International Conference 1917-2017 Russian Revolution Centenary: Marking 100 years since the October Revolution
London 4 November 2017
The Russian Revolution of 1917 changed the course of human history. From the Tsar’s fall in February to the overthrow of the Provisional Government in October, ordinary Russians took centre stage in one of the great dramas of the modern world. To mark these momentous events one hundred years on, the Russian Revolution Centenary Committee is organising a one-day conference in London. We will be welcoming speakers from across Britain and around the world to discuss Russian revolutionary history, politics and culture and relevance today. The centenary year has already seen numerous articles, books, exhibitions and television programmes about the Russian Revolution. Our conference will focus on what we can learn from it. As a society crippled by austerity, with soaring levels of poverty and inequality, Britain is not a world apart from Russia in the early twentieth century. In 2017 over a million Britons are using food banks and working zero-hours contracts. Radical political solutions to society’s problems are being talked about again. The Russian Revolution is a theme for our times. Cover: Mass meeting at the Putilov works 1917 Opp: Factory militia volunteer for Red Army
The old workman who drove held the wheel in one hand, while with the other he swept the far-gleaming capital in an exultant gesture.
‘Mine!’ he cried, his face all alight. ‘All mine now! My Petrograd!’ John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World
Armed soldiers and sailors head for Winter Palace.
International Conference
10.00-11.00 Plenary: An Introduction to the Russian Revolution
1917-2017 Russian Revolution Centenary: Marking 100 years since the October Revolution
Speakers: Sarah Badcock, David Lane and Andrew Murray (chair) 11.00-11.30 Coffee 11.30-12.45 Sessions Women and the Russian Revolution Speakers: Sarah Badcock, Mary Davis (chair) and Rachel Holmes The Soviet Union: A Retrospective Speakers: Mick Costello (chair), David Lane and Slava Tetekin October and Soviet Cinema Speakers: John Green (chair) and Mike Wayne
10-6
Saturday 4 November 2017 TUC Congress House 23-28 Great Russell Street London WC1B 3LS
12.45-13.45 Lunch (refreshments not provided)
13.45-15.00 Plenary: The Impact of the Russian Revolution in Britain Speakers: Mary Davis, Richard Leonard, Tosh McDonald (chair) and Adrian Weir This session is dedicated to the memory of Ken Gill (1927-2009) 15.00-15.30 Coffee 15.30-16.45 Sessions Art and the Russian Revolution
The Russian Revolution and the Third World Speakers: Vijay Prashad and Teresita Vicente Sotolongo (chair) 16.45-18.00 Plenary: Is the Legacy of the Russian Revolution Still Relevant in the World Today? Speakers: Brinda Karat, Aleida Guevara March, Slava Tetekin and Johanna ScheringerWright (chair)
Speakers: Ralph Gibson (chair) and Christine Lindey Why Did the Russian Revolution Inspire Revolutions in Other European Countries? Speakers: Jonathan White (chair), Johanna ScheringerWright and Chris Wrigley
Lenin speaks at unveiling of monument to Marx and Engels
Speakers
Sarah Badcock is Associate Professor in History at Nottingham University. Her research focuses on Russia in the late imperial and revolutionary periods. She is interested in comparative perspectives on questions of punishment, free and unfree labour, and penal cultures. Her most recent book A prison without walls? Eastern Siberian exile in the last years of Tsarism was published by Oxford University Press in 2016. Her research on ordinary people’s experiences of the Russian Revolution culminated in the book Politics and the People in Revolutionary Russia: a provincial history (2007). Mick Costello is a council member of the Society for Co-operation in Russian and Soviet Studies. He was previously the British Communist Party’s industrial organiser and industrial correspondent for the Morning Star newspaper. He both lived and travelled extensively in the Soviet Union where he visited factories and workplaces. He published Workers’ Participation in the Soviet Union in 1977. He was recently awarded a PhD in Social Anthropology by the University of Kent for his thesis Abkhaz custom and law in today’s state-building and ‘modernisation’.
Exhibition The Marx Memorial Library’s Heritage Lottery Funded exhibition, The Russian Revolution 1917-1922 will be on display. For further information visit www.russianrevolution. marx-memorial-library.org.uk
Mary Davis FRSA is Visiting Professor of Labour History at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has written, broadcast and lectured widely on women’s history, labour history, imperialism and racism. She was an elected member of the Trades Union Congress women’s committee for 25 years. She is one of the founder
members of the Sylvia Pankhurst Memorial Committee. She was awarded the TUC Women’s Gold Badge in 2010 for services to trade unionism. Ralph Gibson is Honorary Secretary of the Society for Co-operation in Russian and Soviet Studies and Co-Chair of the Russian Revolution Centenary Committee. John Green studied film at the national film college in Babelsberg in the German Democratic Republic. After returning to Britain in 1968, he worked for over 20 years making news reports and documentaries for television. He was also, for several years, a member of the radical filmmaking group Cinema Action. In 1989 he became a communications officer for NALGO (later UNISON) and now works as a freelance writer. His most recent book is A Political Family: The Kuczynskis, Fascism, Espionage and the Cold War (2017). Aleida Guevara March is a Cuban paediatrician, international medical mission veteran and daughter of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. She is a doctor at Havana’s William Solar Children’s Hospital and has also worked on international medical brigades in Angola, Ecuador and Nicaragua. Aleida is the eldest daughter of four children born to Che Guevara and his second wife, Aleida March. Rachel Holmes is the author of Eleanor Marx: A Life, serialised on BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, and her
book on Sylvia Pankhurst is out from Bloomsbury in 2018. Her previous books include The Hottentot Venus: The life and death of Saartjie Baartman and The Secret Life of Dr James Barry. She co-edited Fifty Shades of Feminism and I Call Myself A Feminist. Brinda Karat joined the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in 1975 and has been an active member of the student, trade union and women’s movements. Between 1993 and 2004 she was General Secretary of the All India Democratic Women’s Association and continues to serve as its Vice President. In 2005 she became the first female member of the political bureau of the CPI (M) and was elected to the Upper House of India’s Parliament representing West Bengal. David Lane is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and currently Emeritus Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge University. Previously he was Professor of Sociology at the University of Birmingham. He has written extensively on the USSR and state socialism, Marxism, class and stratification. His recent writings have focussed on the transformation of state socialism, globalisation; political elites in Britain, Russia and Ukraine; unemployment in Russia and Ukraine; the enlargement of the European Union. Richard Leonard is MSP for Central Scotland and the Scottish Labour Party’s front bench spokesperson on the economy. He was previously a
research officer at the Scottish Trades Union Congress, Parliamentary Assistant to Alex Falconer MEP and Political Officer for GMB Scotland. He has written widely on the history of the Labour Party.
editor on the Morning Star from 1977 to 1984 and is the author of a number of books on history and politics. He was a senior advisor to the Labour Party’s 2017 general election campaign.
Christine Lindey was previously an Associate Lecturer in Art History at the University of the Arts, London and at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her most influential book is Art in the Cold War: from Vladivostok to Kalamazoo (1990) which pioneered the comparative study of Soviet and Western art. She is a visual arts critic for the Morning Star and her fifth book, Art for All: British Socially Committed Art c.1939-c.1962 is forthcoming.
Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Professor of International Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut (USA). He is a staff writer for Frontline (India), The Hindu (India), BirGün (Turkey) and Alternet (USA) and is the Chief Editor of LeftWord Books. He is the author of The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (2008) and recently edited the volumes Red October: The Russian Revolution and the Communist Horizon (2017) and Will the Flower Slip Through the Asphalt? Writers Respond to Capitalist Climate Change (2017).
Tosh McDonald has been a rail worker since 1979 when he started as a freight guard in Doncaster. He became a train driver in 1990 moving to Leeds for the position. He served first as a local trade union representative and then as a regional representative covering Sheffield, Doncaster, Hull and Immingham. He was elected to ASLEF’s National Executive in 2004 becoming the union’s Vice President in 2006 and President in 2015. He toured the Soviet Union as part of a delegation in 1988. He is a keen internationalist and biker. Andrew Murray is Chief of Staff of Unite the Union and was previously its Director of Communications. He was the Chair of the Stop the War Coalition from 2001 until 2011 and in 2015-16. He was a political reporter and features
Johanna Scheringer-Wright is a member of the Thuringia Landtag for Die Linke (The Left) in Germany. She is the Die Linke parliamentary fraction’s spokesperson on agrarian policy and regional development and a member of the parliamentary committee for infrastructure, agriculture and forests. She also sits on Die Linke’s national committee. Teresita Vicente Sotolongo joined the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1981. She held a number of senior diplomatic posts in Europe before becoming Cuban Ambassador to the Swiss Confederation and the Principality of Liechtenstein in 2000.
Between 2004 and 2008 she served as Director of the Europe Directorate at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and then Ambassador to Canada until 2013. She was Chargée d’Affaires at the Cuban Embassy in London prior to being appointed Ambassador to the UK in 2015. Vyacheslav (Slava) Tetekin was a lifelong member of Communist Party of the Soviet Union and served as a member of the Duma for its successor the Communist Party of the Russian Federation until 2016. He is currently a policy adviser to the CPRF’s general secretary Gennady Zyuganov and a member of the editorial board of the left-wing newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya (Soviet Russia). He was also previously the party’s international secretary. A specialist on Africa, he was involved in the Soviet Union’s support for national liberation movements on that continent from the 1970s. Mike Wayne is a professor in Film and Media at Brunel University. He has written widely on Marxist cultural theory and aesthetics, including Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism and the Third Critique (2014). He has also codirected a number of documentary films, most recently The Acting Class (2017) about stratification in the acting industry. Adrian Weir has a background in the engineering industry in Southampton where he was a lay trade union representative. After a break in
employment to pursue a course of higher education he began work for the Transport and General Workers’ Union in its London Region in the mid 1980s. He is currently Unite the Union’s Assistant Chief of Staff. He is also an officer of the Campaign for Trade Union Freedom and a member the Publications Committee of the Institute of Employment Rights. Jonathan White is an Associate Editor of Theory and Struggle, the journal of the Marx Memorial Library. He is the editor and co-author of Building an Economy for the People: an alternative economic and political strategy for 21st century Britain, published by Manifesto Press, contributes regularly to the Morning Star and has published and taught on aspects of Marxism, mostly at the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School. Chris Wrigley is Emeritus Professor of History at Nottingham University. His books include Arthur Henderson (1990), Lloyd George and the Challenge of Labour: 1918-22 (1990), British Trade Unions since 1933 (2002) and AJP Taylor: Radical Historian of Europe (2006). He also edited A History of British Industrial Relations 18751979 (1982-97), Challenges of Labour: Central and Western Europe, 1917-20 (1993), The First World War and the International Economy (2000), The Blackwell Companion to Early Twentieth Century British History (2003) and Britain’s Second Labour Government, 1929-31 (2012).
Tickets ÂŁ10/ÂŁ8 concessions http://www.1917.org.uk secretary@1917.org.uk 020 7253 1485 Russian Revolution Centenary Committee 37a Clerkenwell Green, London, EC1R 0DU @1917Centenary www.facebook.com/1917centenary Above: Provisional Government is deposed. Notice of 7 November 1917. Left: Women led the way with the initial combative demonstrations in Petrograd. Watch used by leaders of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee to set the time of the assault on Winter Palace.
Supported by
The Russian Revolution Centenary Committee brings together labour movement, heritage and cultural organisations with the aim of informing debate about the Revolution’s continuing relevance to politics and society today.
Image credits: Sputnik and Marx Memorial Library & Workers’ School. Brochure design: Phil Katz
Mass literacy campaigns brought millions of adults into education for the first time. Back cover: Motorised detachment of Red Army militia.