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Received: 19 January 2018 | Revised: 7 February 2018 | Accepted: 8 February 2018

COMMENTARY LANDS AND

In praise of the October Revolution

Jacques R. Pauwels

Independent Scholar The October Revolution was not a coup d’etat, and it would not have
Correspondence succeeded without the support of the majority of the Russian people;
Jacques R. Pauwels, 22 Chestnut it also benefited from the enthusiasm and support of plebeians
Avenue, Brantford, Ontario N3T 4C1, worldwide, including the United States. The Revolution did not
Canada.
produce Utopia, but many of the expectations it raised were not
Email: [email protected]
disappointed. Without the October Revolution, Russia would not
have morphed in very short time from a big but backward and
impoverished country, ravaged by the Great War, into one of the
world’s two superpowers with a relatively high standard of living;
and the colonies and semi-colonies of the imperialist powers might
not have achieved their independence. As for the Western World, it
would not have attained its high level of political and social
democracy without the major political and social reforms that were
introduced by the ruling elites in the years following 1917 to avoid
revolutions a la russe in Britain, France, and so forth. Finally, it is
also thanks to the October Revolution that the Soviet Union was
strong enough to survive the Nazi onslaught of 1941 and ultimately
to bring about the defeat of Nazi Germany—for the benefit not only
of the Russians and other Soviet peoples, for whom Hitler had
planned enslavement, but for all of Europe and the entire world.

In 1917, while still deeply involved in the so-called Great War, Russia was rocked by a twin revolu-tion. A first
revolutionary wave flooded the land toward the end of February, at least according to the Julian calendar then still in
use in the empire of the czars; but it was already March according to the modern Gregorian calendar, which was to
be introduced in Russia in early 1918. A second revolution-ary phase followed in October, that is, in November
according to the Gregorian calendar, so that this “October Revolution” was later to be commemorated in the 11th
rather than the 10th month. The revo-

lution of February/March involved the abdication of the czar as well as all sorts of remarkable demo-cratic reforms,
for example, the separation of church and state and the introduction of universal (female as well as male) suffrage,
which did not yet exist even in Britain and most other Western

Jacques R. Pauwels, author of The Great Class War 1914–1918, James Lorimer, Toronto, 2016.

Journal of Labor and Society. 2018;1–15. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/lands VC 2018 Immanuel Ness and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. | 1
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European countries. But October witnessed the advent to power of the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin. They
were Marxist socialists, but very different from the more numerous adepts of the “reformist” or “evolu-
tionary” variety of socialism, known as just socialists or social democrats. In contrast to the latter, the
Bolsheviks continued to believe in the necessity and desirability of a revolutionary transition from the
existing capitalist—and in Russia still mostly feudal—established order to a socialist society. Under
Bolshevik auspices, the Russian Revolution was radicalized, as reflected in communist measures such
as the redistribution of the land and the socialization of factories and other means of production. Yet
another important, genuinely revolutionary decision made by Lenin and his comrades was to withdraw
Russia from a war that had been dragging on for years, causing immense losses and misery for the
Russian people.
An American journalist, John Reed, a scion of a bourgeois family but a convinced socialist, wit-nessed
the turbulent events in Russia in the fall of 1917 and wrote a book about it, Ten Days that
Shook the World. Reed’s account was published in New York in 1919, and its success revealed that
workers and other wage-earners as well as many if not most farmers and countless petty bourgeois in
the United States welcomed the news of the October Revolution with great interest and genuine enthu-
siasm. This belies the widespread notion that America has always been an unassailable fortress of capi-
talism, where Bolshevism (or communism) and even socialism (or social democracy) never had a
chance of taking root.
In the United States, Western Europe, and many other parts of the world, the October Revolution
did indeed benefit from considerable sympathy and support from the members of the lower classes;
and the reasons for this were the same as in Russia itself. A first determinant was the general war wea-
riness after years of massive, futile, and interminable slaughter, known as the Great War. In view of
the intransigently bellicose attitude of all governments, escape from this hell seemed possible only via
revolution. (Conversely, in 1914 the elites had unleashed a war to chase away the spectre of revolution,
as I have argued in a book, The Great Class War 1914–1918 (Pauwels, 2016), a quarry that yielded
much material used for the construction of this essay.) Second, the plebs bitterly resented the aristo-cratic,
bourgeois, and clerical elites that in 1914 still ruled all those countries in a most undemocratic
manner, caused the war, rationalized and perpetuated it, and—at least in the case of bankers and weap-ons
manufacturers—profited enormously from it. Third, the plebeians were extremely resentful
because those same elites had been using the war as a pretext to arrest the political and social democra-
tization process that had been making remarkable (albeit slow and limited) progress since the end of
the 19th century, thanks to the efforts of the labor movement. In all belligerent countries, most if not
all of the hard-earned democratic achievements on the social as well as political level, such as the limi-
tation of working hours and the right to strike, were rolled back soon after the start of the conflict; and
wherever they existed, embryonically democratic parliamentary systems were soon replaced, de facto
if not de iure, by authoritarian and even dictatorial regimes such as those of Clemenceau, Lloyd
George, and Ludendorff. Those regimes were characterized by a drastic curtailment of freedoms and a
proto-totalitarian repression of pacifists and dissenters in general. Last, but not least, the war inflicted
ever-increasing misery on the lower classes, whose members were required to do most of the killing
and dying or, at the home front, to toil longer and longer for lower and lower wages—all of this on
behalf of a presumably sacred cause in which, blinded by a blaze of patriotic propaganda, they had
believed only very briefly during that sweltering summer of 1914. The Great War thus caused increas-ing
misery, restlessness, and seditiousness among the military as well as civilian plebeians, as was
demonstrated all too clearly by countless strikes, demonstrations, riots, and fraternizations with the
enemy.
Karl Marx had predicted that the capitalist system would inexorably pauperize the proletarians,
pushing the latter with their backs against the wall, so to speak, and that this would ultimately induce
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them to strike back and overthrow the established order by means of a revolution. In the decennia
before 1914, however, it looked as though he had been mistaken. The fate of the workers had
improved remarkably, at least in Western Europe. One determinant of that development was the pres-
sure brought to bear by the emerging socialist parties and the labor unions; this pressure had forced the
ruling elites to make concessions in the shape of democratic reforms such as the widening of the fran-
chise and the introduction of social benefits, shorter working hours, higher wages, the abolition of child
labor, and so forth. Another factor was the worldwide imperialist expansion of the capitalist system, a
European system that was morphing into a world system, to use terminology coined by Immanuel
Wallerstein: the super-exploitation of colonies such as India and Congo, and semi-colonies such as
China, yielded super-profits, of which a (modest) part was used to provide an elite of workers in capi-
talism’s Western core countries with higher wages, improved working conditions, and a better exis-
tence in general, causing that labor aristocracy to adopt a petty-bourgeois mentality—and taking the
wind out of their revolutionary sails. Under the auspices of imperialism, the misery was thus exported
—together with the revolutionary potential—to the colonies and semi-colonies, to the unhappy lands
that were later to be known collectively as the Third World. The leaders and most members of
Europe’s socialist/social-democratic parties shifted surreptitiously from Marx’s orthodox revolutionary
socialism to an evolutionary (or reformist) socialism; and it was just as discreetly that they internalized
racism, an essential component of the imperialism that enabled an improvement of the lot of an aristoc-
racy of workers in the core countries thanks to the super-exploitation of non-White workers in the colo-
nies. Indeed, the European socialists displayed no solidarity with the black, brown, or yellow denizens
in the colonies; to the contrary, socialist leaders such as Bernstein in Germany and Vandervelde in Bel-
gium revealed themselves to be champions of colonialism; they subscribed to what became known as
social-imperialism. “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” may have remained a socialist slogan, but the
reformist socialists wanted no union, and displayed no solidarity, with their colored counterparts in the
colonies.
When the Great War caused extreme misery to rear its ugly head again in Europe, even in Western
Europe, the pauperization, and the potential for revolution, revisited the imperialist heartland in spec-
tacular fashion. Even the labor aristocracy lost the privileges that had caused its embourgeoisement,
and countless reformist socialists thus reconverted to the revolutionary socialist creed. The German
workers, for example, were traumatized by the fact that not only pork—symbol of the prosperity they
had achieved in the antebellum—disappeared from their plates: even the humble but indispensable
potato had to surrender its familiar spot on their table to unappetizing turnips. Even so, it is hardly sur-
prising that the first country to experience a revolutionary explosion happened to be Russia. In that
country, where the industrialization process had not yet made much progress by 1914 and where the
plebs still consisted overwhelmingly, though not exclusively, of impoverished and illiterate peasants,
the lot of the plebeians had never improved significantly; and on the eve of the Great War, the country
was still mired in quasi-medieval social and political conditions. When the war came and made things
even worse, the thoroughly pauperized Russian lower classes were, therefore, the first European prole-
tarians to be ready for revolution. In fact, they had already displayed a readiness for revolution, and
actually made a revolution, in 1905, namely on the occasion of the war waged in that year by the czar’s
empire against Japan. That explosion of popular discontent had been smothered in blood, however,
and had yielded very little change; the Russian people continued to suffer poverty and misery. But the
situation was to become much worse after the czarist elite dragged the country into the Great War in
the summer of 1914. By 1917, the army already counted millions of casualties, and wages had declined
to half of the levels of 1913 while prices had increased to three times the levels of 1914.
At that point, Olga and Ivan decided they had had enough. The soldiers, peasants, workers, and
other plebeians urgently wanted peace as well as radical political and social reforms, and a new
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revolution broke out. The first revolutionary wave in February/March brought the abdication of the
czar plus impressive democratic reforms on the political level, above all the introduction of
universal suffrage. But the first revolutionary phase sorely disappointed the Russian people in
two crucial respects: the provisional government, led by Alexander Kerensky, a reformist socialist,
but consisting predominantly of representatives of the czarist ancien regime who abhorred
revolution, was not pre-pared to pull the country out of the war; and it also refused to give in to
the general demand for radical social and economic reforms, first and foremost a redistribution of
the land to the advantage of the peasants and to the disadvantage of the aristocratic and clerical
landowners. The small Bolshevik Party led by Vladimir Ulyanov, known as Lenin, became
extremely popular and ultimately obtained mass support because it appeared to be the only party
that was prepared to immediately conclude an armi-stice and to take the revolutionary measures
longed for by the overwhelming majority of the Russian people.
That the Bolsheviks enjoyed the support of the majority of the Russian population was
recognized by Western war correspondents in the country; John Reed was one of them. Within all
countries that were part of the Entente, however, the political, economic, and military leaders were
desperate to keep Russia as an ally against Germany and they found Lenin’s plans to make peace
as abominable as his revolutionary intentions. The leading newspapers that functioned as
mouthpieces of the Western elites, such as The Times, denounced the Bolsheviks from the start
as thieves, murderers, and/or blasphemers, denigrated them as Asiatic—preferably Mongoloid—
barbarians, blamed them for monstrous fictitious crimes, and condemned their rule as an
abominable dictatorship. In the West, Lenin and the other Bol-sheviks were also anathematized
because they declined to take responsibility for the hefty unpaid bills for weapons (and champagne
and such) that the czarist regime had ordered from British and French suppliers (Commiedad, 2016; Pauwels
The October Revolution was not a coup d’etat; it was not the handiwork of an individual, Lenin,
and a small clique of other Bolsheviks. The revolution of 1905 and the first phase of the revolution
of 1917 had not been the work of one or more individuals, either. In the years before 1914,
countless observers in Western Europe and the United States, and in Russia itself, including many
who had never heard of Lenin or the Bolsheviks, were convinced that a revolution like the one of
1905 was certain to rock the czar’s empire again soon. By early 1917, Russia was indeed overripe
for revolution, and when the cataclysm came, it was the work of the Russian people, not only in
its first phase, but also in its second one, the October Revolution. The revolution was made by
Russia’s soldiers, peasants, and workers, because they had been thoroughly pauperized: in the
long run by exploitation at the hands of the aristocratic and bourgeois elite, and in the short run—
from 1914 to 1917—by a horrible war for which they rightly held that same elite responsible. As
the Italian historian Domenico Losurdo has emphasized (Losurdo, 2006a, pp. 97–104), Lenin and
the Bolsheviks did not make the October Revo-lution, but they did take over its leadership and
steered it in a specific direction—away from Russia’s peculiar blend of feudalism and capitalism
and in the direction of socialism; and they unquestionably did so with the approval and support
of a clear majority of the people. Without massive popular sup-port, the October Revolution would
never have succeeded. And it was thanks to this revolution that Russia could finally exit the
abominable bloodbath of the Great War and that, after years of foreign intervention and civil war,
a large-scale social-economic experiment could get underway: the construc-tion of an egalitarian, socialist s
In other belligerent countries, and in some neutral ones, the Great War likewise triggered an
increasing pauperization of the plebs, affecting even the formerly complacent labor aristocracy,
and sooner or later this development inevitably yielded a potentially revolutionary situation. In
Germany, France, Britain, and Italy, by 1917 at the latest, soldiers as well as civilians had had
enough and directed the arrows of their resentment at the elites that had dragged their countries into war: po
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like Clemenceau and Lloyd George who ruled increasingly dictatorially; generals such as
Haig, Nivelle, and Ludendorff who caused their plebeian underlings to be massacred by the
millions; the cap-italists who profited handsomely from the war; and the prelates who
sanctified the war as a crusade. In those countries too, countless people longed for radical
change. The situation was pregnant with revo-lution; and the example set by the Bolsheviks
in Russia made a profound impression on those who sought revolutionary, or at least radical,
change. In France, Britain, and Italy, front soldiers as well as factory workers openly displayed
admiration and sympathy for the Russian revolutionaries; and it became obvious that they
were determined to follow the Bolshevik example to put an end not only to the murderous war
but also to the capitalist social-economic system they considered responsible for that
holocaust. In a note to Clemenceau, Lloyd George lamented in the spring of 1919 that the “war
conditions” had triggered “a deep sense not only of discontent, but of anger and revolt,
amongst the workmen,” that “the whole of Europe [was] filled with the spirit of revolution,”
and that “the whole existing order in its political, social and economic aspects is questioned by the mas
It is generally known that the Russian revolutionary precedent inspired a revolution in Germany.
But hardly anyone is aware that, within the German Empire, not only Berlin and Munich
revealed themselves to be revolutionary flashpoints, but also Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace.
In November 1918, soldiers and civilians, the latter mostly workers, established a Russian-
style Soviet there, which immediately promulgated all sorts of radical democratic changes,
including wage increases and the right to strike. That council also proclaimed that Alsace
would in future belong to neither Germany nor France but, thanks to the “triumph of the red
flag,” would constitute a free, democratic, and linguisti-cally tolerant—that is, bilingual—
republic. The predominantly German-speaking local bourgeoisie as well as the social
democrats abhorred these plans and opted for being “French rather than red”; and after the
conclusion of the armistice on November 11, they implored the French army to march at once
to Strasbourg, dissolve the Soviet, and undo its reforms. This did come to pass, with the result
that Alsace was forcibly annexed by France and the use of the German language was outlawed
there (Action Antifasciste Alsace, 2010). This kind of liberation put an end, as far as Alsace
was concerned, to a bloody conflict that continues to be lionized in conventional historiography as the “
On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, the news of the October Revolution was likewise
greeted with much enthusiasm and admiration. The United States had not become involved
in the conflict rag-ing in Europe because the American people lusted for bloodshed, but
because the nation’s power elite, consisting virtually exclusively of industrialists and bankers,
expected wonderful things from war. In 1914, America was mired in a deep recession, but the
war in Europe revealed itself to be a mighty stimulus for the economy: for American arms
manufacturers and other industrialists, it proved to be an opportunity to rake in unprecedented
profits, primarily by supplying war materiel to Britain and France. (No business could be done
with Germany, which was blockaded by the Royal Navy.) Ameri-can banks—especially J.P.
Morgan & Co, known as the House of Morgan, loaned enormous sums of money to Britain,
and it was Wall Street that managed to convince president Wilson to enter the war on the side
of the British in April 1917. This was deemed to be necessary, because at that moment the
situation looked particularly precarious for the British and the French: the revolution that had
erupted in Russia a few months earlier had drastically reduced the usefulness of that ally and
even threatened to remove the czar’s empire from the ranks of the Entente, and the French
army, bedeviled by mutinies, seemed about to collapse. In the case of a defeat, the British
would never be able to pay back the bil-lions of dollars they had borrowed, would they? This
would be a disaster for the House of Morgan and other American banks, for the American economy, and
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In the United States, too, the plebeians had to supply the cannon fodder and pay for the cost
of the war in many other ways. Poverty was widespread in the country, as it still is today, affecting
mostly, but certainly not exclusively, the Afro-Americans in their urban ghettos and the “Indians”
in their reserves. The workers’ real wages continued to be extremely low, and in the factories they
slaved away up to 12 and even 14 hr/day and 6 or 7 days/week. Security at work was virtually non-
existent, and no bill had yet put a legal end to the labor of more than two million children. Countless
American plebeians no longer believed in the hypothetical benefits of capitalism and longed for an
alternative social-economic system. Many of them joined the ranks of the country’s relatively
radical socialist party, or became anarchists. America’s socialists wanted to pull the country out
of the war; conversely, not all but most pacifists were attracted by socialism or anarchism. That
dialectic terrified the country’s elite, which had hoped that the war would also serve to divert
attention from social problems. By means of brutal repression, justified all too easily by the state
of war, they attempted to muzzle the socialists, anarchists, radical union leaders, and pacifists,
and to repress all forms of unorthodox think-ing and dissent. Symptomatic of this reflex were
quasi-totalitarian laws such as the 1917 Espionage Act and the 1918 Sedition Act, introduced
under the auspices of president Woodrow Wilson, who con-tinues to be generally but wrongly
lionized as a pious apostle of the democratic faith. The state was henceforth allowed to censor to
its heart’s content, close periodicals, and arrest and incarcerate people; and pacifists, socialists,
anarchists, and any citizens who opposed the war were execrated as traitors to their country.
It was at this delicate moment in time, in 1918, that the news of the October Revolution reached
the United States, to be welcomed by much interest and enthusiasm. John Reed’s bestselling
eyewit-ness account fanned those flames of goodwill and served as grist for the mill of the
countless Ameri-cans who, in a context of poverty, war, and repression, yearned more than ever
before for radical social-economic as well as political changes, the demise of the capitalist system,
and a rising of the socialist sun. Enthusiasm and support for the cause of the Bolsheviks was
particularly strong in the rel-atively radical American labor movement, particularly among the
members of the revolutionary union International Workers of the World (IWW) and the very numerous Americ
But surprisingly, many petty bourgeois, intellectuals, artists, and so forth were also galvanized by
the news of the red revolution in Russia. Conversely, the October Revolution was abhorred and
despised by the elite of the land, which shuddered at the thought of a similar revolutionary
conflagration in America itself. The Wall Street Journal, then already the reactionary mouthpiece
of U.S. industry and finance, sounded the alarm with front-page headlines such as: “Lenin and
Trotsky Are On Their Way!”
The Russian example infected the United States, and revolutionary unrest culminated in 1919.
In that year—and especially during its “red summer”—the country experienced countless strikes
big and small, including an unprecedented work stoppage by police in a major city, Boston. But it
never came to a revolution. This was due primarily to the way in which the authorities reacted on
behalf of the beleaguered elite, namely with merciless repression. The war had provided them with
useful weapons for that purpose, such as the Espionage Act, used by the Wilson administration to
repress whatever seemed Bolshevik. In collaboration with the media, such as the newspapers of
William Randolph Hearst, the government orchestrated a “red scare” to persuade the American
public of the dangers of “godless Bolshevism.” A. Mitchell Palmer, Wilson’s attorney-general,
ordered the arrest of thousands of “reds,” that is, supporters or sympathizers of Bolshevism,
socialists, anarchists, and other real or imaginary radicals; many of them were persecuted or
deported without due process in the infamous 1919–1920 raids named after him, the “Palmer
Raids.” The repression associated with the Red Scare was also partly privatized, that is, it was
entrusted to organizations that were simultaneously anti-democratic, anti-socialist, and anti-Semitic, but pres
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The Ku Klux Klan was the most infamous of these vigilante groups, often assaulting and even
murder-ing its victims.
The term Red Scare is misleading in the sense that it suggests that the reds were the perpetrators of
terror; in reality, the red supporters and sympathizers of Bolshevism were the victims of terror, and
they included not only the members of the big socialist party and the labor unions, but all real or
sus-pected radicals and subversive elements, for example, Jews. The latter were associated in general with
socialism, an ideology developed by Karl Marx, a Jew, and in particular with Bolshevism, in which
Jews such as Trotsky played a prominent role; as targets of harsh repression in the czarist empire, they
had much to gain from its overthrow. The concept of “Judeo-Bolshevism,” which held the Jews
responsible for the Russian Revolution and thus linked contra-revolutionary anti-Bolshevism with
anti-Semitism, had as its most infamous American apostle the industrialist Henry Ford, author of a blatantly
anti-Semitic opus, The International Jew, published in the early 1920s. Soon translated into German, it
exerted a decisive influence on Hitler, who felt called upon to exterminate Judeo-Bolshevism by
destroying the Soviet Union, the fruit of the October Revolution, a state he referred to as Rußland unter
Judenherrschaft, “Russia ruled by the Jews.”
It should not surprise us that in the United States too, it was the most oppressed and exploited
peo-ple, the African-Americans, who displayed the greatest interest and enthusiasm for the
October Revolu-tion. According to the author of an article on “Black Bolsheviks,” “Black radicals across the
States followed events in Russia with rapturous attentiveness, convinced that the victory of Lenin’s
Bolsheviks in the October Revolution held vital lessons for their own struggle for liberation”
(Heide-man, 2015). In this particularly American context, the social question also acquired a second racial
dimension, namely an anti-Hamitic (anti-black) one, and the theory and practice of White supremacy
were thus also pressed into the contra-revolutionary service of an American capitalism that felt
threat-ened by “Bolshiness.” It was not a coincidence that vigilante groups such as the Ku Klux
Klan primar-ily targeted blacks, that the “red summer” of 1919 was characterized by countless race riots, and
thousands of African-Americans were to become the victims of bestial lynchings in the years and even
decades following the Russian Revolution. During the interbellum, the Soviet Union was to serve as
an example and a source of hope for black Americans; conversely, the American champions of White
supremacy were to gaze admiringly in the direction of Nazi Germany, the country that proudly and
openly carried racial hatred—of both the anti-Semitic and anti-Hamitic variety—in its banner.
A second important reason why no revolution erupted in the United States was the considerable
disunity that reigned in the potentially revolutionary camp in general and in the socialist party in
partic-ular. At the height of revolutionary agitation, when factors such as unanimity and firm leadership migh
have been decisive, the socialist party broke up over the question of whether the revolutionary
guide-lines emanating from Moscow ought to be complied with or not. John Reed was one of the radical,
revolutionary socialists who split from the increasingly reformist party at that time. He returned
to Rus-sia to work in the Comintern, the communist International, for a worldwide revolution, but died of
typhus in Moscow in October 1920, and was buried in a tomb of honor along the Kremlin wall. In any
event, while in Russia the revolution succeeded thanks to massive popular enthusiasm and support, but
also thanks to the firm leadership provided by the Bolsheviks, in the United States the revolutionary
potential did not come to fruition. The determinants of this failure certainly included brutal state
repres-sion. As for popular support, it was considerable, but it may have been insufficient. And a final, not to
be underestimated factor was lack of unanimity among all the radical elements that could have
pro-vided the necessary leadership and organization; in other words, America’s revolutionary movement
lacked a Bolshevik Party and a Lenin.
The success of John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World reflects the fact that the October
Rev-olution generated enormous enthusiasm in Russia itself, in the United States, and in the rest of the
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world. But was that enthusiasm justified? What did Lenin and the Bolsheviks achieve? Did the October
Revolution not only shake, but also change the world? And, if so, how? For better, or for worse? In
the movie Reds (1981), inspired by Reed’s book, John Reed himself, brilliantly portrayed by Warren
Beatty, ends up disillusioned and, as could be expected from a Cold War-era Hollywood production, it
was implied that it was Lenin himself who brutally crushed the grand illusions of 1917 with his
alleg-edly authoritarian conduct. An initially democratic revolutionary movement was presumably betrayed
by its Bolshevik leaders, thus degenerating into a nasty dictatorship. This was pure Cold War
propa-ganda, however, and the historical truth is very different: the October Revolution was not only not a
coup d’etat carried out by Lenin and a handful of accomplices, but a spontaneous, democratic
move-ment, which generated many important democratic achievements on the political and, even more so,
social-economic level.
The primordial achievement of Lenin and the Bolsheviks was this: they put an end to Russia’s
involvement in the Great War in which millions of Russians had perished. That accomplishment was
very much welcomed by Russia’s polloi, but it perturbed an elite of statesmen in London, Paris, and
Washington, because it meant that they lost an important ally in the war against Germany; they,
there-fore, excoriated Russia’s Bolshevik revolutionaries and supported the country’s counter-
revolutionaries. (It is a pathetic absurdity of Western historiography that Lenin, who brought the
Rus-sian people the peace they longed for, is portrayed as a dictator, while Western statesmen such as
Churchill, who wanted to keep the Russians in the war against their will and, therefore, supported
anti-Bolshevik, reactionary, and bellicose elements, are extolled as wonderful democrats.) Under Bolshevik
auspices, moreover, major social-economic reforms were soon enacted, whose democratic nature and
importance cannot possibly be denied: first and foremost, a redistribution of the land to the
disadvant-age of the large landowners of the nobility and the Orthodox Church and to the advantage of the bu
of the peasants, hitherto still quasi-serfs. The October Revolution spelled the end of the autocratic,
feu-dal, virtually medieval established order and ushered in the rapid modernization of Europe’s most
backward great power. This also brought about the demise of archaic curses such as illiteracy
and reli-gious obscurantism. It did not take long before there was work for everybody and most, if
not all Rus-sians enjoyed benefits such as decent housing, free education and health care, and old-age pensi
The concomitant modernization (via mechanization and collectivization) of agriculture and the
large-scale industrialization were admittedly far from painless, but also achieved impressive
results in rela-tively little time (Tauger, 2017). And much was done for—and by—Russia’s women: employmen
opportunities, equal pay for equal work, free childcare for working mothers, and legalization of divorce
and abortion (Trudell, 2017).
It cannot be denied that the revolution and the ensuing revolutionary changes were accompanied
by much violence and bloodshed. However, we should keep in mind that the birthplace of the
revolu-tion was czarist Russia, a state infamous for its brutal treatment of real or perceived dissidents; it is
unsurprising that the revolutionary enemies of czarism would exact retaliation in kind for this
merci-lessness. Moreover, as the American historian Arno Mayer has explained in a remarkable book, The
Furies, the revolution was in many ways the offspring of the First World War, that is, the greatest
slaughter the world had ever seen, and this holocaust proved to be the catalyst of an unprecedented
and widespread brutalization; it was inevitable that this found its terrible reflection in sadistic excesses
on the part of most if not all contestants in the Russian Revolution as well as the ensuing civil
war, for-eign interventions, and international conflicts. Mayer has also convincingly demonstrated that, as in
case of the French Revolution, the terror was in fact mostly not the work of the revolution itself, but of
the reaction against the revolution, of the counter-revolution (Aptheker, 1981, pp. 89–100; Beer, 2017;
Mayer, 2000). In recent decades, leading American and international historians and other academics—
for example, Robert W. Thurston, J. Arch Getty, and Mark Tauger—have also demonstrated that
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countless crimes for which the Bolshevik/communist leaders of revolutionary Russia and its
successor-state, the Soviet Union, have been blamed, were grotesque inventions. Many of these fabrications
already originated at the time of the revolution itself, they were concocted by the counter-revolutionary
“Whites” or by the governments and media of the Western powers, who hated the Bolsheviks for
many reasons, as we have already seen. The American press mogul William Randolph Hearst was one
of the prime purveyors of such fabrications. Other horror stories, for example, the myth of the
deliber-ately orchestrated famine in Ukraine, were conjured up in the thirties by the propaganda services of th
Nazis, archenemies of the Soviets; they were to be recycled later, in the context of the Cold War, by
anti-Soviet experts of the CIA or the British secret services, such as Robert Conquest, all too often in
collaboration with Ukrainian and other Eastern-European Nazi collaborators who fled from the Soviet
Union in 1944–1945 to escape punishment for their abominable misdeeds. More recently, Grover Furr
has demonstrated, via a meticulous analysis of the footnotes in Timothy Snyder’s famous book,
Blood-lands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, the falsehood of every single one of the allegations about
Soviet crimes featured in that book; in an earlier opus, Furr had already demonstrated the baselessness
of all of Khrushchev’s infamous claims about the alleged crimes of Stalin (Furr, 2014, 2011). Finally,
it must be acknowledged that the Soviet Union was a beleaguered fortress from the beginning until the
end of its history, and that this perennial external threat was responsible for much of the internal
oppres-sion. Michael Parenti, for example, has aptly observed that the Soviet system was a form
of “siege social-ism,” a beleaguered and therefore unattractive and grim kind of socialism (Parenti, 1997, pp.
times of foreign conflict, countless other countries similarly deemed it necessary to curtail the freedoms
of their citizens, for example, all belligerent countries in World War I and more recently, in the context
of the so-called War against Terror, the United States with its repressive Patriot Act.
The October Revolution also brought the Russian people or, more precisely, the various peoples of
the former czarist empire and the later Soviet Union, many benefits in the long run. It has been argued
that Soviet communism, successor to the Bolshevism of the time of the revolution itself, was
ineffi-cient. This is belied by the undeniable fact that communism managed, within the space of merely three
decades after 1917, to transform the most backward major country in Europe into one of the world’s
two superpowers, and this despite the enormous losses inflicted by the unprecedentedly murderous and
destructive Nazi aggression in 1941–1945—an aggression, incidentally, which the country would
never have survived without the support of the major part of its population. By 1947, the standard of
living in the Soviet Union was considerably higher than in 1917, and it continued to rise during
the fol-lowing decennia; it was admittedly never as high as that of the well-to-do in the richest
capitalist coun-tries, but it was certainly considerably higher than that of the majority of most black and many
Americans and of the millions, if not billions, of denizens of the countries of a Third World that also
happened to be capitalist, such as India, Indonesia, and most countries of Africa and Latin America.
Millions of children and grandchildren of desperately poor and illiterate Russian peasants had become
not only reasonably well-off industrial or agricultural workers but also engineers, teachers, physicians,
nurses, and so forth. The kind of widespread, desperate poverty that was so typical of Russia before
the October Revolution was able to make a comeback there in the 1990s, that is, at the time when
capi-talism was restored under the auspices of Boris Yeltsin. The latter orchestrated what may well have
been the biggest swindle in world history: the privatization of the enormous collective wealth, built up
between 1917 and 1990, via superhuman efforts and untold sacrifices, by the labor of the Soviet people
(Alleg, 2011).
If the Soviet Union disappeared, it was certainly not because its citizens longed for its demise. In a
1991 referendum, no less than three quarters of them voted to preserve the Soviet state. And they did
so for the simple reason that it was to their advantage. Indeed, the demise of the Soviet Union,
pre-pared by Gorbachev and achieved—in a most undemocratic manner—by Yeltsin, turned out to be a
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catastrophe for the majority of the Soviet population. (Gorbachev may have been lionized in the West,
but in Russia he has been widely despised.) The collapse of the Soviet Union was partly due to the
gigantic cost of an armament race the Soviets had not wanted and ultimately could not afford, but also,
and probably primarily, to disunity and conflict within the leadership of the Communist party. (This is
argued convincingly in the 2010 book of Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny, Socialism Betrayed:
Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union 1917–1991.) It is thus not surprising that even now, a majority
of Russians regrets the disappearance of the Soviet Union and continues to admire Lenin and Stalin,
and that in former East-Bloc countries such as Romania and East-Germany, many if not most people
regret the passing of the not-so-bad times before the fall of the Berlin Wall. In those formerly commu-
nist countries, there is now admittedly more freedom but, as a denizen of Germany’s eastern reaches
has sarcastically quipped, this freedom amounts mostly to “a being free of employment, of safe streets,
of free health care, of social security.” In Russia, and in the former satellites of the Soviet Union,
opin-ion polls have revealed that a significant percentage, if not outright majorities, of the population
con-sider that life was better under communism (Commiedad, 2016; Gowans, 2011, 2013). A major
determinant of this nostalgia is the fact that vital social services such as medical care and education,
including higher education, are no longer free of charge or very inexpensive, as they used to be;
con-versely, some practices usually associated with nasty 19th-century capitalism, such as child labor, have
been able to make a comeback in former Soviet republics such as Uzbekistan. Women also lost many
of the considerable gains they had achieved under communism, for example, with respect to employ-
ment opportunities, economic independence, and affordable childcare (Kergel, 2015, pp. 20–21).
The October Revolution took aim at a capitalism that had started to spread all over the globe in its
imperialist manifestation. A relatively small number of industrialized European countries, as well as
the United States and Japan, were taking control, either directly or indirectly, of the rest of the world.
And this implied that millions of inhabitants of colonies such as India and semi-colonies such as China
were oppressed, exploited, and in some cases even partly or entirely massacred to provide the capitalist
core countries with raw materials, markets, investment opportunities, rich agricultural lands, and cheap
labor. A British economist, John A. Hobson, had already drawn attention to this phenomenon in 1902
and invented a name for it, “imperialism.” But it was Lenin who was to formulate the theory of this
new manifestation of capitalism. He did so in 1916 in a book entitled Imperialism, the Highest Stage
of Capitalism. Led by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the October Revolution challenged not just capitalism
but capitalism in its imperialist manifestation; it constituted not merely a backlash against the
oppres-sion and exploitation of the proletarians in Russia itself and in the Western core countries
of the capi-talist world system, but also against the imperialist exploitation of the predominantly dark-skinned
denizens of the colonies and semi-colonies, in what was later to be called the Third World. This was
something that the socialist and social-democratic parties and the labor unions of imperialist countries
such as Britain, France, the United States, Belgium, and so forth had never done. Those reformist
par-ties indeed happened to represent the labor aristocracy that profited in many ways from the exploitation
of the colonies. They felt little sympathy, and demonstrated no solidarity, with the dark-skinned
inhabi-tants of the distant colonies of their fatherlands; similarly, most American socialists had internalized
White-supremacist ideas and did not give a fig about the fate of “niggers” or “Injuns.”
The Russian Bolsheviks, on the other hand, labored with word and deed for the emancipation of
the allegedly inferior yellow, brown, and black colonial peoples. The revolutionary experiment in
Rus-sia functioned as a beacon for the oppressed people of India, China, and Vietnam, and inspired
count-less personalities—not only communists, but also nationalists—who were to morph into leaders of the
struggle for freedom in their countries, such as Ho Chi Minh, Mao Ze Dong, Sun Yat Sen, and Mus-
tafa Kemal (a.k.a. Ataturk), as the Italian historian Luciano Canfora has pointed out (Canfora, 2013,
pp. 96–97).
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Moscow provided freedom fighters in the colonies with not only moral but also material support,
and that was to bear fruit in the years immediately after World War II. In stark contrast with the
situa-tion today, it was then still generally acknowledged that the victory against Hitler’s Third Reich was
due first and foremost to the Soviet Union, and that this achievement represented a victory of anti-
imperialism over imperialism. Independence movements and national revolutions in the colonies were
thus encouraged and emboldened, and it was in this context that most colonies were soon to achieve
their emancipation from colonial rule. Already in 1947, for example, London had to let go of the jewel
in the crown of British colonialism, India. The reason for that was not the non-violent resistance
embodied by Gandhi, who was despised and ignored by Churchill, but the fact that the leaders of
Brit-ain, a country much weakened by the war, realized that it was impossible to triumph—at least not in
the long run—against armed freedom fighters who could rely on the support of the Soviet Union
(Losurdo, 2010). In Vietnam too, first the French colonial masters and, years later, the neo-colonial
Americans, were forced to withdraw after a humiliating defeat at the hands of freedom fighters who
enjoyed the support of Moscow as well as the overwhelming majority of their own people.
The October Revolution integrated the ethnic minorities, regardless of skin color, into a multi-
ethnic state, admittedly—and inevitably—dominated by its major, Russian component, and that Soviet
state labored from start to finish for the emancipation of the millions of people who were oppressed
and exploited by Western colonialism. The contrast with the American Revolution is striking: of this
revolution—arguably not a real revolution, but a rebellion of the colonial elite against the government
in London—it can be said that it achieved liberty and democracy for the exclusive benefit of a White
and mostly English-speaking minority, in other words, that it established a kind of “Herrenvolk-
democ-racy,” as Domenico Losurdo has called it (2006b, 216ff). Conversely, the American
Revolution ex-tegrated the black and so-called red population: in the newborn United States, the blacks remain
slaves, property of the champions not only of liberty but also of White supremacy, such as Washington
and Jefferson; and the “redskins” were systematically robbed of their land and, according to the motto
“the only good Indian is a dead Indian,” nearly exterminated in what an American historian, David E.
Stannard, has described as the American holocaust (Stannard, 1992). Contempt for presumably inferior
colored people was destined for a long career in the United States. Incidentally, it was an American,
the “scientific racist” Lothrop Stoddard (1883–1950), who referred to the allegedly inferior non-Whites
as “under-men” in a book published in 1920, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Suprem-
acy; this term was to be eagerly adopted by Hitler and the Nazis in an infamous German version,
Untermensch. Also typical is the fact that during the Vietnam War, not only freedom fighters, but also
women and children, were despised by the Americans as Untermenschen and slaughtered—in May Lai
and in countless other cases—according to the motto “the only good gook [Vietnamese] is a dead
gook.”
In the land that is the fruit of the American Revolution, even today the emancipation of the black,
African-American population is far from complete. If some improvement did belatedly occur in this
respect, namely after the Second World War, this development is to be credited, at least indirectly, to
the child of Russia’s October Revolution, the Soviet Union. Why? The systematic discrimination and
the frequent lynchings that were the lot of blacks, primarily but not exclusively in the southern states,
only came to an end in the 1960s, in the context of the Cold War. America’s system of segregation
contrasted dramatically with the situation in the Soviet Union, a multi-ethnic country that did not
dis-criminate on the basis of skin color and whose constitution specifically barred racial discrimination.
“Here, I am not a Negro but a human being for the first time in my life ... I walk in full human dig-
nity,” declared a famous African-American, the singer Paul Robeson, during a visit to Russia (quoted
in King, 2011). And while Washington proved to be a devoted friend of the South African Apartheid
regime, for example, helping it to locate and arrest Nelson Mandela, Moscow was considered by that
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regime to be its greatest international foe. It was in the hope of minimizing the embarrassment thus
caused internationally, especially in the newly independent—and mostly non-aligned—nations of Asia
and Africa, that Washington finally started to treat its own black people as humans and as citizens.
(With the demise of the Soviet Union, however, this factor ceased to play a role, and this explains
why, since then, no further progress has been achieved in the direction of the emancipation of
African-Americans, not even during the eight years of Obama’s presidency.)
In Latin America, the October Revolution likewise served as a shining example and source of
inspiration for countless people and contributed to the improvement of their lot. The desire and
deter-mination to bring about far-reaching revolutionary change spread very soon from revolutionary Russ
to that part of the world where, ever since the Spanish (and Portuguese) conquest, the majority of the
population—mostly “Indians,” blacks, mestizos, and other non-Whites—had been the object of brutal
oppression and exploitation; in other words: where a long process of pauperization had created a fertile
soil for revolution. And indeed, at the end of the Great War, Latin America, like Europe, seemed to be
on the brink of a revolutionary explosion. In January 1919, Argentina experienced a “tragic week” of
strikes and demonstrations that were suppressed in bloody fashion by the police. That eruption was not
the result of a Bolshevik conspiracy, as the authorities claimed, but was certainly inspired by the events
in Russia. In the same context, hundreds of strikes occurred in neighboring Chile between 1917 and
1921. In the town of Puerto Natales, in distant Chilean Patagonia, protesting and striking workers even
came to power, but the army intervened to restore order, as the saying goes, and executed some of the
leaders of the rebellion. Mexico, Cuba, and Colombia were likewise shaken by waves of unrest and
strikes. In all these cases, the elite reacted to the mostly peaceful demonstrations and strikes with
repression, all too often brutal and bloody, which confirms Arno Mayer’s thesis that the counter-
revolution has tended to be much more sanguinary than the revolution. But sometimes more moderate
elements within the traditional oligarchies wisely decided that it was safer to throw oil on the
revolu-tionary waves by making concessions in the shape of modest political and social reforms. In the ear
twenties, countries such as Chile thus witnessed the shortening of the work week, the introduction of
pensions and paid holidays, and other forms of social benefits, whereby it was clearly hoped that this
would “prevent unrest among the workers” (Bethell, 1986, pp. 357–360; Williamson, 1992, pp. 317).
For these much-needed improvements in the miserable lot of the Latin-American workers, Lenin and
the Bolsheviks also deserve credit. For it was their example and their influence that had transformed
the traditionally meek proletarians of South and Central America into a militant host that terrified the
elites and thus achieved, for the very first time, some progress in the direction of democracy.
Contrary to what we hear again and again from the mainstream media and historians, the example
of the October Revolution, and the efforts of the state that it gave birth to, the Soviet Union, achieved
a lot for the cause of freedom and democracy, not only in Russia itself but also in the Third World.
Last, but certainly not least, Western Europe as well as non-European Western countries such
as Can-ada owe a great deal of their democracy and prosperity to this revolution. In 1917, 1918, and 1919, t
widespread and increasing pauperization caused by the Great War brought about revolutionary
situa-tions not only in Russia but also in Central and Western Europe. Virtually everywhere, the military
was plagued by soldiers’ mutinies and fraternizations with the enemy, while on the home front the
civilians demonstrated, rioted, and went on strike. In the case of Germany, a genuine revolution
erupted, which was to be smothered in blood by the new, presumably democratic government,
domi-nated by social democrats, and the army. But the authorities simultaneously found it necessary to
respond to the widespread demand for change by making important concessions in the shape
of far-reaching political as well as social reforms. Those reforms were reflected in the constitution
of the Wei-mar Republic, a new German state that revealed itself to be one of the most progressive and dem
countries on earth. In France and Britain, revolutionary situations likewise arose in 1918–1919. It was
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to take the wind out of these revolutionary sails that the ruling elites rushed to introduce significant
political and social reforms such as the 8-hr workday. Thus, they not only restarted, but even fast-forwarded, a
democratization process that they had arrested, and even rolled back as much as possible,
in 1914. The French and British elites abhorred these democratic reforms, and they would never have
sponsored them if they had not been terrified by the alternative scenario, namely a real revolution, a
revolution a la russe. The same can be said about the major democratic innovations hurriedly intro-duced in 1918–
1919 by the ruling elites of Belgium as well as the neutral Netherlands and Switzerland,
where the conflict had also pauperized the plebs and produced a real or perceived revolutionary situa-tion. As the
English historian Eric Hobsbawm has written in this context, “anything was better than
Bolshevism” for the defenders of the bastions of capitalism, who feared that the end was near (Hobs-bawm, 1994,
pp. 331–332). It cannot be denied that the wave of reforms introduced at the end of
World War I constituted a major step forward in the process that eventually provided Western Europe
with a remarkably high level of democracy and prosperity. It is similarly undeniable that these reforms
would not have been enacted, so that this happy result would never have been achieved, if the elites
that godfathered them had not been so terrified by the October Revolution (Pauwels, 2016, Chapter
28).
The child of the October Revolution, the Soviet Union, also made contributions to the cause of
democracy and freedom that are not to be underestimated. For example, it cannot be denied that it was
the Soviet state that, during the Second World War, made the greatest contribution to the victory over
Nazi Germany. Without the October Revolution, which metamorphosed the still overwhelmingly feu-dal Russian
Empire into the Soviet Union, this achievement would not have been possible. In 1914,
the strength of czarist Russia was grossly overestimated by friend as well as foe; conversely, in 1941,
when Nazi Germany attacked the country, the strength of the Soviet Union was grossly underesti-mated. Not only
in Berlin, but also in London and Washington, the army chiefs were convinced that
the Wehrmacht would cut through the Red Army “like a hot knife through butter” and that Hitler’s
Blitzkrieg in the east would conclude after a maximum of 8 weeks with a smashing German triumph
(Pauwels, 2015, pp. 65–66). Thanks to the October Revolution and the subsequent extremely rapid
industrialization of the country, however, the land of the Soviets had become a first-class military
power, as the Nazi invaders were to find out, most spectacularly in Stalingrad. An American expert in
the field has even gone as far as to state that it is unlikely that the Soviet Union would have survived
the Nazi onslaught if its system had not been the one produced by the Russian Revolution under Bol-shevik
auspices, that is, a communist one (Lieberman, 1985, p.71). And let us not overlook the fact
that even Western Europe owed its liberation from Nazi tyranny to the Soviets. It was the fact that
almost ninety percent of the Nazi armed forces were chained to the Eastern Front that enabled the land-ings in
Normandy and the subsequent successes of the Americans, British, Canadians, and so forth, on
the Western Front, as General Eisenhower candidly admitted on one occasion (Pauwels, 2015, p. 124).
Let us return to the theme of the social and political reforms that brought Western Europe an
unprecedented measure of democracy in the 20th century. The first wave of these reforms rolled in
after the First World War and would not have occurred without the October Revolution. The aftermath

of the Second World War witnessed the inflow of a second wave of political and especially social
reforms, which created the so-called welfare state. For that hefty dose of democracy, much credit also
goes to the October Revolution and the Soviet Union. As Domenico Losurdo observes, “Sans la
October revolution ... one cannot understand the developments and, even earlier, the advent
de l’Etat social en Occident. ” (“Without the October Revolution ... we cannot understand the develop-ment or, even
earlier, the emergence of the Welfare State in the West”) (Losurdo, 2007, p. 122). The
victory of this socialist and anti-imperialist state against capitalist and imperialist Nazi Germany
sparked an enormous amount of interest in, and enthusiasm for, the socialist counter-system of
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capitalism, of which Nazism, like fascism in general, had been a manifestation. The elites of countries such as Britain
were again greatly alarmed and, for the sole purpose of avoiding revolutionary trouble, hastily introduced democratic
reforms they abhorred but had the merit, from their point of view, of pla-cating the restless plebeians. We can thus
understand how it was a most conservative politician, Lord Beveridge, who was the godfather of Britain’s welfare
state. A major dose of democracy was adminis-tered in other Western countries for the same reason. And it was
the need to compete with the Soviet Union in the context of the Cold War that caused the elites of the Western world
to continue to pamper their plebeians with generous social services. For the unprecedentedly high degree of political
as well as social democracy it was privileged to enjoy after 1945, the population of Western countries should thus
be grateful to the Russians and other peoples of the former czarist empire, who made the October Revolution, and
to Lenin and his Bolsheviks, who provided the indispensable leadership.

The implosion of the Soviet Union around 1990 relieved the Western elite of the need to be kind and generous
to its plebeians. It became possible to start dismantling the welfare state with its unprece-dentedly high degree of
political and especially social democracy, and to launch a great leap backward to the conditions of the unbridled
capitalism of the 19th century, with plenty of unemployment, under-paid precarious employment, and little or no
social services (Pauwels, 2016, 550ff; Petras, 2012).
“Capitalism with a human face,” which had emerged, Aphrodite-like, from the foam of two postwar waves of political
and social democratization, regressed to its nasty primordial persona, to “capitalism in your face,” as Michael Parenti
has put it (Parenti, 1997). But while this process generates fabulous riches for a minority of the population, it involves
an increasing pauperization of the majority, which is likely to yield unrest, seditiousness, rebellion, and—if Marx was
right—revolution. Will history repeat itself? Will there be another Red October?

ORCID

Jacques R. Pauwels http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2981-6145

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How to cite this article: Pauwels JR. In praise of the October Revolution. Journal of Labor and
Society. 2018;00:1–15. https://doi.org/10.1111/lands.12327