this point, the WRP lost members and became ever more isolated from the rest of the labour movement. Healy was known to have punched members of the central committee while theoretical discussions were in progress. However, the group remained sizeable and wealthy enough to produce a daily newspaper, much of the money for the printing enterprise coming from subsidies and printing contracts with various Middle Eastern regimes as internal reports later proved. They supplemented their income by printing newspapers for leading figures of the Labour Left such as the Labour Herald for Ted Knight, a member of the SLL. Healy forged a friendship with Livingstone, the Herald also served as a vehicle for the WRPs limited entryist operation in this period. Healys regime within The Club, SLL and WRP was marked by demands for a level of activism. An exception to this requirement was made for participants in the cultural fronts the SLL set up to attract actors and writers, in late October 1985, Healy was expelled from the WRP. Jennings, Healys former secretary and close personal companion over 19 years, I dont care whether its 26,36 or 236. She denounced her former colleague, This is part of a political frame-up by Mr Banda who wants to dissolve the WRP because he has moved to the right, as a result of these developments, the WRP collapsed into eight or nine competing groups
Gerry Healy
–
Gerry Healy
14.
C. L. R. James
–
Cyril Lionel Robert James, who sometimes wrote under the pen-name J. R. Johnson, was an Afro-Trinidadian historian, journalist and socialist. His works are influential in various theoretical, social, and historiographical contexts and his work is a staple of subaltern studies, and he figures as a pioneering and influential voice in postcolonial literature. Born in Tunapuna, Trinidad, then a British Crown colony, James was the first child of Elizabeth James and Robert Alexander, during this time James took a job as cricket correspondent with the Manchester Guardian. In 1933 James moved to London, the following year he joined a Trotskyist group that met to talk for hours in his rented room. Louise Cripps, one of its members, recalled, We felt our work could contribute to the time when we would see Socialism spreading, James had begun to campaign for the independence of the West Indies while in Trinidad. Leading members included Amy Ashwood Garvey, Jomo Kenyatta and Chris Braithwaite, when the IAFE was transformed into the International African Service Bureau in 1937, James edited its newsletter, Africa and the World, and its journal, International African Opinion. The Bureau was led by his childhood friend George Padmore, who would be a force for socialist Pan-Africanism for several decades. Both Padmore and James wrote for the New Leader, published by the Independent Labour Party and that same year saw the publication in London by Secker & Warburg of Jamess novel, Minty Alley, which he had brought with him in manuscript from Trinidad. It was the first novel to be published by a black Caribbean author in the UK, James went to Paris to research this work, where he met Haitian military historian Alfred Auguste Nemours. In 1936, James and his Trotskyist Marxist Group left the ILP to form an open party, in 1938, this new group took part in several mergers to form the Revolutionary Socialist League. The RSL was a highly factionalised organisation, Jamess relationship with Louise Cripps had broken up after her second abortion so that intimate tie no longer bound him to England. James travelled to the United States in late 1938, after a tour sponsored by the SWP, he visited Trotsky in Coyoacán, México in April 1939. He stayed about a month and also met Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, a key topic that James and Trotsky discussed was the Negro Question. He then stayed in the United States until he was deported in 1953, by 1940, he had begun to doubt Trotskys view of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state. He left the SWP along with Max Shachtman, who formed the Workers Party, within the WP, James formed the Johnson-Forest Tendency with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee to spread their views within the new party. While within the WP, the views of the Johnson-Forest Tendency underwent considerable development, by the end of the Second World War, they had definitively rejected Trotskys theory of Russia as a degenerated workers state. Instead, they classified it as state capitalist, a political evolution shared by other Trotskyists of their generation, such liberation struggles came to take centre stage for the Johnson-Forest Tendency. After the Second World War, the WP witnessed a downturn in revolutionary sentiment, the Tendency, on the other hand, was encouraged by the prospects for revolutionary change for oppressed peoples
C. L. R. James
–
C.L.R. James
15.
Pierre Lambert
–
Pierre Lambert was a French Trotskyist leader, who, for many years acted as the central leader of the French Courant Communiste Internationaliste which founded the Parti des Travailleurs. He was born in Paris to a family of Russian Jewish immigrants, Lambert began his activity as a Trotskyist militant before the Second World War when he was a member of the Internationalist Workers Party led by Raymond Molinier. After the war he continued his activism, as a member of the now united French section of the Fourth International, in the PCI he was known as a specialist in trade union matters. Differences between Lambert and Bleibtreu forced the latter to leave the PCI, as leader of the PCI by 1954 Lambert forged an alliance with the Socialist Workers Party in the United States and others opposed to Pablo. Lambert lead the PCI to join with these anti-Pabloist fores to form the International Committee of the Fourth International, Lambert was left in 1963 to continue the ICFI in an alliance with the Gerry Healy-led Socialist Labour League, based in Britain. By the time of the ICFIs congress in 1966, pressures were building between the OCI and the SLL, in 1971 the OCI left the ICFI to form the Organising Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International and in 1973 and 1974 proposed discussions to the USFI. The parity commission failed, leaving Lamberts supporters organised in the Fourth International, in 1996 the Fourth International reproclaimed the Fourth International and goes by that name since. Under his real name of Pierre Boussel, Lambert was candidate at the election in 1988. Lambert biography De la IVe Internationale au Parti des travailleurs Tribute in Libération,16 January 2008
Pierre Lambert
–
Pierre Lambert in 1988 in the city of Montpellier
16.
Ernest Mandel
–
Ernest Ezra Mandel, was a revolutionary Marxist theorist. Born in Frankfurt, Mandel was recruited to the Belgian section of the international Trotskyist movement and his parents, Henri and Rosa Mandel, were Jewish emigres from Poland, the former a member of Rosa Luxemburgs and Karl Liebknechts Spartacist League. Ernests start of university study was interrupted when the German occupying forces closed the university, during World War II, he escaped twice after being arrested in the course of resistance activities, and survived imprisonment in the German concentration camp at Dora. After the war, he became a leader of the Belgian Trotskyists and he gained respect as a prolific journalist with a clear and lively style, as an orthodox Marxist theoretician, and as a talented debater. He wrote for numerous outlets in the 1940s and 1950s including Het Parool, Le Peuple, lObservateur. At the height of the Cold War, he defended the merits of Marxism in debate with the social democrat. After the 1946 World Congress of the Fourth International, Mandel was elected into the leadership of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International, the regroupment formed the Reunified Fourth International. Until his death in 1995, Mandel remained the most prominent leader, after publishing Marxist Economic Theory, Mandel traveled to Cuba and worked closely with Che Guevara on economic planning, after Guevara had read the new book and encouraged Mandels interventions. He resumed his university studies and graduated from what is now the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris in 1967. Only from 1968 did Mandel become well known as a figure and Marxist politician, touring student campuses in Europe and America giving talks on socialism, imperialism. In 1972, his exclusion from the United States was upheld in the US Supreme Court case Kleindienst v. Mandel, in 1978 he delivered the Alfred Marshall Lectures at the University of Cambridge, on the topic of the long waves of capitalist development. As a man in his 70s, he travelled to Russia to defend his vision of a free and democratic socialism and continued to support the idea of Revolution in the West until his death. In total, he published approximately 2,000 articles and around 30 books during his life in German, Dutch, French, English and other languages, during the Second World War, he was one of the editors of the underground newspaper, Het Vrije Woord. In addition, he edited or contributed to many books, maintained a voluminous correspondence. He considered it his mission to transmit the heritage of classical Marxist thought, deformed by the experience of Stalinism, and to a large extent he did influence a generation of scholars and activists in their understanding of important Marxist concepts. In his writings, perhaps most striking is the tension between creative independent thinking and the desire for an adherence to Marxist doctrinal orthodoxy. Due to his commitment to socialist democracy, he has even been characterised as Luxemburgist and his late capitalism was late in the sense of delayed rather than near-death. He still believed though that this system hadn’t overcome its tendency to crises, Mandel was co-founder, with Livio Maitan, of the International Institute for Research and Education, which was selected as the home of the Ernest Mandel Study Centre after this death
Ernest Mandel
–
Ernest Mandel
Ernest Mandel
–
Het Vrije Woord, October 1940
17.
International Marxist Tendency
–
Their website, www. Marxist. com, is edited by Alan Woods. The site is multilingual, and publishes international current affairs articles written from a Marxist perspective, the IMT is active in over 30 countries worldwide. Militant was an entryist group within the British Labour Party based around the Militant newspaper which was founded in 1964, in 1974, Militant and its allies in Sweden, Ireland and other countries formed the Committee for a Workers International. At the time it was the largest Trotskyist organization in Europe, the organisation acquired more members during the 1970s and early 1980s and dominated the Labour Party in Liverpool. Labour leader Neil Kinnock described Militant as a maggot within the body of the Labour Party, ted Grant was a long time leader of Militant until it split in early 1992 over a number of issues, primarily whether to continue working within the Labour Party. The majority formed Militant Labour rejecting entryism, which became the Socialist Party of England. Grant argued that leaving Labour would amount to throwing away many decades of patient work, however, he and his supporters were expelled from the tendency and together with Alan Woods they formed Socialist Appeal in Britain. At its World Congress in 2006, the organisation was renamed the International Marxist Tendency, Woods is editor of the British sections journal Socialist Appeal and of the IMT website, In Defence of Marxism. The International Marxist Tendency adheres to orthodox Trotskyism, emphasising the education of cadres of workers, the IMTs Brazilian section, Esquerda Marxista was formerly a recognized tendency within the ruling Workers Party and has a majority in the Movimento Negro Socialista. Two members of the Greek Section were elected to the Central Committee of SYRIZA during its congress in July 2013. This faction has since pushed within SYRIZA for the rejection of austerity and this organizations positions have gained the attention of the Wall Street Journal, which interviewed some members as part of an article on June 23,2015. The Communist Tendency joined the newly founded Popular Unity following its split from SYRIZA The Mexican section, several members of the Mexican section were mentioned by name in articles by the Conservative newspaper La Razón. On August 26,2015 members of La Izquerda Socialista were injured in a confrontation with police after leaving an Ayotzinapa protest in Mexico city. Among the injured was Ubaldo Meneses, editor of the newspaper. This work, however, is combined with independent work outside these parties. The IMTs section in the United States does not pursue entryism, the IMT has spread to parts of Latin America, where it now has groups in Venezuela, Peru, Argentina, Mexico, Bolivia, Brazil and El Salvador. IMT activists also play an important role in FRETECO movement in Brazil and they have been very active in Venezuela, where their section supports Hugo Chavez while promoting the ideas of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky. Every year all the sections of tendency take part in a event that is either a World Congress or a World School of Marxism
International Marxist Tendency
–
Logo of the In Defence Of Marxism website.
International Marxist Tendency
–
Leading theoretician of the International Marxist Tendency
Alan Woods, in a meeting with Venezuelan president
Hugo Chávez.
International Marxist Tendency
–
The banner of the International Marxist Tendency
18.
International Socialist Tendency
–
The International Socialist Tendency is an international grouping of unorthodox Trotskyist organisations espousing the ideas of Tony Cliff, founder of the Socialist Workers Party in Britain. It has sections across 27 countries, however, its strongest presence is in Europe, the politics of the IST are similar to the politics of many Trotskyist Internationals. Through the 1950s the SRG had a relationship with the US Independent Socialist League led by Max Shachtman until it dissolved in 1958. It then retained links with comrades coming out of that group, but there was no significant growth in support for its ideas until the late 1960s. Some of the ideas of the IST, such as the permanent arms economy were originally developed from writings published by the ISL, the theory of the permanent arms economy was developed by T. N. In the 1960s the International Socialists established links with militants in a number of countries led to the formation of IS groups in those countries. Perhaps the first such group was the Irish IS group founded in 1971, followed by groups in Australia, Canada, meanwhile, links were built with the Independent Socialists in the USA. These links led to a split in the American IS in 1978 and the formation of the ISO, during the late 1960s the British IS also attended a series of meetings held by the French Lutte Ouvriere group which were also attended by the American IS. In many quarters the IS and LO groups were seen as constituting a loose semi-syndicalist tendency within world Trotskyism in this period, the meetings were also attended by a wide variety of groups such as the Italian Autonomia Operaia but petered out. Despite this growth there was no formal organisation, however, international meetings of the leaderships of the IS tendency did develop, usually held in conjunction with the British Socialist Workers Partys Marxism Summer School, held in London. This was the foundation of the IST which at point in the 1990s came to be referred to thus with capitalisation. Through the 1980s the IST grew internationally, in part, as other revolutionary socialist tendencies entered into crisis thus removing competitors. New IS groups appeared in France, Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, Norway, a group of Turkish comrades were also recruited in exile during this period, its members living in Germany and Britain. The 1990s saw more growth for the IST as groups were founded in yet more countries including Austria, Cyprus, Spain, Aotearoa/New Zealand, South Africa, Zimbabwe. Groups were also founded in the former Eastern Bloc states as contact could be sustained in those countries for the first time after the collapse of the USSR and this led to the foundation of IS groups in Poland and the Czech Republic. A group linked to the IST existed in Russia but collapsed, however, the 1990s also saw the beginning of serious problems for the IST. While there was a deal of geographical expansion there were also losses. There were a number of splits which were unrelated to each other and those causes were a concern among some members of the groups concerned that the internal regime of their own group had become bureaucratised and lacked in democratic accountability
International Socialist Tendency
–
Logo of the International Socialist Tendency
19.
League for the Fourth International
–
The League for the Fourth International is a Trotskyist international organisation, whose most noteworthy section is the Internationalist Group/Grupo Internacionalista in the United States. It has other affiliates in Mexico and Brazil, all of these are very small and based in at most one or two cities. Like other international Trotskyist groups, it fights for international socialist revolution, in addition to which the new Internationalist group had links with the Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil which had been developing fraternal relations with the Spartacist League. In 2004, the LFIs Dutch section, consisting of one member. The leading member is Jan Norden, former editor of the Spartacist League newspaper Workers Vanguard and founder of the LFIs American section and their English language newspaper is called The Internationalist
League for the Fourth International
–
Members of the Internationalist Group march at
Occupy Wall Street
20.
Bolshevik Party
–
The RSDLP was a revolutionary socialist political party formed in 1898 in Minsk in Belarus to unite the various revolutionary organisations of the Russian Empire into one party. In the Second Party Congress vote, the Bolsheviks won on the majority of important issues and they ultimately became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks or Reds came to power in Russia during the October Revolution phase of the Russian Revolution of 1917, with the Reds defeating the Whites, and others during the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922, the RSFSR became the chief constituent of the Soviet Union in December 1922. Their beliefs and practices were often referred to as Bolshevism, in the 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, held in Brussels and London during August 1903, Lenin and Julius Martov disagreed over the membership rules. Lenin wanted members who recognise the Party Programme and support it by material means, Julius Martov suggested by regular personal assistance under the direction of one of the partys organisations. Lenin advocated limiting party membership to a core of active members. A main source of the factions could be attributed to Lenin’s steadfast opinion. It was obvious at early stages in Lenin’s revolutionary practices that he would not be willing to concede on any party policy that conflicted with his own predetermined ideas and it was the loyalty that he had to his own self-envisioned utopia that caused the party split. He was seen even by fellow party members as being so narrow minded that he believed there were only two types of people, Friend and enemy—those who followed him, and all the rest. Leon Trotsky, one of Lenins fellow revolutionaries, compared Lenin in 1904 to the French revolutionary Robespierre, Lenins view of politics as verbal and ideological warfare and his inability to accept criticism even if it came from his own dedicated followers was the reason behind this accusation. The root of the split was a book titled What is to be Done. that Lenin wrote while serving a sentence of exile, in Germany, the book was published in 1902, in Russia, strict censorship outlawed its publication and distribution. One of the points of Lenin’s writing was that a revolution can only be achieved by the strong leadership of one person over the masses. After the proposed revolution had overthrown the government, this individual leader must release power. Lenin also wrote that revolutionary leaders must dedicate their lives to the cause in order for it to be successful. Lenins view of a socialist intelligentsia showed that he was not a supporter of Marxist theory. For example, Lenin agreed with the Marxist idea of eliminating social classes, most party members considered unequal treatment of workers immoral, and were loyal to the idea of a completely classless society, so Lenin’s variations caused the party internal dissonance. Although the party split of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks would not become official until 1903, as discussed in What is to be Done. Lenin firmly believed that a political structure was needed to effectively initiate a formal revolution
Bolshevik Party
–
Bolshevik Party meeting. Sitting (from left):
Avel Enukidze,
Mikhail Kalinin,
Nikolai Bukharin,
Mikhail Tomsky,
Mikhail Lashevich,
Lev Kamenev,
Yevgeni Preobrazhensky,
Leonid Serebryakov,
Vladimir Lenin and
Alexei Rykov.
Bolshevik Party
–
Boris Kustodiev ’s 1920 painting " Bolshevik "
Bolshevik Party
–
Left to right:
Leon Trotsky,
Vladimir Lenin, and
Lev Kamenev
Bolshevik Party
–
"Down with Bolshevism. Bolshevism brings war and destruction, hunger and death", anti-Bolshevik propaganda, Germany, 1919.
21.
Soviet Union
–
The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a socialist state in Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. It was nominally a union of national republics, but its government. The Soviet Union had its roots in the October Revolution of 1917 and this established the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic and started the Russian Civil War between the revolutionary Reds and the counter-revolutionary Whites. In 1922, the communists were victorious, forming the Soviet Union with the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian, following Lenins death in 1924, a collective leadership and a brief power struggle, Joseph Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s. Stalin suppressed all opposition to his rule, committed the state ideology to Marxism–Leninism. As a result, the country underwent a period of rapid industrialization and collectivization which laid the foundation for its victory in World War II and postwar dominance of Eastern Europe. Shortly before World War II, Stalin signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact agreeing to non-aggression with Nazi Germany, in June 1941, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, opening the largest and bloodiest theater of war in history. Soviet war casualties accounted for the highest proportion of the conflict in the effort of acquiring the upper hand over Axis forces at battles such as Stalingrad. Soviet forces eventually captured Berlin in 1945, the territory overtaken by the Red Army became satellite states of the Eastern Bloc. The Cold War emerged by 1947 as the Soviet bloc confronted the Western states that united in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. Following Stalins death in 1953, a period of political and economic liberalization, known as de-Stalinization and Khrushchevs Thaw, the country developed rapidly, as millions of peasants were moved into industrialized cities. The USSR took a lead in the Space Race with Sputnik 1, the first ever satellite, and Vostok 1. In the 1970s, there was a brief détente of relations with the United States, the war drained economic resources and was matched by an escalation of American military aid to Mujahideen fighters. In the mid-1980s, the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to reform and liberalize the economy through his policies of glasnost. The goal was to preserve the Communist Party while reversing the economic stagnation, the Cold War ended during his tenure, and in 1989 Soviet satellite countries in Eastern Europe overthrew their respective communist regimes. This led to the rise of strong nationalist and separatist movements inside the USSR as well, in August 1991, a coup détat was attempted by Communist Party hardliners. It failed, with Russian President Boris Yeltsin playing a role in facing down the coup. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned and the twelve constituent republics emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union as independent post-Soviet states
Soviet Union
–
Vladimir Lenin addressing a crowd with Trotsky, 1920
Soviet Union
–
Flag
Soviet Union
–
Stalin and
Nikolai Yezhov, head of the
NKVD. After Yezhov was executed, he was
edited out of the image.
Soviet Union
22.
Vladimir Lenin
–
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by the alias Lenin, was a Russian communist revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as head of government of the Russian Republic from 1917 to 1918, of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic from 1918 to 1924, under his administration, Russia and then the wider Soviet Union became a one-party socialist state governed by the Russian Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, he developed political theories known as Leninism, born to a wealthy middle-class family in Simbirsk, Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics following his brothers execution in 1887. Expelled from Kazan Imperial University for participating in protests against the Russian Empires Tsarist regime and he moved to Saint Petersburg in 1893 and became a senior figure in the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. In 1897, he was arrested for sedition and exiled to Shushenskoye for three years, where he married Nadezhda Krupskaya, after his exile, he moved to Western Europe, where he became a prominent party theorist through his publications. In 1903, he took a key role in a RSDLP ideological split, Lenins government was led by the Bolsheviks—now renamed the Communist Party—with some powers initially also held by elected soviets. It redistributed land among the peasantry and nationalised banks and large-scale industry, opponents were suppressed in the Red Terror, a violent campaign orchestrated by the state security services, tens of thousands were killed and others interned in concentration camps. Anti-Bolshevik armies, established by both right and left-wing groups, were defeated in the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1922, responding to wartime devastation, famine, and popular uprisings, in 1921 Lenin promoted economic growth through a mixed economic system. Seeking to promote world revolution, Lenins government created the Communist International, waged the Polish–Soviet War, in increasingly poor health, Lenin expressed opposition to the growing power of his successor, Joseph Stalin, before dying at his Gorki mansion. He became a figurehead behind Marxism-Leninism and thus a prominent influence over the international communist movement. Lenins father, Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov, was from a family of serfs, his origins remain unclear, with suggestions being made that he was Russian, Chuvash, Mordvin. Despite this lower-class background he had risen to middle-class status, studying physics and mathematics at Kazan Imperial University before teaching at the Penza Institute for the Nobility, Ilya married Maria Alexandrovna Blank in mid-1863. Well educated and from a prosperous background, she was the daughter of a German–Swedish woman. Soon after their wedding, Ilya obtained a job in Nizhny Novgorod, five years after that, he was promoted to Director of Public Schools for the province, overseeing the foundation of over 450 schools as a part of the governments plans for modernisation. His dedication to education earned him the Order of St. Vladimir, the couple had two children, Anna and Alexander, before Lenin—who would gain the childhood nickname of Volodya—was born in Simbirsk on 10 April 1870, and baptised several days later. They were followed by three children, Olga, Dmitry, and Maria. Two later siblings died in infancy, Ilya was a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church and baptised his children into it, although Maria – a Lutheran – was largely indifferent to Christianity, a view that influenced her children. Every summer they holidayed at a manor in Kokushkino
Vladimir Lenin
–
Lenin in 1920
Vladimir Lenin
–
"Volodya", aged four.
Vladimir Lenin
–
Lenin, c. 1887.
Vladimir Lenin
–
Lenin (left) in December 1895 and his wife Nadezhda.
23.
The Declaration of 46
–
The Declaration of 46 was a secret letter sent by a group of 46 leading Soviet communists to the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party on 15 October 1923. Starting in mid-summer 1923, the Soviet economy ran into significant difficulties arising from the scissor crisis and this led to numerous strikes countrywide. Two secret groups within the Communist Party, Workers Truth and Workers Group, were uncovered and suppressed by the Soviet secret police, in September–October 1923, the much anticipated Communist revolution in Germany ended in defeat. On 8 October 1923, Trotsky sent a letter to the Central Committee, Trotsky wrote, In the fiercest moment of War Communism, the system of appointment within the party did not have one tenth of the extent that it has now. Appointment of the secretaries of provincial committees is now the rule and that creates for the secretary a position essentially independent of the local organization. The bureaucratization of the party apparatus has developed to unheard-of proportions by means of the method of secretarial selection. Beneath this stratum, abstaining from their own opinions, there lies the broad mass of the party, one week later, the Declaration of 46 followed. All these are elements of an economic, credit and financial crisis which has already begun, and the latter, as everyone understands, is now more necessary than ever before, upon it depends the fate of the world revolution and the working class of all countries. This is a fact which is known to every member of the party. The situation which has developed is explained by the fact that the regime of dictatorship within the party which unfolded after the Xth Congress has outlived itself. Many of us consciously chose not to resist such a regime, the about-face of 1921, followed by Lenins illness, demanded, as far as some of us were concerned, a dictatorship within the party as a temporary measure. Other comrades from the very beginning reacted to it skeptically or opposed it, in any case, by the XIIth Party Congress this regime had become obsolete. It began to show the side of the coin. The inner-party bonds began to weaken, extreme oppositional, even openly unhealthy, tendencies within the party began to take on an anti-party character, for there was no inner-party, comradely discussion of the most acute questions. And such a discussion could have revealed, without any difficulty, as a result, we have seen the formation of illegal groupings, which draw party members away from the party, and we have witnessed the party losing contact with the working masses. In the party, the more silently and secretly the struggle is waged and we need real unity in discussions and in actions. The impending ordeals require the unanimous, fraternal, absolutely conscious, extremely energetic, the fractional regime must be eliminated, and this must be done first of all by those who have created it, it must be replaced by a regime of comradely unity and inner-party democracy. Breslav L. A. Beloborodov 11 October 1923 I am in agreement with the proposals
The Declaration of 46
–
Chervonets 1922
24.
Triumvirate
–
A triumvirate is a political regime ruled or dominated by three powerful individuals known as triumvirs. The arrangement can be formal or informal, though the three are notionally equal, this is rarely the case in reality. The term can also be used to describe a state with three different military leaders who all claim to be the sole leader, in the context of the Soviet Union and Russia, the term troika is used for triumvirate. Originally, triumviri were special commissions of three men appointed for specific administrative tasks apart from the duties of Roman magistrates. The capitales were first established around 290–287 BCE and they were supervised by the praetor urbanus. These triumviri, or the tresviri nocturni, may also have some responsibility for fire control. The triumviri or tresviri aere argento auro flando feriundo supervised the issuing of Roman coins, three-man commissions were also appointed for purposes such as establishing colonies or distributing land. Triumviri mensarii served as bankers, the full range of their financial functions in 216 BCE. Another form of commission was the tresviri epulones, who were in charge of organizing public feasts on holidays. This commission was created in 196 BCE by a law on behalf of the people. The arrangement had no status, and its purpose was to consolidate the political power of the three and their supporters against the senatorial elite. After the death of Crassus in 53 BCE, the two fought a civil war, during which Pompey was killed and Caesar established his sole rule as perpetual dictator. The Second Triumvirate was recognized as a triumvirate at the time, a Lex Titia formalized the rule of Octavian, Mark Antony, and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus. The legal language makes reference to the traditional tresviri, although the constitutional machinery of the Republic was not irrevocably dismantled by the Lex Titia, in the event it never recovered. Lepidus was sidelined early in the triumvirate, and Antony was eliminated in civil war, in various municipalities under the Principate, the chief magistracy was a college of three, styled triumviri. In the Bible triumvirates occurred at some events in both the Old Testament and New Testament. In the Book of Exodus Moses, his brother Aaron and, according to some views their nephew or brother-in-law, Hur acted this way during Battle of Rephidim against the Amalekites. In the Gospels as a leading trio among the Twelve apostles at three occasions during public ministry of Jesus acted Peter, James, son of Zebedee
Triumvirate
Triumvirate
Triumvirate
–
Triumvirate of: (L-R) Saint-Just, Robespierre, and Couthon
Triumvirate
–
The "Triumvirate of National Defence": (L-R) Admiral Kountouriotis, Venizelos, and General Danglis
25.
Comintern
–
The Communist International, abbreviated as Comintern and also known as the Third International, was an international communist organization that advocated world communism. The Comintern had seven World Congresses between 1919 and 1935 and it also had thirteen Enlarged Plenums of its governing Executive Committee, which had much the same function as the somewhat larger and more grandiose Congresses. The Comintern was officially dissolved by Joseph Stalin in 1943, while the differences had been evident for decades, World War I proved the issue that finally divided the revolutionary and reformist wings of the workers movement. The socialist movement had been historically antimilitarist and internationalist, and therefore opposed workers serving as fodder for the bourgeois governments at war. This especially since the Triple Alliance comprised two empires, while the Triple Entente gathered France and Britain into an alliance with Russia, karl Marxs The Communist Manifesto had stated that the working class has no country and exclaimed Proletarians of all countries, unite. Massive majorities voted in favor of resolutions for the Second International to call upon the working class to resist war if it were declared. Nevertheless, within hours of the declarations of war, almost all the socialist parties of the combatant states announced their support for the war, the only exceptions were the socialist parties of the Balkans. To Lenins surprise, even the Social Democratic Party of Germany voted in favor of war credits, Socialist parties in neutral countries mostly supported neutrality rather than total opposition to the war. The International divided into a left and a reformist right. Lenin condemned much of the center as social-pacifists for several reasons, Lenins term social-pacifist aimed in particular at Ramsay MacDonald, leader of the Independent Labour Party in Britain, who opposed the war on grounds of pacifism, but did not actively resist it. Discredited by its passivity towards world events, the Second International dissolved in the middle of the war in 1916, the victory of the Russian Communist Party in the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 was felt throughout the world. An alternative path to power to parliamentary politics was demonstrated, with much of Europe on the verge of economic and political collapse in the aftermath of the carnage of the Great War, revolutionary sentiments were widespread. The Bolsheviks believed that required a new international to ferment revolution in Europe. The Comintern was founded at a Congress held in Moscow March 2–6,1919, there were 52 delegates present from 34 parties. They decided to form an Executive Committee with representatives of the most important sections, the Congress decided that the Executive Committee would elect a five-member bureau to run the daily affairs of the International. However, such a bureau was not formed and Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev was assisted by Angelica Balabanoff, acting as the secretary of the International, Victor L. Kibaltchitch and Vladmir Ossipovich Mazin. Lenin, Trotsky and Alexandra Kollontai presented material, the main topic of discussion was the difference between bourgeois democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The central policy of the Comintern under Lenins leadership was that Communist parties should be established across the world to aid the international proletarian revolution, in this period, the Comintern was promoted as the General Staff of the World Revolution
Comintern
–
The Communist International published a theoretical magazine in a variety of European languages from 1919 to 1943.
Comintern
–
Second Congress of the Communist International. 1920.
Comintern
–
Boris Kustodiyev. Festival of the II Congress of Comintern on the Uritsky Square (former Palace square) in Petrograd
26.
Grigory Zinoviev
–
Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev, born Hirsch Apfelbaum, known also under the name Ovsei-Gershon Aronovich Radomyslsky, was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet Communist politician. Zinoviev was one of the seven members of the first Politburo, founded in 1917 in order to manage the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Stalin, Sokolnikov and Bubnov. Zinoviev is best remembered as the head of the Communist International. He was in competition against Joseph Stalin who eliminated him from the Soviet political leadership in 1926, Zinoviev was the alleged author of the Zinoviev letter to British communists, urging revolution, and published just before the 1924 general election, apparently to provoke a right-wing reaction. The letter is widely dismissed as a forgery, gregory Zinoviev was born in Yelizavetgrad, Russian Empire, to Jewish dairy farmers, who educated him at home. Between 1923 and 1935 the city was known as Zinovyevsk and he studied philosophy, literature and history. He became interested in politics, and joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1901 and he was a member of its Bolshevik faction from the time of its creation in 1903. He was elected to the RSDLPs Central Committee in 1907 and sided with Lenin in 1908 when the Bolshevik faction split into Lenins supporters, Zinoviev remained Lenins constant aide-de-camp and representative in various socialist organizations until 1917. Zinoviev spent the first three years of World War I in Switzerland, after the Russian monarchy was overthrown during the February Revolution, he returned to Russia in April 1917 in a sealed train with Lenin and other revolutionaries opposed to the war. He remained a part of the Bolshevik leadership throughout most of that year, however, Zinoviev and Lenin soon had a falling out over Zinovievs opposition to Lenins call for an open insurrection against the Provisional Government. On October 10,1917, he and Lev Kamenev were the only two Central Committee members to vote against an armed revolt and their publication of an open letter opposed to the use of force enraged Lenin, who demanded their expulsion from the party. In response, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Alexei Rykov, Vladimir Milyutin, the following day, Lenin wrote a proclamation calling Zinoviev and Kamenev deserters. He never forgot their behavior, eventually making a reference to their October episode in his Testament. Zinoviev soon returned to the fold and was again elected to the Central Committee at the VII Party Congress on March 8,1918. He was put in charge of the Petrograd city and regional government, sometime in 1918, while Ukraine was under German occupation, the rabbis of Odessa ceremonially anathematized Trotsky, Zinoviev, and other Jewish Bolshevik leaders in the synagogue. He became a member of the ruling Politburo when it was created after the VIII Congress on March 25,1919. He also became the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Comintern when it was created in March 1919, Zinoviev was responsible for Petrograds defense during two periods of intense clashes with White forces in 1919. Trotsky, who was in charge of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, thought little of Zinovievs leadership
Grigory Zinoviev
–
Grigory Zinoviev Григо́рий Евсе́евич Зино́вьев
Grigory Zinoviev
–
Zinoviev in 1908
Grigory Zinoviev
–
Zinoviev, speaking at an engagement with
Maxim Gorky
Grigory Zinoviev
–
Zinoviev speaks
27.
General Secretary of the CPSU
–
Joseph Stalin elevated the office to overall command of the Communist Party and by extension the whole Soviet Union. Nikita Khrushchev renamed the post First Secretary in 1953, the change was reverted in 1966, the office grew out of less powerful secretarial positions within the party, Technical Secretary, Chairman of the Secretariat, Responsible Secretary. Two, the party in reality controlled the state and was powerful than it. Thus the general came to control the country. This system, whose design was overseen and approved by Lenin, was liable to turn a so-predisposed general secretary into an autocrat. But Lenin and many Bolsheviks apparently believed that leadership and esprit de corps among the party vanguard would prevent this from happening. Lenin realized before he died that Stalin had a personality that could abuse the power of the office, but Lenin was already incapacitated and soon died. What little warning about Stalin he gave to the top party members was too little, too late. In other words, he maintained a veneer of the ideology of collective leadership even after the autocracy was long established, none of his subordinates publicly broke character in playing along with this notion, although they all privately knew better. After Stalins death, steps were taken to curtail the autocratic potential of the secretary position, making it no longer absolute. In its first two incarnations the office performed mostly secretarial work, the post of Responsible Secretary was then established in 1919 to perform administrative work. In 1922, the office of General Secretary followed as an administrative and disciplinary position. Stalin, its first incumbent, used the principles of democratic centralism to transform his office into that of party leader, in 1934, the 17th Party Congress refrained from formally re-electing Stalin as General Secretary. However, Stalin was re-elected into all other positions and remained leader of the party without diminishment, in the 1950s, Stalin increasingly withdrew from Secretariat business, leaving the supervision of the body to Georgy Malenkov, possibly to test him as a potential successor. In October 1952, at the 19th Party Congress, Stalin restructured the partys leadership. His request, voiced through Malenkov, to be relieved of his duties in the party due to his age, was rejected by the party congress. In the end, the congress formally abolished Stalins office of General Secretary, though Stalin remained one of the party secretaries, when Stalin died on 5 March 1953, Malenkov was the most important member of the Secretariat, which also included Nikita Khrushchev, among others. Khrushchev was elected to the new office of First Secretary at the Central Committee plenum on 14 September of the same year, originally conceived as a collective leadership, Khrushchev removed his rivals from power in both 1955 and 1957 and reinforced the supremacy of the First Secretary
General Secretary of the CPSU
–
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last General Secretary
General Secretary of the CPSU
–
Emblem of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
General Secretary of the CPSU
–
Elena Stasova (1873–1966)
General Secretary of the CPSU
–
Yakov Sverdlov (1885–1919)
28.
Joseph Stalin
–
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953. Holding the post of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he was effectively the dictator of the state. Stalin was one of the seven members of the first Politburo, founded in 1917 in order to manage the Bolshevik Revolution, alongside Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Sokolnikov, and Bubnov. Among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who took part in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and he managed to consolidate power following the 1924 death of Vladimir Lenin by suppressing Lenins criticisms and expanding the functions of his role, all the while eliminating any opposition. He remained General Secretary until the post was abolished in 1952, the economic changes coincided with the imprisonment of millions of people in Gulag labour camps. The initial upheaval in agriculture disrupted food production and contributed to the catastrophic Soviet famine of 1932–33, major figures in the Communist Party and government, and many Red Army high commanders, were arrested and shot after being convicted of treason in show trials. Stalins invasion of Bukovina in 1940 violated the pact, as it went beyond the Soviet sphere of influence agreed with the Axis, Germany ended the pact when Hitler launched a massive invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Despite heavy human and territorial losses, Soviet forces managed to halt the Nazi incursion after the decisive Battles of Moscow, after defeating the Axis powers on the Eastern Front, the Red Army captured Berlin in May 1945, effectively ending the war in Europe for the Allies. The Soviet Union subsequently emerged as one of two recognized world superpowers, the other being the United States, Communist governments loyal to the Soviet Union were established in most countries freed from German occupation by the Red Army, which later constituted the Eastern Bloc. Stalin also had relations with Mao Zedong in China and Kim Il-sung in North Korea. On February 9,1946, Stalin delivered a public speech in which he explained the fundamental incompatibility of communism and capitalism. He stressed that the system needed war for raw materials. The Second World War was but the latest in a chain of conflicts which could be broken only when the economy made the transformation into communism. Stalin led the Soviet Union through its post-war reconstruction phase, which saw a significant rise in tension with the Western world that would later be known as the Cold War, Stalin remains a controversial figure today, with many regarding him as a tyrant. However, popular opinion within the Russian Federation is mixed, the exact number of deaths caused by Stalins regime is still a subject of debate, but it is widely agreed to be in the order of millions. Joseph Stalin was born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, the Russian-language version of his birth name is Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. Ioseb was born on 18 December 1878 in the town of Gori, Georgia and his father was Besarion Jughashvili, a cobbler, while his mother was Ekaterine Keke Geladze, a housemaid. As a child, Ioseb was plagued with health issues
Joseph Stalin
–
Stalin at the
Tehran Conference in 1943.
Joseph Stalin
–
Prior to the revolution of 1917, Stalin played an active role in fighting the Russian government. Here he is shown on a 1911 information card from the files of the Russian police in Saint Petersburg.
Joseph Stalin
–
A group of participants in the 8th Congress of the Russian Communist Party, 1919. In the middle are Stalin,
Vladimir Lenin, and
Mikhail Kalinin.
29.
Politburo
–
A politburo /ˈpɒlɪtˌbjʊəroʊ/ or political bureau is the executive committee for a number of Communist Parties. The term politburo in English comes from the Russian Politbyuro, itself a contraction of Politicheskoye Byuro, the Spanish term Politburó is directly loaned from Russian, as is the German Politbüro. Chinese uses a calque, from which the Vietnamese, and Korean terms derive, the first politburo was created in Russia by the Bolshevik Party in 1917 to provide strong and continuous leadership during the Russian Revolution occurring during the same year. The first Politburo had seven members, Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Stalin, except for Lenin, who died in 1924, Stalin had all the original members of the Politburo executed from 1937–1940. During the 20th century, nations that had a politburo included the USSR, East Germany, Afghanistan, Czechoslovakia and China, today, there are five countries that have a politburo system. In Marxist–Leninist states, the party is seen as the vanguard of the people, in that way, the party officials in the Politburo informally lead the state. Officially, the Party Congress elects a Central Committee which, in turn, elects the Politburo, the Politburo was theoretically answerable to the Central Committee. Under Stalin this model was reversed, and it was the General Secretary who determined the composition of the Politburo and this tendency decreased to some extent after Stalins death, though in practice the Politburo remained a self-perpetuating body whose decisions de facto had the force of law. In Trotskyist parties, the Politburo is a bureau of the Central Committee tasked with making political decisions. It is appointed by the Central Committee from among its members, the post of General Secretary carries far less weight in this model. See, for example, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party
Politburo
–
Soviet Politburo passes resolution to execute 346 "enemies of the CPSU and the Soviet Power" who led "counter-revolutionary, right-trotskyite, plotting and spying activities". Signed by secretary:
Stalin, 17 January 1940
30.
Lev Kamenev
–
Lev Borisovich Kamenev, born Rozenfeld, was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a prominent Soviet politician. He was one of the seven members of the first Politburo, founded in 1917 to manage the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Stalin, Kamenev was the brother-in-law of Leon Trotsky. He served briefly as the equivalent of the first head of state of Soviet Russia in 1917, Joseph Stalin viewed him as a source of discontent and a source of opposition to his own leadership. After Kamenev fell out of favour, Stalin had him executed on 25 August 1936, aged 53, Lev Borisovich Rozenfeld was born in Moscow, the son of a Jewish railway worker and a Russian Orthodox mother. His father used the wealth he earned in the building of the Baku-Batumi railway to pay for an education for Lev. He went to the boys Gymnasium in Tiflis, Georgia and attended Moscow University, Rozenfeld became politically active during university and was arrested in 1902, ending his formal education. From that point on, he worked as a professional revolutionary and he adopted Kamenev as his revolutionary surname. In the early 1900s, he married Olga Bronstein, a fellow Marxist, the couple had two sons together. Kamenev joined the Communists in 1901 and he took a brief trip abroad in 1902, meeting Russian social democratic leaders living in exile, including Vladimir Lenin, whose adherent and close associate he became. He also visited Paris and met the Iskra group who published the newspaper. He went back to London to attend the 5th RSDLP Party Congress, where he was elected to the partys Central Committee and the Bolshevik Center, in May 1907, but was arrested upon his return to Russia. After Kamenev was released from prison in 1908, he and his family went abroad later in the year to help Lenin edit the Bolshevik magazine Proletariy. After Lenins split with another senior Bolshevik leader, Alexander Bogdanov, in mid-1908, Kamenev and they helped him expel Bogdanov and his Otzovist followers from the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP in mid-1909. In January 1910 Leninists, followers of Bogdanov, and various Menshevik factions held a meeting of the partys Central Committee in Paris, Kamenev and Zinoviev were dubious about the idea, but were willing to give it a try under pressure from conciliator Bolsheviks like Victor Nogin. Lenin was adamantly opposed to re-unification, but was outvoted within the Bolshevik leadership, the meeting reached a tentative agreement. As one of its provisions, Trotskys Vienna-based Pravda was designated as a central organ. Kamenev, Trotskys brother-in-law, was added to Pravdas editorial board as a representative of the Bolsheviks in this process, the unification attempts failed in August 1910, when Kamenev resigned from the board amid mutual recriminations. After the failure of the attempt, Kamenev continued working for Proletariy
Lev Kamenev
–
Lev Kamenev Лев Каменев
Lev Kamenev
–
Kamenev
Lev Kamenev
–
Pallbearers Carrying Lenin's Coffin during his funeral, from
Paveletsky Rail Terminal to the Labor Temple.
Felix Dzerzhinsky at the front with
Timofei Sapronov behind him and Lev Kamenev on the left
Lev Kamenev
–
Kamenev and
Lenin at
Gorki, 1922
31.
Pravda
–
The newspaper began publication on 5 May 1912 in the Russian Empire, but was already extant abroad in January 1911. It emerged as a newspaper of the Soviet Union after the October Revolution. The newspaper was an organ of the Central Committee of the CPSU between 1912 and 1991, in 1996 there was an internal dispute between the owners of Pravda International and some of the Pravda journalists which led to Pravda splitting into different entities. After a legal dispute between the parties, the Russian court of arbitration stipulated that both entities would be allowed to continue using the Pravda name. Though Pravda officially began publication on 5 May 1912, the anniversary of Karl Marxs birth, its origins back to 1903 when it was founded in Moscow by a wealthy railway engineer. Pravda had started publishing in the light of the Russian Revolution of 1905, during its earliest days, Pravda had no political orientation. Kozhevnikov started it as a journal of arts, literature and social life, Kozhevnikov was soon able to form up a team of young writers including A. A. Bogdanov, N. A Rozhkov, M. N Pokrovsky, I. I Skvortsov-Stepanov, P. P Rumyantsev, lunts, who were active contributors on social life section of Pravda. Later they became the board of the journal and in the near future also became the active members of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Because of certain quarrels between Kozhevnikov and the board, he had asked them to leave and the Menshevik faction of the RSDLP took over as Editorial Board. But the relationship between them and Kozhevnikov was also a bitter one, the Ukrainian political party Spilka, which was also a splinter group of the RSDLP, took over the journal as its organ. Leon Trotsky was invited to edit the paper in 1908 and the paper was moved to Vienna in 1909. By then, the board of Pravda consisted of hard-line Bolsheviks who sidelined the Spilka leadership soon after it shifted to Vienna. Trotsky had introduced a format to the newspaper and distanced itself from the intra-party struggles inside the RSDLP. During those days, Pravda gained an audience among Russian workers. By 1910 the Central Committee of the RSDLP suggested making Pravda its official organ, finally, at the sixth conference of the RSDLP held in Prague in January 1912, the Menshevik faction was expelled from the party. The party under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin decided to make Pravda its official mouthpiece, the paper was shifted from Vienna to St. Petersburg and the first issue under Lenins leadership was published on 5 May 1912. It was the first time that Pravda was published as a political newspaper
Pravda
–
The front page of Pravda on
June 23, 1941, including a printed radio speech by
Molotov
Pravda
–
Vladimir Lenin in his study inside the Kremlin, reading Pravda. Circa 1918.
Pravda
–
A delegate at
17th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) holding Pravda newspaper (1934)
Pravda
–
A soldier reading Pravda during WWII. October -December 1941-RIAN
32.
Nikolai Bukharin
–
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin was a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary, Soviet politician and prolific author on revolutionary theory. As a young man, he spent six years in exile, working closely with fellow exiles Vladimir Lenin, by late 1924, this had positioned Bukharin favourably as Joseph Stalins chief ally, with Bukharin soon elaborating Stalins new theory and policy of Socialism in One Country. Together, Bukharin and Stalin ousted Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev from the party at the XVth Communist Party Congress in December 1927, from 1926 to 1929, Bukharin enjoyed great power as General Secretary of Cominterns executive committee. But Stalin’s decision to proceed with collectivisation drove the two men apart, and Bukharin was expelled from the Politburo in 1929. Arrested in February 1937, he was charged with conspiring to overthrow the Soviet state and executed in March 1938, Nikolai Bukharin was born on September 27,1888 in Moscow. He was the son of two schoolteachers, Ivan Gavrilovich Bukharin and Liubov Ivanovna Bukharina. His childhood is recounted in his mostly autobiographic novel How It All Began. Bukharins political life began at the age of sixteen with his lifelong friend Ilya Ehrenburg when he participated in student activities at Moscow University related to the Russian Revolution of 1905 and he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1906, becoming a member of the Bolshevik faction. With Grigori Sokolnikov, he convened the 1907 national youth conference in Moscow, by age twenty, he was a member of the Moscow Committee of the party. The committee was heavily infiltrated by the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, as one of its leaders, Bukharin quickly became a person of interest to them. They married soon after their exile, in 1911, during the exile, he continued his education and wrote several books that established him as a major Bolshevik theorist in his 20s. His work, Imperialism and World Economy influenced Lenin, who borrowed from it in his larger and better known work, Imperialism. Nevertheless, he and Lenin often had hot disputes on issues and Bukharins closeness with the European Left. Bukharin developed an interest in the works of Austrian Marxists and non-Marxist economic theorists, such as Aleksandr Bogdanov, also while in Vienna in 1913, he helped the Georgian Bolshevik Joseph Stalin write an article, Marxism and the National Question, at Lenins request. In October 1916, while based in New York City, he edited the newspaper Novy Mir with Leon Trotsky, when Trotsky arrived in New York in January 1917, Bukharin was the first to greet him. At the news of the Russian Revolution of February 1917, exiled revolutionaries from around the world began to back to the homeland. Trotsky left New York on March 27,1917, sailing for St. Petersburg, Bukharin left New York in early April and returned to Russia by way of Japan, arriving in Moscow in early May 1917. Politically, the Bolsheviks in Moscow remained a minority to the Mensheviks
Nikolai Bukharin
–
Nikolai Bukharin Никола́й Буха́рин
Nikolai Bukharin
–
Ivan Bukharin, father of Nikolai
Nikolai Bukharin
–
Stalin and Bukharin, c.1928
Nikolai Bukharin
–
Nikolai Bukharin
33.
Sovnarkom
–
The Council of Peoples Commissars was a government institution formed shortly after the October Revolution in 1917. Created in the Russian Republic, the council laid foundations in restructuring the country to form the Soviet Union and it evolved to become the highest government authority of executive power in the government of the Soviet Union. The chairman of council was thus the head of government. The constitution enabled the Sovnarkom to issue decrees carrying the force of law when the Congress was not in session. The Congress then routinely approved these decrees at its next session, when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was established in December 1922, the USSR Sovnarkom was modelled on the RSFSR Sovnarkom. It was transformed in 1946 into the Council of Ministers, the first council elected by the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets was composed as follows. Upon the creation of the USSR in 1922, the Unions government was modelled after the first Sovnarkom, the Soviet republics retained their own governments which dealt with domestic matters. In 1946, the Sovnarkoms were transformed into the Council of Ministers at both all-Union and Union Republic level
Sovnarkom
–
A Sovnarkom session between December 1917 and January 1918, with (from the left)
Isaac Steinberg,
Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov,
Boris Kamkov,
Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich, V. E. Trutovsky,
Alexander Shlyapnikov, P. P. Proshyan,
Lenin,
Stalin,
Alexandra Kollontai,
Pavel Dybenko, E. K. Kosharova,
Nikolai Podvoisky,
Nikolai Gorbunov, V. I. Nevsky, Alexander Shotman,
Georgy Chicherin
Sovnarkom
–
Lenin and Stalin in 1922
34.
Alexei Rykov
–
Alexei Ivanovich Rykov was a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet politician most prominent as Premier of Russia and the Soviet Union from 1924 to 1929 and 1924 to 1930 respectively. Rykov joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1898, and after it split into Bolshevik and Menshevik factions in 1903 and he played an active part in the 1905 Russian Revolution. During the Russian Civil War, Rykov oversaw the implementation of the War Communism economic policy, after Lenin was incapacitated by his third stroke in March 1923 Rykov—along with Lev Kamenev—was elected by the Sovnarkom to serve as Deputy Chairman to Lenin. While both Rykov and Kamenev were Lenins deputies, Kamenev was the acting Premier of the Soviet Union, on 21 December 1930 he was removed from the Politburo. From 1931-37 Rykov served as Peoples Commissar of Communications on the Council he formerly chaired, on 17 February 1937—at a meeting of the Central Committee—he was arrested with Nikolai Bukharin. In March 1938 both were found guilty of treason and executed, Alexei Ivanovich Rykov was born on 25 February 1881 in Saratov, Russia. His parents were peasants from the village of Kukarka, alexeis father, Ivan Illych Rykov, a farmer whose work had led the family to settle in Saratov died in 1889 from cholera while working in Merv. His widowed stepmother could not care for him, so he was cared for by his sister, Klavdiya Ivanovna Rykova. In 1892 he began his first year of school in Saratov. An outstanding student, he started school at age 13. He excelled in mathematics, physics and the natural sciences, at 15 Rykov stopped attending church and confession, and renounced his faith. He graduated from school in 1900 and enrolled at the University of Kazan to study law. Rykov joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1898 and supported its Bolshevik faction when the party split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks at its Second Congress in 1903. He worked as a Bolshevik agent in Moscow and Saint Petersburg and he was elected a member of the Partys Central Committee at its 3rd Congress in London in 1905 and its 4th Congress in Copenhagen in 1906. He was elected member of the Central Committee at the 5th Congress in London. He spent 1910-11 exiled in France, and in 1912 expressed reproach towards Lenins proposal that the Bolsheviks become an independent party, the dispute was interrupted by Rykovs exile to Siberia for revolutionary activity. Rykov returned from Siberia after the February Revolution of 1917 and re-joined the Bolsheviks and he became a member of the Petrograd Soviet and the Moscow Soviet. At the 6th Congress of the Bolshevik Party in July–August 1917 he was elected to the Central Committee, during the October Revolution of 1917, he was a member of the Military Revolutionary Committee in Moscow
Alexei Rykov
–
Alexei Rykov Алексей Рыков
Alexei Rykov
–
Alexei Ivanovich Rykov
Alexei Rykov
–
Rykov on the cover of
Time in 1924
Alexei Rykov
–
Rykov as Soviet Premier, mid-1920s
35.
Permanent Revolution
–
Permanent revolution is a term within Marxist theory, established in usage by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels by at least 1850 but which has since become most closely associated with Leon Trotsky. The use of the term by different theorists is not identical, Trotsky put forward his conception of permanent revolution as an explanation of how socialist revolutions could occur in societies that had not achieved advanced capitalism. Part of his theory is the impossibility of socialism in one country. Second, that the proletariat can and must, therefore, seize social, economic, Marx first used the phrase in the following passage from The Holy Family. He wrote, Napoleon presented the last battle of revolutionary terror against the society which had been proclaimed by this same Revolution. He decided to recognise and protect this basis and he was no terrorist with his head in the clouds. Yet at the time he still regarded the state as an end in itself and civil life only as a treasurer. He perfected the terror by substituting permanent war for permanent revolution and he fed the egoism of the French nation to complete satiety but demanded also the sacrifice of bourgeois business, enjoyments, wealth, etc. whenever this was required by the political aim of conquest. His scorn of industrial hommes daffaires was the complement to his scorn of ideologists, in his home policy, too, he combated bourgeois society as the opponent of the state which in his own person he still held to be an absolute aim in itself. Thus he declared in the State Council that he would not suffer the owner of estates to cultivate them or not as he pleased. Thus, too, he conceived the plan of subordinating trade to the state by appropriation of roulage, French businessmen took steps to anticipate the event that first shook Napoleons power. Paris exchange-brokers forced him by means of an artificially created famine to delay the opening of the Russian campaign by two months and thus to launch it too late in the year. According to Marx, he did this by suppressing the liberalism of bourgeois society, and he did it because he saw the state as an end in itself, thus, he substituted permanent war for permanent revolution. The final two sentences, however, show that the bourgeoisie did not give up hope, but continued to pursue their interests. This tells us that, for Marx, permanent revolution involves a revolutionary class continuing to push for, by 1849, Marx and Engels were able to quote the use of the phrase by other writers, suggesting that it had achieved some recognition in intellectual circles. Marxs most famous use of the permanent revolution is his March 1850 Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League. His audience is the proletariat in Germany, faced with the prospect that the petty-bourgeois democrats will for the moment acquire a predominant influence – i. e. temporary political power, in the remainder of the text, Marx outlines his proposal that the proletariat make the revolution permanent. Such a unity would be to their advantage alone and to the disadvantage of the proletariat
Permanent Revolution
–
An edition of The Permanent Revolution, published by
Socialist Resistance
36.
Shanghai massacre
–
During the remainder of 1927 the Communists launched several revolts in an attempt to win back power, marking the beginning of the Chinese Civil War. With the failure of the Guangzhou Uprising the Chinese Communist Partys eclipse was complete, the incident was a key moment in the complex sequence of events that set the stage for the first ten years of the Nationalist government. Depending on writers political views, the incident is sometimes referred to as the April 12 Purge, Shanghai Massacre. This alliance included both financial and military aid and a small but important group of Soviet political and military advisors, the Soviet Unions conditions for alliance and aid included cooperation with the small Chinese Communist Party. Following their admission, Communist activities within the KMT, often covert, internal conflicts between left- and right-wing leaders of the KMT with regards to the CCP problem continued right up to the launch of the Northern Expedition. Plans for a Northern Expedition originated with Sun Yat-sen, after his expulsion from the government in Peking, by 1920 he had made a military comeback, gaining control of some parts of Guangdong province. His goal was to extend his control all of China. Initial successes in the first months of the Expedition soon saw the KMTs National Revolutionary Army in control of Guangdong and large areas in Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi, with the growth of KMT authority and military strength, the struggle for control of the Partys direction and leadership intensified. On March 1 the Nationalist government reorganized the Military Commission and placed Chiang under its jurisdiction, Chiang found out about this plot, which most likely led to his determination to purge the CCP from KMT. In response to the advances of the NRA, Communists in Shanghai began to plan uprisings against the warlord forces controlling the city. On March 21–22 KMT and CCP union workers led by Zhou Enlai and Chen Duxiu launched an uprising in Shanghai. On April 5 Wang Jingwei arrived in Shanghai from overseas and met with CCP leader Chen Duxiu, on April 11 Chiang issued a secret order to all provinces under the control of his forces to purge Communists from the KMT. Before dawn on April 12 gang members began to attack district offices controlled by the workers, including Zhabei, Nanshi. Under an emergency decree, Chiang ordered the 26th Army to disarm the workers militias, the union workers organized a mass meeting denouncing Chiang Kai-shek on April 13, and thousands of workers and students went to the headquarters of the 2nd Division of the 26th Army to protest. Soldiers opened fire, killing 100 and wounding many more, over 1000 Communists were arrested, some 300 were executed and more than 5,000 went missing. Western news reports later nicknamed Gen. Bai The Hewer of Communist Heads, for the Kuomintang,39 members of the Kuomintang Central Committee in Wuhan publicly denounced Chiang as a traitor to Sun Yat-sen, including Suns widow Soong Ching-ling immediately after the purge. However, Chiang was defiant, forming a new Nationalist Government at Nanjing to rival the Communist-tolerant Nationalist Government in Wuhan controlled by Wang Jingwei on April 18. More than 10,000 communists in Canton, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo, Nanjing, Hangzhou, the Soviet Union officially terminated its cooperation with the KMT while Wang, fearing retribution as a Communist sympathizer, fled to Europe
Shanghai massacre
–
Chiang Kai-shek at the beginning of the Northern Expedition in 1926.
Shanghai massacre
–
KMT troops rounding up Communist prisoners.
37.
Chinese Revolution of 1925-27
–
The Northern Expedition was a Kuomintang military campaign, led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, from 1926–28. Its main objective was to unify China under its own control by ending the rule of the Beiyang government as well as the local warlords and it led to the end of the Warlord Era, the reunification of China in 1928 and the establishment of the Nanjing government. The Northern Expedition, also known as the Northern March, began from the KMTs power base in Guangdong province, in 1925 the May 30 Movement announced plans for a strike and protest against western imperialism and its warlord agents in China. At the same time the First United Front between the KMT and the Communist Party of China was questioned after the Zhongshan Warship Incident in March 1926, subsequent events made Chiang Kai-shek the paramount military leader of the KMT. Although Chiang doubted Sun Yat-sens policy of alliance with the Soviet Union, notable military leaders and well-trained soldiers came from the Whampoa Military Academy, which was set up by Sun Yat-sen in 1924. The Academy accepted all persons regardless of party alignment, the success of the Northern Expedition can largely be attributed to both the KMT and CPC working together militarily. This unison, at the time, was encouraged by the Soviet Union. The main targets of this expedition were three notorious and powerful warlords, Zhang Zuolin, who governed Manchuria, Wu Peifu in the Central Plain region, and Sun Chuanfang on the east coast. On July 9,1926, Chiang gave a lecture to 100,000 soldiers of the National Revolutionary Army in a ceremony that was the commencement of the Northern Expedition. Following the defeat of the Zhili clique, Chiang decided to purge all Communists from the Kuomintang, in the Shanghai massacre of April 12, thousands of Communists were executed or went missing, while others were arrested and imprisoned. The purge caused a split between the KMTs left and right wings, the leftists, led by Wang Jingwei in the KMT capital at Wuhan, condemned Chiangs purge. Chiang, however, subsequently established his own capital in Nanjing, as a result, the Nationalist party and its military forces were in a state of disarray during the summer of 1927. The purge gave the warlords an opportunity to rebuild their armies, Sun Chuanfang began to marshal his forces with his ally Xu Kun, one of Chinas best generals. At the same time Sun was communicating with Zhang Zuolin of Manchuria, requesting assistance of any kind in the hopes of regaining his lost territory and he brought up an army of 100,000 men and arranged them around the Lower Yangtze River. The Nationalists were able to muster the same amount of manpower but were riven by political tensions, in addition, Sun and Xu Kun had the element of surprise on their side, for their attack was not fully expected by Chiang or his commanders. Finally, the Nationalists had stationed many of their troops north of the Yangtze in order to hold Xuzhou, leaving them exposed to the warlord armies, thus, many of Chiangs troops were in exposed and isolated positions that they could not defend properly, or with purpose. The stage was set for the last great struggle of the Warlord Era, on July 24 Sun Chuanfang ordered the counterattack to begin. His army, including Xu Kuns forces, tore through the surprised Nationalist troops, the Second Route Army, stationed in the area, was forced to withdraw south, using the Long-Hai railway as an escape route
Chinese Revolution of 1925-27
–
Clockwise from top-left: Chiang inspecting soldiers of the National Revolutionary Army; NRA troops marching northwards; an NRA artillery unit engaged in a battle with warlords; people showing support for the NRA; peasants volunteer to join the expedition; NRA soldiers preparing to launch an attack.
Chinese Revolution of 1925-27
–
The
National Revolutionary Army soldiers marched into the British concessions in
Hankou during the Northern Expedition.
Chinese Revolution of 1925-27
–
Chiang Kai-shek, Commander-in-Chief of the National Revolutionary Army, emerged from the Northern Expedition as the leader of China.
38.
Communist Party of China
–
The Communist Party of China is the founding and ruling political party of the Peoples Republic of China. It was founded in 1921, chiefly by Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, the CPC is currently the worlds second largest political party with a membership of 88.76 million as of 2016. It also controls the worlds largest armed force, the Peoples Liberation Army, the highest body of the CPC is the National Congress, convened every fifth year. The partys leader holds the offices of General Secretary, Chairman of the Central Military Commission, through these posts the party leader is the countrys paramount leader. The current party leader is Xi Jinping, elected at the 18th National Congress, the CPC is still committed to communist thought and continues to participate in the International Meeting of Communist and Workers Parties each year. The official explanation for Chinas economic reforms is that the country is in the stage of socialism. The planned economy established under Mao Zedong was replaced by the socialist market economy, the CPC has its origins in the May Fourth Movement of 1919, during which radical ideologies like Marxism and anarchism gained traction among Chinese intellectuals. Other influences stemming from the Bolshevik revolution and Marxist theory inspired the Communist Party of China, Li Dazhao was the first leading Chinese intellectual who publicly supported Leninism and world revolution. In contrast to Chen Duxiu, Li did not renounce participation in the affairs of the Republic of China, both of them regarded the October Revolution in Russia as groundbreaking, believing it to herald a new era for oppressed countries everywhere. The CPC was modeled on Vladimir Lenins theory of a vanguard party, Study circles were, according to Cai Hesen, the rudiments. Several study circles were established during the New Culture Movement, the founding National Congress of the CPC was held on 23–31 July 1921. With only 50 members in the beginning of 1921, the CPC organization, while it was originally planned to be held in Shanghai French Concession, police officers interrupted the meeting on 3 July. Because of that, the congress was moved to a tourist boat on South Lake in Jiaxing, Zhejiang province, only 12 delegates attended the congress, with neither Li nor Chen being able to attend. Chen sent a representative to attend the congress. The resolutions of the called for the establishment of a communist party. The communists dominated the left wing of the KMT, a party organized on Leninist lines, when KMT leader Sun Yat-sen died in March 1925, he was succeeded by a rightist, Chiang Kai-shek, who initiated moves to marginalize the position of the communists. Fresh from the success of the Northern Expedition to overthrow the warlords, Chiang Kai-shek turned on the communists, ignoring the orders of the Wuhan-based KMT government, he marched on Shanghai, a city controlled by communist militias. Although the communists welcomed Chiangs arrival, he turned on them, Chiangs army then marched on Wuhan, but was prevented from taking the city by CPC General Ye Ting and his troops
Communist Party of China
–
Mao declared the establishment of the People's Republic of China on 1 October 1949
Communist Party of China
Communist Party of China
–
Chinese communists celebrate
Joseph Stalin 's birthday, 1949
Communist Party of China
–
A monument dedicated to Marx (left) and Engels (right) in Shanghai, China
39.
Kuomintang
–
The Kuomintang of China is a major political party in the Republic of China. It is currently the second-largest in the country, the predecessor of the KMT, the Revolutionary Alliance, was one of the major advocates of the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty and the establishment of a republic. The KMT was founded by Song Jiaoren and Sun Yat-sen shortly after the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, Sun was the provisional president but he did not have military power and ceded the first presidency to the military leader Yuan Shikai. After Yuans death, China was divided by warlords, while the KMT was able to only part of the south. Later led by Chiang Kai-shek, the KMT formed the National Revolutionary Army and it was the ruling party in mainland China from 1928 until its retreat to Taiwan in 1949 after being defeated by the Communist Party of China during the Chinese Civil War. In Taiwan, the KMT continued as the ruling party until the reforms in the late 1970s through the 1990s loosened its grip on power. Since 1987, the Republic of China is no longer a single-party state, however, the KMT is currently the main opposition party in the Legislative Yuan. The guiding ideology is the Three Principles of the People, advocated by Sun Yat-sen and its party headquarters are located in Taipei. The KMT is a member of the International Democrat Union, the previous president, Ma Ying-jeou, elected in 2008 and re-elected in 2012, was the seventh KMT member to hold the office of the presidency. Together with the People First Party and New Party, the KMT forms what is known as the Taiwanese Pan-Blue Coalition, however, the KMT has been forced to moderate its stance by advocating the political and legal status quo of modern Taiwan. However, since 2008, in order to ease tensions with the PRC, the group planned and supported the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 and the founding of the Republic of China on 1 January 1912. However, Sun did not have power and ceded the provisional presidency of the republic to Yuan Shikai. On 25 August 1912, the Nationalist Party was established at the Huguang Guild Hall in Peking, Sun, the then-President of the ROC, was chosen as the party chairman with Huang Xing as his deputy. The party opposed constitutional monarchists and sought to check the power of Yuan, the Nationalists won an overwhelming majority of the first National Assembly election in December 1912. But Yuan soon began to ignore the parliament in making presidential decisions, Song Jiaoren was assassinated in Shanghai in 1913. Yuan, claiming subversiveness and betrayal, expelled adherents of the KMT from the parliament, Yuan dissolved the Nationalists in November and dismissed the parliament early in 1914. Yuan Shikai proclaimed himself emperor in December 1915, in order tonary Party, members must take an oath of personal loyalty to Sun, which many old revolutionaries regarded as undemocratic and contrary to the spirit of the revolution. Thus, many old revolutionaries did not join Suns new organisation, Sun returned to China in 1917 to establish a military junta at Canton, in order to against the Beiyang government, but was soon forced out of office and exiled to Shanghai
Kuomintang
–
The KMT refer reverentially to founder
Sun Yat-sen as the "Father of the Nation." Sun is pictured here in 1917.
Kuomintang
Kuomintang
–
Venue of the
1st National Congress of Kuomintang in 1924.
Kuomintang
–
Generalissimo
Chiang Kai-shek, who assumed the leadership of KMT after the death of Sun Yat-sen in 1925.
40.
Great Purge
–
The Great Purge or the Great Terror was a campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union which occurred from 1936 to 1938. In Russian historiography, the period of the most intense purge, 1937–1938, is called Yezhovshchina, after Nikolai Yezhov and it has been estimated between 600,000 and 3 million people died at the hands of the Soviet government during the Purge. In the Western world, Robert Conquests 1968 book The Great Terror popularized that phrase, Conquests title was in turn an allusion to the period called the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. The term repression was used to describe the prosecution of people considered counter-revolutionaries and enemies of the people by the leadership of the Soviet Union. The purge was motivated by the desire to remove dissenters from the Communist Party, most public attention was focused on the purge of the leadership of the Communist Party, as well as of government bureaucrats and leaders of the armed forces, most of whom were Party members. The campaigns also affected many other categories of the society, intelligentsia, peasants and especially those branded as too rich for a peasant, a series of NKVD operations affected a number of national minorities, accused of being fifth column communities. Due legal process, as defined by Soviet law in force at the time, was largely replaced with summary proceedings by NKVD troikas. Hundreds of thousands of victims were accused of political crimes, they were quickly executed by shooting. Many died at the labor camps of starvation, disease, exposure. Other methods of dispatching victims were used on an experimental basis, one secret policeman, for example, gassed people to death in batches in the back of a specially adapted airtight van. The campaigns were carried out according to the line, and often by direct orders. The threat of war heightened Stalins perception of marginal and politically suspect populations as the source of an uprising in case of invasion. He began to plan for the elimination of such potential recruits for a mythical fifth column of wreckers, terrorists. The term purge in Soviet political slang was an abbreviation of the purge of the Party ranks. In 1933, for example, the Party expelled some 400,000 people, but from 1936 until 1953, the term changed its meaning, because being expelled from the Party came to mean almost certain arrest, imprisonment, and often execution. Stalins opponents on both sides of the political spectrum chided him as undemocratic and lax on bureaucratic corruption and these tendencies may have accumulated substantial support among the working class by attacking the privileges and luxuries the state offered to its high-paid elite. The Ryutin Affair seemed to vindicate Stalins suspicions and he enforced a ban on party factions and banned those party members who had opposed him, effectively ending democratic centralism. In the new form of Party organization, the Politburo, and this required the elimination of all Marxists with different views, especially those among the prestigious old guard of revolutionaries
Great Purge
–
Partial view of a plaque with photos of victims of the Great Purge who were shot in the
Butovo firing range near Moscow. The photos were taken after the arrest of each victim.
Great Purge
–
Excerpt of
NKVD Order No. 00447
Great Purge
–
A list from the Great Purge signed by
Stalin,
Molotov,
Kaganovich,
Voroshilov,
Mikoyan, and
Chubar.
Great Purge
–
Leon Trotsky, in 1929, shortly before being driven out of the Soviet Union.
41.
Collectivization
–
Collective farming and communal farming are various types of agricultural production in which multiple farmers run their holdings as a joint enterprise. This type of collective is often an agricultural cooperative in which member-owners engage jointly in farming activities, the process by which farmland is aggregated is called collectivization. In some countries, there have been state-run and cooperative-run variants, for example, the Soviet Union had both kolkhozy and sovkhozy, often denoted in English as collective farms and state farms, respectively. In general, collective farming is contrasted with family farming and with arrangements in which land was owned by landlords or aristocrats. Notable examples of collective farming include the kolkhozy that dominated Soviet agriculture between 1930 and 1991 and the Israeli kibbutzim, both are collective farms based on common ownership of resources and on pooling of labour and income in accordance with the theoretical principles of cooperative organizations. They differ radically, however, in the application of the cooperative principles relative to freedom of choice, a small group of farming or herding families living together on a jointly-managed piece of land is surely one of the most common living arrangements in all of human history. This has co-existed with, and competed with, more forms of ownership. Private ownership came to predominate in much of the Western world, the process by which Western Europes communal land became private is a fundamental question behind views of property, is it the legacy of historical injustices and crimes. Karl Marx believed that what he called primitive communism was ended by exploitative means he called primitive accumulation, by contrast Libertarian thinkers say that by the homestead principle, whoever is first to work on the land is the rightful owner. A calpulli consisted of a number of extended families with a presumed common ancestor. Each calpulli owned the land and granted the individual families the right to farm parts of it, the Huron had an essentially communal system of land ownership. The French Catholic missionary Gabriel Sagard described the fundamentals, the Huron had as much land as they need. As a result, the Huron could give families their own land, any Huron was free to clear the land and farm on the basis of usufruct. He maintained possession of the land as long as he continued to actively cultivate, once he abandoned the land, it reverted to communal ownership, and anyone could take it up for themselves. The Iroquois had a communal system of land distribution. The tribe owned all lands but gave out tracts to the different clans for further distribution among households for cultivation, the land would be redistributed among the households every few years, and a clan could request a redistribution of tracts when the Clan Mothers Council gathered. Those clans that abused their allocated land or otherwise did not take care of it would be warned, land property was really only the concern of the women, since it was the womens job to cultivate food and not the mens. The Clan Mothers Council also reserved certain areas of land to be worked by the women of all the different clans, food from such lands, called kěndiǔgwǎge hodiyěntho, would be used at festivals and large council gatherings
Collectivization
–
Latter-day Iroquois longhouse housing several hundred people.
42.
Stalinism
–
Stalinism is the means of governing and related policies implemented by Joseph Stalin. These included not only people but also working-class people accused of counter-revolutionary sympathies. Rapid industrialization was accompanied with mass collectivization of agriculture and rapid urbanization, rapid urbanization converted many small villages into industrial cities. After the American private enterprises completed their tasks, Soviet state enterprises took over, the term came into prominence during the mid-1930s, when Lazar Kaganovich, a Soviet politician and associate of Stalin, reportedly declared, Lets replace Long Live Leninism with Long Live Stalinism. Stalin initially met this usage with hesitancy, dismissing it as excessively praiseful, Stalinism usually denotes a style of a government, and an ideology. From 1917 to 1924, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin often appeared united, in his dispute with Leon Trotsky, Stalin de-emphasized the role of workers in advanced capitalist countries. Also, Stalin polemicized against Trotsky on the role of peasants, as in China, in Stalins view, counterrevolutionary elements will try to derail the transition to full Communism, and the state must be powerful enough to defeat them. For this reason, Communist regimes influenced by Stalin have been described as totalitarian. Soviet puppet Sheng Shicai extended Stalinist rule in Xinjiang province in the 1930s, Sheng conducted a purge similar to Stalins Great Purge in 1937. Stalin blamed the Kulaks as the inciters of reactionary violence against the people during the implementation of agricultural collectivisation, in response, the state under Stalins leadership initiated a violent campaign against the Kulaks, which has been labeled as classicide. Those targeted by the purge were often expelled from the party, in the 1930s, Stalin apparently became increasingly worried about the growing popularity of the Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov. After the assassination of Kirov, which may have been orchestrated by Stalin, Stalin invented a detailed scheme to implicate opposition leaders in the murder, including Trotsky, thereafter, several trials known as the Moscow Trials were held, but the procedures were replicated throughout the country. Article 58 of the code, which listed prohibited anti-Soviet activities as counterrevolutionary crime, was applied in the broadest manner. The Russian word troika gained a new meaning, a quick, Stalins hand-picked executioner, Vasili Blokhin, was entrusted with carrying out some of the high-profile executions in this period. Many military leaders were convicted of treason and a purge of Red Army officers followed. The repression of so many formerly high-ranking revolutionaries and party members led Leon Trotsky to claim that a river of blood separated Stalins regime from that of Lenin. In August 1940, Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico, where he had lived in exile since January 1937, this eliminated the last of Stalins opponents among the former Party leadership. With the exception of Vladimir Milyutin and Joseph Stalin himself, all of the members of Lenins original cabinet who had not succumbed to death from natural causes before the purge were executed
Stalinism
–
The
Chilean Communist Party (Proletarian Action) during
May Day demonstration in
Santiago, Chile, carrying a banner with the portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin.
Stalinism
–
Manipulated photo intended to show
Vladimir Lenin with Stalin in the early 1920s.
Stalinism
–
Members of the
Communist Party of China celebrating Stalin's birthday, in 1949.
43.
Communist
–
Communism includes a variety of schools of thought, which broadly include Marxism, anarchism, and the political ideologies grouped around both. The primary element which will enable this transformation, according to analysis, is the social ownership of the means of production. Likewise, some communists defend both theory and practice, while others argue that historical practice diverged from communist principles to a greater or lesser degree, according to Richard Pipes, the idea of a classless, egalitarian society first emerged in Ancient Greece. At one time or another, various small communist communities existed, in the medieval Christian church, for example, some monastic communities and religious orders shared their land and their other property. Communist thought has also traced back to the works of the 16th-century English writer Thomas More. In his treatise Utopia, More portrayed a society based on ownership of property. In the 17th century, communist thought surfaced again in England, criticism of the idea of private property continued into the Age of Enlightenment of the 18th century, through such thinkers as Jean Jacques Rousseau in France. Later, following the upheaval of the French Revolution, communism emerged as a political doctrine, in the early 19th century, Various social reformers founded communities based on common ownership. But unlike many previous communist communities, they replaced the emphasis with a rational. Notable among them were Robert Owen, who founded New Harmony in Indiana, in its modern form, communism grew out of the socialist movement in 19th-century Europe. As the Industrial Revolution advanced, socialist critics blamed capitalism for the misery of the new class of urban factory workers who labored under often-hazardous conditions. Foremost among these critics were Marx and his associate Friedrich Engels, in 1848, Marx and Engels offered a new definition of communism and popularized the term in their famous pamphlet The Communist Manifesto. The 1917 October Revolution in Russia set the conditions for the rise to power of Lenins Bolsheviks. The revolution transferred power to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, in which the Bolsheviks had a majority, the event generated a great deal of practical and theoretical debate within the Marxist movement. Marx predicted that socialism and communism would be built upon foundations laid by the most advanced capitalist development, Russia, however, was one of the poorest countries in Europe with an enormous, largely illiterate peasantry and a minority of industrial workers. Marx had explicitly stated that Russia might be able to skip the stage of bourgeois rule, the moderate Mensheviks opposed Lenins Bolshevik plan for socialist revolution before capitalism was more fully developed. The Great Purge of 1937–1938 was Stalins attempt to destroy any possible opposition within the Communist Party and its leading role in the Second World War saw the emergence of the Soviet Union as a superpower, with strong influence over Eastern Europe and parts of Asia. The European and Japanese empires were shattered and Communist parties played a role in many independence movements
Communist
–
Vladimir Lenin after his return to
Petrograd
Communist
–
USSR postage stamp depicting the states ruled by self-proclaimed communist parties, launching the first artificial satellite,
Sputnik 1
Communist
–
A demonstration of the
Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Moscow, December 2011
44.
Red Army
–
The Workers and Peasants Red Army was the army and the air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, and after 1922 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The army was established immediately after the 1917 October Revolution, the Bolsheviks raised an army to oppose the military confederations of their adversaries during the Russian Civil War. The Red Army is credited as being the land force in the Allied victory in the European theatre of World War II. During operations on the Eastern Front, it fought 75%–80% of the German land forces deployed in the war, inflicting the vast majority of all German losses and ultimately capturing the German capital. In September 1917, Vladimir Lenin wrote, There is only one way to prevent the restoration of the police, at the time, the Imperial Russian Army had started to collapse. The Tsarist general Nikolay Dukhonin estimated that there had been 2 million deserters,1.8 million dead,5 million wounded and 2 million prisoners and he estimated the remaining troops as numbering 10 million. Therefore, the Council of Peoples Commissars decided to form the Red Army on 28 January 1918 and they envisioned a body formed from the class-conscious and best elements of the working classes. All citizens of the Russian republic aged 18 or older were eligible, in the event of an entire unit wanting to join the Red Army, a collective guarantee and the affirmative vote of all its members would be necessary. Because the Red Army was composed mainly of peasants, the families of those who served were guaranteed rations, some peasants who remained at home yearned to join the Army, men, along with some women, flooded the recruitment centres. If they were turned away they would collect scrap metal and prepare care-packages, in some cases the money they earned would go towards tanks for the Army. Nikolai Krylenko was the supreme commander-in-chief, with Aleksandr Myasnikyan as deputy, Nikolai Podvoisky became the commissar for war, Pavel Dybenko, commissar for the fleet. Proshyan, Samoisky, Steinberg were also specified as peoples commissars as well as Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich from the Bureau of Commissars, at a joint meeting of Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, held on 22 February 1918, Krylenko remarked, We have no army. The Red Guard units are brushed aside like flies and we have no power to stay the enemy, only an immediate signing of the peace treaty will save us from destruction. This provoked the insurrection of General Alexey Maximovich Kaledins Volunteer Army in the River Don region, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk aggravated Russian internal politics. The situation encouraged direct Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, a series of engagements resulted, involving, amongst others, the Czechoslovak Legion, the Polish 5th Rifle Division, and the pro-Bolshevik Red Latvian Riflemen. The Whites defeated the Red Army on each front, Leon Trotsky reformed and counterattacked, the Red Army repelled Admiral Kolchaks army in June, and the armies of General Denikin and General Yudenich in October. By mid-November the White armies were all almost completely exhausted, in January 1920, Budennys First Cavalry Army entered Rostov-on-Don. 1919 to 1923 At the wars start, the Red Army consisted of 299 infantry regiments, Civil war intensified after Lenin dissolved the Russian Constituent Assembly and the Soviet government signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, removing Russia from the Great War
Red Army
–
Red Guards unit of the Vulkan factory
Red Army
–
Soviet Armed Forces
Red Army
–
Vladimir Lenin,
Klim Voroshilov,
Leon Trotsky and soldiers,
Petrograd, 1921
Red Army
–
Soviet tanks in the
Battle of Khalkhin Gol, August 1939
45.
Russian Civil War
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The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war in the former Russian Empire immediately after the Russian Revolutions of 1917, as many factions vied to determine Russias political future. In addition, rival militant socialists and nonideological Green armies fought against both the Bolsheviks and the Whites, eight foreign nations intervened against the Red Army, notably the Allied Forces and the pro-German armies. The Red Army defeated the White Armed Forces of South Russia in Ukraine, the remains of the White forces commanded by Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel were beaten in Crimea and evacuated in late 1920. Lesser battles of the war continued on the periphery for two years, and minor skirmishes with the remnants of the White forces in the Far East continued well into 1923. Armed national resistance in Central Asia was not completely crushed until 1934, there were an estimated 7,000, 000–12,000,000 casualties during the war, mostly civilians. The Russian Civil War has been described by some as the greatest national catastrophe that Europe had yet seen, many pro-independence movements emerged after the break-up of the Russian Empire and fought in the war. Several parts of the former Russian Empire—Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the rest of the former Russian Empire was consolidated into the Soviet Union shortly afterwards. After the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, the Russian Provisional Government was established during the February Revolution of 1917, Political commissars were appointed to each unit of the army to maintain morale and ensure loyalty. In June 1918, when it became apparent that an army composed solely of workers would be far too small. Former Tsarist officers were utilized as military specialists, sometimes their families were taken hostage in order to ensure their loyalty, at the start of the war three-quarters of the Red Army officer corps was composed of former Tsarist officers. By its end, 83% of all Red Army divisional and corps commanders were ex-Tsarist soldiers, a Ukrainian nationalist movement was active in Ukraine during the war. More significant was the emergence of an anarchist political and military movement known as the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine or the Anarchist Black Army led by Nestor Makhno, some of the military forces were set up on the basis of clandestine officers organizations in the cities. The Czechoslovak Legions had been part of the Russian army and numbered around 30,000 troops by October 1917 and they had an agreement with the new Bolshevik government to be evacuated from the Eastern Front via the port of Vladivostok to France. The transport from the Eastern Front to Vladivostok slowed down in the chaos, under pressure from the Central Powers, Trotsky ordered the disarming and arrest of the legionaries, which created tensions with the Bolsheviks. The Western Allies armed and supported opponents of the Bolsheviks, hence, many of these countries expressed their support for the Whites, including the provision of troops and supplies. Winston Churchill declared that Bolshevism must be strangled in its cradle, the British and French had supported Russia during World War I on a massive scale with war materials. After the treaty, it looked like much of material would fall into the hands of the Germans. Under this pretext began allied intervention in the Russian Civil War with the United Kingdom, there were violent clashes with troops loyal to the Bolsheviks
Russian Civil War
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Clockwise from top: Soldiers of the
Don Army in 1919; a White
infantry division in March 1920; soldiers of the
1st Cavalry Army;
Leon Trotsky in 1918; hanging of workers in
Yekaterinoslav by the
Austro-Hungarian Army, April 1918.
Russian Civil War
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Anti-Bolshevik
Volunteer Army in South Russia, January 1918
Russian Civil War
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Russian soldiers of the anti-Bolshevik
Siberian Army in 1919
Russian Civil War
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American troops in Vladivostok during the
Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War (August 1918)
46.
Andrei Bubnov
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Andrei Sergeyevich Bubnov was a Bolshevik revolutionary leader in Russia, and member of the Left Opposition. Bubnov was born in Ivanovo-Voznesensk in Vladimir Governorate on 23 March 1883 into a local Russian merchants family and he was expelled from Moscow University for revolutionary activities. He studied at the Moscow Agricultural Institute and while a student joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903. He was a supporter of the Bolshevik faction of the party and attended the 4th and 5th Party Conferences in Stockholm and London, in 1909 Bubnov was made an agent of the Central Committee in Moscow and later sent to organize workers in Nizhny Novgorod. He was arrested a total of thirteen times by the czarist government, on the outbreak of the First World War Bubnov became involved in the anti-war movement. He was arrested in October 1916 and exiled to Siberia, Bubnov returned to Moscow in 1917 after the February Revolution. He joined the Moscow Soviet and, at the 6th Party Conference in July 1917, just before the October Revolution, he was elected as one of the seven members of the first Bolshevik Politburo alongside Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Stalin, and Sokolnikov. As a member of the Military Revolutionary Committee he helped organize the October Revolution, during the Russian Civil War Bubnov joined the Red Army and fought on the Ukrainian Front and in the Caucasus. After the war he joined the Moscow Party Committee and became a member of the Left Opposition. He was not always orthodox, The Party noted that he was with the left-wing in 1918, the Democratic-Centralists in 1920–1, and the Trotskyites in 1923, when he signed their Declaration of 46. In January 1924, however, he switched to supporting Joseph Stalin and was rewarded by being appointed as Head of Political Control of the Red Army, from the 13th to 17th Party Conferences, he was elected to the central committee. Under the pseudonym Kisanko, he traveled to Guangzhou, China, to lead a team of Soviet advisors to the Nationalists, following the Canton Coup on 20 March 1926, he worked out an agreement with the new Nationalist strongman Chiang Kai-shek. He was recalled at Chiangs request the next month and he then worked with Grigori Voitinsky and Fedor Raskolnikov on the Preliminary Theses on the Situation in China, which was presented to the ECCI in November and December of that year. In 1929, he replaced Lunacharsky as Peoples Commissar for Education, as Commissar for Education, he ended the period of progressive, experimental educational practices and switched the emphasis to training in practical industrial skills. He was arrested by the NKVD during the Great Purge on 17 October 1937, records from the time, which were not made public until the 1980s and 1990s, show that he was sentenced to death on 1 August 1938 and shot the same day. It encouraged their families and the public to believe that they were probably still alive in a camp or hospital somewhere. Bubnov was posthumously rehabilitated in February 1956 during the de-Stalinization of the Khrushchev thaw, however, even at the time, the Soviet government did not make public the lists of the purged persons who had already long been executed. Thus, their relatives were still searching for them in various psychiatric hospitals in the 1970s
Andrei Bubnov
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Andrei Bubnov Андрей Бубнов
47.
Chen Duxiu
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Chen Duxiu was a Chinese revolutionary socialist, educator, philosopher, and author, who co-founded the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, serving from 1921 to 1927 as its first General Secretary. Chen was a figure in the anti-imperial Xinhai Revolution and the May Fourth Movement for Science. Politically, he advocated the Trotskyist theory of Marxism, Chens ancestral home was in Anqing, Anhui, where he established the influential vernacular Chinese periodical New Youth. October 9,1879, Birth in Anqing, Anhui,1879 to 1901, Early life and education in China. 1901 to 1908, Study in Japan, organising Republican revolutionary groups,1908 to 1911, Working as a teacher. 1911 to 1915, Participation in the Xinhai Revolution, the post-revolution Republican government,1915 to 1920, Leading figure in the May Fourth Movement. Becomes leader of Trotskyists in China,1932 to 1937, Arrest by Kuomintang authorities and imprisonment. 1937 to 1942, Retires from public life, may 27,1942, Death due to heart attack. Chen Duxiu was born in the city of Anqing, in Anhui province and he was born to a wealthy family of officials, the youngest of four children. In his youth, he was described as volatile, emotional, intuitive, non-intellectual, and his father died when Chen was two years old, and he was raised primarily by his grandfather, and, later, by his older brother. Chen was given a traditional Confucian education by his grandfather, several private tutors, a thorough knowledge of Confucian literary and philosophical works was the pre-requisites for civil service in Imperial China. Chen took and passed the imperial examination in 1896. He later wrote a memoir in which he reminisced about the filthy conditions, the dishonesty. 1898, he passed the exam and became a student of Qiushi Academy in Hangzhou, where he studied French, English. It was in Japan where Chen became influenced by socialism and the growing Chinese dissident movement, while studying in Japan, Chen helped to found two radical political parties, but refused to join Sun Yat-sens Tongmenghui Revolutionary Alliance, which he regarded as narrowly racist. In 1908, he accepted a position at the Army Elementary School in Hangzhou. At the same time, widespread corruption within the Qing bureaucracy had left the empire in a state of total economic paralysis, against this background Chen Duxiu became an increasingly influential activist in the revolutionary movement against both foreign imperialism and the Qing government itself. Influenced by his time in Japan, Chen founded the Anhui Patriotic Association in 1903 and he was an outspoken writer and political leader by the time of the Wuchang Uprising of 1911, which started the Xinhai Revolution and led to the collapse of the Qing Dynasty
Chen Duxiu
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Chen in the First
Nanjing Prison in the spring of the 26th year of the Republic [1937]
48.
Chinese Communist Party
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The Communist Party of China is the founding and ruling political party of the Peoples Republic of China. It was founded in 1921, chiefly by Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, the CPC is currently the worlds second largest political party with a membership of 88.76 million as of 2016. It also controls the worlds largest armed force, the Peoples Liberation Army, the highest body of the CPC is the National Congress, convened every fifth year. The partys leader holds the offices of General Secretary, Chairman of the Central Military Commission, through these posts the party leader is the countrys paramount leader. The current party leader is Xi Jinping, elected at the 18th National Congress, the CPC is still committed to communist thought and continues to participate in the International Meeting of Communist and Workers Parties each year. The official explanation for Chinas economic reforms is that the country is in the stage of socialism. The planned economy established under Mao Zedong was replaced by the socialist market economy, the CPC has its origins in the May Fourth Movement of 1919, during which radical ideologies like Marxism and anarchism gained traction among Chinese intellectuals. Other influences stemming from the Bolshevik revolution and Marxist theory inspired the Communist Party of China, Li Dazhao was the first leading Chinese intellectual who publicly supported Leninism and world revolution. In contrast to Chen Duxiu, Li did not renounce participation in the affairs of the Republic of China, both of them regarded the October Revolution in Russia as groundbreaking, believing it to herald a new era for oppressed countries everywhere. The CPC was modeled on Vladimir Lenins theory of a vanguard party, Study circles were, according to Cai Hesen, the rudiments. Several study circles were established during the New Culture Movement, the founding National Congress of the CPC was held on 23–31 July 1921. With only 50 members in the beginning of 1921, the CPC organization, while it was originally planned to be held in Shanghai French Concession, police officers interrupted the meeting on 3 July. Because of that, the congress was moved to a tourist boat on South Lake in Jiaxing, Zhejiang province, only 12 delegates attended the congress, with neither Li nor Chen being able to attend. Chen sent a representative to attend the congress. The resolutions of the called for the establishment of a communist party. The communists dominated the left wing of the KMT, a party organized on Leninist lines, when KMT leader Sun Yat-sen died in March 1925, he was succeeded by a rightist, Chiang Kai-shek, who initiated moves to marginalize the position of the communists. Fresh from the success of the Northern Expedition to overthrow the warlords, Chiang Kai-shek turned on the communists, ignoring the orders of the Wuhan-based KMT government, he marched on Shanghai, a city controlled by communist militias. Although the communists welcomed Chiangs arrival, he turned on them, Chiangs army then marched on Wuhan, but was prevented from taking the city by CPC General Ye Ting and his troops
Chinese Communist Party
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Mao declared the establishment of the People's Republic of China on 1 October 1949
Chinese Communist Party
Chinese Communist Party
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Chinese communists celebrate
Joseph Stalin 's birthday, 1949
Chinese Communist Party
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A monument dedicated to Marx (left) and Engels (right) in Shanghai, China
49.
Adolph Joffe
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Adolph Abramovich Joffe was a Communist revolutionary, a Bolshevik politician and a Soviet diplomat of Karaite descent. Adolf Abramovich Joffe was born in Simferopol, Crimea, Russian Empire in a wealthy Karaite family and he became a social democrat in 1900 while still in high school, formally joining the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1903. In 1904 Joffe was sent to Baku, which he had to flee to avoid arrest and he was then sent to Moscow, but had to flee again, this time abroad. After the events of Bloody Sunday on January 9,1905, Joffe returned to Russia, in early 1906 he was forced to emigrate and lived in Berlin until his expulsion from Germany in May 1906. In Russia, Joffe was close to the Menshevik faction within the Russian Social Democratic Party. However, after moving to Vienna in May 1906, he became close to Leon Trotskys position and helped Trotsky edit Pravda from 1908 to 1912 while studying medicine and with Alfred Adler and he also used his familys fortune to support Pravda financially. During the course of his revolutionary activity Joffe adopted the party name V. Krymsky. In 1912 Joffe was arrested while visiting Odessa, imprisoned for 10 months, in 1917, Joffe, freed from the Siberian exile by the February Revolution, returned to the Crimea. Instead, he joined forces with Trotsky, who had just returned from abroad, in May 1917, Joffe and Trotsky temporarily joined Mezhraiontsy who merged with the Bolsheviks at the VIth Bolshevik Party Congress held between 26 July and 3 August 1917. Joffe headed the Bolshevik faction in the Petrograd Duma in the fall of 1917 and was one of the Dumas delegates to the Democratic Conference between September 14 and 22. Two weeks later, on October 7, once the more radical Bolshevik faction gained the hand, Joffe. Joffe served as the Chairman of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee which overthrew the Russian Provisional Government on October 25–26,1917. From November 30,1917 until January 1918, Joffe was the head of the Soviet delegation that was sent to Brest-Litovsk to negotiate an end to the hostilities with Germany, grigori Yakovlovich Sokolnikov, leader of the signatory team, signed on behalf of Russia. His whole theory is based on the universal application of the right of self-governance of nations in the broadest form. If he continued to hold on his utopic viewpoints the peace would not be possible, mr. Joffe looked astonishedly at me with his gentle eyes and was silent for a while. Then he continued in a - for me, ever unforgettable - friendly, or I would even nearly say suppliant, tone, I very much hope that we will also be able to raise the revolution in your country. At the VIIth Extraordinary Congress of the Bolshevik Party between March 6 and March 8,1918, Joffe was re-elected to the Central Committee and he signed the Soviet-German Supplementary Treaty on August 27,1918. In 1919–1920, Joffe was a member of the Council of Labor and Defense and he wasnt re-elected to the Central Committee at the VIII Party Congress in March 1919 and would never again occupy a major leadership position
Adolph Joffe
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Adolph Joffe Адо́льф Ио́ффе
Adolph Joffe
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Joffe signing
Treaty of Tartu
50.
Nikolai Krestinsky
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Nikolay Nikolayevich Krestinsky was a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet politician. Like most Old Bolsheviks, he did not survive the Great Purge, Krestinsky was born in the town of Mogilev, in what is now Mahilyow Voblast of Belarus. According to Russian archivist A. B, roginsky, Krestinsky was of ethnic Russian origin. Other sources suggest ethnic Ukrainian origins, while according to Felix Chuev, Krestinsky joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1903 and sided with its Bolshevik faction. After the February Revolution, which overthrew monarchy in Russia, he proved to be a capable organizer and was elected to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party on 3 August 1917. He was made a member of the first Soviet Orgburo on 16 January 1919 and he was also made a member of the Central Committee Secretariat on 29 November 1919 and served as the partys Responsible Secretary for the next year and a half. In late 1920 to early 1921, after the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War, after Vladimir Lenins victory at the tenth party congress in March 1921, Krestinsky lost his Politburo, Orgburo and Secretariat posts and became Soviet ambassador to Germany. The post was an important and sensitive one because of Soviet Russias crucial and delicate relationship with Germany at the time, Krestinsky supported Trotsky and the Left Opposition in 1923 – early 1927, but distanced himself from Trotsky later in 1927. He completely broke with the opposition in April 1928, Krestinsky continued working as a diplomat until 1937, when he was arrested during the Great Purges. He was put on trial on 12 March 1938, while almost all other defendants admitted their guilt during the Moscow Show Trials, Krestinsky at first denied everything, but reversed himself the following day. On 2 March he said to the judge, Vasili Ulrikh. I was never a member of the right-winger and Trotskyite bloc, nor have I committed a single one of the crimes imputed to me, personally, and in particular I am not guilty of having maintained relations with the German Secret Service. And instead of saying, Yes, I am guilty, I almost mechanically answered, No, such a reversion was a rare episode in the show trials of the late 1930s. Krestinsky was sentenced to death and executed in March 1938 and he was partially exonerated during Nikita Khrushchevs partial destalinization and was cleared of all charges during perestroika
Nikolai Krestinsky
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Nikolay Krestinsky
