Introduction

Red Britain ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Matthew Taunton
Keyword(s):  
Russian Revolution ◽  
George Orwell ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Catastrophic Event ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
Arthur Koestler ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
British Culture

The introduction argues that the Russian Revolution should be understood as a fundamentally important precondition for mid-century British culture. It explains the range of intellectuals covered in the book, and the central importance of anti-Communists Arthur Koestler and George Orwell for its argument. It then outlines three key arguments that run through the book: first, that the effects of the Russian Revolution on British culture are best understood in terms of gradual sedimentation in a longue durée rather than as a catastrophic event; second, Red Britain emphasizes the ideological diversity on either side of the Cold War divide; third, that British responses to the Bolshevik Revolution should be understood not only as a clash of internationalist or cosmopolitan ideologies, but also as an episode within a longer history of nationally grounded Anglo-Russian cultural and political relations. The introduction ends with brief summaries of the book’s five chapters.

Two and Two Make Five

Red Britain ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 60-111
Author(s):  
Matthew Taunton
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Dialectical Materialism ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Soviet State ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
Arthur Koestler ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Relationship

The Bolshevik Revolution induced British writers to rethink the politics of number, and this chapter considers the significance of the marked preponderance of numbers, equations, and arithmetic in discussions of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet State. It explores the obsessive use of statistics by the Soviet Union and its British defenders, as a utilitarian form of socialism came to dominate left-wing discussions of politics. The chapter theorizes a ‘Romantic anti-Communism’ that opposed itself to such calculations, and often to the principle of quantitative equality. The chapter also explores—partly via the equation ‘two and two make five’ (featured Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, but also in other texts that mediate the relationship between Russian and British socialism)—how the seemingly timeless propositions of mathematics were up for grabs in the debates around Marxist science and dialectical materialism. Writers covered include Orwell, Arthur Koestler, and Bertrand Russell.

“Rosa Luxemburg Belongs to Us!” German Communism and the Luxemburg Legacy

1994 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric D. Weitz
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
History Of ◽  
Entire History ◽  
Socialist Politics ◽  
Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg's commitment to democratic politics stands as her most pronounced intellectual legacy. Her rhetoric, rarely mundane, becomes especially compelling and powerful when she invokes the creative potential of human beings to order their own affairs, the lifeblood of society pulsing through the actions of ordinary people. Especially her famed writings on the Russian Revolution have served as the intellectual wellsprings for an alternative socialist politics beginning with Paul Levi (her successor as head of the Communist party of Germany) in 1922 and continuing through the entire history of the twentieth- century Left. Written within months of the Bolshevik Revolution and while she still languished in prison, the oft-cited passages offer some of the finest expressions of her democratic sensibilities. In the margins she wrote what would become one of her most famous passages, the central phrase of which— “Freiheit ist immer Freiheit der Andersdenkenden”— was unfurled at the Liebknect-Luxemburg counterdemonstration in January 1988 in the German Democratic Republic and became the clarion call of the opposition in its early phase.

Red Britain

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Taunton
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Subsequent Development ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
George Orwell ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Law And Justice ◽  
Raymond Williams

Red Britain provocatively situates the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 as the most definitive pretext for the cultural and political debates of the British mid-century. Drawing on new archival research and historical scholarship to investigate British responses to Soviet politics and culture, Taunton describes their conceptual, discursive, and formal reverberations in British literature and culture. The book provides new insight into writers including Arthur Koestler, Doris Lessing, George Orwell, Dorothy Richardson, H. G Wells, and Raymond Williams, as well as a diverse cast of lesser-known writers, intellectuals, journalists, and visitors to the Soviet Union. As Taunton shows, the cultural resonances of the Russian Revolution are more far-reaching and various than has been acknowledged. Each of the five chapters of Red Britain takes as its subject one particular problem or debate, and explores the ways in which it was politicized as a result of the Russian Revolution and the subsequent development of the Soviet state. The chapters focus on the idea of the future; numbers and arithmetic; law and justice; debates around agriculture and landowning; and finally orality, literacy, and religion. In all of these spheres, Red Britain explores how political ideas formed in the Bolshevik revolution—futurist, utilitarian, literate, urban, statist, and economistic—clashed with and sometimes redirected, and were sometimes overwritten by, the medievalist, romantic, oral, pastoral, anarchic, and ethical emphases of English socialism.

The Early History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1920–9

1958 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 41-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Pelling
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Early History ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
British Labour ◽  
History Of

THE Communist Party of Great Britain, like the Communist Parties of most other European countries, was founded shortly after the Russian Bolshevik revolution. It was unique among the Communist Parties of the major countries in being the result of an amalgamation of small revolutionary groups rather than a product of the schism of a large existing organization. The British Labour Party did not split as a result of the Russian revolution: the Communist Party grew up out of elements which for the most part had had a separate existence on the Labour Party's left wing.

The ‘Problem of People’: British Colonials, Cold War Powers, and the Chinese Refugees in Hong Kong, 1949–62

2007 ◽  
Vol 41 (6) ◽  
pp. 1145-1181 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHI-KWAN MARK
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Social Services ◽  
The United States ◽  
Local History ◽  
War Powers ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Refugee Problem ◽  
The Cold War

From late 1956 onwards, British colonial officials spoke of the postwar influx of Chinese refugees from the mainland to Hong Kong as a ‘problem of people’, with serious consequences on housing, social services and even political relations. The problem was also one of an international concern: both Communist and Nationalist China and the United States saw it in the wider context of their Cold War struggles. At first, the Hong Kong government was ambivalent about providing massive relief for the refugees, either by itself or by the United Nations. But by the late 1950s and early 1960s, the political importance of turning potential rioters into responsible citizens, and the Cold War implications of great powers' involvement convinced British colonials that the only lasting solution to the problem was not overseas emigration (with outside aid) but full local integration (through trade and industrialization). The international history of the Chinese refugee problem epitomizes the local history of the Cold War over Hong Kong.

Economic Views of L. Trotsky

2004 ◽  
pp. 142-157
Author(s):  
M. Voeikov ◽  
S. Dzarasov
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Russian History ◽  
History Of

The paper written in the light of 125th birth anniversary of L. Trotsky analyzes the life and ideas of one of the most prominent figures in the Russian history of the 20th century. He was one of the leaders of the Russian revolution in its Bolshevik period, worked with V. Lenin and played a significant role in the Civil War. Rejected by the party bureaucracy L. Trotsky led uncompromising struggle against Stalinism, defending his own understanding of the revolutionary ideals. The authors try to explain these events in historical perspective, avoiding biases of both Stalinism and anticommunism.

A Sacred Space Is Never Empty

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Smolkin
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Sacred Space ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Mikhail Gorbachev ◽  
Soviet Leadership ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Communist Ideology ◽  
History Of ◽  
Soviet Experiment

When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power used a variety of tools—from education to propaganda to terror—to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality. Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating an atheist society. This book presents the first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The book argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must make sense of Soviet atheism. It shows how atheism was reimagined as an alternative cosmology with its own set of positive beliefs, practices, and spiritual commitments. Through its engagements with religion, the Soviet leadership realized that removing religion from the “sacred spaces” of Soviet life was not enough. Then, in the final years of the Soviet experiment, Mikhail Gorbachev—in a stunning and unexpected reversal—abandoned atheism and reintroduced religion into Soviet public life. The book explores the meaning of atheism for religious life, for Communist ideology, and for Soviet politics.

Christianity in the Twentieth Century

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Stanley
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Regional Survey ◽  
History Of Christianity ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Different Parts

This book charts the transformation of one of the world's great religions during an age marked by world wars, genocide, nationalism, decolonization, and powerful ideological currents, many of them hostile to Christianity. The book traces how Christianity evolved from a religion defined by the culture and politics of Europe to the expanding polycentric and multicultural faith it is today—one whose growing popular support is strongest in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, China, and other parts of Asia. The book sheds critical light on themes of central importance for understanding the global contours of modern Christianity, illustrating each one with contrasting case studies, usually taken from different parts of the world. Unlike other books on world Christianity, this one is not a regional survey or chronological narrative, nor does it focus on theology or ecclesiastical institutions. The book provides a history of Christianity as a popular faith experienced and lived by its adherents, telling a compelling and multifaceted story of Christendom's fortunes in Europe, North America, and across the rest of the globe. It demonstrates how Christianity has had less to fear from the onslaughts of secularism than from the readiness of Christians themselves to accommodate their faith to ideologies that privilege racial identity or radical individualism.

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