The London History Festival - Kensington Central Library 3 November 2009

In 2009 editor of History Today Paul Lay discussed with historian John Adamson abo Charles I and the origins of the English Civil War.

John Adamson is a fellow of Peterhouse College, Cambridge and his book The Noble Revolt has been described as "a work of great style and imagination as well as scholarship... As with a great 19thcentury novel, the story and the characters will become your friends for life."[1]

Early on in his career, Adamson courted controversy, according to Roger Richardson" In the early 1990s John Adamson found himself at the centre of a significant historical controversy about his bold re-interpretation of the English Civil War as the "last baronial revolt".[2]

Mark Kishlansky of Harvard University led the attack by accusing Adamson of "slipshod work, misleading handling of the evidence and weakly supported conclusions. The dispute spilt out from the academic journals in which it had originated to the newspaper press and many of the big names of the historical profession at that time - Conrad Russell, Lawrence Stone and Hugh Trevor-Roper among them - weighed in on one side or the other".

The History Today discussion began with elaboration by Adamson on why he began his book The Noble Revolt in 1640. From the beginning, Adamson sought to distance himself from any form of the socio-economic explanation of the civil war.

He accused some historians of relying too much on large abstract forces, and the role of the individual had been underestimated. He said he did not agree with long term views, these got us nowhere, and he certainly did not agree that there was a bourgeois revolution. He felt that an "economic determinist" viewpoint did not explain too much.

Adamson echoed the prevailing academic orthodoxy that there was no bourgeois revolution mainly because he felt there was no rising bourgeoisie and that people from all social classes can be found on either side of the struggle.

Adamson concurs with an increasingly large number of historians who see Cromwell, as a representative of the declining gentry rather than a rising bourgeoisie. Adamson believes that Cromwell never intended a revolution. Adamson's premise that the bourgeoisie was on both sides was of levelled at Christopher Hill.

In her obituary of Christopher Hill Ann Talbot, states that "Hill, of course, was well aware that there were gentlemen and landowners on the Parliamentary side in the Civil war and small farmers and artisans on the Royalist side. He had read enough Marx and Lenin to know that one could not expect a chemically real revolution in which the members of one social class lined up one side of the barricades and those of the other on the opposite side. However, he was sensitive enough to his historical sources to detect the social currents that brought people of diverse social backgrounds into a struggle against the king and well-grounded enough in history to identify new and revolutionary ideas in the curious and archaic guise in which they appeared—as the ideologists of the revolution ransacked the Bible and half-understood historical precedent for some kind of theory to explain what they were doing".[3]

Adamson explained his reasoning behind his rejection of a Marxist understanding of history. He believed that socialism had collapsed with the coming down of the Berlin Wall in 1989. He incorrectly stated that no one had anticipated the fall of the wall and communism, which is not valid. He went on to say that there has been in the past too much emphasis on social classes in the civil war, but in reality, the war was much more about personal allegiances and decisions.

According to Adamson, the war was caused by Charles 1 and his inexperience and vanity. Adamson during the meeting expressed much sympathy for Charles 1st. As can be seen from this quote from his book The Noble Revolt "From the cabin at the stern of the barge, Charles caught a glimpse of the gilded weather-vanes of Whitehall Palace before the boat turned westwards, past the Abbey, and under the great east window of St Stephen's Chapel – the Commons' chamber, and the scene of his most recent political debacle. It would be seven years before Charles saw his palace again".

The meeting at the London History Festival is crucial in so much as it gives a glimpse at what a revisionist argument looks like. While Adamson said a lot of what he was against he said little about what he was for.

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[1] (Ed Smith, The Times.Com

[2] Not the main act but a prelude to drama- https://www.timeshighereducation.com/cn/books/not-the-main-act-but-a-prelude-to-drama/209736.article

[3] "These the times ... this the man": an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill by Ann Talbot 25 March 2003-www.wsws.org

The Impact of the English Civil Wars (A History Today Book) [Paperback] J.S. Morrill (Editor) 1991

This collection of new essays covers a whole range of subjects military, political, social, religious, cultural and economic that were impacted by the civil war. Primarily aimed at the student and the general reader the book combines charts, extracts from original documents and illustrative material drawn largely from contemporary pamphlets and sources to provide the reader with a basic understanding of the impact of the civil war.

Like many other aspects of the history of the English Civil War, its impact on society, politics and the economy has caused serious disagreements among historians. While a substantial minority (albeit in the past) have said it is impossible to ignore or deny that the civil war did have some impact and that changes did occur in the social, economic and political superstructure, others have played down appreciably the consequences. Some have even tried to deny that social changes were crucial in determining the outcome of the war.

Certainly, over the last quarter of a century, it has been highly fashionable to question the social context of the civil war. In the book, The Causes of the English Civil War on p117 Ann Hughes says this changing historical fashion can be illustrated from the titles of two collections of sources covering early modern social history. In 1965, Lawrence Stone published Social Change and Revolution in England 1540-1640, whereas Barry Coward produced Social Change and Continuity in Early Modern England1550-1750. The coupling of continuity rather than revolution with social changes in the latter work reveals a more qualified assessment of the extent of transformation at the beginning of modern England.

The New Social History historiography appeared in the early 1970s. According to some historians, it was perhaps the last major historiography of the 20th century to try and explain the complex historical phenomenon known as the English Civil War. Before the 1970s, Social History had mostly been limited to a study of everyday life. During the last thirty-odd years, the subject has come to prominence because some aspects of it have become the bête noir of several revisionist historians. The most positive side of the new history is that it has brought into the public domain the lives of working people or the poor who had largely been ignored by historians. On the downside, this new history became divorced from any form of economic or materialist explanation of the civil war.

This collection of essays comes predominantly from historians who in one way or another are sceptical regarding the impact of the war with the sole exception of John Walters. The majority of contributors are against any form of Marxist historiography.

Given John Morrill's editorial role in preparing this collection of essays, it is, necessary to understand his take on these events. He was clearly influenced by the New Social History historiography in an interview he describes his attitude towards those historians who were in the forefront of the group "So there came along the new social history which opened up a whole range of types of evidence, and so one of the most important things to happen for my period was the work which is most naturally associated with Keith Wrightson (who trained in Cambridge, spent many years in St Andrews, returned to Cambridge and then moved to Yale). And the Wrightson revolution indeed, in the way in which social history is done, had an enormous impact on those of us who were more interested in high politics. I mean traditional politics, constructed high politics. Wrightson's importance for my work is again something that people might be a bit surprised to hear about, but I personally, in my mid-career, saw it as absolutely fundamental.[1]

In his introduction, John Morrill is correct to point out while there is general agreement amongst historians of what to call the events in France around 1789 or 1917 in Russia. However, there is little agreement as to what to call the revolutionary events in 1640s England.

A reader coming to these events for the first time will find out that this problem is down to many factors.  A major one being the political bias of the historian.  Another is the sheer complexity of the historical crisis that gripped the English state. The book is recommended in the sense that it does give the reader a broad range of differing views, albeit absent is a Marxist explanation. The book is simple in design but has a generous supply of fantastic illustrations which in themselves are worth further exploration.

Chapter one is Charles Charlton's Impact of the fighting. Charlton begins by assessing the number of dead and wounded during the conflict. Another ground for disagreement.  Charlton does highlight one of the biggest problems is that when dealing with primary sources regarding causalities, they are open to bias depending on which side they came .

In a striking passage in his memoirs, Richard Baxter "said he watched the battle of Langport as a young chaplain in the army of the parliament.  Baxter witnessed fierce fighting. Facing defeat, the Royalists panicked. Standing next to Baxter was Major Thomas Harrison. As the Parliamentary army charged the Royalists fled, Baxter heard him 'with a loud voice break forth into the praises of God with fluent expressions, as if he had been in a rapture.'[2]

According to D H Pennington, "it was the bloodiest conflict in relative terms in English history" crops and land were seized; cattle and horses were taken. Pennington makes the point that the Royalists were often more brutal than the Parliamentarians.

Another useful source on the impact of the civil war is the work of Steven Porter. While careful not to exaggerate the destruction, he has some relevant statistical data on the scale of the impact of the civil war. 150 towns and 50 villages suffered the destruction of property. According to the House of Lords Record Office, Main Papers,23 Sept. 1648 "…miserable it is to see the multitudes of inhabitants and their children flocking in the streets of the bordering towns and villages and have not a house to putt their heads therein, whereby to exercise their calling."

Taunton according to the Earl of Clarendon heavily destroyed by fire, but according to Sprigge a flourishing city was all but destroyed. A number of books have come out recently which contain important sources of eyewitness accounts of the civil war. Jogh adair's book contains important eye witness accounts. Adair highlighted one particular aspect "which was the development of social advancement inside the army and service in the armies of parliament certainly provided opportunities for social advancement. At first, the rival armies were officered by men of much the same social status, but gradually new people from the middle, lower middle and artisan classed moved into positions of responsibility, both on committees that ran the war and in the wider army. John Hampden's Shepherd, Thomas Shelbourne, rose to be colonel of Cromwell regiment of Ironsides and there were similar stories. The more conservative Puritan gentry objected to their newcomers as much as on social grounds as on account of their often unorthodox or radical religious views".[3]

Forced requisitioning took place but a lot of goods were paid for at market prices. Adair says while there was "decay of life" there was also opposition to this massive growth of profits for many people. Also, things such as the legal system remained relatively healthy and survived unscathed. In London, the impact of the civil war is hard to assess in many respects everyday life carried on as normal. London also avoided sack or siege, however, emergency wartime powers were resented by large sections of the population. Its economy was vital for the New Model Army and this state of affairs led one Royalist to lament "if posterity shall ask who pulled the crown from the king's head said it was proud unthankful schismatically, rebellious, blood City of London".Charlton who came from a military background is particularly keen on military matters, but when it comes to a more in-depth understanding of why people fought and how the war came about, the chapter is very light. People on both sides of the war "chose deliberately which side they fought on".

Chapter Two the Impact on Government by David L Smith.  Smith seems to argue that the civil war was largely a defensive manoeuvre by parliament against a corrupt and inept monarchy. Smith believes that no appreciable changes occurred during the civil war and protectorate, and we quickly move onto a united monarchy after Cromwell's death.

Chapter 3 The Impact of Puritanism is by John Morrill is well written, and Morrill argues his point well but a lot more could have been said on this subject. The Puritan religion did have a material basis. For the understanding of some of the great problems of human history, the study of religion is a necessity. Cliff slaughter posed this question "What are the relationship between the social divisions among men and their beliefs about the nature of things? How do ruling classes ensure extended periods of acceptance of their rule by those they oppress? Why was the 'Utopians' wrong in thinking that it was sufficient only to work out a reasonable arrangement of social relations in order to proceed to its construction? It was out of the examination of questions like this in the German school of criticism of religion that Marx emerged to present for the first time a scientific view of society. 'The criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism.' [4]

Suffice to say this is not Morrill's position. Therefore, I find his analysis on Puritanism a little one-sided.  Also, there appears to be an absence of struggle in Morrill's chapter. Morrill writes nothing about the differing radical Puritan groups that were outside mainstream Puritan politics.

This is the history of the victors as Christopher Hill would have said. Little is mentioned of radical sects such as the Ranters, who flourished in England at the time of the Puritan Revolution. While it is generally accepted that there was not a massive amount of unrest and protest during the civil war, there was riots and unrest. John Morrill has made the point that changes in social and economic policy were mostly controlled by the middling sort and large-scale outbreaks were prevented by this class.

However, there was a tangible fear amongst sections of the middle class who feared the little people As Lucy Hutchinson writes with disdain, "almost all the Parliament garrisons were infested and disturbed with like factious little people, in so much that many worthy gentlemen were wearied out of their command, some oppressed by a particular sort of individuals in the House whom, to distinguish from the most honorable gentlemen, they called worsted stocking men".[5]

Hutchinson is probably referring to the people that were increasingly being influenced by the Levellers who expressed an awareness especially among the lower sections of society that in order to have a say in these changes they must organise through some kind of political organisation.

The ideas of this group came from the lower strata of society. Their ideas of wider democracy and equality were an anathema to the victorious upper-middle classes. It was as necessary for Cromwell to crush the Ranters as to liquidate Lilburne's Levellers and Winstanley's Diggers.

Chapter IV The Impact on Political Thought by Glen Burgess. For a substantial part of the 20th-century, civil war historiography was dominated by Marxist historians who were clear that social and economic changes did bring about changes in people's thinking.

Burgess in this chapter does not agree that there is a connection between economics and politics which Marxists have commonly described as the relationship between base and superstructure.

As Karl Marx explained in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) "In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, who are independent of their will, namely [the] relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or — this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms — with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead, sooner or later, to the transformation of the whole, immense, superstructure. In studying such transformations, it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic, or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production".

Burgess goes on to explain that previous approaches to ideological struggles in the revolution were expressed through an examination of pamphlets of the 1640s. While recognising that the literature was partisan, they were taken "at face value, as part of a philosophical debate." This approach, says Burgess, maybe "inherently distorting."

Burgess believes that politics were fluid and that no one stuck to their principles but ideas were mere "rhetoric." His examination of the different groups, including radical groups guides his approach. He believes that the various political groups were mostly acting empirically. Taking advantage of changes in the political situation with some rhetorical statements.

This, in my opinion, does not explain the complex philosophical problems that were being tackled by people like Thomas Hobbes and James  Harrington, to name just two. In Anti Duhring Engels said if "Englishmen nowadays do not exactly relish the compliment they paid their ancestors, more's the pity. It is none the less undeniable that Bacon, Hobbes and Locke are the fathers of that brilliant school of French materialists which made the eighteenth century in spite of all battles of land and sea won over Frenchmen by Germans and Englishmen, a primarily French Century, even before that crowning French revolution, the results of which we outsiders, in England as well as in Germany are still trying to acclimatise".[6]

Chapter V the Impact of the New Model Army. Ian Gentles does an excellent introduction to the New Model Army. John Walters chapter is a bit of a strange choice in this selection of essays in so much as you would not classify him as a revisionist historian. He would be much closer to Marxist historians. His work is always impressive, and this essay carries on in the same vein. Walters actually believes that the world was turned upside down.

Walters examines large swathes of primary sources, but as a good historian does not take them at face value. He recognises that these are not impartial documents but were weapons of war.  Significantly it is in this chapter that we get a real feel of the social turmoil that existed during the civil war. Walter's believes that large segments of the population were becoming radicalised and became involved in a number of political and military activities. 

Riots broke out all over the place and many of these reflected the level of poverty that existed. Walters believes that these disorders threatened the social order. Walters is the only chapter that women get a look in. while not examined in any depth Walters recognises that large sections of the female population were being radicalised alongside their menfolk.

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[1] Professor John Morrill Interview Transcript This interview took place at Selwyn College, Cambridge, 26 March 2008

[2] Quoted in -Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars 1638-1651 by Charles Carlton Routledge, 428 pp, £25.00, October 1992, ISBN 0 415 03282 2

[3] By the Sword Divided: Eyewitness Accounts of the English Civil War (Sutton Illustrated History Paperbacks) Paperback – 22 April 1998

by John Adair

[4] Cliff Slaughter Religion and Social Revolt From Labour Review, Vol.3 No.3, May-June 1958,

[5] ] Memoirs of the life of Colonel Hutchinson, publ. by J. Hutchinson. To which is prefixed The life of Mrs. Hutchinson, written by herself (Google eBook)

[6] Socialism: Utopian and Scientific-By Friedrich Engels

Stalin's Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky, Bertrand M. Patenaude’s Faber & Faber Hardcover – 18 Jun. 2009

The historiography of Leon Trotsky has historically been a battleground reflecting larger ideological struggles. Few revolutionaries have faced such prolonged distortion, vilification, and erasure. Trotsky’s political legacy—linked to the October Revolution and the global socialist movement—continues to generate fierce scholarly and political debates. Bertrand M. Patenaude’s book, Stalin’s Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky (also published as Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary in the U.S.), engages with this contentious history especially at a time when post-Soviet liberal and conservative groups are actively trying to undermine Trotskyism as both a historical and current force. Therefore, Patenaude’s biography should be seen not just as a scholarly work on Trotsky, but also as a reflection of the ideological context in which it was created.

This review contends that Patenaude’s work plays a dual, contradictory role. It corrects significant falsehoods found in Robert Service’s widely criticized Trotsky biography, providing an important corrective. However, Patenaude’s narrative remains limited by the liberal-academic framework it is created within, reflecting many of the political and methodological biases typical of anti-Marxist history. Consequently, while the biography is sometimes sympathetic and quite readable, it ultimately fails to fully understand Trotsky’s political ambitions or the broader historical forces that influenced his life and death.

I. Patenaude’s Intervention Against the Post‑Soviet School of Falsification

Patenaude’s most notable scholarly achievement is not his biography but his scathing review of Robert Service’s Trotsky in The American Historical Review. This review, later used by the International Committee of the Fourth International in its documentation against anti-Trotskyist misinformation, revealed numerous factual inaccuracies, distortions, and methodological flaws in Service’s work. Patenaude remarked: “I have counted more than four dozen [mistakes]… At times, the errors are jaw-dropping.”

The biography by Service was found to be completely unreliable, according to Patenaude, due to errors such as confusing Trotsky’s sons, misidentifying the largest party in the First Duma, a mistaken reference to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, reversing Trotsky’s 1940 stance on U.S. involvement in World War II, and citing the wrong year of Trotsky’s widow Natalia Sedova’s death.

The Marxist author David North correctly characterized Patenaude’s review as “a damning critique of Service’s fundamental skills as a historian.” In this context, Patenaude’s contribution plays a crucial political and historiographical role: it protects the accuracy of the historical record from a surge of post-Soviet revisionism that aims to undermine revolutionary Marxism by distorting the reputations of its key figures.

II. Liberal Biography and the Limits of Method

While Patenaude’s critique of Service highlights his strengths, it also reveals the limits of his own biography. Despite having unprecedented access to Trotsky’s papers at Harvard and the Hoover Institution, Patenaude’s account is still influenced by the ideological biases of the liberal academic world. His tendency toward a novelistic, character-focused style — a trend that's becoming more common in modern biography — is not well-suited for accurately tracing the political and theoretical growth of a revolutionary Marxist.

The issue extends beyond style. The liberal biographical approach relies on methodological individualism, which simplifies political history to leaders' psychology, replacing structural analysis with anecdotes and gossip. Patenaude’s frequent digressions into Trotsky’s personal life — including a salacious story about his affair with Frida Kahlo — illustrate this trend. While this material might interest a general audience, it offers limited insight into Trotsky’s political development or the broader historical forces that influenced it.

Even more concerning are Patenaude’s unsupported political claims. He states that Trotsky "helped create the first totalitarian state,” a statement that not only has no supporting evidence but also echoes Cold War liberal stereotypes that equate Bolshevism with Stalinism. Likewise, his mention of Trotsky’s attempt to “cloak the Bolshevik coup” shows a shallow understanding of 1917 historiography and a passive acceptance of anti-revolutionary stories.

III. The Erasure of Trotskyism as a Movement

One of the most significant shortcomings of Patenaude’s biography is its almost complete neglect of Trotskyism as a political movement. The book barely mentions the Fourth International, the Transitional Programme, or the global network of militants who carried on Trotsky’s fight against Stalinism. This omission is deliberate. Recognizing Trotskyism as a vibrant movement — rather than just the tragic aftermath of a lost revolution — would force acknowledgment of Trotsky’s ongoing critique of Stalinism and his emphasis on the importance of international working-class struggle.

Patenaude heavily relies on sources from former Trotskyists who later disaffiliated, which further distorts the narrative. While these testimonies have some value, they need careful contextualization — something Patenaude seldom offers. Consequently, his depiction of the Trotskyist movement reduces it to a series of “sects” engaged in “splits and mergers," creating a caricature that hides the actual political debates that motivated the movement.

IV. The Hoover Institution and the Politics of Archival Knowledge

Patenaude’s connection to the Hoover Institution—known for its anti-Communist scholarship—is relevant to the limitations of his work. The Hoover archives hold valuable resources on the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union. However, these materials are influenced by Cold War-era ideological views that portray Bolshevism as a departure from liberal modernity. Despite his scholarly thoroughness, Patenaude’s biography still operates within this ideological framework.

This is clear in how he handles the Soviet bureaucracy and Stalinist terror. Although Patenaude highlights Trotsky’s personal tragedies—such as the killing of his family, his exile-induced isolation, and the constant danger of assassination—he does not place these events within Trotsky's own analysis of bureaucratic decline. As a result, the political significance of Trotsky’s fight against Stalinism becomes obscured by a focus on personal suffering rather than political context.

V. Conclusion: The Politics of Historical Memory

Patenaude’s Stalin’s Nemesis demonstrates notable narrative skill and occasional insights. It vividly depicts Trotsky’s last decade and serves as a needed correction to Robert Service's distortions. However, it does not fully achieve a thorough historical understanding of Trotsky’s life, politics, and legacy. Its liberal perspective, dependence on impressionistic sources, and overlooking of Trotskyism as a movement make it insufficient as a political biography.

The struggle over Trotsky’s historical image is not an antiquarian dispute. It is an ideological conflict rooted in contemporary class relations and the political needs of ruling strata. Trotsky’s programme — international proletarian revolution, workers’ democracy, and the fight against bureaucratic degeneration — remains a threat to both Stalinist apologetics and capitalist triumphalism. Any serious historiography must therefore approach Trotsky not as a tragic figure of the past but as a revolutionary whose ideas remain relevant to the present.

Readers interested in Trotsky’s life and ideas should examine his writings and prominent Marxist biographies from before the post-Soviet revisionist wave. While Patenaude’s biography offers an approachable overview, it does not replace a thorough, politically rigorous exploration of Trotsky’s revolutionary contributions.

 

 

The Milosevic Trial: William Walker’s role as provocateur

William Walker, the former head of the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) insisted in his testimony to The Hague that Slobodan Milosevic had knowledge of the events in Kosovo and should be held responsible for the atrocities carried out there.

Former Yugoslav President Milosevic is on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for crimes against humanity. He faces five counts of war crimes in Kosovo and has been indicted for another 61 counts of war crimes, including genocide, for alleged crimes in Croatia and Bosnia.

Walker’s testimony was key to the prosecution’s efforts to establish Milosevic’s guilt. He said of the accused, “His knowledge was in many respects quite detailed. I never wavered in my opinion that I was dealing with the person who was in maximum control of events in Kosovo, at least from the Serb side.”

Walker’s testimony on the alleged massacre at Racak in particular was meant to prove that Milosevic was responsible for the events in Kosovo and that the NATO bombing of Serbia was a justifiable response. Then US Foreign Secretary Madeleine Albright called Racak a “galvanising incident”, while for German Foreign Minister Joschka Fisher, “Racak became the turning point”.

To emphasis the importance of his account, judges at the Hague tribunal gave Walker nearly two days to testify. In contrast, when Milosevic asked how long he had to question the witness he was told by Judge May, “Three hours, no more: if you refrain from arguing with the witness, if you refrain from repeating the question, if you ask short questions you will be able to get more done.”

Despite this obvious bias on the part of the court, things did not turn out quite the way the prosecution wanted. Walker’s testimony served to highlight the central role he had played in proclaiming Racak as a massacre and thus paving the way for NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia.

William Walker was head of the KVM, which was set up under the control of the OSCE after an agreement between Milosevic and the US envoy Richard Holbrooke in October 13, 1998. Before becoming head of the KVM, Walker was a deputy to the Reagan administration’s Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrahams, who was implicated in the Iran-Contra affair, through which the US illegally supplied weapons to the right-wing Contras who were seeking to overthrow the Sandinista government.

Prior to his appearing at The Hague, two of Walker’s weapons inspectors had given evidence about the events in Kosovo leading up to the NATO bombing—his deputy General Karol Drewienkiewicz and Colonel Richard Ciaglinski. They had also given evidence about the alleged massacre at Racak.

What happened at Racak?

On January 15, 1999, Serbian police and army personnel, accompanied by KVM inspectors and the media, mounted an operation against ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) gunmen, whom they thought were hiding out in Racak, after ambushing and killing three policemen. The army sent in armoured troop carriers and artillery into Racak, Petroovo, Malopoljce and Renaja. Two days later, after intense fighting between the Yugoslav forces and the KLA, Drewienkiewicz and Walker visited the area. Drewienkiewicz explained how, on the way, “Walker made it clear to me that I was to adopt an extremely uncompromising attitude in this matter.” When they arrived, the KLA took them to a gully that contained 45 dead bodies.

Once the bodies had been discovered, Drewienkiewicz told the court, “Walker’s assistant rushed to the top of a hill to phone through to NATO.” At a press conference that evening, Walker announced that there had been a massacre (without mentioning the deaths of the three policemen). Shortly before the announcement Drewienkiewicz said he heard Walker on the phone to Richard Holbrooke saying, “Dick, you can kiss your Nobel Peace Prize goodbye.” Drewienkiewicz added, “I was surprised at the time that he was as specific as to refer to the event as a massacre. However, I do agree with what he said.”

Walker admitted that Drewienkiewicz had briefed him 14 hours before—the night of January 15—about fighting in the area between the KLA and the army and that three policemen had been killed in the vicinity three or four days before. He also knew on January 15 of police reports that 15 KLA militia had been killed at Racak, but at the press conference he said he disbelieved them. Film also shows him walking amongst KLA uniformed corpses.

Walker still held his press conference on January 16 without mentioning the dead policeman or the KLA and saying that the bodies were all civilians. His press statement was, he said, “totally my creation” (page 6805). Walker admitted that he was “not a crime scene investigator” (page 6801) and when one arrived—Judge Danica Marinkovic—on January 17, he refused to meet her. During his testimony, he said he had no recollection of Holbrooke or NATO commander General Wesley Clark speaking to him—“No recollection of myself talking to some of the people who have later said they talked to me.”

However, Wesley Clark does remember talking to Walker. In his book Clark describes a phone call from Walker on January 16:

“Wes, we’ve got trouble here” he began. “I know a massacre when I see one. I’ve seen them before, when I was in Central America. And I am looking at a massacre now... There are forty of them in a ditch, maybe more. These aren’t fighters, they’re farmers, you can tell by looking at their hands and their clothes. And they have been shot at close range”.

This account has been disputed by the findings of a Finnish forensics team called in to investigate the incident. The team was firstly critical of the fact that, in the haste to describe the incident at Racak as a massacre, basic crime scene procedures had not been observed. Three days after the event, the Finnish forensic team reported that at no point was the scene of the incident isolated to stop unauthorised access. The report stated, “The scene should then be photographed and videotaped, any evidence be collected and victims localised and marked at site... victims should then be placed in individual bodybags for transport to the morgue. With respect to Racak none of this was done or was done partially and improperly”. The team had no independent verification of the massacre and had to rely on information from the OSCE and European Union observers or the press. Other findings show that only one dead victim was a woman. One victim was under 15 years of age. Six had suffered single gunshot wounds. Most of the 44 were covered by multiple wounds from different angles and elevations, characteristic of a firefight rather than a close range execution. Only one had been shot at close range and no signs of post-mortem mutilations were found. The team could not confirm that the victims were from Racak.

Compare Walker’s response to Racak with his attitude to the murder of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador or the killing of teenagers in Pec by the KLA. In El Salvador Walker tried to blame the killing of the Jesuits on guerrillas dressed as soldiers. He told the ICTY, “I made an inaccurate statement, in hindsight”. When the KLA was blamed for the killing of the Serb teenagers in Pec he said, “When you don’t know what has happened, it’s lot more difficult to sort of pronounce yourself ... To this day we do not know who committed that act.” He did not exercise the same degree of caution regarding Racak.

When Milosevic tried to raise the events in El Salvador, Judge May intervened by saying: “Your attempt to discredit this witness with events so long ago the Trial Chamber has ruled as irrelevant.” And later: “This is an absurd question, absolutely absurd. Now you’re wasting everybody’s time.”

Milosevic drew attention to the fact that Walker was at the same airport, Illopango, with Lt. Col. Oliver North who was gun running to the Contras, while Walker was supposedly providing them with humanitarian aid. Walker explained this by saying, “Unbeknownst to me, unbeknownst to the State Department, unbeknownst essentially to the world, a Colonel Oliver North in the National Security Council was doing things that were eventually determined by Judge Walsh and his commission to be illegal.”

Walker’s account discredited

Milosevic continued to try and discredit Walker’s account and his interpretation of events in Racak. He asked of Walker, “Now that we are talking about Racak, in your statement you say the following: ‘As I was watching these bodies, I noticed a few things. First of all, judging by the wounds and the blood around them, and also the pools of dried blood on the land around the bodies; it was obvious that these were the clothes that the people wore when they were killed. There was no doubt in my mind that they died where they were lying. The quantity and the location of the blood on the soil in front of them, each and every one of them, was a clear indication of that’.”

Milosevic asked for a series of photos of the bodies to be shown in the correct order and asked, “Where is this blood by the bodies or by individual bodies? Where did you see traces of blood there?”

This began the following exchange:

Walker: “On that picture?”...

Milosevic: “Are there any traces of blood here anywhere?”

Walker: “I assume that’s blood.”

Milosevic: “You’re talking about pools of blood on the soil, and on the soil there is no blood at all.”

Walker: “Not in this picture.”

Milosevic: “Not on the previous picture either. Is there any blood, any traces of blood, any pools of blood here on the soil either?”

Walker: “Not on that picture.”

Milosevic: “Not even here, there is no trace of blood anywhere on the ground, and we see that there are rocks all around.”

Some of the photographs used in the trial came from one of Walker’s observers in the KVM, a London Metropolitan police inspector, Ian Robert Hendrie. Hendrie had recently given evidence to the trial regarding his trip to the “massacre site”. When asked by Milosevic if he toured the site accompanied or alone, Hendrie said that someone had shown him around. He was asked whom and he replied, “I don’t know.” Hendrie could not explain why his photographs showed only patches of blood and not pools.

In his previous testimony, the chief forensic pathologist for the ICTY, Eric Baccard, admitted the stiffness and position of the dead bodies was unusual and it was possible they were moved. From the bullet wounds he said it was impossible to tell if they were due to “accident, homicide or an armed conflict.”

In one incident Milosevic asked Walker if he knew a Canadian Historian Roly Keith, who had been with NATO for 30 years and was head of the KVM in Kosovo Polje. Walker said he did not and so could not recollect his own head of KVM in Kosovo. The reason for Walker’s selective memory was apparent when Milosevic produced a quote from Keith which contradicted Walker’s testimony as to the situation in Kosovo. Keith said, “I can testify to the fact that in February and March there was no genocide. When it comes to ethnic cleansing, I was not present nor did I see events which could be characterised as ethnic cleansing. In connection to my previous answer, I wish to state that I was witness to a series of incidents, and most of them were caused by the KLA, for which the security forces aided by the army reacted.”

Walker’s silences and evasions over the activities of the KLA were again brought out when Milosevic asked if he had read the March 12, 2000 article in the Sunday Times entitled, “CIA aided Kosovo guerrilla army”. Walker said he had not. The article explained how US intelligence agents helped train the KLA before NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia. The CIA were ceasefire monitors in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999, while they were giving the KLA training manuals and field advice.

The article also questions Walker’s role in preparing the way for NATO air strikes. “The American agenda consisted of their diplomatic observers, a.k.a. the CIA, operating on completely different terms to the rest of Europe and the OSCE, said a European envoy.” While Walker dismissed claims that he wanted airstrikes, he admitted that the CIA was involved in the countdown to them.

Walker said: “Overnight we went from having a handful of people to 130 or more. Could the agency have put them in at that point? Sure they could. It’s their job. But nobody told me”. While no proof exists that Walker was a CIA agent, his role was in many respects no different.

The article goes on to say that according to ex-CIA sources, diplomatic observers were “a CIA front, gathering intelligence on the KLA arms and leadership. One agent said: ‘I’d tell them which hill to avoid, which wood to go behind, that sort of thing’. Klorin Krasniqi, a New York builder and one of the KLA’s largest financiers said: ‘It was purely the Albanian Diaspora helping their brothers’.”

The article describes how the KLA got round a loophole that permitted sniper rifles to be exported to hunting clubs. Agim Ceku, a KLA commander, had established many contacts during the latter stages of the war through his work in the Croatian army. He said the Croatian army had been receiving help from an American company called Military Professional Resources Inc., whose personnel were in Kosovo at the time.

Walker’s testimony was another debacle for The Hague tribunal. Far too much information was released as to the real series of events that led up to the bombing of Serbia in 1999. Whether there was a massacre at Racak will need further study, although sufficient evidence has been shown for any objective observer to err on the side of caution. What is certain is that Walker played a pivotal role in providing NATO with justification for the bombing of Yugoslavia.

Obituary: Alvaro Cunhal—leading betrayer of Portugal’s 1974 revolution

By Keith Livesey and Paul Mitchell

Four years saw the death at age 91 of Alvaro Cunhal, leader of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) for more than 30 years, from 1961 to 1992. This long-serving Stalinist functionary played a crucial role in helping to save Portuguese capitalism from the revolutionary upheaval known as the “Carnation Revolution” that followed the collapse of the Salazar-Caetano dictatorship in 1974.

During the revolutionary upheaval, Cunhal acted as minister without portfolio in several provisional governments and continued as a deputy in the Portuguese Assembly of the Republic until 1987.

The death of Cunhal evoked gushing praise from Portuguese and international leaders who recognised the threat posed to international capitalism by the 1974-1975 revolution. Portuguese President Jorge Sampaio, announcing a national day of mourning for Cunhal, called him “a great man whose life is connected with the history of the twentieth century. He has his place among us in the fight against the authoritarian regime, in the revolution and the consolidation of Portuguese democracy.”

Cunhal was born November 10, 1913, in Coimbra, northern Portugal, during a period of great political and social crisis. The period of the First Republic between 1910 and 1926 witnessed eight presidents and 45 governments. A radical working class carried out a general strike in 1917 and provoked two states of siege.

In Russia, the Bolsheviks provided the leadership for a successful revolution in October 1917. It was a powerful vindication of Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. In opposition to the Menshevik conception that Russia was too economically backward for socialism, Trotsky insisted that the real dynamics of Russian development could be understood only within the context of the world economy. Consequently, the democratic tasks once associated with the bourgeois revolution could only be completed under the leadership of the working class, drawing behind it the rural masses, as a component part of a socialist revolution that must be completed on the global arena.

The Bolshevik leaders knew that the construction of socialism in impoverished and war-ravaged Russia was dependent on successful workers’ revolutions in Germany and other more highly industrialised countries. It was on this basis and with the help of the Communist International (Comintern) that the PCP was formed in 1921.

But the subsequent evolution of the PCP and all the world’s communist parties were shaped by the rise to power of a bureaucratic caste within the USSR under the leadership of Joseph Stalin. The orientation of the Comintern changed radically after Lenin’s death. The unveiling of the theory of “socialism in one country” by Stalin and Bukharin in 1924 provided the ideological foundation for the abandonment of the programme of world socialist revolution and the increasing subordination of the international workers’ movement to the Stalinist bureaucracy’s defence of its own material interests. This produced massive defeats for the working class: most catastrophic of all was Hitler’s accession to power in Germany in 1933, following which Trotsky concluded that the Soviet Communist Party and its satellite parties in the Comintern could not be reformed and called for the founding of the Fourth International to carry forward the struggle for world socialist revolution.

Stalinism and the Popular Front

Stalinism’s political disarming of the working class was also to prove disastrous in Portugal. Economic instability and an insurgent working class had produced a right-wing coup in 1926, and by 1933, influenced by Mussolini’s fascism in Italy, the formal declaration of an authoritarian “New State” by Prime Minister Antonio de Oliveira Salazar. The fascist National Union (UN) party was made the only legal party, and independent trade unions and strikes were outlawed. Salazar established strict censorship and created a vicious secret police force.

The PCP was outlawed and its leadership imprisoned or driven into exile. The party had been purged in 1929, following the Sixth Congress of the Comintern, and Bento Gonçalves, who had only joined the organisation the previous year, installed as General Secretary.

Cunhal joined the PCP in 1931 whilst studying law at university and left for the Soviet Union to attend a congress of Communist youth in September 1935. It was at this time that the Stalinist bureaucracy began to advance its policy of building “popular fronts” with “democratic” bourgeois governments and liberal-reformist elements worldwide supposedly to combat fascism and defend the USSR.

Cunhal, who came to epitomise the policy of popular frontism in Portugal became the leader of the youth organisation and joined the Central Committee of the PCP in 1936 at the age of 22.

That year marked a crucial turning point in European history. In June, mass strikes brought France to the brink of revolution. In Spain, in July, fascist military officers led by General Franco attempted a coup, sparking a workers’ uprising and precipitating civil war. By imposing the popular front policy and opposing the independent political mobilisation of the working class against all factions of the bourgeoisie, the Comintern played a critical role in defending Spanish capitalism, liquidating the Spanish revolution and making possible the victory of Franco’s fascist forces.

The Portuguese Communist Party adopted the same political line, helping to block the possibility of the Portuguese workers challenging the Salazar regime, which was able to survive the Second World War and plagued the country for another three decades.

Despite the suppression of the PCP—Cunhal spent a total of 15 years in jail—the party maintained its slavish adherence to the Stalinist two-stage theory of revolution. According to this false and disastrous conception, during the “first stage” of the revolution, which had a national-bourgeois character, the working class had to subordinate itself and its class interests to supposedly progressive bourgeois forces. The “second stage,” the socialist revolution, was put off to an ever-more-distant future.

In 1945, as a means of defending his rule in the face of increasing social agitation, Salazar introduced an amnesty for political prisoners and a limited relaxation of censorship. In the parliamentary election that year, the PCP joined the Movement of Democratic Unity (MUD), a coalition of bourgeois forces from across the political spectrum (including the extreme right). When the MUD withdrew, claiming the elections were rigged, its leadership was arrested.

In 1958, the PCP supported General Humberto Delgado, a prominent leader in the “New State,” when he contested the presidency in opposition to the official National Union candidate who won the election after widespread ballot rigging. Salazar altered the constitution in order to prevent further direct elections to the presidency.

Cunhal became secretary general of the PCP in 1961 and three years later formed the Patriotic Front for National Liberation (FPLN) with the Socialist Party and liberal bourgeois figures such as Delgado.

In 1970, Cunhal reiterated the Stalinist two-stage theory. He wrote that “at each stage of the revolution the proletariat must have a corresponding system of alliances with different classes and layers of the population... The proletariat’s allies for the socialist revolution are not the same as for the national democratic revolution.”

This was a wholesale repudiation of Marxism and the critical lessons of the twentieth century, including, above all, the Russian Revolution. It was also a forewarning of the role the PCP would play in the revolution that erupted a few years later.

The early 1970s witnessed a huge international crisis of the capitalist system. US President Richard Nixon withdrew the dollar from the gold standard and ended the Bretton Woods agreement that had underpinned the world economy since 1944, helping precipitate a severe recession.

Although the Salazar regime had done everything in its power to keep Portugal backwards and isolated, the country could not be insulated from the world economy. During the 1960s, foreign investment in Portugal trebled, mainly from the United States. By 1973, 150 companies dominated the entire economy headed by a few very wealthy Portuguese families.

The PCP and the Junta

In the 1970s, the Portuguese ruling elite confronted a massive strike wave at home and uprisings in the colonies. Nearly one half of the national budget was spent keeping 150,000 troops abroad fighting the national liberation movements in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau. Compulsory military service combined with low pay to intensify grievances in the army and stimulated an oppositional movement amongst the troops known as the “Movement of the Captains,” which later developed into the Armed Forces Movement (MFA).

On April 25, 1974, the MFA overthrew Salazar’s successor Marcello Caetano, claiming it was “interpreting the wishes of the people.” A National Salvation Council or Junta was formed, composed entirely of high-ranking military officers, with General Antonio de Spinola, the army’s second in command and a director of two of Portugal’s leading monopolies, as president.

Spinola intended to limit the coup to a simple “renovation,” but it immediately brought the masses onto the streets demanding further change. Workers began taking over factories, offices and shops, and peasants occupied farmlands. The revolutionary atmosphere spread throughout the armed forces, with soldiers and sailors marching alongside the workers, carrying banners calling for socialism.

Previously banned parties emerged from underground or exile, including the PCP and the Portuguese Socialist Party (PSP) led by Mario Soares. The more far-sighted members of the ruling elite knew the vital role these parties would be called upon to play in preventing the development of the social revolution. Cunhal was brought back from exile in Moscow and given a military welcome at the airport. He was given the second most important ministerial post in the government, a chauffeur and a bodyguard, and the PCP was given a five-storey building.

One of the critical questions posed by the revolution concerned the nature of the officers’ movement, the MFA, which had adopted the slogan of “the alliance of the MFA and the people”—a slogan never challenged by the PCP, PSP and various “left” groups. Instead, Cunhal reached a de facto agreement with the MFA, declaring it “is the motive force and guarantee of our revolution.... [T]he PCP holds that the alliance between the popular movement and the MFA is a necessary and decisive factor for the establishment of a democratic regime, a prime guarantee of the development of the revolutionary process.” The PCP newspaper Avante condemned those who called for a government of “socialist option” as “completely unrealistic.”

The MFA, while it postured demagogically, represented the armed might of the capitalist state and, potentially, at least, represented the threat of a new dictatorship. It was intent on suppressing any independent political activity by the working class—particularly when this threatened to undermine the power of the army. It declared, “No political-military organisations outside the AFM [MFA] will be permitted in the armed forces, whether they represent parties or not, since all military personnel must be integrated into their own movement.”

At the time, the International Committee of the Fourth International and its Portuguese supporters, the League for the Construction of the Revolutionary Party, demanded that the PCP and PSP break with the bourgeois parties, the state machinery and MFA, and fight for the dissolution of the army and the creation of workers, peasants and soldiers soviets.

Instead, the PCP’s Avelino Gonçalves joined Cunhal in the First Provisional Government as minister of labour to enforce labour discipline and implement the austerity programme in the MFA’s “battle for production.” The PCP exhorted workers to “Save the National Economy” and condemned any manifestation of independent activity by the working class.

Subsequent provisional governments, which included Cunhal, introduced anti-strike laws, and workers who refused to obey military orders were arrested and told they would only be reinstated “on condition they took no further part in political activity.”

The revolution betrayed

The actions of the social democrats and the Stalinists gave reaction a second wind and led to two further coup attempts in September 1974 and March 1975.

The government then approved an economic plan endorsed by the MFA that excluded “the social-democratic control of the management of capitalism,” but called for partial nationalisations, the takeover of some large and badly managed estates, and increased foreign investment.

The PCP dutifully declared that business had been “nationalised in the service of the people,” but the capitalist nationalisation proposed differed little from that carried out in many Western countries after World War II, which left economic and state power in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Nationalisation was also a method of installing state-appointed managers in enterprises that had been occupied by workers.

Elections were held on April 25, 1975, in which the PSP won nearly 38 percent of the vote, the semi-fascist Popular Democratic Party (PPD) took 26.4 percent and the PCP 13 percent. But with no sign of the promised agrarian reforms, landless agricultural workers joined the urban insurrectionary movement, seized the large farming estates and started developing them collectively. The PCP called the occupations “anarchistic” and proposed that all future occupations be controlled by the unions (which it in turn controlled).

Between June and August 1975, following the exit of the PSP and PPD from the fourth provisional government, the PCP and its allies were left in virtual control of the state and the ministries. The military wing of the PCP dominated the MFA’s Council of the Revolution.

The MFA and PCP convened a Front of Revolutionary Unity (FUR) to “institutionalise” the “pact” between the MFA and the people. FUR was a popular front set-up to betray the revolution at the most critical moment and received the support of most of the left groups who claimed its so-called “popular assemblies” were “autonomous organs of popular power” that provided “a way forward for the revolutionary process.”

These popular assemblies, in fact, functioned to destroy the independent character of the workers’ committees that had emerged and prevent moves towards dual power and the creation of soviets or workers’ councils. The assemblies were vetted by the MFA and subject to military control at all levels to ensure their “independence from all parties.” No political organisations were to be permitted in the armed forces except the MFA itself.

When these measures proved unable to contain working class resistance, the PCP-dominated fifth provisional government resigned in order to avoid a direct revolutionary challenge to bourgeois rule, along with Prime Minister General Vasco Gonçalves, a leading member of the MFA and a figure closely associated with the PCP. The PCP, along with the PSP and PPD, joined a sixth provisional government—headed by Admiral Jose Baptista Pinheiro de Azevedo—which immediately circulated plans for austerity and repression.

The crisis reached fever pitch. The sixth government and the Council of the Revolution were opposed by so many sections of society that a situation of dual power existed. But within days, the army moved in to dismantle barricades and disarm workers and soldiers with scarcely a shot being fired. “Rank-and-file” military organisations, which in the previous weeks had mobilised tens of thousands in demonstrations, dissolved in the face of some 200 commandos.

A new constitution was proclaimed on April 2, 1976, and elections for a new parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, led to a PSP victory. Almost immediately, Soares turned to the International Monetary Fund and implemented a structural adjustment programme at the behest of big business.

The Portuguese bourgeoisie weathered the revolution thanks to the betrayal of Cunhal’s PCP and its left hangers-on, who tied the working class to the bourgeois parties, the state machine and the MFA. Had the Portuguese revolution triumphed, it would have been a mighty blow to international capital and inspired social movements developing throughout the world in the 1970s. A New York Times editorial on February 17, 1975, gives some indication of the crisis at the time, declaring “a communist takeover of Portugal might encourage a similar trend in Italy and France, create problems in Greece and Turkey, affect the succession in Spain and Yugoslavia and send tremors throughout Western Europe.”

However, neither Cunhal nor the PCP had any intention of mounting a “communist takeover.” Cunhal’s political conceptions, which were essentially those of a Portuguese petit-bourgeois nationalist, were made plain in an interview he gave to Quaderni Comunisti in 1995. He absolved Stalinism and himself for the betrayals of the working class in the twentieth century. He thought that “capitalism’s potentialities were underestimated and socialism’s potentialities overestimated” and that “the way ahead may not lie in attempts to define a world-wide strategy for communists.” He blamed Mikhail Gorbachev “as the number one culprit for that great historic disaster which was the USSR’s collapse and disintegration.” He attacked the European Union from the right saying, “The major consequences of European integration for Portugal are very serious. With a policy of national capitulation, the right wing government sacrifices Portuguese interests to foreign interests.”

Today, the PCP retains its influence within the largest Portuguese trade union federation, the General Confederation of Portuguese Workers, which has played an invaluable role in imposing austerity measures promulgated by one government after another. Such is Cunhal’s real legacy.

.

1917: Before and After by Edward Hallett Carr, Macmillan,1969

“Trotsky was a hero of the revolution; He fell when the heroic age was over.”

E H Carr.

This collection of articles, reviews, and lectures primarily focuses on Carr’s assessment of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and its revolutionaries.

The items that comprise this slim volume were written before 1950, offering a welcome opportunity for a limited survey of his work and its place in the field of Soviet studies.

The themes of the lectures are broad in scope. Ranging from figures such as Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky and literary figures such as Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Like all Carr’s work, his writing style is clear and straightforward, explaining complex historical and political events in a language untainted by jargon. 

However, one major criticism of Carr’s work and perhaps the biggest charge against him is that he was only interested in writing about the victors in history. This is not true. While he did not deal with the defeat suffered by Leon Trotsky and others on the scale of, say, Isaac Deutscher, he nonetheless treated the defeated with precision and sympathy.

The first chapter, "The Russian Revolution: Its Place in History," is a well-written attempt to situate the revolution within its historical context. This is a solid piece of writing, free of the usual cynicism that permeates Soviet historiography today. Carr correctly observes that the Russian revolutionaries learned lessons from previous revolutions, including the French and English bourgeois revolutions.

The second chapter serves as a preface to a translation of the novel "What Is to Be Done?" By Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Vladimir Lenin held the book in high regard.  One of Lenin's great works, "What Is to Be Done?", written in 1902, took its name from this book. He called the author a “great Russian socialist.” This is a very sympathetic portrait of Chernyshevsky. The novel is highly thought of in academic circles. Joseph Frank wrote, "No work in modern literature, with the possible exception of Uncle Tom's Cabin, can compete with What Is to Be Done? In its effect on human lives and its power to make history. For Chernyshevsky's novel, Far more than Marx's Capital supplied the emotional dynamic that eventually went to make the Russian Revolution."[1]

Carr’s third chapter is titled "Red Rosa." As Carr admits, it is tough to do justice to Luxemburg in the space of eleven pages of text. A full-length biography and then some are needed. Luxembourg was held in high esteem amongst the Bolshevik leaders. Lenin especially commented that “Although the Eagles do swoop down and beneath the chickens fly, chickens with outspread wings never will soar amid clouds in the sky.”[2]

Carr properly designates Luxembourg as an equal of any leading Marxists of the time. She played a crucial role in exposing Eduard Bernstein’s revision of Marxism. Her Accumulation of Capital, written in 1915, was, among other things, an attack on Bernstein’s revisionism.  Luxembourg, it is true, did not hold back any criticism, especially of the Bolsheviks, if she felt it was warranted.

The paragraph below, quoted in Carr’s book, has been interpreted as a thinly veiled attack on the Bolsheviks, but I am not sure Carr reads it that way.

“The essence of socialist society consists in the fact that the vast labouring mass ceases to be dominated, but rather, makes the entire political and economic life its own life and gives that life a conscious, free, and autonomous direction. The proletarian revolution requires no terror for its aims; it hates and despises killing. It does not need these weapons because it does not combat individuals, but rather institutions, and it does not enter the arena with naïve illusions whose disappointment it would seek to avenge. It is not the desperate attempt of a minority to mould the world forcibly according to its ideal, but the action of the great, massive millions of the people, destined to fulfil a historic mission and to transform historical necessity into reality.[3]“

Carr’s fourth chapter is titled "The Bolshevik Utopia." This is a highly misleading piece of writing, as it gives the impression that Marxism has a utopian content. Given that Carr is usually very precise in his writing, this is not a mistake or slip of the pen. Carr did identify with this characterisation of the Bolsheviks. It is somewhat surprising, given that Carr would have been familiar with the decades-long struggle the Marxist movement carried out against the utopian socialists.

The Tragedy of Trotsky is by far the most interesting piece of this collection. The chapter is a multi-layer review of Isaac Deutscher’s biography of the Russian revolutionary. Carr, it must be said, was one of the first historians to carry out a significant attempt at restoring Trotsky to his rightful place in Soviet and international history. Using sources from the Russian archives, he was one of the first historians to write a detailed account of the political struggles within the leadership of the Communist Party of the USSR from 1923 to 1924.

Carr thought that there was an alternative to Stalinism in the form of Leon Trotsky and his Left Opposition. According to the Marxist writer David North, “Carr was not politically sympathetic to Trotsky. However, he brilliantly summarised and analysed the complex issues of program, policy, and principle with which Trotsky grappled during a challenging and critical period of Soviet history. Carr’s account made clear that Trotsky became the target of an unprincipled attack that was, in its initial stages, motivated by his rivals’ subjective considerations of personal power. While Carr found much to criticise in Trotsky’s response to the provocations of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, the historian left no doubt that he viewed Trotsky as, alongside Lenin, the towering figure of the Bolshevik Revolution”. [4]

Carr’s Place in Soviet Historiography

Carr was part of that generation of historians, although not a Marxist, who sought to make an objective evaluation of the October Revolution and its aftermath. As one writer commented, "not exactly a Marxist, but strongly impregnated with Marxist ways of thinking, applied to international affairs."

Carr, who worked under difficult circumstances throughout his career, had to come to terms with the debilitating effect of Stalinism on his field of historical study. According to Deutscher, “The Stalinist state intimidated the historian and dictated to him first the pattern into which he was expected to force events and then the ever-new versions of the events themselves. At the outset, the historian was subjected to this pressure mainly when dealing with the Soviet Revolution, the party strife that had preceded and followed it, and especially the struggles within the Bolshevik Party. All these had to be treated in a manner justifying Stalin as the Leader of monolithic Bolshevism”.  [5]

Since Carr’s time, there has been a distinct and traceable decline in the historical study of the Russian Revolution. The failure of today’s historians to produce an objective and intelligent account of the revolution has more to do with current politics than it does with merely poor academic standards, despite having access to archives that Carr could have only dreamed of. In fact, outside the confines of the International Committee of the Fourth International, there has been no historian who has bettered Carr’s work.

It is not within the realm of this review to examine the current state of Russian historiography; suffice it to say it is at a very low ebb. Far from being objective historical studies, many of the books appearing lately have been hagiographies, and they are also very right-wing. Many of them fail to meet even the most basic academic standards.

One such book is Robert Service’s biography of Trotsky. According to David North, “Trotsky: A Biography is a crude and offensive book, produced without respect for the most minimal standards of scholarship. Service’s 'research,' if one wishes to call it that, has been conducted in bad faith. His Trotsky is not history, but rather an exercise in character assassination. Service is not content to distort and falsify Trotsky’s political deeds and ideas. Frequently descending to the level of a grocery store tabloid, Service attempts to splatter filth on Trotsky’s personal life. Among his favourite devices is to refer to “rumours” about Trotsky’s intimate relations, without even bothering to identify the rumour’s source, let alone substantiate its credibility.[6]

In conclusion, I am not saying Carr is without flaws and limitations. His work, however, will “remain a significant and enduring landmark in historical writing devoted to the Bolshevik revolution. “It will take a very great historian to better his work.

 

[1] Joseph Frank, The Southern Review

[2] Leon Trotsky- Hands Off Rosa Luxemburg! (June 1932)

[3] Rosa Luxemburg: What Does the Spartacus League Want? (December 1918)

[4] North, David, In Defence of Leon Trotsky, Mehring Books, Detroit,2015

[5] Isaac Deutscher’s Heretics and Renegades and Other Essays (Hamish and Hamilton, London, 1955). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

[6] In The Service of Historical Falsification: A Review of Robert Service's Trotsky-David North 2009

 

 

Notes

1.           Heretics and Renegades and Other Essays, Isaac Deutscher, Hamish and Hamilton, London, 1955).

2.           EH Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1921 (three volumes, London,

3.           The Interregnum, 1923-1924 (London, 1954).