OCR POLICIES COUNCILS O ACTION PART 3: After the General Strike

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simply that the stories revolve around delightful, passionate and tortured love relationships that came to bother the Stalinist bureaucracy.

Rather it is the fact that the models described are women who come to realise that their initiative and dependence is being stiffled and sapped by the jealous emotional bonds of marriage and who turn instead to the collective for support with childrearing and for warmth and comradeship.

Restoration

This ran counter the Stalinist ' objective of restoration of the family.

So undoubtedly the vivid depictions of incipient opportunism and bureaucratism were also seen as intolerable by the Stalinists.

Much of the appeal of the book lies in its portrayal of everyday life in the 1920s in the USSR, the immense possibilities and the immense dangers in the battle between the bourgeois and proletarian social orders. Personal conflicts reflect these wider social conflicts.

Committed

All the leading women in the stories are committed party activists. It was a joy in shared political work and mutual admiration which The struggle had been betrayed. The miners were left alone to be driven back to work with longer hours and lower wages.

The members of the councils of action had shown courage and inventiveness as well as enormous potential power.

This potential had not been realised because its possibility or necessity not been pointed out.

Political power

There were some ways in which councils of action took over elements of local political power.

Thus besides issuing their own newspapers, they sometimes stopped the distribution of anti-strike papers.

Cowdenbeath and TUC leaders leaving after the sell-out