Why Bush didn't visit the battleship Aurora
By Stephen Millies
During the Iraq War, President George W. Bush
made a photo op of landing on the deck of the aircraft carrier
Abraham Lincoln. Yet this war criminal didn't dare visit the
battleship Aurora when he recently traveled to St. Petersburg
in Russia.
Unlike the planes that took off from that U.S. ship and
dropped thousands of bombs on Iraqi children, the Aurora
delivered a mighty blow for human freedom. The shots fired from
this Russian vessel by sailors on Nov. 7, 1917, guaranteed the
victory of the workers' insurrection that was taking over St.
Petersburg, then known as Petrograd. The Russian Revolution
eventually ended World War I.
The world's first socialist revolution was born.
Russia's revolution inspired oppressed people all over the
world to break their chains. China's landless millions knew
that Russia's peasants had taken over the land. Decades of
struggle there led to the establishment of the People's
Republic of China in 1949.
The USSR aided Cuba, Korea, Vietnam and Africa--not just
with surplus food but with the technology and skills to develop
their economies.
Thirty thousand members of the South African Communist Party
proudly display the "hammer and sickle" on their banners. This
symbol--showing the unity of workers and peasants--was the
Soviet emblem.
Heroic city defeated Hitler
Hitler hated the birthplace of the Russian Revolution so
much that, during World War II, he wanted to raze it to the
ground. By that time its name had been changed from Petrograd
to Leningrad, after the revolution's leader, V.I. Lenin.
Nazi armies blockaded Leningrad for 900 days. Over a million
people perished in history's greatest siege. But the city's
workers and soldiers held out and helped defeat Hitler.
In Piskariovskoye Cemetery alone, 500,000 of these heroes
are buried. More people were interred in the 186 mass graves
there then the number of U.S. dead in World War II.
Even presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton paid homage
at Piskariovskoye. But George W. Bush ignored this sacred
ground.
Working class citadel built by serfs
Bush went to St. Petersburg as it was celebrating its 300th
anniversary. It was named for the patron saint of its founder,
Peter the Great. This tyrant had his own son, Alexis, beaten to
death.
Thirty thousand serfs died during the building of St.
Petersburg. Serfdom was a form of land slavery. Serfs could be
sold with the land they were forced to work on. They were
beaten with a whip known as a "knout."
As terrible as these conditions were, African Americans were
treated worse on plantations. Tens of millions died in the
African Holocaust.
Just as serf labor built St. Petersburg, slave labor built
Washington, D.C. The U.S. Capitol was constructed by Black
people in chains. Bush must have felt at home.
It wasn't accidental that Russian serfdom was abolished in
1861 at the beginning of the U.S. Civil War. Czar Alexander II
was forced to get rid of this feudal form of exploitation in
order to keep up with his more advanced European rivals. But
shock waves from John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry were also
persuasive.
St. Petersburg was already the political and cultural
capital of the Russian Empire. Alexander Pushkin, the most
beloved of Russian writers and poets, was a resident. Like the
elder Alexandre Dumas, who wrote "The Three Muske teers,"
Pushkin was a Black man with African ancestry.
Abolishing serfdom led to the growth of a working class that
was forced to sell its labor power to wealthy capitalists.
Because industrialization started later in Russia than in
Western Europe, St. Petersburg skipped over the stage of
smaller workshops and became home to the largest factories in
Europe. The Putilov works alone employed 30,000 workers in the
manufacture of engines and cars.
These workers, brought together under one roof in large
numbers, could feel their own strength. But they also needed a
revolutionary theory to get rid of the czar and the capitalists
who were making them work 11 hours a day.
The teachings of Karl Marx showed them how capitalism
developed and why it would be overthrown. The greatest Russian
Marxist was Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik Party. When Lenin
was 17 years old, his brother was hanged in St. Petersburg for
trying to overthrow the czar.
Lenin waged a merciless struggle against racism. He taught
Russians that they couldn't free themselves while other peoples
in the czarist empire--like Kazakhs, Georgians, Ukrainians and
Jews--were treated like animals. The Soviet Union pioneered
affirmative action.
In 1905 workers in St. Petersburg formed their own councils,
called "soviets." That was during the first of Russia's three
revolutions. Although defeated in 1905, they were victorious in
1917 when peasants and soldiers joined them.
The U.S. government dominated by Wall Street spent trillions
of dollars and threatened nuclear annihilation in order to
overthrow the Soviet Union and its socialist achievements. They
finally succeeded in 1991 and changed the city's name. But the
memory of what workers did in St. Petersburg 86 years ago will
never be erased.
Reprinted from the June 12, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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