Red Star Over the Third World

Vijay Prashad

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786804815
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economia
• Subtopic: Economia del lavoro

From Cuba to Vietnam, from China to South Africa, the October Revolution inspired millions of people beyond the territory of Russia. The Revolution proved that the masses could not only overthrow autocratic governments, but also form an opposing government in their own image. The new idea that the working class and the peasantry could be allied, combined with the clear strength and necessity of a vanguard party, guided multiplying revolutions across the globe. This book explains the ideological power of the October Revolution in the Global South. From Ho Chí Minhto Fidel Castro, to reflections on polycentric Communism and collective memories of Communism, it shows how, for a brief moment, another world was possible. It is not a comprehensive study, but a small book with a large hope – that a new generation will come to see the importance of this revolutionary spirit for the working class and peasantry in the parts of the world that suffered under the heel of colonial domination for centuries.

Soviet Asia

The October Revolution certainly began in the cities of St. Petersburg and Moscow. In June 1916, nonetheless, unrest broke out in the Kazakh steppe and Turkestan against the Tsar’s attempt to conscript the people of Central Asia into his futile European war. In Ferghana Valley and into the areas of the Kazakh and Kirghiz, the people attacked Russian settlers and then fled – en masse – into China’s Xinjiang. Chinese secret societies – rooted in anti-monarchical ideas – had infiltrated Central Asia. One such society was the Gelaohui, which had been brought to Xinjiang by the Hunan army of Zuo Zongtang. One of the members of the Gelaohui was Mao’s main general, Zhu De. When asked about Bolshevism and its impact on the organization of the Chinese Communist Party, Zhu De told the American communist Agnes Smedley that ‘the cell system was as old as the Chinese secret societies’. He would know. He was a Great Elder of the Gelaohui lodge in Sichuan till he became a communist. The Gelaohui and the Red Spears moved between Central Asia and China, inculcating the view that the Tsar must be overthrown. The October Revolution had its origins, then, not only in St. Petersburg but also in Qaraqol (Kazakhstan).

Many Russian settlers in this region, uneasy about the revolts around them, joined the White Army to overthrow the October Revolution. The Soviets sent a Commission to investigate the situation in Turkestan. It recommended that the old Tsarist bureaucrats be removed from the area, that colonialist attitudes amongst the Russian settlers be eliminated and that the old feudal and patriarchal attitudes amongst the Central Asians be combatted. Tensions between Turkestan and Moscow prevailed. The communists in Tashkent – such as Turar Ryskulov, Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev and later Zeki Velidi Togan – fought for the autonomy of their region from Moscow and for a much less hostile position towards the elites of the Turkmen people. Moscow was not keen on this. Its representatives in the Commission – no Turkmen amongst them – wanted to integrate the area into the USSR and to move towards a much fiercer politics of class struggle. Lenin felt that the local communists had a better sense of the ground than his own comrades in Moscow. In his note to the ‘Communists of Turkestan’, Lenin wrote,

The attitude of the Soviet Workers’ and Peasants’ Republic to the weak and hitherto oppressed nations is of very practical significance for the whole of Asia and for all the colonies of the world, for thousands and millions of people. I earnestly urge you to devote the closest attention to this question, to exert every effort to set an effective example of comradely relations with the peoples of Turkestan, to demonstrate to them by your actions that we are sincere in our desire to wipe out all traces of Great-Russian imperialism and wage an implacable struggle against world imperialism, headed by British imperialism.

The idea of ‘Great Russian imperialism’ was crucial for the territory of the former Tsarist Empire. Central Asia had to be a model for a post-colonial world. Soviet troops routed the local kings of Khiva and Bukhara, putting in place of the monarchs the Khorezm People’s Soviet Republic and the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic (both later incorporated into the Uzbek and Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republics). These republics – based on the policy of self-determination – needed to guard their autonomy carefully.

Uneasiness remained at the heart of the Central Asian areas. Questions of religious freedom and the rights of the small proprietors dogged the Soviet project. The Young Bukharans and the Young Khivans – such as Abdulrauf Fitrat, Fayzulla Khodzhayev and Akmal Ikramov – were impatient to transform the structure and culture of their societies. For them, the Soviet promise meant that their societies – mired in feudalism – could be wrenched into an egalitarian era. The Indian writer L.G. Ardnihcas travelled through Central Asia two decades later and found that ‘the early Bolsheviks made many mistakes of policy and procedure. They were imbued with a sense of superiority that was almost fatal to the cause’. At the Congress of the Toilers of the East at Baku in 1920, Grigory Zinoviev came to the heart of the problem in Central Asia. The most important issue, he said, was land reform. Zinoviev felt that the Central Asian peasantry was too timid to take action. ‘Centuries of stagnation’ as a result of ‘many centuries of oppression and slavery on the part of Europeans’, he said in his speech to the delegates, had halted the peasantry. ‘The solution of the land question in the East’, he said, ‘is surrounded with considerable difficulties which arise partly because the peasants, beaten and terrified by their oppressors, have not dared to take decisive revolutionary action’. It is here that the Bolsheviks had to act.

In the Azerbaijan Republic, for instance, where the Soviet system is already in force, there are still peasants who fear to seize the land for themselves, being afraid of the revenge of the bourgeoisie and the landlords. The same difficulty is to be met in Turkestan where there are still Russians who were sent by Tsarism and the bourgeoisie especially to oppress the natives. This part of the inhabitants, not wishing to abandon its privileges, continues to act as before, though frequently covering itself with Soviet and Communist watchwords. The problem confronting all true representatives of the Soviet is to denounce these gentry and show the native peoples that Soviet Russia will not tolerate the former colonial policy of robbery, but is the bearer of culture and civilization in the best sense of the words. This we do, not after the fashion of the old colonists, but as elder brothers bringing light and culture.

These ‘elder brothers’ were not Russian chauvinists, but Central Asians who had turned to Communism. The Soviets trained local men and women at the Communist University of the Toiling East (KUTV) in Moscow. These men and women then returned to their homes and developed – to the extent that they found possible – a Central Asian communism. The Communist Party, Ardnihcas wrote in The Soviet East, ‘decided to have its hands made of local flesh and blood and to discard the hand thrust from outside into the national republics’.

One of these republics was that of the Kyrgyz people, who lived between the USSR and China. When the Kara-Kyrgyz Autonomous Oblast was created in 1924, the Kyrgyz people had no alphabet for their language (although some used the Arabic script, but only rarely). Within a few years, the new Soviet introduced a Latin-based alphabet. As Raymond Steiger and Andrew Davies noted in 1942 in their book Soviet Asia, ‘Until a few years ago, there was no written alphabet of the Kirghiz language; the great majority of the people was illiterate. Today, the Kirghiz have an alphabet, and in 1939 there were 20,000 pupils in the republic’s 1,500 elementary schools, 119 high schools, and three universities. More than 20,000 teachers gave instruction in the native language from books printed in the new alphabet’. ‘It is the common people, the peasant, the labourer and the nomad shepherd,’ Ardnihcas wrote, ‘who have taken the lead in the achievement of the great transformation’.

Remarkable achievements of massive scale improved the lives of the peoples of Soviet Asia. The 1,500-kilometre Turkestan-Siberia (Turksib) Railway ran from Tashkent (Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic) to connect with the Trans-Siberian Railway. This mammoth project went from 1926 to 1931 as part of the First Five-Year Plan of the USSR. A documentary of the construction – made by Viktor Turin and released in 1929 as Turksib – is a superb exploration of the problems faced by the nomadic peoples of the region and how the railway would lift some of their burdens. Ghafur Ghulam, later the National Poet of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, watched the train project come to fruition and wrote an ode to its importance (it was translated in 1933 by the African American communist poet Langston Hughes and his neighbour, the Georgian sculptor Nina Zorokovitz). ‘Crushed by the bronze five-pointed heart of the locomotive’, he wrote, ‘along these ancient roads which have seen so many things’ would now come the proletariat of Asia. They will now travel on a ‘steel caravan in union and solidarity’.

These ancient roads are our immortality.

And along these roads

Will pass the gale of liberty

And not the smell of blood.

Turin’s documentary and Ghulam’s poem celebrate the immense social labour of the Central Asian people who were now creating projects for their own benefit. But this train was not the only major project. The 300-kilometre Great Ferghana Canal (completed in 1939) helped draw water from the Syr Darya River to the cotton fields of the Ferghana Valley in the eastern part of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. It would allow the expansion of agriculture in that region, drawing in farmers from across Central Asia to the fertile valley.

None of these gigantic projects could have been conceived if the various republics were not linked together into the USSR. In hindsight, there is a great deal of criticism of the environmental problems from the Soviet-era fertilizer industry near the Aral Sea and of the use of industrial chemicals in the soil in the Ferghana Valley. This is, of course, true, but it not a problem solely of the communist experiment.

Inspiration for the common people of Central Asia came from the Soviet decrees that echoed off the walls of the colonies, their titles illustrative enough:

Red Caravan (1939), photograph by Max Penson (1893-1959).

To All the Muslim Workers in Russia and the East (November 1917). Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia (December 1917). Declaration of the Rights of Workers and Exploited People (January 1918).

The declaration of December 1917 was most powerful. It called not only for ‘the equality and sovereignty of the peoples of Russia’ but also ‘the right of the peoples of Russia to free self-determination, even to the point of separation and the formation of an independent state’. This was unimaginable in the colonies. When US President Woodrow Wilson tried to take credit for the ideas of peace without annexation and for self-determination, the Indian journalist and nationalist K.P. Khandilkar wrote in Chitramaya-Jagat, ‘Lenin did it more than two years ago’.

By late 1919, even those who had either put their faith in Wilson, or who had used Wilson’s words, found themselves disappointed. China’s Mao, then a young man, saw the European leaders as ‘a bunch of robbers’ who ‘cynically championed self-determination’. Lenin’s USSR, in this period, did not have the same kind of institutional limitations as Wilson’s USA. Wilson’s test came at the League of Nations meeting in Paris, where he helped squelch the Japanese bid to have a Racial Equality Clause at the heart of the League of Nations Covenant. Wilson’s emissaries proceeded to bury that Clause, damaging the League of Nations and putting aside the universalism of his own proposals for self-determination. Racism was vital to the capitalist policies of the United States and the European countries that relied upon ideas of racial superiority to maintain their colonies and semi-colonies as places of super-exploitation of people and nature. No question of giving these places freedom. Wilson sent in the United States military to occupy Nicaragua in 1914, Haiti in 1915 and the Dominican Republic in 1916. In 1913-14, Wilson intervened militarily in Mexico to undermine its revolution. The unseemliness of Wilson’s imperialist military actions irked Wilson’s Secretary of State Robert Lansing, who wrote to his president in 1916, ‘It seems to me that we should avoid the use of the word Intervention and deny that any invasion of Mexico is for the sake of intervention.’ Wilson’s advisor, George Louis Beer, encouraged him not to allow his own rhetoric to imply self-determination for African states. ‘The negro race’, wrote Beer, ‘has hitherto shown no capacity for progressive development except under the tutelage of other peoples.’ In this list of other peoples were the British and French – who had experience – as well as the Scandinavians – who had a clean reputation. The people of Africa and Asia, however, were ‘not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world’. Wilson was the contemporary of the Bolsheviks. Their world was alien to his.

The Communist International met for the first time in March 1919; it snubbed Versailles and Wilson. They were not relevant to it. It charted a different course that culminated at the Baku Conference of the Toilers of the East (1920). The Bolshevik Mission in Tbilisi (Georgia) offered the following description of the conference,

The first sitting of the Conference was devoted to Zinoviev’s speech, which explained the aims of the Conference. The passage in Zinoviev’s speech where he invited the Eastern peoples to a holy war was interrupted by the demonstrations of the delegates who in an ecstasy jumped from their seats, unsheathed their swords and waved them in the air. The hall was filled with cheering in all languages. For many minutes, to the strains of the Internationale, the Conference swore to keep faithful to the cause of the working classes. The sitting was very enthusiastic, and was frequently interrupted by ovations.

In the evenings, Baku wore a holiday appearance. Artistic triumphal arches and beautiful decorations filled the streets. Throughout the day, the delegates moved about the streets. Comrade Zinoviev was the object of much attention. Wherever he was seen in the streets, he was surrounded by cheering crowds.

By 1922, the Soviet Foreign Ministry acknowledged that in the East the influence of the Soviets was ‘constantly growing’ because of its diplomatic creativity (examples for them were the 1921 Soviet-Turkish treaty and the 1921 Soviet-Persian Treaty).

The Communist International struggled to balance the needs of its European members with the members from the countries colonized by Europe. The former represented the countries of the colonizers. They had to fight in their own societies to build organizations of the working class and other allied classes at the same time as they were charged with driving an anti-colonial agenda. The Comintern’s attempt to get them to hold a Colonial Conference spluttered. It was difficult to find out what these European communists – seen as a pipeline to the colonies – were doing in terms of practical work to build alliances between workers in their countries and in the colonies. These European communists found it difficult to work amongst workers in their countries who had been dominated by a labour aristocracy that was often pro-imperialist. It was not easy to push a double agenda – for the rights of the European workers and for the workers and peasants in the colonies. No such difficulty lay in the colonies – from Indo-China to the Gold Coast of Africa. But other difficulties haunted communists in the colonies. They found it difficult to create a precise framework to work with the bourgeois nationalists who also hated colonial rule but who had no problem with capitalism. These contradictions dampened the work of the Comintern. Nonetheless, it was through the Comintern that trade unionists and revolutionary nationalists from one end of the world found out about the work of their peers on the other side. The infrastructure of global communism was created by the Comintern activists, who travelled from one end of China to the other end of Mexico to meet with socialists, anarchists, syndicalists, rebels of all kinds to urge them towards unity with the Communist movement.

Papers such as The Negro Worker allowed unionists across the continents to keep up with each other and to experience the unity that allowed them to magnify their work. The Trinidadian Marxist intellectual C.L.R. James observed the work of his Trinidadian friend George Padmore, head of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers. ‘It must be remembered that men in Mombasa, in Lagos, in Fyzabad, in Port-au-Prince, in Dakar, struggling to establish a trade union or political organization, most often under illegal conditions and under heavy persecution, read and followed with exceptional concern the directives which came from the revered and trusted centre in Moscow’, James wrote. This ‘trusted centre’ was the Comintern. It provided the necessary organization to help workers from one end of the world to be in touch with others at the other end. Padmore edited The Negro Worker, which gave ‘hundreds of thousands of active Negroes and the millions whom they represented’ access to the world, wrote James. It gave them insight into ‘Communism in theory and the concrete idea of Russia as a great power, which was on the side of the oppressed’. This, James wrote even as he was critical of the USSR, ‘is what The Negro Worker gave to the sweating and struggling thousands in the West Indies, in Nigeria, in South Africa, all over the world’.

Platforms such as Internationale Arbeiterhilfe (Workers’ International Relief – IAH) emerged initially to help draw attention to the struggles inside the USSR with hunger – to enable Europeans mainly raise funds to help prevent famine. But the work of the IAH would eventually widen outwards, building solidarity campaigns from Japan to Mexico, from Argentina to Australia. The IAH worked from Germany, but turned its energy outwards towards the ‘oppressed and ex...