WELFARE State Network Conference. Sat 29 Special Labour Conference on Clause 4 Bolshevik decade - 19171927 and the defeat of the opposition, the victory of stalinism and the transformation of the Communist International from organiser of the world revolution into a branch of the stalinist foreign office.
In retrospect I would go even further back. The banning of factions at the [Bolsheviks' 10th] Congress, one of Lenin's few strategic mistakes, was the beginning of the end. It was the foundation on which Stalin could build his bureaucratic strangulation of the revolution.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK How can we talk of a Bolshevik century - a century which saw the physical liquidation of the leaders of October; a century in which the political self-determination of the imperialist colonies has resulted in even greater exploitation in the form of neocolonialism; where the 'ethnic diversity' of the nations in the Czar's 'prison house of people' has been hideously transformed into xenophobic madness and the revival of anti-semitism; a century which saw the destruction of the most powerful working class movement - in Germany - and ended with the geographical elimination of the USSR itself.
Bebel, at the turn of the century, described the 19th century as the century of hope and predicted that the 20th would be the century of achievement. The October revolution seemed to give flesh to that prediction. Now history will regard October as marxists regarded the Paris Commune - an example of what can be, a blueprint for the future.
What we have left is a nucleus of Bolshevism, a kernel of what we must safeguard for future generations.
Charlie van Gelderen, Cambridge.