Ireland and the Russian Revolution

Colm Bryce22

In February 1918, an estimated 10,000 ‘workers’ parliament’. That is people packed into the Mansion House in the language of the Bolshevists Dublin to ‘hail with delight the advent of and Sinn Féiners and it should the Russian Bolshevik revolution’.1 The open the eyes of the authorities, speakers included some of the most promi- and also of the vast majority of nent figures in the Irish revolutionary move- the men, who are loyal and law ment such as Maud Gonne and Constance abiding, to the real objectives of Markievicz, Tom Johnston of the Labour the strike committee. These ob- Party, a representative of the Soviet gov- jectives are not industrial, but ernment and the meeting was chaired by revolutionary, and if they were William O’Brien, one of the leaders of the attained they would bring disas- 1913 Dublin Lockout. The Red Flag was ter to the city.2 sung and thousands marched through the streets of Dublin afterwards. On May Day 1920, a few months after A few weeks later The Irish Times the general strike, 100,000 workers marched warned against the danger of Bolshevism: in Belfast, under red flags. On the same day, tens of thousands marched in towns and vil- They have invaded Ireland, and lages across the whole of Ireland. The Irish if the democracies do not keep Transport and General Workers Union (IT- their heads, they may extend to GWU) which had called for the marches, de- other countries in Europe. The clared itself in favour of the ‘soviet system’.3 infection of Ireland by the an- In 1918, the British Prime Minister archy of Bolshevism is one of Lloyd George wrote to his counterpart those phenomena which, though Clemenceau in France: almost incredible to reason and experience, are made intelligible The whole of Europe is filled by the accidents of fortune or hu- with the spirit of revolution. man folly. There is a deep sense, not only But it was not only in the South that of discontent, but also of anger radical ideas were catching fire. and revolt amongst the workers. A general strike in Belfast in 1919, led by The whole existing order, in its the shipyard and engineering workers, and political, social and economic as- bringing together Protestant and Catholic pects, is questioned by the mass workers, saw the formation of a strike com- of the population from one end of mittee which effectively ran the city, control- Europe to the other. Bolshevism 4 ling the movement of goods and the distri- is gaining ground everywhere. bution of electricity and other essential sup- The head of the British army, General plies. Sir Henry Wilson, warned the king and the The Belfast Newsletter was quick to British government that ‘a Bolshevik rising point to the danger of revolution: was likely’ and wrote ‘I have not been so ner- One of the (strikers) deputation vous about the state of affairs in the British boasted that they had set up a empire since July 1914, and in many ways I 22I would like to thank Shaun Doherty, Andy Brown and Julie Sherry for their comments on an earlier draft of this article. I would also like to thank Dave Sherry for access to the manuscript of his forthcoming book on the Russian Revolution. 1E O’Connor, Reds and Greens, Dublin: UCD press, 2004, p.15 2Newsletter, February 4, 1919. 3Martin Upchurch, Syndicalism and the transition to Communism, p.186 4Quoted in E H Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, (London, 1966) Vol. 3, pp.135-6

42 am more anxious today than I was even in curred in the historical development of the that fateful month’.5 country is the unfolding of a unique histor- Yet the impact of the Russian Revolu- ical narrative, arising from a national char- tion on Ireland, this mortal danger to the acter or peculiar national circumstances. whole of Europe and the British Empire, is This is true of the mainstream and offi- barely remembered in the official history of cial narratives of the Russian revolution it- either the Northern or the Southern states self, which is generally portrayed as due to in Ireland. Russian exceptionalism, or the uniquely in- The Russian Revolution had a deep im- genious (or, more commonly, disingenuous) pact on Ireland, with waves of strikes and figure of Lenin. workplace occupations declaring themselves It is also the case with the years of revo- ‘soviets’, as well as four general strikes ‘more lutionary upheaval in Ireland after WWI in powerful and radical than those in the cities Ireland. of Britain’ 6 and numerous attempts to seize The states that grew out of a divided landed estates between 1919 and 1922. Ireland after partition, dominated on both The parallels with the massive social up- sides by the interests of landlords and big heaval in Russia were not lost on the workers employers, had a keen interest in promoting and poor farmers and landless labourers who their own, separate, national myths. Class drew inspiration from the new Soviet govern- politics went against their need for ‘national ment, nor on the wealthy farmers, industri- unity’, on both sides of the border. alists and church leaders who were terrified Episodes which revealed the deep class of the implications for their property and po- divisions and explosive social forces, such litical power. The Russian Revolution drew as the Belfast General Strike of 1919 or the attention of the early Dáil which set out the Limerick Soviet, which pitted northern to gain recognition from the new Bolshevik and southern workers against their respec- state, and the whole question of Irish inde- tive bosses, politicians and religious lead- pendence and its violent suppression by the ers, are written out of mainstream history British government exerted a profound in- and even for writers who are sympathetic to fluence on the revolutionary policies of the them, treated as a temporary blip in an oth- early Bolshevik government in its attitude erwise uninterrupted story of bitter civil war to national freedom. and sectarian pogroms that could only have This article will examine these three as- ended in the entrenched division of Ireland. pects of the relationship between the Rus- This general contempt for working class sian revolution and Ireland in an attempt to history is even more hostile to the notion rescue some of the lessons of those revolu- that ‘foreign ideas’ like socialism and com- tionary moments from the condescension of munism would have had any bearing on history. events in Ireland, much less that they may have pointed to an alternative strategy for The international revolutionary liberation for the working class. wave The Irish revolution took place in the context and aftermath of a world war which In the hands of nationalist or bourgeois his- demonstrated the interconnectedness of the torians, the history of any country is nar- world. rowed, constricted, proceeding in roughly a Working class families in every corner of straight line, towards a unique national des- Europe and its empires saw the massacres tiny. in the trenches of France devour almost a Wars, great economic recessions, interna- whole generation of their young men. The tional treaties, colonial empires may come war led to desperate suffering at home too and go, but the explanation for what oc- and to pressure to intensify work in the fac- 5The Military Correspondence of Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson, 1918-22, (London, 1985), pp177-8 6 C. Harman, ‘Ireland: The Missing Key’, Socialist Worker Review, December 1984, available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/harman/1984/12/ireland.htm

43 tories, especially those connected to war pro- geoisie was yet to be undermined duction, as they watched the wealthy factory (and this may be brought about owners make fortunes from the carnage. The by a war of ‘attrition’ but has not Russian Revolution itself and the great wave yet happened) and the proletar- of revolts that swept the whole of Europe in ian movements in the imperialist these years, from Berlin to Barcelona, from countries were still very feeble. Glasgow to Turin, are only understandable What will happen when the war as part of a great period of crisis for inter- has caused complete exhaustion, national capitalism and the immense social or when, in one state at least, upheaval unleashed by war. the power of the bourgeoisie has In the run up to the 1916 Easter Ris- been shaken under the blows of ing, James Connolly, the great revolutionary proletarian struggle...The strug- socialist, outlined his hope that a revolt in gle of oppressed nations in Eu- Ireland might be a spark ‘that may yet set a rope, a struggle capable of going torch to a European conflagration that will all the way to insurrection and not burn out until the last capitalist bond street fighting, capable of break- and debenture will be shrivelled on the fu- ing down the iron discipline of neral pyre of the last warlord’. 7 Connolly’s the army and martial law, will execution after the Rising robbed the work- ‘sharpen the revolutionary cri- ing class movement of its foremost radical sis in Europe’ to an infinitely leader. But the great wave of revolt that greater degree than a much more brought the war to an end was exactly what developed rebellion in a remote he had hoped for and ushered years of up- colony. A blow delivered against heaval in which the promise of massive social the power of the English impe- transformation was closer than at any time rialist bourgeoisie by a rebellion before or since. in Ireland is a hundred times Writing on the Easter Rising, while more significant politically than the war in Europe still raged, Lenin ar- a blow of equal force delivered gued against those, including some social- in Asia or Africa...The dialectics ists, who dismissed struggles for national of history are such that small self-determination and who failed to see nations, powerless as an inde- such revolts in the context of wider strug- pendent factor in the struggle gle against imperialism and capitalism. In against imperialism, play a part terms which echo Connolly’s vision, Lenin as one of the ferments, one of saw such revolts not as isolated expressions the bacilli, which help the real of specific national grievances, but related to anti-imperialist force, the social- a more general crisis and connected to the ist proletariat, to make its ap- international struggle against capitalism: pearance on the scene.8

Owing to the crisis in imperial- It was this outlook which was confirmed ism, the flames of national re- by the scale and ferocity of the revolts which volt have flared up both in the shook Europe as the war ended. The writer colonies and in Europe, and that Victor Serge, an anarchist who became an the national sympathies and an- active Bolshevik during the revolution, cap- tipathies have manifested them- tured the scale of the turmoil in 1918 and selves in spite of the Draconian the hopes it raised: threats and measures of repres- sion. All this before the crisis Revolution descended on the of imperialism hit its peak: the streets of Vienna and Budapest. power of the imperialist bour- From the North Sea to the Volga 7Irish Worker, 8 August 1914 8V I Lenin, ‘The Irish Rebellion of 1916’, in Collected Works, Vol 22, pp. 353-358 available at www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/jul/x01.htm

44 the councils of workers’ and sol- It brought to the surface a deep cleav- diers’ deputies – the soviets – age in the workers’ movement. The lead- are the real masters of the hour. ership of the mass reformist organisations, Germany’s legal government is a like the British Labour Party (who’s MPs council of People’s Commissars joined the National Government during the made up of six socialists... The war in 1915) and the German SPD, almost newspapers of the period are as- without exception, collapsed behind their re- tonishing... riots in Paris, ri- spective ruling classes when the war broke ots in Lyon, revolution in Bel- out. The tiny minority of radical anti-war gium, revolution in Constantino- and anti-capitalist socialists and organisa- ple, victory of the soviets in tions seemed isolated and on the margin of Bulgaria, rioting in Copenhagen. events. The whole of Europe is in move- The political collapse of the International ment. Clandestine or open so- at the outbreak of the war left many social- viets are appearing everywhere, ists, Connolly included, disorientated and even in the allied armies; every- despairing. Only a handful of representa- thing is possible, everything.9 tives could be gathered in 1915 in Zimmer- The great tumult and convulsions were wald in Switzerland to convene a conference just as much present in Ireland and their of anti-war socialists. But among them were outcome and eventual suppression revealed people like Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg that the same political and social forces that and Karl Liebknecht from Germany. And were at play in Russia, Germany, Italy and out of these small and seemingly marginal elsewhere were present in Ireland too. forces, who took a consistent stand against the war and capitalism, would emerge the political leadership which would seek to fo- Reform or revolution? cus and direct the revolts which began to Before the war, Europe had been convulsed break out after three years of previously by a rising wave of strikes, known in Britain unimaginable slaughter and deprivation. as ‘the Great Unrest’, of which the great re- The war had largely suppressed the im- volt of the 1913 Lockout in Dublin, involv- pulse of revolt in 1914. Strikes were imme- ing mass militant strike action by largely un- diately outlawed in most countries and ‘ag- skilled workers was typical. itators’ sacked or sent to the front. But it In the two decades prior to this, trade re-emerged with enormous force to bring the unions and socialist organisations had grown war to an end. rapidly into mass organisations of the work- The combination of mass struggles over ing class, such as the German Social Demo- economic demands, such as the strikes be- cratic Party (SPD) and the British Labour gun by women textile workers in Petro- Party. They were linked together in the So- grad in February 1917, in the context of cialist International which claimed to stand the war, rapidly fused with political de- for the overthrow of capitalism. As the mands. Within days, the Russian army, al- threat of war approached, they passed nu- ready riven with mass desertions and mu- merous resolutions demanding peace and tinies, refused orders to fight the strikers and pledging to stand against the workers of one marchers and the Tsar’s regime was brought country fighting workers of another country down. in the interests of imperialism. It was a pattern that was repeated But the war exposed the gap between throughout Europe. Everywhere, the de- the official policy of the Second International mand over economic questions, such as and the gradualist, reformist practice of its bread and wages, rapidly crossed over into main organisations, which aimed at winning political demands for an end to the war and socialism through taking control of national for real democracy. The entire French Army parliaments. on the Western Front refused to fight in May 9Victor Serge, Year One of the Russian Revolution, London 1966, Vol3 pp.135-16

45 1917. French women textile workers in Paris about direct democracy. They were the were on strike in that spring of 1917 and means by which workers could collectively plans for a new military offensive in May take economic power from the capitalist produced a strike of over 200,000 workers class, soldiers and sailors could defy military at Paris’ car factories. At the huge Renault orders, debate and vote on their demands, Billancourt factory, a strike rally ended with co-ordinate with others and take all decision chants of ‘Down with the war!’10 making into their own hands. British soldiers mutinied in their tens of It was this organic process that the Bol- thousands, while engineering workers in the sheviks were able to relate to, seeing in Midlands and north-east and women factory this direct workers’ democracy the basis for workers in England, dockers and shipyard working class power and the overthrow of workers in Glasgow and Liverpool all struck capitalism. Their growing strength during in defiance of the government, the police, the 1917 was a result of their clear demands for Labour Party and the trade union leaders. ‘Bread, Peace and Land’ and the means of Women workers in Turin in August 1917, achieving it was ‘All power to the soviets’. faced with bread shortages, began a strike It was this idea which caught the imag- which closed the whole city. Bosses at one ination of workers and soldiers engaged in factory promised bread if they went back to their own battles in other countries. In work. They responded with chants of ‘To August 1917 Turin factory workers, called hell with the bread! We want peace! Down to a mass meeting to meet Russian repre- with the profiteers! Down with the war!’ sentatives of the Kerensky provisional gov- and stayed out on strike.11 ernment, which had taken power after the February revolution and who were there to In Germany in 1918, a sailors’ mutiny urge them to keep production up for the war which began in Kiel quickly spread to Ham- effort, instead chanted ‘Viva Lenin’.12 burg and then Berlin, fusing with strikes in In 1919 10,000 British soldiers mutinied by coalminers, dockers and engineers and in Folkestone in Kent. They set up a union brought the war to an end. The German and their mutiny spread, along with their Kaiser fled. popular chant ‘Come on you Bolsheviks’.13 The eruption of revolts in Egypt, India, Just as in Russia after the February rev- Afghanistan and elsewhere across the em- olution, the old parties of the bourgeoisie pires, often involving mutinies by British and the reformist socialists sought to hold garrisons, showed how the sudden shifts of back the revolution, protect ‘private prop- consciousness produced by the war had pro- erty’ and prove their credentials to the great found effect on previously settled social re- powers by returning to the war. lations. The combination of the mass, often spon- It brought ‘political’ and ‘economic’ taneous revolts and their conscious direction questions together, the fight for the means towards the seizure of state power by work- of life with the fight against war and foreign ers’ organisations was the crucial question of oppression. these years and, with the exception of Rus- It was the form of workers’ organisation sia, the existing socialist organisations were that emerged in these mass struggles that either too inexperienced or stood aside from was the crucial factor. This was about more the growing revolt. than simply voting in a polling booth ev- As Chris Harman explains, the deep ery five years or joining a trade union. The legacy of gradualism in the workers’ move- Councils of Workers’, Sailors’ and Soldiers’ ment did not suddenly disappear: Deputies in Germany, the factory commis- sions in Italy, the Soviets in Russia, were ...the heritage of fifty years of 10Dave Sherry, Russia 1917: The Unfinished and Unforgotten Revolution, (forthcoming), p. 116-117 11Donny Gluckstein, The Western Soviets: Workers Councils versus Parliament, 1915-20, (London, 1985), p.170 12Ibid. p.178 13John Newsinger, Them and Us: Fighting the Class War 1910-19, (London, 2015, p.70

46 gradual development was not to The role of railway workers was a key fac- be erased so rapidly. The old So- tor. As in Russia, their action could prevent cial Democratic and trade union the movement of army regiments hostile to leaders moved into the gap left the revolution. by the discredited bourgeois par- Action by Irish rail workers, often in de- ties. The Communist Left on fiance of their British-based union leaders, the other hand still lacked the was an enormous concern to the British ad- organisation to respond to this. ministration. It acted when there was no mass Irish railway workers, inspired by the ex- support; when there was mass ample of British dockers refusing to load support it failed to act.14 ships with munitions to attack the new Rus- sian workers’ state, similarly began to refuse to carry British soldiers or transport muni- The Irish Soviets tions in Ireland. The surge of patriotism that led tens of thousands of the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Irish Volunteers to sign up for the war, had turned by 1917 to war weariness and passive resistance. The Unionist leaders in the North openly worried about the slowing of recruitment among Protestant workers and feared that they may have to rely on Catholics.15 Workers Soviet Mills: ‘We make bread not profits’ When the British government threatened to introduce conscription in Ireland in 1918, huge demonstrations and a general strike, The revolutionary years in Ireland contained led by the ITGWU, brought it to a halt. all the basic features of the wider revolution- The reason the shift in mood was two- ary wave. The war caused mass upheaval in fold: the sheer fact of the slaughter in the Ireland. The old certainties began to break trenches and the intensification of work and apart. pressure of supplying the war effort. Fac- One indication of the scale of the upsurge tory workers, especially, faced constant de- was the massive growth in trade union mem- mands for longer hours and speed-up. The bership, especially with the ITGWU, from a end of the war unleashed a wave of pent-up low point of 6,000 in 1916 to over 100,000 by demands that produced open revolt in in- 1920. dustrial centres like Glasgow, Liverpool and In Ireland, as in Russia, the industrial Belfast, often led by militant shop stewards. working class were a minority, concentrated In the lead up to the 1919 General Strike, in a few towns and cities. Most heavy in- Willie Gallacher, who would later be one dustry was concentrated in the north-east, of the founding members of the Commu- around Belfast, with some manufacturing nist Party, addressed mass meetings of ship- in centres like Derry. Much of the rest of yard workers in Belfast, despite being openly the country was underdeveloped, acting as against the war and facing an organised a huge producer and supplier of agricultural group of loyalist workers who tried to shout produce for the British market. But this him down. gave transport workers, dockers and railway Gallacher was one of the most prominent workers, and workers in local creameries, ba- leaders of the Clyde Workers’ Committee, a con factories and so on a disproportionate network of hundreds of rank and file socialist and central role in the social revolt. militants which had co-ordinated strike ac- 14Chris Harman, How The Revolution Was Lost, Autumn 1967 available at https://www.marxists.org/ archive/harman/1967/xx/revlost.htm 15Fergal McCluskey, The Irish Revolution, 1912–23: Tyrone, Dublin, 2014

47 tion against attacks on their working condi- control spread to such unlikely places as an tions during the war, before being violently asylum in Monaghan and the Arigna coal suppressed, and was at the forefront of the mine in Leitrim. strikes which broke out in engineering after It also fuelled attacks on the big landed the war. estates, often abandoned by their English The 1919 General Strike in Belfast grew landlords, and to attempts at land seizures. out of a strike for shorter hours, which This social revolt was a much bigger threat spread from heavy industry and engineering to the British at the time than the spo- to bring the whole of the city to a stand- radic guerrilla campaign being fought by the still and place power in the hands of a strike IRA.16 committee of trade union leaders. The hold The highpoint of this use of workers’ ac- of loyalism was weakening in the face of a tion against the British suppression of the struggle which drew Protestant and Catholic independence struggle came with the 1921 workers into battle against mainly Unionist general strike to free republican prisoners employers and the British government. being held in Mountjoy prison. 17 The strike in Glasgow was suppressed by The potential for this experience to gen- British troops, backed up by tanks parked in eralise opposition to the British government George Square. Such was the threat posed in both the North and the South was never by the Belfast strike that there were more realised however. British troops in Belfast to ‘maintain order’ The union leaders in Dublin did not call than in the whole of the rest of Ireland, de- for any solidarity action with the strike in spite the outbreak of the War of Indepen- Belfast, even when railway workers were or- dence in the rest of the country. dered to move troops to Belfast to suppress The great wave of revolt was not just it. about economic questions. The spark for the Similarly, the influence of the labour Limerick Soviet was the killing by British leaders on the Limerick Soviet was disas- soldiers of an IRA leader, Robert Byrne, trous. They talked of a general strike, but during an escape attempt. In response to under the influence of the Sinn Féin lead- protests the British army imposed martial ership in Dublin, fearful of the escalation of law on Limerick and the trade unions in the strike, instead called for an evacuation of the town called an all-out strike in response. the city, and the strike effectively collapsed. The leadership of the strike movement, call- Despite this general approach of caution ing itself the ‘Soviet’, took the key decisions and timidity on the part of the labour lead- over production and food supplies into its ers, the potential for revolt continued. own hands. The use of the strike weapon, and in par- Dáil and Russia Treaty ticular, the occupation of pivotal workplaces The key weakness of the most prominent in rural areas such as creameries, intensi- labour and union leaders was their inabil- fied alongside the guerrilla war being fought ity to break from the Irish nationalist move- by the IRA and the violent reprisals by the ment. And the new Dáil government, dom- British government. inated by Sinn Féin, consciously set out to This was especially true in Munster incorporate them and suppress the threat of throughout 1919 and 1920, where a chain class conflict. Sinn Féin had swept the board of creameries owned by the Cleeve family, at the 1919 Westminster elections, and in- were taken over by their 3,000 workers. At stead of taking their seats as MPs in Lon- Knocklong the workers raised the banner don, set up their own parliament, the Dáil outside the creamery ‘We make butter, not in Dublin. profits’. The growth of militant strikes and their spilling over into episodes of workers’ Providing they supported ‘phys- 16Conor Kostick, Revolution In Ireland: Popular Militancy 1917 to 1923, London, 1996, Ch 5 17For a more detailed account of the role of workers in the Irish revolution see Conor Kostick, ‘The Irish Working Class and the War of Independence’, Irish Marxist Review 14, November 2015, pp18-29

48 ical force’ it did not matter to States, sought to bring some order to the rank and file republicans what chaos, and arranged a conference at Ver- their other views were. So in sailles outside Paris to establish the terms the first Dáil (i.e. the republican of the peace and set rules for what might parliament) of 1919 nearly two replace the old states. thirds of the members were from The Free State craved recognition from the urban professional and white the great powers as the legitimate govern- collar class, another quarter were ment of Ireland. To this end, it sent a rep- capitalists and the remaining 10 resentative to attend the Versailles Peace percent farmers.18 talks, but he could obtain no credentials, with the big powers not wishing to go The new government struggled to estab- against Britain, and spent weeks wandering lish its legitimacy and authority. the corridors excluded. The potential for class conflict to under- The first Dáil also went to great lengths mine the national struggle by threatening to seek recognition from the new Bolshevik the interests of the wealthier classes was al- government, which was the first government luded to by the Secretary of the Dáil: ‘The to officially recognise the republic. 20 They mind of the people was being diverted from also drew up detailed plans for trade and the struggle for freedom by class war...There other treaties with them. was a moment when it seemed nothing could prevent wholesale appropriation’.19 This had two purposes, neither of them The new Dáil set up its own Dáil courts, revolutionary. First, it was a useful bar- which were aimed at establishing its gov- gaining chip when it came to the major ne- ernmental authority, collecting taxes and so gotiations with the big powers and espe- on, but ended up preventing the wholesale cially Britain. The new Russian government seizure of landed estates. was pioneering a new form of open diplo- As the Free State was established after macy, opening the previously secret files of the signing of the Treaty, Free State soldiers the Russian state, negotiating peace treaties marched the length of the Shannon, sup- with Germany that were debated widely and pressing the different worker occupations as openly in Russian society. they marched. Russia was being invaded by 14 separate The struggle against radical movements armies, who aimed at the restoration of the pre-occupied the Dáil domestically, but the old regime, under the leadership of various new government was also seeking interna- right wing generals, and Russia was desper- tional recognition, which led it to adopt rad- ate for some international relief. ical and even socialist phrases in its public The negotiations opened by the new statements, seeking the endorsement of the Irish government, through various support- new governments brought to power after the ers in the US, proposed various joint trade war. and diplomatic arrangements, opposition to The war and the revolutionary upheavals arms being sent to Russia, the hope that which ended it had brought turmoil for na- 50,000 rifles might be sent to Ireland and tion states throughout Europe. In Germany, so on. the Kaiser had been overthrown and re- But it had a second purpose, which was placed with an interim government, which to further compromise and neutralise the struggled to withstand the immense work- leaders of the labour movement in Ireland. ers, soldiers and sailors revolt. The Austro- This is, in part, the meaning of the consti- Hungarian empire and the Ottoman empire tution of the first Dáil, drawn up in consul- had both collapsed. The victorious nation tation with labour leaders Thompson and states, especially the newly emerging United O’Brien, and delivered to the reconvened 18Chris Harman, Background to the Crisis, available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/harman/ 1974/06/nireland.htm 19Quoted in Chris Bambery, Ireland’s Permanent Revolution, London: 1986, p.75 20P Beresford Ellis, A History of the Irish Working Class, London, 1984, p.247

49 Second International meeting, with an eye to of all the children of the nation equally. In- getting official state recognition by the new stead, it gave up the North and came down social democratic forces vying for power in to a calculation of relative military strength. Germany.21 The contrast with the approach of the In notes attached to the draft of the new Russian government is useful. Rather Treaty with Russia, advising those charged than rely on peace treaties with hostile pow- with negotiating it were even more explicit. ers, it openly appealed to German workers ‘...you should arrange to have a strong labour to revolt against their own government, and man, for example, Johnson or O’Brien, with mounted a massive campaign, based on an someone whose tendencies are not so social- appeal to an exhausted working class to de- istic and who knows industrial conditions’. fend the new society of workers control that Referring to the sections of the Treaty which they had brought into being. In areas that agree to oppose all military intervention in were won back from control by the White Russia and in Ireland, it notes that, ‘Under Armies, the Red Army immediately estab- these clauses we may be able to help them lished a local soviet and took control of fac- here, and they may be able to help us in tories and large estates from the landlords. England. The treaty itself is bound to af- fect both of us in this respect on account of the germ noticeable in all labour organisa- The Russian Revolution and na- tions’.22 tional liberation The crucial role of the labour leadership The early years of the revolution inspired in downplaying the interests of the working a generation of socialists, not just with the class in deference to the nationalist leader- promise it held out of direct workers’ democ- ship was praised by De Valera: racy, but also the liberation of previously op- When we wanted the help pressed nations. of Labour against conscription, From before the war, Lenin had ar- Labour gave it to us. When gued that socialists, rather than engaging we wanted the help of Labour in a blanket condemnation of nationalism, in Berne [to get recognition needed to distinguish between the nation- from the Second International], alism of the oppressor nations and the na- Labour gave it to us and got Ire- tionalism of the oppressed nations and take land recognised as a distinct na- a clear position of endorsing and support- tion. When we wanted Labour ing the right of oppressed nations to self- to stand down at the election determination. The fight for national liber- and not divide us, but that we ation was a part of, not separate to, the fight should stand foursquare against for socialism. one enemy, Labour fell in with us.23 The proletariat cannot achieve freedom other than by revolu- What this betrayed is that the key fo- tionary struggle for the over- cus for the nationalist movement was recog- throw of the tsarist monarchy nition as one of the nations of the world; and its replacement by a demo- all else was subordinate to this. How little cratic republic. The tsarist the phraseology of the first constitution mat- monarchy precludes liberty and tered was revealed when it came to the real equal rights for nationalities, and negotiations which began in London in 1921. is, furthermore, the bulwark of The construction of the Treaty with Britain barbarity, brutality and reac- made little or no mention of the cherishing tion in both Europe and Asia. 21Ibid. 22Intercourse between Bolshevism and Sinn Féin, HMSO, London available at https://archive.org/ details/op1256928-1001 23Quoted in P Beresford Ellis, A History of the Irish Working Class, London, 1984, p.245-6

50 This monarchy can be over- the Bolshevik party and among those drawn thrown only by the united pro- to the Communist International. Lenin vig- letariat of all the nations of Rus- orously argued that the new Soviet govern- sia, which is giving the lead ment must make good on its promise to lib- to consistently democratic ele- erate oppressed nationalities, but must guar- ments capable of revolutionary antee their rights to freedom to practice re- struggle from among the work- ligion and use their own language. ing masses of all nations. This was the origin of the title ‘Union It follows, therefore, that work- of Soviet Socialist Republics’, a free union ers who place political unity with of socialist countries (and a title that was ‘their own’ bourgeoisie above later to be drained of any meaning as Stalin complete unity with the prole- reimposed the most monstrous tyranny and tariat of all nations, are act- forced collectivisation on the former Tsarist ing against their own interests, colonies). against the interests of social- Lenin also argued that this approach had ism and against the interests of practical consequences for socialists interna- democracy.24 tionally, especially for those in the imperi- alist countries. Socialists, he argued, could Without this attitude, Lenin argued, the not confine themselves to simple economic immense resentment towards the imperialist questions and trade union struggles, but power and the rising anger against depriva- must take up, in a practical way, the strug- tion would forever be left to be articulated gle against all injustice and forms of oppres- by the leadership of the nationalist move- sion. To do so, he argued, would draw a clear ment, led by the middle class and profession- distinction between revolutionaries and re- als, whose interests were limited to the es- formists, who at the crucial moment, would tablishment of capitalism in ‘their own’ na- always fall in behind the demands of impe- tional territory. rialism and capitalism. The revolutionaries Lenin uses the example of Ireland to ar- had to set themselves the task of winning the gue for the right to secession and for a break majority among workers and the oppressed with national chauvinism. so that they could provide a consistent lead- Lenin’s views on the 1916 Easter Upris- ership of the struggle when it came to war ing, where he disagreed with those who dis- and revolution. missed it as a ‘mere putsch’ was a continua- During the congresses of the Communist tion of this debate within the socialist move- International, Lenin engaged in a particu- ment, taking on the views of prominent so- larly sharp debate with the British delega- cialists such as Karl Radek, who would later tion, which included Sylvia Pankhurst and become a minister in the Soviet government. Willie Gallacher, warning of the dangers of But what Lenin insisted upon was social- not taking national liberation seriously, and ists maintaining their own independent or- of engaging in mere revolutionary phrases, ganisation, based on the working class, that instead of socialists engaging in the practi- could challenge the middle-class nationalists cal work of trying to convince workers and for leadership of the revolt and argue that soldiers not to fight in imperialist wars. the only way to freedom was through inter- In Ireland, for instance, there are national revolution. two hundred thousand British This had practical consequences for the soldiers who are applying fero- early Bolshevik government. Tsarist Russia cious terror methods to suppress was the heart of an empire that dominated the Irish. The British Socialists and oppressed nations throughout Central are not conducting any revolu- Asia. The demands for national freedom in tionary propaganda among these its colonies produced sharp debates within soldiers, though our resolutions 24V I Lenin, Theses on the National Question, 1913, available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/ lenin/works/1913/jun/30.htm

51 clearly state that we can ac- dence and the class struggle was one of the cept into the Communist Inter- most distinctive features of the Russian Rev- national only those British par- olution. The Bolsheviks took the position ties that conduct genuinely revo- of supporting national liberation and guar- lutionary propaganda among the anteeing freedom for religious and national British workers and soldiers.25 languages precisely in order to undermine the appeal of bourgeois nationalism in the James Connolly’s son Roddy, travelled colonial countries and appeal to the working to the Second Congress of the Communist class to see their interests as best defended International in 1920 in Petrograd and pre- by allying with the socialist revolution. It sented a report on the situation in Ireland, is very notable, especially given the rise of which drew out the class contradictions of Islamophobia in recent decades and the in- 26 the struggle. Roddy Connolly was in- ability of large sections of the left interna- volved in the struggle within the Social- tionally to separate their views on religious ist Party of Ireland, initially dominated by and sexual freedom from the need to con- the leadership of O’Brien and Thompson, to front it that the early Soviet regime guaran- transform it into a radical socialist organisa- teed religious freedom to Muslims, encour- tion. The new Communist Party was even- aged practicing Muslims to join the Com- tually formed in 1920, but with few forces munist Party and the Red Army, especially and very little influence. As the Civil War in the oppressed countries of Central and following the signing of the Treaty took off, East Asia and recognised Sharia common Connolly travelled to see Liam Lynch, the law. The subsequent overturning of all these leader of the anti-Treaty forces to urge him freedoms under Stalin’s rule is another ex- to adopt a policy that took up social and ample of the degeneration and betrayal of workers’ issues, but Lynch dismissed his sug- the revolution.28 gestions as a ‘waste of time’. 27 The result was that the campaign against the Treaty was reduced to an entirely military question, The lessons of October against far superior forces. The victory of workers’ power in Russia was propelled by immense, often unco-ordinated revolts but it was also a conscious process. It required a political organisation that could give expression and direction to the immense social revolt. In the absence of such parties, other so- cial forces would come to dominate, frustrate and ultimately drive back the revolutionary wave. The Cadets, Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks who made up the caretaker Pro- visional Government in Russia after the fall Lenin (centre) with Roddy Connolly (centre-right) of the Tsar, could only envisage a change in government from Tsarism to parliamen- tary democracy and at the first opportu- The need to link the struggle for indepen- nity sought to restore the rights of landlords, 25V I Lenin, The Second Congress of the Communist International, July 19-August 2 1920, available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jul/x03.htm 26Lenin warmly welcomed him, saying that he had read his father’s Labour In Irish History and rated him ‘head and shoulders’ above all his European contemporaries. C. McGuire, Roddy Connolly and the Struggle for Socialism in Ireland, Cork: Cork University Press, 2008, pp. 20, 31-32 27Kieran Allen, 1916: Ireland’s Revolutionary Tradition, Dublin:2016, p.103 28D Crouch, ‘The Bolsheviks and Islam’ International Socialism 110, 2006 available at http://isj.org. uk/the-bolsheviks-and-islam/

52 hand control of the factories back to the cap- into a coherent strategy that might have italists and return to fighting in the world provided an independent, class-based alter- war. This was the great contradiction, the native challenge to both nationalism and clash between rising expectations of a risen unionism that, at least, might have survived people and a mass of workers and soldiers the revolutionary period. who refused to continue to fight that drove Despite the magnificent and path- the explosive events of 1917 and deepened breaking contribution of James Connolly to the revolutionary wave in Russia.29 the development of socialist ideas and organ- The growth of Bolshevism during the isation in Ireland, and the enormous gap left war, and especially in 1917, was really the in the leadership of the socialist movement experience of the need for centralised direc- in Ireland after his execution, the experience tion of the mass revolts, peasant uprisings, of the years of revolution bear out the warn- strikes and mutinies towards the confronta- ings that Lenin had tried to sound to the tion for state power. international socialist movement. What Lenin had was an organisation in In Ireland, the movement veered between Russia, connected by regular newspapers, syndicalism, the belief that militant, direct involving thousands of activists based in action trade unionism could by itself re- workplaces, towns, army barracks and vil- sult in the eventual victory of socialism, to lages, who had been forged in the strug- collapsing politically behind the leadership gles and defeats of previous years, which was of the nationalist movement, deferring the able to connect with the rising outbreaks of struggle for an improvement in workers’ lives strikes in the cities and the growing mutinies and postponing the resolution of workers’ in- among soldiers and sailors and to give it terests. direction. In July 1917, for instance, this The huge wave of class struggle in Ire- meant restraining the demands by Petro- land took place at a time when Connolly’s grad workers and solders, on massive armed Irish Citizens Army had effectively dissolved demonstrations, to immediately seize power itself into the IRA, when the ITGWU came from the Provisional government. Lenin and under the leadership of a layer of cautious, the Bolsheviks argued that if they didn’t win essentially conservative trade union officials support in the rest of the country they would and when there was a mere handful of revo- be isolated, surrounded and defeated. The lutionary socialists, who played a key role in roots of the revolution were spontaneous re- many of the struggles, but were barely able volts, spurred by the immense social crisis to co-ordinate their organisation. 30 caused by the war, but they required con- In the absence of an alternative pole of scious direction and co-ordination to bring political attraction within the movement, to victory. the radicals and trade unionists were un- This was the over-riding lesson of the able to withstand the overshadowing of the Russian Revolution, the need for a strategy class struggle as unionist reaction turned and organisation that sought to replace the to pogroms against Catholics and ‘rotten rule of the bourgeoisie with the democratic Prods’ in the shipyards of the North and rule of the workers organisations, the ‘sovi- areas such as Lisburn, nor the breaking ets’ or workers’ councils. of workers’ struggle by the new Free State The lack of direction of the workers’ re- regime as recession bit deep in the South. volts in Ireland, their subordination to the The attempts to establish a communist leadership of the national movement, high- political organisation in Ireland came too lights the absence of a political force in Ire- late and when they eventually did were over- land (and also Britain) which might have shadowed by the defeat of the Russian Rev- brought together the various struggles of this olution at the hands of Stalin. period, particularly by making a connection With the isolation of the Russian rev- between those in the North and the South, olution and especially after Lenin’s death 29Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, London, 1977 30See Conor Kostick, Revolution in Ireland: Popular Militancy 1917 to 1923, London:1996 Ch, 7

53 in 1924, the influence of the new Russian nations, represented a massive reversal of government on the Communist Parties of the initial promise of the revolution and bent the rest of the world was almost every- the development of revolutionary politics in where disastrous. The new Stalinist bureau- Ireland out of all recognition. cracy reacted to the isolation by rejecting The Stalinism of what became known the idea of international revolution and at- as the Eastern Bloc never inspired or en- tempting to build up the Russian economy thused more than a small minority of the through increasing exploitation of Russian working class in Ireland and was a gift to workers. This ushered in the ear of mass those who denounced socialism from the pul- forced collectivisation, constant speed-ups pit or the platform of Orange marches. But and repression in the factories, the show- the initial promise of the Russian Revolu- trails and witch-hunts of anyone opposed to tion, the idea of international workers’ rev- the party leadership. All the hope of the olution, and the liberation for all oppressed flowering of workers democracy, the liber- nations and oppressed groups, was an elec- ation of women and freedom for oppressed trifying idea among Irish workers. The po- nationalities, were completely overturned. tential for that hope to be translated into The isolation and subsequent degenera- conscious revolutionary organisation, capa- tion of the Russian revolution and the emer- ble of influencing the struggles of the future, gence of Stalinism, with all its tyranny and is a task that confronts the socialist move- oppression, especially of the former colonial ment in Ireland today.

54