WeeklyWorker

04.08.2010

Hands off Russia!

Further episodes from our history : 1918-1919

In the winter of 1919, a hapless official at the war office in London was asked by a journalist if Britain was at war with soviet Russia. In manner of all minor bureaucrats looking to avoid culpability for a wrong answer, he referred the matter upwards. He soon received this brusque written clarification from a superior: “Of course we are at war with soviet Russia, but as far as the press and the public are concerned we are not.”[1]

Actually, by the time of this exchange the war was being continued by proxy - the white armies of general Denikin in southern Russia, general Miller in the north and admiral Koltchack in Siberia. The last British troops had sailed for home from Murmansk and Vladivostok on October 12 and November 1 1919 respectively. It was true that, even as our war office pen-pusher cited above was being told ‘deny everything’, there was still a British military mission with the counterrevolutionary forces in southern Russia. However, the initial commitment of the British state had been far bigger - from the summer of 1918, significant British armed forces had actively intervened in Russia to help strangle the new workers’ state.

In addition to direct troop deployments, the Allied governments as a whole - not simply the UK - had poured huge amounts of munitions and other military supplies into Russia to aid the counterrevolution. Not only the white armies, but also the anti-soviet forces in the states on Russia’s western frontier. In addition, Japanese troops occupied Vladivostok, and Russia was subject to a vicious blockade on both her eastern and western borders. The land of the soviets, bled white in the carnage of the first imperialist world war, was in mortal danger.

Socialists in Britain - soon to unite their disparate forces within the CPGB under direct influence of the 1917 revolution - raised their voices in urgent calls for solidarity.

The Allied intervention in Russia

The Call No125, August 29 1918

Deaf to the protests of financiers, but inspired by the ideals of international labour, the Bolsheviks are wresting the main industries from the hands of their capitalist owners, declaring the means of production to be the common property of the Russian people, and imposing on the workers in each industry the responsibility for its control. Hence every capitalist and financier, whatever his nationality, cries, ‘Down with the Bolsheviks!’

In placing the power of the franchise in the hands of the workers, soldiers and peasants, the Bolsheviks swept away the false bases for the right to vote known to western nations, such as property qualifications or, in the case of women, age and marriage, and made the title to vote dependent upon the performance of social labour. Hence every reactionary, whatever his nationality, fearing the consequence of a labour franchise, cries, ‘Down with the Bolsheviks!’

Their enemies allege that the Bolsheviks have made mistakes and committed excesses. But what are their alleged mistakes and excesses compared with the known crimes of their critics who rule the world now? … It is because the control of natural resources by labour is dreaded by the great majority of the rich and wealthy that they call for war on the Russian socialist republic.

The British Socialist Party therefore urges all organisations whose members realise that the defeat of Russian socialism is the defeat of labour everywhere, to pass the following resolution and make it known as widely as possible:

“This meeting of workers protests against the armed intervention in Russia in opposition to the declared wishes of the soviet government and in direct contradiction to the Allies’ pronouncement in favour of the self-determination of all nations. This meeting believes that the overthrow of the soviet administration would be a disaster to the organised labour movement throughout the world, and could only be construed as evidence of the intention of governments to make war on the working class. It calls upon the British government to abandon its present policy with regard to Russia and instead to offer Russia the technical and economic aid required for her reconstruction.”

Executive committee of the British Socialist Party

These calls chimed with the instinctive solidarity felt in the workers’ movement and in wider working class communities with the new proletarian power that had arisen in the east. Although initially expressed as an inchoate mass sentiment, it had solid material roots.

World War I had derailed a rising tsunami of strikes and unrest in Britain - the Webbs, noting the huge increase of industrial disputes, observed that the workers’ movement “was, in fact, in the summer of 1914, working up for an almost revolutionary outburst of gigantic industrial disputes, which could not have failed to be seriously embarrassing for [the Labour Party], when, in August 1914, war was declared.”[2]

Class war was initially overwhelmed by inter-imperialist war. But not for long. In 1915, big strikes by the south Wales miners and the Clyde engineers announced the changing mood. An index of the recovery of the movement can be seen in the growth of trade union membership as the war raged on - from two and a quarter million in 1913 to four and a half million by 1918. Against this backdrop, no wonder that first the February, then even more dramatically the October, revolutions in Russia excited enthusiasm and instinctive empathy amongst huge numbers of working people in Britain.

Not so the official leaders of the workers’ movement, however - at least, not as far as the October - Bolshevik - revolution was concerned. The Labour Party and the Independent Labour Party (still at that time the largest and most influential socialist organisation)[3] were against Lenin and his party. In the Herald, Brailsford[4] had condemned their “reckless and uncalculated folly” in leading the revolution, declaring later that “they have shown no trace … of statesmanship”.[5] The Labour Leader featured denunciations by Philip Snowden and others.[6] In July 1918, the forlorn figure of Kerensky - ignominiously ousted from power by the revolution - made an appearance at the Labour Party conference to plead for an anti-soviet intervention (he had only a month to wait, of course).

In these circumstances, the work of anti-intervention solidarity was largely conducted by the socialist sects. Amongst these, the outstanding organisation in defence of soviet Russia was the Workers’ Socialist Federation, a small ultra-leftist organisation based in London’s East End (it was to participate in later negotiations to establish the CPGB).

The WSF was led by the redoubtable Sylvia Pankhurst, an outstanding champion of the rights of working class women, who edited its paper the Workers’ Dreadnought.[7] Among its most active members in 1919 was Harry Pollitt (later general secretary of the CPGB). He and the WSF worked tirelessly in London’s docklands to persuade workers “to refuse to touch any ship that is to carry munitions to Russia”.

On January 18 1919 a national Hands Off Russia conference was called by the London Workers’ Committee in association with the Socialist Labour Party and the BSP.

Hands off Russia

The Call No144, January 9 1919

The arrangements for the conference and mass meeting, convened by the London Workers’ Committee for the purpose of demanding the withdrawal of troops from Russia, to be held on Saturday January 18th at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, EC, are now completed. The conference will open at 10am, with WF Watson in the chair, and, with an interval for lunch, will continue until 5 o’clock. The mass meeting will commence at 7.30pm, doors open at 6.30. Between 6.30 and 7.30 there will be music under the direction of Cedar Paul. See that your organisation is represented at the conference. Admission free. No tickets are required.

The conference was a great success. There were 350, mostly workplace and trade union, delegates. The main resolution, moved by Pollitt, pledged to “carry on active agitation to solidify the labour movement for the purposes of declaring ... a general strike” unless the intervention against soviet Russia was unconditionally ended.

In June 1919 the committee elected at the January conference was superseded by a national Hands Off Russia committee. Although it had Pollitt as its organiser, it was made up of the big trade union names of the day: the TUC’s AA Purcell, CT Cramp of the NUR, Tom Mann, general secretary of the ASE, George Peet, secretary of the National Shop Stewards Committee, John Bromley, general secretary of the locomotivemen and firemen, and John Hill, general secretary of the boilermakers’ union. While this greatly extended the reach of the campaign, it did not mean that the trade union bureaucracy had been won to communism. Leftist though Pankhurst’s WSF may have been on many important questions, its warnings of the perfidious and unreliable nature of these trade union lefts was spot on.

The Russian Revolution in danger

Workers’ Dreadnought, Vol 6, No31, October 25 1919: editorial by E Sylvia Pankhurst

The British munitions are strangling the Russian revolution. Denikin advances constantly with terrible and ever more certain menace.

British workers, sailors, dockers, engineers, what are you doing’? You are helping the master class to exterminate your brothers; to crush the hope of communism throughout the world!

The Southport Labour Party conference decided to organise a general strike to stop the war on soviet Russia. To the executive was left the task of making arrangements with the trade unions and the duty of fixing the day. The joint executive did nothing: it disobeyed orders.

The spirit of the Glasgow TUC which followed was also emphatically for the strike, and its executive - the parliamentary committee - was censured because it had failed to call a delegate conference to decide the question. The parliamentary committee was now ordered to call this conference immediately. Why has the conference not been called?

The Russian Revolution is being strangled not by the government, but by the half-hearted officials who pretend to lead the workers, but who are merely marking time. They will mark time until, as they expect, the revolution is destroyed and none need fear it. They will use their post-mortem sympathy for it to secure cheap cheers from those who are politically asleep today.

We address ourselves not to the avowed enemies of the workers’ revolution - Thomas, Henderson, MacDonald and their like - but to its so-called friends - Smillie, Williams, Hodges, Cramp, Bromley.[8]

What are these men doing in this hour of crisis? If Smillie, Williams, Cramp, Hodges and Bromley were in truth keenly alive to the workers’ interests, keenly alive, far-seeing and earnest to serve them well, they would denounce the traitors within the movement as more dangerous to the cause of working class emancipation than the very capitalists themselves!

Workers! We appeal to you not to wait for the timid opportunists who presume to lead you. Only the general strike and the sabotage of munitions can save the soviets.

Awake then, and in acting for yourselves without leaders, register a vow that you will fling from your executive organs everyone who has not taken an active part in bringing about the general strike against the intervention in Russia. That issue is the test of their value to the workers’ cause, both nationally and internationally.

The ‘secret war’ against Russia referred to at the beginning of this article was dramatically stepped in April 1920 when Poland invaded Russia with British and French backing.

In May, the hard slog of Pollitt and other WSFers finally paid off when dockers in London East India docks - with the public backing of their leader, Ernest Bevin - refused to load munitions onto the Jolly George. It electrified the whole working class movement.

Three months later the Labour Party and the TUC set up a National Council of Action, which threatened to “call for any and every form of withdrawal of labour” in defence of soviet Russia. The tone of the speeches at the August 13 conference convened to endorse this decision are testimony not so much to the revolutionary temper of the top bureaucrats who made them, but to the mood of the militants that were pressurising them from below.

Rightwinger JH Thomas told the meeting: “… when you vote for this resolution do not do so on the assumption that you are voting for a simple down-tools policy. It is nothing of the kind. If this resolution is to be given effect to, its means a challenge to the whole constitution of this country (cheers)”.

AG Cameron of the woodworkers’ union was even more explicit: “If the day comes when we do take this action, and if the powers that be endeavour to interfere too much, we may be compelled to things that will cause them to abdicate, and to tell them that if they cannot run the country in a peaceful and humane manner without interfering in the lives of other nations, we will be compelled, even against all constitutions, to chance to do something to take the country into our own hands for our own people.”[9]

Across the country the working class prepared for a general strike and perhaps more; 350 local Councils of Action were set up. Badly rattled, the Lloyd George government backed down.

Sensing the latent power of this new movement, militants around the country besieged the Council of Action with demands that it take up other key questions facing the class - the war in Ireland and unemployment, for example. Despite the fact that it did not push further, its significance was attested to by Lenin himself:

“This Council of Action, independently of parliament, presents an ultimatum to the government in the name of the workers - it is the transition to the workers’ dictatorship … the whole of the English bourgeois press wrote that the Councils of Action were soviets. And it was right. They were not called soviets but in actual fact they were such.”[10]

Notes

  1. WP and ZA Coates A history of Anglo-Soviet relations London 1945.
  2. A Hutt The post-war history of the British working class London 1937, p10.
  3. The ILP was established in 1893, as an attempt to create a working class organisation politically independent of the Liberal Party. Broadly a Christian socialist organisation, the Keir Hardie-led ILP was strong enough by 1895 to contest 28 seats.
  4. Henry Noel Brailsford (1873-1958) was a prolific journalist and ILP member. In his Problems of the British revolution, Trotsky described him thus: “His historical mission consists in ‘correcting’ Thomas and MacDonald, in creating a safety valve for the discontent of the masses, in blurring the edges and in dissolving cogent thought into a formless ‘leftism’.”
  5. A Hutt The post-war history of the British working class London 1937, p33.
  6. Snowden originally joined the Liberal Party, despite his father’s Chartist background. A Methodist and a teetotaller, he became convinced of his version of ‘socialism’ while actually researching a speech on its dangers. He joined the ILP, became a prominent speaker for the organisation, wrote a popular Christian socialist pamphlet with Kier Hardie entitled The Christ that is to be (1903) and was a pacifist in World War I. He was expelled from the Labour Party as a result of his participation in MacDonald’s national government of 1931.
  7. Sylvia Pankhurst (May 5 1882 - September 27 1960) was a prominent suffragette who, in 1914, broke with the official Women’s Social and Political Union, led by her mother and her sister, over that organisation’s support for the war. She set up the East London Federation of Suffragettes. This militant formation evolved leftwards, changing its name first to the Women’s Suffrage Federation, then to the Workers’ Socialist Federation.
  8. Members of the Labour Party executive.
  9. Report of the special conference on labour and the Russo-Polish war pp12-18, cited in Hutt op cit pp39-40.
  10. VI Lenin CW Vol 31, Moscow 1977, p308.