A 100 years after the Russian Revolution

Elio Delgado Legon

HAVANA TIMES — On October 25th 1917 (November 7th using the Gregorian calendar), events unfolded that “shook” the world, according to US author John Reed. On that day, a hundred years ago, workers, farmers and soldiers, tired of being exploited and of the Tsarist regime’s poor governance, which even though it had been overthrown by the February Revolution and had been replaced with Kerensky’s provisional government, the same Tsarist conditions remained.

Two blank shots were fired from the cruise ship Aurora at night-time on November 6th. It was a signal to storm the winter palace in Petrograd, Russia’s capital at this time. At the head of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party was Vladimir Ilich Ulianov (Lenin) who then went on to take the reins of that huge country, which was economically backward, had a system of feudal serfdom in the countryside, without any industrial progress, a high level of illiteracy and cruel exploitation of workers.

I won’t go into details so as not to bore you with facts that have been explained in history books, but the October Revolution, led by Lenin, put Karl Marx’s revolutionary theories into action and great feats were achieved by following the enduring example of people rising up and fighting for a more just and fair society.

With the foundation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the USSR Communist Party. the people in this huge conglomerate of countries fought huge wars and achieved incredible progress economically as well as in the social, political, cultural and military sectors. They managed to transform that impoverished and over-exploited society into a global power, in a relatively short space of time.

It’s worth pointing out that the USSR victoriously took on German Fascism in what they called their “Great Patriotic Homeland War”, at the expense of millions of lives, and made them withdraw back to Berlin, leaving its army absolutely demoralized and crushed.

It was only then, after four years of bloody war, that Western countries took to action, but not to fight Fascism, which had already been crushed, but to stop Soviet troops from invading all of Germany and to pocket the merits of winning out over fascism.

Since the end of the Second World War and the defeat of fascism, the USSR embarked on the task of making progress again. Under the leadership of the Communist Party, it managed to make great advances in all the fields already mentioned as well as in science, to such an extent that they were the first country to send a man into space.

The achievements and progress of a new fairer society in the USSR was the example that exploited workers and farmers needed all over the world to understand that Marx’s ideas weren’t an unattainable dream.

Global capitalism’s media barrage spread lies about communism and socialism across the globe, coining terms like “Red scare”, the “Iron curtain and others in the same vein, which kept a lot of the people in the world confused, afraid of Socialism’s ideas.

The mistakes made by the Soviet leadership, the loss of values, corruption and finally betrayal, combined with the lack of Party unity put an end to the socialist system in the USSR and in neighboring countries which made up the Soviet Bloc in Eastern Europe. Enemies of socialism immediately began to throw out ideas, such as the end of history, the failure of socialism etc.

However, Socialism has irrefutably proved on more than one occasion that it is viable and is the fairest socio-political system that exists and the only one that is able to make everyone happy, without any kind of discrimination and it continues on strong 100 years after the October Revolution.