There was plenty of revolutionary sentiment at the opening lecture of the CAS/MillerComm 2017 Lecture Series on Wednesday, September 6, where Dr. Vijay Prashad gave a lecture titled “The Russian Revolution as the Mirror of Third World Aspirations.” In a show of solidarity with groups currently fighting oppression in all its forms, Dr. Prashad attended the rally on campus in protest of the Trump administration’s decision to repeal DACA earlier in the day with Dr. Harriet Murav. Prashad’s talk along with the campus’ protest movements and display of solidarity with groups currently fighting oppression was a perfect way to to kick off REEEC’s Fall event series “1917: Ten days that shook the world / 2017: Ten days that shake the campus” commemorating the anniversary of the Russian Revolution.
At the reception before the lecture, Dr. David Cooper made a champagne toast to the heroes of the revolution; and also to those who resisted it, to its dead, and to its students. Murav noted that, although there was little to no working Illinois State budget, the resultant 1917-2017 program is evidence that when we work together, we can still accomplish things.
That such an event was taking place on an American university campus was telling, as Dr. Prashad’s lecture opened with a story about foreign journalists interviewing Lenin, asking whether the revolution had more chance of success in the East or the West. Lenin famously said that, while real communism could only succeed in the industrialized West, the West lives at the expense of the East while also raising armies there and teaching them to fight. In this manner, the West digs its grave in the East. He used this story to set up a dichotomy between the East and West that he followed throughout the lecture.
To this end Dr. Prashad quoted many political and social revolutionaries who, along with Ghandi, maintained that the 1905 uprising taught important lessons about the power of non-cooperation and politics of the masses. He argued that in India, and in other parts of the Third World, the lessons of 1905 and 1917 remain alive. He went on to outline Lenin’s tactics that were most successful in the East, arguing that Lenin’s revolution sought to draw workers alongside workers. In this new form of communal politics, which demanded rights over land and labor among other freedoms, he argued that other peasant societies—those in India, China, and Egypt for example—saw their own aspirations. The social and economic similarities among these diverse countries are striking: vast agricultural land, limited industry, little access to electricity, mass hunger and poverty. The new social fabric of Soviet society, with its newspapers, fairs, clubs, libraries, and youth societies, brought the chance for social advances that were every bit as important as addressing the systemic problems of hunger and modernization.
Women’s rights were also greatly expanded under communism where women held highly visible and important roles in early Soviet political structures. Prashad drew on photographs of women from all over the world attending political delegations to insist that the particularities of their struggle toward liberation and freedom be recognized; listing their own demands, which included access to employment and education, the abolition of polygamy, among other protections of rights. One photograph showed a female delegate from Turkey addressing the assembly with the list of demands for equality. Another
showed a group of women from India marching with a banner representing a union of “Social Health Workers” (pictured left). These early forms of gender equality are still a vital part of women’s movements in the Third World today.
While many of the exciting international movements were abandoned by the USSR by 1918 in favor of socialism in one country, the momentum for revolution was still building in other parts of the world. At this point Dr. Prashad turned his attention to José Carlos Mariátegui who argued that socialism in the Americas must be its own heroic movement and must include indigenous peoples, most of whom were not industrial workers. He pointed to the Indigenismo movement, which saw the past as an origin rather than a program. This idea is integral to Dr. Prashad’s conception of the Third World’s inheritance of the Russian revolution. Despite the many atrocities committed in the name of the revolution, he insisted that its legacy was rooted in the anti-imperial aspirations and solidarity movements that sprung up in the Third World in its wake.
He did note that the Thaw was particularly damaging to the USSR’s reputation in the Third World where the political image of Stalin stood for class struggle, not purges. Serious debates in communist parties around the world led leaders of different movements to break from party-line as they struggled to reconcile their own political aspirations with the violence of Stalinist suppression and the subsequent invasion of Hungary. Many of these leaders pushed for “polycentric communism” in an effort to hang on to the desire for emancipation and anti-imperialism, and to commit to a greater cause within their own dream of socialism. This, Dr. Prashad argued, is how the revolution is remembered in many parts of the Third World.
In a moment of such cynicism and easy despair, especially in intellectual circles in the US, his reparative reading of hope, idealism, and belief in the possibility of revolution is refreshing. As the lecture came to a close, many questions revolved around his sometimes problematic idealism. He was quick to accept this label and made no effort to excuse his idealism or answer for it. In fact it seems embedded in his worldview and vital, not just to his rendering of the Russian revolution, but to his continued belief in the revolutionary power of politics of the masses. In response to concerns about basing one’s revolutionary hopes on fantasy, he aptly noted that historical inspiration is always a mix of fantasy and reality and that this is really a good thing because if all politicians were historians nothing would ever get going. It’s perhaps too easy to toss out a quip like this to gloss over the heroic celebration of incredibly violent histories, but Dr. Prashad seemed less interested in arguing for or against any particular historical interpretation of the effects of the revolution and more interested in simply highlighting the lasting importance of the revolutionary movement itself. He argued that, in peasant societies, revolution seemed inevitable after 1917 and, just as importantly, it offered an option aside from either the violence of terrorism or the tedious games of petitionism. That sense of the inevitability of mass political movements was and is important, especially given recent events. He cited the Trump administration’s rescinding of the DACA program as evidence that even the loftiest democracies waiver between fantasy and reality at their best and, at their worst, can easily fall victim to authoritarianism and political terror. “If centralized planning doesn’t work, okay,” he says, “how about something else? We have hope and creativity. Put it to use.”
Meagan Smith is a PhD candidate in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on the representation of border walls in twentieth and twenty-first century dystopian fiction from the US, Russia, and Mexico.
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