Lenin's Moscow

By Alfred Rosmer and Ian Birchall

This memoir by a Comintern leader in the early Soviet Union is “a vital primary source . . . clear and unpretentious”(Ian Birchall, from the new preface).

When Alfred Rosmer arrived in Russia in 1919, it was considered by millions to be the center of world revolution. It was also a society beleaguered by civil war and encircled by hostile powers seeking to snuff out the promise and potential the first successful workers’ revolution represented. It was in this context that revolutionaries from across the globe undertook the creation of the Communist International, hoping to forge an instrument to fan the flames of the struggle against global capitalism.

In this gripping political memoir of his time in Moscow, Rosmer draws on his unique perspective as both a delegate to the Comintern and as a member of its Executive Committee to paint a stunning picture of the early years of Soviet rule. From the debates sparked by the publication of Lenin’s State and Revolution and Left-Wing Communism to the efforts of the International to extend its influence beyond Europe with the Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku, Rosmer documents key developments with an unparalleled clarity of vision and offers invaluable insights.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781608466672

Book preview

LENIN’S MOSCOW

Third Edition

by ALFRED ROSMER

introduced and translated by

Ian Birchall

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Haymarket Books

Chicago, Illinois

Translation © 1971 Ian Birchall

Previous edition published in 1987 by Bookmarks First edition published in 1971 by Pluto Press

This edition published in 2016 by

Haymarket Books

P.O. Box 180165

Chicago, IL 60618

773-583-7884

www.haymarketbooks.org

[e-mail]

ISBN: 978-1-60846-667-2

Trade distribution:

In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com

In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca

In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.com

All other countries, Publishers Group Worldwide, www.pgw.com

This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.

Cover image: Inside of the Shukhov broadcasting tower in Moscow. The radio tower was originally designed as a 350 meter-tall steel diagrid structure by the Russian engineer Vladimir Grigoryevich Shukhov. Because of the steel shortage during the Russian Civil War of 1920-1922, the final construction is only half as high. The tower is currently threatened with demolition.

Cover design by Eric Kerl.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

Contents

Translator’s Introduction to the Third Edition

Introduction

Author’s Foreword

1920

1 Europe in 1920

2 The journey to Moscow

3 May Day in Vienna

4 Masaryk’s Czechoslovakia

5 Clara Zetkin. Shlyapnikov. Great demonstration at Berlin

6 From Stettin to Reval (Tallinn)

7 Petrograd. Zinoviev

8 Moscow: at the Executive Committee of the Communist International. Sadoul/Radek/Bukharin

9 Trotsky

10 At the Kremlin: Lenin

11 Among the delegates to the Second Congress of the Communist International

12 Radek speaks of Bakunin

13 Smolny: Solemn opening session of the Second Congress

14 The debates of the Second Congress

15 Trotsky’s closing speech presents the Manifesto

16 The Eastern peoples at the congress of Baku

17 The Russian trade unions

18 The Anarchists. Death and funeral of Kropotkin

19 Congress of the French Socialist Party: a majority for affiliation to the Communist International

20 The French Communist group in Moscow

21 ‘Trotsky’s Train’. Wrangel. End of the Civil War

1921

1 The trade-union question provokes a great debate

2 The Kronstadt rising

3 Lenin presents the New Economic Policy (nep) to the Third Congress of the Communist International

4 The Red International of Labour Unions holds its founding congress

5 Balance-sheet of seventeen months in Russia

6 Return to Paris—a different world

1922

1 Return to Moscow; the United Front; Shlyapnikov and Cachin

2 World economic crisis. Lloyd George proposes a conference. Cannes.

3 The delegates of the three internationals at Berlin

4 Genoa and Rapallo

5 The trial of the Social-Revolutionaries

6 Fifth anniversary of the October Revolution.Fourth Congress of the Communist International

7 The French Communist Party and its difficulties

8 Frossard resigns—Cachin remains

1923

1 Poincaré has the Ruhr occupied

2 Hamburg: Fusion of the Second International and the Vienna International

3 Confusion in the leadership of the Communist International. Revolutionary situation in Germany

1924

1 Lenin’s Death

Appendixes

1 Lenin’s Testament

2 Fortunes of Lenin’s Testament

3 Lenin’s last speech to the Communist International

Conclusion

Biographical Notes

About the Authors

Translator’s Introduction to the Third Edition

In 1953, when Alfred Rosmer’s Lenin’s Moscow was first published, the Cold War was still at its most intense. It was the year of Stalin’s death, but nobody yet knew in what direction his heirs would move. In the United States McCarthy’s witch-hunts raged, persecuting individuals with any present or past link to Communism. In Rosmer’s homeland of France, a series of right-wing pro-American governments were systematically attacking working-class organisation. The one thing on which Communists and anti-Communists were in agreement was that Stalin was the direct descendant of Lenin and the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Only a tiny handful of revolutionary socialists affirmed their independence of Washington and Moscow.

Rosmer’s book, the memoirs of a participant in the Second, Third and Fourth Congresses of the Communist International [Comintern] tells a story very different from the dominant orthodoxy. The congresses which Rosmer describes had nothing in common with the monolithic unanimity which characterised the Comintern in its later years. They brought together militants from widely diverse organisations and traditions, united only by a commitment to the destruction of the system that had produced the horrors of the First World War. Their debates were wide-ranging, dealing with fundamentals of analysis and strategy, fierce but generally fraternal.

Today’s world is apparently very different. The old hostilities of the Cold War have given way to a war on terror and the Soviet Union has disappeared. Conservatives tell us that any revolution must lead to tyranny, while many on the left argue that Lenin and all he stood for are obsolete. Yet war and poverty, oppression and exploitation, all that the Comintern fought to destroy, are still with us. The study of our history remains an indispensable guide.

The years after the Russian Revolution of 1917 saw the highest level of working-class struggle that the world has yet experienced. Whatever difficulties the revolution faced from the outset, it was a moment of tremendous hope for the working class throughout the world. The Comintern was founded in 1919 because the Bolshevik leaders knew that their revolution could not survive unless it spread; nobody had yet thought of the idea of socialism in one country. The Comintern aimed to bring together all those who had broken with the Second International, which had miserably capitulated to support for the war in 1914, with all those who wanted to build new parties aiming at a rapid conquest of working-class power.

Alfred Rosmer was a witness to this process and a leading participant in it. Yet his name remains largely unknown.¹. His expulsion from the French Communist Party in 1924 meant that he went largely unmentioned in official histories of the Comintern. The novelist Albert Camus, a younger friend of Rosmer’s who wrote the preface to the original edition of Lenin’s Moscow, noted that it is one of the paradoxes of this age lacking in memory that today it should be my job to introduce Alfred Rosmer, whereas the other way round would be more fitting.².

Alfred Griot was born in the United States in 1877, but his French family returned to France in 1884. As a young man he was employed as an office worker and a proofreader, and he was attracted towards anarchist ideas. He took his pseudonym from the hero of Ibsen’s play, Rosmersholm, an incurable idealist. His political activity really began with his involvement in the journal La Vie ouvrière (Workers’ Life), which appeared in France between 1909 and 1914. This was launched by Pierre Monatte; it was produced by a nucleus of writers whom Monatte gathered around himself, mainly from the revolutionary syndicalist current of the French working-class movement. The syndicalists argued that it would be trade-union direct action, ultimately a general strike, which would overthrow capitalism and establish working-class rule.

The journal appeared twice monthly with a broad range of articles. Much of the international coverage was written by Rosmer, who spoke fluent English. He travelled to Britain to report on developments there, including the suffragette movement.

Although La Vie ouvrière’s circulation was small (never above two thousand), it had a deserved international reputation. Its readers included Zinoviev, the future president of the Comintern, in Switzerland, who may well have shown his copy to his comrade Lenin. When Rosmer went to Moscow in 1920, he found that militants from several countries knew his name from La Vie ouvrière.

As well as writing on international questions, Rosmer became involved with the fight for women’s equality. Many revolutionary syndicalists argued that women should be excluded from industrial employment, notably in the printing trade; it was claimed that the employers wanted to bring in women in order to have a more docile labour force and thus weaken trade-union organisation. In 1913 a very undocile lady in Lyon, Madame Couriau, took a job in the printing industry. The local union refused to accept her as a member, and instructed her husband, also a printer, to make her give up the job. When he refused to do so, he was expelled from the union.

Rosmer wrote five articles for the syndicalist daily paper La Bataille syndicaliste. In the first four he interviewed various union officials to establish the different views about female labour. Only after carefully listening to the various opinions did Rosmer conclude by arguing that the unions should welcome women into membership, so that they could not be used to divide the workforce. He insisted on the right of women to equality: Is it so difficult to admit that a woman can act on her own account, and that she has a say in the matter when it comes to controlling her life and her destiny?³.

The outbreak of war in August 1914 had a catastrophic effect on the international working-class movement. In his history of the labour movement during the First World War⁴. Rosmer describes how Paris, where only a week earlier there had been a mass antiwar demonstration, became a city full of marchers chanting To Berlin, to Berlin and singing the Marseillaise. He and Monatte went to visit some of their closest collaborators and found that they had either decided to support the war now that it could not be prevented, or that they were too crushed and demoralised to do anything. Only a handful were willing to resist.

A tiny group began to meet regularly in the offices of La Vie ouvrière, although the journal was unable to appear any more. A little later they were joined by a Russian exile who had come from Vienna to Paris when the war broke out, Leon Trotsky. He and Rosmer developed a friendship which was severely shaken on occasion but lasted until Trotsky’s death.

In the spring of 1915 Rosmer was involved in one of the first public actions against the war. The metalworkers’ union had decided to bring out a special issue of its newspaper for May Day. Rosmer worked closely with Alphonse Merrheim, a leading member of the union. Government censorship strictly controlled any published material hostile to the war. Merrheim and Rosmer prepared an issue with a number of articles critical of the war, including a piece by Rosmer about the strikes in Scotland in February 1915, of which French workers knew nothing. The proofs were submitted to the censors, who demanded the removal of the offending articles. A few papers were run off with the appropriate blank spaces, and a large number with the full version. These were then carefully packed up into packets, with the censored papers at the top and the rest underneath, and put into the post. They thus succeeded in distributing some seventeen thousand papers.⁵. Rosmer was also centrally involved in organising for the Zimmerwald conference of 1915, which was the first attempt to regroup antiwar forces on an international level.

When the war ended there was mass radicalisation among workers, especially ex-servicemen. The revolutionary syndicalists played an important role, underestimated by many historians, in the activity which led up to the foundation of the French Communist Party from a split in the Socialist Party at the Tours Congress in December 1920.

Rosmer himself did not attend the Congress. The Comintern needed to build mass parties rapidly; it also needed cadres, people with judgement and experience who could resist pressures from left and right and provide the newly radicalised workers with the leadership they needed. It was in this context that he was invited to Russia for the Second Congress of the Comintern in July 1920.

Rosmer had been a revolutionary for only eleven years, but by the standards of the time he was a seasoned veteran. Moreover he had the confidence of Trotsky—and soon won the respect of Lenin. So he did not return to France after the Second Congress. He stayed in Moscow for some seventeen months in order to assist with the building of the Comintern and especially of the Red International of Labour Unions. Like Victor Serge, (whose Memoirs⁶. makes an excellent complement to Rosmer’s book), Rosmer had the job of trying to attract syndicalists and anarchists into the orbit of the Comintern. Because of their previous record and contacts they were well placed to do such work.

When Lenin disappeared from the Comintern leadership, things got rapidly worse. Zinoviev now became the dominant figure in the International and tried to impose a bureaucratic Bolshevisation on parties throughout Europe, promoting leaderships which would cooperate with him. Rosmer could not survive long in this new atmosphere. Matters came to a head over the question of the MacDonald Labour government in Britain. The official line was that it would be enough to denounce this treacherous Labour government, and workers would quickly see its true nature and flock to the Communists. Rosmer argued that a more patient strategy would be necessary; including raising concrete demands and doing systematic united front work with the Labour left. At the end of 1924 Rosmer, together with Monatte, was expelled from the French Communist Party.

In just ten years the wheel had come full circle. In 1914 Rosmer had been part of a tiny handful of antiwar activists; by 1920 that handful had grown to a new International organising hundreds of thousands of workers and a mass Communist Party in France. But in 1924 Rosmer was again one of a tiny group of comrades. Rosmer and Monatte now set up an independent publication, La Révolution prolétarienne (Proletarian Revolution). But it was a confusing situation; initially Rosmer believed that Zinoviev was a greater threat than Stalin.⁷.

By 1929 Rosmer had joined forces with his old comrade Trotsky in the task of trying to regroup the forces of the Left Opposition. Rosmer travelled across Europe—to Germany, Austria, Belgium—holding meetings for small numbers of oppositionists. At the same time he was concerned to develop a new generation of militants. But the movement did not grow, and disputes between individuals rapidly took on an importance they would not have had in a larger movement. A quarrel between Rosmer and Trotsky erupted over the person of Raymond Molinier, a young man for whom Trotsky had high hopes, but whom Rosmer regarded with complete contempt. Trotsky saw Rosmer as too conservative in his approach. The phenomenon of the bright-eyed youngster offering get-rich-quick solutions has been repeated in the movement, and Trotsky’s own impatience during this episode is open to criticism. By early 1931 Rosmer had broken all ties with Trotsky.

Rosmer and his wife lived at Périgny, to the south of Paris in a modest home, a converted barn named La Grange. Although they had no further organisational contact with the Trotskyist movement, they made their home available for the founding congress of the Fourth International in 1938.

Rosmer remained faithful for the rest of his life to his basic principles, and strove to preserve a revolutionary tradition independent of both Western imperialism and Stalinism. Natalia Trotsky, already increasingly distrustful of the Fourth International, gave him the job of getting Trotsky’s works back into print in Europe and especially in France. Few of Trotsky’s books had survived the Nazi occupation and, given the Communist Party’s enormous influence in the postwar period, it was no easy job to persuade publishers to take on Trotsky. He was assisted in this task by Maurice Nadeau.

Rosmer had little sympathy with official Trotskyism and in 1951 he endorsed Natalia Trotsky’s break with the Fourth International. He characterised Russia as nothing but a great power, military and militaristic, ... distinctive only by the brutality of a totalitarian regime.⁸. In the early fifties Rosmer came to Britain and met Tony Cliff who was greatly encouraged when Rosmer told him how small the French antiwar group had been at the outset.⁹. He reviewed Cliff’s book on Eastern Europe.¹⁰. Even at the height of the Cold War, he maintained his independence of both Washington and Moscow, breaking with his old friends on the editorial board of La Révolution prolétarienne because he felt they were too sympathetic to the United States in the Cold War.¹¹.

In 1960, at the age of eighty-three, Rosmer (alongside his old comrade from La Vie ouvrière Robert Louzon) signed the Manifesto of the 121, which unequivocally supported those who refused to fight against Algerian independence and gave practical assistance to the Algerian struggle. Forty-six years on from 1914, he was still prepared to defy the law in implacable opposition to imperialism and war. The American historian Robert Wohl, author of one of the best studies of the early years of the French Communist Party, who interviewed him shortly before his death in 1964 noted, To the end he never gave up his belief in the Leninism of 1917-22, which in his view was corrupted but not called into question as a doctrine.¹².

There is one enormous gap in Lenin’s Moscow. It contains no mention of Rosmer’s lifelong partner, the remarkable Marguerite Thévenet. Rosmer met her during the course of his antiwar activities and she became his partner for the rest of his life—although they only got round to marrying in 1932. Thévenet was a remarkable woman, who deserves a full-length study in her own right, but unfortunately very little documentation seems to exist. This is partly due to her own personal modesty and unwillingness to achieve any sort of prominence. Moreover her speciality in the period during the war and after was in smuggling people across frontiers to assist the revolutionary cause. Such activity required considerable discretion, and was best not discussed in detail even many years after the event.

Thévenet was present at the Tours Congress in 1920, and was probably involved in organising the presence there of Clara Zetkin. The dramatic appearance of this veteran German revolutionary, despite a French government ban, so soon after the end of the war, was a magnificent internationalist gesture. Zetkin wrote to Lenin, During my stay I have learnt to value Madame Rosmer as one of the most lucid, loyal, energetic and politically intelligent ‘men’ in the French movement. She has a penetrating eye and a sound judgment for things and people.¹³.

Thévenet also played a key role in organising solidarity with the victims of the Russian famine, and in 1922 took supplies into some of the worst hit areas, thus seeing a side of revolutionary Russia unknown to those who only attended conferences.¹⁴. She played an important part in organising the first Trotskyist grouping in France. Her correspondence with Trotsky¹⁵. was always forthright; she was never deferential or afraid to disagree.

* * *

This translation first appeared in 1971¹⁶.. The years between the French general strike of 1968 and the Portuguese revolution of 1974-75 were a time of great hope. The working class was reemerging onto the stage of history, Stalinism and reformism were in retreat. It was easy to imagine that we were entering a new age of revolution, and Rosmer’s book seemed to offer both an inspiration and a guide to the struggles ahead.

By the time the second edition appeared in 1987¹⁷. those hopes had been crushed; Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were in the ascendant. But Rosmer’s career still offered some lessons. He was a revolutionary who had known both how to swim against the stream and how to swim with it. Amid the isolation of the First World War, and again during the thirties and the Cold War, he held firm to a clear and principled analysis without bending to the pressures of the times. But he also responded quickly and imaginatively when a new phase of mass struggle began.

Hopefully this new edition will introduce Rosmer and the events he lived through to a generation not warped by the Cold War and the defeats of the past. There is much in the book that will be of interest to younger activists.

Rosmer knew and closely observed Lenin, one of the great figures of the twentieth century. Rosmer would doubtless have concurred with the great Trinidadian Marxist CLR James, who wrote that Lenin was neither God nor Stalin.¹⁸. Rosmer shows us a Lenin who was a great leader and teacher, but who could lead and teach precisely because he knew how to listen and to learn from the movement. This is the Lenin who openly contradicted Zinoviev and Paul Levi at the Second Congress when they sought to insult and patronise the revolutionary syndicalists who had come to Moscow.¹⁹. This is the Lenin whose final speech to the International in 1922—a warning against those who, like Zinoviev, would try to impose a single organisational pattern on all the parties of the International—was cheered to the echo, but apparently not listened to.

There has been much new writing on the Comintern in the last twenty-five years. Pierre Broué’s Histoire de l’internationale communiste²⁰. drew out the enormous positive features of the International, but also frankly showed its weaknesses, very much in the spirit of Rosmer. The efforts of John Riddell and his collaborators have made available the full proceedings of the first four congresses of the Comintern²¹.. Many other important works of scholarship have appeared—though we still await a biography of Zinoviev, who, as Rosmer shows, played a key role in the decline of the Comintern.

Lenin’s Moscow remains a vital primary source for historians of the International, written by a participant witness. Rosmer’s account is clear and unpretentious, and can also serve as an introduction for those beginning to study the subject. Rosmer’s narrative sets the debates in their historical context, making us aware of the danger of repeating quotations from Lenin or Trotsky torn from the circumstances in which they were originally made. In particular his account of the initial reception of two books by Lenin, State and Revolution and Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder is a valuable corrective to the way such texts are sometimes quoted as though they were timeless scriptures.

In an increasingly globalised world the internationalism embodied by Rosmer remains highly relevant. For the delegates at the early congresses of the Comintern, the debates centred on events which had real consequences for the international movement—the rise of Mussolini in Italy, the March Action in Germany, the French invasion of the Ruhr. And Rosmer shows how the International tried to extend its influence beyond Europe to the oppressed peoples of the world, not just through slogans and resolutions but by organising the Baku Congress, where more than one thousand eight hundred delegates, mainly from Asia, gathered.

Rosmer’s particular responsibility was the building of the Red International of Labour Unions—the RILU—which was to provide an alternative to the existing reformist international organisation of trade unions. Many historians from the left have condemned the RILU and seen the whole project as being entirely flawed.²². But more recently the work of Reiner Tosstorff has given us a more nuanced account of the enterprise.²³.

The war had broken down the traditional divisions in the labour movement in Europe. The split between socialists and syndicalists had been overridden by the division between those who had supported the war and those who had opposed it. The Comintern was now anxious to draw in the best militants from the syndicalist and even anarchist traditions. The Bolsheviks had not abandoned their criticisms of the syndicalists on questions like participation in parliamentary elections or the need for a revolutionary party. But the main task now was to win over the syndicalists and draw them into the Comintern’s organisation. Rosmer was happy to do this because in his view Bolshevism was the heir to all that had been best in revolutionary syndicalism.

Rosmer had a hard task; many of the Russians involved had little understanding of the Western labour movement. Zinoviev, who worked with Rosmer on this project, seemed to think it was enough to issue ringing denunciations of the right-wing trade-union leaders as scabs and traitors, rather than to make a real effort to win over the rank-and-file activists. Many syndicalists from France, Spain and Italy were worried that the RILU would simply be a subordinate appendage of the Comintern, and that the trade unions would be seen as subordinate to the new Communist Parties.

Rosmer rejected the idea that politics should be excluded from the trade unions, something patently absurd in a potentially revolutionary situation. At the same time he made it clear that the unions must not be bureaucratically manipulated by Communist Parties. It was the job of Communists to fight within the unions for their positions and to win support by persuasion. But Rosmer had great difficulty steering a course between the Comintern bureaucrats who didn’t understand their own policy and the dogmatic syndicalists who saw no need to move on from their pre-war positions. The RILU did not achieve any significant success, but Rosmer’s account may have lessons for those trying to organise co-operation between activists coming from widely differing traditions.

This is, of course, an aspect of another question that is central to Rosmer’s account, the united front. The united front is one of the most vital yet difficult tactics that revolutionaries have to apply, for it must always be formulated concretely, in terms of the specific demands and organisational forms required in a particular situation. Rosmer takes us beyond the conference resolutions and shows us the problems of fighting for the united front line within the Comintern and of implementing it on the ground.

In the early 1920s the united front tactic raised particular problems. In order to establish the International in the first place it had been necessary to carry through a sharp fight to split existing working-class parties, and major efforts had to be made (not always successfully) to exclude from the Comintern centrists and indeed open reformists who wanted to jump on the bandwagon of a victorious and popular revolution. Hence the famous twenty-one conditions for membership of the International. But having established itself on a clear political basis the Comintern had to fight for united action with those it had just split from. Many in the organisation’s ranks could not—or would not—understand the logic of this strategy. Rosmer’s book illustrates the problems of the period—problems which have their parallels in our own day.

The united front strategy developed by the Comintern from 1921 onwards was mainly aimed at the mass of workers organised in the traditional reformist parties, many of which still had ostensibly socialist and even Marxist programmes. But there was also the question of the many thousands of workers, often young, who had adopted positions which could be described as ultra-left.

When there is an upturn in struggle large numbers of people are drawn in who have no memory or experience of previous defeats; therefore they believe the revolutionary process will be much simpler and quicker than it in fact turns out to be, and they substitute their own hopes and aspirations for the realities of the situation. They assume that because they personally have lost all their illusions in, say, parliamentary democracy or the trade-union bureaucracy, everybody else will also have seen through them.

With his own roots in anarchism and syndicalism, Rosmer was able to respond sympathetically to those of a similar background who were being won over to the Comintern; but he was severely critical of the various forms of ultra-leftism that flourished in the atmosphere of the early 1920s. Supporters of the revolutionary offensive, opponents of participation in parliament, pure syndicalists hostile to the notion of a revolutionary party—all spoke up in the early congresses of the International.

Such ultra-leftism was and is the product of a labour movement that has become so bureaucratised and conservative that it offers little attraction to young militants who want to smash the old order. But Lenin and Trotsky—though not many of the other Bolshevik leaders—seem to have wanted a united front with the reformists on the one hand, but on the other hand an alliance with the various ultra-lefts (especially syndicalists) who had some real base in the European labour movement. The besieged revolution needed allies in every quarter.

History does not repeat itself and parallels cannot be drawn too closely. But there may be some points of comparison between the ultra-lefts of the 1920s and the anticapitalist movement at the turn of the century or the more recent Occupy movement. Socialists need to discover ways of working constructively and co-operatively with such movements. Rosmer’s experiences may give us some assistance in this task.

In the decades ahead new struggles and new organisations may take forms that are very different to anything envisaged by Lenin or by Rosmer. But certain principles remain—the need for principled internationalism, opposition to oppression in all its manifestations and maximum unity in action combined with maximum clarity in analysis. Rosmer’s book still has a message for a world very different from the one it was written for.

Ian Birchall

May 2014

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1 There is a biography in French: Christian Gras, Alfred Rosmer (1877-1964) et le mouvement révolutionnaire international, Paris 1971. A selection of writings by Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer was published as From Syndicalism to Trotskyism, Revolutionary History Vol. 7, No. 4, 2000.

2 A Camus, Oeuvres complètes, tome III, Paris, 2008, p. 439.

3 The text of the article appears in Revolutionary History 7/4, pp. 26-8.

4 A Rosmer, Le mouvement ouvrier pendant la guerre, Paris, 1936 ; see the translation of chapter 7 in Revolutionary History 7/4, pp. 40-46.

5 Le mouvement ouvrier pendant la guerre, pp. 254-8.

6 See the first complete translation, V Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, New York, 2012.

7 See article from La Révolution prolétarienne, February 1926, translated in Revolutionary History 7/4, pp. 109-116.

8 See Revolutionary History 7/4, pp. 158-9.

9 T Cliff, A World to Win, London, 2000, p. 57.

10 Preuves, November 1953; translated in International Socialism 103 http://www.isj.org.uk/?id=42

11 See letter to Stan Newens of 2 November 1954 (Newens archive), published in Revolutionary History 7/4, pp. 159.

12 R Wohl, French Communism in the Making 1914-1924, Stanford 1966, p. 427.

13 Letter of 25 January 1921, in R Stoljarowa and P Schmalfuss (eds), Briefe Deutscher an Lenin 1817-1923, Berlin, 1990, translated in Revolutionary History 9, No. 2, 2006, pp. 217-222.

14 Her account of her travels appeared in the French Communist Party daily, L’Humanité, in June 1922, translated in Revolutionary History 7/4, pp. 86-92.

15 See Leon Trotsky, Alfred Rosmer and Marguerite Rosmer, Correspondance 1929-1939 (ed. P Broué), Paris, 1982). Some letters are translated in Revolutionary History 7/4, pp. 119-150.

16 Pluto Press, London.

17 Bookmarks, 1987.

18 CLR James, Trotskyism, Controversy, October 1937, cited C Hogsbjerg, CLR James in Imperial Britain, Durham & London, 2014, p. 213.

19 J Riddell, (ed.), 1991, Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite! Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, 1920, New York 1991, Vol. I, pp. 166-68.

20 Pierre Broué, Histoire de l’Internationale Communiste, Paris, 1997. It is hoped an English translation of this important book will appear in the not too distant future.

21 J Riddell, (ed.), 1987, Founding the Communist International: Proceedings and Documents of the First Congress, March 1919, New York 1987; J Riddell, (ed.), 1991, Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite! Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, 1920, two volumes, New York 1991; J Riddell (ed.), Toward the United Front: Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International 1922, Chicago 2012. Also on the Baku Congress J Riddell (ed.), To See the Dawn, New York, 1993. The proceedings of the Third Congress are due to appear shortly.

22 For example T Cliff and D Gluckstein, Marxism and Trade Union Struggle, London, 1986, pp. 49-50.

23 R Tosstorff, The Red International of Labour Unions (RILU), 1920–1937, Leiden, 2016. See I Birchall, review article in Historical Materialism, 17 (2009), pp. 164-76. See also R Darlington, Radical Unionism, Chicago, 2013.

Introduction

by Ian Birchall

revolutionaries have to know both how to swim against the stream and how to swim with it. When the workers’ movement is in retreat, when the traditional organisations of the left are crumbling around them, they have to hold firm to a clear and principled analysis without bending to the pressures of the times. But such tenacity is useless unless, when a new phase of mass struggle begins, they can respond quickly and imaginatively to it, and give the leadership that is required.

Alfred Rosmer, the author of Lenin’s Moscow, faced both these tasks. In his long life as a revolutionary he went on fighting for his vision of internationalist socialism when the European labour movement collapsed in 1914, during the high tide of the years following 1917, and then through the bleak, bitter isolation that came when the Russian Revolution was betrayed and lost.

Rosmer—his family name was Griot—was born in New York in 1877 to French parents.¹. They had not been directly involved in the Paris Commune of 1871, but probably left France because of the period of repression that followed it. The family returned to France in 1884. Rosmer became an office-worker, then an employee of the Préfecture de la Seine and a proof-reader. The name Rosmer, which he used throughout his life, was taken from the hero of Ibsen’s Rosmerholm, an incurable idealist.

Rosmer began his political life as an anarchist around 1896 at the time of the Dreyfus case; he evolved towards revolutionary syndicalism and in the years before 1914 worked with Pierre Monatte on the journal La Vie Ouvrière. As an intransigent syndicalist he refused all contact with organisations of the Second International. Rosmer was also a resolute advocate of the right of women to take employment, something rejected by many French trade unionists at this time. In 1913 he was involved in supporting Mme Couriau, a Lyons woman who had taken a job as a printing worker. Not only did the union