Ireland and the Russian Revolution
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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.