Swallows and Bolsheviks

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SuITEy MAURICE MOSCOVITCH Bus immobilised by strikers is towed away system had broken down by continued to work on the the end of the first week in docks until the end of the Our regular readers may well have difficulty in identifying the English writer who was invited to attend the 1917 Petrograd Soviet from its first meeting; who was detained by the British police as a 'Bolshevik agent' in 1919, and, later that year, arranged the peace negotiations between the Estonian and Bolshevik governments.

The man was Arthur Ransome, who was also a close friend of Karl Radek; his: wife Evgenia was Trotsky's secretary, and as a child he had been taught to skate by the Anarchist leader Kropotkin!

Today Arthur Ransome is mainly remembered for his Swallows and Amazons series of books for children.

Radek For all their many strengths, these books were very obviously not written by a revolutionary socialist.

Ransome was • no communist-when questioned by the British police, he any case.

In Newcastle the local strike-breaking authorities were compelled to negotiate with the Council of Action about the unloading of goods on the docks.

Infringement Although this was raised in Parliament as an infringement of governmental authority, no agreement was ever actually made and blacklegs declared that his politics were 'fishing', and this was not bluffing.

It seems unlikely that such an individual could add to our understanding of the Russian Revolution, but, in a small way, he did just that.

Ransome left England for Russia in 1913, to escape from a disastrous marriage and the aftermath of a libel case provoked by his book on Oscar Wilde.

Folklore

This was the first of several visits up to 1928. Although he had gone there to study folklore he became a journalist for the Daily News then later for the Manchester Guardian.

In his reports to these leftliberal papers, Ransome stressed the colossal effects produced within Russia by the imperialist war, and pointed to the inevitability of revolutionary upsurge.

Later, he was to argue forcibly for recognition of the Bolshevik government, and against any form imperialist intervention or blockade.

Although he never spoke there, Ransome regularly attended the Petrograd Soviet where he had speaking, but not voting rights.

Ridicule

There he clearly recognised both the power expressed in the form of the Soviet, and the crucial importance of the Bolsheviks.

These insights of course brought him ridicule and suspicion from the British bourgeoisie.

Ransome planned to write a history of the revolution, but the Soviet secret police removed most of his material -an event which, remarkably, he seems to have understood THE strike atrila After the strike was over the Comintern issued a statement about its development which included the following statement:

"The Councils of Action organised by the trade unions actually developed into District Soviets. The Departments organised by the General Council already resembled in their structure and functions, the departments of the St Petersburg as justified under the circumstances, and he returned to Russia in 1919.

His aim was to counter bourgeois propaganda for military intervention by revealing the truth of what was happening inside Russia.

The result was a short book, Six Weeks in Russia in 1919, which immediately became a bestseller.

Impressions

The book is not an analysis of the new revolutionary state, but a collection of shrewd and accurate impressions.

Ransome describes domestic and street scenes in Moscow and Petrograd, and relates interviews with a wide range of Russians, including Lenin and Bukharin.

In his own words, what emerges is "That extraordinary vitality which obstinately persists in Moscow even in these dark days of discomfort, disillusion, pestilence, starvation and unwanted war' The revolutionary reconstruction of Russian society was being obstructed by war, with poverty, and political reaction as constant enemies.

Above all, Ransome was impressed by the response of the workers to this situationthe co operation with which they united to overcome these problems.

Knowing that their leaders shared the same food and the same housing conditions, they could at the very least agree with the chambermaid who said "that there was not enough to eat, but that she felt freer!'.

Advantages

Others of course were more conscious of the revolutionary war in which they were engaged. Such was Soviet in the period of the so-called 'dual power' (February-November 1917)"

This point represented the opinion of the Stalin faction of the Comintern that the TUC leaders were capable themselves of fighting for power without any alternative coming from within the working class movement itself.

It was reflected slogan put forward in Britain by the Communist itself calling for "All Power to the General Council". Ransome Pavlovich, President of the Committee of State Constructions, who talked about the immense military advantages possessed by the counterrevolutionary white armies.

'And yet we win. Why? Because from every town we capture we get new strength. And any town they take is a source of weakness to them, one more town to garrison and hold against the wishes of the population!'.

Technology

The book • details the workings of the housing committees and the factory councils. It also shows the attempts made to convince peasants of the advantages of new technology, as again in the talk with Pavlovich:

"The local inhabitants, partly, no doubt, under the influence of our political opponents, were extremely hostile with regard to the building of the power station, simply because they did not understand it.

I went there myself, and explained to them what it would mean, that their river would become a rich river, that they would be able to get cheap power for all sorts of works, and that they would have electric light in all their houses.

To call on the TUC leaders to act was not in itself mistaken. What was necessary was to face before the masses rapidly moving into struggle the question of leaderhsip, and the alternative possibilities which had been opened up.

The workers were in a position to begin to run society differently from the way the capitalist class were doing.

The problem was to raise the political road along which they could proceed.

Then they carried me shoulder-high through the village, and sent telegrams to Lenin, to Zinoviev, to everybody they could think of, and since then we have had nothing but help from them' But what comes over most strongly is the quality which dominates the great film of early Soviet cinema-the revolutionary ardour of the Russian workers.

Ransome does not avoid direct political comment altogether. In a brief account he sharply exposes the weaknesses of the opposition parties-the left Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and right Social Revolutionaries-and shows how the last two hoped to mobilise the peasantry against the Bolsheviks.

His own support for the Bolsheviks was entirely based in his recognition that the party held the support of the vast majority of the population because it offered, and was prepared to fight for policies that could fulfil their demands and aspirations.

This was not just their heroism at points of great challenge, but the enthusiasm shown in every moment of their daily life, as in this description:

'there are many classes for working men, designed to The Communist Party, under the tutorship of Stalin, completely failed to do this.

In the last party publication before the strike, the Workers Daily of 3 May, the councils of action were told they 'should not take over any of the duties which ordinarily belong to the Trade Unions' In the Party's Bulletin issued the following day, it was said that:

Unconcerned "All it needs now is for every man to stand fast and the fight is won"

R. Page Arnot, a leading CP member a short time before released from prison was active in setting up a Joint Strike Committee in Northumberland and Durham.

He said at the same time that he was unconcerned:

.. with any wider horizons, but simply with our limited objective"

This was a disastrous attitude. Only at the very end did the CP begin to fight for a definite line within the strike.

Meetings

The day after it was called off they advocated emergency meetings of councils of action and the day after that a national meeting of council of action representatives to scientific knowledge of his own trade and so prevent him from being merely a machine carrying out single uncomprehended process.

The workers . crowd to these courses. One course, for example, is attended by a thousand men, in spite of the appalling cold of the lecture rooms' Ransome's partial but accurate insights were the product of a shrewd materialism which enabled him to perceive the forces shaping history, even if he could not analyse them.

At the same time his humanism, and genuine concern for the political ideals of the one-time revolutionary bourgeoisie, gave him the ability to respect the liberty, equality and fraternity gained .in the struggles of the Russian workers.

It was for these qualițies that Lenin told Ransome, laughingly, that he had 'more or less succeeded in understanding what they were at and that Lenin would be "pleased to see him again'.

Because they knew. he would present an honest and sympathetic report, the Bolsheviks invited Ransome to extend his stay and sit in on the meetings which were to become the founding conference of the Third International.

Conversations

Ransome admitted that as the only non-communist who attended these meetings, he gave a sketchy and disappointing report in the end.

But the core of the book is the conversations with those figures involved in building a socialist society. Its value is not as a source of hidden information, but as a record of the enthusiasm and dedication with which they confronted the massive problems in their path.

Six Weeks in Russia in 1919 is very difficult to obtain now, but the sales of Ransome's other books may persuade some publisher to re-issue it in the near future.

Until that happens, it's worth trying to find the Autobiography of Arthur Ransome in a local library.

A large part of that later book is taken up with Ransome's visits to Russia, and the relevant chapters throw an interesting sidelight on the early development of the Soviet Union.

consider 'the question of changing the leadership of the labour movement' Hindsight Only some weeks later did a pamphlet issued by the CP set out the issues more clearly.

It was, they said with hindsight:

"... not enough for the workers to give greater powers to the General Council or the local Trades Councils acting under the General Council. It was necessary to go beyond this to the defeat of the labour bureaucracy"

The Communist Party was unable to learn from these errors and develop in a revolutionary direction.

Assimilate

It is up to the Trotskyist movement today to assimilate these experiences and to bring them into the struggle for alternative leadership in the workers' movement.

The call for councils of action has again begun to get a response within the struggle against the Lib-Lab coalition and its wage-cutting policies.

The problems political, theoretical and practical which necessarily follow can only be solved if we assimilate in a living way the historical experiences described this article. in

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