Ebook: Romancing the Revolution: The Myth of Soviet Democracy and the British Left

In the years immediately following the First World War and the 1917
Russian Revolution, many of those on the British Left were tempted, to
a greater or lesser degree, by what Ian Bullock calls the
“myth” of soviet democracy: the belief that Russia had
embarked on a brave experiment in a form of popular government more
advanced even than British parliamentarism. In Romancing the
Revolution, Bullock examines the reaction of a broad spectrum of
the British Left to this idealized concept of soviet democracy. At
conferences and congresses, and above all in the contemporary left-wing
press, debates raged over how best to lay the groundwork for a soviet
system in Britain, over how soviets should be organized, over the
virtues (if any) of the parliamentary system, over the true meaning of
the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” over whether British
communists should affiliate to the Third International, and over a host
of other issues—including the puzzling question of what was
actually going on in Russia. As Bullock demonstrates, even in the face
of mounting evidence that the Bolshevik revolution had produced
something closer to genuine dictatorship than genuine democracy, many
of those on the Left were slow to abandon the hope that revolutionary
transformations were indeed in store for Britain—that the soviet
system would at long last allow the country to achieve real social
equality and economic justice.