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Note: RAN refers to this website, Reality Analysis Notes. Numbered citations are included in the References section at the end of this document.

They did it, they actually did it. A century ago, on 7 November 1917 (25 October 1917 by the old Julian calendar then used in Russia), the Bolsheviks (a workingclass-based revolutionary Marxist party) actually managed to inspire, exhort, mobilize, and lead the Russian working class to overthrow the country’s private-profit-based capitalist system and establish a workers state – implementing the class rule of the proletariat, or working class, with a social-economic system based on addressing the needs of the society and its population.

The revolution, given its name from the month of the older Russian calendar then in effect, quickly became known worldwide as the October Revolution. Beginning in 1927, it was referred to as the Great October Socialist Revolution.

The explosive event was all the more astounding and spectacular because it occurred within what was then one of the most backward countries on Earth in terms of economic and societal development. Russia at that time, by common metrics, was perhaps at approximately the level of today’s Bangladesh, Tanzania, or Cambodia, with largely a peasant population and a relatively tiny working class of just a few million. On top of this, the country was further devastated by the horrific, bloody economic and manpower toll of the imperialist First World War.

But for years, the Russian working class had developed into one of the most class-conscious and militant in the world. Primarily providing the key infusion of essential revolutionary leadership was the confluence of insight and understanding on the part of two leading revolutionists: Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Lenin brought crucial insight into the nature of the capitalist state; the necessity for a highly disciplined democratic-centralist vanguard party composed of a cadre of dedicated and seasoned professional revolutionists; and an instinct for sensing and igniting the revolutionary impulses of working people. Trotsky, a relatively recent convert to the Bolsheviks from a separate revolutionary faction, particularly brought his concept of Permanent Revolution – the understanding that within the imperialist world order, socialist revolution was now on the immediate agenda of the working class; and that even a developmentally backward nation like Russia could leap forward to socialist revolution and the creation of a workers state. [1]

However, for this to fully succeed, socialist revolution in at least one or more advanced countries such as Germany, France, Britain, or the USA would be necessary. The development of socialism is predicated on advanced industrialization and material abundance. The hope that revolution in Russia would spark a similar revolutionary surge in one or more advanced countries was integral with the Bolsheviks’ strategy.

But even against this background of underdevelopment and poverty, Russia’s October upheaval ushered in a monumental, epochal advance in human civilization that shook the capitalist-imperialist world order to its foundations. (American revolutionary John Reed, a participant in the early days of the establishment of the Soviet Union, aptly titled his book – a chronicle of the historic events for a popular audience – Ten Days That Shook the World.)

The capitalist class state apparatus was shattered, and replaced by a system based on the relatively new sovyety – soviets, i.e. workers councils – electoral and decisionmaking bodies that had proliferated in worksites and workingclass neighborhoods. With a fusillade of unprecedented, revolutionary actions, the Bolshevik-majority government of the new workers state immediately proceeded to eradicate the oppression, criminal mayhem, and societal residue of the old class order:

• The new government jerked Russia out of the savage industrialized imperialist slaughterhouse of World War 1.

• They renounced and published the sordid, sinister, plunderous secret treaties among Russia and its allied combatants.

• They proclaimed the right to self-determination of the disparate nationalities of the former Russian empire, valid even to the point of secession and independence. In 1922, together with representatives of Ukraine, the Transcaucasus, and Byelorussia, they created the nucleus of the multi-national/multi-ethnic Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

• They proclaimed workers’ control of factory management and operation; nationalized the banking system; and abolished the private ownership of land, turning land-use decisions over to collective bodies, with the poorer peasants given priority in agricultural land use.

• They liberated the Russian population – and women especially – from the oppressive confinement of both the Tsarist legacy and bourgeois (capitalist) class rule, now decisively smashed. Soviet Russia became the first nation on Earth to legalize abortion, and to accord women the right to vote. The workers government took the unprecedented measure of creating a Women’s Bureau (Zhenotdel) to reach out to women and spearhead their emancipation. “Immoral” behaviors such as homosexuality and prostitution were also decriminalized.

• They established a totally free national healthcare system; launched a vigorous, effective literacy campaign; and provided communal food centers.

These thunderous, titanic advancements for Russia’s working class and oppressed masses sparked excitement and evoked inspiration and hope among working people and their allies across the Earth. In country after country, socialist movements arose anew or changed course in efforts to emulate the successful political program of the Bolshevik achievement.

But while placing state power in the hands of Russia’s proletariat, the revolution also triggered angry resistance from the elite strata of the overthrown ruling class and their political and military satraps. A disparate amalgam of monarchists, influential capitalists, conservatives, liberals, pro-Tsarists, antisemites, social-democrats and “democratic” socialists, aristocrats, petit-bourgeois small-business owners and reactionary professionals, rightwing militarists, and other opponents of the new workers state coalesced to form the counter-revolutionary White forces, unleashing a horrific, devastating civil war for nearly five years.

The White forces were vigorously assisted by at least a dozen foreign armies and military detachments, including from such formidable major powers as Britain, France, Italy, Japan, Canada, and the USA. Ultimately, in 1922, the Russian workingclass state’s Red Army, headed by Trotsky, prevailed.

But at a terrible cost. With as many as 12,000,000 casualties, according to Wikipedia, “The Russian Civil War has been described by some as the greatest national catastrophe that Europe had yet seen.” Added to this was the failure of the expected revolutionary surge in the relatively advanced industrial countries of Western Europe to materialize (attributable mainly to the comparatively inadequate preparation of the region’s nominally revolutionary parties). These failures, particularly the debacle in Germany, were a bitter setback to the Russian workers and revolutionists.

Under these conditions – Russia’s profound economic and social underdevelopment and poverty; the debilitation of the First World War, national isolation; the exhaustion, resource depletion, and social and political disorientation of the civil war; the collapse of revolutuionary hopes and attempts in Western Europe – a fertile environment for toxic rightwing seeds materialized within the new society, sprouting reactionary dynamics that would lead to the degeneration and, less than 75 years later, eventual destruction of the workingclass state itself … while mowing a path of bloody betrayals and terrible setbacks for the world proletariat along the path of history.

Enabled, nurtured, and led, ironically, by the relatively minor Bolshevik figure Josef Stalin, a nascent bureaucratic caste – exhibiting characteristics of the petit-bourgeoisie (i.e., the class of shopkeepers, professionals, administrators, etc.) combined with the “labor aristocracy” (i.e., skilled craftsman, etc.) – gradually congealed from within the new government’s administrative bureaucracy distorted by the deformative conditions of economic and social distress exacerbated by scarcity and the special agonies, terrors, deprivations, cruelties, and horrors of the civil war.

The sinister power of this growth of a parasitic caste on the workingclass state strengthened insidiously, until, less than seven years after its initial victory, in early 1924 the October Revolution itself was betrayed and derailed by Stalin and his conservative entourage via what amounted to a political coup, signaling a de facto political counter-revolution – an historic disaster in its consequences. [2] As the Stalinists consolidated their power, this conservatism was encapsulated in Stalin’s schema of “Socialism in One Country”, aptly characterized by revolutionary Marxist Victor Gibbons at a 2007 presentation sponsored by the revolutionary Marxist Spartacist League:

As a theory it was absurd. A workers state cannot ignore the capitalist-dominated international economy. In order to achieve a classless, socialist society, what is required are socialist revolutions to expropriate the bourgeoisies and establish planned, collectivized economies. But Stalin’s nationalist formula crystallized a mood of conservatism, a retreat into a false hope of stability for which Soviet society ached after years of war, revolution and privation.

Flowing from this misguidance came the rationale that broader socialist revolution needed to be sacrificed to the needs of “Socialism in One Country”. This in turn led to decades of class-collaboration with an array of capitalist regimes and imperialist powers and political forces (even Hitler and his Nazis), wrenching betrayals of the world’s working class, and criminal wrecking and demolition of revolutionary efforts and movements across the globe. Workingclass revolutions in China, Spain, Greece, and Hungary were sabotaged, aborted, thwarted. Multiple revolutionary opportunities were foregone in service of the Soviet bureaucratic caste and their narrow, self-serving focus on single-country “socialism” – a policy that functioned to oppose international socialist revolution rather than further it.

While the perspective of international revolution was expunged from Stalin’s Soviet Union, nevertheless, the now seriously degenerated workingclass state managed to forge forward. A record of economic and societal achievement resulted primarily from a kind of residual momentum drawing mainly upon a legacy of the powerful capabilities of workingclass property forms and collectivization, rather than revolutionary purpose. Massive industrialization projects and the industrialized collectivization of agricultural production were among the phenomenal Soviet achievements made possible by the collectivized workingclass economic system, capturing the amazement and envy of the working class and other oppressed masses across the planet. The USSR ultimately expanded to encompass 15 affiliated workers republics.

Crushing the Nazi Wehrmacht in World War 2, and facing hostility from the elites of vanquished (formerly Nazi-allied) capitalist nations, the Soviet Union proceeded to install top-down deformed workingclass states – ominously impaired, as in the USSR, by a tiny caste of bureaucratic political rulers in lieu of workers democracy – throughout most of Eastern Europe. (Rather than to spread international revolution, the key objective was to provide the Soviet Union – and its own ruling bureaucratic caste – with a buffer against the postwar imperialist threat being amassed in Western Europe by the United States and other major imperialist powers).

In Yugoslavia, a pro-Soviet partisan guerrilla army led by Josip Tito defeated the Nazis, eventually overthrew capitalism, and installed their own more “independent” workingclass state – albeit deformed with a bureaucratic caste on the Stalinist model. Albania, also liberated by pro-Soviet partisan guerrillas, followed a similar path.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, inspired by the power of the Soviet Union and the breathtaking accomplishments of its collectivized economic system, and influenced by the constraints of colonial occupation, pro-socialist guerrilla movements prevailed in China and North Korea. But again, in these desperately underdeveloped and war-shattered countries, in the absence of workingclass revolution, peasant-based guerrilla revolutions produced severely impaired workers states, incorporating workingclass property forms in collectivized economic systems but deformed with ruling bureaucratic castes. Years later, this model of guerrilla revolution produced similarly deformed workingclass states in Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos. [3]

To adequately understand and carry forward the lessons of Russia’s Great October Socialist Revolution of a century ago, it’s essential to realistically assess these historical outcomes. In all these deformed states, the expunging of capitalism and installation of workingclass property forms with collectivized economies has produced dramatic improvements in national development and the lives of the working class and population in general, while removing these territories from capitalist exploitation has accrued to the disadvantage of the capitalist system and world imperialism in the process. But these gains are unstable and clearly reversible.

Unfortunately, the absence of democratic decisionmaking processes for the working class, plus the byzantine dysfunctionality of top-down “command-style” economic decisionmaking systems, constitute a recipe for disaster. Together with the isolation of these systems functioning in weaker, developing countries within a world order dominated by imperialist economic and military pressure, especially from the virulently hostile USA, these deformed workingclass states are rendered dangerously fragile, with the working class often alienated and disoriented, and bureaucratic castes conflicted between the interests of their own working masses and the pressures and largely fantasized enticements of the advanced highly industrialized capitalist societies.

The fragility of the deformed workingclass states and the “Socialism in One Country” model has been decisively demonstrated in the collapse of the USSR and the cluster of deformed workingclass states it helped foster in Eastern Europe. As authoritarian mismanagement led to increasingly more disruptive national economic crises, the bureaucratic castes of these fragile states fractured, with some sections embracing capitalist counter-revolution – even seeking to seize state property and become exploitative capitalists themselves – and others pursing obscurity or continued political life, perhaps as social-democratic-like politicians within the newly formed capitalist societies.

Meanwhile, the remaining deformed workingclass states, despite their profound deformities and deviations from the path to world revolution and the full liberation of humanity, nevertheless represent bona fide and defensible gains, tenuous though they are, for the workingclass forces in the ongoing international class struggle. And they remain a testament to the enduring value and power of the Russian socialist revolution that inspired and invigorated them.

Summation: One hundred years after its occurrence, and despite its subsequent tragic degeneration, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 continues to rank among the most heroic events in humanity’s historical record, and certainly represents the most significant advance for human civilization in modern history. The Bolshevist program of revolutionary Marxism, building a vanguard class-struggle combat party with a cadre of disciplined professional revolutionists, persistently endeavoring to raise and focus the class-consciousness of the working class to a recognition of its revolutionary tasks, and intervening in ongoing struggles toward fulfillment of those tasks, remains an enduring model for the worldwide workers movement and for all those seeking a way forward for humanity. And especially in today’s 21st century era of intensified attack on the living standards of the working class and masses of the population, seemingly endless wars and the threat of nuclear holocaust, rebirth of Gilded Age capitalism amidst deepening income inequality, and the rise of proto-fascistic capitalist demagogues and fascist stridency, the Bolshevist program for socialist revolution seems more relevant than ever.

■

References

[1] Sources for the information in this and following sections include, for example:

• V. I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done? (1902).

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/

• Ibid., The State and Revolution (1917).

https://www.marxists.org/ebooks/lenin/state-and-revolution.pdf

• Ibid., Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917).

http://www.readingfromtheleft.com/Books/Classics/LeninImperialism.pdf

• Leon Trotsky, Permanent Revolution (Pioneer Publishers, New York, 1965).

• Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed (Vintage Books, New York, 1954-1965).

• Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power (Norton Library, New York, 1978).

• «We Are the Party of the Russian Revolution», Workers Vanguard No. 924, 7 November 2008.

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/924/russianrev.html

• «The Russian Revolutions of 1917; The Russian Civil War».

http://acienciala.faculty.ku.edu/communistnationssince1917/ch2.html

• «The Evolution and Dissolution of the Soviet Kitchen», Vestnik, 2015/08/28.

http://www.sras.org/history_soviet_kitchen

• Steven Argue, «Why the Russian Revolution is Still Important», IndyBay, 3 Mar. 2012.

https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2012/03/03/18708611.php

• «Soviet medicine—a workers’ health plan», 31 Aug 2009

https://www.workers.org/2009/us/health_care_0903/

[2] Sources for the information in this and following sections include, for example::

• Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (Pioneer Publishers, New York, 1937-1957).

• «The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of Women», Spartacist English edition No. 59 • Spring 2006.

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/esp/59/emancipation.html

• Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed (Vintage Books, New York, 1959-1965).

• Eric Hobsbawm, «Lenin and the “Aristocracy of Labor”», Monthly Review, 2012/12/01.

https://monthlyreview.org/2012/12/01/lenin-and-the-aristocracy-of-labor/

• Socialist Party Reporter, «Women’s & LGBT Liberation in Revolutionary Russia», Socialist Party/Ireland, 14 Jan. 2016.

http://socialistparty.ie/2016/01/womens-lgbt-liberation-in-revolutionary-russia/

• «Lenin’s Struggle against Bureaucracy».

https://www.marxist.com/LeninAndTrotsky/chapter07.html

• «‘All Shades of Political Thought’», Caste & Class in the USSR, 1917, No.24 (Feb 2002).

http://www.bolshevik.org/1917/no24/political_revolution.html

• «90 years after the Bolshevik October “We are the party of the Russian Revolution”», Workers Hammer, No. 201, Winter 2007-2008.

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wh/201/RussianRevolution.html/

[3] See, for example:

Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) (Adopted 1998) and Preface to ICL Declaration of Principles (Adopted 2010).

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/icldop/index.html

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In further commemoration of the centenary of the October Bolshevik Revolution, a compilation of excerpts from an assortment of radical-left assessments of the revolution and perspectives of its achievements is appended in the remainder of this document. Reality Analysis Notes does not necessarily endorse or agree with all views and characterizations expressed.

«October 1917: The Bolshevik Revolution», Workers Vanguard, No. 953, 26 February 2010

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/953/1917revolution.html

…

The 1917 Russian October Revolution was the greatest victory for the working people of the world, a defining event of modern history. For the first time ever the proletariat seized state power and created a workers state based on soviets, or workers councils, under the Bolshevik Party’s leadership. As the founder of American Trotskyism, James P. Cannon, put it in 1939:

“The Russian Bolsheviks on November 7, 1917, once and for all, took the question of the workers’ revolution out of the realm of abstraction and gave it flesh and blood reality.”

— Struggle for a Proletarian Party, 1943

The Soviet government decreed land to the peasants and pulled Russia out of World War I, an interimperialist war. It demanded an immediate peace without annexations, including freedom for the colonies subjugated by the imperialists. It also recognised the right to self-determination of all the non-Russian peoples oppressed under tsarist/capitalist rule.

The Bolshevik Revolution was not made solely for Russia, but for the working masses of the whole world, occurring at a time when the Indian subcontinent, China and Africa were either colonies or semicolonies of the imperialist powers. The Bolshevik Revolution became a beacon to the oppressed masses of all countries, not least in the colonial world. Revulsion against the imperialist rulers as a result of the slaughter in World War I led to a wave of revolutionary and pre-revolutionary struggles in many countries. This wave ended with the defeat of the German Revolution of 1923.

Only in Russia in October 1917 did this upsurge result in the working class taking state power, because uniquely among the socialist organisations of their time, the Bolsheviks had a programme for working-class power. At the outbreak of WWI on 4 August 1914, the German Social Democracy (as well as the Labour Party and most other parties in the Second International) passed definitively into the camp of social-chauvinism by supporting their “own” bourgeoisie in war. WWI was a watershed, provoking a profound realignment in the revolutionary workers movement internationally. Prepared by years of struggle and a decisive split with the Russian opportunists—the Mensheviks—Lenin and the Bolsheviks emerged as the leadership of an international movement to recapture the banner of revolutionary Marxism.

…

Despite the grim poverty of Russia at the time of the October Revolution, the young workers state granted far-reaching measures of equality. It eliminated laws discriminating against women and gave women in Russia a level of equality and freedom that has not yet been attained by the most economically advanced “democratic” capitalist countries today. Just over a month after the revolution, two decrees established civil marriage and allowed for divorce at the request of either partner; all laws against homosexual acts and other consensual sexual activity were also abolished.

…

Socialist Party Reporter, «Women’s & LGBT Liberation in Revolutionary Russia», Socialist Party/Ireland, 14 Jan. 2016

http://socialistparty.ie/2016/01/womens-lgbt-liberation-in-revolutionary-russia/

…

The complete overthrow of capitalism and landlordism by the Bolshevik Party and Russian working class in 1917 spurred a radical change in society, the likes of which had never been seen before or since. The Bolsheviks were able to take power precisely because they were the voice of the oppressed masses, workers, the poor and women.

…

Most progressive laws in history

On the 17 December 1917, just seven weeks after forming the world’s first workers’ state, religious marriage was abolished and very easily accessible divorce was legalised. The following month the Family Code was brought into law. The code enshrined legal equality for women and abolished the “illegitimacy” of children. Significantly, and emphasising how vital this was seen to be, the Family Code was introduced by the Bolsheviks while simultaneously trying to end the world war, prevent a civil war, free the peasantry and kick-start industry and the economy.

Throughout the 1920s, the Family Code was added to and each change was accompanied by full public discussion and debate. From its earliest days Russian Socialist propaganda argued for equality for women, but the keystone for the Bolsheviks was women’s enslavement in the traditional family. Before the revolution, a woman’s life was strictly mapped out – get married, be monogamous, have children be tied to “the eternal drudgery of the kitchen and the nursery”.[v] The quality of the lives of women was never considered and their happiness and pleasure were irrelevant. The Bolsheviks immediately set about challenging this and with it the role of the Russian Orthodox Church and patriarchy.

…

The revolution made a heroic effort to destroy the so-called ‘family hearth’ and began to implement plans for a system of social care that included maternity houses, clinics, schools, crèches and kindergartens, social dining rooms and laundries, all aimed to relieve women from the constraints of the home. Paid maternity leave both before and after birth was introduced for women workers and access to nursing rooms in workplaces to allow breastfeeding, with breaks every three hours for new mother, were written into employment laws.

Abortion was legalised in 1920 and was described by Leon Trotsky as being one of a woman’s “most important civil, political and cultural rights”. … Abortion was free and available through the state, and working women were prioritised.

In November 1918, the first All-Russian Conference of Working Women met, organised by Alexandra Kollontai and Inessa Armand, with over a thousand women in attendance. The organisers reiterated that women’s emancipation went hand in hand with the building of socialism.[viii]

It wasn’t long after these changes were made that the forces of reaction launched a civil war on the country that had already been savaged by World War 1. Shortly after the war began, the Women’s Bureau, or Zhenotdel, was established. Its aim was to reach out to women, bring them to activity and education and inform them of their new rights. The bureau ran literary classes, political discussions and workshops on how to organise facilities needed in the workplace such as day cares etc. Delegates of women from factories attended education courses run by the bureau that lasted three to six months, and then returned to report to their co-workers.

The Women’s Bureau were successful in raising consciousness amongst masses of working women on a range of issues, including child-care, housing and public health and broadened the horizons of thousands of women. By 1922 the number of female members of the now Communist Party exceeded 30,000.

Despite war shortages, the Red Army provided the Women’s Bureau with a dedicated train and access to the railways, enabling them to travel around the country, building local branches of the bureau. Thousands of women joined. The branches held small as well as large meetings and discussion circles that specifically discussed issues affecting women.

…

Prostitution was deliberately decriminalised in 1922, but pimping was outlawed. Clinics that treated women with STIs and provided sex education and job training were opened. Trotsky described prostitution as “the extreme degradation of women in the interests of men who can pay for it”. …

Bolshevik sex crime laws were distinctive in their gender neutrality and rejection of morality and moral language. The law enshrined sex crimes as, “Injurious to the health, freedom and dignity” of the victim. Rape was defined by law as “non-consensual sexual intercourse using either physical or psychological force.” …

…

The Russian Revolution also changed the lives of LGBT people. Under the Tsar, homosexuality was outlawed, “sodomy” illegal; lesbianism, like women’s sexuality generally, was completely ignored. After the revolution homosexuality was decriminalised when all anti-gay laws were removed from the Criminal Code in 1922.

In his essay, “Sex and Sexuality in Russia” Jason Yanowitz describes the impact that the revolution had on gay, lesbian and transgender people. Surviving memoirs show many gays and lesbians took the revolution as a chance to live open lives. Same sex marriage was legal, how wide-spread it was is unknown as limited research has been conducted, but at least one court case established its legality. There were people who decided to live as the opposite gender following the revolution and by 1926 it became legal to change your sex on passports. Intersex and trans people received medical care and were not demonised. Research on these issues were state-funded and permission was granted to perform gender reassignment surgeries at the request of the patient. Openly gay people were allowed to serve in government and public positions. Georgy Chicherin, for example, was appointed Commisar for Foreign Affairs in 1918. He was an openly gay man with a flamboyant style. It is inconceiveable that such an individual would be given this role by any capitalist state.

In 1923, the Commissar of Health led a delegation to the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin and described the new laws around homosexuality as being “deliberately emancipatory, widely accepted in society and no one looking to repeal them”…..

…

Steven Argue, «Why The Russian Revolution is Still Important», IndyBay.org, 3 Mar. 2012

https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2012/03/03/18708611.php

…

The Russian Revolution led by Lenin and Trotsky ended Russia’s involvement in the inter-imperialist mass slaughter of World War I, brought about a sweeping land reform for the peasants, abolished capitalism and created a socialist system that was capable of turning one of the poorest countries in the world into an industrial powerhouse capable of smashing Nazi Germany and rebuilding after two major imperialist invasions to provide everyone with a guaranteed job, housing, education, and health care, brought national rights to oppressed minorities forming republics of ethnic regions, legalizing their languages and providing education in those languages while also giving their economies special help through the planned economy, brought about big advances in women’s rights and rights for homosexuals, made education and health care priorities, and ended government backed pogroms against Jews.

…

Marcus Papadopoulos, «The Centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution: a Legacy to Celebrate», Off-Guardian, 2 October 2017

https://off-guardian.org/2017/10/02/the-centenary-of-the-bolshevik-revolution-a-legacy-to-celebrate/

…

The Soviet Union, in 1920, was the first country in history to introduce free healthcare for its citizens. For the first time ever, all Russians, regardless of background, would be entitled to free medical treatment, including medications and operations. That was a truly remarkable reform and one that enabled the Bolsheviks to claim, with justification, the moral high ground over the capitalist world.

…

Education was another area that the Bolsheviks completely overhauled and, in doing so, set a shining example to the rest of the world. Compulsory education for all Soviet children was introduced, while higher education – in colleges and universities – was made free. The Soviets constantly emphasised to children and young people the importance of education and reading, and this would eventually result in the Soviet Union having one of the most skilled labour forces in the world, together with a highly educated population.

Illiteracy in the Soviet Union, which had plagued the old Russia and handicapped her economic and industrial endeavours, was eliminated within a relatively short period of time by the Bolsheviks. By 1900, literacy levels in Imperial Russia was less than 30 per cent; however, by the end of the 1930s, literacy in Soviet Russia was approximately 75 per cent, and by the end of the 1950s this figure had risen to nearly 100 per cent. …

The Bolsheviks averred that the right to a free and good quality education was the right of all children and young people in Russia. And by having created an education system that was one of the most revered in the world, the Soviets laid the foundation for the USSR to eventually become one of the leading countries in science, engineering, medicine, industry, space and health.

Healthcare and education were, indisputably, two of the greatest achievements of Soviet communism, and following 1945 the communist countries in Eastern Europe emulated the Soviet system, which yielded tremendously successful results for their respective populations. The rest of the world marvelled at the Soviet education system.

…

The next area that the Bolsheviks excelled in was the emancipation of women. How many women in the world today, when celebrating International Women’s Day, on March 8, know that the origins of this day are to be found in Soviet Russia? Because Lenin gave women the same rights as men in political and social matters; so, for instance, women and men were afforded equal pay, women were given the vote and were free to enter politics, and a minimum wage was introduced in which both sexes were paid equally. The Bolsheviks also introduced paid maternity-leave and legalised abortion.

The Soviet Union was a beacon in the world for women’s rights and gave a whole new meaning to gender equality. And the fact that the first woman in space – Valentina Tereshkova – was a Soviet speaks volumes about the Bolsheviks’ contribution in bringing equality to women.

…

The Great October Socialist Revolution, as it truly was, is another glorious episode in the history of Russia and, without a doubt, one of its greatest. The revolution gave birth to a country which would eventually become a superpower and the most powerful state in Russian history. But, even more importantly than that, the revolution gave the Russian people and, indeed, all of the others peoples who went from being citizens of the Russian Empire to citizens of the USSR, something they had never really experienced before: security and stability, in the form of education, healthcare, jobs, housing, welfare and pensions.

The Bolshevik Revolution is when the needs of the ordinary man and woman, for the first time in human history, came to the fore in a country and dictated government policy. That is something to rejoice about, especially in a world today where the focus is on money and materialism, with little attention given to providing the ordinary person with the fundamentals in life.

…

«We Are the Party of the Russian Revolution», Workers Vanguard No. 924, 7 November 2008.

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/924/russianrev.html

…

During the course of the Russian Revolution, the multinational proletariat, drawing behind it the peasantry and the oppressed nationalities, forged its own new organs of class power, the soviets. With the smashing of the old capitalist state, these organs, under Bolshevik leadership, formed the basis of the new workers state. The vanguard of the workers understood that they were not just taking power in Russia; they were opening the first chapter of the world socialist revolution. They inspired workers uprisings throughout Europe and inspired rebellions by imperialism’s colonial slaves.

The tremors of October 1917 extended all the way around the globe to right here in the richest bastion of imperialism. In 1919, the Bolsheviks launched the Communist International (CI). Under Bolshevik leaders V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the CI and the Soviet state became the most powerful revolutionary force ever yet assembled by the world proletariat.

The October Revolution forged a Red Army that emerged victorious from four years of civil war as well as invasion by the armies of 14 capitalist powers in league with their local capitalist henchmen. The Soviet government expropriated the capitalists and repudiated outright the tsar’s massive debt to foreign bankers. It proclaimed the right of working people to jobs, health care, housing and education, as the first steps to building a socialist society.

It gave land to the peasants and self-determination to the many oppressed nations of the tsar’s prison house of peoples. It tore down the whole edifice of Russian patriarchal medievalism. The early Soviet government not only separated church and state, it put all available resources toward universal secular education and science. It eliminated all laws discriminating against national and ethnic minorities, women and homosexuals. Soviet Russia not only gave the vote to women at a time when the Western imperialists were beating them bloody for demanding such a thing; the Bolsheviks put women in the front ranks of proletarian rule as factory managers, state commissars and army commanders.

The Soviet workers state proved the superiority of nationalized property and planned economy over capitalist private property and anarchy in production. Out of the historical poverty left by tsarist Russia, the wreckage left by imperialist invasions, the continuing economic and military encirclement by imperialism, and in spite of Stalinist mismanagement and parasitism, the Soviet Union achieved unrivaled modernization and growth. At the same time as the capitalist world had fallen into the abyss of the 1930s Great Depression, the Soviet planned economy brought tens of millions of Soviet workers and peasants out of Russia’s medieval villages and turned them into educated modern proletarians, scientists, directors of industry and commanders of the mechanized Red Army.

The Soviet Union was the industrial and military powerhouse that made possible, and protected, the overturns of capitalist rule from Cuba to East Europe to China to Vietnam and North Korea. Had it not been for the USSR, the imperialists would have attacked North Korea, China and Vietnam with nuclear weapons during the Korean and Vietnam wars.

Eric Mann, «The 100th Anniversary of the October Revolution: the Great Breakthrough in Anti-Imperialist Socialism», Counterpunch, 30 Oct. 2017.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/30/the-100th-anniversary-of-the-october-revolution-the-great-breakthrough-in-anti-imperialist-socialism/

This month marks the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution of October 1917. As we in the United States try to imagine a revolutionary opposition to the U.S. imperialist system a great appreciation of the achievements of the Russian revolution and the Soviet Union is a critical part of our revolutionary future.

The Russian revolution created the Soviet Union-the first “workers state” and the first successful revolution that survived the world imperialist counterrevolution. The Bolshevik Party (the first communist party) was part of a united front of parties that seized power from the reactionary feudal Tsar in the February revolution of 1917. Then in October 1917 the Bolsheviks overthrew the forces of capitalism and seized state power from the social democratic Kerensky government. The Russian revolution came to power as an anti-war movement against the forces in Russia that wanted to continue World War I-one of the greatest imperialist bloodbaths of all time in which more than 18 million “workers of the world” were sent to their deaths by the capitalist governments of Europe with strong support from their “socialist” parties.

The Bolshevik Party and Soviet State built its own military and police, defended themselves against external and internal capitalist attack, and survived in a hostile world for 72 years-a true miracle against all odds. From the perspective of the world’s exploited and oppressed people this was a profound achievement in human history and offered them an optimistic vision of their own future.

The day before the successful October revolution the entire world was ruled by the U.S. and European colonial and imperialist powers. But the day after the Russian Revolution the communists created a new political momentum and material balance of forces that captured the imagination of workers and anti-colonial movements all over the world.

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The Russian revolution was the first revolution that seized state power, built its own military and police, beat back the capitalists, and was able to sustain its own revolutionary advances against the most reactionary and brutal attacks to overthrow it. It was a “workers state” that was born in the caldron of a world dominated by U.S. and European imperialism-a world capitalist system that was exercising a brutal world colonial dictatorship over the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America and Black, Indigenous, and other colonial peoples inside its borders. The Russian revolution came out of the womb needing to defend its very existence from a world imperialist system that carried out counter-revolutionary infanticide as a central tenet of its strategy and existence.

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[When] in October 1917 the Bolsheviks successfully seized state power, created their own armed forces, suppressed the armed forces of the occupying powers and reactionary forces in a bloody civil war, the Soviet Union’s successful seizure of maintenance of state power was seen all over the world as a great historical victory-the first time in modern history that the masses of oppressed people had successfully managed to not just overthrow the power of their oppressors but create military structure to protect and maintain a new society.

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The Soviet Union successfully defended its revolution from a brutal world invasion of imperialist countries that included the British, U.S., and Canadians, Indian colonial recruits sent by England, Scots, and 70,000 Japanese troops. It also had to defeat a right-wing assault inside Russia, appropriately called “The Whites!” in a civil war instigated by the world imperialist powers. The Russian Revolution came to power in blood and war instigated against it by the most powerful imperialist forces in the world and won! The Soviet Union was built on military force against military force. Let the record show that the United States, England, Japan, and every other capitalist state ” tried to overthrow the Russian revolution and had they succeeded they would have re-established a bloody puppet government as they have all over the world. The October Revolution, led by workers, peasants, and a political party that had never governed and had been underground for a decade, took on the entire world capitalist system-and won!

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Alan Woods, «What the Russian Revolution achieved and why it degenerated», Bolshevik.info, 27 January 2017.

https://www.bolshevik.info/what-the-russian-revolution-achieved-and-why-it-degenerated.htm

The regime established by the October Revolution was neither totalitarian nor bureaucratic, but the most democratic regime yet seen on earth. The October Revolution radically abolished private ownership of the means of production. For the first time in history, the viability of a nationalised planned economy was demonstrated, not in theory but in practice. Over one-sixth of the earth’s surface, in a gigantic, unprecedented experiment, it was proved that it was possible to run society without capitalists, landowners and moneylenders.

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Despite the monstrous crimes of the bureaucracy, the unprecedented advances of the Soviet Union represent not only a historic achievement, but are, above all, a glimpse of the enormous possibilities inherent in a nationalised planned economy, especially if it were run on democratic lines. They stand out in complete contrast to the crisis of the productive forces of capitalism on a world scale today.

Unprecedented advance

The October revolution of 1917 brought about the greatest advance of the productive forces of any country in history. Before the revolution in czarist Russia was an extremely backward, semi-feudal economy with a predominantly illiterate population. Out of a total population of 150 million people there were only approximately four million industrial workers. That means it was far more backward than Pakistan at the present time.

Under frightful conditions of economic, social and cultural backwardness, the regime of workers’ democracy established by Lenin and Trotsky began the titanic task of dragging Russia out of backwardness on the basis of a nationalised planned economy. The results have no precedent in economic history. Within the space of two decades Russia had established a powerful industrial base, developed industry, science and technology and abolished illiteracy. It achieved remarkable advances in the fields of health, culture and education. This was at a time when the Western world was in the grip of mass unemployment and economic collapse in the Great Depression.

The viability of the new productive system was put to a severe test in 1941-45, when the Soviet Union was invaded by Nazi Germany with all the combined resources of Europe at its disposal. Despite the loss of 27 million lives, the USSR succeeded in defeating Hitler, and went on, after 1945, to reconstruct its shattered economy in a remarkably short space of time, transforming itself into the world’s second power.

Such astonishing advances in a country must give us pause for thought. One can sympathise with the ideals of the Bolshevik Revolution, or oppose them, but such a remarkable transformation in such a short space of time demands the attention of thinking people everywhere.

In a period of 50 years, the USSR increased its gross domestic product nine times over. Despite the terrible destruction of the Second World War, it increased its GDP five times over from 1945 to 1979. In 1950, the GDP of the USSR was only 33 per cent that of the USA. By 1979, it was already 58 per cent. By the late 1970s, the Soviet Union was a formidable industrial power, which in absolute terms had already overtaken the rest of the world in a whole series of key sectors. The USSR was the world’s second biggest industrial producer after the USA and was the biggest producer of oil, steel, cement, asbestos, tractors, and many machine tools.

Nor is the full extent of the achievement expressed in these figures. All this was achieved virtually without unemployment or inflation. Unemployment like that in the West was unknown in the Soviet Union. In fact, it was legally a crime. (Ironically, this law still remains on the statute books today, although it means nothing.) There might be examples of cases arising from bungling or individuals who came into conflict with the authorities being deprived of their jobs. But such phenomena did not flow from the nature of a nationalised planned economy, and need not have existed. They had nothing in common with either the cyclical unemployment of capitalism or the organic cancer which now affects the whole of the Western world and which currently condemns 35 million people in the OECD countries to a life of enforced idleness.

Moreover, for most of the post-war period, there was little or no inflation. The bureaucracy learned the truth of Trotsky’s warning that “inflation is the syphilis of a planned economy”. After the Second World War for most of the time they took care to ensure that inflation was kept under control. This was particularly the case with the prices of basic items of consumption. Before perestroika (reconstruction), the last time meat and dairy prices had been increased was in 1962. Bread, sugar and most food prices had last been increased in 1955. Rents were extremely low, particularly when compared to the West, where most workers have to pay a third or more of their wages on housing costs. Only in the last period, with the chaos of perestroika, did this begin to break down. With the rush towards a market economy, both unemployment and inflation soared to unprecedented levels.

The USSR had a balanced budget and even a small surplus every year. It is interesting to note that not a single Western government has succeeded in achieving this result (as the Maastricht conditions prove), just as they have not succeeded in achieving full employment and zero inflation, things which also existed in the Soviet Union. The Western critics of the Soviet Union kept very quiet about this, because it demonstrated the possibilities of even a transitional economy, never mind socialism.

From a backward, semi-feudal, mainly illiterate country in 1917, the USSR became a modern, developed economy, with a quarter of the world’s scientists, a health and educational system equal or superior to anything found in the West, able to launch the first space satellite and put the first man into space. In the 1980s, the USSR had more scientists than the USA, Japan, Britain and Germany combined. Only recently the West was compelled to admit grudgingly that the Soviet space programme was far in advance of America’s. The fact that the West still has to use Russian rockets to put men and women into space is sufficient proof of this.

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The October Revolution was a milestone in the struggle for women’s emancipation. Prior to that, under Tsarism, women were regarded as mere appendages of the household. Tsarist laws explicitly permitted a man to use violence against his wife. In some rural areas women were forced to wear veils and were prevented from learning to read and write. Between 1917 and 1927 a whole series of laws were passed giving women formal equality with men. The 1919 programme of the Communist Party boldly proclaimed: “Not confining itself to formal equality of women, the party strives to liberate them from the material burdens of obsolete household work by replacing it by communal houses, public eating places, central laundries, nurseries, etc.”

Women were no longer obliged to live with their husbands or accompany them if a change of job meant a change of house. They were given equal rights to be head of the household and received equal pay. Attention was paid to the women’s childbearing role and special maternity laws were introduced banning long hours and night work and establishing paid leave at childbirth, family allowances and child-care centres. Abortion was legalised in 1920, divorce was simplified and civil registration of marriage was introduced. The concept of illegitimate children was also abolished. In the words of Lenin: “In the literal sense, we did not leave a single brick standing of the despicable laws which placed women in a state of inferiority compared with men…”

Material advances were made to facilitate the full involvement of women in all spheres of social, economic and political life – the provision of free school meals, milk for children, special food and cloth allowances for children in need, pregnancy consultation centres, maternity homes, créches and other facilities. True, the emergence of Stalinism ushered in a series of counter-reforms in the social sphere, which drastically affected the position of women. But with the death of Stalin, the post-war economic growth allowed a steady general improvement: retirement at 55 years, no discrimination in pay and terms of employment, and the right of pregnant women to shift to lighter work with fully paid maternity leave for 56 days before and 56 days after the birth of a child. New legislation in 1970 abolished night work and underground work for women. The number of women in higher education as a percentage of the total rose from 28 per cent in 1927, to 43 per cent in 1960, to 49 per cent in 1970. The only other countries in the world where women constituted over 40 per cent of the total in higher education were Finland, France, and the United States.

There were improvements in pre-school care for children: in 1960 there were 500,000 places, but by 1971 this had risen to over five million. The tremendous advances of the planned economy, with the consequent improvements in health care, were reflected in the doubling of the life expectancy for women from 30 to 74 years and the reduction in child mortality by 90 per cent. In 1975 women working in education had risen to 73 per cent. In 1959 one-third of women were in occupations where 70 per cent of the workforce were women, but by 1970 this figure had climbed to 55 per cent. By this time, 98 per cent of nurses were women, as were 75 per cent of teachers, 95 per cent of librarians and 75 per cent of doctors. In 1950 there were 600 female doctors of science, but by 1984 it had climbed to 5,600.

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Hispano-Soviet Friendship Association BIENVENIDO!, «The Achievements of the USSR» [undated].

http://www.northstarcompass.org/nsc1212/ussr.htm

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[The] Soviet Union was the first country in world history to have completely eliminated hunger, an achievement that countries as “developed” as the United States have never reached. This shows the high efficiency that the socialist system reached at that time. In addition to eradicating hunger, the Soviet Union had been at the forefront of the global campaign for the eradication of smallpox and the establishment of networks of water, electricity, heating and transport almost free.

The Soviet Union was the first country to have an entirely literate population. The Soviet education system guaranteed public education, universal, free and compulsory collectivism.

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The USSR was the first country to establish the University of evening allowing workers to study. It is not by chance that the Soviet Union was the country where were sold as many books in the world, exceeded that of all books sold in the country then.

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The USSR was able to create from scratch, a popular army capable of facing the great imperialist armies such as the United States, England, France or Nazi Germany. The USSR had also become a great scientific and industrial power, and one of the powers of the space industry pioneers and pioneers of space, Yuri Gagarin was the first to enter space. The Soviets were the first to launch a satellite into space on October 4, 1957, a feat that surprised the world.

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«The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of Women», Workers Vanguard No. 1108, 24 March 2017, and No. 1109, 7 April 2017.

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/1108/russian_revolution.html

The Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 was the greatest victory for the world’s working people and for all of the oppressed. The spark for the revolutionary upsurge was a mass outpouring of women in Petrograd on International Women’s Day (IWD), March 8 (February 23 by the old Julian calendar). While in recent years bourgeois feminists have usurped IWD, in fact it is a workers’ celebration that originated in 1908 among female needle trades workers in Manhattan.

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The grim poverty of the world’s first workers state began with the economic and social backwardness inherited from the old tsarist empire. Foreign investment had built modern factories in the major cities, creating a compact, powerful proletariat that was able to make the revolution in a majority-peasant country. The revolutionary workers were, in most cases, only one or two generations removed from the peasantry. The workers supported their cousins in the countryside when they seized the landed estates and divided up the land among those who worked it. The alliance (smychka) between the workers and peasants was key to the success of the revolution. But the mass of peasant smallholders was also a reservoir of social and economic backwardness. The devastation wrought by World War I was compounded by the bloody Civil War (1918-1920) that the Bolshevik government had to fight against the armies of counterrevolution and imperialist intervention, throwing the country’s economy back decades. The imperialists also instituted an economic blockade, isolating the Soviet Union from the world economy and world division of labor.

Marxists have always understood that the material abundance necessary to uproot class society and its attendant oppressions can only come from the highest level of technology and science based on an internationally planned economy. The economic devastation and isolation of the Soviet workers state led to strong material pressures toward bureaucratization. In the last years of his life, Lenin, often in alliance with Trotsky, waged a series of battles in the party against the political manifestations of the bureaucratic pressures. The Bolsheviks knew that socialism could only be built on a worldwide basis, and they fought to extend the revolution internationally, especially to the advanced capitalist economies of Europe; the idea that socialism could be built in a single country was a later perversion introduced as part of the justification for the bureaucratic degeneration of the revolution.

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The October Revolution put power in the hands of a working class that was numerically small in a country that was relatively backward. The Bolsheviks thus faced problems that Marx and Engels, who had projected that the proletarian revolution would occur first in more industrialized countries, could not have anticipated. It was envisioned by the Bolsheviks that the Russian Revolution would inspire workers in the economically advanced European countries to overthrow their bourgeoisies, and these new revolutions would in turn come to the aid of the Russian proletariat. These workers states would not usher in socialist societies but would be transitional regimes that would lay the foundations for socialism based on an internationally planned economy in which there would be no more class distinctions and the state itself would wither away.

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Abortion: Free and on Demand

In 1920 the Soviet government issued a decree overturning criminal penalties for abortion—the first government in the world to do so:

“As long as the remnants of the past and the difficult economic conditions of the present compel some women to undergo an abortion, the People’s Commissariat of Health and Social Welfare and the People’s Commissariat of Justice regard the use of penal measures as inappropriate and therefore, to preserve women’s health and protect the race against ignorant or self-seeking profiteers, it is resolved:

“I. Free abortion, interrupting pregnancy by artificial means, shall be performed in state hospitals, where women are assured maximum safety in the operation.”

— “Decree of the People’s Commissariat of Health and Social Welfare and the People’s Commissariat of Justice in Soviet Russia,” translated from Die Kommunistische Fraueninternationale (Communist Women’s International, April 1921), in W&R No. 34, Spring 1988

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Jeff Mackler, «The Relevance of the Russian Revolution Today», Counterpunch, 27 Oct. 2017.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/27/the-relevance-of-the-russian-revolution-today/

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To this day, 100 years after Lenin’s Bolshevik Party led the world’s first socialist revolution, no party has matched its record of social, political, theoretical, organizational, military, cultural, and moral contributions to the advancement of the interests of the working-class masses.

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Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution held that the national democratic tasks of previous bourgeois revolutions-land reform and democratic rights and institutions as opposed to autocratic/monarchial institutions-could only be accomplished in the framework of a socialist revolution, which would abolish capitalist property relations and establish workers’ democratic rule through the agency of nationally and locally organized soviets.

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Relevance of the Bolshevik program today

The Bolshevik-program not only focused on the issue of working class political independence from capitalist politics and from the capitalist state power but also on a number of related issues that were critical to winning the massive and majority support required to establish and maintain the world’s first experiment in majority rule.

On Day One of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, the All Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers, Peasant and Soldiers Deputies approved a decree that nationalized all capitalist land in the largest nation on earth.

This land was immediately granted to the peasant soviets to distribute in accord with the historic aspirations of Russia’s vast poor peasantry. This single measure cemented Russia’s massively oppressed majority to the revolution.

Aside from revolutionary Cuba, no nation since then has implemented a land reform-distribution of that scope. Indeed, today in Latin America every so-called revolutionary or “popular” regime, from Venezuela to Bolivia, Ecuador and Uruguay to Nicaragua and Argentina, has failed to accomplish even a modest land reform. To do so would entail a break with the capitalist system of private property that none of the above dared to contemplate.

This fundamental failure to meet the needs of the historically oppressed poor peasants and farmers inevitably cuts deep into the support required to underline the inevitable imperialist efforts to destabilize and overthrow these “popular” governments, all of which are or have recently been dominated by a combination of left-sounding reformers allied with the nation’s bankers and ruling capitalists.

Self-determination of oppressed nations

On the same Day One, the Soviets decreed the right of Russia’s conquered peoples, its oppressed nationalities, to self-determination-that is, the right to decide to leave the USSR and organize their own separate state or to remain. Those who chose to remain were guaranteed their historic rights to language and culture, as opposed to the domination of the previous colonialist Russian conquerors. The oppressed nations were granted an autonomy that guaranteed their political, economic, and cultural rights as well as their right to change their minds in the future and secede.

With few exceptions the oppressed and now liberated peoples decided to remain, if for no other reason that the revolution had granted them the land as against their landlords and a political and social freedom that exceeded any other on earth.

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Bolsheviks implement revolutionary program

The Bolsheviks seized on that special moment in history—a generalized crisis of capitalist credibility, an immediate revolutionary crisis wherein their program was in perfect harmony with the immediate aspirations and mobilizations of tens of millions of Russia’s working masses.

In this context, the actual seizure of power in Petrograd on Oct. 25, 1917 was achieved with an estimated loss of some dozen lives. The same scenario was more or less repeated in the following days across Russia.

The decrees that shortly followed the Bolshevik-led seizure of power astonished the world. They published and repudiated all the secret treaties that Tsarism had imposed on conquered nations. They renounced Russian territorial acquisitions and financial concessions forced on conquered peoples.

They opened the borders of revolutionary Russia to revolutionary fighters from around the world and led in establishing the Third or Communist International, based on a repudiation of imperialist war, on solidarity with the oppressed people and nations, and on the premise of constructing disciplined, democratic revolutionary parties on the Bolshevik model everywhere with the objective of organizing for social revolution.

The Soviet government abolished all discriminatory laws against women, against gender discrimination, and against racism in all its manifestations. These were not just empty decrees but were implemented in practice via newly established Soviet organs led by the best fighters in all these critical fields of human endeavor.

The Soviet government established a system of free education and health care. It opened its doors to artists, writers, musicians, and scientists to share every form of social, cultural and scientific expression of humanity’s future. It encouraged the formation of Communist Parties dedicated to humanity’s future everywhere on earth.

All this was accomplished in the context of the concerted efforts of world imperialism to shut down and cut off the wonders achieved by the free people of the Soviet Union.

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