Monday 13th November

The battle for Paschendale had just started, but hundreds of miles away events far more important were happening.  The Russian Revolution was starting.  Well actually, these things can rarely be fixed to a specific date.  In a way the Russian Revolution started in 1905, twelve years earlier.  That revolt was crushed, but it did not kill the idea, and Lenin and Trotsky went into exile, and started planning.  The World was at War, in February the already shaky Russian Tsar abdicated and a provisional Government took over – but local Soviets were formed by the Bolshevicks and a power struggle ensued against a background of terrible defeats by the Russian Army on the Eastern Front.

There was a civil war which the Red Army eventually won.  A peace was concluded speedily with Germany and Soviet Russia was established.

And yet….in the news, practically nothing.  Why is that?  Okay, the Revolution eventually failed in the 1990’s, but it was still a monumental event.  In many ways it was the constant fear of Revolution in the West which allowed change to take place here.  Without the Russian Revolution we may have still have had the old Tory world of deference and mass poverty.  Our politicians always had one eye on Russia.

I have read extensively of the Russian Revolution.  It still fascinates me.  And almost the best read is actually Solzhenitsyn.  His series ‘The Red Wheel’  is a wonderful triumph.  He only completed three books before he died, taking us from the start of the war from a Russian perspective and into April 1917.  But the author takes us into the lives of the rich and powerful and also ordinary people.  It is fiction, but seems more real than the dry Historical tomes available.

And even today, the shadow of the Russian Revolution still hovers just over the Horizon.  The fear of ‘the mob’, the realisation that you can only trample on people’s faces for so long.

Unless you understand History, you are bound to repeat it….