How King Street Kept An Eye on Left 1

 

 

 

In the 1950s, a network of dedicated informers secretly kept tabs on the Left in Britain. They weren't working for the Special Branch, MI5 or the CIA. Their instructions came from the Central Organisation Department of the British Communist Party. 

KONNI ZILLIACUS. Gateshead MP expelled by Labour as "fellow traveller", denounced in Prague as "British imperialist agent". Zilliacus, later MP for Manchester, Gorton, had upset Stalinists by siding with Tito in opposition to Moscow line.


In 1951 a young man called lan, from Wavertree in Liverpool,wrote to a comrade called Vic about the Labour League of Youth(LLY) on Merseyside: "I am now on a personal friendly basis with members of the LLY from at least five different branches on Merseyside . you know, to the extent that I am going round to the sec. of one of the branches next Tuesday for tea and we are then having (at his request) a long talk about the past and present policies of the CP, . .'

"Of these branches,Birkenhead and Walton are completely dominated by the Trotsky organisation together with unorganised Titoist elements.While Bootle,Princes Park are run by Catholic Action and the Trotskyite groupings are confined to only one or two members,Wavertree LLY is run by the very reactionary Labour constituency partyand it is very difficult to carry on discussions.'

Ian estimated that Birkenhead,Walton and Bootle had up to 28 members apiece, He described their"pseudo-Marxist education' and activities, and named names. On Bootle; 'The Trotskyite responsible for the Trotskyite fraction for work in this branch is Bill Fletcher,who is I believe incidentally a renegade from the YCL . 'TheTrotskyite group controls the "Rally' the organ of Birkenhiead LLY having at least four out the seven members of the editorial board - those members being .(gives names) ... The editor Alan Giles is however not I think a Trotskyist but is a Titoist who gets most of his line from Yugoslav Fortnightly and the Anglo- Yugoslav Friendship. 1

"Titoism" was a serious charge. Laszlo Rajk, Hungarian Communist Party leader and Spanish Civil War veteran, had been executed as a "Titoist' in 1949. The British Communist Party published ".Tito's Plot Against Europe' (1950), by Derek Kartun, and lames Klugman's "From Trotsky to Tito" (1951), Konni Zilliacus, MP, expelled by Labour as a "fellow-traveller", had written for  R.Palme-Dutt's Labour Monthly, and his book Dragon' s Teeth was recommended by it in July 1949. In the December 1949 issue Ivor Montagu attacked Zilliacus for siding with the Yugoslavs, and during the 1952 Prague trials the Gateshead MP was denounced as an "imperialist agent", "one of the most experienced agents in British intelligence".2



Czech CP general secretary Rudolf Slansky and his co defendants were "found guilty of spying and sabotage for the US and its satellites,' wrote Monty Johnstone in the Young Communist League's monthly, Challenge. "Many were shown to have  "acted as spies in the labour movement since the pre war days. . , Such activities can and must be rooted out in this as in other countries . . .'3

The Trotskyists and "Titoites" of Merseyside weren't the only cause for concern. In 1953 the Teeside district secretary reported coming across an organisation called Common Cause in West Hartlepool.4 He enclosed a duplicated bulletin it had produced for a meeting on "Stalin' s fascist imperialism", denouncing the Communist Party as "a treacherous conspiracy", Advertised speakers included Rupert Speir, the Tory MP for Hexham, and "C .A .Smith, MA, PhD, BSc (Econ.)",whom it mentioned had been 'Dux prizewinner at the local secondary school', rowed for King's College, Newcastle, graduated in philosophy, become national chairman of the ILP, and was now general secretary of Common Cause, "the new non-party anti- Communist organisation.'5

 "There is nothing very much for us to add. .', the Central Organisation Department (aka Betty Reid) replied,"C.A. Smith has a long record of Trotskyist activities and is a bitter anti.Soviet propagandist. . .'6

On 1 January 1954 the Holiday Friendship Service advertised in "Tribune offering trips in Bulgaria and the Russian zone of Austria.  Communist Party members were asked to look into this. One of them dutifully attended a meeting in Swansea, where "a young woman called Miss Smith,age about 25, a most unnatural manner," "come hither" " eyes' answered questions and discussed arrangements for holidays in Bulgaria. The report was forwarded to headquarters by Bill Alexander, of the Welsh district committee, which was thanked for being first to respond to the Party's request.7

Phil Piratin, former Communist MP for Mile End, wrote to Peter Kerrigan (CP industrial organiser) about a man called C.Ford who was working for the Amalgamated Engineering Union: "At a talk he gave to an organisation recently where he expressed quite reactionary views, he also mentioned that he had contacts in countries like Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. He said that he was arranging a holiday visit to Bulgaria this year. That is all the information I have,It maybe that he is connected with one of the friendship organisations, in which case the sooner they get to know about him the better.

On ll April l954 the Movement for Colonial Freedom was formed. A five page report for the Communist Party detailed its aims, officers, and sponsors, who included Tony Benn, Sir Richard Acland, Walter Padley MP, Reverend Donald Soper, Cannon Collins, Dame Sybil Thomdyke,and among union leaders, Bob Edwards, Jack Stanley and Jim Mortimer. Fenner Brockway was elected chairman. and the council included Jennie Lee, Leslie Plummer, Tony Benn and Canon Collins.

Claiming the support for the colonial peoples was "a tribute to the stimulating effect of the Daily Worker and the activity of the Communist Party, ' the report adds:
"However,this new movement has no clear policy on the nature of the common fight with the colonial peoples, and there are extremely dubious elements in the leadership,"9

This sour note may have been induced by the prominence of former ILP members like Brockway, Bob Edwards, Walter Padley and Dick Beech.JackStanley,leader of the Constructional Engineering Union, was working with the Trotskyists on the editorial board of "Socialist Outlook". A
"Socialist Outlook" meeting at Holborn Hall on Sunday19 October 1952, at which the main speakers were editor John Lawrence and Gerry Healy, was the subject of a detailed report..l0



In April 1954 the Communist Party's"World News and Views' ran two articles by someone called Barry McKaig on "Trotskyism in the Labour Party'. Basing himself on the Moscow Trials and the
thoughts of Comrade Stalin, the writer declared: "ContemporaryTrotskyism is not a political tendency in the working class, but an unprincipled band of wreckers.... in the hire of intelligence service organs of foreign States".

After this,he got down to his real business; naming names, of people associated with "Socialist Outlook" who were former members of the Revolutionary Communist Party. " Mr Healy is, of course, one of the best known of post-war Trotskyists...Mr.C. Van Gelderen, a South African, has featured in Socialist Outlook ...was a member of the Executive Committee of the Revolutionary Socialist League and youth organiser, Another contributor to Socialist Outlook is Mr. W. Hunter. who was a contributor to Socialist Appeal and a London Divisional Organiser of the ILP in 1944. (He was ILP Industrial Organiser in London).

Labour's National Executive Committee took up the chase in a circular to Labour Party members; While prominent members of the Labour Party have contributed to this journal (Socialist
Outlook) a number of its regular contributors are known for their previous association with the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party. The Revolutionary Comrnunist Party dissolved
in 1949 and advised its members to join the Labour Party and fight for their policy within its ranks'.

In a Sunday newspaper article defending the refusal of political asylum to an American professor, Dr. Cort, Home Secretary Herbert Morrison remarked that Labour had refused to admit Leon Trotsky
in l930,out of consideration for its relations with the Soviet Government.Michael Foot, writing in Tribune, asked: What in heaven's name is the National Executive trying to achieve by this rigmarole? Are they attempting to appease the NKVD and the Un-American Activities Committee by the same single act? . 11

On May Day 1954 someone sat down to pen a "Report on Trots' quoting an interview with Ron Halverson, in Enfield, and information from "Doug M.' in south London,, and "Mac' in north-west London. Dealing with various AEU stewards and Labour councillors associated with "Socialist Outlook", it also noted in passing:"The congress delegate from Neath who was put up by a friend of Doug's alleged that Homer was losing influence among miners because of his drinking and private life. Should be noted that there are Trots in Neath."12 [Arthur Homer(1894-1968), a founder member of the CP, was elected South Wales miners' president in 1936, and became general secretary of the
National Union of Mineworkers in 1946. he was a likable character, with friends who had little sympathy with his communist views'(Chambers Biographical Dictionary). Some miners didn't like
Horner's suport for productivity drives.

In response to a note from Reid, Eddie Marsden, a Party member in the Constructional Engineering Union,said he and someone called Bobby had had a chat with Jack Stanley. "We are not properly
aware, other than the article in WN, as to what is thought of SO and its E. board, but JS did tell me they had made a number of changes . . .' Marsden thought Stanley was not politically sophisticated," he might be fooled' by the Trotskyites "and this is probably what is taking place."13

Betty Reid commented "I was a little disturbed by this note about Stanley. In the first place I should have thought the two articles were quite clear (if I may say so) and explicit on the character of the Editorial board. Moreover since they were written the shift of emphasis has been to a quite open and explicit and very unpleasant Trotskyist line which is not in any way concealed, and therefore now there is much less justification than before for being taken in."14

When a group called the Workers League advertised a meeting in the Socialist Leader, the names involved had to be checked out.

On 4 June 1954,Reid asked BettyMatthews of London District Committee: "Will you check for me what is known about a man called Fred Garnsey who was a bricklayer and a member in Battersea. Could the Battersea comrades be asked why he left the Party and anything they may know about him and his personal contacts."

J. Evans of Battersea responded tersely:
"Garnsey is over 70 years of age, secretary of AUBTW branch. All his contacts are r wing and Trotskyite sympathisers like ex- CP Alf  Loughton (Trot),JFLane jar,Trot or Trot sympathy, J.Wix Trot. Don't even know he was ever in Party."15

Dennis Goodwin reported on a worker called Brace:

"Dear Betty,

Regarding Brace, according to our comrades this man was associated for a considerable period with the Anarchists and was a member of the Central No.1 branch of the ETU.

He is now said to be working in the Docks having left the electrical industry and is working as a docker and is in touch with and probably working with Constable. He is said to have contact with our lads on the various contracting jobs when he was in the electrical work and was always prepared to have a go with us but always expressed a narking criticism of the Party."16

On 16 June Bert Pearce of the CP's Birmingham city committee wrote to Mick Bennett at King Street, forwarding a three-page report on the stormy "Socialist Outlook' shareholders" meeting which had taken place in London a few weeks previously. Someone had pulled a knife on John Lawrence before the meeting started, and speakers bad been barracked. Gerry Healy's supporters, described as "the Trotskyite elements", had battled John Lawrence s faction for control of the paper, The informant,a Birmingham Labour Party member, described background conflict in the labour movement in Birmingham.17

The "Central Organisation Department" (i.e. Betty Reid) thanked cde. Pearce for his report - "very helpful indeed and fuller than the other points we bad on the same affair" - and said any further material he could send would be welcome.

"I think there is just one point on the report which you should bear in rnind, she added. "The battle is not one between Trotskyists and non-Trotskyists, but between two separate sections equally suspect, one of whom bas a more subtle and "non-sectarian" line than the other. We should not have any illusions about the former Editor and his supporters . . ."18

Trotsky's Fourth International, deprived of its founder and many leading cadres,was unsure what to make of the post.war world, and the Cold War. Lawrence had become the leading British advocate for
Michael Raptis (Pablo)'s view; that confronted with imperialist war preparations, and under mass pressure, the Soviet bureaucracy could reform itself, and the Cominform become a revolutionary
leadership., The job of Trotskyists, it followed,was to get closer to their erstwhile Stalinist opponents, and provide an ideological shove.

The British Communist Party leadership had obtained Trotskyist internal documents, including resolutions from Latin America accusing Pablo opponents,particularly the veteran US Trotskyist James Cannon, of "Stalinophobia", desertion in the face of Yankee imperialism~, and acting as "left spokesman of the anti-communist campaign led by the State Department"19

The Brazilians concluded their resolution (January 1954} with a resounding "Long Live the Fourth International! Long Live Trotskyism!", But at a meeting on 2 October 1954, attended by a delegate from the American Socialist Union (formed by Pabloites expelled from Cannon s SWP), Lawrence declared (according to a report for the CP) that Trotskyism was "dead as a doornail".20

Proposals were made to break with the Fourth International, remain in the Labour Party,but work  with the Communist Party, with the perspective of  a united front between Labour's Bevanites and the CP; to support the peace movement and friendship with the Soviet Union" The Lawrence group would meet again in November to decide on these proposals, and dissolve itself .

The Communist Party's information came via several routes. At the end of August 1954, Monty ]ohnstone reported on discussions with Ron Shaw, a member of the Labour League of Youth in Clapton, east London . "He is anxious to join the Party and YCL and says that bis last differences with us have now been cleared up. From our discussion which included the Moscow Trials and Trotsky's links with the Fascists, on which he was previously not convinced) this seems in general to be true I promised him Stalin's 1937 report on Trotskyism,"

Shaw had just won his case against expulsion from the Labour Party, and another Communist Party member had urged him to stay in for the moment, and help build opposition to German re-
armament, with Labour's annual conference coming up. Johnstone agreed."I raised in this connection the question of his supplying us with information on Trotskyist activities." Although Shaw was
reluctant to engage in "spying", he agreed to pass on anything he heard.

Johnstone reported what he had gleaned about'.the Group' and its leaders, the split, and who was with whom. His report also dealt with the people publishing "Rally" in Liverpool, mentioning that Paddy Wall was a member according to Shaw, and that they were associated with Ted Grant (whom he mistakenly thought  was running New Park Publications, in fact run by Healy),. One recent development noted in the report: "About seven weeks ago the Lawrence Group was expelled from the
Fourth International, of which -up till then -they were the official British section. Shaw does not know the reasons."21

Shaw said Pablo had boasted on a visit to England that his supporters were gaining important positions in the Communist Parties in France and Italy, and in the West German Social Democrats. Lawrence had told Shaw there were no Trotskyists in the British Communist Party, but his group would not oppose individuals joining

Shaw estimated that of 150 delegates attending the Labour League of Youth Easter conference, nearly 17 were in one or other Trotskyite faction.When Transport House threatened to disband the LLOY if certain resolutions were passed, there had been an "emergency' meeting of groups, leading to a decision to withdraw the resolutions, but keep up some liaison in future.

"When I  see Shaw next l shall have extracted names of LLOY members from conference
reports etc. and will ask him which are in Trotskyist groups,'Johnstone promised.

Another Communist Party member reported that he had been discussing with John Goffe "for the last two years" . Goffe, a Trotsk yist since pre-war days, and supporter of Lawrence's tendency, had become a Labour councillor in Camberwell, and was active in the shopworkers' union, USDAW.
"We reached agreement on policy points for the annual gathering, dealing with wages, trade union organisation and the decline of membership, colonial questions and foreign policy in general, .
We also reached agreement on the panel of names to submit for the Labour Party conference and the TUC, as well as the women's sections .his willingness to hold discussions with us, the information he is prepared to give us and the fight that he puts up on policy questions inside the union are developments worth noting." 22

A report "On Trotskyism and Tmtskyists in Lancs. and Cheshire' by the CP District
Committeefor the region,marked "Private and Highly Confidential', dated October 1954, reviewed Trotskyist activity from 1944, mentioning strikes in Barrow and Salford,and noting "efforts to win influence amongst the Colonial people particularly in the Moss Side area of Manchester and the Exchange division of  Liverpool,"

It said the Trotskyists "were able to cause some confusion, especially amongst the
African workers, A Manchester Cale proprietor, a Nigerian with considerable
wealth, Mr. Mcconnan, was and still is the  leading light in this connection. The
difficulties created for us on the occasion of Robeson's last visit was without a doubt
due to the work of the RCP and this man Mcconnan."23

OPENING Working Class Movement Library in 1987, popular former Salford MP Frank Allaun.   CP report on "Trotskyists" in 1954 voiced "strong suspicions" about him. (Photo from Frank Allaun 1913-2002, a tribute by Hyman Davies, published by Working Class Movement Library). 

The report voiced "strong suspicions that Frank Allsun,an ex-member of the Party in
Manchester, at one time Secretary of the Openshaw branch was very closely
connected with the RCP and a strong advocate of the line of working in the
Labour Party. He was however very careful of direct public association."24

An appendix listed known or suspected Trotskyists, with their addresses,
occupations, and brief notes. Joe Pawsey, of Smedley Road, Cheetham "has contacts
with the Labour Party in Salford through a ward secretary with Trotskyist views, a
Mr.D.Carping , who we are at present checking up on' . The report said enquiries
were continuing into some people. "Bob Leeson may be able to throw some light' on
the Penfolds, a Longsight couple.

Bob Leeson, who had joined the CP in 1950, said Bert Penfold and his wife had been
active in Wandsworth before coming to Manchester, where they organised
Ardwick LLOY on a "purely social" basis with 150 members. "Penfold and his wife
seemed to want to give the impression that their 'Trotskyist days were past.'

Leeson had attended the l949 Labour youth rally at Filey as a delegate from Northwich,
in Cheshire. A campaign had been launched for LP youth sections to have national
status. He had told Trevor Park, a Bury delegate, that if this failed he intended
quitting Labour for the Communist Party. Several people tried to dissuade him.
"Banda's wife told me that after she left the Communist Party in 1947 on political
grounds she was "shadowed by the Party Security Department for six  months".25

This is first part of article published in Stephen Dorril's Lobster magazine, No.31, in 1996.
http://www.8bitmode.com/rogerdog/lobster/lobster31.pdf

The Man Who Was Friday (3) Triumph and Tragedy

HIS OLD FRIENDS. Lenin and Krupskaya. Lenin's widow protested when secret police tried to frame Piatnitsky. But she was unable to save him from the Great Purge.

Abroad again, Piatnitsky went to Liepzig, where the German Social Democrats' presses printed the Russians' literature. Once again it was his job to organise the smuggling. In 1912 he helped organise the Bolsheviks' conference in Prague. Lenin and Krupskaya visited him in Liepzig. The following summer he was invited to stay with them near Zakopane, and went hiking with Lenin in the Tatra mountains. The friends had their disagreements. Lenin ribbed Piatnitsky over his respect for the German Social Democrats, Piatnitsky warned Lenin not to trust Malinowski (who was later proven to be a police agent).


In 1914, having trained as an electrical engineer, Piatnitsky returned to Russia and took a job with the Siemens company in Moscow. They sent him to work in Samara, on a tramway project. The socialists there, Menshevik and Bolshevik, had a recreational society as a cover for political lectures. But once again the authorities were on Piatnitsky's trail, armed with a photograph which he guessed an informer called Zhitomirsky had supplied. Osip was arrested and sent to a fortress prison, and then away to a remote valley in Siberia.

He was out in the wilds on March 1917 when he heard that Czar Nicholas II had been overthrown. Somehow he reached Moscow, reported for party duty, and found work with the railway union. A few years after the revolution, party members were asked to write up their stories. Piatnitsky's account was published in 1925 and translated into German and French before it was published in English by Martin Lawrence as Memoirs of a Bolshevik, and in the United States bv International Publishers (1933).

The Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow enthused in a preface: 'These Memoirs should serve as an excellent material for training our younger generation of workers who are joining the Communist Party. In this respect Comrade Piatnitsky's book might serve as a sort of textbook, and an excellent text book at that, which would help our comrades abroad, who are carrying on their revolutionary work in capitalist countries, to learn the methods of organising underground work and help them to become model Bolshevik party members.'


With its tales of true adventure, and the author's frankness and humour, Memoirs of a Bolshevik is also an enjoyable read. Yet for three quarters of a century it has been kept out of print. The Bund crops up repeatedly in the book, and not just in Osip's native Lithuania where it was particularly strong. Another thing that strikes the reader is how, despite differences and polemics, factions could work together against the autocratic regime, whether planning prison breaks, smuggling papers, or fighting off attacks.

On the eve of the First World War, Piatnitsky found that Zhitomirsky, whom he suspected was a police agent, had been investigated by a three-person committee, comprising one Bolshevik, one Menshevik and one Bundist. Such procedure might sound like common sense, but those of us who have experienced the 57 varieties of the British Left will know that sense is rarely common, and co-operation less so.

What is remarkable about Piatnitsky's book is its timing and its provenance. In the late 1920s, along with brutal forced collectivisation in the Soviet Union, came a period when revolutionary willpower could supposedly conquer everything -environmental, economic, or political. Soviet railway engineers who warned of limits on how much freight their system could carry were condemned as saboteurs. The 1929 crash was seen as the final crisis of capitalism. Failure to carry out revolution was the result of bad leadership. Any element of truth in this was distorted by Stalin, to imply not theoretical critique, but denunciations of left-wing opponents, even potential allies, as the worst-possible enemy.

'Fascism is the military organisation of the bourgeoisie, which leans upon Social Democracy...,' proclaimed Stalin, but'Social Democracy, objectively speaking is the moderate wing of Fascism!' If anyone thought this crude, over the top, or even contradictory, they knew better than to risk voicing their doubts and being branded a 'Trotskyist'. Social democrats and the unions they still led were dubbed 'social fascist', and left-wingers like the British Independent Labour Party (1LP), were 'left social fascists', a more insidious variety.

In Britain, the Communist Party had been growing since the 1926 General Strike and Ramsay Macdonald's abandonment of Labour. It had limited success with breakaway 'red' unions, and repelled valuable friends by its attack on the Left. In Poland, Communist Party members attacked the Bund and its institutions, as 'social fascist', thereby antagonising the very workers with whom they needed to unite in the fight against fascism.

In Germany, the Communist Party was bigger. Its hostility to the Social Democrats, seen as betraying the November 1918 revolution, was understandable. But in the face of Hitler's rise to power, it was suicidal. The Depression made workers who were still in the factories cling tightly to their jobs and their Social Democratic unions, while the Communists were outside competing with the Nazis for support from the unemployed.

At elections in May 1928 the Social Democrats gained 29% of the vote and the Communist Party 10.6%. The Nazis that year had a mere 2.6%. Two years and a slump later, the Social Democrat vote in September 1930 was down to 24.5%, while the Communists got 13.1%. But the Nazi vote had risen alarmingly to 18.3%. Had the two workers' parties combined their strengths, they could have gained wider support and blocked the Nazis on the streets as well as in the polling booths. The gap between them became the gateway through which Hitler marched, to destroy both.

All this time Osip Piatnitsky, promoted into the secretariat of the Communist International, had loyally transmitted the line to the German party and others. As treasurer, and head of the inner OMS, with a trusted person in each party, he could see they complied.

In 1928 he authored a paper snappily entitled 'The Bolshevisation of the Communist Parties of the Capitalist Countries by Eradication of the Social Democratic Tradition'. It was meant to turn them into efficient disciplined revolutionary organisations with militant workplace cells, modelled on an idealised Bolshevik Party, which Piatnitsky's memoirs show, never existed. In reality. 'Bolshevisation1 was about moulding the Comintern and its parties into tools of the Russian state. Stalin came to despise them as ineffective tools, to be disposed of when he could.


Even after Hitler took power in 1933, Piatnitsky's pamphlet 'The Current Situation in Germany', assured readers that the fascists would not last, that workers were resisting, and the Communist Party growing. Had the Nazis attacked social democracy too? They just wanted to give their own supporters good jobs. Of course the Party line had been right.

When workers experiencing the difference between fascism and democracy said there should he a united front, the Communist Party had offered one 'from below'. If the Social Democrat workers did not accept, that was because the leaders in whom they still had illusions held them back. Piatnitsky did admit mistakes. The party should lave made more of the national burden which workers bore. If they just repeated that Social Democrats were 'social fascists'", the Social Democrat workers felt affronted and concluded the Communist Party was not serious about unity.


This came close to what Trotsky had said, but Piatnitsky would not admit that Trotsky had been right. In his Memoirs, recalling Trotsky's past opposition to Lenin, he branded him a 'Liquidator'. As Comintern treasurer he could withold funding from the Canadian CP whose leaders didn't take up the fight against 'Trotskyism'. His criticism of the German party leaders did not acknowledge that they had faithfully followed the Moscow line.


All the same, Piatnitsky remained too honest to be trusted in his Comintern job. There was worse to ccme. As the Soviet leadership lurched towards 'popular front' diplomacy, with its beautifully democratic 1936 constitution, it also launched the purges and show trials in which lifelong communists 'confessed' to being in league with Hitler, the British or whoever, in plots to assassinate Stalin and destroy the Soviet Union.


Piatnitsky was no oppositionist, but he refused to accept the stories of ever widening conspiracies. He knew some of the accused, and had mentioned them in his Memoirs. At a party plenum he accused the NKVD secret police of fabricating evidence and using illegal methods to obtain confessions. Lazar Kaganovich and other Politburo members surrounded him afterwards, begging him to retract, but Piatnitsky replied that he had expressed his opinion and would not withdraw it.


Yezhov, the chief of the NKVD, alleged that Piatnitsky had been a provocateur in the pay of the Czarist secret police. But Piatnitsky was not arrested. He challenged Yezhov to confront him with evidence. Meanwhile the Gestapo and Russian White Guard officers abroad surreptitiously fed the Soviet authorities with material to be used against Piatnitsky. Piatnitsky underwent 220 hours of harsh interrogation but refused to confess anything, instead writing a letter to the Politburo protesting his innocence and loyalty as a communist.


At a night meeting in the Kremlin in May 1938, on Stalin's initiative, they produced a 'witness' from jail to testify that Piatnitsky had been plotting. 'He's lying! He is a fascist, he is a scoundrel!' exclaimed Lenin's widow Krupskaya. 'You know Piatnitsky well, he is after all the most honest man. Lenin loved and respected him very much.'


On 19th June 1938, Piatnitsky was accused of introuducing Trotskyist formulations' into Marxist literature - not quite putting glass in the butter -and of infiltrating Trotskyists into the Comintern. But without his confession to these dastardly crimes the authorities were frustrated in their plans to follow up their trials and purges of Bolsheviks and Red Army commanders with a Comintern trial. This did not stop them locking up many foreign militants like the Invergordon naval mutineer Len Wincott, or executing others, including British Communist Rose Cohen. But British CP leader Harry Politt, who made discreet inquiries in Moscow in 1938 about Rose Cohen's fate, may have been spared in the wake of it because Osip Piatnitsky, being tortured at the time, refused to 'confess'. Piatnitsky was finally executed on 30th October 1939. Yezhov, who had himself been purged in March that year was executed a few months later.


Piatnitsky was among those officially rehabilitated following Khrushev's 'secret speech' to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in 1956. But Memoirs of a Bolshevik has still not been republished.

I don't know why.

The Man Who Was Friday (2) Berlin, London, Odessa and Home

MARX Memorial Library in Clerkenwell Green. In 1902-3, it housed the presses which printed ISKRA. Lenin had an office on the premises. Osip Tarshis, alias Piatnitsky, despatched the revolutionary paper to Russia.

City lights, a new name, and a new trade

Young Osip, from Wilkomir in Lithuania, had escaped a Russian prison, and now he arrived in Germany. In Berlin, the small-town boy was dazzled by the traffic and the bright lights. He rode on trams and gazed in shop windows. At a meeting place, he 'saw the well-dressed gentlemen sitting around small tables drinking their beer, and thought it was a bourgeois gathering, for I had never seen such workers in Russia. It proved to be a Party meeting.'

He was impressed by the German unions, the party bookstores and printing presses. In Berlin he acqired a new name. Perhaps it was the day he arrived. The lady of the house, not wanting visitors to know who was staying, called him Mikhail Davidovich Freitag. The Russian for Friday is Piatnitsa. Somehow it stuck, so comrade Tarshis became better known in the movement as Osip Aaronovich Piatnitsky.

Piatnitsky also came to London, where the Social Democratic Labour Party of Russia was to reconvene its Second Congress. He stayed with Martov, Vera Zasulich and others, and had meals with Lenin and Krupskaya. The winter fogs and grime of the city depressed him. He was surprised to meet people from the old country who had turned from socialism to 'individualist anarchism'. Osip put this down to their exile from home and exclusion from British society and its labour movement.

Iskra was being printed on the presses of the Social Democratic Federation in Clerkenwell. It was Piatnitsky's job to find ways of despatching the paper back to those waiting back home. The Bund's network delivered the first issues of Lenin's Iskra into Russia (later in 1905 the Bolsheviks in St. Petersburg were surprised to receive a consignment of Bund publications. A German worker dispatching the parcels had just assumed the more the merrier, and sent whatever he had).


In Tilsit, Piatnitsky found a group of Lithuanians sending large quantities of religious literature home; this was banned by the Czarist regime because it was in the Lithuanian language. Religious dissenters and Marxists were able to collaborate in adversity, so Marxist pamphlets were smuggled in the same crates as devotional works.

The revolutionaries used suitcases with false bottoms, and devised garments - waistcoats for men and bodices or skirts for women - into which newspapers were sewn. People swore in the Summer heat, but were all right in winter. Some even regretted parting with their garments, asserts Piatnitsky, the ladies' tailor, proudly: 'The women got used to them - they made them look impressive, dignified, with good round figures.'

The 1903 congress saw the Bund's delegates walk out when its status was not recognised as 'representative of the Jewish proletariat'. It ended with the split between the 'Bolshevik' and Menshevik' factions over what constituted party membership. Lenin lost control of Iskra. Piatnitsky was bewildered when the older theoretician Plekhanov turned against Lenin, and was upset to part with comrades he had admired; but he chose to go with the Bolsheviks.

The Battles in Odessa

In 1905 theoretical debate was jostled aside by real revolution. Arriving in Odessa that summer, Piatnitsky found party organisation was built from the top, on the principle of co-option. There were committees of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, the Bund, the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Dashnaks (an Armenian party), each working separately. But at the end of August someone began moves for a joint meeting. "I think it was the Bund ... organisationally they stood closer to the Mensheviks, but on many tactical questions of the period the Odessa Bund sided with us."

Not content with having massacred demonstrators on the Odessa steps, the Czarist regime wanted its revenge for the strikes, the Potemkin battleship mutiny, and the revolutionary ferment in Odessa. In October, along with the Czar's manifesto promising reform and national unity, came armed gangs harassing people in Odessa, and an organised pogrom against the Jews. There was a meeting in the university to organise resistance and defence. 'Besides us, the Mensheviks, the Bund group and the Socialist-Revolutionaries (SRs), resentatives of the Dashnaks, the Poale Zion and Serpovists attended the meetings of the committee' (Serpovists were members of the Chaim Zhitlovsky's Jewish Socialist Labour Party, and close to the SRs). Piatnitsky was worried that not enough non-Jewish workers showed up.

The Black Hundred pogromists, officers leading peasants, lumpen and criminals alongside plain-clothes police, were backed by Cossacks and well-armed troops. The workers' defence squads were heavily outgunned. On 19th October a detachment of railway workers routed a right-wing gang in the Dalmitsy district, but had to retreat, with heavy losses, when the army intervened. In some places people broke into gun shops for weapons to defend themselves. The battleship Potemkin and its revolutionary sailors had left Odessa, but a detachment of naval cadets fought bravely against the reactionaries, Piatnitsky records.

Still, after three days - the usual time alotted for pogroms by the Czarist authorities -some 800 Jews had been killed in Odessa, hundreds were injured or raped, and thousands were burned out of their homes.

The strikes resumed on a bigger scale in December. Under pressure from the rank and file for unity, an Odessa soviet was formed with elected delegates, like that in St Petersburg. The executive met in tearooms run by the Bund and other organisations, but had to keep on the move. In January 1906, Piatnitsky and others were arrested. Released after a hunger strike, but still depressed over the pogrom, and feeling that the movement in Odessa was ebbing, he accepted a call from Moscow to come and help the party press.

On his way, he made a diversion to his home town to visit family and friends. Wilkomir, awakened by the great events elsewhere, was not yet touched by the tide of repression. There were public meetings in the park. The Bund had a children's section - the Little Bund. There was a branch of the Social Democratic Labour Party with Russian, Lithuanian, Polish and Jewish members.

In Moscow, the workers still seemed to be in fighting mood. The party was working with students and producing a paper for soldiers. At holiday times, Moscow workers returning to their villages took political literature for the peasants. Piatnitsky organised printing, obtained paper and arranged distribution. But when police raided the printing works and people's flats he realised they had full details of who they were looking for, including his real name, which he had almost forgotten himself.

Leaving Moscow to shake off spies before going abroad, Osip returned to Wilkomir in May 1908. His home town was now an occupied country. Mounted police were dragging in Lithuanian peasants for interrogation. Even the Bund was lying low. He had been home 10 days when he was arrested. His mother arrived and he feared she would blurt out his name, but she kept quiet as he was taken away.

The prison was crowded with Lithuanians, Poles and Jews. Police officers boasted about flogging and torturing peasants, and showed him a blood-stained cell. Piatnitsky, using another pseudonym, 'Pokenansky', was anxious that they should not find out who he really was or where he had been, and trace his contacts. They hauled him in front of some old Lithuanians and asked if this fellow was really Pokenansky. The old men swore he was, they would recognise him anywhere, he looked just like his father who had gone to America. Osip had never met them before in his life, but their testimony saved him.

The Man Who Was Friday: 1) The Tailor's Apprentice

He was born on January 1882, in Wilkomir, a small town in the Pale of Settlement. His father and two elder brothers were carpenters, but young Osip Aaronovich Tarshis was apprenticed in a tailor's shop to learn ladies' dressmaking. At 14, he listened to the workers talking about socialists who had been deported back to their home town.

He wrote: 'From casual talk 1 learned that these socialists used to meet the local intellectuals and workers, teach the latter how to read and write, give them books to read, etc. Also they often talked in my shop about secret meetings that were held in the capitals of the different provinces - in Vilna, Kovno and Warsaw - and about arrests which were made there.'

More exciting, when his brothers came home at the end of the year, young Osip found out they were involved. By the end of 1897 Osip had a job in Kovno, where he lodged with his brothers. He sat in on the carpenters' illicit meetings, held in members' homes, and liable to be raided by the police at any time.

Soon Osip had a new job, besides his paid work in the tailoring shop. He was to carry political literature between Kovno and Vilna. This illegal traffic was to become his speciality. Meantime, trade unionism was growing. The garment workers went on strike for a reduction of hours - to a 12-hour day. But the employers had got young Osip's measure, and he was blacklisted in the Kovno area.

Leaving for Vilna, at the end of 1898, he entrusted the Rabochnaya Znaya (Workers Banner) printing press, which he had looked after, to a trusted comrade, a member of the Jewish Worker's Bund. A few years later when Osip returned to Kovno on a mission for Iskra (The Spark) the Bund asked his help in organising workers at a firm that shipped timber to Germany on the River Nieman.

The day he left for Vilna, Osip glimpsed the wider world of struggle. Weeping parents were at the station seeing off soldiers, sent to crush the Boxer Rebellion in China. Why should we fight the Chinese people, with whom we have no quarrel, Osip mused, when the same army is used to suppress us here?

Even the Czar's army had its uses, however. In Vilna, where Osip was recruited to the Iskra group, he discovered it had an Iskra Military Organisation, headed by an army doctor, which sent revolutionary literature through the army's own mail to contacts across the Czar's sprawling empire.

There were unions in several trades in Vilna, but none recruited workers regardless of nationality, according to Osip, nor did they have a central body. However the Bund brought workers together for May Day and other events, often held out in the woods. Osip and friends went to a celebration of Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press. The girls stayed in a one-room cabin, while the lads slept out on the porch. Next morning they found someone had stolen their clothes and shoes. They had to signal frantically to passers-by, who scoured the neighbourhood for cast-offs, so they could get home.

It wasn't always funny. A friend from Osip's home town, not a party member, Solomon Rogut, caught carrying illegal literature, was beaten unconscious and left for dead. The Bund in Wilkomir produced a pamphlet about Rogut. But Osip felt responsible for having involved his friend.

Workers found rough and ready ways to deal with scabs and informers, and battle the authorities. They had set up unofficial 'labour exchanges' where they could drop in, drink tea, hear news of any work, and discuss affairs of state. Hearing that three women had been arrested for distributing leaflets, workers from Osip's 'exchange' stormed the police station. After cutting its telephone wires, they fought sabre-wielding police to reach the top floor and free the women held there. Many of these workers were injured or arrested later, but all were proud of what they had done.

Osip himself was taken off a Kovno train and questioned by police in March 1902. They knew about his links with the Iskra group. He was held in Vilna for a week, then sent to Kiev. There was student unrest there, and the jail filled up with students. Moved to the political wing, Osip was able to do some reading, and had tutors. He acknowledges that a compositor, Joseph Blumenfeld, with whom he later had differences, helped him. He also mentions Nicolai Bauman, a Bolshevik whose murder by Black Hundreds in Moscow aroused huge anger there in 1905.

Future Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov was with Osip in the Kiev prisoners' escape committee. They practised human pyramids to the height of the wall, and celebrated birthdays to get the guards accustomed to drinking with them. They smuggled in sleeping powders for the guards and, through Osip's contacts, they obtained false passports and papers for themselves. They assembled a grapple and ladder, and tied sheets into a rope.

Getting over the wall one August night, Osip went from town to town posing as a student. At Zhitomir he was sheltered in the Bund's secret committee room. For a time he returned to his old trade, taking digs with a fellow worker. But the authorities were after him, and someone from the prison saw him at the market. A friend had his papers. They met in the woods and, accompanied by two Bundist women, went to Kamenets Podolsk. From there, wading across rivers, they crossed into Austria at night. Then it was on to Berlin, where Osip began the next stage of his career.

Revolution of 1905: (3) A new idea from Ivanovo-Voznesensk. And then Odessa - the dream and the nightmare.

What made strikes in Russia into revolution was not just their extent or the adoption of political demands, still less the violence and destruction (at which the forces of order always excelled), but the way workers progressed from immediate economic concerns to lead society, creating organs which took on functions normally reserved for government.

At Ivanovo-Voznesensk, a textile city north-east of Moscow, a government factory inspector advised discontented workers to form an assembly. In May they came out on strike demanding shorter hours, a higher minimum wage, paid maternity leave, factory nurseries, freedom to meet and the right to read newspapers during breaks. On 20th May they voted to set up a workers' militia to keep order and combat hooligans of the monarchist, antisemitic Black Hundreds.

The strike committee found itself called upon to regulate food prices in the shops and to decide if printers could produce official notices requested by the Governor. With Cossack reinforcements, the authorities tried to stop the workers from meeting. But the strike lasted until July, when employers agreed to pay rises, paid maternity leave and other demands. Meanwhile the workers' committee had adopted a new name: soviet, meaning 'council.

In Lodz, after soldiers shot demonstrators, workers led by the Polish Socialists, Social Democrats and the Bund resisted government troops for three days in June 1905. Some 300 people were killed and 1,000 wounded. Trouble spread across Poland and the troops had to be reinforced from 250,000 to 300,000.

Odessa in the south, a boom city in the late 19th century, had been quiet at the start of 1905. Two Bolsheviks who tried to start a strike in the railway workshops after Bloody Sunday were handed over to police. But that spring political unrest and union activity grew among dockers and doctors, sailors and seamstresses.

Many had come to Odessa in prosperous times, among them Jewish workers who found employment in factories and the waterfront. Bundist militants escaping police crackdowns in Vilna came too. Bolsheviks were gaining influence among the railway workers, and there were Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries too. At the urging of the workers, and on the initiative of the Bund, the different factions in Odessa began meeting to discuss a common strategy. Odessa city council, which had tried to send money to Bloody Sunday victims, asked Dr Mikhail Bogomolets to report on workers' conditions and health in the Peresyp district. His detailed report called for new sewers, improvements in factory conditions, enforcement of public health laws, workers' participation in safety measures, trade union rights and democratic local government. Dr Bogomolets, a Bolshevik, did more than recommend reforms. He and his colleagues saw to it that workers from the Peresyp came to the meetings.

Politics breathed fresh life into union activity. On 6th May over 10,000 workers walked out of Peresyp's
engineering plants and shipyards, and strikes spread. Demands included canteen facilities, sickness benefits, free medical care, an end to bosses using offensive language and an end to the war.

On 15th June, after clashes between striking workers and the police and Black Hundreds, which left scores dead and many buildings blazing, the Czar placed Odessa under martial law. Into this port sailed the battleship Potemkin, seized by its crew after a row over maggot-ridden food. They brought ashore the body of a comrade killed by the officers.

Konstantin Feldman, a student, went down to the port.
'Where are you going?'
'To the free revolutionary ship,' I answered.
'And who may you be, a Social Democrat?'
'Yes'.
'And what proof do you have to show?'
'Social Democrats don't have passports to show, they let us go to rot in Siberia and prison without them.'
'Well get in with us.

He stepped down into the cutter alongside the young sailor who had challenged him, a craggy-faced Ukrainian whom the men introduced as their commander, 25-year old Matyushenko. Two other agitators arrived on board the Potemkin, one of them a Bundist. The sailors gathered for a mass meeting. Feldman told them about the workers' struggles all over Russia, and said workers were dying with the slogan 'Death or Freedom!' It was taken up in thundering chorus. Then the Bundist spoke of brotherhood and equality, of the solidarity of the proletariat, of the Social Democrats marching at their head. 'And hand in hand with the proletariat of all lands, you sailors, their brothers, give a mighty cheer: Hurrah for socialism! Hurrah for freedom!' A mighty hurrah resounded.

But then the bell rang for dinner. The sailors invited us to join them. We were glad to accept their invitations, for we had eaten nothing all the morning. Surrounded by a dense crowd of sailors,
we went below. We were offered a little glass of vodka, then we were seated on long benches besides the sailors. The faces of all were excited. Our hearts too were throbbing joyfully. Can it be it's not a dream? Can the freedom of Russia be so near?

'I longed to shake hands; I could have hugged them all in a burst of holiday feeling. And at that instant I felt someone squeezing my hand. I turned round. It was the Bundist. He too was feeling as I did. We stood in silence, looking into each others eyes, and one of us murmured, "Can it be...?" That simple phrase said it all.'

Onshore, as Odessa citizens gathered to cheer the Potemkin, the powers that be ordered a massacre, troops shooting people down mercilessly on the steps as depicted in Eisenstein's famous film. Over 1,000 were killed. At the urging of Bolsheviks and Bundists, the Potemkin sailors replied by shelling a theatre where the reactionaries were meeting. But one ship could not take on the whole Russian army and navy, though when the Black Sea fleet steamed up, the Potemkin, signalling to them, 'Join us', was able to sail through.

The reactionaries had not finished. In October, even as the Czar proclaimed limited freedoms and a limited parliament, the Duma, they launched a bloody antisemitic pogrom in Odessa lasting three days, and killing 800 people. Neither old people nor babies were spared. 'The Jews want freedom? We'll show them what freedom is!' said Neidhardt, Odessa's City Governor. Such 'spontaneous' pogroms, better organised and better armed than the revolution, spread across Russia, though not where the socialists were stronger, Moscow or St Petersburg, where a young fellow called Bronstein, better known as Trotsky, was chairing the Soviet.

To change the world you not only had to down tools, but take up arms, to know what you were up against. Russia had given the world a glimpse of things to come: the dream of solidarity on Potemkin and the nightmare of the Odessa steps massacre and pogroms.

(first published in Jewish Socialist no.50, Summer 2005)

Revolution of 1905:(2) Shaking an Empire

BLOODY SUNDAY. Began with a peaceful petition.

The entire Russian Empire was shaken by Bloody Sunday in St.Petersburg, all the peoples' discontents bursting forth. "Comrades! On the streets of St.Petersburg the first barricades have been built... the great day has come! The revolution has come ... Arm yourselves!', urged Rafael Abramowitz, a leader of the Jewish Workers' Bund, who had left St Petersburg to report to a Central Committee meeting in Dvinsk.

On 10th January the Bund and its allies called a general strike. Workers were already out in St Petersburg and Moscow, and strikes rolled from Warsaw and Vilna (11th January), Riga and Kiev (12th January), Lodz, Minsk and other cities by the 13th, and, by the end of week as far as Batum and Tbilisi in the Caucasus, Samara and Kazan. Altogether, half a million workers went on strike - Russian and Pole, Jew and Lett, Georgian and Finn - and their unrest was shared by students and professionals.

In Riga, the Latvian capital, a meeting of Lettish, Jewish, Russian and Ukrainian Social Democrats resolved to campaign for a constituent assembly and political freedom. Some 15,000 people, some armed with pistols, marched on 13th January. Police and troops opened fire, killing at least 40 people and wounding 200. Crowds fleeing across the frozen River Dvina were drowned as the ice gave way.

In the latter part of the 19th century, capitalism, having spread unevenly around the whole world, entered a new stage. Great powers emerged. Small firms in national markets were overshadowed by giant combinations of industry and capital, commanding governments, their fleets and armies, to carve world markets and materials into empires. Bestriding continents with railways, telegraphs, soldiers and settlers, the United States and Russia reached the Pacific. US power crossed to 'liberate' Spain's Philippines colony, and eye China. Russian interests, keeping forces in Manchuria after the Boxer Rebellion, coveted neighbouring Korea, where they faced a new upstart rival: Japan.

The Russian Empire, though still feared in Europe, was backward. Its autocratic regime and army rested on the backs of poor peasants barely out of serfdom. Its institutions maintained outdated prejudices, notably the segregation and persecution of Russia's Jews. Russia's educated and business classes had little say in politics; its rapidly growing working class had no rights at all. Huge modern factories established by foreign capital stood surrounded by insanitary slums. Only the means of repression - secret police, prison exile, state-sponsored pogroms - foreshadowed later developments. That repression, and the advanced ideas, which spread among intellectuals and working people despite the efforts of police and priests, even secretly penetrating some army units and ships.

The brutal weight of repression was sometimes lightened by inefficiency, confusion and corruption. A police chief in Ekaterinoslav earned praise and promotion by uncovering and closing illicit printing presses each year, until it emerged that he kept setting them up to make his name with raids. Nowadays we'd say he was meeting targets.

The Japanese government sent a note to the Imperial Russian government about timber concessions that a retired officer turned speculator, Bezobrazov, had obtained along Korea's Yalu river, claimed by Japan. Bezobrazov had friends in the Admiralty and court, and the Russian government took no notice of the Japanese, trusting that its forces in Manchuria and warships at Port Arthur would hold them away.
On 26th January 1904, Japanese torpedo boats attacked Russia's fleet at Port Arthur, sinking or crippling most of it before sailing home. 'Asiatic treachery!' screamed the conservative St Petersburg press, vowing that Russia would soon be avenged. A Moscow University professor, Prince Trubetskoi, said Russia was defending Europe against the 'yellow danger, the new hordes of Mongols'. But the Japanese army was German-trained, and its Navy equipped and trained by Britain. Seeing what havoc its new Whitehead torpedoes had wreaked in Port Arthur, The Times said Japan's 'act of daring' would earn 'a place of honour in naval annals'. Who would foresee Pearl Harbour?

Russian officers called the Japanese 'yellow monkeys'. They assumed Russia's huge army and gold reserve would prevail. A brief mood of patriotism swept through the middle class, dreaming of'destiny in the east . But Russia's army was scattered across a huge empire, larger forces holding rebellious Poland and the Baltic areas than could be moved to the Far East. Economically, while British and American finance bankrolled the Japanese, Russia was devastated by the war. Firms profiting from military contracts were outnumbered by those hit by disruption of Asian trade. Workers were laid off, textiles left standing in the Trans-Siberian Railway's sidings as it struggled to convey military supplies.

Though some Russian units fought bravely, they were badly led and poorly equipped, and morale fell. Foreign observers reported that the only time senior commanders led from the front was fleeing ahead of their men after the Battle of Mukden (March 1905).

With one fleet lying at the bottom of the Yellow Sea and other ships bottled up in the Black Sea by Turkish batteries and international treaty, Russia despatched a fleet from the Baltic to the Pacific war zone. Panickv over rumours of saboteurs and Japanese gunboats, the Russians sank a British trawler in the North Sea, engendering war talk and harassment from shadowing Royal Navy ships, before sailing around Africa. With scarcely a port willing to shelter them for coaling, they endured tropical sickness, hardship and mutiny By the time they reached the Pacific, Port Arthur had fallen, on 20th December 1904, two week-before Bloody Sunday.

Heading for Vladivostok, the doomed fleet entered the Tsushima Strait and the jaws of the Japanese navy. It was destroyed on 14th May 1905 and its admiral was captured. Russia secretly accepted the good offices of US President Theodore Roosevelt to sue for peace.

Talk of Japanese agents in Europe was not entirely groundless. Colonel Akashi, former military attache in St Petersburg, had travelled to Sweden to meet Finnish, Polish and Russian revolutionaries. Finnish radical Konni Zilliacus saw the war as an opportunity. He urged a united manifesto to the Czar, propaganda among the troops, and arms for the revolution. He thought Japanese forces could free political prisoners from Siberia. Polish Socialist Party leader Jozef Pilsudski sought support in Japan to raise a Polish Legion.

More advanced than Russia in some respects, its western subject peoples smarted under social and national oppression. Poland's 11.3 million people, less than 8% of the Russian Empire's population, contributed 25% of its industrial output and 150 million roubles a year to the imperial treasury. But Poles were denied even local councils and were excluded from government jobs. The schools were forbidden to teach Catholicism or the Polish language. Some 60% of Polish army recruits could neither read nor write.
Wealthy Polish manufacturers and landlords tempered national resentment with appreciation of Russian order and markets, hoping to share in the spoils of empire. Dmowski's National Democrats (Endeks) opposed Pilsudski's adventurism, focusing their nationalism against Germans, or safer still, Poland's Jews, even though many Jews were serving at the front in Manchuria.

Besides those sent to war, some 100,000 workers in Poland were laid off when Asian markets closed and those still working faced wage cuts.

Following Bloody Sunday, the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), the more marxist Social Democratic Party of Poland and Lithuania, and the Bund called strikes. School students went on strike, demanding teaching in their own language. During a three-day general strike in Lodz, barricades went up and the Governor was captured until troops rescued him. With their leader's nationalist, military outlook, and hopes on Japan, PPS armed squads ambushed troops and police on Warsaw streets. This led to nervous, trigger-happy soldiers shooting people indiscriminately but did not provide workers with means to take power or defend themselves. Warsaw was placed under siege on 17th January; 64 people were killed and 69 wounded by government troops.

At the Socialist International Congress in Amsterdam in 1904, the veteran Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov embraced Japanese socialist Sen Katayama, to rapturous applause from delegates. If the Czarist government defeated Japan, Plekhanov declared, the losers would be the Russian people and the subject nations. As internationalists the social democrats could neither go along with liberal patriotism nor tie their hopes to Japanese victory. As it turned out, Russia's defeat could be entrusted to the rulers who had taken the country to war in the first place. But if the workers' struggle hastened an end to the war, so much the better. In that sense, socialists were 'defeatists'.