Byltingin í Rússlandi, Sources, Preface & Introduction

This is the first part of my translation of Byltingin í Rússlandi - The Revolution in Russia by Stefán Pjetursson

Sources

A History of Russia, Alfred Nicolas Rambaud, 1895

Russia, Wallace West, 1912

The Old and the New Russia, Grossman, 1917

Six Weeks in Russia, Arthur Ransome, 1920

The Russian Republic, Cecil Malone, 1920[1]

Bolshevism at Work, William T Goode, 1920

The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Fred Engels, 1848

The Communist Programme, Nikolai Bukharin 1919

Preface

The reason for this book is simple. I and many others have discussed how incomplete and wrong the history of the revolution in Russia has been that has reached Iceland. Recently the papers have carried reports that have barely tried to give an overview of these extraordinary events. They have just reported ill-considered and often untrue telegrams or dubious letters from the newspapers abroad. Despite this, it cannot be hidden that the Russian Revolution is absolutely extraordinary and must have far reaching consequences. So people will have little or no choice but to follow these events.

This book is an opportunity to give people a more complete account of the Russian Revolution, the events and their causes. How it got off the ground and the organisation behind it. Of course in such a short book it is not possible to do this other than in broad strokes.

To this end, I have tried to capture the reliable history of the Revolution and I have particularly chosen those events that have often been written about by both sides.

I know full well that many people will find fault with this book. Doubtless many more will find much of it questionable. But I invite the readers not to let prejudice against the Revolution both in Iceland and abroad cloud their judgement of the subject matter. The first condition for this is that reading it can be of use.

Reykjavík May1921

Introduction

We Icelanders, who live at the ends of the earth, have escaped the worst of the horrors recently enacted throughout the civilised world. With growing astonishment we have heard how millions have been sent out to certain death, how whole states have starved and the same states, driven by necessity have risen against the men and parties who sent them down this impassable route.

We have seen empires like Austria fall and small countries rise up to trash them. We have seen states as important as Germany rise in its fury against the Kaiser's dynasty and its lackeys, and overthrow them in the hope that this way they could get a just peace.

But we have also seen how their hopes and those of other states have been defeated. How the right of the fist and shameful injustice triumphed at the so-called peace conference of Versailles.

The injustice of the result has fired the anger of all the best people in the world. There we sit for the time being - they may not challenge the authority of the victors, for behind the Versailles Peace treaty stands English, French and American capitalism. It remains to be seen how long they remain in agreement.

People’s hopes had been enormous and they had not thought it possible that war could happen between civilised states. Likewise, after the war, people told themselves that something great and extraordinary, something truly wonderful must spring from the blood spilt.

Some believed that the war would ensure the rights of small nations like the Allies said. That this was a war for peace - the last war that there ever would be.

Utterly empty delusions!

Now dread has struck mankind. People are asking—how are we to prevent this ever happening again?

At the same time as the victors of the world war have been dividing the spoils, they have caused the events in Eastern Europe that will have even greater repercussions than what happened in the world in previous years.

People are beginning to fall silent about the world war and the Versailles peace treaty and get louder about the Revolution in Russia, the proletarian movement that is called Bolshevism throughout the world.

Everywhere people are taking sides over this movement— for or against—revolution will plunge the world into ruin if not stopped, or Bolshevism is the only way to save mankind.

The present system had displayed all its weaknesses and had led to poverty and insecurity for most of the world. The question became whether people should turn and follow or be utterly hostile to this new movement. Many people both here in Iceland and abroad thought that the Russian Revolution was a whirlwind that would soon subside. If this were the correct way to look at it then it would mean that the movement did not have deep roots.

But for a whole century the revolution has been digging itself into Russia. It has been energetically prepared by many of the best people that Russia has. And it is precisely these people that it is necessary to get to know to understand the Revolution and form ideas about it, whatever future it has.

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[1] Cecil Malone,Coalition Liberal MP for Leyton East, north east London, Britain

Cod in the North Sea - swimming against the stream

The Icelandic prime minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir has tried very hard to get Iceland into the European union. Well Jóhanna has announced her retirement and the EU hasn't got any more stable since the beginning of the financial crisis. Here's a piece from this weeks Socialist Worker newspaper in Britain about overfishing and the disappearing cod. It finishes with this thought about the EU and it's planning,

'The EU’s quota system is sometimes presented as an alternative to the unrestrained competition of the market. In fact it institutionalises competition.

Individual states lobby for their own fishing industries and against others. For example, this summer British fisheries minister Richard Benyon met with other European fisheries ministers. He argued that Cornish fishing workers should get a larger share of the quota than Spanish ones.

As well as sowing nationalist division, the system creates enormous waste. One of the biggest problems is the fish that are caught but then thrown away to comply with quotas.

Fish of different species often swim together—and are caught in the same nets. Every year half the fish caught are thrown back into the North Sea.

The EU announced a plan to phase in bans on these “discards” by 2018. Celebrity cod-botherer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall called it a “massive breakthrough”.

But the ban won’t make the problem go away. As long as there are quotas, the waste will continue. The solution is not EU bureaucracy, but a democratically planned economy.'

A democratically planned economy is a deeply unfashionable idea amongst the ruling class for the obvious reason that if we had real democracy we'd have no ruling class. For more on a democratically planned economy see John Molyneux's Future Socialist Society and an interview with Alex Callinicos posted in Capital and Class

Byltingin Í Rússlandi - The Revolution in Russia

In 1921 socialist students in Reykjavik published a little book called The Revolution in Russia, Byltingin í Rússlandi. The author Stefán Pjetursson was then studying Law in the University of Iceland. He was assisted by Stefán Jóhann Stefánsson, Jón Thoroddsen, Tómas Jónsson, Sigurður Jónasson who were all undergraduates and Einar Olgeirsson who was still in High School.[1] The young Icelandic socialists wanted to counter the misinformation of  the opponents of the revolution. Various authors in right wing Icelandic papers such as Morgunblaðið were writing about the horrors of the revolution and the Civil War and blaming the Bolsheviks for the chaos, hunger and violence.

Byltingin Í Rússlandi 

These young people were not merely writing about world shaking events from the isolation of their rocky outcrop of Europe. Icelandic young people with sponsors or family money[2] often went to the capital cities of mainland Europe to work and study. Before the University of Iceland was founded in 1911 there was no other way to gain a degree. Hendrik Ottósson[3] had met Swedish communists in Copenhagen when he was studying there in 1918-9 and was invited to the 2^nd Congress of the Communist International [Comintern] in 1920 by telegram from Fredrik Ström.[4] On his way there he met his old school friend Brynjólfur Bjarnason and with Ström’s help they both managed to attend the Comintern as observers. They joined the meetings held in Russia, organised by the Bolsheviks, with delegates from all the foreign communist parties that agreed to the conditions for membership of the Communist International, A year later Hendrik and Brynjólfur went to the Third Congress of the Comintern with Ólafur Friðriksson, editor of the Social Democrats paper Alþýðublaðið and Ársæll Sigurdsson who represented the Icelandic left in Copenhagen, mostly students.

When Byltingin Í Rússlandi was published the Civil War in Russia was over and the Red Army led by Leon Trotsky had won. The cost of this achievement in the face of an international blockade and invasion by at least fourteen countries was terrible. The infrastructure was almost wrecked and the working class almost wiped out as people from cities left for the countryside to avoid starvation and disease.  Lenin and the Bolsheviks knew that if the revolution did not spread to Germany[5], then their own revolution would be strangled.  The millions, who wanted to see the working class and oppressed peoples running the world for themselves - for the benefit of the majority - expected the revolution to spread throughout Europe and then rest of the world soon.

Byltingin Í Rússlandi is a defence of the Russian Revolution in the face of the Icelandic establishment, its capitalists and their mouthpieces. It also tries to shore up the confidence of the Icelandic left and trade unionists and arm them against pessimism.

“The Revolution cannot develop if it is hemmed in by capitalists on all sides, says Stefán, but there is a growing proletariat in all countries and neither mourning nor Old Wives Tales will prevent the progress of our party because it is based on Marx’s golden words from the Communist Manifesto.”

Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution.

The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

Proletarians of all countries, Unite!

Unfortunately Byltingin Í Rússlandi is not available online. It also does not appear in the National Library of Iceland’s database, at least not in the online search engine. In 2003 it did appear on their database as a reference book unavailable for loan but it could not be found during the week I spent four days in the library. At the time there was at least one copy in a private collection in Reykjavik and two copies in the library in Ísafjörður. I have since found a copy in the Kolaport market but it is fragile, and though I photocopied it to read I’m reluctant to unwrap it again for scanning when there maybe very few copies left. That said if no one else puts it online in the next six months I will have too. In the meantime I will put up a translation a chapter at a time.

Finally a note about the language of the book which is remarkable; it is full of Danish spellings of Icelandic words, so ‘jeg’ is used instead of ég, ‘sjer’ instead of sér and dozens of others. This is the kind of language that appears very often in Morgunblaðið at the time. Meanwhile the workers’ papers such as Verkamannablaðið use direct Icelandic without any Danish-isms.  I’ll come back to this subject later as the fight for ‘pure’ Icelandic is part of the two struggles for Icelandic independence. One bourgeois and the other working class and peasant.  

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[1] Kommúnistahreyfingin á Íslandi 1921-34, Þór Whitehead p10

[2] Ólafur Friðriksson, future editor of the Social Democrats paper Alþýðublaðið, was sent out to Copenhagen by his father to learn double-entry bookkeeping in 1906 when he was twenty. He met Jack London and was employed by him to review books, which Ólafur said paid well. Klukkan var Eitt, p24-28

[3] Hendrik Ottósson, Hvíta Stríðið p15 and Frá Hlíðarhúsum 294-5 cited  Kommúnistahreyfingin á Íslandi 1921-34, Þór Whitehead, p10

[4] Fredrik Ström had sided with the far left of the SDP headed by communists. The group supported the Bolsheviks and formed the first Swedish Communist Party

[5] At the time Germany had the largest, best educated and most highly organised working class in the world.

The Lost Revolution: Germany 1918-23, Chris Harman; How the Revolution was Lost, Chris Harman and The German Revolution 1917-23, Pierre Broué

The Olympics: Raining on their parade

The 2012 Olympics opening ceremony has started tonight in London where the Olympic torch has lit a big bowl of fuel in East London. The torch relay was introduced in 1936 by the Nazi German government whose dreams of Aryan glory were shaken by African American Jesse Owens' multiple gold medals.
Halldór Kiljan Laxness, Iceland's greatest novelist, left-winger and future Nobel Laureate, was in Germany at the time visiting Leipzig. He went to see potential publishers for a German translation of his great novel Salka Valka and stopped off at Berlin when a friend managed to get him tickets to the Games. Unlike other Icelandic commentators, Halldór wasn't impressed that Icelandic athletes were there at all;

'It can be said in praise of the Icelandic "athletes" who were taking their ease there, that none of them had even the lowest level of ability that was required for these games, but got to be there, as far as I could understand, because they belonged to the fairer race, as the Germans consider themselves, and the only way they drew attention to themselves was by giving the fascist salute on the field and denying at the same time the one thing that they could have shown: respect for their own nation.'

Normal Service Will be Resumed

For the next seven weeks or so  I will be submerged in preparation for and the aftermath of Europes largest festival of the Left Marxism 2012. So apologies for the hiatus but I will return in late July with Stefán Pjetursson’s book Byltingin í Rússlandi, the Revolution in Russia,first published in Reykjavik 1921. This was designed as a straightforward explanation of Russia's history and the background to the Revolution, and to counter the lies and misunderstandings of the rightwing Press. See you then..

Women and Revolution - An angry Egyptian writes

Next weekend in Reykjavik a film festival of short films and documentaries about women and women's rights opens including Hidden Faces about Egyptian women.

In her blog An Angry Egyptian, Egyptian revolutionary socialist Gigi Ibrahim responds to feminist Mona El Tahawy who argues that women in the Middle East are oppressed because men hate them.  She also blames religion for misogyny and sexual violence. El Tahawy has been involved in the protests in Egypt but her understanding of oppression and religion cannot explain how women were able to sleep out in Tahrir Sq for weeks safely, nor why secular and Muslim Egyptians protected Christians whilst they prayed and Christians protected Muslims. In short she does not understand class. For her men can only be part of the problem. Nawal Al Sadawi, Egyptian author, doctor, activist and longtime women's rights campaigner, however does understand.

‘In the square, I felt for the first time that women are equal to men, It's like I carried a burden on my back, and now I feel free.' Al Sadawi was arrested and censored for her work under Anwar Sadat's and Hosni Mubarak's regimes. "Suzanne Mubarak silenced women, killed the feminist movement, and did nothing for us," she said, dismissing the former first lady's "National Council of Women" as little more than a PR campaign for the regime.’

Lives unfettered by possessions or a home

Apologies to Comrade Markin for the slow response to your question. Commenting on To Talk about Women's Oppression We have to Talk about Class, you asked,

‘about the position of women you've described in early 20th Century Iceland. I get the impression that although the same material oppression was experienced as elsewhere in early capitalism, there is a countervailing tendency in that women worked from very early on in the development of capitalism. (In Britain, for instance, it wasn't until the end of the Industrial Revolution that large numbers of women were pulled into the factories). Is this impression correct and, if so, is there any cultural cause behind it?’

It’s true that women in Iceland were at the forefront of Iceland’s transition to capitalism, though women in Britain were also down the mines before they went into the factories.

To understand the way women became industrial workers we need to understand the peculiarities of Iceland’s material conditions and the legal constraints placed upon its peasantry to suit the economic demands of its ruling class.

Iceland was one of the last parts of Europe to be settled from the end of the 9th late C and roughly all the habitable land had been divided up into homesteads by the early 13th C. But the pioneers of one age, the rebellious class that ran away from the Norwegian King Harold Fairhair, were not so keen on rebellion when they had established their farms and needed obedient servants and farmworkers.

Norwegian rule gave way to a more powerful Danish state and monopoly trade with little investment through 17th & 18th C.

By the late 18th C the Icelandic ruling class, made up of landowners, Danish or Icelandic officers of the Danish Crown and its church Lutheranism, had become a conservative force that was actively blocking development. Farm leases were often very short, even two or three years which did not allow people time to improve their land and buildings. Then if tenants did manage to make improvements the rents often went up.[1] There was soil erosion and loss of trees yet the old technologies of drainage and manuring though well known in mainland Europe were barely used, so land was much less productive than it could have been.  

The legal obligations imposed on the peasantry by the Vistarband system saw any peasant family as a source of new paupers so the authorities actively tried to ensure that most people could not marry. By 1850 35- 40% of the population over 15 yrs old were servants. That is unmarried indoor and outdoor workers contracted 1 year at a time, for bed, board + low wages. They were essential to the hay harvest and in the winter women could work on wool processing while the men were sent to fish, for which they received no extra pay with all profit going to their employer. Added to this was a culture of young people being sent out to work and grow up on a farm away from that of their parents as part of their education.[2]

This meant that Iceland had a large highly mobile workforce that owned far fewer material possessions than a person could carry. For instance in the parish records in 1816 Sigríður Einarsdóttir aged 27 was a servant at the farm Hruni in Southern Iceland. In 1818 she moved a few miles west to Þrándarholt in the parish of Hrepphólar until she moved to Miðfell from1824 til 1836. She then moved to another farm in Hrepphólar, Dalbær from 1837-39 and in 1840 moved back to the parish of Hruni and worked at Syði Sandlækur until 1844. The following year Sigríður went back to Miðfell and moved again in 1847 to the parish of Hruni where she was registered as a servant in Hrunakrókur from 1847-50 moving within the same parish in the early 1850’s to Bryðjuholt where she was still registered as a servant in the 1855 census.

In 1816 16 year old Gróa Bjarnadóttir was also in Southern Iceland in the parish of Hruni as a servant at the farm Efrasel. From 1819-22 she moved to Berghylur in the same parish. From 1822-28 Gróa moved to Skipholt in the neighbouring parish of Tungfell. From 1829-1840 she doesn’t show up in the records but in 1840 was registered as a housekeeper in Gröf in the parish of Hruni. She remained at Gröf but after 1855 as a servant. In 1860 she was a servant at Þverspyrna still in the parish of Hruni, Southern Iceland and her final years were at Haukholt in Tungufell where she died in 1864.[3]

There were many reasons why people chose to move; to be near friends or family, to follow a good employer as they changed farm, for better wages and conditions or aging servants may not have had their contracts renewed, others could be sacked though not always with impunity.

'In 1916 Guðrún Þorleifsdóttir was sacked her for refusing to act as an unpaid servant to the local merchant in her free time. Guðrún had been hired to work in the hay and had brought her very young baby with her as was usual, and so argued that at the end of her working day she could expect to be free look after her child and herself. The farmer argued that she had to serve the merchant because the farm women had always done so. The farmer threatened to take her to court but let her off with just being sacked and turned out of the house. In January 1917 the Court found in Guðrún’s favour and the farmer had to pay her severance compensation.' 

Women in Iceland have never been a 'reserve army of labour'. However little they have been paid in money or board and lodgings, and however bad their conditions, they have lived by their work and when new opportunities came with fish and urbanisation they seized them with both hands.

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[1] Gísli Águst Gunnlaugsson, Studia Historica Upsaliensia 154 Family and Household in Iceland 1801-1930 pg 79

  [2] Loftur Guttormsson cited Gísli Águst Gunnlaugsson, Studia Historica Upsaliensia 154 Family and Household in Iceland 1801-1930pg 60

[3] Gísli Águst Gunnlaugsson, Studia Historica Upsaliensia 154 Family and Household in Iceland1801-1930pg 82