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Today is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Lenin. To mark the occasion, David Lane presents an assessment of Lenins theory of socialist revolution. He writes that while Lenin was correct in his appraisal of the social forces in support of a bourgeois revolution, he provided an incomplete and erroneous analysis of advanced imperial monopoly capitalism. Consequently, the October Revolution of 1917 was a local and regional achievement, but did not have the global revolutionary consequences that he anticipated.

It is 150 years since the birth, on 22 April 1870 in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk, Russia), of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov: known universally as Lenin. He came from a wealthy family in the social estate of the nobility. His father was an inspector of schools and able to finance the education of his two sons at university. A formative event in Lenins life was the execution by hanging of his brother for plotting the assassination of the Tsar in 1887. Lenin himself followed in the tradition of opposition to the autocracy and was expelled from Kazan university for dissident activity and later, in 1897, exiled for three years to Shushenskoye in Siberia.

He became an active social-democrat in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party and was a founder and leader of its Bolshevik wing. Lenin was a leading Marxist theorist of monopoly capitalism and is best known for devising the tactics and strategy for the successful Bolshevik insurrection against the Provisional Government in October 1917. He consequently became the head of the government of Soviet Russia and later the Soviet Union (Chairman of the Council of Peoples Commissars) until he died in 1924.

Views about Lenin

Lenin is a controversial political leader who aroused deep feelings of loyalty among his followers, not only Bolsheviks in the former USSR but also among the leaders of communist parties, such as Mao Tse Tung and Fidel Castro. Concurrently, the memory of Lenin is subjected to intense hostility by his opponents both in the former socialist countries, and by politicians, the mass media and academics in western countries.

LeszekKolakowski has set the tone for contemporary western interpretations. To Lenin . . . all theoretical questions were merely instruments of a single aim, the revolution; and the meaning of all human affairs, ideas, institutions and values resided exclusively in their bearing in the class struggle. . .. By a natural progression, the dictatorship first exercised over society, in the name of the working class and then over the working class, in the name of the party, was now applied to the party itself, creating the basis for a one-man tyranny (pp. 383, 489).

Marxists have been divided about Lenin. He has been the subject of abuse from many communists and ex-communists alike who have considered Lenins thought, or the doctrine of Leninism, to be an unacceptable development or extension of Marxist thought. This has a long history going back before the October Revolution with criticisms by Rosa Luxemburg of Lenins call for a centralised and organised political party.

Marxists sympathetic to the socialist states, however, have a more positive view of Lenins work. Georgy Lukacs, the eminent Hungarian philosopher, as early as 1924, described Lenin as the greatest thinker to have been produced by the revolutionary working-class movement since Marx. (p. 9). Even after the dismantling of the European communist states, in the twenty-first century, writers such Lars T Lih, and Alan Shandro, provide positive appraisals of Lenins leadership and political analysis. Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian philosopher and political critic, has called for a return to Lenin, to repeating, in the present worldwide conditions, the Leninist gesture of reinventing the revolutionary project in the conditions of imperialism and colonialism. (p.11)

The ambiguity of these conflicting interpretations lies in the lumping together of quite distinctive phases and dimensions of Lenins political philosophy and action. Lenins thought has to be deconstructed from the ideology and practice of Marxism-Leninism. We need to distinguish between Lenins thought (his conception of the conditions and tactics for socialist revolution); the legitimating doctrine of Leninism devised in the USSR after the Bolshevik seizure of power, and the continuation of the revolution after Lenins death under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, and in China under Mao Zedong.

Whereas Marx and Engels used western Europe as their chief empirical referent, Lenins approach was based on his observation of Russian society in the late nineteenth century which he embedded in the evolution of capitalism as a world economic system. Such contradictions could only be resolved, he contended, by a movement to socialism. By extending Marxs method and linking it in this way explicitly to Russian problems, Marxism as it developed in Russia became differentiated from the Marxism of western Europe.

Socialist revolution

Lenin followed conventional nineteen century Marxist reasoning: socialism could only arise out of modern bourgeois capitalism. He developed an understanding of capitalism as applied to Russia in three substantive ways. These three elements should be seen in combination and may be regarded as Lenins theory of socialist revolution. There is first, based on Marxist laws of historical materialism, the idea of the uneven development of capitalism; second, a theory of leadership and mobilisation embodied in a political party promoting revolution; and third, a theory of imperialism which describes the stage of monopoly capitalism in the early twentieth century. Lenin went beyond Marx and Engels by combining political economy, a sociological understanding of the social structure, and political action.

The first major shift in Marxist orientation in Lenins thinking is that the developing and exploited countries (Russia being the paradigmatic case) have moved them to the vanguard of socialist revolution. This was legitimated by the theory of combined and uneven development and of imperialism (see Lenins Development of Capitalism in Russia). As an integral part of Lenins thought, it links the socialist revolution in the East to consequences of capitalism in the West.

Europe in 1917 gave rise to a situation which offered us the opportunity to create the fundamental requisites of civilisation in a different way from that of the Western European countries. Lenins theory of revolution involved an important shift in emphasis. For European Marxists, the socialist revolution would arise out of the most developed forms of capitalism where the contradictions and the strength of the working class would be greatest. For Lenin, capitalism was international: the socialist revolution would take place at the weakest link in the capitalist chain and this was to be found in countries undergoing the transition to capitalism. The contradictions of capitalism were greatest in the semi-peripheries of world capitalism. Lenin also anticipated revolution spreading to Asian countries such as China. In this respect, Lenin was correct: world history took a different turn. The focus of socialist revolution moved to the East. But that was not all.

Revolution in the West

Lenins idea was that a Russian revolution led by the Bolsheviks would be paralleled in western Europe. During the 1905 Revolution he said: [I]f we succeed the revolutionary conflagration will spread to Europe: the European worker languishing under bourgeois reaction, will rise in his turn and show us how it is done, then the revolutionary upsurge in Europe will have a repercussive effect upon Russia and will convert an epoch in a few revolutionary years into an era of several revolutionary decades. In the socialist revolution, the ally of the Russian working class (here he included the rural poor peasants) would be the international working class.

Lenins theory linked empirically the rise of capitalism in a post-feudal country (Russia) to the imperialist nature of capitalism and its effects on the class structure of the core and peripheral countries. There were major implications. First, imperialism exploits the developing countries which leads concurrently to the development of capitalism in the dependent host countries and improvements to living standards of the workers in the dominant home countries. Consequently, the working classes in the advanced countries support their governments in their claims for colonies and areas of influence.

Second, the class struggle had to be understood in an international perspective. Exploitation on a world scale transcends national boundaries. The collapse of the world system of capitalism would snap first at its weakest link. Russia was the paradigmatic case. The revolution in Russia would be the spark which would lead to the proletarian revolution in the West. These three factors provided the material foundation for a socialist revolution in Russia.

The role of the party

Marx and Engels were principally concerned with the anatomy and dynamics of capitalism. The political praxis of the move to socialism, the vehicle of change, was undeveloped in their thinking. It was assumed that workers parties, the social-democratic party in particular, would be the instrument of change. However, Russia lacked a civil society in which political parties could form and challenge for political power.

Lenin called for a centralised party of committed socialist revolutionaries. In his path breaking pamphlet, What is to be done?, he contended that, Class consciousness can be brought to the workers only from outside. The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own effort is able to develop trade union consciousness. That is, the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers and strive to compel the government to pass necessary legislation. Lenin here called for the formation of a revolutionary Marxist party to lead the working class.

The most innovative feature of Lenins approach is the way he combined theory and praxis on national and international levels. Lenin was primarily concerned with changing the world rather than interpreting it. As the influential French philosopher, Louis Althusser, has cogently put it: in Lenins political and economic works, we can study Marxist philosophy at work . . . in the practical state, Marxist philosophy which has become politics, political action, analysis and decision.

An evaluation

The political conditions in Russia revised traditional Marxism in three ways. First, the class structure of countries as they moved from feudalism to capitalism differed from the developed capitalist countries: Russia lacked a politically confident domestic capitalist class, the peasantry was differentiated and included layers of labourers and poor peasants who were allied to the working class.

Second, the geographical spread of capitalism in the form of imperialism gave class conflict an international scope though it retained a national focus; its uneven development led to severe contradictions in the semi-peripheral economies. Third, the political conditions in the dependent colonial countries were autocratic and lacked parliamentary forms of participation. A revolutionary party was required and it should be organised and composed only of socialists supporting a course of revolutionary action initially to bring about a democratic republic, to be followed by a socialist revolution.

Socialist revolution in Russia

Lenin made a decisive shift in Marxist analysis. In the traditional Marxist prognosis, only at the most advanced stage of capitalism would the contradictions lead to its collapse followed by the transition to a communist mode of production. For Lenin, capitalism was formed from different interconnected state formations with uneven and hybrid levels of capitalist development.

Lenin concluded that world capitalism was most vulnerable at its weakest link (or links), not at its most advanced and developed formation. But a new social formation would not spontaneously grow out of capitalism. Human action in the form of a Marxist political party was necessary to move society on from capitalism to socialism. Lenin shifted attention away from the system contradictions of capitalism to the social class contradictions. He added a sociological critique to Marxs economic analysis.

What did Lenin get right, and in what respects has history shown his thinking to be wrong or incomplete? Lenins analysis of the social structure of development in Russia, as an exemplar of developing colonial countries, was correct. He detected the weakness of the domestic bourgeoisie as a revolutionary force. He fittingly widened the definition of the working class from the proletariat to include all the working population (trudyashchiysya) in the democratic revolution.

The problem of the peasantry

While he considered the rich and middle peasantry to be class groups which would support the overthrow of the autocracy and the institution of a property-owning bourgeoisie, he misjudged the middle and poor peasants adverse disposition towards a collectivist economic structure. The October Revolution led not only to the consolidation of peasant lands but to a considerable growth in the number of middle and poor peasants. The middle peasants had more to lose than their chains. They would not accept a collectivist form of economic coordination and land reform. In the period of revolutionary consolidation, after 1917, class interests diverged and later led to open conflict between town and country.

However, in China (and also in the eastern European socialist states after the Second World War) the move to collectivisation was much less violent and generally more successful. As Nolan has put it: the process of collectivization was carried through in fundamentally different ways in China and the Soviet Union, and with sharply contrasting results. In China, collectivization was achieved with far less social disruption, without widespread bloodshed and loss of human life, and without drastic economic losses (p. 194).

In China, the Communist Party had a base in the countryside whereas in the USSR it was an urban party composed of manual and non-manual workers. In the circumstances of Russia in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the leadership had to extract grain from the peasants, whereas in China the process was one of increasing production by moving to more efficient units. In Russia, the largest group in the countryside were middle peasants producing primarily for themselves (and selling surplus) on their individual plots granted to them by the October Revolution. Their attachment to land ownership was much greater than their support for a new form of collective ownership. Consequently, the Bolsheviks, when in power, faced opposition from the villages which led to violence between the peasantry and Soviet leadership.

Party organisation

Lenins analysis of the need for political organisation, which was necessary to further the interests of the opposition to the Tsarist autocracy, was correct. Under the conditions of police surveillance, a party of a new type with a democratic form of policy making and centralised organisation and control was a practical necessity in Tsarist Russia. The role of the media in the form of an all-Russian newspaper as an educative instrument as well as a coordinating one was also right.

Where Lenin was incomplete was in his failure fully to understand the autocratic effects of bureaucratic control which became apparent in the period after the seizure of power in Russia. While organisational forms, similar to democratic centralism, had also been adopted by other social-democratic parties (such as the SPD in Germany), after 1917, in Russia, it became a process of centralised economic development and modernisation. The political forms of Tsarist Russia were reconstituted as a socialist political bureaucracy. Applying democratic centralism as a form of organisation to all associations in society led to forms of political domination incompatible with socialism.

Geopolitical and economic analysis

Lenins geopolitical analysis of capitalism as imperial monopoly capitalism correctly drew attention to the inherent conflict between hegemonic capitalist and dependent states. He saw the contradictions between the positive effects of economic development concurrent with the economic exploitation of the dependent countries.

Lenins political focus, on capitalisms weakest links and the successful seizure of power in 1917, shifted the national and socialist revolutions to the colonial world. Lenin showed immense courage and political leadership in carrying out a successful national revolution. This was his greatest achievement. Lenin noted the dislocating effects of the First World War on the capitalist powers. It was a decisive factor in disrupting the Russian economy and society and created a wide range of political strata predisposed to revolution.

But he was mistaken to believe that it would break world capitalism. Moreover, Lenin misjudged the national political and social relationships between classes in the developed capitalist states. On 20 October 1920, in a report to the Central Committee at the Ninth All-Russian Conference of the Communist Party, he reiterated his belief that in Germany and England we have created a new zone of the proletarian revolution against worldwide imperialism. (p. 100) Despite significant demonstrations and strike activity, the idea that a working-class rebellion would take place then in England was grossly mistaken.

Imperial capitalism could be likened not to a continuous chain, but to a large tree cutting off new thin and old decayed branches does not kill it. Capitalism continued to expand and grow. Eventually in the late twentieth century, it overpowered the Soviet Union as well as the eastern European socialist states. Lenin erred in his understanding of the working classes in the advanced capitalist states. Despite systemic economic crises, capitalist societies have maintained high levels of social and political integration. Even in the early twentieth century, the western working-classes remained integrated into capitalist society and this attachment was neither broken by the suffering endured during the First World War, nor by the victory of the Bolsheviks in Russia.

Lenin creatively fused Marxs economic analysis of capitalism to a sociology of Russia, to a geo-economics of capitalism and to a politics of leadership and action. Lenin regarded the October Revolution in Russia as a success for the socialist cause. However, his approach was incomplete and he provided an erroneous analysis of the disintegration of advanced imperial capitalism. Social and political integration has remained much higher than he anticipated and in this he is not alone. Capitalism in the West was threatened by the October Revolution but not defeated by it. Slavoj Zizeks appeal to reinvent Lenins call to revolution, in the conditions of imperialism and colonialism, remains even more challenging now than it did in October 1917. What is lacking is an analysis not of the weakest links in capitalism, but of the hegemonic core.

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Note: This article gives the views of theauthor, not the position of EUROPP European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics.

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About the author

David Lane Cambridge UniversityDavid Lane is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (UK) and Emeritus Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge University; previously he was Professor of Sociology at the University of Birmingham. His recent publications include: Changing Regional Alliances for China and the West (With G. Zhu) (2018), The Capitalist Transformation of State Socialism (2014). He has written extensively on development, transformation and the changing forms of capitalist society. Recent work has been on Eurasia, employment and unemployment and alternatives to capitalism.

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Revisiting Lenin's theory of socialist revolution on the 150th anniversary of his birth - EUROPP - European Politics and Policy

Check NCERT Solutions for Class 9 Social Science (History - Chapter 2 Socialism in Europe and the Russian Revolution) based on the latest CBSE Class 9th Social Science Syllabus 2020-21. These solutions are very helpful for the preparation of the Class 9th SST exam 2020-21.

Question 1. What were the social, economic and political conditions in Russia before 1905?

Answer 1.

Social Conditions:

About 85% of Russia's population was into agriculture. Workers were a divided social group. Some had strong links with the villages from which they came. Others had settled in cities permanently.

Workers were divided by skill. Despite divisions, workers did unite to strike work (stop work) when they disagreed with employers about dismissals or work conditions. These strikes took place frequently in the textile industry during 1896-1897, and in the metal industry during 1902.

In the countryside, peasants cultivated most of the land. But the nobility, the crown and the Orthodox Church owned large properties. Like workers, peasants too were divided. They were also deeply religious. But except in a few cases they had no respect for the nobility.

Economic Conditions:

The vast majority of people in Russia were agriculturists. About 85 percent of the Russian empire s population earned their living from agriculture cultivators produced for the market as well as for their own needs and Russia was a major exporter of grain.

The industry was found in pockets. Prominent industrial areas were St Petersburg and Moscow. Craftsmen undertook much of the production, but large factories existed alongside craft workshops.

Many factories were set up in the 1890s when Russias railway network was extended, and foreign investment in industry increased. Coal production doubled and iron and steel output quadrupled.

In Russia, peasants wanted the land of the nobles to be given to them. Frequently, they refused to pay rent and even murdered landlords. In 1902, this occurred on a large scale in south Russia. And in 1905, such incidents took place all over Russia.

Political Condition:

Socialists were active in the countryside through the late nineteenth century. They formed the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1900. This party struggled for peasant's rights and demanded that land belonging to nobles be transferred to peasants.

Social Democrats disagreed with Socialist Revolutionaries about peasants. Lenin felt that peasants were not one united group. Some were poor and others rich, some worked as labourers while others were capitalists who employed workers.

Given this differentiation within them, they could not all be part of a socialist movement. The party was divided over the strategy of the organisation. Vladimir

Lenin (who led the Bolshevik group) thought that in a repressive society like Tsarist Russia the party should be disciplined and should control the number and quality of its members.

Russia was an autocracy. Tsar was not subject to parliament. Liberals in Russia campaigned to end this state of affairs.

Together with the Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries, they worked with peasants and workers during the revolution of 1905 to demand a constitution.

One day over 110,000 workers in St Petersburg went on strike demanding a reduction in the working day to eight hours, an increase in wages

and improvement in working conditions.

When the procession of workers led by Father Gapon reached the Winter Palace it was attacked by the police and the Cossacks. Over 100 workers were killed and about 300 wounded.

The incident, known as Bloody Sunday, started a series of events that became known as the 1905 Revolution.

NCERT Solutions for Class 9 Social Science: History - Chapter 1 The French Revolution

Question 2. In what ways was the working population in Russia different from other countries in Europe, before 1917?

Answer 2.

About 85 percent of the Russian empire's population earned their living from agriculture. This proportion was higher than in most European countries.

For instance, in France and Germany, the proportion was between 40 per cent and 50 per cent.

In the empire, cultivators produced for the market as well as for their own needs and Russia was a major exporter of grain.

Russian peasants were different from other European peasants in another way. They pooled their land together periodically and their commune (mir) divided it according to the needs of individual families.

Question 3. Why did the Tsarist autocracy collapse in 1917?

Answer 3.

In 1914, war broke out between two European alliances - Germany, Austria and Turkey (the Central powers) and France, Britain and Russia (later Italy and Romania). This was the First World War.

In Russia, the war was initially popular and people rallied around Tsar Nicholas II. As the war continued, though, the Tsar refused to consult the main parties in the Duma. Support wore thin.

Anti-German sentiments ran high, as can be seen in the renaming of St Petersburg - a German name- as Petrograd.

The Tsarina Alexandra's German origins and poor advisers, especially a monk called Rasputin, made the autocracy unpopular.

The First World War on the 'eastern front' differed from that on the 'western front'. In the west, armies fought from trenches stretched along eastern France. In the east, armies moved a good deal and fought battles leaving large casualties. Defeats were shocking and demoralising.

Russia's armies lost badly in Germany and Austria between 1914 and 1916. There were over 7 million casualties by 1917.

As they retreated, the Russian army destroyed crops and buildings to prevent the enemy from being able to live off the land. The destruction of crops and buildings led to over 3 million refugees in Russia. The situation discredited the government and the Tsar. Soldiers did not wish to fight such a war.

The war also had a severe impact on the industry. Russia's own industries were few in number and the country was cut off from other suppliers of industrial goods by German control of the Baltic Sea.

Industrial equipment disintegrated more rapidly in Russia than elsewhere in Europe. By 1916, railway lines began to break down. Able-bodied men were called up to the war. As a result, there were labour shortages and small workshops producing essentials were shut down.

Large supplies of grain were sent to feed the army. For the people in the cities, bread and flour became scarce. By the winter of 1916, riots at bread shops were common. In February 1917, the government suspended the Duma.

Military commanders advised Tsar to abdicate. He followed their advice and abdicated on 2 March.

Question 4. Make two lists: one with the main events and the effects of the February Revolution and the other with the main events and effects of the October Revolution. Write a paragraph on who was involved in each, who were the leaders and what was the impact of each on Soviet history.

Answer 4.

February Revolution:

In February 1917, food shortages were deeply felt in the workers quarters. The winter was very cold & there had been an exceptional frost and heavy snow. Parliamentarians wishing to preserve the elected government were opposed to the Tsar's desire to dissolve the Duma.

On 22 February, a lockout took place at a factory on the right bank. The next day, workers in fifty factories called a strike in sympathy.

In many factories, women led the way to strikes. This came to be called the International Women's Day.

On Sunday, 25 February, the government suspended the Duma. Politicians spoke out against the measure.

Demonstrators returned in force to the streets of the left bank on the 26th. On the 27th, the Police Headquarters were ransacked. The

streets thronged with people raising slogans about bread, wages, better hours and democracy.

The government tried to control the situation and called out the cavalry once again. However, the cavalry refused to fire on the demonstrators

An officer was shot at the barracks of a regiment and three other regiments mutinied, voting to join the striking workers. By that evening, soldiers and striking workers had gathered to form a 'soviet' or 'council' in the same building as the Duma met. This was the Petrograd Soviet.

The very next day, a delegation went to see the Tsar.

Military commanders advised him to abdicate. He followed their advice and abdicated on 2 March. Soviet leaders and Duma leaders formed a Provisional Government to run the country. Russias future would be decided by a constituent assembly, elected based on universal adult suffrage. Petrograd had led the February Revolution that brought down the monarchy in February 1917.

In April 1917, the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin returned to Russia from his exile. He and the Bolsheviks had opposed the war since 1914.

He declared that the war be brought to a close, land be transferred to the peasants, and banks be nationalised. These three demands were Lenin's 'April Theses'.

Popular demonstrations staged by the Bolsheviks July 1917 were sternly repressed.

Meanwhile, in the countryside, peasants and their Socialist Revolutionary leaders pressed for a redistribution of land.

Land committees were formed to handle this. Encouraged by the Socialist Revolutionaries, peasants seized land between July and September 1917.

October Revolution:

On 16 October 1917, Lenin persuaded the Petrograd Soviet and

the Bolshevik Party to agree to a socialist seizure of power. A

Military Revolutionary Committee was appointed by the Soviet

under Leon Trotskii to organise the seizure. The date of the event

was kept a secret.

The uprising began on 24 October. Sensing trouble, Prime Minister

Kerenskii had left the city to summon troops. At dawn, military men loyal to the government seized the buildings of two Bolshevik newspapers. Pro-government troops were sent to take over telephone

and telegraph offices and protect the Winter Palace.

In a swift response, the Military Revolutionary Committee ordered its supporters to seize government offices and arrest ministers.

Late in the day, the ship Aurora shelled the Winter Palace. Other vessels

sailed down the Neva and took over various military points. By nightfall, the city was under the committee's control and the ministers had surrendered.

At a meeting of the All Russian Congress of Soviets in Petrograd, the majority approved the Bolshevik action.

Uprisings took place in other cities. There was heavy fighting - especially in Moscow - but by December, the Bolsheviks controlled the Moscow-Petrograd area. The Bolsheviks were opposed to private property.

Most industry and banks were nationalised in November 1917.

The land was declared social property and peasants were allowed to seize the land of the nobility The Bolshevik Party was renamed the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik).

In November 1917, the Bolsheviks conducted the elections to the Constituent Assembly, but they failed to gain majority support.

In January 1918, the Assembly rejected Bolshevik measures and Lenin dismissed the Assembly. He thought the All Russian Congress of Soviets was more democratic than an assembly elected in uncertain conditions.

In March 1918, despite opposition by their political allies, the Bolsheviks made peace with Germany at Brest Litovsk.

Question 5. What were the main changes brought about by the Bolsheviks immediately after the October Revolution?

Answer 5.

The main changes were:

Most industry and banks were nationalised in November 1917.

The land was declared social property and peasants were allowed to seize the land of the nobility.

In cities, Bolsheviks enforced the partition of large houses according to family requirements.

They banned the use of the old titles of the aristocracy.

New uniforms were designed for the army and officials.

The Bolshevik Party was renamed the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik)

In November 1917, the Bolsheviks conducted the elections to the Constituent Assembly, but they failed to gain majority support.

In January 1918, the Assembly rejected Bolshevik measures and Lenin dismissed the Assembly

In March 1918, despite opposition by their political allies, the Bolsheviks made peace with Germany at Brest Litovsk.

The Bolsheviks became the only party to participate in the elections to the All Russian Congress of Soviets, which became the Parliament of the country.

Russia became a one-party state. Trade unions were kept under party control.

Question 6. Write a few lines to show what you know about:

kulaks

the Duma

women workers between 1900 and 1930

the Liberals

Stalins collectivisation programme.

Continued here:
NCERT Solutions for Class 9 Social Science: History - Chapter 2 Socialism in Europe and the Russian Revolution -

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Talk of the County: A vote for Biden is a vote for socialism, and the country sinking to new lows as it did d - Chicago Tribune

Deineka/Samokhvalov

an exhibition at the Manege Central Exhibition Hall, St. Petersburg, November 18, 2019January 19, 2020

In Aleksandr Deinekas painting Textile Workers (1927), three barefoot young women in simple shifts work in a light-filled blue-gray space, the rows of bobbins rendered as floating lozenges along the walls. The girl in the foreground, a skinny teenager, pulls a thread from a bobbin that seems to hang in the air. She faces us, but is unaware of our presence: we have the advantage, as if looking through a two-way mirror. On the right side of the canvas, another woman walks pensively into white nothingness. Deineka, one of the Soviet Unions most successful artists, said the painting was intended to celebrate the rhythms of the factory, but today it looks more like a glimpse into an alternate universe: the early Soviet project, with its vertiginous hopes for a new world.

At the exhibit Deineka/Samokhvalov, on view this winter at St. Petersburgs Manege Central Exhibition Hall, Textile Workers hung in a dim room, the painting lit so that it seemed to glow from within. The factory workers looked like ghosts from a future that never happened. But as presented at the Manege, the painting also evoked something intensely contemporary: a cell phone screen, luminous with color, solitary, easy to like. The dim lighting wasnt helpful if you wanted to scrutinize Deinekas technique, but it made the painting look great on Instagram. Welcome to a new Russian aesthetic: socialist realism curated for social media.

The exhibition, a centerpiece of the eighth St. Petersburg International Cultural Forum, was imagined as a soccer match between two major Soviet painters from rival cities: Deineka, who lived in Moscow, and his Leningrad contemporary Aleksandr Samokhvalov, who is far less famous but more than held his own. The pale neoclassical faade of the Manegewhich was the tsars riding hall and then the garage of the NKVD, the Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairswas adorned with colored banners announcing the competition: Deineka (number 99, for his birth year of 1899) vs. Samokhvalov (born 1894 and thus number 94), Moscow vs. Leningrad. Arriving at the exhibition, you entered a stand of bleachers from which you could watch clips of Soviet athletes in slow motion, with atmospheric music piped in throughout the gallery. At the end of the show you emerged onto half an AstroTurf soccer field, complete with a Deineka sculpture of soccer players. The elderly female attendants familiar from every Russian museum no longer wore their customary fringed floral scarves and fuzzy sweaters; instead, they were dressed in Deineka or Samokhvalov soccer jerseys and American sneakers. It was gimmicky but cute, and it successfully conveyed the idea that the exhibition wasnt a dry academic exercise but a popular event. Nearly a century on, socialist realism can finally be fun.

Both Deineka and Samokhvalov were precocious, politically committed, self-made artists: in other words, perfect poster boys for the Soviet art industry that emerged after the revolution. Deineka was born in Kursk, the son of a railway worker, while Samokhvalov was the child of a small-time tradesman in the town of Bezhetsk, in Tver Oblast. In 1908, at the tender age of fourteen, Samokhvalov was expelled from school for revolutionary activities. In 1914 he moved to St. Petersburg. After the revolution he studied under the painter Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, who was known for his use of spherical perspectivea painters version of a fish-eye lensand for his interest in Renaissance and old Russian frescoes, an enthusiasm that he passed on to his gifted pupil.

Deineka turned eighteen in 1917, coming of age with the revolution. A year later he was in charge of Kursks department of fine arts. Mobilized into the Red Army in 1919, he made designs for propaganda posters and agit-trains, the propaganda vehicles that rolled through the country spreading the Soviet word. In 1921 he moved to Moscow, where he enrolled in the Higher Arts and Technical Studios, which was established in 1920 by Lenins decree and would soon become a hotbed of the Soviet avant-garde.

The 1920s brought heated debates about the kind of art (and literature, music, theater, and dance) that best embodied Soviet values. The avant-garde had blossomed in the years before the revolution, in the work of Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, Natalya Goncharova, Marc Chagall, and many others. Some of these artists emigrated after the revolution, but many remained, fighting for the idea that a new society demanded new artistic forms. At first it seemed that the avant-garde, with its iconoclastic disdain for everything it deemed bourgeois and old-fashioned, might win out. But not everyone agreed that the avant-garde was capable of capturing the attention of the masses and conveying socialist messages across the USSR. The Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia rejected all forms of modernism, calling for a return to the realist pictorial style of the nineteenth-century Russian classics. Both Deineka and Samokhvalov fell somewhere in the middle (though closer to the avant-garde), seeking to combine modernist techniquescubism, off-kilter composition, flattened perspective, collage- and montage-like effectswith explicitly socialist content, while preserving some of the old methods, such as easel painting.1 In an era of acute artistic factionalism, the two drifted among different groups even as their careers gained momentum.

The Central Committee dissolved all independent artistic groups in 1932, replacing them with official trade unions. Socialist realism, a slippery genre purporting to depict the Soviet world in its revolutionary developmentas it ought to be rather than as it actually wasbecame the official genre of the USSR. The socialist part mattered more than the realism. A work passed muster if it was deemed an adequate expression of Soviet values, however they were being defined at a particular momentand the definitions changed frequently. The more prestigious or well connected the artist, the more he or she was likely to get away with. Formalism, which was understood as a preference for form over political content, became a term of abuse, liable to be lobbed at even remotely abstract works. Movements like Constructivism were sidelined or eliminated. But modernist techniques remained visible in official Soviet art, notably in the work of Deineka and Samokhvalov, figurative painters deeply marked by avant-garde movements.

The careers of both artists peaked in the late 1920s and the 1930s. To be an official artist under Stalin meant many constraints and the constant risk of denunciation, banishment, or worse. But it also meant many benefits, such as special access to housing and medical care, government commissions, paid research trips within the Soviet Union, and even travel abroad. A central state commissioning agency made contracts with artists, dispensing a monthly stipend in exchange for a certain number of works over a set period; the subject matter was not specified. The state placed the artists works in museums and institutions. As long as you werent pegged as a class enemy, and provided you had strong nerves, you could live well as an official Soviet artist.

Deineka was particularly successful; he was granted many prestigious commissions and allowed the extraordinary privilege of traveling around the worldeven to the United States in 1934, for a well-received traveling exhibition called The Art of Soviet Russia. The art historian Christina Kiaer, the leading English-language expert on Deineka, argues that the show succeeded in the US because, for both strategic and contingent reasons, selections skewed toward work that was less overtly political than run-of-the-mill socialist realism. American critics expressed their pleasant surprise that the Soviet works they saw were not simple propaganda. Singling out Deineka for special praise, The New York Timess art critic wrote, We cannot but conclude that the workrepresents the spirit of a people released; of a people free, at length, to warm itself at the hearth of human peace and comradeship and simple, spontaneous happiness. Fortune magazine exclaimed, in no man more than Deyneka does the Russian painters kinship with the American appear.

The shows figurative leanings went over well in a country where the art of the period was more figurative and less abstract than that in Western Europe. The subject matter was agreeably familiar: one visitor reportedly remarked approvingly that a painting of railroad yards might have been painted by a unit of the Engineers Club of Baltimore. Vanity Fair commissioned Deineka to travel to Lake Placid, where he drew a ski-jump scene that became a cover for the magazine.2 (The cover and Lake Placid sketches were shown at the Manege.)

Deineka was praised in Western Europe as well. While his work was not nearly ideological enough for some of his more zealous colleagues at home, Europeans understood and admired his muted modernism and relatively subtle political content. In 1934 Matisse called Deineka the most talented and the most advanced of all the young Soviet artists. His work was shown around Europe and sold for precious foreign currency. Rivals soon accused him again of formalismincluding in The Defense of Petrograd (1928), which had already become a Soviet classicbut he managed to shake off the attacks. He dodged the purges that took down many of his fellow artists and even his first wife, the artist Pavla Freiburg, who died soon after her arrest.

Deineka/Samokhvalov made it clear that both artists did their share of straightforward propaganda, though they did it with style. Deinekas most famous poster, Work, Build, and Dont Whine (1933), which depicts a woman twisting as she prepares to throw a discus, shows his preoccupation with the body in motion. Samokhvalov painted a beautiful bronze hammer and sickle atop a bronze CCCP (the Cyrillic letters for USSR) on a blood-red background, as well as an elaborately detailed visual representation of Marxist theory, with cartoons illustrating each stage of socialism, from hunter-gatherers worshipping stone idols to Vladimir Tatlins spiraling, never-constructed Monument to the Third International. Samokhvalov built his career on portraits of workers, often women who looked like Viking goddesses of industrialization. His famous series Builders of the Metro (1934), based on his observation of the construction of the Moscow metro system, shows hugely strong, determined women doing things like drilling into rock, exerting the full force of their bountifully muscular frames. But much of Deineka and Samokhvalovs work is too fantastical to feel didactic.

In 1935 Stalin declared that life has become better, comrades, life has become more joyous since the first stage of industrialization and collectivization had been completed. In keeping with this newly decreed mood, Samokhvalovs Soviet Physical Culture (1935) depicts a candy-colored Valhalla for Soviet athletes and aviators. A girl waves from atop a huge ball adorned with the letters CCCP; a nearly naked man holds up a bikini-clad woman who seems to be imitating the toy-like planes above her as a woman pilot rushes forward to cheer her on. Faint white parachutes float through the sky, as if aviators are being dropped like confetti over the celebrants. Its a blissful, childlike, and utterly unreal vision, especially considering that it was painted in the midst of famine and mass arrests.

The version of Soviet Physical Culture on view at the Manege was a sketch for a panel in the USSRs pavilion at the 1937 World Exhibition in Paris. Samokhvalovs panel won a Grand Prix, and his painting Girl in a Soccer Jersey, depicting a Soviet Madonna in black-and-white stripes, won a gold medal. (At the Manege, the painting, probably his most famous, was surrounded by smaller studies for the canvas, creating a vaguely Warholian effect; the spotlights gave the display the air of a secular altar.) Deinekas panel for the Soviet pavilion depicted shock workersheroes of labor who succeeded in greatly exceeding their production targetsmarching happily forward. The Soviet pavilion faced the German one, which had been designed by Albert Speer, and the Soviets were happy to emerge with more prizes and medals than their German rivals.3 The exhibition was a triumph, a successful display of Soviet cultural achievements in the international arena.

Even before Stalins pronouncement about the increase in jubilation, critics had praised Deineka for his joyful renderings of the new person. Today his new Soviet people dont look particularly happy. Instead, they have an intriguingly enigmatic quality. Theyre slightly wooden, rough-hewn, and their eyes are a little blank, as if they have not yet been fully animated by their creator. The viewer is spared the ruddy, routinized cheer of the lower echelons of socialist realist painting. As Kiaer argues, Deineka shows people who are midway through a process of becoming a new kind of socialist being.

He has a similarly idiosyncratic approach to Soviet collectives: his Collective Farm Worker on a Bicycle (1935) shows a woman cycling alone through a green, idyllic landscape. Theres no work and no collective, only a happy ride on a bicycle, a rare luxury during that period. Socialist realist portraits of impossible abundance and harmony, grinning workers feasting on the fruits of the land, were cruelly at odds with real life in the Soviet 1930s. Deinekas cycling fantasy is not much more realistic, but it is vastly less bombastic and less prescriptive. One womans reverie on the empty road, in the empty landscape, stands for the unanswered question of what socialism and collectivization will bringand perhaps what it will mean for individual identity and consciousness.4 This openness and ambiguity, in contrast with the monotonous confidence of lesser works of socialist realism, is what makes Deinekas work feel alive today, long after the Soviet experiment has met its bitter end.

The Manege exhibition was organized by theme: sports and work, war and peace, heroes and children. But these were only a few of the possible thematic permutations. One could, for example, have paired sports and war. Take Samokhvalovs Militarized Komsomol (19311933), which shows earnest boys and girls practicing with their rifles, their sharp-planed faces shining in warm sunlight. One girl wears a black-and-white-striped soccer jersey with a bubblegum-pink skirt. They look like theyre having fun; war is still a game.

Sometimes the juxtaposition was the product of historical contingency rather than artistic intention. In Deinekas The Shower. After the Fight, the viewer is just behind the shapely back of a naked man whos watching six of his cheery, equally shapely comrades taking showers. The painting was based on a photo of boxers (Deineka was an avid boxer and gym rat), but by the time it was exhibited in 1943, the word fight had come to signify something much more serious. Deineka had often depicted athletes defying gravity, leaping from ski jumps or hurling themselves toward the finish line. Now he made paintings like Fallen Ace (1943), which showed a pilot plunging headfirst from the sky. It shows the same lack of concern about mechanics evident in many of Deinekas sports paintings. The pilots torso seems to have swiveled 180 degrees at the waist, but he appears oddly relaxed: his arm is bent behind his head as if hes napping on a couch. His body looks as if it has been superimposed on the bleak, bombed-out landscape, like a collage. Transcendent athleticism had been replaced by the incomprehensibility of violent death.

The purges and professional attacks of the late 1930s had taken a toll on Deinekas reputation, though hed avoided arrest or blacklisting. The war allowed him to regain his former status. He remained in Moscow, sketched troops in action, drew military propaganda posters, and produced the large-scale The Defense of Sevastopol (1942) in record time. It became his most famous painting, though it is far from his best. (The canvas wasnt included in Deineka/Samokhvalov; when I visited it in the nearby Russian Museum, it was surrounded by schoolchildren.) He went to Berlin in 1945 and made paintings of the ruins that are notable for their eerie absence of people, particularly striking for an artist so preoccupied with the human body. But the renewed conservatism of the postwar years brought Deineka under attack for formalism yet again, and he had to rely on teaching jobs to support himself. He had a happy last hurrah during Khrushchevs Thaw, when his work became a memento of Soviet dreams of the happy new man, functioning as a state-sanctioned, safer alternative to European art. A 1956 Picasso exhibition in Moscow had been so successful that authorities feared that Western modern art was winning the hearts of Soviet citizens. When Deineka was granted a large Soviet exhibition the following year, his modernism was widely praised, apparently as part of a coordinated effort to reappropriate the label. When Deineka died in 1969, his reputation was secure. Samokhvalov spent the war years as a set designer for a theater troupe that performed at the front; he was decorated after the war, and remained in the states good graces until his death in 1971.

On the last days of Deineka/Samokhvalov in January, lines stretched around the block. Nearly thirty years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, official Soviet painting holds a fresh interest, especially for viewers who were too young to experience it the first time around. You can still find Soviet dissenters who express a visceral loathing for art that they perceive as the effluvia of totalitarianismbut their ranks shrink every year, and they arent on Instagram.

Meanwhile, theres an ever-growing number of social media accounts devoted to Soviet culture, notably Soviet Visuals, which posts images of art, ephemera, and everyday life. The account began as the hobby of Varvara Bortsova, a young Russian ex-ballerina, but it soon became so popular that she made it a full-time job. Soviet Visuals is motivated by curiosity about the distant days of the Soviet Union, how it looked and sounded and tasted. The project has become an easily accessible archive of the Soviet everyday that reminds us that, despite the hardships and injustices Soviet citizens endured, they also laughed, ate ice cream, liked dressing up and dancing, and generally led varied and complex lives. The project is a much needed antidote to lingering cold war clichs that make the USSR sound like nothing more than one big Gulag. Soviet Visuals gift shop, which sells T-shirts, pillows, and other merchandise bearing Soviet designs, capitalizes on the perverse thrill of transforming Soviet culture into consumerist kitsch.

On the more serious side, there is burgeoning interest in official Soviet culture among younger academics, both Russian and foreign. By engaging seriously with socialist realism and related genres rather than dismissing them as propaganda, these scholars have produced some of the most interesting recent work in Soviet studies. New examination of nondissident culture sheds light on the elaborate process of negotiation that characterized Soviet artistic life, giving us a far more complex understanding of the period and reviving the reputations of some artists who, like Deineka and Samokhvalov, managed to produce valuable work while successfully navigating the shoals of Soviet doctrine.

Official Soviet painting has also drawn the attention of collectors and museums. The devoutly Russian Orthodox banking billionaire Aleksei Ananiev collected about six thousand works of socialist realism, even founding a museum in Moscow, the Institute of Russian Realist Art, to house them. (Ananiev fled Russia in 2017, accused of embezzlement; the artworks were subsequently arrested and the museum closed.) Sothebys showed pieces from Ananievs collection in a 2013 exhibition on sports in Soviet art, which included work by Deineka. Three years earlier, it had sold a socialist realist painting for a record $1.5 million. During Russian Art Week in 2017 at London auction houses, Deineka was the undisputed star: both MacDougalls and Sothebys were offering his works for about 3 million. MacDougalls managed to sell its pastel-tinted study for a panel at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition, while Sothebys grimmer Coal Miner, a piece of a larger painting, didnt find a buyer. Deineka, who spent his entire career working within the Soviet system of government commissions, stipends, and censorship, has entered the free market at last.

I visited Deineka/Samokhvalov at the winter solstice, when the sky was still midnight blue at 10 AM and strings of lights sparkled like icicles above the Neva River. St. Petersburg is a museum city, begging for a period drama to be filmed among its meringue palaces and curving canals, in the gilded fin-de-sicle shops and cafs of Nevsky Prospekt. In recent years, a new kind of period piece has popped up on its streets, as elsewhere in the former USSR: restaurants and cafs that evoke an idealized memory of a Soviet apartment or cafeteria. The Soviet epoch has become the object of cozy, amused nostalgia. To some extent, an Instagrammable exhibition of Deineka and Samokhvalov is a higher-brow expression of this tendency.

Is there something more sinister at play? In a perceptive review of Deineka/Samokhvalov on the Russian website Colta, the art historian Nadia Plungian remarked that government representatives and their rich and powerful guests had been invited to the opening of the exhibition, but art historians and critics had not. This, she wrote, prompted some observers to wonder whether Soviet art had again become a gift wrap for current government ideology, even if it has little in common with that of the Soviets.5 This approach would be consistent with the cultural tactics of the Russian government under Putin: create a reassuring sense of continuity by embracing the Soviet Unions greatest cultural and historical hits, claiming the power and accomplishments of the Soviet Union (and also the Russian Empire) while papering over blatant ideological contradictions. But the work of Deineka and Samokhvalov, having already transcended socialist realist pablum, is strange and strong enough to survive a new generation of politicians.

Link:
What Is Socialist Realism? | by Sophie Pinkham - The New York Review of Books

25 April 2020

Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, the world has grown accustomed to the daily White House press briefings, in which a scowling Donald Trump parades his staggering ignorance and promotes quackery, as medical experts contradict his harebrained and antiscientific justifications for a rapid return to work.

But even these daily spectacles could not have prepared audiences for Trumps performance Thursday, when the president urged Americans to inject themselves with disinfectant and insert ultraviolet lights into their bodies, measures which would kill those unfortunate enough to listen to the presidents advice.

I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute, Trump said. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets inside the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.

Trump continued: So supposing we hit the body with a tremendouswhether its ultraviolet or just a very powerful lightand I think you said that hasnt been checked because of the testing. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or some other way, and I think you said youre going to test that, too.

These statements provoked a flurry of denunciations by astounded medical professionals. The maker of Lysol disinfectant was forced to publicly rebuke the president by issuing a statement saying, We must be clear that under no circumstances should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body.

In recent weeks, Trump has pronounced that his gut instinct told him the pandemic would be over in April, that it was no worse than the flu, and that the medication hydroxychloroquineproduced by a friend who stood to profit from the presidents recommendationcould cure the virus, despite Food and Drug Administration warnings that it would lead to increased deaths.

It is easy enough to point out that these statements express Trumps own stunning backwardness and callous indifference to human life.

But what remains to be explained is: How did this grotesque sociopath come to occupy the White House, and what does his sordid presidency reveal about the state of the American political system?

A characteristic of a doomed political system, often observed in history, is the elevation of an especially despicable and even depraved personality to a high position in the state, frequently as a key adviser to the ruler. Such individuals often become the focus of public outrage.

Among the most notorious examples of such a personality in the twentieth century was Grigori Rasputin, the mad monk, who exerted immense influence over the Russian Tsar Nicholas II and the Empress Alexandra. A horse thief and rapist, Rasputin became the trusted and indispensable adviser of the royal couple, partly on the basis of his claim that he could treat their hemophiliac son through a combination of religious incantations, the conjuring of spirits and his own frightening stare. The Tsar and Tsarina took no major decisions without consulting their corrupt and dissolute friend.

Fearful that the influence wielded by Rasputin was leading the regime to disaster, a group of disgruntled nobles carried out the friends gruesome assassination in December 1916. Their action failed to stave off the revolution, which began two months later.

Rasputinism entered into the vocabulary of politics as a word that denotes an obscene level of state corruption and decadence. In his History of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky recalled that this bizarre episode, in the final years of the crisis-ridden Russian autocracy, acquired the character of a disgusting nightmare overhanging the country.

Trotsky continued: If by the word hooliganism we understand the extreme expression of those antisocial parasite elements at the bottom of society, we may define Rasputinism as a crowned hooliganism at its very top.

A century after the original version, a form of Rasputinism has emerged in the United States. But the American Rasputin is not the adviser to the president. He is the presidenta vile scoundrel and social degenerate, incapable of formulating a coherent sentence, let alone a logical argumentpositioned at the apex of the American state!

Trump epitomizes an oligarchy whose wealth is based on a level of parasitism that is hardly to be distinguished from criminality. His thuggishness, cultural backwardness and contempt for the common people embody the attitudes and practices of the swarms of banksters, billionaire investors, vulture capitalists, hedge fund managers, asset strippers, real estate swindlers and media moguls who run both political parties and all three branches of government.

The US presently finds itself in the midst of a crisis of unparalleled dimensions, with the government in the hands of a person who is telling the population to inject bleach into its veins.

In the period of its historic rise, the American bourgeoisie could produce Abraham Lincoln, who embodied the democratic ethos of the American Revolution and stewarded the country through the Civil War. In the next great crisisthe Great DepressionFranklin Delano Roosevelt was capable of speaking seriously about social issuesas FDR did in his fireside chatsand appealing to the democratic sentiments of the broad masses of people.

Today, decades of US economic decline have eliminated any basis within the ruling class for the defense of the countrys democratic traditions. American capitalism finds its quintessential expression in the persona of Trump. That does not mean that all American capitalists like what they see. But looking into the mirror is not always a pleasant experience. In the final analysis, Trump is their man. They must take him as he is.

Truth be told, what use would Wall Street have for a man of science and high culture in the White House? The interests of the banks and corporations are not served by a scientifically informed approach to the pandemic. The factories must be reopened. Profit must be squeezed out of the working class. Monthly mortgages, rents and interest payments are due and must be met. Dr. Anthony Fauci and his fellow epidemiologists, with their endless jeremiads on the danger posed by the current and a second wave of the pandemic, are getting on the nerves of corporate America.

Within 24 hours of Trumps statement on injecting disinfectant and using ultraviolet light inside the body, the fifty thousandth person died of the virus in the US. As several states rushed back to work, April 23 almost set a record for new positive cases nationwide. The United Nations is preparing for famines that threaten to take the lives of hundreds of millions in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Though Trump says it more bluntly than his counterparts in Europe and across the world, the US president is expressing the viewpoint of the entire global ruling elite.

In Germany, Angela Merkel is opening the country by sending the working class back to their jobs, indifferent to evidence that this will lead to a new wave of deaths. The same is true in Spain, Britain, France and elsewhere. In Latin America, the position of the ruling class is summed up in the response of Brazils right-wing Jair Bolsonaro and Mexicos ostensibly left-wing Andrs Manuel Lpez Obrador, both of whom have claimed that God will protect their respective populations from the virus.

If society were directed rationally and democratically, on the basis of socialist policies, a globally planned and scientifically guided mass intervention could conquer the pandemic and save millions of lives. The pandemic is a biological reality, but the response to this phenomenon is conditioned by the class interests that dominate society. The lethality of the pandemic is determined less by the RNA of the virus than by the economic and social priorities of the capitalist class.

In the final analysis, the fight against the pandemic is inextricably bound up with the fight for the transfer of power to the working class and the establishment of socialism.

Eric London and David North

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Rasputin in the White House - World Socialist Web Site