Socialism in Greece before the October Revolution

Posted on June 10, 2012 by Mike

Originally written in June 2008 for greeklish.org; revised and expanded June 8-10, 2012.

Some time ago, I picked up a book called The Socialism of To-day from a local antiquarian bookseller.  The book was published by Henry Holt and Company in 1916 by members of a committee of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society and purported to be “the first international and comprehensive source-book dealing with the Socialist movement in any language.” Strangely enough, the copy that I procured is actually the former property of the St. Charles Seminary Library in Carthagena, Ohio, which apparently had a rather extensive collection of holdings regarding Marxism. (I know this because I now own a number of such discarded volumes from the collection of the now defunct seminary.)

An appealing feature of the above-noted volume is the fact that it was published just a year before the Russian Revolution and my natural inclination was to flip immediately to the section entitled “Russia and Finland” (Part I, Section II, Chapter VI) and review the authors’ assessment of Lenin and company on the eve of the birth of the USSR.  It is actually Kerensky and not Lenin who dominates the 7½ pages devoted to Russia, the latter of whom is referred to only in passing on page 98 through the collective reference of six deputies of the Duma known as the “Lenin followers.”

The movement in America garners extensive coverage in this book.  Entire sections are devoted to the efforts of American socialist organizations in addressing vital topics of the day such as the then-burgeoning tensions involving immigrant workers and racial and ethnic minorities.  The narratives therein clearly show the care and attention that America’s radical left was willing to devote to these matters many decades before the American government offered anything other than relative indifference and complete disregard.  Eugene Debs and Daniel De Leon are mentioned in these sections, highlighting their integral roles in the organization of American workers and activists.

Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Otto Bauer feature prominently in an extensive section of the book entitled “The Proposed General Strike for the Equal Suffrage in Prussia” (Part II, Chapter II).  Included here are addresses and resolutions by Luxemburg, et al. and and editorial summary from Vorwaerts (Vorwärts).

I was pleasantly surprised to find material dedicated to the movement in Greece as part of the chapter entitled “Roumania, Bulgaria and Greece” (Part I, Section I, Chapter IX).  The piece chronicles the struggles of the early socialist movement in Greece, highlighting the work of Dr. Dracoules. Eleftherios Venizelos merits only a passing mention in the piece, although the two decades following the publication of this volume would see the political career of Venizelos in a succession of high highs and low lows…often to the collective detriment of the the Greek people.

Reproduced below are pages 188 through 190 of The Socialism of To-day in their entirety.  This text has been reproduced in accordance with Fair Use provisions.1

GREECE

Elefthérios Venizélos

Greece has experienced a rapid industrial development during the last 15 years. As far back as the year 1885, Dr. Dracoules began with his propaganda work. In 1893, as leader of the Greek Socialist Party, he secured 4,000 votes in Athens, and in 1901 he was elected to the Greek Parliament, where he served several years.

Attempts have often been made during the past few years to establish a consolidated economic or political organization, but up to the present without any satisfactory results. This regrettable state of affairs may be attributed to the fact that emigration is increasing day by day, and it is just the most skilled and intelligent workers who are driven from their homes on account of their unfortunate political and economic conditions. At any rate, the constant agitation of a more progressive body has already had a great influence upon public opinion, and it is to-day generally recognized that the present conditions are untenable.

It was in 1909 that the military arose and swept away the existing government. The movement was supported by a great mass of the people, because an improvement in their conditions was hoped for as soon as new members were elected to the government. The new government relied to a certain extent upon the Socialist or semi-Socialist elements which had arisen from the Dracoules propaganda, and had developed a program “of struggle against the plutocracy.” Venizelos, the skillful prime minister, succeeded in turning a part of the movement to his purposes, at the same time that he was building up the Balkan League against Turkey inspired by the idea–launched by the Socialists–of a confederation of all the nations of the peninsula.

The government also succeeded in serving their own financial interests under the cloak of a propaganda campaign against modern capitalism. The people were forced to put up with this because they were helpless and disunited. The new political power offered brutal opposition to any attempt on the part of the workers to organize. Dr. Dracoules, in 1912, secured 12,000 of the 48,000 votes of Athens, and was almost elected in another district where he was also candidate. Nevertheless, the propaganda and the rising number of votes for the new movement resulted in a small progressive group in Parliament pushing forward with the labor laws.

In the meantime a Socialist weekly paper was established for the purpose of furthering the propaganda and organization work systematically. This was the first necessity–having regard to the great disruption in the existing groups. There is a very mixed “Labor Federation of Athens and Piraeus,” to which 17 industries belong, whilst 1 yellow organization has compromised 14 groups since 1910. Some 15 organizations, which are naturally still weak, both numerically and financially, belong to a third tendency. They represent no unity, it is true, but there are hopes of building up modern organizations with these as a basis. The followers of Dracoules created a labor league in 1909, which comprised two separate organizations–one Socialist Party and one trades-union center. This league has organizations in several towns. It propagates an understanding between the workers of the other Balkan States, hoping to put an end to the race hatred which exists.

Postscript:

Over a century later, the people of Greece, as well as those throughout Eastern Europe and the Balkan Peninsula, have endured death and mayhem on shockingly grand scales. Invasions, occupations, pogroms and genocides – wrought by the forces of fascism and imperialism – have perpetuated the kind of ethnic discord mentioned in the concluding sentence of the above article. Moreover, Greece itself has struggled through the most trying period since the fall of The Junta, suffering through corruption, riots, economic plundering led by the United States and IMF and widespread unrest throughout the cities and the countryside. Surprisingly, Marxism is still a rather popular “boogeyman” used to cajole working people into supporting status quo parties like PASOK as well as those of the Right, including New Democracy and the Neo-Nazis known as “Golden Dawn.” Nevertheless, the Left remains alive and well in Greece although the diverse mosaic of parties and organizations is – at least at the time of this writing – so fragmented and unorganized that imminent victory by a united front of socialist organizations remains unlikely, at least for the near future.

1. Since my original transcription of the selected text in 2008, the entire volume has been made available online through archive.org and other sites.

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Tales of the Cold War: Mutually Assured Deception

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Mike

Originally written in November 2005; revised and expanded April 2011 & May 2012.

Cold War alignment in Europe

On November 25, 2005, the right-wing government of Poland publicized Cold War-era plans for Soviet nuclear strikes on NATO countries.  The plans were dated around 1979 and they ostensibly detailed a planned Soviet response to attack by NATO forces.

From Guardian Unlimited:

A series of red mushroom clouds over Western Europe show that Soviet nuclear weapons strikes would have been launched at Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Belgium if NATO had struck first. Red clouds are drawn over the then German capital, Bonn, and other key German cities such as the financial centre of Frankfurt, Cologne, Stuttgart, Munich and the strategically important northern port of Hamburg. Brussels, the political headquarters of NATO, is also targeted. Blue mushroom clouds, representing the expected NATO nuclear strikes, are drawn over cities in the eastern bloc, including Warsaw and the then Czechoslovakian capital, Prague. France would have escaped attack, possibly because it is not a member of NATO’s integrated structure. Britain, which has always been at the heart of NATO, would also have been spared, suggesting Moscow wanted to stop at the Rhine to avoid overstretching its forces. The exercise, entitled Seven Days to the River Rhine, indicated Warsaw Pact forces aimed to reach the Franco-German border within a week of a NATO attack.

[…]

Mr. Sikorski, who made a name for himself working for the rightwing American Enterprise Institute thinktank in Washington, made clear he was prepared for a backlash from Russia, whose president, Vladimir Putin, has lamented the demise of the Soviet Union.

Announcing the release of 1,700 Warsaw Pact papers from Poland’s military archive, he said: “This is crucial to educating the country on the way Poland was an unwilling ally of the USSR in the cold war. The map shows a classic Warsaw Pact exercise – it was a ‘counter’ attack to defend itself by going all the way to the Atlantic.”

Mr. Sikorski, who was appointed after the Law and Justice party won a surprise victory in the recent elections after pledging to cleanse the country of its communist past, believes the map shows how Moscow was prepared to sacrifice Poland to save the Soviet Union. (full article)

What came into light, by and through the release of these Warsaw Pact documents, was the likelihood that Europe would have been the primary stage for a nuclear showdown between the superpowers at the height of the Cold War.

But was this concept that shocking? And was it that implausible that NATO would act offensively against the Warsaw Pact nations?

NATO Gambles With Nuclear War; Panorama DDR (1980)

In early 1980, Belgian Imelda Verrept, a former secretary in the International Secretariat of NATO Headquarters in Brussels, defected to the DDR with secret NATO documents that outlined the NATO position vis- à-vis the risk of a nuclear counter-strike.  She was interviewed by ADN on DDR television in April 1980 and at that time she shared her knowledge of how Europe would fare as a result of a NATO-initiated nuclear conflagration:

ADN:  Another indication that crucial importance is attached to nuclear weapons in NATO’s military strategy and in its war preparations:  The suggested deployment of new missles alone…is evidence of their planned function in the Pact’s military strategy which is aimed at a military attack on the socialist countries.

MRS. VERREPT: (N)uclear capability would “put NATO in a better position to guarantee flexible response and forward defence, to engage in measured escalation and, if necessary, resort to a full-scale nuclear war”.

For “forward defence”, a piece of doubletalk belonging to NATO’s disinformation system, one should in fact read “aggression”. There is no chance of NATO being content with the 572 new nuclear missiles. The missile decision already contains new proposals for expanding its nuclear capability in Europe.

[…]

The Pact members are expected to share not only the costs but also the risks involved in the use of the new nuclear capability and the losses and destruction in the event of a nuclear war…

I am no military expert, but the perusal of…many other NATO documents caused my suspicion that the USA was wanting to incite Western Europe into a nuclear war against the socialist countries, without risking the destruction of American cities, to harden into a certainty. The missile decision makes possible a strategy advantageous to the USA.

ADN: One could call that unhitching the USA from the danger of a nuclear counter-strike which would be directed exclusively against Western Europe.

MRS. VERREPT: Various prominent individuals have addressed themselves to this question, for instance Mr. Schmückle in a newspaper interview, Mr. de Vries, Chairman of the Defence Committee in the Dutch Parliament, and also Mr. Kissinger recently in Brussels. He said there was little likelihood of an American President being prepared to react immediately with strategic nuclear weapons to a threat directed exclusively at Western Europe and hence risk the destruction of American cities. One has to read a bit between the lines here.

ADN: Is this danger recognized by people in Belgium?

MRS. VERREPT: I hope that my remarks on the subject will help them to recognize it. In NATO there is a lot of harping on the themes of Atlantic solidarity and obligations to the alliance. No one needs any reminding, however, that the USA has always gone it alone when it suited its interests to do so.

(from “NATO Gambles With Nuclear War,” pages 10 and 11, published by Panorama DDR, c. 1980)

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Blast zone diagram; from Civil Defense (Grazhdanskaya Oborona), Publishing House for Higher Education (1970)

Having attended elementary and middle school during the Reagan era, I vividly recall  how frequently the topic of nuclear war was raised during classes, including social studies, reading and so forth. One of the mantras that teachers used to cap their lessons on nuclear war was the thought-provoking phrase, “In a nuclear war, nobody wins.”  Back then, I guess I didn’t realize that when they said “nobody wins,” the words were especially true for the people of Europe who lived each day amidst the omnipresent threat of nuclear Armageddon, be it from the Warsaw Pact’s missiles in the East or via NATO’s skies to the West.

Decades later it’s a hard sell as to whether or not we’re any better off than we were during the Cold War.  The Center for Defense Information estimates that both the United States and Russia currently have around 10,000 nuclear weapons each in their respective stockpiles.  Moreover, there are now more countries with their own nuclear weapons that at any point during the Cold War era and it’s generally held that a localized or regional conflict (like a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan) would wreak havoc on life far and wide – after killing millions in the initial conflict, of course.  The geopolitical fallout caused by the fall of the USSR has also provided new opportunities at all corners of the globe for exploitation  and subjugation of the world’s working people.

No doubt that there is some bliss in maintaining a spirited and collective ignorance of a shared life spent on the brink of annihilation but it’s hard to say what the world will be like if people wait too long to wake up.

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Site additions

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Mike

Zinovoev (Jerzy Kosinski) seriously gets his chow on

For those who check this page with some regularity (and believe me, I know your ranks can be counted upon one hand), it may appear that there’s not much in the way of new material. However, the layout and organization of this site allows for many options beyond a typical listing of entries in chronological order. Some documents from the old blog have been re-posted on here on gammacloud.org and although they may be slightly edited, they are archived according to their original date of publication. Here are the most recent of these additions:

Also, there are now dedicated pages for my list of of-site works as well as a “Recommended Reading” list and an overview of my 12 favorite books.

One of my favorites

My “Life in Music” series is ongoing, featuring mix CD listings and artwork spanning 1973 to 1984. The first installment of my 1985-1987 collection will be uploaded shortly.

The Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya Archive continues to grow and I have a new pieces of ephemera as well as an original translation of a war-era Pravda article that will be added to the collection shortly.

Finally, I am in the process of creating a “Special Collections” area on the site that will feature rare and somewhat obscure works that are not available anywhere else on the web. More on that another day.

There’s also a page that offers an overview of my other works from around the ‘net to provide a little insight as to how I spend many an evening.

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International Women’s Day 2012

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Mike

International Women’s Day, as described by Alexandra Kollontai, began as “a day of international solidarity, and a day for reviewing the strength and organization of proletarian women.”  Established through the determination of radical activist and organizer Clara Zetkin and a resolution adopted at the International Conference of Working Women the first IWD was marked in 1911.   Today, IWD is commemorated around the world as “a global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future.”

Decades before the invasion by fascist Germany, the USSR had the tremendous foresight and vision to place men and women on an equal footing in virtually every walk of life, including military service. Indeed, women like Red Army sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko (1916-1974) were a tremendous asset to Soviet forces in the battle against the Nazi onslaught and the bane of imperialist aggressors at almost every turn. For her part, Pavlichenko logged a total of almost 309 confirmed kills during her time in action against Hitler’s forces, earning her celebrated spot in history as the greatest female sniper of all time.

In recognition of International Women’s Day 2012, an excerpt from Pavlichenko’s “Message to the American People” (1942) is presented below. I originally transcribed this for the scholarly website Marxists Internet Archive in April 2011 and the complete article is posted in MIA’s Soviet History Archive.

Lyudmila Pavlichenko

I can’t help feeling that the American people are still too indifferent to the war and what it really means. I do not believe the American people as a whole entirely understand what war is like. Most of you so far only feel it as an inconvenience—doing without gasoline, being a little limited in the amount of sugar you use. You do not know what it is to have bombs falling all around you. You do not know what it is to see babies murdered, women and girls ravished by the Hitlerite beasts. You do not know what it is to find the charred bodies of your own comrades burned and tortured beyond recognition, to see rows of brave, fine people—people you knew—hanging along the roadside. You do not know what it is to walk into a home for old people won back from the Germans, as I did on the Sovkhoz Ilyichka, near Odessa. It was early morning, and the sun was just rising, and we went in to set the people there free. But what we found were the bodies of 108 old people, shot and tortured, slashed to pieces, blown up by grenades.

108 people, all of them old and ill. And so depraved are those Hitlerites that the old women had all been raped. Things like this could sometime happen to you if Hitler wins more victories.

[. . .]

In closing I have a special message for American women. I would like them to know first about our mothers. Soviet mothers love their children enormously. I know how much my mother loves me—and yet she writes to me: “I want to see you more than anything—but don’t come home until you come with victory.” And when their sons are killed our mothers do not stop to mourn—they work all the harder. Soviet mothers send their sons to the front, and if necessary their daughters too, without tears in their eyes. They know that it is necessary. While women are not regularly a part of our armed forces, many are fighting in one way or another. There are many, many cases where mothers whose sons are at the front become guerrilla fighters. Our women were on a basis of complete equality long before the war. From the first day of the Revolution full rights were granted the women of Soviet Russia. One of the most important things is that every woman has her own specialty. That is what actually makes them as independent as men. Soviet women have complete self-respect, because their dignity as human beings is fully recognized. Whatever we do, we are honored not just as women, but as individual personalities, as human beings. That is a very big word. Because we can be fully that, we feel no limitations because of our sex. That is why women have so naturally taken their places beside men in this war. We have a tradition, too, to live up to. There was Durova, the Russian woman guerrilla, who fought against Napoleon’s invading armies in 1812, and Dasha Sevastopolskaya who fought in the heroic defense of Sevastopol in 1854-55. So in today’s war our women have carried on these traditions—and added something. The names of many of them have already been immortalized Lisa Chaikina, Tanya (Zoya) Kosmodemianskaya, Maria Baida, Nina Onilova, Valya Phillipova—and scores of others. Our women have proved that we can master machines and technique as well as men can, that we can have as much will and determination as men can, that we can kill our enemies as well as men can. It seems strange to many Americans that women go into battle. They seem to think the war has changed them into some strange kind of creature between a man and a woman. But we are still feminine beings. We can still wear nice clothes and have polished fingernails in the proper time and place. We remain women and human beings as before. The war has made us tougher, that’s all.

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Further Reading:
Women and Marxism Subject Archive    marxists.org

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