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Pink rose and drops from archives.
Early May we had a terrorist attack in Perth.
This is how our government handles it.
The rules are as follows;
1/ When an Islamic terrorist attack occurs, never mention “Islam” or “Islamic”.
2/ If the offender is a teenager, allow the “young and stupid” implication to flow through the briefing – even if not actually stated.
3/ As soon as possible, introduce the claim of “radicalisation”. This has the immediate effect of isolating the offender from “normal” Islam thus avoiding the need to answer more searching questions.
4/ Add “on the internet” to explain how the radicalisation occurred. The idea that an unknown and mysterious force of evil – somewhere out in the ether – twisted the mind of a young and vulnerable individual simply reinforces the separation objective. It removes responsibility from the local community into the dark world of the internet and the separation and isolation objective is now virtually achieved.
To cap off the briefing exercise, there is one more vital component;
5/ Mental illness. This provides the coup de grace to the briefing and even offers some sympathy for the offender. In fact, an effective mental illness presentation could potentially wipe out any liability for the terrorist attack and the offender may be transformed into a victim.
depuis 4 ans, cela fait la 255ème victime sur le territoire français
un homme, qui tentait de protéger sa femme, a été tué au couteau par un homme que la police
a tué après avoir fait 2 autres victimes, plus légèrement blessées, alors qu'il se dirigeait avec détermination vers un centre commercial
selon la version officielle l'assassin n'était pas radicalisé MAIS
portait une djellabah noire, a crié Allah Akbar en tuant sa victime, avait un Coran avec lui !!!
a man was killed this morning as he was trying to protect his wife
2 other people were injured
officially he was no moslem but shouted Allah Akbar when he killed with a knife his victim, was wearing a djellabah and had a Coran with him -
he was shot by the police as he was close to a commercial center -
in 4 years this is the 255th victim killed on the french territory
A pair of chopped and radical Morris units at the annual "Wheels" car festival.
(1 of 2) 1960 Morris Minor, radicalised just a bit!
(2 of 2) 1956 Morris Minor Coupe.
Queanbeyan, New South Wales, Australia.
A pair of chopped and radical Morris units at the annual "Wheels" car festival.
(1 of 2) 1960 Morris Minor, radicalised just a bit!
(2 of 2) 1956 Morris Minor Coupe.
Queanbeyan, New South Wales, Australia.
I am increasingly trying to express a certain kind of radical honesty, at least when I find myself in a situation where I feel burdened in a way that I have to refuse to expose myself to it any further in order to protect myself. And to be honest and truthful with myself. Sometimes it has been a long road to get here, but the last few years have been a tough school for me.
In case of doubt, this leads to me having to separate myself from people.
And so yesterday I had to part ways with someone who is becoming increasingly politically radicalised.
A person I have been in contact with for many years, independent of Flickr, a completely normal life contact, a not so very close friend but a friendly person to me. How does that make me feel? Ambivalent. This person has never done me any harm personally, but in view of the developments in Germany, I can't tolerate people in my environment who are increasingly adopting a radical political position. It's very close to my heart to witness these latest developments.
It worries me a lot.
FRIDAY OCTOBRE 16, 2020
A Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, le 16 octobre 2020. Non loin du collège,
www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2020/10/17/attentat-de-con...
FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 25, 2020
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo_shooting
www.theguardian.com/media/2020/sep/26/suspect-in-new-char...
www.politico.eu/article/main-suspect-in-knife-attack-near...
www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/charlie-hebdo-se...
www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/paris-un-individu-blesse...
www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/attaque-a-paris-le-suspe...
6/30/2022 6 p.m.
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Montmartre steps, Paris 2
In 1871, Montmartre was the site of the beginning of the revolutionary uprising of the Paris Commune. During the Franco-Prussian War, the French army had stored a large number of cannon in a park at the top of the hill, near where the Basilica is today. On 18 March 1871, the soldiers from the French Army tried to remove the cannon from the hilltop. They were blocked by members of the politically-radicalised Paris National Guard, who captured and then killed two French army generals, and installed a revolutionary government that lasted two months. The heights of Montmartre were retaken by the French Army with heavy fighting at the end of May 1871, during what became known as the Semaine Sanglante, or "Bloody Week"
Funny how as lads we are probably very nondescript unless we really push the boat out! yet as women we always seem to care about our appearance and wouldn't think about going anywhere looking like we had been pull through a hedge backwards.
Yeah I know sometimes it looks like I have been and on one or two occasion I felt like I had been lol.
Still I think I scrub up ok given what I have to work with.
Been over thinking again (sorry amber) but I do feel that our glory days of freedom of movement and self expression could become very awkward in the coming few years what with the new politics in the world and general intolerance of the different.
This isn't just happening in Trumpton (USA) but also here in Europe with the rise of the far right and even more so in the radicalised Muslim world and the old land of the Russian bear.
I hope we have learnt the lessons of the past and recognise the sprouting seeds that gave birth to Nazi ideas back in the 30s. for if we ignore these first shoots and wait to see what happens we could find our glorious garden strangled by knot weed.
Our voices need to be heard loud and clear now more than ever before.
Here's a useful & straightforward introduction to the subject for anyone not in the UK:
www.ucu.org.uk/counterterrorismact
and here are the links included in the image:
www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/mar/28/teachers-nut-bac...
www.independent.co.uk/voices/letters/prevent-will-have-a-...
www.vice.com/en_uk/read/is-prevent-being-used-to-hassle-s...
www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/muslim-students-t...
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/feb/03/prevent-strategy-...
www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/apr/21/government-preve...
On June 20th, members of Mehdi Foundation India staged a procession urging the government to ban Zakir Naik, Wahhabism and Peace TV. This was part of initiative to curb radicalisation in India, in response to the dramatic rise of Wahhabism in the country. Many people attended our demonstration. It was covered by different media outlets, who praised our bold actions and called for further support of this cause. We are pleased with the result of our efforts and we will continue to speak out against Wahhabism and its dangers in India for as long as it is necessary!
© Leanne Boulton, All Rights Reserved
Street candid taken in Glasgow, Scotland. I was accosted by a 'security guard' at the Christmas market while taking this shot, he tried to question me as to why I was taking photo's and told me that the market stalls were private property, I told him that it didn't matter because I was in a public place, he then asked if I was a photography student. I told him I was a radicalised photographer, which didn't go down too well, and he said "you are now a person of interest"... "oh, I am very interesting," I said! ;)
"ISIS is not an immediate concern for either Europe or North America. Your problem is that those among Muslims in your countries who have been radicalised can act as a lone wolf any time." - HH Younus AlGohar
Read the article below:
rariazgoharshahi.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/the-real-threat-t...
Color's Gels on flashguns.
Questioning the believings, or the believers.
There is so many cross around my region, some of them are beautifull, some are ugly as hell.
But nobody seem to realise their presence. I don't know if it's good or bad, i don't care... but this period is a corner, the loosing of kind of faith, and in oppostion the radicalisation of others.
All of these, are artificials, the cross, the myth, are only some creations of the humans themselves.
What is the purpose, and why are they turning back on their own creation ?
I don't have the answers, i'm only questioning.
Sculpture by Daniel Clemmett. Recycled steel car bonnets.
artist brief: 'National hero, bush ranger, terrorist, Robin Hood, migrant, boat person, criminal... What would Ned think? I am wondering about our contemporary national ideologies and I am worried about the bigotry at the heart of our nation. A grand misguided gesture; a heroic failure. One of our greatest national heroes was born out of the radicalisation of the persecuted. Will it happen again? Do we need that many heroes? We have our own death cults in this country and we honour them, rallying numbers, brokering insurances and imagining titles , we pay and we consume. I am misquoting Banksy when I say we don't really need another hero, we just need someone to take out the garbage. "
A practical strategy to de-radicalise individuals vulnerable to becoming Islamist terrorists.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyzUtAKehn0
Main points:
- Since the beginning of the religion, Islam was not understood completely by all. Only those who managed to purify their hearts understood it. In order to fully understand the religion and the Quran, one has to embrace the knowledge of the heart: how to fix the heart.
- You become corrupt in two organs. When your mind is corrupt, your actions will be ugly. When heart is corrupt, your character will be ugly. Muslims who confined themselves to the Sharia only and never learned the spiritual aspect of the religion, they were never good human beings. An overwhelming majority of Muslims are unaware of existence of spirituality, or their minds are so corrupt that they won't accept it.
- Today, Saudi Arabia exports Wahhabism to aid it in its race to become the next superpower. To stop Islamic terrorism, stop Wahhabism! A universal coalition should combat the ideology of Wahhabism with academic credentials. This is more important than anything else.
- We can't approach terrorists to de-radicalise them. To stop the supply of terrorists, we need to make a de-radicalisation strategy to benefit youth. There should be a spiritual rehabilitation centre to combat Wahhabism, where people can learn about Sufism from Sufis.
Read the full transcript here: rariazgoharshahi.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/spiritual-rehabil...
Sign the petition to ban Wahhabism: www.change.org/p/rt-hon-david...
HH Younus AlGohar responds to slogans raised by radical Muslims of imposing Sharia Law in the United Kingdom and taking over England. He gives practical advice for the British government on handling the situation.
⁃Radical Muslims want to impose Sharia Law in the UK, banning the sale of alcohol and restricting the way women can dress. Ironically, many of these radical Muslims are people originally from the Middle East who were granted asylum in the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom gave them shelter and benefits, and as repayment, they want to take over the country and kick out the British natives. This is madness and hypocrisy.
⁃If anyone from the West were granted asylum in Saudi Arabia and then raised slogans of imposing the Christian faith in Mecca, Muslims would not like it. It makes no sense to impose Sharia Law in the UK, a non-Muslim country. Radicals are so bold because the laws in the United Kingdom are soft.
⁃Most converts in the United Kingdom are radicalised by Anjem Choudary. The government must take strict action against him. He outright opposes the British police and army; he must be put behind bars.
⁃Had the UK been strict, the number of people being radicalised would have been manageable. Right now, many areas in London, Luton, Bedfordshire, Bedford, Bradford, Oldham, Rochdale, Barry and Altrincham. Dewsbury is the British Kaaba of Dewsbury. It is a mini Saudi Arabia.
⁃The Islam that does not promote terrorism does not exist today. What is left is Wahhabism. All Wahhabis are potential terrorists. All radical Muslims want to impose Sharia Law - this is not an individual opinion. Rather, it is rooted in their ideology. Wahhabis want world domination; part of their plan is to take over the United Kingdom.
⁃The UK government must study Wahhabism and recognise radical Islam. They should keep track of the points mentioned in the Wahhabi ideology and check them against the belief system of Wahhabi Muslims. If Muslims are found to practise this ideology, they should be put behind bars. Strict measures must be taken before the situation gets from bad to worse.
You can watch the live recordings of these videos every day at 22:00 GMT on younusalgohar.com
Can't access this video? Watch it on Daily Motion: www.dailymotion.com/mehdifound...
Listen to this speech on the go with SoundCloud: soundcloud.com/younusalgohar/
At Messiah Foundation International, we have a profound understanding of the factors that draw vulnerable youth towards radicalisation.
We strongly believe that radicalisation is principally based on wrong interpretation of the text of the Quran. People are being told fascinating, lustful stories to lure them towards Islamist organisations. In order to help prevent radicalisation, we are offering free classes for the public, in which attendees will be presented with academic reasoning to counter what radical Islamists teach.
Classes begin every day at 8:00 PM in our London office. To reserve your seat, please call us on WhatsApp: +447456280590
Address: 22 Park Street, Park House Suite 414 Croydon, CRO 1YE
A team from Messiah Foundation USA visited Washington Monument, Washington D.C. USA to raise awareness about 'Ban Wahhabism' Campaign amongst the public. Here are some of the comments from people we spoke to.
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The Wahhabi ideology is the backbone of Islamic terrorism, sponsored by Saudi Arabia. It is responsible for the radicalisation of American youth and vulnerable individuals. It is a form of hate speech that incites enmity for the West and threatens everything the United States of America stands for.
ISIS (Daesh) is getting stronger. As long as the Wahhabi ideology is practised here, ISIS will have supporters in the United States. There are many Wahhabi mosques promoting this twisted ideology all over the United States.
Homegrown terrorism is a result of the Wahhabi ideology infiltrating the United States.
Recent terrorist attacks across Europe indicate that action is needed - and fast. Since 9/11, the US has seen many attempts by our enemies to carry out attacks on US soil.
Now, ISIS has very publicly threatened Washington D.C. and New York City.
Wahhabi mosques in the United States effectively work as terrorist-producing factories. They have converted vulnerable people into barbarians.
Even with continued airstrikes in Syria, we will have achieved nothing while the ideology of ISIS, Wahhabism, thrives within our borders.
To tackle homegrown terrorism and restore peace, it is necessary now to ban Wahhabism from the United States. We must protect ourselves and the next generation from this poisonous ideology!
We are in great danger from the death cult of Wahhabism. This is a matter of national security and our very future.
Let's demand that President Obama take a firm stand against homegrown terrorism. President Obama must ban Wahhabism - before it is too late!
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov[b] (22 April [O.S. 10 April] 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 until his death in 1924, and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia, and later the Soviet Union, became a one-party socialist state governed by the Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, his developments to the ideology are called Leninism.
Born to a schoolteacher's family in Simbirsk, Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics following his brother's 1887 execution. Expelled from Kazan Imperial University for participating in protests against the Tsarist government, he devoted the following years to a law degree. He relocated to Saint Petersburg in 1893 where he became a senior Marxist activist. In 1897, he was arrested for sedition and exiled to Shushenskoye in Siberia for three years, where he married Nadezhda Krupskaya. After his exile, he moved to Western Europe, where he became a prominent theorist in the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). In 1903, he took a key role in the RSDLP ideological split, leading the Bolshevik faction against Julius Martov's Mensheviks. Following Russia's failed Revolution of 1905, he initially campaigned for the First World War to be transformed into a Europe-wide proletarian revolution, which, as a Marxist, he believed would cause the overthrow of capitalism and the rise of socialism. After the 1917 February Revolution ousted the Tsar and established a Provisional Government, he returned to Russia and played a leading role in the October Revolution, in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the new government.
Lenin's Bolshevik government initially shared power with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, elected soviets, and a multi-party Constituent Assembly, although by 1918 it had centralised power in the new Communist Party. Lenin's administration redistributed land among the peasantry and nationalised banks and large-scale industry. It withdrew from the First World War by signing a treaty conceding territory to the Central Powers, and promoted world revolution through the Communist International. Opponents were suppressed in the Red Terror, a violent campaign administered by the state security services; tens of thousands were killed or interned in concentration camps. His administration defeated right and left-wing anti-Bolshevik armies in the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1922 and oversaw the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–1921. Responding to wartime devastation, famine, and popular uprisings, in 1921 Lenin encouraged economic growth through the New Economic Policy. Several non-Russian nations had secured independence from Russia after 1917, but five were forcibly re-united into the new Soviet Union in 1922, while others repelled Soviet invasions. His health failing, Lenin died in Gorki, with Joseph Stalin succeeding him as the pre-eminent figure in the Soviet government.
Widely considered one of the most significant and influential figures of the 20th century, Lenin was the posthumous subject of a pervasive personality cult within the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991. He became an ideological figurehead behind Marxism–Leninism and a prominent influence over the international communist movement. A controversial and highly divisive historical figure, Lenin is viewed by his supporters as a champion of socialism, communism, anti-imperialism and the working class, while his critics accuse him of establishing a totalitarian dictatorship that oversaw mass killings and political repression of dissidents.
University and political radicalisation: 1887–1893
Upon entering Kazan University in August 1887, Lenin moved into a nearby flat. There, he joined a zemlyachestvo, a form of university society that represented the men of a particular region. This group elected him as its representative to the university's zemlyachestvo council, and he took part in a December demonstration against government restrictions that banned student societies. The police arrested Lenin and accused him of being a ringleader in the demonstration; he was expelled from the university, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs exiled him to his family's Kokushkino estate. There, he read voraciously, becoming enamoured with Nikolay Chernyshevsky's 1863 pro-revolutionary novel What Is to Be Done?
Lenin's mother was concerned by her son's radicalisation, and was instrumental in convincing the Interior Ministry to allow him to return to the city of Kazan, but not the university. On his return, he joined Nikolai Fedoseev's revolutionary circle, through which he discovered Karl Marx's 1867 book Capital. This sparked his interest in Marxism, a socio-political theory that argued that society developed in stages, that this development resulted from class struggle, and that capitalist society would ultimately give way to socialist society and then communist society. Wary of his political views, Lenin's mother bought a country estate in Alakaevka village, Samara Oblast, in the hope that her son would turn his attention to agriculture. He had little interest in farm management, and his mother soon sold the land, keeping the house as a summer home.
In September 1889, the Ulyanov family moved to the city of Samara, where Lenin joined Alexei Sklyarenko's socialist discussion circle. There, Lenin fully embraced Marxism and produced a Russian language translation of Marx and Friedrich Engels's 1848 political pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto. He began to read the works of the Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov, agreeing with Plekhanov's argument that Russia was moving from feudalism to capitalism and so socialism would be implemented by the proletariat, or urban working class, rather than the peasantry. This Marxist perspective contrasted with the view of the agrarian-socialist Narodnik movement, which held that the peasantry could establish socialism in Russia by forming peasant communes, thereby bypassing capitalism. This Narodnik view developed in the 1860s with the People's Freedom Party and was then dominant within the Russian revolutionary movement. Lenin rejected the premise of the agrarian-socialist argument but was influenced by agrarian-socialists like Pyotr Tkachev and Sergei Nechaev and befriended several Narodniks.
In May 1890, Maria, who retained societal influence as the widow of a nobleman, persuaded the authorities to allow Lenin to take his exams externally at the University of St Petersburg, where he obtained the equivalent of a first-class degree with honours. The graduation celebrations were marred when his sister Olga died of typhoid. Lenin remained in Samara for several years, working first as a legal assistant for a regional court and then for a local lawyer. He devoted much time to radical politics, remaining active in Sklyarenko's group and formulating ideas about how Marxism applied to Russia. Inspired by Plekhanov's work, Lenin collected data on Russian society, using it to support a Marxist interpretation of societal development and counter the claims of the Narodniks. He wrote a paper on peasant economics; it was rejected by the liberal journal Russian Thought.
Revolutionary activity
Early activism and imprisonment: 1893–1900
In late 1893, Lenin moved to Saint Petersburg. There, he worked as a barrister's assistant and rose to a senior position in a Marxist revolutionary cell that called itself the Social-Democrats after the Marxist Social Democratic Party of Germany. Championing Marxism within the socialist movement, he encouraged the founding of revolutionary cells in Russia's industrial centres. By late 1894, he was leading a Marxist workers' circle, and meticulously covered his tracks to evade police spies. He began a romantic relationship with Nadezhda "Nadya" Krupskaya, a Marxist schoolteacher. He also authored a political tract criticising the Narodnik agrarian-socialists, What the "Friends of the People" Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats; around 200 copies were illegally printed in 1894.
Hoping to cement connections between his Social-Democrats and Emancipation of Labour, a group of Russian Marxists based in Switzerland, Lenin visited the country to meet group members Plekhanov and Pavel Axelrod. He proceeded to Paris to meet Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue and to research the Paris Commune of 1871, which he considered an early prototype for a proletarian government. Financed by his mother, he stayed in a Swiss health spa before travelling to Berlin, where he studied for six weeks at the Staatsbibliothek and met the Marxist Wilhelm Liebknecht. Returning to Russia with a stash of illegal revolutionary publications, he travelled to various cities distributing literature to striking workers. While involved in producing a news sheet, Rabochee delo (Workers' Cause), he was among 40 activists arrested in St. Petersburg and charged with sedition.
Refused legal representation or bail, Lenin denied all charges against him but remained imprisoned for a year before sentencing. He spent this time theorising and writing. In this work he noted that the rise of industrial capitalism in Russia had caused large numbers of peasants to move to the cities, where they formed a proletariat. From his Marxist perspective, Lenin argued that this Russian proletariat would develop class consciousness, which would in turn lead them to violently overthrow tsarism, the aristocracy, and the bourgeoisie and to establish a proletariat state that would move toward socialism.
In February 1897, Lenin was sentenced without trial to three years' exile in eastern Siberia. He was granted a few days in Saint Petersburg to put his affairs in order and used this time to meet with the Social-Democrats, who had renamed themselves the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. His journey to eastern Siberia took 11 weeks, for much of which he was accompanied by his mother and sisters. Deemed only a minor threat to the government, he was exiled to Shushenskoye, Minusinsky District, where he was kept under police surveillance; he was nevertheless able to correspond with other revolutionaries, many of whom visited him, and permitted to go on trips to swim in the Yenisei River and to hunt duck and snipe.
In May 1898, Nadya joined him in exile, having been arrested in August 1896 for organising a strike. She was initially posted to Ufa, but persuaded the authorities to move her to Shushenskoye, where she and Lenin married on 10 July 1898. Settling into a family life with Nadya's mother Elizaveta Vasilyevna, in Shushenskoye the couple translated English socialist literature into Russian. There, Lenin wrote A Protest by Russian Social-Democrats to criticise German Marxist revisionists like Eduard Bernstein who advocated a peaceful, electoral path to socialism. He also finished The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), his longest book to date, which criticised the agrarian-socialists and promoted a Marxist analysis of Russian economic development. Published under the pseudonym of Vladimir Ilin, upon publication it received predominantly poor reviews.
Munich, London, and Geneva: 1900–1905
After his exile, Lenin settled in Pskov in early 1900. There, he began raising funds for a newspaper, Iskra (Spark), a new organ of the Russian Marxist party, now calling itself the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). In July 1900, Lenin left Russia for Western Europe; in Switzerland he met other Russian Marxists, and at a Corsier conference they agreed to launch the paper from Munich, where Lenin relocated in September. Containing contributions from prominent European Marxists, Iskra was smuggled into Russia, becoming the country's most successful underground publication for 50 years. He first adopted the pseudonym Lenin in December 1901, possibly based on the Siberian River Lena; he often used the fuller pseudonym of N. Lenin, and while the N did not stand for anything, a popular misconception later arose that it represented Nikolai. Under this pseudonym, in 1902 he published his most influential publication to date, the pamphlet What Is to Be Done?, which outlined his thoughts on the need for a vanguard party to lead the proletariat to revolution.
Nadya joined Lenin in Munich and became his secretary. They continued their political agitation, as Lenin wrote for Iskra and drafted the RSDLP programme, attacking ideological dissenters and external critics, particularly the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR),[ a Narodnik agrarian-socialist group founded in 1901. Despite remaining a Marxist, he accepted the Narodnik view on the revolutionary power of the Russian peasantry, accordingly, penning the 1903 pamphlet To the Village Poor. To evade Bavarian police, Lenin moved to London with Iskra in April 1902, where he befriended fellow Russian-Ukrainian Marxist Leon Trotsky. Lenin fell ill with erysipelas and was unable to take such a leading role on the Iskra editorial board; in his absence, the board moved its base of operations to Geneva.
The second RSDLP Congress was held in London in July 1903. At the conference, a schism emerged between Lenin's supporters and those of Julius Martov. Martov argued that party members should be able to express themselves independently of the party leadership; Lenin disagreed, emphasising the need for a strong leadership with complete control over the party. Lenin's supporters were in the majority, and he termed them the "majoritarians" (bol'sheviki in Russian; Bolsheviks); in response, Martov termed his followers the "minoritarians" (men'sheviki in Russian; Mensheviks). Arguments between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks continued after the conference; the Bolsheviks accused their rivals of being opportunists and reformists who lacked discipline, while the Mensheviks accused Lenin of being a despot and autocrat. Enraged at the Mensheviks, Lenin resigned from the Iskra editorial board and in May 1904 published the anti-Menshevik tract One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. The stress made Lenin ill, and to recuperate he holidayed in Switzerland. The Bolshevik faction grew in strength; by spring 1905, the whole RSDLP Central Committee was Bolshevik, and in December they founded the newspaper Vperyod (Forward).
Revolution of 1905 and its aftermath: 1905–1914
In January 1905, the Bloody Sunday massacre of protesters in St. Petersburg sparked a spate of civil unrest in the Russian Empire known as the Revolution of 1905. Lenin urged Bolsheviks to take a greater role in the events, encouraging violent insurrection. In doing so, he adopted SR slogans regarding "armed insurrection", "mass terror", and "the expropriation of gentry land", resulting in Menshevik accusations that he had deviated from orthodox Marxism. In turn, he insisted that the Bolsheviks split completely with the Mensheviks; many Bolsheviks refused, and both groups attended the Third RSDLP Congress, held in London in April 1905. Lenin presented many of his ideas in the pamphlet Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, published in August 1905. Here, he predicted that Russia's liberal bourgeoisie would be sated by a transition to constitutional monarchy and thus betray the revolution; instead, he argued that the proletariat would have to build an alliance with the peasantry to overthrow the Tsarist regime and establish the "provisional revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry."
The uprising has begun. Force against Force. Street fighting is raging, barricades are being thrown up, rifles are cracking, guns are booming. Rivers of blood are flowing, the civil war for freedom is blazing up. Moscow and the South, the Caucasus and Poland are ready to join the proletariat of St. Petersburg. The slogan of the workers has become: Death or Freedom!
In response to the revolution of 1905, which had failed to overthrow the government, Tsar Nicholas II accepted a series of liberal reforms in his October Manifesto. In this climate, Lenin felt it safe to return to St. Petersburg. Joining the editorial board of Novaya Zhizn (New Life), a radical legal newspaper run by Maria Andreyeva, he used it to discuss issues facing the RSDLP. He encouraged the party to seek out a much wider membership, and advocated the continual escalation of violent confrontation, believing both to be necessary for a successful revolution. Recognising that membership fees and donations from a few wealthy sympathisers were insufficient to finance the Bolsheviks' activities, Lenin endorsed the idea of robbing post offices, railway stations, trains, and banks. Under the lead of Leonid Krasin, a group of Bolsheviks began carrying out such criminal actions, the best-known taking place in June 1907, when a group of Bolsheviks acting under the leadership of Joseph Stalin committed an armed robbery of the State Bank in Tiflis, Georgia.
Although he briefly supported the idea of reconciliation between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Lenin's advocacy of violence and robbery was condemned by the Mensheviks at the Fourth RSDLP Congress, held in Stockholm in April 1906. Lenin was involved in setting up a Bolshevik Centre in Kuokkala, Grand Duchy of Finland, which was at the time an autonomous state within the Russian Empire, before the Bolsheviks regained dominance of the RSDLP at its Fifth Congress, held in London in May 1907. As the Tsarist government cracked down on opposition, both by disbanding Russia's legislative assembly, the Second Duma, and by ordering its secret police, the Okhrana, to arrest revolutionaries, Lenin fled Finland for Switzerland. There, he tried to exchange those banknotes stolen in Tiflis that had identifiable serial numbers on them.
Alexander Bogdanov and other prominent Bolsheviks decided to relocate the Bolshevik Centre to Paris; although Lenin disagreed, he moved to the city in December 1908. Lenin disliked Paris, lambasting it as "a foul hole", and while there he sued a motorist who knocked him off his bike. Lenin became very critical of Bogdanov's view that Russia's proletariat had to develop a socialist culture in order to become a successful revolutionary vehicle. Instead, Lenin favoured a vanguard of socialist intelligentsia who would lead the working-classes in revolution. Furthermore, Bogdanov, influenced by Ernest Mach, believed that all concepts of the world were relative, whereas Lenin stuck to the orthodox Marxist view that there was an objective reality independent of human observation. Bogdanov and Lenin holidayed together at Maxim Gorky's villa in Capri in April 1908 on returning to Paris, Lenin encouraged a split within the Bolshevik faction between his and Bogdanov's followers, accusing the latter of deviating from Marxism.
In May 1908, Lenin lived briefly in London, where he used the British Museum Reading Room to write Materialism and Empirio-criticism, an attack on what he described as the "bourgeois-reactionary falsehood" of Bogdanov's relativism. Lenin's factionalism began to alienate increasing numbers of Bolsheviks, including his former close supporters Alexei Rykov and Lev Kamenev. The Okhrana exploited his factionalist attitude by sending a spy, Roman Malinovsky, to act as a vocal Lenin supporter within the party. Various Bolsheviks expressed their suspicions about Malinovsky to Lenin, although it is unclear if the latter was aware of the spy's duplicity; it is possible that he used Malinovsky to feed false information to the Okhrana.
In August 1910, Lenin attended the Eighth Congress of the Second International, an international meeting of socialists, in Copenhagen as the RSDLP's representative, following this with a holiday in Stockholm with his mother. With his wife and sisters, he then moved to France, settling first in Bombon and then Paris. Here, he became a close friend to the French Bolshevik Inessa Armand; some biographers suggest that they had an extra-marital affair from 1910 to 1912. Meanwhile, at a Paris meeting in June 1911, the RSDLP Central Committee decided to move their focus of operations back to Russia, ordering the closure of the Bolshevik Centre and its newspaper, Proletari. Seeking to rebuild his influence in the party, Lenin arranged for a party conference to be held in Prague in January 1912, and although 16 of the 18 attendants were Bolsheviks, he was heavily criticised for his factionalist tendencies and failed to boost his status within the party.
Moving to Kraków in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, a culturally Polish part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he used Jagiellonian University's library to conduct research. He stayed in close contact with the RSDLP, which was operating in the Russian Empire, convincing the Duma's Bolshevik members to split from their parliamentary alliance with the Mensheviks. In January 1913, Stalin, whom Lenin referred to as the "wonderful Georgian", visited him, and they discussed the future of non-Russian ethnic groups in the Empire. Due to the ailing health of both Lenin and his wife, they moved to the rural town of Biały Dunajec, before heading to Bern for Nadya to have surgery on her goitre.
First World War: 1914–1917
The [First World] war is being waged for the division of colonies and the robbery of foreign territory; thieves have fallen out–and to refer to the defeats at a given moment of one of the thieves in order to identify the interests of all thieves with the interests of the nation or the fatherland is an unconscionable bourgeois lie.
Lenin was in Galicia when the First World War broke out. The war pitted the Russian Empire against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and due to his Russian citizenship, Lenin was arrested and briefly imprisoned until his anti-Tsarist credentials were explained. Lenin and his wife returned to Bern, before relocating to Zürich in February 1916. Lenin was angry that the German Social-Democratic Party was supporting the German war effort, which was a direct contravention of the Second International's Stuttgart resolution that socialist parties would oppose the conflict and saw the Second International as defunct. He attended the Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915 and the Kienthal Conference in April 1916, urging socialists across the continent to convert the "imperialist war" into a continent-wide "civil war" with the proletariat pitted against the bourgeoisie and aristocracy. In July 1916, Lenin's mother died, but he was unable to attend her funeral. Her death deeply affected him, and he became depressed, fearing that he too would die before seeing the proletarian revolution.
In September 1917, Lenin published Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which argued that imperialism was a product of monopoly capitalism, as capitalists sought to increase their profits by extending into new territories where wages were lower and raw materials cheaper. He believed that competition and conflict would increase and that war between the imperialist powers would continue until they were overthrown by proletariat revolution and socialism established. He spent much of this time reading the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Aristotle, all of whom had been key influences on Marx. This changed Lenin's interpretation of Marxism; whereas he once believed that policies could be developed based on predetermined scientific principles, he concluded that the only test of whether a policy was correct was its practice. He still perceived himself as an orthodox Marxist, but he began to diverge from some of Marx's predictions about societal development; whereas Marx had believed that a "bourgeoisie-democratic revolution" of the middle-classes had to take place before a "socialist revolution" of the proletariat, Lenin believed that in Russia the proletariat could overthrow the Tsarist regime without an intermediate revolution.
February Revolution and the July Days: 1917
In February 1917, the February Revolution broke out in St. Petersburg, renamed Petrograd at the beginning of the First World War, as industrial workers went on strike over food shortages and deteriorating factory conditions. The unrest spread to other parts of Russia, and fearing that he would be violently overthrown, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated. The State Duma took over control of the country, establishing the Russian Provisional Government and converting the Empire into a new Russian Republic. When Lenin learned of this from his base in Switzerland, he celebrated with other dissidents. He decided to return to Russia to take charge of the Bolsheviks but found that most passages into the country were blocked due to the ongoing conflict. He organised a plan with other dissidents to negotiate a passage for them through Germany, with which Russia was then at war. Recognising that these dissidents could cause problems for their Russian enemies, the German government agreed to permit 32 Russian citizens to travel by train through their territory, among them Lenin and his wife. For political reasons, Lenin and the Germans agreed to a cover story that Lenin had travelled by sealed train carriage through German territory, but in fact the train was not truly sealed, and the passengers were allowed to disembark to, for example, spend the night in Frankfurt. The group travelled by train from Zürich to Sassnitz, proceeding by ferry to Trelleborg, Sweden, and from there to the Haparanda–Tornio border crossing and then to Helsinki before taking the final train to Petrograd in disguise.
Arriving at Petrograd's Finland Station in April, Lenin gave a speech to Bolshevik supporters condemning the Provisional Government and again calling for a continent-wide European proletarian revolution. Over the following days, he spoke at Bolshevik meetings, lambasting those who wanted reconciliation with the Mensheviks and revealing his "April Theses", an outline of his plans for the Bolsheviks, which he had written on the journey from Switzerland. He publicly condemned both the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries, who dominated the influential Petrograd Soviet, for supporting the Provisional Government, denouncing them as traitors to socialism. Considering the government to be just as imperialist as the Tsarist regime, he advocated immediate peace with Germany and Austria-Hungary, rule by soviets, the nationalisation of industry and banks, and the state expropriation of land, all with the intention of establishing a proletariat government and pushing toward a socialist society. By contrast, the Mensheviks believed that Russia was insufficiently developed to transition to socialism and accused Lenin of trying to plunge the new Republic into civil war. Over the coming months Lenin campaigned for his policies, attending the meetings of the Bolshevik Central Committee, prolifically writing for the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, and giving public speeches in Petrograd aimed at converting workers, soldiers, sailors, and peasants to his cause.
Sensing growing frustration among Bolshevik supporters, Lenin suggested an armed political demonstration in Petrograd to test the government's response. Amid deteriorating health, he left the city to recuperate in the Finnish village of Neivola. The Bolsheviks' armed demonstration, the July Days, took place while Lenin was away, but upon learning that demonstrators had violently clashed with government forces, he returned to Petrograd and called for calm. Responding to the violence, the government ordered the arrest of Lenin and other prominent Bolsheviks, raiding their offices, and publicly alleging that he was a German agent provocateur. Evading arrest, Lenin hid in a series of Petrograd safe houses. Fearing that he would be killed, Lenin and fellow senior Bolshevik Grigory Zinoviev escaped Petrograd in disguise, relocating to Razliv. There, Lenin began work on the book that became The State and Revolution, an exposition on how he believed the socialist state would develop after the proletariat revolution, and how from then on the state would gradually wither away, leaving a pure communist society. He began arguing for a Bolshevik-led armed insurrection to topple the government, but at a clandestine meeting of the party's central committee this idea was rejected. Lenin then headed by train and by foot to Finland, arriving at Helsinki on 10 August, where he hid away in safe houses belonging to Bolshevik sympathisers.
October Revolution: 1917
In August 1917, while Lenin was in Finland, General Lavr Kornilov, the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army, sent troops to Petrograd in what appeared to be a military coup attempt against the Provisional Government. Premier Alexander Kerensky turned to the Petrograd Soviet, including its Bolshevik members, for help, allowing the revolutionaries to organise workers as Red Guards to defend the city. The coup petered out before it reached Petrograd, but the events had allowed the Bolsheviks to return to the open political arena. Fearing a counter-revolution from right-wing forces hostile to socialism, the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries who dominated the Petrograd Soviet had been instrumental in pressuring the government to normalise relations with the Bolsheviks. Both the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries had lost much popular support because of their affiliation with the Provisional Government and its unpopular continuation of the war. The Bolsheviks capitalised on this, and soon the pro-Bolshevik Marxist Trotsky was elected leader of the Petrograd Soviet. In September, the Bolsheviks gained a majority in the workers' sections of both the Moscow and Petrograd Soviets.
Recognising that the situation was safer for him, Lenin returned to Petrograd. There he attended a meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee on 10 October, where he again argued that the party should lead an armed insurrection to topple the Provisional Government. This time the argument won with ten votes against two. Critics of the plan, Zinoviev and Kamenev, argued that Russian workers would not support a violent coup against the regime and that there was no clear evidence for Lenin's assertion that all of Europe was on the verge of proletarian revolution. The party began plans to organise the offensive, holding a final meeting at the Smolny Institute on 24 October. This was the base of the Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC), an armed militia largely loyal to the Bolsheviks that had been established by the Petrograd Soviet during Kornilov's alleged coup.
In October, the MRC was ordered to take control of Petrograd's key transport, communication, printing and utilities hubs, and did so without bloodshed. Bolsheviks besieged the government in the Winter Palace and overcame it and arrested its ministers after the cruiser Aurora, controlled by Bolshevik seamen, fired a blank shot to signal the start of the revolution. During the insurrection, Lenin gave a speech to the Petrograd Soviet announcing that the Provisional Government had been overthrown. The Bolsheviks declared the formation of a new government, the Council of People's Commissars, or Sovnarkom. Lenin initially turned down the leading position of Chairman, suggesting Trotsky for the job, but other Bolsheviks insisted and ultimately Lenin relented. Lenin and other Bolsheviks then attended the Second Congress of Soviets on 26 and 27 October and announced the creation of the new government. Menshevik attendees condemned the illegitimate seizure of power and the risk of civil war. In these early days of the new regime, Lenin avoided talking in Marxist and socialist terms so as not to alienate Russia's population, and instead spoke about having a country controlled by the workers. Lenin and many other Bolsheviks expected proletariat revolution to sweep across Europe in days or months.
Lenin's government
Organising the Soviet government: 1917–1918
The Provisional Government had planned for a Constituent Assembly to be elected in November 1917; against Lenin's objections, Sovnarkom agreed for the vote to take place as scheduled. In the constitutional election, the Bolsheviks gained approximately a quarter of the vote, being defeated by the agrarian-focused Socialist-Revolutionaries. Lenin argued that the election was not a fair reflection of the people's will, that the electorate had not had time to learn the Bolsheviks' political programme, and that the candidacy lists had been drawn up before the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries split from the Socialist-Revolutionaries. Nevertheless, the newly elected Russian Constituent Assembly convened in Petrograd in January 1918. Sovnarkom argued that it was counter-revolutionary because it sought to remove power from the soviets, but the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks denied this. The Bolsheviks presented the Assembly with a motion that would strip it of most of its legal powers; when the Assembly rejected the motion, Sovnarkom declared this as evidence of its counter-revolutionary nature and forcibly disbanded it.
Lenin rejected repeated calls, including from some Bolsheviks, to establish a coalition government with other socialist parties. Although refusing a coalition with the Mensheviks or Socialist-Revolutionaries, Sovnarkom partially relented; they allowed the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries five posts in the cabinet in December 1917. This coalition only lasted four months until March 1918, when the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries pulled out of the government over a disagreement about the Bolsheviks' approach to ending the First World War. At their 7th Congress in March 1918, the Bolsheviks changed their official name from the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party to the Russian Communist Party, as Lenin wanted to both distance his group from the increasingly reformist German Social Democratic Party and to emphasise its ultimate goal, that of a communist society.
Although ultimate power officially rested with the country's government in the form of Sovnarkom and the Executive Committee (VTSIK) elected by the All-Russian Congress of Soviets (ARCS), the Communist Party was de facto in control in Russia, as acknowledged by its members at the time. By 1918, Sovnarkom began acting unilaterally, claiming a need for expediency, with the ARCS and VTSIK becoming increasingly marginalised, so the soviets no longer had a role in governing Russia. During 1918 and 1919, the government expelled Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries from the soviets. Russia had become a one-party state.
Within the party was established a Political Bureau (Politburo) and Organisation Bureau (Orgburo) to accompany the existing Central Committee; the decisions of these party bodies had to be adopted by Sovnarkom and the Council of Labour and Defence. Lenin was the most significant figure in this governance structure as well as being the Chairman of Sovnarkom and sitting on the Council of Labour and Defence, and on the Central Committee and Politburo of the Communist Party. The only individual to have anywhere near this influence was Lenin's right-hand man, Yakov Sverdlov, who died in March 1919 during a flu pandemic. In November 1917, Lenin and his wife took a two-room flat within the Smolny Institute; the following month they left for a brief holiday in Halila, Finland. In January 1918, he survived an assassination attempt in Petrograd; Fritz Platten, who was with Lenin at the time, shielded him and was injured by a bullet.
Concerned that the German Army posed a threat to Petrograd, in March 1918 Sovnarkom relocated to Moscow, initially as a temporary measure. There, Lenin, Trotsky, and other Bolshevik leaders moved into the Kremlin, where Lenin lived with his wife and sister Maria in a first-floor apartment adjacent to the room in which the Sovnarkom meetings were held. Lenin disliked Moscow, but rarely left the city centre during the rest of his life. He survived a second assassination attempt, in Moscow in August 1918; he was shot following a public speech and injured badly. A Socialist-Revolutionary, Fanny Kaplan, was arrested and executed. The attack was widely covered in the Russian press, generating much sympathy for Lenin and boosting his popularity. As a respite, he was driven in September 1918 to the luxurious Gorki estate, just outside Moscow, recently nationalized for him by the government.
Social, legal, and economic reform: 1917–1918
To All Workers, Soldiers and Peasants. The Soviet authority will at once propose a democratic peace to all nations and an immediate armistice on all fronts. It will safeguard the transfer without compensation of all land—landlord, imperial, and monastery—to the peasants' committees; it will defend the soldiers' rights, introducing a complete democratisation of the army; it will establish workers' control over industry; it will ensure the convocation of the Constituent Assembly on the date set; it will supply the cities with bread and the villages with articles of first necessity; and it will secure to all nationalities inhabiting Russia the right of self-determination ... Long live the revolution!
Upon taking power, Lenin's regime issued a series of decrees. The first was a Decree on Land, which declared that the landed estates of the aristocracy and the Orthodox Church should be nationalised and redistributed to peasants by local governments. This contrasted with Lenin's desire for agricultural collectivisation but provided governmental recognition of the widespread peasant land seizures that had already occurred. In November 1917, the government issued the Decree on the Press that closed many opposition media outlets deemed counter revolutionary. They claimed the measure would be temporary; the decree was widely criticised, including by many Bolsheviks, for compromising freedom of the press.
In November 1917, Lenin issued the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia, which stated that non-Russian ethnic groups living inside the Republic had the right to secede from Russian authority and establish their own independent nation-states. Many nations declared independence (Finland and Lithuania in December 1917, Latvia and Ukraine in January 1918, Estonia in February 1918, Transcaucasia in April 1918, and Poland in November 1918). Soon, the Bolsheviks actively promoted communist parties in these independent nation-states, while at the Fifth All-Russian Congress of the Soviets in July 1918 a constitution was approved that reformed the Russian Republic into the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Seeking to modernise the country, the government officially converted Russia from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar used in Europe.
In November 1917, Sovnarkom issued a decree abolishing Russia's legal system, calling on the use of "revolutionary conscience" to replace the abolished laws. The courts were replaced by a two-tier system, namely the Revolutionary Tribunals to deal with counter-revolutionary crimes, and the People's Courts to deal with civil and other criminal offences. They were instructed to ignore pre-existing laws and base their rulings on the Sovnarkom decrees and a "socialist sense of justice." November also saw an overhaul of the armed forces; Sovnarkom implemented egalitarian measures, abolished previous ranks, titles, and medals, and called on soldiers to establish committees to elect their commanders.
Earth of Filth".
In October 1917, Lenin issued a decree limiting work for everyone in Russia to eight hours per day. He also issued the Decree on Popular Education that stipulated that the government would guarantee free, secular education for all children in Russia, and a decree establishing a system of state orphanages. To combat mass illiteracy, a literacy campaign was initiated; an estimated 5 million people enrolled in crash courses of basic literacy from 1920 to 1926. Embracing the equality of the sexes, laws were introduced that helped to emancipate women, by giving them economic autonomy from their husbands and removing restrictions on divorce. Zhenotdel, a Bolshevik women's organisation, was established to further these aims. Under Lenin, Russia became the first country to legalize abortion on demand in the first trimester. Militantly atheist, Lenin and the Communist Party wanted to demolish organised religion. In January 1918, the government decreed the separation of church and state, and prohibited religious instruction in schools.
In November 1917, Lenin issued the Decree on Workers' Control, which called on the workers of each enterprise to establish an elected committee to monitor their enterprise's management. That month they also issued an order requisitioning the country's gold, and nationalised the banks, which Lenin saw as a major step toward socialism. In December, Sovnarkom established a Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh), which had authority over industry, banking, agriculture, and trade. The factory committees were subordinate to the trade unions, which were subordinate to VSNKh; the state's centralised economic plan was prioritised over the workers' local economic interests. In early 1918, Sovnarkom cancelled all foreign debts and refused to pay interest owed on them. In April 1918, it nationalised foreign trade, establishing a state monopoly on imports and exports. In June 1918, it decreed nationalisation of public utilities, railways, engineering, textiles, metallurgy, and mining, although often these were state-owned in name only. Full-scale nationalisation did not take place until November 1920, when small-scale industrial enterprises were brought under state control.
A faction of the Bolsheviks known as the "Left Communists" criticised Sovnarkom's economic policy as too moderate; they wanted nationalisation of all industry, agriculture, trade, finance, transport, and communication. Lenin believed that this was impractical at that stage and that the government should only nationalise Russia's large-scale capitalist enterprises, such as the banks, railways, larger landed estates, and larger factories and mines, allowing smaller businesses to operate privately until they grew large enough to be successfully nationalised. Lenin also disagreed with the Left Communists about the economic organisation; in June 1918, he argued that centralised economic control of industry was needed, whereas Left Communists wanted each factory to be controlled by its workers, a syndicalist approach that Lenin considered detrimental to the cause of socialism.
Adopting a left-libertarian perspective, both the Left Communists and other factions in the Communist Party critiqued the decline of democratic institutions in Russia. Internationally, many socialists decried Lenin's regime and denied that he was establishing socialism; in particular, they highlighted the lack of widespread political participation, popular consultation, and industrial democracy. In late 1918, the Czech-Austrian Marxist Karl Kautsky authored an anti-Leninist pamphlet condemning the anti-democratic nature of Soviet Russia, to which Lenin published a vociferous reply, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg echoed Kautsky's views, while Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin described the Bolshevik seizure of power as "the burial of the Russian Revolution."
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk: 1917–1918
[By prolonging the war] we unusually strengthen German imperialism, and the peace will have to be concluded anyway, but then the peace will be worse because it will be concluded by someone other than ourselves. No doubt the peace which we are now being forced to conclude is an indecent peace, but if war commences our government will be swept away and the peace will be concluded by another government.
Upon taking power, Lenin believed that a key policy of his government must be to withdraw from the First World War by establishing an armistice with the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. He believed that ongoing war would create resentment among war-weary Russian troops, to whom he had promised peace, and that these troops and the advancing German Army threatened both his own government and the cause of international socialism. By contrast, other Bolsheviks, in particular Nikolai Bukharin and the Left Communists, believed that peace with the Central Powers would be a betrayal of international socialism and that Russia should instead wage "a war of revolutionary defence" that would provoke an uprising of the German proletariat against their own government.
Lenin proposed a three-month armistice in his Decree on Peace of November 1917, which was approved by the Second Congress of Soviets and presented to the German and Austro-Hungarian governments. The Germans responded positively, viewing this as an opportunity to focus on the Western Front and stave off looming defeat. In November, armistice talks began at Brest-Litovsk, the headquarters of the German high command on the Eastern Front, with the Russian delegation being led by Trotsky and Adolph Joffe. Meanwhile, a ceasefire until January was agreed. During negotiations, the Germans insisted on keeping their wartime conquests, which included Poland, Lithuania, and Courland, whereas the Russians countered that this was a violation of these nations' rights to self-determination. Some Bolsheviks had expressed hopes of dragging out negotiations until proletarian revolution broke out throughout Europe. On 7 January 1918, Trotsky returned from Brest-Litovsk to St. Petersburg with an ultimatum from the Central Powers: either Russia accept Germany's territorial demands or the war would resume.
In January and again in February, Lenin urged the Bolsheviks to accept Germany's proposals. He argued that the territorial losses were acceptable if it ensured the survival of the Bolshevik-led government. The majority of Bolsheviks rejected his position, hoping to prolong the armistice and call Germany's bluff. On 18 February, the German Army launched Operation Faustschlag, advancing further into Russian-controlled territory and conquering Dvinsk within a day. At this point, Lenin finally convinced a small majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee to accept the Central Powers' demands. On 23 February, the Central Powers issued a new ultimatum: Russia had to recognise German control not only of Poland and the Baltic states but also of Ukraine or face a full-scale invasion.
On 3 March, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed. It resulted in massive territorial losses for Russia, with 26% of the former Empire's population, 37% of its agricultural harvest area, 28% of its industry, 26% of its railway tracks, and three-quarters of its coal and iron deposits being transferred to German control. Accordingly, the Treaty was deeply unpopular across Russia's political spectrum, and several Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries resigned from Sovnarkom in protest. After the Treaty, Sovnarkom focused on trying to foment proletarian revolution in Germany, issuing an array of anti-war and anti-government publications in the country; the German government retaliated by expelling Russia's diplomats. The Treaty nevertheless failed to stop the Central Powers' defeat; in November 1918, the German Emperor Wilhelm II abdicated and the country's new administration signed the Armistice with the Allies. As a result, Sovnarkom proclaimed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk void.
Anti-Kulak campaigns, Cheka, and Red Terror: 1918–1922
[The bourgeoisie] practised terror against the workers, soldiers and peasants in the interests of a small group of landowners and bankers, whereas the Soviet regime applies decisive measures against landowners, plunderers and their accomplices in the interests of the workers, soldiers and peasants.
By early 1918, many cities in western Russia faced famine as a result of chronic food shortages. Lenin blamed this on the kulaks, or wealthier peasants, who allegedly hoarded the grain that they had produced to increase its financial value. In May 1918, he issued a requisitioning order that established armed detachments to confiscate grain from kulaks for distribution in the cities, and in June called for the formation of Committees of Poor Peasants to aid in requisitioning. This policy resulted in vast social disorder and violence, as armed detachments often clashed with peasant groups, helping to set the stage for the civil war. A prominent example of Lenin's views was his August 1918 telegram to the Bolsheviks of Penza, which called upon them to suppress a peasant insurrection by publicly hanging at least 100 "known kulaks, rich men, [and] bloodsuckers."
The requisitions disincentivised peasants from producing more grain than they could personally consume, and thus production slumped. A booming black market supplemented the official state-sanctioned economy, and Lenin called on speculators, black marketeers and looters to be shot. Both the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries condemned the armed appropriations of grain at the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets in July 1918. Realising that the Committees of the Poor Peasants were also persecuting peasants who were not kulaks and thus contributing to anti-government feeling among the peasantry, in December 1918 Lenin abolished them.
Lenin repeatedly emphasised the need for terror and violence in overthrowing the old order and ensuring the success of the revolution. Speaking to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets in November 1917, he declared that "the state is an institution built up for the sake of exercising violence. Previously, this violence was exercised by a handful of moneybags over the entire people; now we want [...] to organise violence in the interests of the people." He strongly opposed suggestions to abolish capital punishment. Fearing anti-Bolshevik forces would overthrow his administration, in December 1917 Lenin ordered the establishment of the Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, or Cheka, a political police force led by Felix Dzerzhinsky.
In September 1918, Sovnarkom passed a decree that inaugurated the Red Terror, a system of repression orchestrated by the Cheka secret police.[261] Although sometimes described as an attempt to eliminate the entire bourgeoisie, Lenin did not want to exterminate all members of this class, merely those who sought to reinstate their rule. The majority of the Terror's victims were well-to-do citizens or former members of the Tsarist administration; others were non-bourgeois anti-Bolsheviks and perceived social undesirables such as prostitutes. The Cheka claimed the right to both sentence and execute anyone whom it deemed to be an enemy of the government, without recourse to the Revolutionary Tribunals. Accordingly, throughout Soviet Russia the Cheka carried out killings, often in large numbers. For example, the Petrograd Cheka executed 512 people in a few days. There are no surviving records to provide an accurate figure of how many perished in the Red Terror; later estimates of historians have ranged between 10,000 and 15,000, and 50,000 to 140,000.
Lenin never witnessed this violence or participated in it first-hand, and publicly distanced himself from it. His published articles and speeches rarely called for executions, but he regularly did so in his coded telegrams and confidential notes. Many Bolsheviks expressed disapproval of the Cheka's mass executions and feared the organisation's apparent unaccountability. The Communist Party tried to restrain its activities in February 1919, stripping it of its powers of tribunal and execution in those areas not under official martial law, but the Cheka continued as before in swathes of the country. By 1920, the Cheka had become the most powerful institution in Soviet Russia, exerting influence over all other state apparatus.
A decree in April 1919 resulted in the establishment of concentration camps, which were entrusted to the Cheka, later administered by a new government agency, Gulag. By the end of 1920, 84 camps had been established across Soviet Russia, holding about 50,000 prisoners; by October 1923, this had grown to 315 camps and about 70,000 inmates. Those interned in the camps were used as slave labour. From July 1922, intellectuals deemed to be opposing the Bolshevik government were exiled to inhospitable regions or deported from Russia altogether; Lenin personally scrutinised the lists of those to be dealt with in this manner. In May 1922, Lenin issued a decree calling for the execution of anti-Bolshevik priests, causing between 14,000 and 20,000 deaths. The Russian Orthodox Church was worst affected; the government's anti-religious policies also harmed Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, Jewish synagogues, and Islamic mosques.
Civil War and the Polish–Soviet War: 1918–1920
The existence of the Soviet Republic alongside the imperialist states over the long run is unthinkable. In the end, either the one or the other will triumph. And until that end will have arrived, a series of the most terrible conflicts between the Soviet Republic and the bourgeois governments is unavoidable. This means that the ruling class, the proletariat, if it only wishes to rule and is to rule, must demonstrate this also with its military organization.
Lenin expected Russia's aristocracy and bourgeoisie to oppose his government, but he believed that the numerical superiority of the lower classes, coupled with the Bolsheviks' ability to effectively organise them, guaranteed a swift victory in any conflict. In this, he failed to anticipate the intensity of the violent opposition to Bolshevik rule in Russia. A long and bloody Civil War ensued between the Bolshevik Reds and the anti-Bolshevik Whites, starting in 1917 and ending in 1923 with the Reds' victory. It also encompassed ethnic conflicts on Russia's borders, and anti-Bolshevik peasant and left-wing uprisings throughout the former Empire. Accordingly, various historians have seen the civil war as representing two distinct conflicts: one between the revolutionaries and the counterrevolutionaries, and the other between different revolutionary factions.
The White armies were established by former Tsarist military officers, and included Anton Denikin's Volunteer Army in South Russia, Alexander Kolchak's forces in Siberia, and Nikolai Yudenich's troops in the newly independent Baltic states. The Whites were bolstered when 35,000 members of the Czech Legion, who were prisoners of war from the conflict with the Central Powers, turned against Sovnarkom and allied with the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch), an anti-Bolshevik government established in Samara. The Whites were also backed by Western governments who perceived the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk as a betrayal of the Allied war effort and feared the Bolsheviks' calls for world revolution. In 1918, Great Britain, France, United States, Canada, Italy, and Serbia landed 10,000 troops in Murmansk, seizing Kandalaksha, while later that year British, American, and Japanese forces landed in Vladivostok. Western troops soon pulled out of the civil war, instead only supporting the Whites with officers, technicians and armaments, but Japan remained because they saw the conflict as an opportunity for territorial expansion.
Lenin tasked Trotsky with establishing a Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, and with his support, Trotsky organised a Revolutionary Military Council in September 1918, remaining its chairman until 1925. Recognising their valuable military experience, Lenin agreed that officers from the old Tsarist army could serve in the Red Army, although Trotsky established military councils to monitor their activities. The Reds held control of Russia's two largest cities, Moscow and Petrograd, as well as most of Great Russia, while the Whites were located largely on the former Empire's peripheries. The latter were therefore hindered by being both fragmented and geographically scattered, and because their ethnic Russian supremacism alienated the region's national minorities. Anti-Bolshevik armies carried out the White Terror, a campaign of violence against perceived Bolshevik supporters which was typically more spontaneous than the state-sanctioned Red Terror. Both White and Red Armies were responsible for attacks against Jewish communities, prompting Lenin to issue a condemnation of antisemitism, blaming prejudice against Jews on capitalist propaganda.
In July 1918, Sverdlov informed Sovnarkom that the Ural Regional Soviet had overseen the murder of the former Tsar and his immediate family in Yekaterinburg to prevent them from being rescued by advancing White troops. Although lacking proof, biographers and historians like Richard Pipes and Dmitri Volkogonov have expressed the view that the killing was probably sanctioned by Lenin; conversely, historian James Ryan cautioned that there was "no reason" to believe this. Whether Lenin sanctioned it or not, he still regarded it as necessary, highlighting the precedent set by the execution of Louis XVI in the French Revolution.
After the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries had abandoned the coalition and increasingly viewed the Bolsheviks as traitors to the revolution. In July 1918, the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Yakov Blumkin assassinated the German ambassador to Russia, Wilhelm von Mirbach, hoping that the ensuing diplomatic incident would lead to a relaunched revolutionary war against Germany. The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries then launched a coup in Moscow, shelling the Kremlin and seizing the city's central post office before being stopped by Trotsky's forces. The party's leaders and many members were arrested and imprisoned but were treated more leniently than other opponents of the Bolsheviks.
By 1919, the White armies were in retreat and by the start of 1920 were defeated on all three fronts. Although Sovnarkom were victorious, the territorial extent of the Russian state had been reduced, for many non-Russian ethnic groups had used the disarray to push for national independence. In March 1921, during a related war against Poland, the Peace of Riga was signed, splitting disputed territories in Belarus and Ukraine between the Republic of Poland and Soviet Russia. Soviet Russia sought to re-conquer all newly independent nations of the former Empire, although their success was limited. Estonia, Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania all repelled Soviet invasions, while Ukraine, Belarus (as a result of the Polish–Soviet War), Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia were occupied by the Red Army. By 1921, Soviet Russia had defeated the Ukrainian national movements and occupied the Caucasus, although anti-Bolshevik uprisings in Central Asia lasted until the late 1920s.
After the German Ober Ost garrisons were withdrawn from the Eastern Front following the Armistice, both Soviet Russian armies and Polish ones moved in to fill the vacuum. The newly independent Polish state and the Soviet government each sought territorial expansion in the region. Polish and Russian troops first clashed in February 1919, with the conflict developing into the Polish–Soviet War. Unlike the Soviets' previous conflicts, this had greater implications for the export of revolution and the future of Europe. Polish forces pushed into Ukraine and by May 1920 had taken Kiev from the Soviets. After forcing the Polish Army back, Lenin urged the Red Army to invade Poland itself, believing that the Polish proletariat would rise up to support the Russian troops and thus spark European revolution. Trotsky and other Bolsheviks were sceptical, but agreed to the invasion. The Polish proletariat did not rise, and the Red Army was defeated at the Battle of Warsaw. The Polish armies pushed the Red Army back into Russia, forcing Sovnarkom to sue for peace; the war culminated in the Peace of Riga, in which Russia ceded territory to Poland.
Death and funeral: 1923–1924
Lenin's funeral, as painted by Isaac Brodsky, 1925
In March 1923, Lenin had a third stroke and lost his ability to speak; that month, he experienced partial paralysis on his right side and began exhibiting sensory aphasia. By May, he appeared to be making a slow recovery, regaining some of his mobility, speech, and writing skills. In October, he made a final visit to the Kremlin. In his final weeks, Lenin was visited by Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin; the latter visited him at his Gorki mansion on the day of his death. On 21 January 1924, Lenin fell into a coma and died later that day at age 53. His official cause of death was recorded as an incurable disease of the blood vessels. "Good dog", are said to have been Lenin's last words, upon his dog having brought him a dead bird.
The Soviet government publicly announced Lenin's death the following day. On 23 January, mourners from the Communist Party, trade unions, and Soviets visited his Gorki home to inspect the body, which was carried aloft in a red coffin by leading Bolsheviks. Transported by train to Moscow, the coffin was taken to the House of Trade Unions, where the body lay in state. Over the next three days, around a million mourners came to see the body, many queuing for hours in the freezing conditions. On 26 January, the eleventh All-Union Congress of Soviets met to pay respects, with speeches by Kalinin, Zinoviev, and Stalin. Notably, Trotsky was absent; he had been convalescing in the Caucasus, and he later claimed that Stalin sent him a telegram with the incorrect date of the planned funeral, making it impossible for him to arrive in time. Lenin's funeral took place the following day, when his body was carried to Red Square, accompanied by martial music, where assembled crowds listened to a series of speeches before the corpse was placed into the vault of a specially erected mausoleum. Despite the freezing temperatures, tens of thousands attended.
Against Krupskaya's protestations, Lenin's body was embalmed to preserve it for long-term public display in the Red Square mausoleum. During this process, Lenin's brain was removed; in 1925 an institute was established to dissect it, revealing that Lenin had had severe sclerosis. In July 1929, the Politburo agreed to replace the temporary mausoleum with a permanent one in granite, which was finished in 1933. His sarcophagus was replaced in 1940 and again in 1970. For safety amid the Second World War, from 1941 to 1945 the body was temporarily moved to Tyumen. As of 2023, his body remains on public display in Lenin's Mausoleum on Red Square.
The Postcard
A postally unused Photocolour postcard that was printed and published in the mid 1960's by E. T. W. Dennis & Sons of Scarborough and London.
The card has a divided back.
The Manchester Arena Bombing
On the 22nd. May 2017, an Islamist extremist suicide bomber detonated a shrapnel-laden homemade bomb as people were leaving the Manchester Arena following a concert by American singer Ariana Grande.
Twenty-three people were killed, including the attacker, and 1,017 were injured, many of them children. Several hundred more suffered psychological trauma.
The bomber was Salman Ramadan Abedi, a 22-year-old local man of Libyan ancestry. After initial suspicions of a terrorist network, police later said that they believed Abedi had largely acted alone, but that others had been aware of his plans.
In March 2020, the bomber's brother, Hashem Abedi, was found guilty of 22 counts of murder and attempting to murder 1,017 others, and was sentenced to life in prison.
The incident was the deadliest terrorist attack and the first suicide bombing in the United Kingdom since the 7th. July 2005 London bombings.
The Bombing
On the 22nd. May 2017 at 22:15 a member of the public reported Abedi, wearing black clothes and a large rucksack to Showsec security. A security guard observed Abedi, but said that he did not intervene in case his concerns about Abedi were wrong, and out of fear of being considered a racist.
The security guard tried to use his radio to alert the security control room, but was unable to get through.
Police officers on duty that night were subsequently criticised for their behaviour in the hours leading up to the atrocity - including a two-hour dinner break and a 10-mile round trip to buy a kebab.
At one point, when Abedi took his final trip through the station to his hiding place in the foyer, there were no BTP officers on duty in the area.
At 22:31 the suicide bomber detonated an improvised explosive device, packed with nuts and bolts to act as shrapnel, in the foyer area of the Manchester Arena.
The attack took place after a concert by Ariana Grande that was part of her Dangerous Woman Tour. 14,200 people had attended the concert.
Many exiting concert-goers and waiting parents were in the foyer at the time of the explosion. According to evidence presented at the coroner's inquest, the bomb was powerful enough to kill people up to 20 metres (66 ft) away.
A report by inquiry chair John Saunders blamed “failings by individuals” for “missed opportunities” to detect and stop bomber Salman Abedi.
Saunders outlined a “litany” of failures by venue operators SMG, security firm Showsec and British Transport Police (BTP) - failures that included taking unauthorised two-hour meal breaks and ignoring members of the public who tried to raise the alarm:
-- Reconnaissance Oversights
Abedi went to the arena several times to carry out hostile reconnaissance in the run-up to the bombing, visiting on the 18th. and 21st. May, and also on the afternoon of the day of the attack.
Although arena operator SMG and security firm Showsec “had experience of identifying and responding to potential hostile reconnaissance effectively”, the system for passing on information about suspicious behaviour was “insufficiently robust”.
If the Showsec staff on duty at the time, Kyle Lawler and Mohammed Agha - then aged 18 and 19 respectively - had been aware of previous reports of suspicious activity, “it would have increased the possibility” of Abedi being spotted.
Inquiry chair Saunders also notes that SMG could have extended the permitted security perimeter from the entrance doors of the arena to the City Room, the foyer where the bomb detonated. The report says:
“Had permission to push out the perimeter
been granted, an attack in the City Room
would have been much less likely.”
-- Absence of Officers
Despite five officers being assigned to the arena on the night of the attack, “there was a complete absence of any BTP officer in the City Room” in the half hour before Abedi detonated the bomb. And no officers were policing the public areas of the venue between 8.58pm and 9.36pm.
The report found that BTP officers “took breaks substantially and unjustifiably” longer than their authorised one hour. Instructions to stagger breaks between 7.30pm and 9pm - when younger children could be leaving the venue - were also ignored.
The public inquiry into the attack had previously heard how two officers on duty at the concert, PC Jessica Bullough and PCSO Mark Renshaw, had taken a “two-hour-and-nine-minute dinner break to get a kebab five miles from the arena”. The Telegraph reported:
"Bullough has since admitted that were
she present on her shift as she should
have been, she would have likely stopped
Abedi and asked him what was in his bag”.
-- The CCTV Blindspot
Saunders' report says that Abedi chose an “obvious hiding place” in a CCTV blindspot of the arena City Room foyer, having no doubt identified this area during his hostile reconnaissance:
“Had the area been covered by CCTV so that
there was no blind spot, it is likely that this
behaviour by Abedi would have been identified
as suspicious by anyone monitoring the CCTV."
Giving evidence to the inquiry, Showsec security guard Agha said that he had noticed Abedi in the City Room, but only because he “liked the look” of Abedi's trainers.
-- Inadequate Patrols
The inquiry report says that:
"A further missed opportunity to spot Abedi
in the half hour before the bomb detonated
arose from the absence of an adequate
security patrol by Showsec at any stage
during this time”.
The supervisor charged with carrying out “pre-egress” checks, Jordan Beak, did so “only very briefly”, patrolling for about ten minutes, during which he just “looked towards the staircases up to the mezzanine area”, where Abedi was sitting.
The report notes:
“He did not consider them a very important
part of the check because it was not an
egress route. Mr Beak did not go up on to the
mezzanine area, and so he did not see Abedi.
This was a significant missed opportunity.”
-- Concerns ‘Fobbed Off’
Saunders wrote that:
"The most striking missed opportunity, and the
one that is likely to have made a significant
difference, was an attempt by a member of the
public to raise concerns about Abedi after
becoming suspicious about the bomber's large
and obviously heavy backpack".
Christopher Wild told the inquiry how he had spotted Abedi while waiting for his 14-year-old daughter to leave the concert.
According to the BBC, Wild recalled how he approached Abedi and said:
“It doesn't look very good you know, what you
see with bombs and such, you with a rucksack
in a place like this, what are you doing?”
Abedi reportedly told Wild that he was “waiting for somebody, mate”, before asking what time it was.
Wild alerted security guard Agha about his suspicions around fifteen minutes before the blast. But according to the inquiry report:
"Agha did not take Christopher Wild’s
concerns as seriously as he should have”.
Wild felt that he had been “fobbed off” by the guard, who claimed to already be aware of Abedi. Agha is said to have made “inadequate” efforts to flag down his supervisor or pass on the message via his colleague Lawler, who had a radio.
Although Agha did share Wild’s concerns with Lawler, the latter “felt conflicted about what to do” and “stated he was fearful of being branded a racist and would be in trouble if he got it wrong”.
Lawler ultimately made an attempt to contact a senior supervisor through the radio, but couldn’t get through, and made no further efforts to communicate what he had been told to anyone else. Saunders wrote:
“The inadequacy of Mr Lawler’s response
was a product of his failure to take Mr Wild’s
concern and his own observations sufficiently
seriously. Mr Wild’s behaviour was very
responsible. He stated that he formed the
view that Abedi might let a bomb off.
That was sadly all too prescient, and makes
all the more distressing the fact that no effective
steps were taken as a result of his efforts.”
Aftermath of the Explosion
Three hours after the bombing, police conducted a controlled explosion on a suspicious item of clothing in Cathedral Gardens. This was later confirmed to have been abandoned clothing and not dangerous.
Residents and taxi companies in Manchester offered free transport or accommodation via Twitter to those left stranded at the concert. Parents were separated from their children attending the concert in the aftermath of the explosion.
A nearby hotel served as a shelter for people displaced by the bombing, with officials directing separated parents and children there. Manchester's Sikh temples along with local homeowners, hotels and venues offered shelter to survivors of the attack.
Manchester Victoria railway station, which is partly underneath the arena, was evacuated and closed, and services were cancelled. The explosion caused structural damage to the station, which remained closed until the damage had been assessed and repaired, resulting in disruption to train and tram services.
Victoria Station reopened eight days later, following the completion of police investigation work and repairs to the fabric of the building.
On the 23rd. May, Prime Minister Theresa May announced that the UK's terror threat level had been raised to "critical", its highest level.
In the aftermath of the attack, Operation Temperer was activated for the first time, allowing up to 5,000 soldiers to reinforce armed police in protecting parts of the country.
Tours of the Houses of Parliament and the Changing of the Guard ceremony at Buckingham Palace were cancelled on 24 May, and troops were deployed to guard government buildings in London.
On the 23rd. May, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, via the Nashir Telegram channel, said the attack was carried out by "a soldier of the Khilafah". The message called the attack:
"An endeavor to terrorise the mushrikin,
and in response to their transgressions
against the lands of the Muslims."
Abedi's sister said that he was motivated by revenge for Muslim children killed by American airstrikes in Syria.
The Manchester Arena remained closed until September 2017, with scheduled concerts either cancelled or moved to other venues. It reopened on the 9th. September 2017, with a benefit concert featuring Noel Gallagher and other acts associated with North West England.
Later that month, Chris Parker, a homeless man who stole from victims of the attack whilst assisting them, was jailed for 4 years and three months.
Casualties of the Attack
The explosion killed the attacker and 22 concert-goers and parents who were in the entrance waiting to pick up their children following the show. 119 people were initially reported as injured. This number was revised by police to 250 on the 22nd. June, with the addition of severe psychological trauma and minor injuries.
During the public inquiry into the bombing, it was updated in December 2020 to 1,017 people sustaining injuries.
The dead included ten people aged under 20; the youngest victim was an eight-year-old girl, and the oldest was a 51-year-old woman. Of the 22 victims, twenty were Britons and two were British-based Polish nationals.
North West Ambulance Service reported that 60 of its ambulances attended the scene, carried 59 people to local hospitals, and treated walking wounded on site. Of those hospitalised, 12 were children under the age of 16.
The first doctor thought to have been on scene was an off-duty consultant anaesthetist, Michael Daley. In recognition of his bravery for the role he played in the immediate medical response to the incident, Daley's name was entered into the BMA's Book of Valour in June 2017.
The Attacker
The bomber, Salman Ramadan Abedi, was a 22-year-old British Muslim of Libyan ancestry. He was born in Manchester to a Salafi family of Libyan-born refugees who had settled in Manchester after fleeing to the UK to escape the government of Muammar Gaddafi.
He had two brothers and a sister. He grew up in Whalley Range and lived in Fallowfield. Neighbours described the Abedis as a very traditional and "super religious" family who attended Didsbury Mosque.
Abedi attended Wellacre Technology College, Burnage Academy for Boys and The Manchester College. A former tutor remarked that:
"Abedi was a very slow, uneducated
and passive person".
He was among a group of students at his high school who accused a teacher of Islamophobia for asking them what they thought of suicide bombers. He also reportedly said to his friends that being a suicide bomber "was OK" and fellow college students raised concerns about his behaviour.
Abedi's father was a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a Salafi jihadist organisation proscribed by the United Nations, and father and son fought for the group in Libya in 2011 as part of the movement to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi.
Abedi's parents, both born in Tripoli, remained in Libya in 2011, while 17-year-old Abedi returned to live in the United Kingdom. He took a gap year in 2014, where he returned with his brother Hashem to Libya to live with his parents. Abedi was injured in Ajdabiya that year while fighting for an Islamist group.
The brothers were rescued from Tripoli by the Royal Navy survey ship HMS Enterprise in August 2014 as part of a group of 110 British citizens as the Libyan civil war erupted, taken to Malta and flown back to the UK.
According to a retired European intelligence officer, Abedi met with members of the ISIS Battar brigade in Libya, and continued to be in contact with the group upon his return to the UK.
An imam at Didsbury mosque recalled that Abedi looked at him "with hate" after he preached against ISIS and Ansar al-Sharia in 2015.
Abedi's sister said her brother was motivated by the injustice of Muslim children dying in bombings stemming from the American-led intervention in the Syrian Civil War.
A family friend of the Abedi's also remarked that Salman had vowed revenge at the funeral of Abdul Wahab Hafidah, who was run over and stabbed to death by a Manchester gang in 2016 and was a friend of Salman and his younger brother Hashem. Hashem later co-ordinated the Manchester bombing with his brother.
According to an acquaintance in the UK, Abedi was "outgoing" and consumed alcohol, while another said that Abedi was a "regular kid who went out and drank" until about 2016. Abedi was also known to have used cannabis.
He enrolled at the University of Salford in September 2014, where he studied business administration, before dropping out to work in a bakery. Manchester police believe Abedi used student loans to finance the plot, including travel overseas to learn bomb-making.
The Guardian reported that despite dropping out from further education, he was still receiving student loan funding in April 2017. Abedi returned to Manchester on the 18th. May after a trip to Libya and bought bomb-making material, apparently constructing the acetone peroxide-based bomb by himself. Many members of the IS Battar brigade trained people in bomb-making in Libya.
He was known to British security services and police but was not regarded as a high risk, having been linked to petty crime but never flagged up for radical views.
A community worker told the BBC he had called a hotline five years before the bombing to warn police about Abedi's views and members of Britain's Libyan diaspora said they had "warned authorities for years" about Manchester's Islamist radicalisation.
Abedi was allegedly reported to authorities for his extremism by five community leaders and family members, and had been banned from a mosque; the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, however, said Abedi was not known to the Prevent anti-radicalisation programme.
On the 29th. May 2017, MI5 launched an internal inquiry into its handling of the warnings it had received about Abedi and a second, "more in depth" inquiry, into how it missed the danger.
On the 22nd. November 2018, a Parliamentary report said that MI5 had acted "too slowly" in its dealings with Abedi. The committee's report noted:
"What we can say is that there were a number
of failings in the handling of Salman Abedi's case.
While it is impossible to say whether these would
have prevented the devastating attack on the
22nd. May, we have concluded that as a result of
the failings, potential opportunities to prevent it
were missed."
Investigation Into the Bombing
The property in Fallowfield where Abedi lived was raided on the 23rd. May. Armed police breached the house with a controlled explosion and searched it. Abedi's 23-year-old brother was arrested in Chorlton-cum-Hardy in south Manchester in relation to the attack.
Police carried out raids in two other areas of south Manchester and another address in the Whalley Range area. Three other men were arrested, and police initially spoke of a network supporting the bomber; however they later announced that Abedi had sourced all the bomb components himself, and that they now believed he had largely acted alone. On the 6th. July, police said that they believed others had been aware of Abedi's plans.
According to German police sources, Abedi transited through Düsseldorf Airport on his way home to Manchester from Istanbul four days before the bombing. French interior minister Gérard Collomb said that Abedi may have been to Syria, and had "proven" links with IS.
Abedi's younger brother and father were arrested by Libyan security forces on the 23rd. and 24th. May respectively. The brother was suspected of planning an attack in Libya, and was said to be in regular touch with Salman, and was aware of the plan to bomb the Manchester Arena, but not the date.
According to a Libyan official, the brothers spoke on the phone about 15 minutes before the attack was carried out. On the 1st. November 2017, the UK requested Libya to extradite the bomber's younger brother, Hashem Abedi to the UK in order to face trial for complicity in the murder of the 22 people killed in the explosion.
Photographs of the remains of the IED published by The New York Times indicated that it had comprised an explosive charge inside a lightweight metal container which was carried within a black vest or a blue Karrimor backpack.
Most of the fatalities occurred in a ring around the bomber. His torso was propelled by the blast through the doors to the arena, indicating that the explosive charge was held in the backpack and blew him forward on detonation. A small device thought to have possibly been a hand-held detonator was also found.
The bomb contained the explosive TATP, which had been used in previous bombings. According to Manchester police, the explosive device used by Abedi was the design of a skilled bomb-maker and had a back-up means of detonation. Police also said that Salman Abedi bought most of the bomb components himself, and that he was alone during much of the time before carrying out the Manchester bombing.
On the 28th. May, police released images showing Abedi on the night of the bombing, taken from CCTV footage. Further images showed Abedi walking around Manchester with a blue suitcase.
According to US intelligence sources, Abedi was identified by the bank card that he had with him and the identification was confirmed using facial recognition technology.
A public inquiry into the attack was launched in September 2020. The first of three reports to be produced was a 200-page report published on the 17th. June 2021. It found that:
"There were a number of missed opportunities
to alter the course of what happened that night,
and more should have been done by police and
private security guards to prevent the bombing."
News Leaks
Within hours of the attack, Abedi's name and other information that had been given confidentially to security services in the United States and France was leaked to the news media. This led to condemnation from Home Secretary Amber Rudd.
Following the publication of crime scene photographs of the backpack bomb used in the attack in the 24th. May edition of The New York Times, UK counterterrorism police chiefs said the release of the material was detrimental to the investigation.
On the 25th. May, Greater Manchester Police said that it had stopped sharing information on the attack with the US intelligence services. Theresa May said she would make clear to President Trump that:
"Intelligence that has been
shared must be made secure."
Donald Trump described the leaks to the news media as "deeply troubling", and pledged to carry out a full investigation.
New York Times editor Dean Baquet declined to apologise for publishing the backpack bomb photographs, saying:
"We live in different press worlds.
The material was not classified at
the highest level."
On the 26th. May, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the United States government accepted responsibility for the leaks.
Links with the Muslim Brotherhood
According to a secret recording unveiled by the BBC, Mostafa Graf, the imam of the Didsbury Mosque where Salman Abedi and his family were regulars, made a call for armed jihad ten days before Abedi bought his concert ticket.
Following these revelations, the Manchester Police opened an investigation into the mosque and its imam, who also fought with a Libyan Islamist militia. Mostafa Graf is a member of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, an organisation founded by the Muslim Brotherhood and Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Al-Qaradawi is known for having claimed:
"Suicide bombings are a duty".
Haras Rafiq, head of the Quilliam think tank, told The Guardian that the Muslim Brotherhood runs the Didsbury Mosque.
The Didsbury Mosque is controlled by The Islamic Centre (Manchester), an English association headed by Dr. Haytham al-Khaffaf, who is also a director of the Human Relief Foundation, a Muslim Brotherhood organisation blacklisted for terrorism by Israel. Between 2015 and 2016, al-Khaffaf's Human Relief Foundation received over £1.5 million from the Qatar Charity, which is also subject to US counterterrorism surveillance.
Trial and Sentencing of Hashem Abedi
On the 17th. July 2019, Salman Abedi's brother Hashem was charged with murder, attempted murder and conspiracy to cause an explosion. He had been arrested in Libya and extradited to the UK.
His trial began on the 5th. February 2020. On the 17th. March, Hashem Abedi was found guilty on 22 charges of murder, on the grounds that he had helped his brother to source the materials used in the bombing, and had assisted with the manufacture of the explosives which were used in the attack.
On the 20th. August, Hashem Abedi was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 55 years. The judge, Mr Justice Jeremy Baker, said that sentencing rules prevented him from imposing a whole life order as Abedi had been 20 years old at the time of the offence. The minimum age for a whole life order is 21 years old. Abedi's 55-year minimum term is the longest minimum term ever imposed by a British court.
Ismail Abedi
In October 2021 it was reported that Salman Abedi's older brother Ismail had left the UK despite being summonsed by Sir John Saunders to testify before the public inquiry into the bombing. Saunders had refused Ismail Abedi's request for immunity from prosecution while testifying.
Ariana Grande
Ariana Grande posted on Twitter:
"Broken. from the bottom of my
heart, i am so so sorry. i don't
have words."
The tweet briefly became the most-liked tweet in history. Grande suspended her tour and flew back to her mother's home in Florida.
On the 9th. July 2017, a performance to benefit the Manchester bombing victims was held in New York City's The Cutting Room, called "Break Free: United for Manchester", with Broadway theatre and television performers interpreting Ariana Grande songs.
On the 4th. June, Ariana Grande hosted a benefit concert in Manchester, entitled "One Love Manchester" at Old Trafford Cricket Ground that was broadcast live on television, radio and social media.
At the concert, Grande performed along with several other high-profile artists. Free tickets were offered to those who had attended the show on the 22nd. May. The benefit concert and associated Red Cross fund raised £10 million for victims of the attack, and £17 million by August. New York's Vulture section ranked the event as the No. 1 concert of 2017.
The Kerslake Report
On the 27th. March 2018, a report by Bob Kerslake named the "Kerslake Report" was published. The report was an independent review into the preparedness for, and emergency response to, the Manchester Arena attack on the 22nd. May 2017.
In the report, Kerslake "largely praised" the Greater Manchester Police and British Transport Police, and noted that it was "fortuitous" that the North West Ambulance Service was unaware of the declaration of Operation Plato, a protocol under which all responders should have withdrawn from the arena in case of an active killer on the premises.
However, it found that the Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service was "brought to a point of paralysis" as their response was delayed for two hours due to poor communication between the firefighters' liaison officer and the police force.
The report was critical of Vodafone for the "catastrophic failure" of an emergency helpline hosted on a platform provided by Content Guru, saying that delays in getting information caused "significant stress and upset" to families.
It also expressed criticism of some news media, saying:
"To have experienced such intrusive and
overbearing behaviour at a time of such
enormous vulnerability seemed to us to
be completely and utterly unacceptable".
However, it was also noted that:
"We recognise that this was some, but by
no means all of the media, and that the
media also have a positive and important
role to play."
Memorial to the Bombing
The victims of the bombing are commemorated by The Glade of Light, a garden memorial located in Manchester city centre near Manchester Cathedral. The memorial opened to the public in January 2022.
The memorial was vandalised on the 9th. February 2022, causing £10,000 of damage. A 24-year-old man admitted to the offence in April and will be sentenced at a later date.
The 2018 Manchester Terror Attack
The Manchester Arena is next to Victoria Station, and in fact partly above it. Victoria Station witnessed a subsequent terror attack on the 31st. December 2018 at 20.52.
Mahdi Mohamud, a 25 year old man from Somalia stabbed three people in a knife attack at the station. He appears to have acted alone.
Mohamud shouted "Allah!" and "Long live the Caliphate!" during the attack, and "Allahu Akbar" after being arrested. A witness alleged that during the attack he also shouted a slogan criticising Western governments. BBC producer Sam Clack reported that he heard Mohamud saying:
"As long as you keep bombing other
countries this sort of s--- is going to
keep happening,"
Mohamud had lived in England for about 10 years, and resided in Manchester's Cheetham neighbourhood with his parents and siblings.
Two of the three victims, a couple in their 50's who had come into town to celebrate the New Year, were hospitalised with serious injuries. The third victim was a British Transport Police officer who received a stab wound to his shoulder.
Despite suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, Mohamud was convicted of a terror offence and the attempted murder of three people, due to his possession of significant amounts of extremist material and the attack's extensive planning. He pleaded guilty to three counts of attempted murder and a terror offence.
The perpetrator, who was initially detained under the Mental Health Act, was sentenced to life imprisonment in a high-security psychiatric hospital.
The Second Inquiry into the Arena Bombing
On the 3rd. November 2022, inquiry chair Sir John Saunders issued a second report into the atrocity. Within the 884 pages he said that the emergency services failed to communicate properly in response to the incident, stemming from 'failures to prepare.'
He concluded that "Failing" emergency services thought a terror attack "could never happen" before the Manchester Arena bombing.
Sir John Saunders said the majority of those who died were so badly injured they could not have survived. However, it is believed that two of the 22 fatalities could have recovered if they had received better medical care.
Pointing the finger at leaders of the police, fire and ambulance services, he said:
“On the night of the attack, multi‐agency
communication between the three
emergency services was non‐existent.
That failure played a major part in what
went wrong.”
He added:
“There had been failures to prepare. There
had been inadequacies in training.
Well-established principles had not been
ingrained in practice.
Why was that? Partly it was because, despite
the fact that the threat of a terrorist attack was
at a very high level on the 22nd. May 2017, no
one really thought it could happen to them.”
The report also paid tribute to the “heroic” actions of ordinary members of the public who joined police and security and medical teams trying to save lives in a “war zone”.
Sir John said that two fatalities, John Atkinson, 28, and the youngest victim, eight year old Saffie-Rose Roussos, did have a chance of survival. Sir John said:
“I have concluded that one of those who
died, John Atkinson would probably have
survived had the emergency response
been better.”
He added:
“In the case of Saffie Rose Roussos, I have
concluded that there was a remote possibility
that she could have been saved if the rescue
operation had been conducted differently.”
The inquiry heard that only three paramedics went into the City Room after the attack. Crews from Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service took more than two hours to attend the Arena.
Sir John added:
“GMP (Greater Manchester Police) did not
lead the response in accordance with the
guidance that it had been given or parts of
its own plans.
Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service
(GMFRS) failed to turn up at the scene at a
time when they could provide the greatest
assistance.
North West Ambulance Service (NWAS) failed
to send sufficient paramedics into the City
Room.
NWAS did not use available stretchers to
remove casualties in a safe way, and did not
communicate their intentions sufficiently to
those who were in the City Room.”
Despite highlighting a series of failings, he said that:
"There were some parts of the emergency
response that worked well, and that no doubt
lives were saved”.
Paying tribute to those who helped the victims, he said:
“The heroism shown by very many people
that night is striking. I have seen the terrible
footage from the CCTV and body-worn video
cameras of the scene of devastation in the City
Room.
The description of that area as being like a
“warzone” was used by a number of witnesses.
That is an accurate description. To enter the
City Room or remain there to help victims
required great courage.”
Sir John added:
“At the centre of my Inquiry is the terrible loss
of twenty two lives. Each family and each person
at the Arena has a deeply personal story to tell
about the impact of the attack on them.
My report cannot change what has happened.
My intention is to uncover what went wrong and
find ways of improving practices so that no one
has to suffer such terrible pain and loss again.”
The report also stated that responsibility for the deaths lies with suicide bomber Salman Abedi, 22, and his brother Hashem, 25, who is serving life behind bars for his part in the plot.
The inquiry found that the brothers had “planned to cause as much harm to as many people as they could" when Abedi exploded his home made device.
A procession carried out by MFI, calling for Wahhabism, Zakir Naik and Peace TV to be banned in India, in order to stop radicalisation of Indian youth.
The Last Generation – Moves of Hope
A young woman sits at the chessboard, her red hair neatly braided, her delicate face marked by thoughtfulness and a quiet, weary despair. An open book lies before her, like a silent accusation or a final attempt to understand.
She belongs to a generation between ten and twenty-five years old, born into a world already unravelling: the climate crisis, the erosion of trust in institutions, the gradual unpicking of the ties that once held communities together. Change is always difficult—it demands sacrifice, discomfort, letting go of habits. So many simply carry on, telling themselves, “It will probably be fine… the catastrophe won’t come in my lifetime.”
And yet, anger grows. Peaceful protest drifts towards radicalisation, hope gives way to exhaustion, solidarity dissolves into conflict. How far should one go to be heard? At what point does resistance begin to destroy what it aims to protect?
As the chess pieces hold their positions on the board, she wonders: Are there still moves left that do not merely mean sacrifice, but offer perspective? How can life be made bearable, even meaningful, when so much feels already lost?
From the outside, I can only glimpse fragments of their experience – moments of urgency, fatigue, determination and doubt – that have inspired these images.
She sits by the chessboard,
counting the moves that remain.
Outside, the hedges grow unchecked,
the air thick with a heat
no one calls unusual anymore.
She reads, pauses,
not expecting clarity.
Perhaps there is no strategy—
only the slow recognition
of what will not be saved.
Three Haikus
Silent afternoon
pages turn without promise
pieces wait, unmoved
Warm air, brittle light
nothing demands her reply
only small questions
In the quiet room
a book, a cracked white teacup
no easy ending
Wanchalearm Satsaksit: The Thai satirist abducted in broad daylight
By George Wright & Issariya Praithongyaem
BBC News
2 July 2020
Wanchalearm Satsaksit was abducted on 4 June
Sitanan Satsaksit was on the phone to her brother early in the evening on 4 June when he told her to hold the line.
Wanchalearm, also known as Tar, was handing over a few dollars for meatballs at a stall opposite his home in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh.
Then Sitanan heard noise coming from the other end of the line.
"I heard a loud bang. At first I thought he had a car accident as he shouted 'I can't breathe, I can't breathe,'" she tells the BBC.
Sitanan could hear the screams of her brother as men shouted in Khmer, a language she doesn't understand.
But her brother had not been hit by a car - he was being kidnapped.
Witnesses at the scene say they saw a group of armed men bundling Wanchalearm into a black SUV. As he shouted for help in Khmer, some people started moving towards him, but the armed abductors warned them to back off, before speeding away.
Confused and terrified, Sitanan could hear the muffled voice of her brother for another 30 minutes. Then the line went dead.
A friend of Wanchalearm made some inquiries for her.
"Twenty minutes later, this person called me back to say: 'Keep calm sister, Tar was abducted,'" she recalls.
Wanchalearm Satsaksit, 37, a prominent Thai pro-democracy activist who had lived in exile in Cambodia since 2014, has not been seen since. He is the ninth exiled critic of Thailand's military and monarchy to become a victim of enforced disappearance in recent years.
The activist was a critic of Prayuth Chan-ocha, who led the 2014 coup
A popular and colourful character, Wanchalearm's activism started more than a decade ago, primarily focusing on gender and LGBT rights in Thailand. Over time, his interest started to shift to broader calls for democracy in the country, says Sunai Phasuk, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch Asia and friend of Wanchalearm.
By the time of the 2014 military coup led by General Prayuth Chan-ocha, Wanchalearm was affiliated with the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD), also known as the Red Shirts. The group was first formed in 2006 to oppose an earlier military coup which overthrew then prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra.
Wanchalearm was angered by what he saw as yet another affront to democracy by the military in 2014. The new junta wasted little time in rooting out its critics.
Soon after the coup, Wanchalearm's face appeared on TV and he was called to attend a meeting at a military camp, Sunai says. He didn't turn up. Wanchalearm knew this meant he needed to flee his homeland and start a new life in Cambodia.
Once in Phnom Penh, Wanchalearm settled into his new surroundings. But while he had swapped the dangers of Thailand for relative safety in the leafy outskirts of the Cambodian capital, he was still building up an online following in his homeland through his witty takedowns of the Thai government.
Wanchalearm's disappearance has angered many in Thailand
"He sees himself as a satirist, almost like a political comedian," Sunai says. "He made fun continuously of the military junta.
He made fun of Gen Prayuth, who at that time was leader of the coup group, he made fun of other generals.
"He exposed what he considered to be stupid blunders of the junta using the dialect of north-easterners," he adds. "Most of them are poor and he is from that region. He did it to show that a commoner can make fun of those in power. That seemed to be the way of getting even with the oppressors."
But his playful poking did not go unnoticed.
In June 2018, Thai authorities issued an arrest warrant for Wanchalearm based on allegations he violated the Computer-Related Crime Act - which criminalises writing that incites unrest - through his Facebook page. The police vowed to bring him back to Thailand.
Thailand's disappeared Karen activist and the burned village
Wanchalearm was just one of many Thai exiles speaking out from the perceived safety of a neighbouring country. But in reality, doing so is becoming increasingly perilous.
At least eight other pro-democracy activists have disappeared since the 2014 coup.
The bodies of exiled critics Chatcharn Buppawan and Kraidej Luelert were found disembowelled and stuffed with concrete along the Mekong River border with Laos last year. The Thai army says it had no knowledge of what had happened.
Jakrapob Penkair has been in exile since 2009
Jakrapob Penkair, who served as government spokesman under Thaksin Shinawatra, has been living in exile since 2009 after he says he received a tip-off that he was to be killed. He has known Wanchalearm for many years.
Speaking to the BBC from an undisclosed location, Jakrapob says he was shocked by his friend's disappearance due to the light-hearted nature of his activism. He sees almost no chance that Wanchalearm is still alive.
"I think the message is: 'Let's kill these folks. These are outsiders, these are people who are different from us and they should be killed in order to bring Thailand back to normalcy,'" he says.
"But nothing could be more wrong in that interpretation. I believe their decision to kidnap and murder Tar, and others before him, has been subconsciously radicalising the people.
"Like it or not, I think Tar's disappearance and his murder could be a turning point."
Protesters have accused the Thai government of involvement
Wanchalearm's disappearance sparked protests in Bangkok, with demonstrators accusing the Thai government of involvement, while demanding the Cambodian government investigate the case fully. Posters of Wanchalearm and other disappeared activists have been cropping up around the city.
#SaveWanchalearm was trending on Thai Twitter in the days following his abduction.
The hashtag "#abolish112" was also written or retweeted more than 450,000 times. This is a reference to Article 112 of Thailand's criminal code, which states: "Whoever defames, insults or threatens the King, Queen, Heir-Apparent or Regent shall be punished with imprisonment of three to 15 years".
Some of the disappeared dissidents were accused of violating the article. Any public questioning of the monarchy in Thailand was until recently almost unheard of.
Many activists believe this abduction is linked to the palace, but the strict laws against any negative comment on the monarchy make this a dangerous link to explore or investigate.
Despite widespread outrage over the kidnapping of Wanchalearm, few are holding out much hope for his return.
"The abduction is not for money, it's not a private matter. There is no need to keep him alive," says Somyot Pruksakasemsuk, a prominent activist who served seven years in jail on charges of lese majeste - or "insulting the monarchy" - and defamation.
"The objective of kidnapping is to kill him and to create the atmosphere of fear in Thailand and other countries where [Thai] people are active in criticising the monarchy," adds Somyot, whose daughter was once in a long-term relationship with Wanchalearm.
Somyot was in little doubt as to who was behind the disappearance.
"The government knows very well about this kidnap and disappearance. I can insist that the government are the ones behind this violation," he says.
Thai government spokeswoman Narumon Pinyosinwat told the BBC: "We have no idea what happened to him.
"We don't do anything in that category of invading into other countries. They have their own law and control," she said.
"The person who can answer that question best should be the government of Cambodia because they know what happened in that country to this person."
In response to questions raised by opposition politicians in parliament, Thai Foreign Minister Don Pramudwinai said that Wanchalearm did not have political refugee status, so Thailand had to wait for Cambodia to finish its investigation.
The spokesman of the Cambodian interior ministry did not respond to requests for comment. A justice ministry spokesman told Voice of Democracy last week that investigations are under way to ascertain "whether the news is true or not".
Brad Adams, Asia director of Human Rights Watch, said: "Cambodia and Laos have obviously decided to look the other way as now nine prominent Thai exiles have been abducted, and likely killed, by unknown men."
The Thai government is pursuing a "quid pro quo" with its two neighbours, he said, accusing Bangkok of making Thailand "off limits" to Cambodian opposition figures.
"You can be sure there will be more refugees on the chopping block unless governments around the world start publicly demanding answers and accountability from leaders of these three rights abusing governments," he said.
Few are holding out hope Wanchalearm will be found alive
Sunai Phasuk says Cambodia must investigate fully what has happened to Wanchalearm if it expects to be seen as a country that has "improved from a lawless society into a country with due process".
"A crime like this cannot happen in broad daylight. This is a test case for Cambodia," he says.
But Sitanan has little hope of ever seeing Wanchalearm alive again and is just trying to make sense of why someone would want to kill her younger brother.
"I want to know if someone has his own opinion, does he need to be so severely punished?" she asks.
"He didn't rob anyone, he didn't rape anyone. He just thinks differently. Do you really need to kill him?"
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (22 April [O.S. 10 April] 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 until his death in 1924, and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia, and later the Soviet Union, became a one-party socialist state governed by the Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, his developments to the ideology are called Leninism.
Born to a schoolteacher's family in Simbirsk, Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics following his brother's 1887 execution. Expelled from Kazan Imperial University for participating in protests against the Tsarist government, he devoted the following years to a law degree. He relocated to Saint Petersburg in 1893 where he became a senior Marxist activist. In 1897, he was arrested for sedition and exiled to Shushenskoye in Siberia for three years, where he married Nadezhda Krupskaya. After his exile, he moved to Western Europe, where he became a prominent theorist in the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). In 1903, he took a key role in the RSDLP ideological split, leading the Bolshevik faction against Julius Martov's Mensheviks. Following Russia's failed Revolution of 1905, he initially campaigned for the First World War to be transformed into a Europe-wide proletarian revolution, which, as a Marxist, he believed would cause the overthrow of capitalism and the rise of socialism. After the 1917 February Revolution ousted the Tsar and established a Provisional Government, he returned to Russia and played a leading role in the October Revolution, in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the new government.
Lenin's Bolshevik government initially shared power with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, elected soviets, and a multi-party Constituent Assembly, although by 1918 it had centralised power in the new Communist Party. Lenin's administration redistributed land among the peasantry and nationalised banks and large-scale industry. It withdrew from the First World War by signing a treaty conceding territory to the Central Powers, and promoted world revolution through the Communist International. Opponents were suppressed in the Red Terror, a violent campaign administered by the state security services; tens of thousands were killed or interned in concentration camps. His administration defeated right and left-wing anti-Bolshevik armies in the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1922 and oversaw the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–1921. Responding to wartime devastation, famine, and popular uprisings, in 1921 Lenin encouraged economic growth through the New Economic Policy. Several non-Russian nations had secured independence from Russia after 1917, but five were forcibly re-united into the new Soviet Union in 1922, while others repelled Soviet invasions. His health failing, Lenin died in Gorki, with Joseph Stalin succeeding him as the pre-eminent figure in the Soviet government.
Widely considered one of the most significant and influential figures of the 20th century, Lenin was the posthumous subject of a pervasive personality cult within the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991. He became an ideological figurehead behind Marxism–Leninism and a prominent influence over the international communist movement. A controversial and highly divisive historical figure, Lenin is viewed by his supporters as a champion of socialism, communism, anti-imperialism and the working class, while his critics accuse him of establishing a totalitarian dictatorship that oversaw mass killings and political repression of dissidents.
University and political radicalisation: 1887–1893
Upon entering Kazan University in August 1887, Lenin moved into a nearby flat. There, he joined a zemlyachestvo, a form of university society that represented the men of a particular region. This group elected him as its representative to the university's zemlyachestvo council, and he took part in a December demonstration against government restrictions that banned student societies. The police arrested Lenin and accused him of being a ringleader in the demonstration; he was expelled from the university, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs exiled him to his family's Kokushkino estate. There, he read voraciously, becoming enamoured with Nikolay Chernyshevsky's 1863 pro-revolutionary novel What Is to Be Done?
Lenin's mother was concerned by her son's radicalisation, and was instrumental in convincing the Interior Ministry to allow him to return to the city of Kazan, but not the university. On his return, he joined Nikolai Fedoseev's revolutionary circle, through which he discovered Karl Marx's 1867 book Capital. This sparked his interest in Marxism, a socio-political theory that argued that society developed in stages, that this development resulted from class struggle, and that capitalist society would ultimately give way to socialist society and then communist society. Wary of his political views, Lenin's mother bought a country estate in Alakaevka village, Samara Oblast, in the hope that her son would turn his attention to agriculture. He had little interest in farm management, and his mother soon sold the land, keeping the house as a summer home.
In September 1889, the Ulyanov family moved to the city of Samara, where Lenin joined Alexei Sklyarenko's socialist discussion circle. There, Lenin fully embraced Marxism and produced a Russian language translation of Marx and Friedrich Engels's 1848 political pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto. He began to read the works of the Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov, agreeing with Plekhanov's argument that Russia was moving from feudalism to capitalism and so socialism would be implemented by the proletariat, or urban working class, rather than the peasantry. This Marxist perspective contrasted with the view of the agrarian-socialist Narodnik movement, which held that the peasantry could establish socialism in Russia by forming peasant communes, thereby bypassing capitalism. This Narodnik view developed in the 1860s with the People's Freedom Party and was then dominant within the Russian revolutionary movement. Lenin rejected the premise of the agrarian-socialist argument but was influenced by agrarian-socialists like Pyotr Tkachev and Sergei Nechaev and befriended several Narodniks.
In May 1890, Maria, who retained societal influence as the widow of a nobleman, persuaded the authorities to allow Lenin to take his exams externally at the University of St Petersburg, where he obtained the equivalent of a first-class degree with honours. The graduation celebrations were marred when his sister Olga died of typhoid. Lenin remained in Samara for several years, working first as a legal assistant for a regional court and then for a local lawyer. He devoted much time to radical politics, remaining active in Sklyarenko's group and formulating ideas about how Marxism applied to Russia. Inspired by Plekhanov's work, Lenin collected data on Russian society, using it to support a Marxist interpretation of societal development and counter the claims of the Narodniks. He wrote a paper on peasant economics; it was rejected by the liberal journal Russian Thought.
Revolutionary activity
Early activism and imprisonment: 1893–1900
In late 1893, Lenin moved to Saint Petersburg. There, he worked as a barrister's assistant and rose to a senior position in a Marxist revolutionary cell that called itself the Social-Democrats after the Marxist Social Democratic Party of Germany. Championing Marxism within the socialist movement, he encouraged the founding of revolutionary cells in Russia's industrial centres. By late 1894, he was leading a Marxist workers' circle, and meticulously covered his tracks to evade police spies. He began a romantic relationship with Nadezhda "Nadya" Krupskaya, a Marxist schoolteacher. He also authored a political tract criticising the Narodnik agrarian-socialists, What the "Friends of the People" Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats; around 200 copies were illegally printed in 1894.
Hoping to cement connections between his Social-Democrats and Emancipation of Labour, a group of Russian Marxists based in Switzerland, Lenin visited the country to meet group members Plekhanov and Pavel Axelrod. He proceeded to Paris to meet Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue and to research the Paris Commune of 1871, which he considered an early prototype for a proletarian government. Financed by his mother, he stayed in a Swiss health spa before travelling to Berlin, where he studied for six weeks at the Staatsbibliothek and met the Marxist Wilhelm Liebknecht. Returning to Russia with a stash of illegal revolutionary publications, he travelled to various cities distributing literature to striking workers. While involved in producing a news sheet, Rabochee delo (Workers' Cause), he was among 40 activists arrested in St. Petersburg and charged with sedition.
Refused legal representation or bail, Lenin denied all charges against him but remained imprisoned for a year before sentencing. He spent this time theorising and writing. In this work he noted that the rise of industrial capitalism in Russia had caused large numbers of peasants to move to the cities, where they formed a proletariat. From his Marxist perspective, Lenin argued that this Russian proletariat would develop class consciousness, which would in turn lead them to violently overthrow tsarism, the aristocracy, and the bourgeoisie and to establish a proletariat state that would move toward socialism.
In February 1897, Lenin was sentenced without trial to three years' exile in eastern Siberia. He was granted a few days in Saint Petersburg to put his affairs in order and used this time to meet with the Social-Democrats, who had renamed themselves the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. His journey to eastern Siberia took 11 weeks, for much of which he was accompanied by his mother and sisters. Deemed only a minor threat to the government, he was exiled to Shushenskoye, Minusinsky District, where he was kept under police surveillance; he was nevertheless able to correspond with other revolutionaries, many of whom visited him, and permitted to go on trips to swim in the Yenisei River and to hunt duck and snipe.
In May 1898, Nadya joined him in exile, having been arrested in August 1896 for organising a strike. She was initially posted to Ufa, but persuaded the authorities to move her to Shushenskoye, where she and Lenin married on 10 July 1898. Settling into a family life with Nadya's mother Elizaveta Vasilyevna, in Shushenskoye the couple translated English socialist literature into Russian. There, Lenin wrote A Protest by Russian Social-Democrats to criticise German Marxist revisionists like Eduard Bernstein who advocated a peaceful, electoral path to socialism. He also finished The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), his longest book to date, which criticised the agrarian-socialists and promoted a Marxist analysis of Russian economic development. Published under the pseudonym of Vladimir Ilin, upon publication it received predominantly poor reviews.
Munich, London, and Geneva: 1900–1905
After his exile, Lenin settled in Pskov in early 1900. There, he began raising funds for a newspaper, Iskra (Spark), a new organ of the Russian Marxist party, now calling itself the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). In July 1900, Lenin left Russia for Western Europe; in Switzerland he met other Russian Marxists, and at a Corsier conference they agreed to launch the paper from Munich, where Lenin relocated in September. Containing contributions from prominent European Marxists, Iskra was smuggled into Russia, becoming the country's most successful underground publication for 50 years. He first adopted the pseudonym Lenin in December 1901, possibly based on the Siberian River Lena; he often used the fuller pseudonym of N. Lenin, and while the N did not stand for anything, a popular misconception later arose that it represented Nikolai. Under this pseudonym, in 1902 he published his most influential publication to date, the pamphlet What Is to Be Done?, which outlined his thoughts on the need for a vanguard party to lead the proletariat to revolution.
Nadya joined Lenin in Munich and became his secretary. They continued their political agitation, as Lenin wrote for Iskra and drafted the RSDLP programme, attacking ideological dissenters and external critics, particularly the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR),[ a Narodnik agrarian-socialist group founded in 1901. Despite remaining a Marxist, he accepted the Narodnik view on the revolutionary power of the Russian peasantry, accordingly, penning the 1903 pamphlet To the Village Poor. To evade Bavarian police, Lenin moved to London with Iskra in April 1902, where he befriended fellow Russian-Ukrainian Marxist Leon Trotsky. Lenin fell ill with erysipelas and was unable to take such a leading role on the Iskra editorial board; in his absence, the board moved its base of operations to Geneva.
The second RSDLP Congress was held in London in July 1903. At the conference, a schism emerged between Lenin's supporters and those of Julius Martov. Martov argued that party members should be able to express themselves independently of the party leadership; Lenin disagreed, emphasising the need for a strong leadership with complete control over the party. Lenin's supporters were in the majority, and he termed them the "majoritarians" (bol'sheviki in Russian; Bolsheviks); in response, Martov termed his followers the "minoritarians" (men'sheviki in Russian; Mensheviks). Arguments between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks continued after the conference; the Bolsheviks accused their rivals of being opportunists and reformists who lacked discipline, while the Mensheviks accused Lenin of being a despot and autocrat. Enraged at the Mensheviks, Lenin resigned from the Iskra editorial board and in May 1904 published the anti-Menshevik tract One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. The stress made Lenin ill, and to recuperate he holidayed in Switzerland. The Bolshevik faction grew in strength; by spring 1905, the whole RSDLP Central Committee was Bolshevik, and in December they founded the newspaper Vperyod (Forward).
Revolution of 1905 and its aftermath: 1905–1914
In January 1905, the Bloody Sunday massacre of protesters in St. Petersburg sparked a spate of civil unrest in the Russian Empire known as the Revolution of 1905. Lenin urged Bolsheviks to take a greater role in the events, encouraging violent insurrection. In doing so, he adopted SR slogans regarding "armed insurrection", "mass terror", and "the expropriation of gentry land", resulting in Menshevik accusations that he had deviated from orthodox Marxism. In turn, he insisted that the Bolsheviks split completely with the Mensheviks; many Bolsheviks refused, and both groups attended the Third RSDLP Congress, held in London in April 1905. Lenin presented many of his ideas in the pamphlet Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, published in August 1905. Here, he predicted that Russia's liberal bourgeoisie would be sated by a transition to constitutional monarchy and thus betray the revolution; instead, he argued that the proletariat would have to build an alliance with the peasantry to overthrow the Tsarist regime and establish the "provisional revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry."
The uprising has begun. Force against Force. Street fighting is raging, barricades are being thrown up, rifles are cracking, guns are booming. Rivers of blood are flowing, the civil war for freedom is blazing up. Moscow and the South, the Caucasus and Poland are ready to join the proletariat of St. Petersburg. The slogan of the workers has become: Death or Freedom!
In response to the revolution of 1905, which had failed to overthrow the government, Tsar Nicholas II accepted a series of liberal reforms in his October Manifesto. In this climate, Lenin felt it safe to return to St. Petersburg. Joining the editorial board of Novaya Zhizn (New Life), a radical legal newspaper run by Maria Andreyeva, he used it to discuss issues facing the RSDLP. He encouraged the party to seek out a much wider membership, and advocated the continual escalation of violent confrontation, believing both to be necessary for a successful revolution. Recognising that membership fees and donations from a few wealthy sympathisers were insufficient to finance the Bolsheviks' activities, Lenin endorsed the idea of robbing post offices, railway stations, trains, and banks. Under the lead of Leonid Krasin, a group of Bolsheviks began carrying out such criminal actions, the best-known taking place in June 1907, when a group of Bolsheviks acting under the leadership of Joseph Stalin committed an armed robbery of the State Bank in Tiflis, Georgia.
Although he briefly supported the idea of reconciliation between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Lenin's advocacy of violence and robbery was condemned by the Mensheviks at the Fourth RSDLP Congress, held in Stockholm in April 1906. Lenin was involved in setting up a Bolshevik Centre in Kuokkala, Grand Duchy of Finland, which was at the time an autonomous state within the Russian Empire, before the Bolsheviks regained dominance of the RSDLP at its Fifth Congress, held in London in May 1907. As the Tsarist government cracked down on opposition, both by disbanding Russia's legislative assembly, the Second Duma, and by ordering its secret police, the Okhrana, to arrest revolutionaries, Lenin fled Finland for Switzerland. There, he tried to exchange those banknotes stolen in Tiflis that had identifiable serial numbers on them.
Alexander Bogdanov and other prominent Bolsheviks decided to relocate the Bolshevik Centre to Paris; although Lenin disagreed, he moved to the city in December 1908. Lenin disliked Paris, lambasting it as "a foul hole", and while there he sued a motorist who knocked him off his bike. Lenin became very critical of Bogdanov's view that Russia's proletariat had to develop a socialist culture in order to become a successful revolutionary vehicle. Instead, Lenin favoured a vanguard of socialist intelligentsia who would lead the working-classes in revolution. Furthermore, Bogdanov, influenced by Ernest Mach, believed that all concepts of the world were relative, whereas Lenin stuck to the orthodox Marxist view that there was an objective reality independent of human observation. Bogdanov and Lenin holidayed together at Maxim Gorky's villa in Capri in April 1908 on returning to Paris, Lenin encouraged a split within the Bolshevik faction between his and Bogdanov's followers, accusing the latter of deviating from Marxism.
In May 1908, Lenin lived briefly in London, where he used the British Museum Reading Room to write Materialism and Empirio-criticism, an attack on what he described as the "bourgeois-reactionary falsehood" of Bogdanov's relativism. Lenin's factionalism began to alienate increasing numbers of Bolsheviks, including his former close supporters Alexei Rykov and Lev Kamenev. The Okhrana exploited his factionalist attitude by sending a spy, Roman Malinovsky, to act as a vocal Lenin supporter within the party. Various Bolsheviks expressed their suspicions about Malinovsky to Lenin, although it is unclear if the latter was aware of the spy's duplicity; it is possible that he used Malinovsky to feed false information to the Okhrana.
In August 1910, Lenin attended the Eighth Congress of the Second International, an international meeting of socialists, in Copenhagen as the RSDLP's representative, following this with a holiday in Stockholm with his mother. With his wife and sisters, he then moved to France, settling first in Bombon and then Paris. Here, he became a close friend to the French Bolshevik Inessa Armand; some biographers suggest that they had an extra-marital affair from 1910 to 1912. Meanwhile, at a Paris meeting in June 1911, the RSDLP Central Committee decided to move their focus of operations back to Russia, ordering the closure of the Bolshevik Centre and its newspaper, Proletari. Seeking to rebuild his influence in the party, Lenin arranged for a party conference to be held in Prague in January 1912, and although 16 of the 18 attendants were Bolsheviks, he was heavily criticised for his factionalist tendencies and failed to boost his status within the party.
Moving to Kraków in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, a culturally Polish part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he used Jagiellonian University's library to conduct research. He stayed in close contact with the RSDLP, which was operating in the Russian Empire, convincing the Duma's Bolshevik members to split from their parliamentary alliance with the Mensheviks. In January 1913, Stalin, whom Lenin referred to as the "wonderful Georgian", visited him, and they discussed the future of non-Russian ethnic groups in the Empire. Due to the ailing health of both Lenin and his wife, they moved to the rural town of Biały Dunajec, before heading to Bern for Nadya to have surgery on her goitre.
First World War: 1914–1917
The [First World] war is being waged for the division of colonies and the robbery of foreign territory; thieves have fallen out–and to refer to the defeats at a given moment of one of the thieves in order to identify the interests of all thieves with the interests of the nation or the fatherland is an unconscionable bourgeois lie.
Lenin was in Galicia when the First World War broke out. The war pitted the Russian Empire against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and due to his Russian citizenship, Lenin was arrested and briefly imprisoned until his anti-Tsarist credentials were explained. Lenin and his wife returned to Bern, before relocating to Zürich in February 1916. Lenin was angry that the German Social-Democratic Party was supporting the German war effort, which was a direct contravention of the Second International's Stuttgart resolution that socialist parties would oppose the conflict and saw the Second International as defunct. He attended the Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915 and the Kienthal Conference in April 1916, urging socialists across the continent to convert the "imperialist war" into a continent-wide "civil war" with the proletariat pitted against the bourgeoisie and aristocracy. In July 1916, Lenin's mother died, but he was unable to attend her funeral. Her death deeply affected him, and he became depressed, fearing that he too would die before seeing the proletarian revolution.
In September 1917, Lenin published Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which argued that imperialism was a product of monopoly capitalism, as capitalists sought to increase their profits by extending into new territories where wages were lower and raw materials cheaper. He believed that competition and conflict would increase and that war between the imperialist powers would continue until they were overthrown by proletariat revolution and socialism established. He spent much of this time reading the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Aristotle, all of whom had been key influences on Marx. This changed Lenin's interpretation of Marxism; whereas he once believed that policies could be developed based on predetermined scientific principles, he concluded that the only test of whether a policy was correct was its practice. He still perceived himself as an orthodox Marxist, but he began to diverge from some of Marx's predictions about societal development; whereas Marx had believed that a "bourgeoisie-democratic revolution" of the middle-classes had to take place before a "socialist revolution" of the proletariat, Lenin believed that in Russia the proletariat could overthrow the Tsarist regime without an intermediate revolution.
February Revolution and the July Days: 1917
In February 1917, the February Revolution broke out in St. Petersburg, renamed Petrograd at the beginning of the First World War, as industrial workers went on strike over food shortages and deteriorating factory conditions. The unrest spread to other parts of Russia, and fearing that he would be violently overthrown, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated. The State Duma took over control of the country, establishing the Russian Provisional Government and converting the Empire into a new Russian Republic. When Lenin learned of this from his base in Switzerland, he celebrated with other dissidents. He decided to return to Russia to take charge of the Bolsheviks but found that most passages into the country were blocked due to the ongoing conflict. He organised a plan with other dissidents to negotiate a passage for them through Germany, with which Russia was then at war. Recognising that these dissidents could cause problems for their Russian enemies, the German government agreed to permit 32 Russian citizens to travel by train through their territory, among them Lenin and his wife. For political reasons, Lenin and the Germans agreed to a cover story that Lenin had travelled by sealed train carriage through German territory, but in fact the train was not truly sealed, and the passengers were allowed to disembark to, for example, spend the night in Frankfurt. The group travelled by train from Zürich to Sassnitz, proceeding by ferry to Trelleborg, Sweden, and from there to the Haparanda–Tornio border crossing and then to Helsinki before taking the final train to Petrograd in disguise.
Arriving at Petrograd's Finland Station in April, Lenin gave a speech to Bolshevik supporters condemning the Provisional Government and again calling for a continent-wide European proletarian revolution. Over the following days, he spoke at Bolshevik meetings, lambasting those who wanted reconciliation with the Mensheviks and revealing his "April Theses", an outline of his plans for the Bolsheviks, which he had written on the journey from Switzerland. He publicly condemned both the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries, who dominated the influential Petrograd Soviet, for supporting the Provisional Government, denouncing them as traitors to socialism. Considering the government to be just as imperialist as the Tsarist regime, he advocated immediate peace with Germany and Austria-Hungary, rule by soviets, the nationalisation of industry and banks, and the state expropriation of land, all with the intention of establishing a proletariat government and pushing toward a socialist society. By contrast, the Mensheviks believed that Russia was insufficiently developed to transition to socialism and accused Lenin of trying to plunge the new Republic into civil war. Over the coming months Lenin campaigned for his policies, attending the meetings of the Bolshevik Central Committee, prolifically writing for the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, and giving public speeches in Petrograd aimed at converting workers, soldiers, sailors, and peasants to his cause.
Sensing growing frustration among Bolshevik supporters, Lenin suggested an armed political demonstration in Petrograd to test the government's response. Amid deteriorating health, he left the city to recuperate in the Finnish village of Neivola. The Bolsheviks' armed demonstration, the July Days, took place while Lenin was away, but upon learning that demonstrators had violently clashed with government forces, he returned to Petrograd and called for calm. Responding to the violence, the government ordered the arrest of Lenin and other prominent Bolsheviks, raiding their offices, and publicly alleging that he was a German agent provocateur. Evading arrest, Lenin hid in a series of Petrograd safe houses. Fearing that he would be killed, Lenin and fellow senior Bolshevik Grigory Zinoviev escaped Petrograd in disguise, relocating to Razliv. There, Lenin began work on the book that became The State and Revolution, an exposition on how he believed the socialist state would develop after the proletariat revolution, and how from then on the state would gradually wither away, leaving a pure communist society. He began arguing for a Bolshevik-led armed insurrection to topple the government, but at a clandestine meeting of the party's central committee this idea was rejected. Lenin then headed by train and by foot to Finland, arriving at Helsinki on 10 August, where he hid away in safe houses belonging to Bolshevik sympathisers.
October Revolution: 1917
In August 1917, while Lenin was in Finland, General Lavr Kornilov, the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army, sent troops to Petrograd in what appeared to be a military coup attempt against the Provisional Government. Premier Alexander Kerensky turned to the Petrograd Soviet, including its Bolshevik members, for help, allowing the revolutionaries to organise workers as Red Guards to defend the city. The coup petered out before it reached Petrograd, but the events had allowed the Bolsheviks to return to the open political arena. Fearing a counter-revolution from right-wing forces hostile to socialism, the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries who dominated the Petrograd Soviet had been instrumental in pressuring the government to normalise relations with the Bolsheviks. Both the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries had lost much popular support because of their affiliation with the Provisional Government and its unpopular continuation of the war. The Bolsheviks capitalised on this, and soon the pro-Bolshevik Marxist Trotsky was elected leader of the Petrograd Soviet. In September, the Bolsheviks gained a majority in the workers' sections of both the Moscow and Petrograd Soviets.
Recognising that the situation was safer for him, Lenin returned to Petrograd. There he attended a meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee on 10 October, where he again argued that the party should lead an armed insurrection to topple the Provisional Government. This time the argument won with ten votes against two. Critics of the plan, Zinoviev and Kamenev, argued that Russian workers would not support a violent coup against the regime and that there was no clear evidence for Lenin's assertion that all of Europe was on the verge of proletarian revolution. The party began plans to organise the offensive, holding a final meeting at the Smolny Institute on 24 October. This was the base of the Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC), an armed militia largely loyal to the Bolsheviks that had been established by the Petrograd Soviet during Kornilov's alleged coup.
In October, the MRC was ordered to take control of Petrograd's key transport, communication, printing and utilities hubs, and did so without bloodshed. Bolsheviks besieged the government in the Winter Palace and overcame it and arrested its ministers after the cruiser Aurora, controlled by Bolshevik seamen, fired a blank shot to signal the start of the revolution. During the insurrection, Lenin gave a speech to the Petrograd Soviet announcing that the Provisional Government had been overthrown. The Bolsheviks declared the formation of a new government, the Council of People's Commissars, or Sovnarkom. Lenin initially turned down the leading position of Chairman, suggesting Trotsky for the job, but other Bolsheviks insisted and ultimately Lenin relented. Lenin and other Bolsheviks then attended the Second Congress of Soviets on 26 and 27 October and announced the creation of the new government. Menshevik attendees condemned the illegitimate seizure of power and the risk of civil war. In these early days of the new regime, Lenin avoided talking in Marxist and socialist terms so as not to alienate Russia's population, and instead spoke about having a country controlled by the workers. Lenin and many other Bolsheviks expected proletariat revolution to sweep across Europe in days or months.
Lenin's government
Organising the Soviet government: 1917–1918
The Provisional Government had planned for a Constituent Assembly to be elected in November 1917; against Lenin's objections, Sovnarkom agreed for the vote to take place as scheduled. In the constitutional election, the Bolsheviks gained approximately a quarter of the vote, being defeated by the agrarian-focused Socialist-Revolutionaries. Lenin argued that the election was not a fair reflection of the people's will, that the electorate had not had time to learn the Bolsheviks' political programme, and that the candidacy lists had been drawn up before the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries split from the Socialist-Revolutionaries. Nevertheless, the newly elected Russian Constituent Assembly convened in Petrograd in January 1918. Sovnarkom argued that it was counter-revolutionary because it sought to remove power from the soviets, but the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks denied this. The Bolsheviks presented the Assembly with a motion that would strip it of most of its legal powers; when the Assembly rejected the motion, Sovnarkom declared this as evidence of its counter-revolutionary nature and forcibly disbanded it.
Lenin rejected repeated calls, including from some Bolsheviks, to establish a coalition government with other socialist parties. Although refusing a coalition with the Mensheviks or Socialist-Revolutionaries, Sovnarkom partially relented; they allowed the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries five posts in the cabinet in December 1917. This coalition only lasted four months until March 1918, when the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries pulled out of the government over a disagreement about the Bolsheviks' approach to ending the First World War. At their 7th Congress in March 1918, the Bolsheviks changed their official name from the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party to the Russian Communist Party, as Lenin wanted to both distance his group from the increasingly reformist German Social Democratic Party and to emphasise its ultimate goal, that of a communist society.
Although ultimate power officially rested with the country's government in the form of Sovnarkom and the Executive Committee (VTSIK) elected by the All-Russian Congress of Soviets (ARCS), the Communist Party was de facto in control in Russia, as acknowledged by its members at the time. By 1918, Sovnarkom began acting unilaterally, claiming a need for expediency, with the ARCS and VTSIK becoming increasingly marginalised, so the soviets no longer had a role in governing Russia. During 1918 and 1919, the government expelled Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries from the soviets. Russia had become a one-party state.
Within the party was established a Political Bureau (Politburo) and Organisation Bureau (Orgburo) to accompany the existing Central Committee; the decisions of these party bodies had to be adopted by Sovnarkom and the Council of Labour and Defence. Lenin was the most significant figure in this governance structure as well as being the Chairman of Sovnarkom and sitting on the Council of Labour and Defence, and on the Central Committee and Politburo of the Communist Party. The only individual to have anywhere near this influence was Lenin's right-hand man, Yakov Sverdlov, who died in March 1919 during a flu pandemic. In November 1917, Lenin and his wife took a two-room flat within the Smolny Institute; the following month they left for a brief holiday in Halila, Finland. In January 1918, he survived an assassination attempt in Petrograd; Fritz Platten, who was with Lenin at the time, shielded him and was injured by a bullet.
Concerned that the German Army posed a threat to Petrograd, in March 1918 Sovnarkom relocated to Moscow, initially as a temporary measure. There, Lenin, Trotsky, and other Bolshevik leaders moved into the Kremlin, where Lenin lived with his wife and sister Maria in a first-floor apartment adjacent to the room in which the Sovnarkom meetings were held. Lenin disliked Moscow, but rarely left the city centre during the rest of his life. He survived a second assassination attempt, in Moscow in August 1918; he was shot following a public speech and injured badly. A Socialist-Revolutionary, Fanny Kaplan, was arrested and executed. The attack was widely covered in the Russian press, generating much sympathy for Lenin and boosting his popularity. As a respite, he was driven in September 1918 to the luxurious Gorki estate, just outside Moscow, recently nationalized for him by the government.
Social, legal, and economic reform: 1917–1918
To All Workers, Soldiers and Peasants. The Soviet authority will at once propose a democratic peace to all nations and an immediate armistice on all fronts. It will safeguard the transfer without compensation of all land—landlord, imperial, and monastery—to the peasants' committees; it will defend the soldiers' rights, introducing a complete democratisation of the army; it will establish workers' control over industry; it will ensure the convocation of the Constituent Assembly on the date set; it will supply the cities with bread and the villages with articles of first necessity; and it will secure to all nationalities inhabiting Russia the right of self-determination ... Long live the revolution!
Upon taking power, Lenin's regime issued a series of decrees. The first was a Decree on Land, which declared that the landed estates of the aristocracy and the Orthodox Church should be nationalised and redistributed to peasants by local governments. This contrasted with Lenin's desire for agricultural collectivisation but provided governmental recognition of the widespread peasant land seizures that had already occurred. In November 1917, the government issued the Decree on the Press that closed many opposition media outlets deemed counter revolutionary. They claimed the measure would be temporary; the decree was widely criticised, including by many Bolsheviks, for compromising freedom of the press.
In November 1917, Lenin issued the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia, which stated that non-Russian ethnic groups living inside the Republic had the right to secede from Russian authority and establish their own independent nation-states. Many nations declared independence (Finland and Lithuania in December 1917, Latvia and Ukraine in January 1918, Estonia in February 1918, Transcaucasia in April 1918, and Poland in November 1918). Soon, the Bolsheviks actively promoted communist parties in these independent nation-states, while at the Fifth All-Russian Congress of the Soviets in July 1918 a constitution was approved that reformed the Russian Republic into the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Seeking to modernise the country, the government officially converted Russia from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar used in Europe.
In November 1917, Sovnarkom issued a decree abolishing Russia's legal system, calling on the use of "revolutionary conscience" to replace the abolished laws. The courts were replaced by a two-tier system, namely the Revolutionary Tribunals to deal with counter-revolutionary crimes, and the People's Courts to deal with civil and other criminal offences. They were instructed to ignore pre-existing laws and base their rulings on the Sovnarkom decrees and a "socialist sense of justice." November also saw an overhaul of the armed forces; Sovnarkom implemented egalitarian measures, abolished previous ranks, titles, and medals, and called on soldiers to establish committees to elect their commanders.
Earth of Filth".
In October 1917, Lenin issued a decree limiting work for everyone in Russia to eight hours per day. He also issued the Decree on Popular Education that stipulated that the government would guarantee free, secular education for all children in Russia, and a decree establishing a system of state orphanages. To combat mass illiteracy, a literacy campaign was initiated; an estimated 5 million people enrolled in crash courses of basic literacy from 1920 to 1926. Embracing the equality of the sexes, laws were introduced that helped to emancipate women, by giving them economic autonomy from their husbands and removing restrictions on divorce. Zhenotdel, a Bolshevik women's organisation, was established to further these aims. Under Lenin, Russia became the first country to legalize abortion on demand in the first trimester. Militantly atheist, Lenin and the Communist Party wanted to demolish organised religion. In January 1918, the government decreed the separation of church and state, and prohibited religious instruction in schools.
In November 1917, Lenin issued the Decree on Workers' Control, which called on the workers of each enterprise to establish an elected committee to monitor their enterprise's management. That month they also issued an order requisitioning the country's gold, and nationalised the banks, which Lenin saw as a major step toward socialism. In December, Sovnarkom established a Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh), which had authority over industry, banking, agriculture, and trade. The factory committees were subordinate to the trade unions, which were subordinate to VSNKh; the state's centralised economic plan was prioritised over the workers' local economic interests. In early 1918, Sovnarkom cancelled all foreign debts and refused to pay interest owed on them. In April 1918, it nationalised foreign trade, establishing a state monopoly on imports and exports. In June 1918, it decreed nationalisation of public utilities, railways, engineering, textiles, metallurgy, and mining, although often these were state-owned in name only. Full-scale nationalisation did not take place until November 1920, when small-scale industrial enterprises were brought under state control.
A faction of the Bolsheviks known as the "Left Communists" criticised Sovnarkom's economic policy as too moderate; they wanted nationalisation of all industry, agriculture, trade, finance, transport, and communication. Lenin believed that this was impractical at that stage and that the government should only nationalise Russia's large-scale capitalist enterprises, such as the banks, railways, larger landed estates, and larger factories and mines, allowing smaller businesses to operate privately until they grew large enough to be successfully nationalised. Lenin also disagreed with the Left Communists about the economic organisation; in June 1918, he argued that centralised economic control of industry was needed, whereas Left Communists wanted each factory to be controlled by its workers, a syndicalist approach that Lenin considered detrimental to the cause of socialism.
Adopting a left-libertarian perspective, both the Left Communists and other factions in the Communist Party critiqued the decline of democratic institutions in Russia. Internationally, many socialists decried Lenin's regime and denied that he was establishing socialism; in particular, they highlighted the lack of widespread political participation, popular consultation, and industrial democracy. In late 1918, the Czech-Austrian Marxist Karl Kautsky authored an anti-Leninist pamphlet condemning the anti-democratic nature of Soviet Russia, to which Lenin published a vociferous reply, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg echoed Kautsky's views, while Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin described the Bolshevik seizure of power as "the burial of the Russian Revolution."
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk: 1917–1918
[By prolonging the war] we unusually strengthen German imperialism, and the peace will have to be concluded anyway, but then the peace will be worse because it will be concluded by someone other than ourselves. No doubt the peace which we are now being forced to conclude is an indecent peace, but if war commences our government will be swept away and the peace will be concluded by another government.
Upon taking power, Lenin believed that a key policy of his government must be to withdraw from the First World War by establishing an armistice with the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. He believed that ongoing war would create resentment among war-weary Russian troops, to whom he had promised peace, and that these troops and the advancing German Army threatened both his own government and the cause of international socialism. By contrast, other Bolsheviks, in particular Nikolai Bukharin and the Left Communists, believed that peace with the Central Powers would be a betrayal of international socialism and that Russia should instead wage "a war of revolutionary defence" that would provoke an uprising of the German proletariat against their own government.
Lenin proposed a three-month armistice in his Decree on Peace of November 1917, which was approved by the Second Congress of Soviets and presented to the German and Austro-Hungarian governments. The Germans responded positively, viewing this as an opportunity to focus on the Western Front and stave off looming defeat. In November, armistice talks began at Brest-Litovsk, the headquarters of the German high command on the Eastern Front, with the Russian delegation being led by Trotsky and Adolph Joffe. Meanwhile, a ceasefire until January was agreed. During negotiations, the Germans insisted on keeping their wartime conquests, which included Poland, Lithuania, and Courland, whereas the Russians countered that this was a violation of these nations' rights to self-determination. Some Bolsheviks had expressed hopes of dragging out negotiations until proletarian revolution broke out throughout Europe. On 7 January 1918, Trotsky returned from Brest-Litovsk to St. Petersburg with an ultimatum from the Central Powers: either Russia accept Germany's territorial demands or the war would resume.
In January and again in February, Lenin urged the Bolsheviks to accept Germany's proposals. He argued that the territorial losses were acceptable if it ensured the survival of the Bolshevik-led government. The majority of Bolsheviks rejected his position, hoping to prolong the armistice and call Germany's bluff. On 18 February, the German Army launched Operation Faustschlag, advancing further into Russian-controlled territory and conquering Dvinsk within a day. At this point, Lenin finally convinced a small majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee to accept the Central Powers' demands. On 23 February, the Central Powers issued a new ultimatum: Russia had to recognise German control not only of Poland and the Baltic states but also of Ukraine or face a full-scale invasion.
On 3 March, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed. It resulted in massive territorial losses for Russia, with 26% of the former Empire's population, 37% of its agricultural harvest area, 28% of its industry, 26% of its railway tracks, and three-quarters of its coal and iron deposits being transferred to German control. Accordingly, the Treaty was deeply unpopular across Russia's political spectrum, and several Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries resigned from Sovnarkom in protest. After the Treaty, Sovnarkom focused on trying to foment proletarian revolution in Germany, issuing an array of anti-war and anti-government publications in the country; the German government retaliated by expelling Russia's diplomats. The Treaty nevertheless failed to stop the Central Powers' defeat; in November 1918, the German Emperor Wilhelm II abdicated and the country's new administration signed the Armistice with the Allies. As a result, Sovnarkom proclaimed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk void.
Anti-Kulak campaigns, Cheka, and Red Terror: 1918–1922
[The bourgeoisie] practised terror against the workers, soldiers and peasants in the interests of a small group of landowners and bankers, whereas the Soviet regime applies decisive measures against landowners, plunderers and their accomplices in the interests of the workers, soldiers and peasants.
By early 1918, many cities in western Russia faced famine as a result of chronic food shortages. Lenin blamed this on the kulaks, or wealthier peasants, who allegedly hoarded the grain that they had produced to increase its financial value. In May 1918, he issued a requisitioning order that established armed detachments to confiscate grain from kulaks for distribution in the cities, and in June called for the formation of Committees of Poor Peasants to aid in requisitioning. This policy resulted in vast social disorder and violence, as armed detachments often clashed with peasant groups, helping to set the stage for the civil war. A prominent example of Lenin's views was his August 1918 telegram to the Bolsheviks of Penza, which called upon them to suppress a peasant insurrection by publicly hanging at least 100 "known kulaks, rich men, [and] bloodsuckers."
The requisitions disincentivised peasants from producing more grain than they could personally consume, and thus production slumped. A booming black market supplemented the official state-sanctioned economy, and Lenin called on speculators, black marketeers and looters to be shot. Both the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries condemned the armed appropriations of grain at the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets in July 1918. Realising that the Committees of the Poor Peasants were also persecuting peasants who were not kulaks and thus contributing to anti-government feeling among the peasantry, in December 1918 Lenin abolished them.
Lenin repeatedly emphasised the need for terror and violence in overthrowing the old order and ensuring the success of the revolution. Speaking to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets in November 1917, he declared that "the state is an institution built up for the sake of exercising violence. Previously, this violence was exercised by a handful of moneybags over the entire people; now we want [...] to organise violence in the interests of the people." He strongly opposed suggestions to abolish capital punishment. Fearing anti-Bolshevik forces would overthrow his administration, in December 1917 Lenin ordered the establishment of the Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, or Cheka, a political police force led by Felix Dzerzhinsky.
In September 1918, Sovnarkom passed a decree that inaugurated the Red Terror, a system of repression orchestrated by the Cheka secret police.[261] Although sometimes described as an attempt to eliminate the entire bourgeoisie, Lenin did not want to exterminate all members of this class, merely those who sought to reinstate their rule. The majority of the Terror's victims were well-to-do citizens or former members of the Tsarist administration; others were non-bourgeois anti-Bolsheviks and perceived social undesirables such as prostitutes. The Cheka claimed the right to both sentence and execute anyone whom it deemed to be an enemy of the government, without recourse to the Revolutionary Tribunals. Accordingly, throughout Soviet Russia the Cheka carried out killings, often in large numbers. For example, the Petrograd Cheka executed 512 people in a few days. There are no surviving records to provide an accurate figure of how many perished in the Red Terror; later estimates of historians have ranged between 10,000 and 15,000, and 50,000 to 140,000.
Lenin never witnessed this violence or participated in it first-hand, and publicly distanced himself from it. His published articles and speeches rarely called for executions, but he regularly did so in his coded telegrams and confidential notes. Many Bolsheviks expressed disapproval of the Cheka's mass executions and feared the organisation's apparent unaccountability. The Communist Party tried to restrain its activities in February 1919, stripping it of its powers of tribunal and execution in those areas not under official martial law, but the Cheka continued as before in swathes of the country. By 1920, the Cheka had become the most powerful institution in Soviet Russia, exerting influence over all other state apparatus.
A decree in April 1919 resulted in the establishment of concentration camps, which were entrusted to the Cheka, later administered by a new government agency, Gulag. By the end of 1920, 84 camps had been established across Soviet Russia, holding about 50,000 prisoners; by October 1923, this had grown to 315 camps and about 70,000 inmates. Those interned in the camps were used as slave labour. From July 1922, intellectuals deemed to be opposing the Bolshevik government were exiled to inhospitable regions or deported from Russia altogether; Lenin personally scrutinised the lists of those to be dealt with in this manner. In May 1922, Lenin issued a decree calling for the execution of anti-Bolshevik priests, causing between 14,000 and 20,000 deaths. The Russian Orthodox Church was worst affected; the government's anti-religious policies also harmed Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, Jewish synagogues, and Islamic mosques.
Civil War and the Polish–Soviet War: 1918–1920
The existence of the Soviet Republic alongside the imperialist states over the long run is unthinkable. In the end, either the one or the other will triumph. And until that end will have arrived, a series of the most terrible conflicts between the Soviet Republic and the bourgeois governments is unavoidable. This means that the ruling class, the proletariat, if it only wishes to rule and is to rule, must demonstrate this also with its military organization.
Lenin expected Russia's aristocracy and bourgeoisie to oppose his government, but he believed that the numerical superiority of the lower classes, coupled with the Bolsheviks' ability to effectively organise them, guaranteed a swift victory in any conflict. In this, he failed to anticipate the intensity of the violent opposition to Bolshevik rule in Russia. A long and bloody Civil War ensued between the Bolshevik Reds and the anti-Bolshevik Whites, starting in 1917 and ending in 1923 with the Reds' victory. It also encompassed ethnic conflicts on Russia's borders, and anti-Bolshevik peasant and left-wing uprisings throughout the former Empire. Accordingly, various historians have seen the civil war as representing two distinct conflicts: one between the revolutionaries and the counterrevolutionaries, and the other between different revolutionary factions.
The White armies were established by former Tsarist military officers, and included Anton Denikin's Volunteer Army in South Russia, Alexander Kolchak's forces in Siberia, and Nikolai Yudenich's troops in the newly independent Baltic states. The Whites were bolstered when 35,000 members of the Czech Legion, who were prisoners of war from the conflict with the Central Powers, turned against Sovnarkom and allied with the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch), an anti-Bolshevik government established in Samara. The Whites were also backed by Western governments who perceived the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk as a betrayal of the Allied war effort and feared the Bolsheviks' calls for world revolution. In 1918, Great Britain, France, United States, Canada, Italy, and Serbia landed 10,000 troops in Murmansk, seizing Kandalaksha, while later that year British, American, and Japanese forces landed in Vladivostok. Western troops soon pulled out of the civil war, instead only supporting the Whites with officers, technicians and armaments, but Japan remained because they saw the conflict as an opportunity for territorial expansion.
Lenin tasked Trotsky with establishing a Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, and with his support, Trotsky organised a Revolutionary Military Council in September 1918, remaining its chairman until 1925. Recognising their valuable military experience, Lenin agreed that officers from the old Tsarist army could serve in the Red Army, although Trotsky established military councils to monitor their activities. The Reds held control of Russia's two largest cities, Moscow and Petrograd, as well as most of Great Russia, while the Whites were located largely on the former Empire's peripheries. The latter were therefore hindered by being both fragmented and geographically scattered, and because their ethnic Russian supremacism alienated the region's national minorities. Anti-Bolshevik armies carried out the White Terror, a campaign of violence against perceived Bolshevik supporters which was typically more spontaneous than the state-sanctioned Red Terror. Both White and Red Armies were responsible for attacks against Jewish communities, prompting Lenin to issue a condemnation of antisemitism, blaming prejudice against Jews on capitalist propaganda.
In July 1918, Sverdlov informed Sovnarkom that the Ural Regional Soviet had overseen the murder of the former Tsar and his immediate family in Yekaterinburg to prevent them from being rescued by advancing White troops. Although lacking proof, biographers and historians like Richard Pipes and Dmitri Volkogonov have expressed the view that the killing was probably sanctioned by Lenin; conversely, historian James Ryan cautioned that there was "no reason" to believe this. Whether Lenin sanctioned it or not, he still regarded it as necessary, highlighting the precedent set by the execution of Louis XVI in the French Revolution.
After the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries had abandoned the coalition and increasingly viewed the Bolsheviks as traitors to the revolution. In July 1918, the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Yakov Blumkin assassinated the German ambassador to Russia, Wilhelm von Mirbach, hoping that the ensuing diplomatic incident would lead to a relaunched revolutionary war against Germany. The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries then launched a coup in Moscow, shelling the Kremlin and seizing the city's central post office before being stopped by Trotsky's forces. The party's leaders and many members were arrested and imprisoned but were treated more leniently than other opponents of the Bolsheviks.
By 1919, the White armies were in retreat and by the start of 1920 were defeated on all three fronts. Although Sovnarkom were victorious, the territorial extent of the Russian state had been reduced, for many non-Russian ethnic groups had used the disarray to push for national independence. In March 1921, during a related war against Poland, the Peace of Riga was signed, splitting disputed territories in Belarus and Ukraine between the Republic of Poland and Soviet Russia. Soviet Russia sought to re-conquer all newly independent nations of the former Empire, although their success was limited. Estonia, Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania all repelled Soviet invasions, while Ukraine, Belarus (as a result of the Polish–Soviet War), Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia were occupied by the Red Army. By 1921, Soviet Russia had defeated the Ukrainian national movements and occupied the Caucasus, although anti-Bolshevik uprisings in Central Asia lasted until the late 1920s.
After the German Ober Ost garrisons were withdrawn from the Eastern Front following the Armistice, both Soviet Russian armies and Polish ones moved in to fill the vacuum. The newly independent Polish state and the Soviet government each sought territorial expansion in the region. Polish and Russian troops first clashed in February 1919, with the conflict developing into the Polish–Soviet War. Unlike the Soviets' previous conflicts, this had greater implications for the export of revolution and the future of Europe. Polish forces pushed into Ukraine and by May 1920 had taken Kiev from the Soviets. After forcing the Polish Army back, Lenin urged the Red Army to invade Poland itself, believing that the Polish proletariat would rise up to support the Russian troops and thus spark European revolution. Trotsky and other Bolsheviks were sceptical, but agreed to the invasion. The Polish proletariat did not rise, and the Red Army was defeated at the Battle of Warsaw. The Polish armies pushed the Red Army back into Russia, forcing Sovnarkom to sue for peace; the war culminated in the Peace of Riga, in which Russia ceded territory to Poland.
Death and funeral: 1923–1924
Lenin's funeral, as painted by Isaac Brodsky, 1925
In March 1923, Lenin had a third stroke and lost his ability to speak; that month, he experienced partial paralysis on his right side and began exhibiting sensory aphasia. By May, he appeared to be making a slow recovery, regaining some of his mobility, speech, and writing skills. In October, he made a final visit to the Kremlin. In his final weeks, Lenin was visited by Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin; the latter visited him at his Gorki mansion on the day of his death. On 21 January 1924, Lenin fell into a coma and died later that day at age 53. His official cause of death was recorded as an incurable disease of the blood vessels. "Good dog", are said to have been Lenin's last words, upon his dog having brought him a dead bird.
The Soviet government publicly announced Lenin's death the following day. On 23 January, mourners from the Communist Party, trade unions, and Soviets visited his Gorki home to inspect the body, which was carried aloft in a red coffin by leading Bolsheviks. Transported by train to Moscow, the coffin was taken to the House of Trade Unions, where the body lay in state. Over the next three days, around a million mourners came to see the body, many queuing for hours in the freezing conditions. On 26 January, the eleventh All-Union Congress of Soviets met to pay respects, with speeches by Kalinin, Zinoviev, and Stalin. Notably, Trotsky was absent; he had been convalescing in the Caucasus, and he later claimed that Stalin sent him a telegram with the incorrect date of the planned funeral, making it impossible for him to arrive in time. Lenin's funeral took place the following day, when his body was carried to Red Square, accompanied by martial music, where assembled crowds listened to a series of speeches before the corpse was placed into the vault of a specially erected mausoleum. Despite the freezing temperatures, tens of thousands attended.
Against Krupskaya's protestations, Lenin's body was embalmed to preserve it for long-term public display in the Red Square mausoleum. During this process, Lenin's brain was removed; in 1925 an institute was established to dissect it, revealing that Lenin had had severe sclerosis. In July 1929, the Politburo agreed to replace the temporary mausoleum with a permanent one in granite, which was finished in 1933. His sarcophagus was replaced in 1940 and again in 1970. For safety amid the Second World War, from 1941 to 1945 the body was temporarily moved to Tyumen. As of 2023, his body remains on public display in Lenin's Mausoleum on Red Square.
One Tower WTC
I am a French girl (et n'ai pas à le prouver/démontrer à qui que ce soit).
WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THIS WORLD ?
This is so disgusting either terrorists than politicians...
Tuer un homme d'église c'est un sacrilège. c'est lui le martyr, pas vous les gars...
I need to add a new picture.
I am so sorry about all of this, we have to reinvent the world and understand ourself importance: people, teachers, school psychologists, medias, politics (european problem police, une guerre se gagne quand on a un coup d'avance sur l'adversaire - pas l'inverse... pq ts ces assassins ont ete condammes,arretes il y a 1 an ou 2 et relaches alors qu'ils etaient condamnés à de longues peines ??? , NATO should have detroyed daech at the beginning of the syrian revolution when this nasty and disgusting organization was nothing...) and politicians (French Ellis Island needed instead of the shame jungle in Calais or Grande-Synthe, school equality for all children, French religious national associations CFCM and clergé and French-born and educated imams, real Internet cyber criminaliy police),...
Mali, Belgium, Burkina Faso, Somalia, Nigeria, Turkey, France, United States, Yemen, Thailand, Spain, Great Britain, Danemark, Canada, Lebanon, Australia, Thailand, Tunisia, Morocco, no more again.
WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THIS WORLD ?
Allons nous montrer ds les écoles, les collèges, les lycées, les centres aérés, participons plus aux conseils politiques et montrer que oui on peut être français et basanés, de grdes villes ou de petites villes et faire des choses enthousiasmantes ds la vie, être reconnus et appréciés sans attendre de l'Institution scolaire (ou plutôt en l'employant à bon escient) parce qu'on a Osé pour aller voir plus loin, étudier, essayer, ré-ré-ressayer, passer par la fenêtre plutôt que par la porte, ne pas baisser la tête, détourné, être ambitieux et ainsi sortir de sa zone de dé-confort !
Et oui, le l'histoire du Maghreb est plus que liée à celle de l'Europe, il faut le le dire, l'écrire, le revendiqué et l'assumer aux échelles politique et sociale.
Extremism acts could not be linked to any religious things (so stop the #pray for... )
and THEOLOGY IS NOT HISTORY,k IS NOT LAW + EXTREMISM IS NOT RELIGIOUS.
Soft reminder: the idea of an existing god is an idea, idea imagined by men....maybe they kill for the idea of something that doesn't exist... Frightening of stupidity.
www.telerama.fr/scenes/kheireddine-lardjam-ce-sont-nos-en...
www.franceinter.fr/emission-permis-de-penser-processus-de...
... ouais sentiment de surpuissance car nier ds leur enfance...
www.msn.com/fr-fr/actualite/monde/moi-le-coran-je-men-tap...
www.lemonde.fr/attaques-a-paris/article/2015/12/22/en-mem...
www.lemonde.fr/festival/visuel/2016/06/24/ceuxquifont-rya...
et NadineM, je t'emmerde.
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov[b] (22 April [O.S. 10 April] 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 until his death in 1924, and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia, and later the Soviet Union, became a one-party socialist state governed by the Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, his developments to the ideology are called Leninism.
Born to a schoolteacher's family in Simbirsk, Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics following his brother's 1887 execution. Expelled from Kazan Imperial University for participating in protests against the Tsarist government, he devoted the following years to a law degree. He relocated to Saint Petersburg in 1893 where he became a senior Marxist activist. In 1897, he was arrested for sedition and exiled to Shushenskoye in Siberia for three years, where he married Nadezhda Krupskaya. After his exile, he moved to Western Europe, where he became a prominent theorist in the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). In 1903, he took a key role in the RSDLP ideological split, leading the Bolshevik faction against Julius Martov's Mensheviks. Following Russia's failed Revolution of 1905, he initially campaigned for the First World War to be transformed into a Europe-wide proletarian revolution, which, as a Marxist, he believed would cause the overthrow of capitalism and the rise of socialism. After the 1917 February Revolution ousted the Tsar and established a Provisional Government, he returned to Russia and played a leading role in the October Revolution, in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the new government.
Lenin's Bolshevik government initially shared power with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, elected soviets, and a multi-party Constituent Assembly, although by 1918 it had centralised power in the new Communist Party. Lenin's administration redistributed land among the peasantry and nationalised banks and large-scale industry. It withdrew from the First World War by signing a treaty conceding territory to the Central Powers, and promoted world revolution through the Communist International. Opponents were suppressed in the Red Terror, a violent campaign administered by the state security services; tens of thousands were killed or interned in concentration camps. His administration defeated right and left-wing anti-Bolshevik armies in the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1922 and oversaw the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–1921. Responding to wartime devastation, famine, and popular uprisings, in 1921 Lenin encouraged economic growth through the New Economic Policy. Several non-Russian nations had secured independence from Russia after 1917, but five were forcibly re-united into the new Soviet Union in 1922, while others repelled Soviet invasions. His health failing, Lenin died in Gorki, with Joseph Stalin succeeding him as the pre-eminent figure in the Soviet government.
Widely considered one of the most significant and influential figures of the 20th century, Lenin was the posthumous subject of a pervasive personality cult within the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991. He became an ideological figurehead behind Marxism–Leninism and a prominent influence over the international communist movement. A controversial and highly divisive historical figure, Lenin is viewed by his supporters as a champion of socialism, communism, anti-imperialism and the working class, while his critics accuse him of establishing a totalitarian dictatorship that oversaw mass killings and political repression of dissidents.
University and political radicalisation: 1887–1893
Upon entering Kazan University in August 1887, Lenin moved into a nearby flat. There, he joined a zemlyachestvo, a form of university society that represented the men of a particular region. This group elected him as its representative to the university's zemlyachestvo council, and he took part in a December demonstration against government restrictions that banned student societies. The police arrested Lenin and accused him of being a ringleader in the demonstration; he was expelled from the university, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs exiled him to his family's Kokushkino estate. There, he read voraciously, becoming enamoured with Nikolay Chernyshevsky's 1863 pro-revolutionary novel What Is to Be Done?
Lenin's mother was concerned by her son's radicalisation, and was instrumental in convincing the Interior Ministry to allow him to return to the city of Kazan, but not the university. On his return, he joined Nikolai Fedoseev's revolutionary circle, through which he discovered Karl Marx's 1867 book Capital. This sparked his interest in Marxism, a socio-political theory that argued that society developed in stages, that this development resulted from class struggle, and that capitalist society would ultimately give way to socialist society and then communist society. Wary of his political views, Lenin's mother bought a country estate in Alakaevka village, Samara Oblast, in the hope that her son would turn his attention to agriculture. He had little interest in farm management, and his mother soon sold the land, keeping the house as a summer home.
In September 1889, the Ulyanov family moved to the city of Samara, where Lenin joined Alexei Sklyarenko's socialist discussion circle. There, Lenin fully embraced Marxism and produced a Russian language translation of Marx and Friedrich Engels's 1848 political pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto. He began to read the works of the Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov, agreeing with Plekhanov's argument that Russia was moving from feudalism to capitalism and so socialism would be implemented by the proletariat, or urban working class, rather than the peasantry. This Marxist perspective contrasted with the view of the agrarian-socialist Narodnik movement, which held that the peasantry could establish socialism in Russia by forming peasant communes, thereby bypassing capitalism. This Narodnik view developed in the 1860s with the People's Freedom Party and was then dominant within the Russian revolutionary movement. Lenin rejected the premise of the agrarian-socialist argument but was influenced by agrarian-socialists like Pyotr Tkachev and Sergei Nechaev and befriended several Narodniks.
In May 1890, Maria, who retained societal influence as the widow of a nobleman, persuaded the authorities to allow Lenin to take his exams externally at the University of St Petersburg, where he obtained the equivalent of a first-class degree with honours. The graduation celebrations were marred when his sister Olga died of typhoid. Lenin remained in Samara for several years, working first as a legal assistant for a regional court and then for a local lawyer. He devoted much time to radical politics, remaining active in Sklyarenko's group and formulating ideas about how Marxism applied to Russia. Inspired by Plekhanov's work, Lenin collected data on Russian society, using it to support a Marxist interpretation of societal development and counter the claims of the Narodniks. He wrote a paper on peasant economics; it was rejected by the liberal journal Russian Thought.
Revolutionary activity
Early activism and imprisonment: 1893–1900
In late 1893, Lenin moved to Saint Petersburg. There, he worked as a barrister's assistant and rose to a senior position in a Marxist revolutionary cell that called itself the Social-Democrats after the Marxist Social Democratic Party of Germany. Championing Marxism within the socialist movement, he encouraged the founding of revolutionary cells in Russia's industrial centres. By late 1894, he was leading a Marxist workers' circle, and meticulously covered his tracks to evade police spies. He began a romantic relationship with Nadezhda "Nadya" Krupskaya, a Marxist schoolteacher. He also authored a political tract criticising the Narodnik agrarian-socialists, What the "Friends of the People" Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats; around 200 copies were illegally printed in 1894.
Hoping to cement connections between his Social-Democrats and Emancipation of Labour, a group of Russian Marxists based in Switzerland, Lenin visited the country to meet group members Plekhanov and Pavel Axelrod. He proceeded to Paris to meet Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue and to research the Paris Commune of 1871, which he considered an early prototype for a proletarian government. Financed by his mother, he stayed in a Swiss health spa before travelling to Berlin, where he studied for six weeks at the Staatsbibliothek and met the Marxist Wilhelm Liebknecht. Returning to Russia with a stash of illegal revolutionary publications, he travelled to various cities distributing literature to striking workers. While involved in producing a news sheet, Rabochee delo (Workers' Cause), he was among 40 activists arrested in St. Petersburg and charged with sedition.
Refused legal representation or bail, Lenin denied all charges against him but remained imprisoned for a year before sentencing. He spent this time theorising and writing. In this work he noted that the rise of industrial capitalism in Russia had caused large numbers of peasants to move to the cities, where they formed a proletariat. From his Marxist perspective, Lenin argued that this Russian proletariat would develop class consciousness, which would in turn lead them to violently overthrow tsarism, the aristocracy, and the bourgeoisie and to establish a proletariat state that would move toward socialism.
In February 1897, Lenin was sentenced without trial to three years' exile in eastern Siberia. He was granted a few days in Saint Petersburg to put his affairs in order and used this time to meet with the Social-Democrats, who had renamed themselves the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. His journey to eastern Siberia took 11 weeks, for much of which he was accompanied by his mother and sisters. Deemed only a minor threat to the government, he was exiled to Shushenskoye, Minusinsky District, where he was kept under police surveillance; he was nevertheless able to correspond with other revolutionaries, many of whom visited him, and permitted to go on trips to swim in the Yenisei River and to hunt duck and snipe.
In May 1898, Nadya joined him in exile, having been arrested in August 1896 for organising a strike. She was initially posted to Ufa, but persuaded the authorities to move her to Shushenskoye, where she and Lenin married on 10 July 1898. Settling into a family life with Nadya's mother Elizaveta Vasilyevna, in Shushenskoye the couple translated English socialist literature into Russian. There, Lenin wrote A Protest by Russian Social-Democrats to criticise German Marxist revisionists like Eduard Bernstein who advocated a peaceful, electoral path to socialism. He also finished The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), his longest book to date, which criticised the agrarian-socialists and promoted a Marxist analysis of Russian economic development. Published under the pseudonym of Vladimir Ilin, upon publication it received predominantly poor reviews.
Munich, London, and Geneva: 1900–1905
After his exile, Lenin settled in Pskov in early 1900. There, he began raising funds for a newspaper, Iskra (Spark), a new organ of the Russian Marxist party, now calling itself the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). In July 1900, Lenin left Russia for Western Europe; in Switzerland he met other Russian Marxists, and at a Corsier conference they agreed to launch the paper from Munich, where Lenin relocated in September. Containing contributions from prominent European Marxists, Iskra was smuggled into Russia, becoming the country's most successful underground publication for 50 years. He first adopted the pseudonym Lenin in December 1901, possibly based on the Siberian River Lena; he often used the fuller pseudonym of N. Lenin, and while the N did not stand for anything, a popular misconception later arose that it represented Nikolai. Under this pseudonym, in 1902 he published his most influential publication to date, the pamphlet What Is to Be Done?, which outlined his thoughts on the need for a vanguard party to lead the proletariat to revolution.
Nadya joined Lenin in Munich and became his secretary. They continued their political agitation, as Lenin wrote for Iskra and drafted the RSDLP programme, attacking ideological dissenters and external critics, particularly the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR),[ a Narodnik agrarian-socialist group founded in 1901. Despite remaining a Marxist, he accepted the Narodnik view on the revolutionary power of the Russian peasantry, accordingly, penning the 1903 pamphlet To the Village Poor. To evade Bavarian police, Lenin moved to London with Iskra in April 1902, where he befriended fellow Russian-Ukrainian Marxist Leon Trotsky. Lenin fell ill with erysipelas and was unable to take such a leading role on the Iskra editorial board; in his absence, the board moved its base of operations to Geneva.
The second RSDLP Congress was held in London in July 1903. At the conference, a schism emerged between Lenin's supporters and those of Julius Martov. Martov argued that party members should be able to express themselves independently of the party leadership; Lenin disagreed, emphasising the need for a strong leadership with complete control over the party. Lenin's supporters were in the majority, and he termed them the "majoritarians" (bol'sheviki in Russian; Bolsheviks); in response, Martov termed his followers the "minoritarians" (men'sheviki in Russian; Mensheviks). Arguments between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks continued after the conference; the Bolsheviks accused their rivals of being opportunists and reformists who lacked discipline, while the Mensheviks accused Lenin of being a despot and autocrat. Enraged at the Mensheviks, Lenin resigned from the Iskra editorial board and in May 1904 published the anti-Menshevik tract One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. The stress made Lenin ill, and to recuperate he holidayed in Switzerland. The Bolshevik faction grew in strength; by spring 1905, the whole RSDLP Central Committee was Bolshevik, and in December they founded the newspaper Vperyod (Forward).
Revolution of 1905 and its aftermath: 1905–1914
In January 1905, the Bloody Sunday massacre of protesters in St. Petersburg sparked a spate of civil unrest in the Russian Empire known as the Revolution of 1905. Lenin urged Bolsheviks to take a greater role in the events, encouraging violent insurrection. In doing so, he adopted SR slogans regarding "armed insurrection", "mass terror", and "the expropriation of gentry land", resulting in Menshevik accusations that he had deviated from orthodox Marxism. In turn, he insisted that the Bolsheviks split completely with the Mensheviks; many Bolsheviks refused, and both groups attended the Third RSDLP Congress, held in London in April 1905. Lenin presented many of his ideas in the pamphlet Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, published in August 1905. Here, he predicted that Russia's liberal bourgeoisie would be sated by a transition to constitutional monarchy and thus betray the revolution; instead, he argued that the proletariat would have to build an alliance with the peasantry to overthrow the Tsarist regime and establish the "provisional revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry."
The uprising has begun. Force against Force. Street fighting is raging, barricades are being thrown up, rifles are cracking, guns are booming. Rivers of blood are flowing, the civil war for freedom is blazing up. Moscow and the South, the Caucasus and Poland are ready to join the proletariat of St. Petersburg. The slogan of the workers has become: Death or Freedom!
In response to the revolution of 1905, which had failed to overthrow the government, Tsar Nicholas II accepted a series of liberal reforms in his October Manifesto. In this climate, Lenin felt it safe to return to St. Petersburg. Joining the editorial board of Novaya Zhizn (New Life), a radical legal newspaper run by Maria Andreyeva, he used it to discuss issues facing the RSDLP. He encouraged the party to seek out a much wider membership, and advocated the continual escalation of violent confrontation, believing both to be necessary for a successful revolution. Recognising that membership fees and donations from a few wealthy sympathisers were insufficient to finance the Bolsheviks' activities, Lenin endorsed the idea of robbing post offices, railway stations, trains, and banks. Under the lead of Leonid Krasin, a group of Bolsheviks began carrying out such criminal actions, the best-known taking place in June 1907, when a group of Bolsheviks acting under the leadership of Joseph Stalin committed an armed robbery of the State Bank in Tiflis, Georgia.
Although he briefly supported the idea of reconciliation between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Lenin's advocacy of violence and robbery was condemned by the Mensheviks at the Fourth RSDLP Congress, held in Stockholm in April 1906. Lenin was involved in setting up a Bolshevik Centre in Kuokkala, Grand Duchy of Finland, which was at the time an autonomous state within the Russian Empire, before the Bolsheviks regained dominance of the RSDLP at its Fifth Congress, held in London in May 1907. As the Tsarist government cracked down on opposition, both by disbanding Russia's legislative assembly, the Second Duma, and by ordering its secret police, the Okhrana, to arrest revolutionaries, Lenin fled Finland for Switzerland. There, he tried to exchange those banknotes stolen in Tiflis that had identifiable serial numbers on them.
Alexander Bogdanov and other prominent Bolsheviks decided to relocate the Bolshevik Centre to Paris; although Lenin disagreed, he moved to the city in December 1908. Lenin disliked Paris, lambasting it as "a foul hole", and while there he sued a motorist who knocked him off his bike. Lenin became very critical of Bogdanov's view that Russia's proletariat had to develop a socialist culture in order to become a successful revolutionary vehicle. Instead, Lenin favoured a vanguard of socialist intelligentsia who would lead the working-classes in revolution. Furthermore, Bogdanov, influenced by Ernest Mach, believed that all concepts of the world were relative, whereas Lenin stuck to the orthodox Marxist view that there was an objective reality independent of human observation. Bogdanov and Lenin holidayed together at Maxim Gorky's villa in Capri in April 1908 on returning to Paris, Lenin encouraged a split within the Bolshevik faction between his and Bogdanov's followers, accusing the latter of deviating from Marxism.
In May 1908, Lenin lived briefly in London, where he used the British Museum Reading Room to write Materialism and Empirio-criticism, an attack on what he described as the "bourgeois-reactionary falsehood" of Bogdanov's relativism. Lenin's factionalism began to alienate increasing numbers of Bolsheviks, including his former close supporters Alexei Rykov and Lev Kamenev. The Okhrana exploited his factionalist attitude by sending a spy, Roman Malinovsky, to act as a vocal Lenin supporter within the party. Various Bolsheviks expressed their suspicions about Malinovsky to Lenin, although it is unclear if the latter was aware of the spy's duplicity; it is possible that he used Malinovsky to feed false information to the Okhrana.
In August 1910, Lenin attended the Eighth Congress of the Second International, an international meeting of socialists, in Copenhagen as the RSDLP's representative, following this with a holiday in Stockholm with his mother. With his wife and sisters, he then moved to France, settling first in Bombon and then Paris. Here, he became a close friend to the French Bolshevik Inessa Armand; some biographers suggest that they had an extra-marital affair from 1910 to 1912. Meanwhile, at a Paris meeting in June 1911, the RSDLP Central Committee decided to move their focus of operations back to Russia, ordering the closure of the Bolshevik Centre and its newspaper, Proletari. Seeking to rebuild his influence in the party, Lenin arranged for a party conference to be held in Prague in January 1912, and although 16 of the 18 attendants were Bolsheviks, he was heavily criticised for his factionalist tendencies and failed to boost his status within the party.
Moving to Kraków in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, a culturally Polish part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he used Jagiellonian University's library to conduct research. He stayed in close contact with the RSDLP, which was operating in the Russian Empire, convincing the Duma's Bolshevik members to split from their parliamentary alliance with the Mensheviks. In January 1913, Stalin, whom Lenin referred to as the "wonderful Georgian", visited him, and they discussed the future of non-Russian ethnic groups in the Empire. Due to the ailing health of both Lenin and his wife, they moved to the rural town of Biały Dunajec, before heading to Bern for Nadya to have surgery on her goitre.
First World War: 1914–1917
The [First World] war is being waged for the division of colonies and the robbery of foreign territory; thieves have fallen out–and to refer to the defeats at a given moment of one of the thieves in order to identify the interests of all thieves with the interests of the nation or the fatherland is an unconscionable bourgeois lie.
Lenin was in Galicia when the First World War broke out. The war pitted the Russian Empire against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and due to his Russian citizenship, Lenin was arrested and briefly imprisoned until his anti-Tsarist credentials were explained. Lenin and his wife returned to Bern, before relocating to Zürich in February 1916. Lenin was angry that the German Social-Democratic Party was supporting the German war effort, which was a direct contravention of the Second International's Stuttgart resolution that socialist parties would oppose the conflict and saw the Second International as defunct. He attended the Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915 and the Kienthal Conference in April 1916, urging socialists across the continent to convert the "imperialist war" into a continent-wide "civil war" with the proletariat pitted against the bourgeoisie and aristocracy. In July 1916, Lenin's mother died, but he was unable to attend her funeral. Her death deeply affected him, and he became depressed, fearing that he too would die before seeing the proletarian revolution.
In September 1917, Lenin published Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which argued that imperialism was a product of monopoly capitalism, as capitalists sought to increase their profits by extending into new territories where wages were lower and raw materials cheaper. He believed that competition and conflict would increase and that war between the imperialist powers would continue until they were overthrown by proletariat revolution and socialism established. He spent much of this time reading the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Aristotle, all of whom had been key influences on Marx. This changed Lenin's interpretation of Marxism; whereas he once believed that policies could be developed based on predetermined scientific principles, he concluded that the only test of whether a policy was correct was its practice. He still perceived himself as an orthodox Marxist, but he began to diverge from some of Marx's predictions about societal development; whereas Marx had believed that a "bourgeoisie-democratic revolution" of the middle-classes had to take place before a "socialist revolution" of the proletariat, Lenin believed that in Russia the proletariat could overthrow the Tsarist regime without an intermediate revolution.
February Revolution and the July Days: 1917
In February 1917, the February Revolution broke out in St. Petersburg, renamed Petrograd at the beginning of the First World War, as industrial workers went on strike over food shortages and deteriorating factory conditions. The unrest spread to other parts of Russia, and fearing that he would be violently overthrown, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated. The State Duma took over control of the country, establishing the Russian Provisional Government and converting the Empire into a new Russian Republic. When Lenin learned of this from his base in Switzerland, he celebrated with other dissidents. He decided to return to Russia to take charge of the Bolsheviks but found that most passages into the country were blocked due to the ongoing conflict. He organised a plan with other dissidents to negotiate a passage for them through Germany, with which Russia was then at war. Recognising that these dissidents could cause problems for their Russian enemies, the German government agreed to permit 32 Russian citizens to travel by train through their territory, among them Lenin and his wife. For political reasons, Lenin and the Germans agreed to a cover story that Lenin had travelled by sealed train carriage through German territory, but in fact the train was not truly sealed, and the passengers were allowed to disembark to, for example, spend the night in Frankfurt. The group travelled by train from Zürich to Sassnitz, proceeding by ferry to Trelleborg, Sweden, and from there to the Haparanda–Tornio border crossing and then to Helsinki before taking the final train to Petrograd in disguise.
Arriving at Petrograd's Finland Station in April, Lenin gave a speech to Bolshevik supporters condemning the Provisional Government and again calling for a continent-wide European proletarian revolution. Over the following days, he spoke at Bolshevik meetings, lambasting those who wanted reconciliation with the Mensheviks and revealing his "April Theses", an outline of his plans for the Bolsheviks, which he had written on the journey from Switzerland. He publicly condemned both the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries, who dominated the influential Petrograd Soviet, for supporting the Provisional Government, denouncing them as traitors to socialism. Considering the government to be just as imperialist as the Tsarist regime, he advocated immediate peace with Germany and Austria-Hungary, rule by soviets, the nationalisation of industry and banks, and the state expropriation of land, all with the intention of establishing a proletariat government and pushing toward a socialist society. By contrast, the Mensheviks believed that Russia was insufficiently developed to transition to socialism and accused Lenin of trying to plunge the new Republic into civil war. Over the coming months Lenin campaigned for his policies, attending the meetings of the Bolshevik Central Committee, prolifically writing for the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, and giving public speeches in Petrograd aimed at converting workers, soldiers, sailors, and peasants to his cause.
Sensing growing frustration among Bolshevik supporters, Lenin suggested an armed political demonstration in Petrograd to test the government's response. Amid deteriorating health, he left the city to recuperate in the Finnish village of Neivola. The Bolsheviks' armed demonstration, the July Days, took place while Lenin was away, but upon learning that demonstrators had violently clashed with government forces, he returned to Petrograd and called for calm. Responding to the violence, the government ordered the arrest of Lenin and other prominent Bolsheviks, raiding their offices, and publicly alleging that he was a German agent provocateur. Evading arrest, Lenin hid in a series of Petrograd safe houses. Fearing that he would be killed, Lenin and fellow senior Bolshevik Grigory Zinoviev escaped Petrograd in disguise, relocating to Razliv. There, Lenin began work on the book that became The State and Revolution, an exposition on how he believed the socialist state would develop after the proletariat revolution, and how from then on the state would gradually wither away, leaving a pure communist society. He began arguing for a Bolshevik-led armed insurrection to topple the government, but at a clandestine meeting of the party's central committee this idea was rejected. Lenin then headed by train and by foot to Finland, arriving at Helsinki on 10 August, where he hid away in safe houses belonging to Bolshevik sympathisers.
October Revolution: 1917
In August 1917, while Lenin was in Finland, General Lavr Kornilov, the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army, sent troops to Petrograd in what appeared to be a military coup attempt against the Provisional Government. Premier Alexander Kerensky turned to the Petrograd Soviet, including its Bolshevik members, for help, allowing the revolutionaries to organise workers as Red Guards to defend the city. The coup petered out before it reached Petrograd, but the events had allowed the Bolsheviks to return to the open political arena. Fearing a counter-revolution from right-wing forces hostile to socialism, the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries who dominated the Petrograd Soviet had been instrumental in pressuring the government to normalise relations with the Bolsheviks. Both the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries had lost much popular support because of their affiliation with the Provisional Government and its unpopular continuation of the war. The Bolsheviks capitalised on this, and soon the pro-Bolshevik Marxist Trotsky was elected leader of the Petrograd Soviet. In September, the Bolsheviks gained a majority in the workers' sections of both the Moscow and Petrograd Soviets.
Recognising that the situation was safer for him, Lenin returned to Petrograd. There he attended a meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee on 10 October, where he again argued that the party should lead an armed insurrection to topple the Provisional Government. This time the argument won with ten votes against two. Critics of the plan, Zinoviev and Kamenev, argued that Russian workers would not support a violent coup against the regime and that there was no clear evidence for Lenin's assertion that all of Europe was on the verge of proletarian revolution. The party began plans to organise the offensive, holding a final meeting at the Smolny Institute on 24 October. This was the base of the Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC), an armed militia largely loyal to the Bolsheviks that had been established by the Petrograd Soviet during Kornilov's alleged coup.
In October, the MRC was ordered to take control of Petrograd's key transport, communication, printing and utilities hubs, and did so without bloodshed. Bolsheviks besieged the government in the Winter Palace and overcame it and arrested its ministers after the cruiser Aurora, controlled by Bolshevik seamen, fired a blank shot to signal the start of the revolution. During the insurrection, Lenin gave a speech to the Petrograd Soviet announcing that the Provisional Government had been overthrown. The Bolsheviks declared the formation of a new government, the Council of People's Commissars, or Sovnarkom. Lenin initially turned down the leading position of Chairman, suggesting Trotsky for the job, but other Bolsheviks insisted and ultimately Lenin relented. Lenin and other Bolsheviks then attended the Second Congress of Soviets on 26 and 27 October and announced the creation of the new government. Menshevik attendees condemned the illegitimate seizure of power and the risk of civil war. In these early days of the new regime, Lenin avoided talking in Marxist and socialist terms so as not to alienate Russia's population, and instead spoke about having a country controlled by the workers. Lenin and many other Bolsheviks expected proletariat revolution to sweep across Europe in days or months.
Lenin's government
Organising the Soviet government: 1917–1918
The Provisional Government had planned for a Constituent Assembly to be elected in November 1917; against Lenin's objections, Sovnarkom agreed for the vote to take place as scheduled. In the constitutional election, the Bolsheviks gained approximately a quarter of the vote, being defeated by the agrarian-focused Socialist-Revolutionaries. Lenin argued that the election was not a fair reflection of the people's will, that the electorate had not had time to learn the Bolsheviks' political programme, and that the candidacy lists had been drawn up before the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries split from the Socialist-Revolutionaries. Nevertheless, the newly elected Russian Constituent Assembly convened in Petrograd in January 1918. Sovnarkom argued that it was counter-revolutionary because it sought to remove power from the soviets, but the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks denied this. The Bolsheviks presented the Assembly with a motion that would strip it of most of its legal powers; when the Assembly rejected the motion, Sovnarkom declared this as evidence of its counter-revolutionary nature and forcibly disbanded it.
Lenin rejected repeated calls, including from some Bolsheviks, to establish a coalition government with other socialist parties. Although refusing a coalition with the Mensheviks or Socialist-Revolutionaries, Sovnarkom partially relented; they allowed the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries five posts in the cabinet in December 1917. This coalition only lasted four months until March 1918, when the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries pulled out of the government over a disagreement about the Bolsheviks' approach to ending the First World War. At their 7th Congress in March 1918, the Bolsheviks changed their official name from the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party to the Russian Communist Party, as Lenin wanted to both distance his group from the increasingly reformist German Social Democratic Party and to emphasise its ultimate goal, that of a communist society.
Although ultimate power officially rested with the country's government in the form of Sovnarkom and the Executive Committee (VTSIK) elected by the All-Russian Congress of Soviets (ARCS), the Communist Party was de facto in control in Russia, as acknowledged by its members at the time. By 1918, Sovnarkom began acting unilaterally, claiming a need for expediency, with the ARCS and VTSIK becoming increasingly marginalised, so the soviets no longer had a role in governing Russia. During 1918 and 1919, the government expelled Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries from the soviets. Russia had become a one-party state.
Within the party was established a Political Bureau (Politburo) and Organisation Bureau (Orgburo) to accompany the existing Central Committee; the decisions of these party bodies had to be adopted by Sovnarkom and the Council of Labour and Defence. Lenin was the most significant figure in this governance structure as well as being the Chairman of Sovnarkom and sitting on the Council of Labour and Defence, and on the Central Committee and Politburo of the Communist Party. The only individual to have anywhere near this influence was Lenin's right-hand man, Yakov Sverdlov, who died in March 1919 during a flu pandemic. In November 1917, Lenin and his wife took a two-room flat within the Smolny Institute; the following month they left for a brief holiday in Halila, Finland. In January 1918, he survived an assassination attempt in Petrograd; Fritz Platten, who was with Lenin at the time, shielded him and was injured by a bullet.
Concerned that the German Army posed a threat to Petrograd, in March 1918 Sovnarkom relocated to Moscow, initially as a temporary measure. There, Lenin, Trotsky, and other Bolshevik leaders moved into the Kremlin, where Lenin lived with his wife and sister Maria in a first-floor apartment adjacent to the room in which the Sovnarkom meetings were held. Lenin disliked Moscow, but rarely left the city centre during the rest of his life. He survived a second assassination attempt, in Moscow in August 1918; he was shot following a public speech and injured badly. A Socialist-Revolutionary, Fanny Kaplan, was arrested and executed. The attack was widely covered in the Russian press, generating much sympathy for Lenin and boosting his popularity. As a respite, he was driven in September 1918 to the luxurious Gorki estate, just outside Moscow, recently nationalized for him by the government.
Social, legal, and economic reform: 1917–1918
To All Workers, Soldiers and Peasants. The Soviet authority will at once propose a democratic peace to all nations and an immediate armistice on all fronts. It will safeguard the transfer without compensation of all land—landlord, imperial, and monastery—to the peasants' committees; it will defend the soldiers' rights, introducing a complete democratisation of the army; it will establish workers' control over industry; it will ensure the convocation of the Constituent Assembly on the date set; it will supply the cities with bread and the villages with articles of first necessity; and it will secure to all nationalities inhabiting Russia the right of self-determination ... Long live the revolution!
Upon taking power, Lenin's regime issued a series of decrees. The first was a Decree on Land, which declared that the landed estates of the aristocracy and the Orthodox Church should be nationalised and redistributed to peasants by local governments. This contrasted with Lenin's desire for agricultural collectivisation but provided governmental recognition of the widespread peasant land seizures that had already occurred. In November 1917, the government issued the Decree on the Press that closed many opposition media outlets deemed counter revolutionary. They claimed the measure would be temporary; the decree was widely criticised, including by many Bolsheviks, for compromising freedom of the press.
In November 1917, Lenin issued the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia, which stated that non-Russian ethnic groups living inside the Republic had the right to secede from Russian authority and establish their own independent nation-states. Many nations declared independence (Finland and Lithuania in December 1917, Latvia and Ukraine in January 1918, Estonia in February 1918, Transcaucasia in April 1918, and Poland in November 1918). Soon, the Bolsheviks actively promoted communist parties in these independent nation-states, while at the Fifth All-Russian Congress of the Soviets in July 1918 a constitution was approved that reformed the Russian Republic into the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Seeking to modernise the country, the government officially converted Russia from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar used in Europe.
In November 1917, Sovnarkom issued a decree abolishing Russia's legal system, calling on the use of "revolutionary conscience" to replace the abolished laws. The courts were replaced by a two-tier system, namely the Revolutionary Tribunals to deal with counter-revolutionary crimes, and the People's Courts to deal with civil and other criminal offences. They were instructed to ignore pre-existing laws and base their rulings on the Sovnarkom decrees and a "socialist sense of justice." November also saw an overhaul of the armed forces; Sovnarkom implemented egalitarian measures, abolished previous ranks, titles, and medals, and called on soldiers to establish committees to elect their commanders.
Earth of Filth".
In October 1917, Lenin issued a decree limiting work for everyone in Russia to eight hours per day. He also issued the Decree on Popular Education that stipulated that the government would guarantee free, secular education for all children in Russia, and a decree establishing a system of state orphanages. To combat mass illiteracy, a literacy campaign was initiated; an estimated 5 million people enrolled in crash courses of basic literacy from 1920 to 1926. Embracing the equality of the sexes, laws were introduced that helped to emancipate women, by giving them economic autonomy from their husbands and removing restrictions on divorce. Zhenotdel, a Bolshevik women's organisation, was established to further these aims. Under Lenin, Russia became the first country to legalize abortion on demand in the first trimester. Militantly atheist, Lenin and the Communist Party wanted to demolish organised religion. In January 1918, the government decreed the separation of church and state, and prohibited religious instruction in schools.
In November 1917, Lenin issued the Decree on Workers' Control, which called on the workers of each enterprise to establish an elected committee to monitor their enterprise's management. That month they also issued an order requisitioning the country's gold, and nationalised the banks, which Lenin saw as a major step toward socialism. In December, Sovnarkom established a Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh), which had authority over industry, banking, agriculture, and trade. The factory committees were subordinate to the trade unions, which were subordinate to VSNKh; the state's centralised economic plan was prioritised over the workers' local economic interests. In early 1918, Sovnarkom cancelled all foreign debts and refused to pay interest owed on them. In April 1918, it nationalised foreign trade, establishing a state monopoly on imports and exports. In June 1918, it decreed nationalisation of public utilities, railways, engineering, textiles, metallurgy, and mining, although often these were state-owned in name only. Full-scale nationalisation did not take place until November 1920, when small-scale industrial enterprises were brought under state control.
A faction of the Bolsheviks known as the "Left Communists" criticised Sovnarkom's economic policy as too moderate; they wanted nationalisation of all industry, agriculture, trade, finance, transport, and communication. Lenin believed that this was impractical at that stage and that the government should only nationalise Russia's large-scale capitalist enterprises, such as the banks, railways, larger landed estates, and larger factories and mines, allowing smaller businesses to operate privately until they grew large enough to be successfully nationalised. Lenin also disagreed with the Left Communists about the economic organisation; in June 1918, he argued that centralised economic control of industry was needed, whereas Left Communists wanted each factory to be controlled by its workers, a syndicalist approach that Lenin considered detrimental to the cause of socialism.
Adopting a left-libertarian perspective, both the Left Communists and other factions in the Communist Party critiqued the decline of democratic institutions in Russia. Internationally, many socialists decried Lenin's regime and denied that he was establishing socialism; in particular, they highlighted the lack of widespread political participation, popular consultation, and industrial democracy. In late 1918, the Czech-Austrian Marxist Karl Kautsky authored an anti-Leninist pamphlet condemning the anti-democratic nature of Soviet Russia, to which Lenin published a vociferous reply, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg echoed Kautsky's views, while Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin described the Bolshevik seizure of power as "the burial of the Russian Revolution."
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk: 1917–1918
[By prolonging the war] we unusually strengthen German imperialism, and the peace will have to be concluded anyway, but then the peace will be worse because it will be concluded by someone other than ourselves. No doubt the peace which we are now being forced to conclude is an indecent peace, but if war commences our government will be swept away and the peace will be concluded by another government.
Upon taking power, Lenin believed that a key policy of his government must be to withdraw from the First World War by establishing an armistice with the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. He believed that ongoing war would create resentment among war-weary Russian troops, to whom he had promised peace, and that these troops and the advancing German Army threatened both his own government and the cause of international socialism. By contrast, other Bolsheviks, in particular Nikolai Bukharin and the Left Communists, believed that peace with the Central Powers would be a betrayal of international socialism and that Russia should instead wage "a war of revolutionary defence" that would provoke an uprising of the German proletariat against their own government.
Lenin proposed a three-month armistice in his Decree on Peace of November 1917, which was approved by the Second Congress of Soviets and presented to the German and Austro-Hungarian governments. The Germans responded positively, viewing this as an opportunity to focus on the Western Front and stave off looming defeat. In November, armistice talks began at Brest-Litovsk, the headquarters of the German high command on the Eastern Front, with the Russian delegation being led by Trotsky and Adolph Joffe. Meanwhile, a ceasefire until January was agreed. During negotiations, the Germans insisted on keeping their wartime conquests, which included Poland, Lithuania, and Courland, whereas the Russians countered that this was a violation of these nations' rights to self-determination. Some Bolsheviks had expressed hopes of dragging out negotiations until proletarian revolution broke out throughout Europe. On 7 January 1918, Trotsky returned from Brest-Litovsk to St. Petersburg with an ultimatum from the Central Powers: either Russia accept Germany's territorial demands or the war would resume.
In January and again in February, Lenin urged the Bolsheviks to accept Germany's proposals. He argued that the territorial losses were acceptable if it ensured the survival of the Bolshevik-led government. The majority of Bolsheviks rejected his position, hoping to prolong the armistice and call Germany's bluff. On 18 February, the German Army launched Operation Faustschlag, advancing further into Russian-controlled territory and conquering Dvinsk within a day. At this point, Lenin finally convinced a small majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee to accept the Central Powers' demands. On 23 February, the Central Powers issued a new ultimatum: Russia had to recognise German control not only of Poland and the Baltic states but also of Ukraine or face a full-scale invasion.
On 3 March, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed. It resulted in massive territorial losses for Russia, with 26% of the former Empire's population, 37% of its agricultural harvest area, 28% of its industry, 26% of its railway tracks, and three-quarters of its coal and iron deposits being transferred to German control. Accordingly, the Treaty was deeply unpopular across Russia's political spectrum, and several Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries resigned from Sovnarkom in protest. After the Treaty, Sovnarkom focused on trying to foment proletarian revolution in Germany, issuing an array of anti-war and anti-government publications in the country; the German government retaliated by expelling Russia's diplomats. The Treaty nevertheless failed to stop the Central Powers' defeat; in November 1918, the German Emperor Wilhelm II abdicated and the country's new administration signed the Armistice with the Allies. As a result, Sovnarkom proclaimed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk void.
Anti-Kulak campaigns, Cheka, and Red Terror: 1918–1922
[The bourgeoisie] practised terror against the workers, soldiers and peasants in the interests of a small group of landowners and bankers, whereas the Soviet regime applies decisive measures against landowners, plunderers and their accomplices in the interests of the workers, soldiers and peasants.
By early 1918, many cities in western Russia faced famine as a result of chronic food shortages. Lenin blamed this on the kulaks, or wealthier peasants, who allegedly hoarded the grain that they had produced to increase its financial value. In May 1918, he issued a requisitioning order that established armed detachments to confiscate grain from kulaks for distribution in the cities, and in June called for the formation of Committees of Poor Peasants to aid in requisitioning. This policy resulted in vast social disorder and violence, as armed detachments often clashed with peasant groups, helping to set the stage for the civil war. A prominent example of Lenin's views was his August 1918 telegram to the Bolsheviks of Penza, which called upon them to suppress a peasant insurrection by publicly hanging at least 100 "known kulaks, rich men, [and] bloodsuckers."
The requisitions disincentivised peasants from producing more grain than they could personally consume, and thus production slumped. A booming black market supplemented the official state-sanctioned economy, and Lenin called on speculators, black marketeers and looters to be shot. Both the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries condemned the armed appropriations of grain at the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets in July 1918. Realising that the Committees of the Poor Peasants were also persecuting peasants who were not kulaks and thus contributing to anti-government feeling among the peasantry, in December 1918 Lenin abolished them.
Lenin repeatedly emphasised the need for terror and violence in overthrowing the old order and ensuring the success of the revolution. Speaking to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets in November 1917, he declared that "the state is an institution built up for the sake of exercising violence. Previously, this violence was exercised by a handful of moneybags over the entire people; now we want [...] to organise violence in the interests of the people." He strongly opposed suggestions to abolish capital punishment. Fearing anti-Bolshevik forces would overthrow his administration, in December 1917 Lenin ordered the establishment of the Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, or Cheka, a political police force led by Felix Dzerzhinsky.
In September 1918, Sovnarkom passed a decree that inaugurated the Red Terror, a system of repression orchestrated by the Cheka secret police.[261] Although sometimes described as an attempt to eliminate the entire bourgeoisie, Lenin did not want to exterminate all members of this class, merely those who sought to reinstate their rule. The majority of the Terror's victims were well-to-do citizens or former members of the Tsarist administration; others were non-bourgeois anti-Bolsheviks and perceived social undesirables such as prostitutes. The Cheka claimed the right to both sentence and execute anyone whom it deemed to be an enemy of the government, without recourse to the Revolutionary Tribunals. Accordingly, throughout Soviet Russia the Cheka carried out killings, often in large numbers. For example, the Petrograd Cheka executed 512 people in a few days. There are no surviving records to provide an accurate figure of how many perished in the Red Terror; later estimates of historians have ranged between 10,000 and 15,000, and 50,000 to 140,000.
Lenin never witnessed this violence or participated in it first-hand, and publicly distanced himself from it. His published articles and speeches rarely called for executions, but he regularly did so in his coded telegrams and confidential notes. Many Bolsheviks expressed disapproval of the Cheka's mass executions and feared the organisation's apparent unaccountability. The Communist Party tried to restrain its activities in February 1919, stripping it of its powers of tribunal and execution in those areas not under official martial law, but the Cheka continued as before in swathes of the country. By 1920, the Cheka had become the most powerful institution in Soviet Russia, exerting influence over all other state apparatus.
A decree in April 1919 resulted in the establishment of concentration camps, which were entrusted to the Cheka, later administered by a new government agency, Gulag. By the end of 1920, 84 camps had been established across Soviet Russia, holding about 50,000 prisoners; by October 1923, this had grown to 315 camps and about 70,000 inmates. Those interned in the camps were used as slave labour. From July 1922, intellectuals deemed to be opposing the Bolshevik government were exiled to inhospitable regions or deported from Russia altogether; Lenin personally scrutinised the lists of those to be dealt with in this manner. In May 1922, Lenin issued a decree calling for the execution of anti-Bolshevik priests, causing between 14,000 and 20,000 deaths. The Russian Orthodox Church was worst affected; the government's anti-religious policies also harmed Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, Jewish synagogues, and Islamic mosques.
Civil War and the Polish–Soviet War: 1918–1920
The existence of the Soviet Republic alongside the imperialist states over the long run is unthinkable. In the end, either the one or the other will triumph. And until that end will have arrived, a series of the most terrible conflicts between the Soviet Republic and the bourgeois governments is unavoidable. This means that the ruling class, the proletariat, if it only wishes to rule and is to rule, must demonstrate this also with its military organization.
Lenin expected Russia's aristocracy and bourgeoisie to oppose his government, but he believed that the numerical superiority of the lower classes, coupled with the Bolsheviks' ability to effectively organise them, guaranteed a swift victory in any conflict. In this, he failed to anticipate the intensity of the violent opposition to Bolshevik rule in Russia. A long and bloody Civil War ensued between the Bolshevik Reds and the anti-Bolshevik Whites, starting in 1917 and ending in 1923 with the Reds' victory. It also encompassed ethnic conflicts on Russia's borders, and anti-Bolshevik peasant and left-wing uprisings throughout the former Empire. Accordingly, various historians have seen the civil war as representing two distinct conflicts: one between the revolutionaries and the counterrevolutionaries, and the other between different revolutionary factions.
The White armies were established by former Tsarist military officers, and included Anton Denikin's Volunteer Army in South Russia, Alexander Kolchak's forces in Siberia, and Nikolai Yudenich's troops in the newly independent Baltic states. The Whites were bolstered when 35,000 members of the Czech Legion, who were prisoners of war from the conflict with the Central Powers, turned against Sovnarkom and allied with the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch), an anti-Bolshevik government established in Samara. The Whites were also backed by Western governments who perceived the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk as a betrayal of the Allied war effort and feared the Bolsheviks' calls for world revolution. In 1918, Great Britain, France, United States, Canada, Italy, and Serbia landed 10,000 troops in Murmansk, seizing Kandalaksha, while later that year British, American, and Japanese forces landed in Vladivostok. Western troops soon pulled out of the civil war, instead only supporting the Whites with officers, technicians and armaments, but Japan remained because they saw the conflict as an opportunity for territorial expansion.
Lenin tasked Trotsky with establishing a Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, and with his support, Trotsky organised a Revolutionary Military Council in September 1918, remaining its chairman until 1925. Recognising their valuable military experience, Lenin agreed that officers from the old Tsarist army could serve in the Red Army, although Trotsky established military councils to monitor their activities. The Reds held control of Russia's two largest cities, Moscow and Petrograd, as well as most of Great Russia, while the Whites were located largely on the former Empire's peripheries. The latter were therefore hindered by being both fragmented and geographically scattered, and because their ethnic Russian supremacism alienated the region's national minorities. Anti-Bolshevik armies carried out the White Terror, a campaign of violence against perceived Bolshevik supporters which was typically more spontaneous than the state-sanctioned Red Terror. Both White and Red Armies were responsible for attacks against Jewish communities, prompting Lenin to issue a condemnation of antisemitism, blaming prejudice against Jews on capitalist propaganda.
In July 1918, Sverdlov informed Sovnarkom that the Ural Regional Soviet had overseen the murder of the former Tsar and his immediate family in Yekaterinburg to prevent them from being rescued by advancing White troops. Although lacking proof, biographers and historians like Richard Pipes and Dmitri Volkogonov have expressed the view that the killing was probably sanctioned by Lenin; conversely, historian James Ryan cautioned that there was "no reason" to believe this. Whether Lenin sanctioned it or not, he still regarded it as necessary, highlighting the precedent set by the execution of Louis XVI in the French Revolution.
After the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries had abandoned the coalition and increasingly viewed the Bolsheviks as traitors to the revolution. In July 1918, the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Yakov Blumkin assassinated the German ambassador to Russia, Wilhelm von Mirbach, hoping that the ensuing diplomatic incident would lead to a relaunched revolutionary war against Germany. The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries then launched a coup in Moscow, shelling the Kremlin and seizing the city's central post office before being stopped by Trotsky's forces. The party's leaders and many members were arrested and imprisoned but were treated more leniently than other opponents of the Bolsheviks.
By 1919, the White armies were in retreat and by the start of 1920 were defeated on all three fronts. Although Sovnarkom were victorious, the territorial extent of the Russian state had been reduced, for many non-Russian ethnic groups had used the disarray to push for national independence. In March 1921, during a related war against Poland, the Peace of Riga was signed, splitting disputed territories in Belarus and Ukraine between the Republic of Poland and Soviet Russia. Soviet Russia sought to re-conquer all newly independent nations of the former Empire, although their success was limited. Estonia, Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania all repelled Soviet invasions, while Ukraine, Belarus (as a result of the Polish–Soviet War), Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia were occupied by the Red Army. By 1921, Soviet Russia had defeated the Ukrainian national movements and occupied the Caucasus, although anti-Bolshevik uprisings in Central Asia lasted until the late 1920s.
After the German Ober Ost garrisons were withdrawn from the Eastern Front following the Armistice, both Soviet Russian armies and Polish ones moved in to fill the vacuum. The newly independent Polish state and the Soviet government each sought territorial expansion in the region. Polish and Russian troops first clashed in February 1919, with the conflict developing into the Polish–Soviet War. Unlike the Soviets' previous conflicts, this had greater implications for the export of revolution and the future of Europe. Polish forces pushed into Ukraine and by May 1920 had taken Kiev from the Soviets. After forcing the Polish Army back, Lenin urged the Red Army to invade Poland itself, believing that the Polish proletariat would rise up to support the Russian troops and thus spark European revolution. Trotsky and other Bolsheviks were sceptical, but agreed to the invasion. The Polish proletariat did not rise, and the Red Army was defeated at the Battle of Warsaw. The Polish armies pushed the Red Army back into Russia, forcing Sovnarkom to sue for peace; the war culminated in the Peace of Riga, in which Russia ceded territory to Poland.
Death and funeral: 1923–1924
Lenin's funeral, as painted by Isaac Brodsky, 1925
In March 1923, Lenin had a third stroke and lost his ability to speak; that month, he experienced partial paralysis on his right side and began exhibiting sensory aphasia. By May, he appeared to be making a slow recovery, regaining some of his mobility, speech, and writing skills. In October, he made a final visit to the Kremlin. In his final weeks, Lenin was visited by Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin; the latter visited him at his Gorki mansion on the day of his death. On 21 January 1924, Lenin fell into a coma and died later that day at age 53. His official cause of death was recorded as an incurable disease of the blood vessels. "Good dog", are said to have been Lenin's last words, upon his dog having brought him a dead bird.
The Soviet government publicly announced Lenin's death the following day. On 23 January, mourners from the Communist Party, trade unions, and Soviets visited his Gorki home to inspect the body, which was carried aloft in a red coffin by leading Bolsheviks. Transported by train to Moscow, the coffin was taken to the House of Trade Unions, where the body lay in state. Over the next three days, around a million mourners came to see the body, many queuing for hours in the freezing conditions. On 26 January, the eleventh All-Union Congress of Soviets met to pay respects, with speeches by Kalinin, Zinoviev, and Stalin. Notably, Trotsky was absent; he had been convalescing in the Caucasus, and he later claimed that Stalin sent him a telegram with the incorrect date of the planned funeral, making it impossible for him to arrive in time. Lenin's funeral took place the following day, when his body was carried to Red Square, accompanied by martial music, where assembled crowds listened to a series of speeches before the corpse was placed into the vault of a specially erected mausoleum. Despite the freezing temperatures, tens of thousands attended.
Against Krupskaya's protestations, Lenin's body was embalmed to preserve it for long-term public display in the Red Square mausoleum. During this process, Lenin's brain was removed; in 1925 an institute was established to dissect it, revealing that Lenin had had severe sclerosis. In July 1929, the Politburo agreed to replace the temporary mausoleum with a permanent one in granite, which was finished in 1933. His sarcophagus was replaced in 1940 and again in 1970. For safety amid the Second World War, from 1941 to 1945 the body was temporarily moved to Tyumen. As of 2023, his body remains on public display in Lenin's Mausoleum on Red Square.
August Macke (1887 à Meschede – 1914 près de Perthes-lès-Hurlus, Champagne, FR) illustre par son œuvre la curiosité d'une jeune génération d'artistes qui, en divers lieux d'Europe, puis d'Amérique, s'engagent dans l'établissement d'une nouvelle perception du monde et d'un nouveau sens de la vie – voire, dans bien des cas, dans la provocation par des scandales délibérément mis en scène :
« Tout cela », écrit Macke en 1913 dans une lettre à un ami, « le cubisme, le futurisme, l'expressionnisme et la peinture abstraite ne sont que les termes d'un changement de direction que notre pensée picturale veut opérer et opère.»
Ses œuvres se caractérisent par la vitalité et la sensualité de la vie.
Cela se reflète dans la force et la beauté des couleurs, qui dépassent souvent les formes picturales individuelles et intérieures pour envahir l'ensemble du tableau. Sans adhérer rigidement à un manifeste artistique ni radicaliser unilatéralement son langage visuel, August Macke reste ouvert à de nombreuses influences et stimulations dans sa pensée artistique, tout en créant une œuvre indépendante qui offre une synthèse exemplaire des caractéristiques spécifiques de l'expressionnisme rhénan. Son regard se tourne ainsi vers l'Occident : vers la France, vers Paris où, dans les œuvres de Robert Delaunay, il estime avoir trouvé une âme sœur.
Avec des peintures, des sculptures et des gravures, la vaste collection Macke du Kunstmuseum Bonn comprend des œuvres de toutes les phases de la création de l'artiste.
August Macke (1887 in Meschede – 1914 near Perthes-lès-Hurlus, Champagne, FR) illustrates through his work the curiosity of a young generation of artists who, in various parts of Europe and later America, were committed to establishing a new perception of the world and a new meaning of life—in many cases, even to provocation through deliberately staged scandals:
"All this," Macke wrote in a 1913 letter to a friend, "Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, and abstract painting are merely the terms of a change of direction that our pictorial thinking seeks to bring about and does bring about."
His works are characterized by the vitality and sensuality of life.
This is reflected in the strength and beauty of the colors, which often transcend individual, inner pictorial forms to invade the entire picture. Without rigidly adhering to an artistic manifesto or unilaterally radicalizing his visual language, August Macke remained open to numerous influences and stimuli in his artistic thinking, while creating an independent body of work that offers an exemplary synthesis of the specific characteristics of Rhenish Expressionism. His gaze thus turned toward the West: toward France, toward Paris, where, in the works of Robert Delaunay, he felt he had found a kindred spirit.
With paintings, sculptures, and prints, the Kunstmuseum Bonn's extensive Macke Collection includes works from all phases of the artist's creative process.
I've always liked to imagine that the Manic Street Preachers' 1998 song 'If you tolerate this your children will be next' was about the Daily Mail and the fact that if we're not careful they'll be putting out a daily junior edition to indoctrinate our children into their radicalised nonsensical thinking.
Then before you can say 'Social websites harm a child's brain!' we'll all be making highly judgemental knee jerk reactions to every possible scenario, whether we know a single thing about it or not. This would inevitably lead to a catastrophic chain of events whereby most of the UK population would become diehard Daily Mail readers and we'd become a totalitarian police state. id-iom would then have to raise a resistance army made up from the hardy few who experienced a serious case of cognitive dissonance on perusing the Mail. I can only imagine the resulting conflict would be much like the film 'Red Dawn' (the 1984 version not the 2012 version) and we'd eventually rise triumphant in some bleak alternate universe.
After a quick bit of internet research it actually turns out that the song is actually about the Spanish Civil War. Apart from that however I'd like to think my imagined story still holds true. If you haven't read the Daily Mail and generally disklike everything in life then maybe, just maybe, you should give it a go. Anyway, what else was I meant to do with a copy of the Daily Mail?
Cheers
id-iom
Title: If you hate everything....
Materials: Newspaper, spray paint, stencils, paint pen and varnish
Size: 40 x 40 cm
Available - Please email if interested
August Macke (1887 à Meschede – 1914 près de Perthes-lès-Hurlus, Champagne, FR) illustre par son œuvre la curiosité d'une jeune génération d'artistes qui, en divers lieux d'Europe, puis d'Amérique, s'engagent dans l'établissement d'une nouvelle perception du monde et d'un nouveau sens de la vie – voire, dans bien des cas, dans la provocation par des scandales délibérément mis en scène :
« Tout cela », écrit Macke en 1913 dans une lettre à un ami, « le cubisme, le futurisme, l'expressionnisme et la peinture abstraite ne sont que les termes d'un changement de direction que notre pensée picturale veut opérer et opère.»
Ses œuvres se caractérisent par la vitalité et la sensualité de la vie.
Cela se reflète dans la force et la beauté des couleurs, qui dépassent souvent les formes picturales individuelles et intérieures pour envahir l'ensemble du tableau. Sans adhérer rigidement à un manifeste artistique ni radicaliser unilatéralement son langage visuel, August Macke reste ouvert à de nombreuses influences et stimulations dans sa pensée artistique, tout en créant une œuvre indépendante qui offre une synthèse exemplaire des caractéristiques spécifiques de l'expressionnisme rhénan. Son regard se tourne ainsi vers l'Occident : vers la France, vers Paris où, dans les œuvres de Robert Delaunay, il estime avoir trouvé une âme sœur.
Avec des peintures, des sculptures et des gravures, la vaste collection Macke du Kunstmuseum Bonn comprend des œuvres de toutes les phases de la création de l'artiste.
August Macke (1887 in Meschede – 1914 near Perthes-lès-Hurlus, Champagne, FR) illustrates through his work the curiosity of a young generation of artists who, in various parts of Europe and later America, were committed to establishing a new perception of the world and a new meaning of life—in many cases, even to provocation through deliberately staged scandals:
"All this," Macke wrote in a 1913 letter to a friend, "Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, and abstract painting are merely the terms of a change of direction that our pictorial thinking seeks to bring about and does bring about."
His works are characterized by the vitality and sensuality of life.
This is reflected in the strength and beauty of the colors, which often transcend individual, inner pictorial forms to invade the entire picture. Without rigidly adhering to an artistic manifesto or unilaterally radicalizing his visual language, August Macke remained open to numerous influences and stimuli in his artistic thinking, while creating an independent body of work that offers an exemplary synthesis of the specific characteristics of Rhenish Expressionism. His gaze thus turned toward the West: toward France, toward Paris, where, in the works of Robert Delaunay, he felt he had found a kindred spirit.
With paintings, sculptures, and prints, the Kunstmuseum Bonn's extensive Macke Collection includes works from all phases of the artist's creative process.
The Postcard
A postally unused Auto-Photo Series postcard bearing an early image of London Bridge.
The Sale and Removal of London Bridge
By 1896 the bridge was the busiest point in London, and one of its most congested, with 8,000 pedestrians and 900 vehicles crossing every hour. To designs by engineer Edward Cruttwell, it was widened in 1904 by 13 feet (4.0 m), using granite corbels.
However subsequent surveys showed that the bridge was sinking an inch (about 2.5 cm) every eight years, and by 1924 the east side had sunk some three to four inches (about 9 cm) lower than the west side. It was concluded that the bridge would have to be removed and replaced.
Council member Ivan Luckin put forward the idea of selling the bridge, and recalled:
"They all thought I was completely
crazy when I suggested we should
sell London Bridge when it needed
replacing."
Subsequently, in 1968, Council placed the bridge on the market and began to look for potential buyers. On the 18th. April 1968, Rennie's bridge was purchased by the Missourian entrepreneur Robert P. McCulloch of McCulloch Oil for $2,460,000.
The claim that McCulloch believed mistakenly that he was buying the more impressive Tower Bridge was denied by Ivan Luckin in a newspaper interview.
Before the bridge was taken apart, each granite facing block was marked for later reassembly. The blocks were taken to Merrivale Quarry at Princetown in Devon, where 15 to 20 cm (6 to 8 in) were sliced off the inner faces of many, in order to facilitate their fixing.
Stones left behind were sold in an online auction when the quarry was abandoned and flooded in 2003. 10,000 tons of granite blocks were shipped via the Panama Canal to California, then trucked from Long Beach to Arizona.
They were used to face a new, purpose-built hollow core steel-reinforced concrete structure, ensuring that the bridge would support the weight of modern traffic. The bridge was reconstructed at Lake Havasu City, Arizona, and was re-dedicated on the 10th. October 1971 in a ceremony attended by London's Lord Mayor and celebrities.
The bridge carries the McCulloch Boulevard and spans the Bridgewater Channel, an artificial, navigable waterway that leads from the Uptown area of Lake Havasu City.
Terror Attacks on London Bridge and Nearby
There have been four terror attacks on or near London Bridge dating back to 1884. They are as follows:
(1) The 1884 London Bridge Terror Attack
On Saturday 13th. December 1884, two American-Irish Republicans carried out a dynamite attack on London Bridge as part of the Fenian dynamite campaign.
The bomb went off prematurely while the men were in a boat attaching it to a bridge pier at 5.45 pm during the evening rush hour. There was little damage to the bridge, and no casualties other than the bombers.
However, there was considerable collateral damage, and hundreds of windows were shattered on both banks of the Thames. The men's boat was so completely destroyed that the police initially thought the bombers had fled.
On the 25th. December 1884 the mutilated remains of one of the bombers were found. The body of the other man was never recovered, but the police were later able to identify the dead men as two Americans, William Mackey Lomasney, and John Fleming.
The men were identified after a landlord reported to police that dynamite had been found in the rented premises of two American gentlemen who had disappeared after the 13th. December, enabling police to piece together who was responsible for the attack.
The men had already been under surveillance by the police in both America and Great Britain.
(2) The 1992 London Bridge Bombing
On Friday the 28th. February 1992, the Provisional IRA exploded a bomb inside London Bridge station during the morning rush hour, causing extensive damage and wounding 29 people. It was one of many bombings carried out by one of the IRA's London active service units. It occurred just over a year after a bomb at Victoria station.
-- The 1992 Bombing
At around 8:20 am, someone rang Ulster Television's London office warning that a bomb was going to explode in a London station, without saying which one.
About ten minutes later, the bomb detonated, which made debris fly almost 50 feet (15 m) away from the blast area. Twenty nine people were hurt in the explosion, most of them from flying glass and other bits of debris; four were seriously hurt, but nobody was killed.
The victims were treated at Guy's Hospital.
-- Aftermath of the 1992 Explosion
The head of Scotland Yard's anti terrorist squad, George Churchill-Coleman, said that the 2 lb (910 g) bomb of high explosives was "clearly designed to kill."
Investigations suggested that the bomb had been placed in the men's restrooms. Churchill-Coleman added that the IRA's warning was "deliberately vague," and was given too late to act upon.
Prime Minister John Major said that the bombing would not change British policy in Northern Ireland:
"It was pointless. It was cowardly. It was
directed against innocent people and it
will make absolutely no difference to
our policy -- no difference at all."
Fearing additional IRA attacks on public transport, the security services warned commuters "more than ever" to stay on guard at all times. The next day, another bomb went off in London, by the Crown Prosecution Service office, injuring two more people and bringing the total injured to 31 in the space of just over 24 hours.
This was one of dozens of bombs that detonated in London that year, the biggest of which was the Baltic Exchange bombing, killing three people and causing almost £1 billion worth of damage.
The IRA maintained this pressure, bombing mainland Britain and especially the City of London as much as possible until the ceasefire of 1994.
(3) The 2017 London Bridge Attack
On the 3rd. June 2017, a terrorist vehicle-ramming and stabbing took place in London when a van was deliberately driven into pedestrians on London Bridge, and then crashed on Borough High Street, just south of the River Thames.
The van's three occupants then ran to the nearby Borough Market area and began stabbing people in and around restaurants and pubs. They were shot dead by Metropolitan and City of London Police authorised firearms officers, and were found to be wearing fake explosive vests.
Eight people were killed and 48 were injured, including members of the public and four unarmed police officers who attempted to stop the assailants. British authorities described the perpetrators as radical Islamic terrorists.
The Islamic State (ISIS) claimed responsibility for the attack.
-- Background to the 2017 Attack
In March 2017, five people had been killed in a combined vehicle and knife attack at Westminster. In late May, a suicide bomber killed 22 people at an Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena.
After the Manchester bombing, the UK's terror threat level was raised to "critical", its highest level, until the 27th. May 2017, when it was lowered to severe.
-- The 2017 Attack
The attack was carried out using a white Renault Master hired earlier on the same evening in Harold Hill, by Khuram Butt. He had intended to hire a 7.5 tonne lorry, but was refused due to his failure to provide payment details.
The attackers were armed with 12-inch (30 cm) kitchen knives with ceramic blades, which they tied to their wrists with leather straps. They also prepared fake explosive belts by wrapping water bottles in grey tape.
At 21:58 on the 3rd. June 2017, the van travelled south across London Bridge, and returned six minutes later, crossing over the bridge northbound, making a U-turn at the northern end and then driving southbound across the bridge.
It mounted the pavement three times and hit multiple pedestrians, killing two. Witnesses said the van was travelling at high speed. 999 emergency calls were first recorded at 22:07. The van was later found to contain 13 wine bottles containing flammable liquid with rags stuffed in them, along with blow torches.
The van crashed on Borough High Street after crossing the central reservation. The van's tyres were destroyed by the central reservation, and the three attackers, armed with knives, abandoned the vehicle.
Then they ran down the steps to Green Dragon Court, where they killed five people outside and near the Boro Bistro pub. The attackers then went back up the steps to Borough High Street and attacked three bystanders.
Police tried to fight the attackers, but were stabbed, and Ignacio Echeverría helped them by striking the terrorist Redouane and possibly Zaghba with his skateboard. Echeverría was later killed outside Lobos Meat and Tapas.
Members of the public threw bottles and chairs at the attackers. Witnesses reported that the attackers were shouting:
"This is for Allah".
People in and around a number of other restaurants and bars along Stoney Street were also attacked. During the attack, an unknown man was spared by Rachid Redouane, but despite many efforts the man was never found.
A Romanian baker hit one of the attackers over the head with a crate before giving shelter to 20 people inside a bakery inside Borough Market.
One man fought the three attackers with his fists in the Black and Blue steakhouse, shouting:
"F*** you, I'm Millwall."
His actions gave members of the public who were in the restaurant the opportunity to run away. He was stabbed eight times in the hands, chest and head. He underwent surgery at St Thomas' Hospital, and was taken off the critical list on the 4th. June.
A British Transport Police officer armed with a baton also took on the attackers, receiving multiple stab wounds and temporarily losing sight in his right eye as a consequence.
Off-duty Metropolitan police constables Liam Jones and Stewart Henderson rendered first aid to seriously injured members of the public before protecting over 150 people inside the Thameside Inn and evacuating them by Metropolitan marine support unit and RNLI boats to the north shore of the Thames.
The three attackers were then shot dead by armed officers from the City of London and Metropolitan police Specialist Firearms Command eight minutes after the initial emergency call was made.
CCTV footage showed the three attackers in Borough Market running at the armed officers; the attackers were shot dead 20 seconds later. A total of 46 rounds were fired by three City of London and five Metropolitan Police officers.
-- Aftermath of the 2017 Attack
The Metropolitan Police issued 'Run, Hide, Tell' notices via social media during the attack, and asked the public to remain calm and vigilant.
All buildings within the vicinity of London Bridge were evacuated, and London Bridge, Borough and Bank Underground stations were closed at the request of the police.
The mainline railway stations at London Bridge, Waterloo East, Charing Cross and Cannon Street were also closed. The Home Secretary approved the deployment of a military counter terrorist unit from the Special Air Service (SAS).
The helicopters carrying the SAS landed on London Bridge to support the Metropolitan Police because of concerns that there might be more attackers at large.
The Metropolitan Police Marine Policing Unit dispatched boats on the River Thames, with assistance from the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), to contribute to the evacuation of the area and look for any casualties who might have fallen from the bridge.
A stabbing incident took place in Vauxhall at 23:45, causing Vauxhall station to be briefly closed; this was later confirmed to be unrelated to the attack.
At 01:45 on the 4th. June, controlled explosions took place of the attackers' bomb vests, which were found to be fake.
An emergency COBR meeting was held on the morning of the 4th. June. London Bridge mainline railway and underground stations remained closed throughout the 4th. June. A cordon was established around the scene of the attack. London Bridge station reopened at 05:00 on Monday the 5th. June.
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan said that there was a surge of hate crimes and islamophobic incidents following the attack.
New security measures were implemented on eight central London bridges following the attack, to reduce the likelihood of further vehicle attacks, with concrete barriers being installed. The barriers have been criticised for causing severe congestion in cycle lanes during peak hours.
Borough Market reopened on the 14th. June.
-- Casualties of the 2017 Attack
Eight civilians died in the attack: one Spaniard, one Briton, two Australians, one Canadian and three French citizens were killed by the attackers, and the three attackers themselves were killed by armed police.
Two of the civilian fatalities were caused in the initial vehicle-ramming attack, while the remaining six were stabbed to death. One body was recovered from the Thames near Limehouse several days after the attack.
48 people were injured in the attack, including one New Zealander, two Australians, two Germans and four French citizens.
Of the 48 people admitted to hospital, 21 were initially reported to be in a critical condition.
Four police officers were among those injured in the attack. A British Transport Police officer was stabbed, and suffered serious injuries to his head, face and neck. An off-duty Metropolitan Police officer was seriously injured when he was stabbed.
Two other Metropolitan Police officers received head and arm injuries. As a result of police gunfire, a bystander received an accidental gunshot wound, which was not critical.
-- The 2017 Attackers
On the 4th. June the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, said that:
"We are confident about the fact that
they were radical Islamic terrorists, the
way they were inspired, and we need
to find out more about where this
radicalisation came from."
Amaq News Agency, an online outlet associated with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), said the attackers were ISIS fighters.
On the 5th. June, two of the attackers were identified as Khuram Shazad Butt and Rachid Redouane. The third of the three attackers, Youssef Zaghba, was identified the following day.
(a) Khuram Shazad Butt
Butt (born 20th. April 1990) was a Pakistan-born British citizen whose family came from Jhelum. He grew up in Great Britain, living in Plaistow.
He had a wife and two children. Neighbours told the BBC that Butt had been reported to police for attempting to radicalise children; he had also expressed disgust at the way women dressed.
He was known to police as a "heavyweight" member of the banned extremist group al-Muhajiroun. A BBC interviewee said he had a verbal confrontation with Butt in 2013 on the day after another Al-Muhajiroun follower had murdered Fusilier Lee Rigby.
Butt was part of an al-Muhajiroun campaign in 2015 to intimidate Muslims who planned to vote in the UK general elections of that year, on the basis that it was forbidden in Islam.
He was known for holding extreme views, having been barred from two local mosques. He appeared on a 2016 Channel 4 Television documentary, The Jihadis Next Door, which showed him arguing with police over the unfurling of an ISIL black flag in Regent's Park.
According to a friend, he had been radicalised by the YouTube videos of the American Muslim hate preacher Ahmad Musa Jibril. Butt was known to have taken drugs before he became radicalised.
After radicalisation, Butt started to stop his neighbours on the street and ask them whether they had been to the mosque.
Butt had worked for a man accused of training Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the July 2005 London bombing. The police and MI5 knew of Butt, and he was investigated in 2015. The investigation was later "moved into the lower echelons", and his file was classed as low priority.
Butt sometimes manned the desk of the Ummah Fitness Centre gym, where he prayed regularly. CCTV footage was released of Butt, Redouane and Zaghba meeting outside the gym days before the attack. A senior figure at a local mosque had reported the gym to police.
The New York Times said that Butt and his brother were part of the UK government's Prevent programme, which aims to stop people from becoming terrorists, and which reports suspected radicals to police programmes.
At the time of the attack he was on police bail following an allegation of fraud, though the police had intended to take no further action due to a lack of evidence. He had previously been cautioned by police for fraud in 2008 and common assault in 2010.
(b) Rachid Redouane
Redouane (born 31 July 1986) was a failed asylum seeker in the UK, whose application was denied in 2009, and not previously known to police. He had claimed to be either Moroccan or Libyan.
Redouane worked as a pastry chef, and in 2012 he married an Irish woman in a ceremony in Ireland. He beat and bullied his wife.
He used to drink alcohol. He lived variously in Rathmines, a suburb of Dublin, also in Morocco and the UK. According to his wife, Redouane was most likely radicalised in Morocco. Later the couple stayed in the UK on an EU residency card where they had a daughter in 2015.
The couple separated in 2016 and she divorced him after he tried to force his extremist beliefs on her.
At the time of the attack, he was living in Dagenham, East London.
(c) Youssef Zaghba
Zaghba (born 1995 in Fez, Morocco) was at the time of the attack living in east London where he worked in a fast-food outlet. He also worked for an Islamic television channel in London.
Zaghba was born to a Moroccan Muslim father and an Italian Catholic Christian mother who had converted to Islam when she married. Zaghba had dual Moroccan and Italian nationality.
When his parents divorced, he went to Italy with his mother. In 2016, Zaghba was stopped at Bologna Guglielmo Marconi Airport by Italian officers who found ISIS-related materials on his mobile phone; he was stopped from continuing his journey to Istanbul.
Italian authorities said Zaghba was monitored continuously while in Italy and that the UK was informed about him. Giuseppe Amato, an Italian prosecutor, said:
"We did our best. We could just monitor
and surveil Zaghba and send a note to
the British authorities, that's all we could
do and we did it.
Since he moved to London, he came back
to Italy once in a while for a total of 10 days.
And during those 10 days we never let him
out of our sight."
According to The New York Times, the Italian branch of Al-Muhajiroun had introduced Butt to Zaghba.
-- Investigation of the 2017 Attack
On the morning of the 4th. June, police made 12 arrests following raids in flats in the Barking area of east London, where one of the attackers lived; controlled explosions were carried out during the raids.
Those held included five males aged between 27 and 55, arrested at one address in Barking, and six females aged between 19 and 60, arrested at a separate Barking address. One of the arrested males was subsequently released without charge.
Four properties in all were searched, including two in Newham in addition to the two in Barking. Further raids and arrests were made at properties in Newham and Barking early on the morning of the 5th. June.
On the 6th. June, a man was arrested in Barking, and another in Ilford the following day. By the 16th. June, all those arrested had been released without charge.
-- The Inquest Into the 2017 Attack
On the 7th. May 2019, an inquest into the deaths of the victims opened at the Old Bailey in London. Judge Mark Lucraft QC, Chief Coroner of England and Wales, presided, and people related to the dead gave accounts of what happened and who they had lost.
The inquest concluded on the 16th. July 2019 that all three attackers had been lawfully killed.
(4) The 2019 London Bridge Stabbing
On the 29th. November 2019, five people were stabbed, two fatally, in Central London. The attacker, Briton Usman Khan, had been released from prison in 2018 on licence after serving a sentence for terrorist offences.
Khan was attending an offender rehabilitation conference in Fishmongers' Hall when he threatened to detonate what turned out to be a fake suicide vest.
He started to attack people with two knives taped to his wrists, killing two of the conference participants by stabbing them in the chest.
Several people fought back, some attacking Khan with a fire extinguisher, a pike and a narwhal tusk as he fled the building and emerged on to London Bridge, where he was partially disarmed by a plain-clothes police officer.
He was restrained by members of the public until additional police officers arrived, pulled away those restraining him, and shot him.
-- Background to the 2019 Attack
A conference on offender rehabilitation was held on the 29th. November 2019 in Fishmongers' Hall, at the northern end of London Bridge, to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Learning Together. This is a programme run by the Cambridge Institute of Criminology to help offenders reintegrate into society following their release from prison.
Learning Together was set up in 2014 by University of Cambridge academics Ruth Armstrong and Amy Ludlow from the Faculty of Law and Institute of Criminology:
"To bring together people in criminal justice
and higher education institutions to study
alongside each other in inclusive and
transformative learning communities."
The programme served to enable students and prisoners to work together.
Former prisoner Usman Khan had been invited to the conference as a previous participant in the programme, and although banned from entering London under the terms of his release, he was granted a one-day exemption to attend.
-- The 2019 Attack
At 13:58 on the 29th. November, the police were called to Fishmongers' Hall after Khan, wearing a fake suicide vest, threatened to blow up the hall. The police reported that there had been no prior intelligence of the attack.
Holding two kitchen knives taped to his wrists, Khan began stabbing people inside the building. Several fought back, including a South African-born Londoner, Darryn Frost, who grabbed a 1.5-metre-long (4.9 ft) narwhal tusk from the wall to use as a weapon, former prisoner John Crilly, and Steven Gallant, a convicted murderer attending the conference on day release from prison.
Khan fled and began stabbing pedestrians outside on the north side of the bridge.
Several people were injured before members of the public, including a tour guide and a plain-clothes British Transport Police officer, later seen walking away with a knife, restrained and disarmed Khan on the bridge.
One of the people who stepped in to fight the attacker drove him back by spraying a fire extinguisher.
Armed officers of the City of London Police arrived at 14:03 and surrounded the attacker, who at the time was being restrained by a Ministry of Justice communications worker attending the rehabilitation meeting.
The officers pulled this person away to provide a clear shot, before one fired twice. Around 10 minutes after this, Khan started to get up; he was then shot 9 further times by 6 firearms officers. Khan had not been secured after the initial shooting due to the suicide vest. Khan died at the scene.
A Transport for London bus which had stopped adjacent to the site of the shooting was found to have damage to both its front and rear windows, possibly caused, according to the Metropolitan Police, by a ricocheting bullet.
-- The Victims of the 2019 Attack
Three of the victims were associated with Cambridge University's Learning Together prison-rehabilitation programme; two died and one was injured.
The two who died from their stab wounds were Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones.
Merritt was a 25-year-old law and criminology graduate from Cottenham, Cambridgeshire who had studied at the Universities of Manchester and Cambridge. He worked as a University of Cambridge administration officer, and was a course coordinator for Learning Together.
Jones was a 23 year old former Anglia Ruskin University and University of Cambridge student from Stratford-upon-Avon.
Funeral services for Merritt and Jones were conducted on the 20th. December 2019.
Two other women were seriously injured, while a chef who was working at the event was stabbed but had less serious injuries.
-- The Terrorist Usman Khan
Usman Khan was a 28-year-old British national from Stoke-on-Trent, of Pakistani descent. Khan appears to have left school with no qualifications after spending part of his late teens in Pakistan.
He was known to police, and had links to Islamist extremist groups. In December 2018 he had been automatically released from prison on licence, where he was serving a 16-year sentence for terrorism offences, and was wearing an electronic tag.
Khan had been part of a plot, inspired by Al-Qaeda, to establish a terrorist camp on his family's land in Kashmir and bomb the London Stock Exchange. The plot was disrupted by MI5 and the police, as part of MI5's Operation Guava (police Operation Norbury), and Khan was given an indeterminate sentence.
Of the nine men involved, Khan was the youngest at 19 and according to Mr Justice Wilkie, Khan and two others were “more serious jihadis” than the others.
In 2013, Khan's sentence was revised after an appeal, and he was ordered to serve at least 8 years of his new 16-year sentence, with a 5-year extended licence allowing recall to prison.
According to the anti-extremism group Hope not Hate, Khan was a supporter of Al-Muhajiroun, an extremist group with which scores of terrorists were involved. He was a student and personal friend of Anjem Choudary, an Islamist and terrorism supporter.
Post-mortem examination showed evidence of occasional use of cocaine by Khan.
-- Aftermath of the 2019 Attack
The news of the attack was broken live as it happened on the BBC by one of its reporters, John McManus, who witnessed members of the public fighting Khan as he crossed the bridge, and heard two shots being fired by police officers.
McManus said that he was certain that more than two shots were fired during the incident.
The police, ambulance, and fire services attended the scene, and a major incident was declared. A large police cordon was set up in the area and residents were told to stay away. Police closed both Monument Underground station and London Bridge station after the attack.
The Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, returned to Downing Street following the incident, after campaigning in his constituency for the forthcoming general election. Johnson commended the "immense bravery" of the emergency services and members of the public, and claimed that anyone involved in the attack would be hunted down.
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, thanked the emergency services and members of the public who helped to restrain the attacker, saying they had shown "breathtaking heroism".
The Conservative Party, Labour Party and Liberal Democrats temporarily suspended campaigning in London for the general election. A parliamentary election hustings event scheduled to be held at Great St. Mary's Church in Cambridge on the 30th. November was cancelled and replaced by a memorial vigil for the victims of the attack.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick made a statement following the attack. She said that there would be an increased police presence on the streets, and that cordons in the London Bridge area would remain in place. An appeal was made for the public to submit any film or picture evidence or information that could assist the investigation.
In Pakistan, publication of Khan's Pakistani origins by the leading newspaper Dawn were deemed unpatriotic and defamatory, and led to demonstrations demanding that the publisher and the editor be hanged.
The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack. Its news agency, Amaq, claimed Usman Khan was one of its fighters. A janaza prayer for Khan was held at a mosque in Birmingham, and he was buried in his family's ancestral village in Pakistan, following objections to his burial in the UK by local Muslims in his native Stoke.
In 2021, following an inquest, Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation Jonathan Hall QC called for those involved in the planning or preparation of terrorist attacks to be given automatic life sentences. Hall stated:
"It is hard to underestimate how serious
Usman Khan’s original offence was."
-- Investigations Into the 2019 Attack
London Bridge was closed until the early hours of the following Monday for forensic investigation of the scene. A property in Stafford and one in Stoke-on-Trent were searched by police.
An inquest into the deaths of Merritt and Jones was opened on the 4th. December 2019 at the Central Criminal Court in London, and was subsequently adjourned.
A pre-inquest review hearing took place at the Old Bailey on the 16th. October 2020, before the Chief Coroner of England and Wales, Mark Lucraft QC.
The inquest re-opened on the 12th. April 2021, presided over by Lucraft. On the 28th. May 2021 the jury concluded that the victims had been unlawfully killed.
They further concluded that insufficient monitoring of Khan, unreasonable belief in his rehabilitation, a lack of information sharing between agencies, and inadequate security planning at the event were all contributing factors in their deaths.
Khan's inquest, also overseen by Lucraft, found in June 2021 that Khan was lawfully killed by the police.
-- Royal Prerogative of Mercy for Steven Gallant
Steven Gallant was granted the Royal prerogative of mercy by the Lord Chancellor on behalf of the Queen in October 2020, in order to bring his parole hearing forward by ten months to June 2021.
The Ministry of Justice stated that:
"This is in recognition of his exceptionally
brave actions at Fishmongers’ Hall, which
helped save people's lives despite the
tremendous risk to his own".
Though the parole board still has to decide on whether to release him, it was reported that it would be unlikely for his case to be denied after the Queen's intervention. The families of both Merritt and of Gallant's 2005 murder victim approved the action due to his heroic deeds and efforts to turn his life around since the murder.
Fitzalan Square, Sheffield
This photograph was taken on 13th June 1982, on the final day of the Falklands War. It was taken with cheap 35mm film in a 1960s Zenit SLR, and has deteriorated somewhat over the intervening quarter of a century.
News of the World: ARGYS ARE ON THE RUN
Sunday People: BRITAIN ON ROAD TO VICTORY - PICTURES
Sunday Mirror: THE POPE'S ANGUISH - EXCLUSIVE
From 1980 to 1983, I lived in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. I often used to catch the bus from Fitzalan Square, and I took this photograph one Sunday morning as I crossed from the cinema to catch a bus. I was interested in the three newspaper billboards taped to the side of the old cab shelter.
On April 2nd 1982, the Argentinian military junta had invaded the Falkland Islands and South Georgia which, despite being just off their coast, were (and still are) claimed as British Overseas Territories. The British Government had responded by sending a task force to the South Atlantic to repel the invasion, which was completed by the Argentinian surrender on June 13th 1982.
The Falklands War revived the fortunes of the deeply unpopular Thatcher Government, and led inexorably to their landslide victory in the General Election the following year. The huge majority which the Government obtained in 1983 made it possible for them to push through far-reaching policies, including mass privatisation of public services, and a confrontation with the Trade Unions which would lead to the Miners' Strike, an event which would have a huge impact on the city in the photograph above.
It could be said that victory in the Falklands War was a pivotal moment, the biggest single catalyst which would change Britain forever, to the extent that we have a Labour Government now which is still following the policies set in motion by the Conservatives after the 1983 election. It also radicalised a largely disaffected youth culture, which may be one of the reasons that people now in their 40s are the least likely to vote for the two main political parties.
A total of 255 British soldiers lost their lives during the 74 days of the Falklands War, compared with the 191 who have been killed during the eight years of involvement so far in Afghanistan. We forget so easily.
That's a bus to Totley in the background.
This photo is part of my 100 strangers project. Find out more about the project and see pictures taken by other photographers at the 100 Strangers Flickr Group page www.flickr.com/groups/100strangers/
This woman is funny! Actually, she only told me that she flew in from Paris to give a single show that evening at the Ciné-Théâtre Le Château on St-Denis Street, but I checked out her material on the web. Her name is Samia Orosemane. She is a comic and has left many traces on YouTube. You can check out her material easily if you understand French.
I met her at the Maison de la Culture Ahuntsic-Cartierville on the closing day of my exhibition. She accompanied Ibtissem T., a lady I had the pleasure to meet this summer (see Stranger # 21). Despite busy schedules, they dropped by together for a visit before Samia’s show. We chatted a bit. I learned that Samia is Parisian. She was born in the 19th arrondissement of Paris from Tunisian parents. Her husband is from Martinique. She would like to come back to Québec and entertain us longer.
As I had to disassemble my exhibition that evening, I did not have the chance to see her show this time. I hope I’ll have the opportunity to catch her on stage in the future. Samia has a Canadian connection. This woman, who is as comfortable in social media as on stage, put a brief capsule on line in October 2014 after an attack by a fanatic at the Ottawa parliament. Although relieved that the assailant was not an Arabic-speaking Muslim (it was a radicalized convert of Québécois roots), her message was, in short: "Thank you to change religion, jihadists! That’s it! "
The capsule has been seen on various platforms, including her Facebook page, more than a million times. Today just because of this clip, she said that she gets invited as the nice Muslim woman, for example after Charlie Hebdo's attack. Be careful, she is more than that. She can be gently impertinent, hilarious and very generous with young talent that she contributes to discover.
To be continued.
Cette photo fait partie de mon projet 100 Strangers (100 inconnus). Apprenez en plus sur ce type de projet et voyez les photos d’autres photographes à 100 Strangers Flickr Group page
Elle est drôle cette femme! En fait, elle m’a simplement expliqué qu’elle était venue de Paris pour donner un seul spectacle le soir même au Théâtre-Ciné Le Château, rue St-Denis. J'ai cependant regardé un peu de son matériel sur le Web en riant un bon coup. Elle se nomme Samia Orosemane, est humoriste, et a laissé, elle aussi, beaucoup de trace sur You Tube.
Je l’ai rencontré à la Maison de la culture Ahuntsic-Cartierville le jour de la clôture de mon exposition. Elle accompagnait Ibtissem T., une dame que j’ai eu le bonheur de rencontrer cet été (voir l’article Stranger # 021). Malgré des horaires très chargés, elles sont passées ensemble me faire une visite avant le spectacle de Samia. Nous avons causé un peu. J’ai appris que Samia, est une parisienne née dans le 19e arrondissement de parents tunisiens. Son mari est originaire de Martinique. Elle voudrait bien revenir se produire devant nous plus longtemps.
Comme je devais démonter mon exposition le soir même, je n’ai pas eu la chance de voir son spectacle. J’aimerais bien pouvoir me reprendre. Samia a un lien avec le Canada. Cette femme qui est aussi à l’aise dans les médias sociaux que sur scène a pondu une brève capsule en octobre 2014 après l’attaque d’un illuminé au parlement d’Ottawa. Bien que soulagée que l’agresseur n’aient pas été un musulman arabophone (il s’agissait d’un converti pur laine radicalisé), son message en résumé était : « Merci aux djihadistes de changer de religion ! Voilà ! »
La capsule a été vue, sous diverses plateformes dont sa page Facebook, plus d’un million de fois. Aujourd’hui, un peu à cause de ce clip, elle dit être la gentille musulmane qu’on ressort, par exemple après les attentats de Charlie. Attention, elle est bien plus que cela. Elle peut être gentiment impertinente, rigolote et très généreuse avec les jeunes talents qu’elle contribue à faire découvrir.
À suivre.
JOHN LENNON and YOKO ONO (talk to Robin Blackburn and Tariq Ali)
Tariq Ali: Your latest record and your recent public statements, especially the interviews in Rolling Stone magazine, suggest that your views are becoming increasingly radical and political. When did this start to happen?
John Lennon: I've always been politically minded, you know, and against the status quo. It's pretty basic when you're brought up, like I was, to hate and fear the police as a natural enemy and to despise the army as something that takes everybody away and leaves them dead somewhere. I mean, it's just a basic working class thing, though it begins to wear off when you get older, get a family and get swallowed up in the system. In my case I've never not been political, though religion tended to overshadow it in my acid days; that would be around '65 or '66. And that religion was directly the result of all that superstar shit--religion was an outlet for my repression. I thought, 'Well, there's something else to life, isn't there? This isn't it, surely?' But I was always political in a way, you know. In the two books I wrote, even though they were written in a sort of Joycean gobbledegook, there's many knocks at religion and there is a play about a worker and a capitalist. I've been satirising the system since my childhood. I used to write magazines in school and hand them around. I was very conscious of class, they would say with a chip on my shoulder, because I knew what happened to me and I knew about the class repression coming down on us--it was a fucking fact but in the hurricane Beatle world it got left out, I got farther away from reality for a time.
TA: What did you think was the reason for the success of your sort of music?
JL: Well, at the time it was thought that the workers had broken through, but I realise in retrospect that it's the same phoney deal they gave the blacks, it was just like they allowed blacks to be runners or boxers or entertainers. That's the choice they allow you--now the outlet is being a pop star, which is really what I'm saying on the album in 'Working class hero'. As I told Rolling Stone, it's the same people who have the power, the class system didn't change one little bit. Of course, there are a lot of people walking around with long hair now and some trendy middle class kids in pretty clothes. But nothing changed except that we all dressed up a bit, leaving the same bastards running everything.
Robin Blackburn: Of course, class is something the American rock groups haven't tackled yet.
JL: Because they're all middle class and bourgeois and they don't want to show it. They're scared of the workers, actually, because the workers seem mainly right-wing in America, clinging on to their goods. But if these middle class groups realise what's happening, and what the class system has done, it's up to them to repatriate the people and to get out of all that bourgeois shit.
TA: When did you start breaking out of the role imposed on you as a Beatle?
JL: Even during the Beatle heyday I tried to go against it, so did George. We went to America a few times and Epstein always tried to waffle on at us about saying nothing about Vietnam. So there came a time when George and I said 'Listen, when they ask next time, we're going to say we don't like that war and we think they should get right out.' That's what we did. At that time this was a pretty radical thing to do, especially for the 'Fab Four'. It was the first opportunity I personally took to wave the flag a bit. But you've got to remember that I'd always felt repressed. We were all so pressurised that there was hardly any chance of expressing ourselves, especially working at that rate, touring continually and always kept in a cocoon of myths and dreams. It's pretty hard when you are Caesar and everyone is saying how wonderful you are and they are giving you all the goodies and the girls, it's pretty hard to break out of that, to say 'Well, I don't want to be king, I want to be real.' So in its way the second political thing I did was to say 'The Beatles are bigger than Jesus.' That really broke the scene, I nearly got shot in America for that. It was a big trauma for all the kids that were following us. Up to then there was this unspoken policy of not answering delicate questions, though I always read the papers, you know, the political bits. The continual awareness of what was going on made me feel ashamed I wasn't saying anything. I burst out because I could no longer play that game any more, it was just too much for me. Of course, going to America increased the build up on me, especially as the war was going on there. In a way we'd turned out to be a Trojan horse. The 'Fab Four' moved right to the top and then sang about drugs and sex and then I got into more and more heavy stuff and that's when they started dropping us.
RB: Wasn't there a double charge to what you were doing right from the beginning?
Yoko Ono: You were always very direct.
JL: Yes, well, the first thing we did was to proclaim our Liverpoolness to the world, and say 'It's all right to come from Liverpool and talk like this'. Before, anybody from Liverpool who made it, like Ted Ray, Tommy Handley, Arthur Askey, had to lose their accent to get on the BBC. They were only comedians but that's what came out of Liverpool before us. We refused to play that game. After The Beatles came on the scene everyone started putting on a Liverpudlian accent.
TA: In a way you were even thinking about politics when you seemed to be knocking revolution?
JL: Ah, sure, 'Revolution' . There were two versions of that song but the underground left only picked up on the one that said 'count me out'. The original version which ends up on the LP said 'count me in' too; I put in both because I wasn't sure. There was a third version that was just abstract, musique concrete, kind of loops and that, people screaming. I thought I was painting in sound a picture of revolution--but I made a mistake, you know. The mistake was that it was anti-revolution. On the version released as a single I said 'when you talk about destruction you can count me out'. I didn't want to get killed. I didn't really know that much about the Maoists, but I just knew that they seemed to be so few and yet they painted themselves green and stood in front of the police waiting to get picked off. I just thought it was unsubtle, you know. I thought the original Communist revolutionaries coordinated themselves a bit better and didn't go around shouting about it. That was how I felt--I was really asking a question. As someone from the working class I was always interested in Russia and China and everything that related to the working class, even though I was playing the capitalist game. At one time I was so much involved in the religious bullshit that I used to go around calling myself a Christian Communist, but as Janov says, religion is legalised madness. It was therapy that stripped away all that and made me feel my own pain.
RB: This analyst you went to, what's his name. ..
JL: Janov ...
RB: His ideas seem to have something in common with Laing in that he doesn't want to reconcile people to their misery, to adjust them to the world but rather to make them face up to its causes?
JL: Well, his thing is to feel the pain that's accumulated inside you ever since your childhood. I had to do it to really kill off all the religious myths. In the therapy you really feel every painful moment of your life--it's excruciating, you are forced to realise that your pain, the kind that makes you wake up afraid with your heart pounding, is really yours and not the result of somebody up in the sky. It's the result of your parents and your environment. As I realised this it all started to fall into place. This therapy forced me to have done with all the God shit. All of us growing up have come to terms with too much pain. Although we repress it, it's still there. The worst pain is that of not being wanted, of realising your parents do not need you in the way you need them. When I was a child I experienced moments of not wanting to see the ugliness, not wanting to see not being wanted. This lack of love went into my eyes and into my mind. Janov doesn't just talk to you about this but makes you feel it--once you've allowed yourself to feel again, you do most of the work yourself. When you wake up and your heart is going like the clappers or your back feels strained, or you develop some other hang-up, you should let your mind go to the pain and the pain itself will regurgitate the memory which originally caused you to suppress it in your body. In this way the pain goes to the right channel instead of being repressed again, as it is if you take a pill or a bath, saying 'Well, I'll get over it'. Most people channel their pain into God or masturbation or some dream of making it. The therapy is like a very slow acid trip which happens naturally in your body. It is hard to talk about, you know, because--you feel 'I am pain' and it sounds sort of arbitrary, but pain to me now has a different meaning because of having physically felt all these extraordinary repressions. It was like taking gloves off, and feeling your own skin for the first time. It's a bit of a drag to say so, but I don't think you can understand this unless you've gone through it--though I try to put some of it over on the album. But for me at any rate it was all part of dissolving the God trip or father-figure trip. Facing up to reality instead of always looking for some kind of heaven.
RB: Do you see the family in general as the source of these repressions?
JL: Mine is an extreme case, you know. My father and mother split and I never saw my father until I was 20, nor did I see much more of my mother. But Yoko had her parents there and it was the same....
YO: Perhaps one feels more pain when parents are there. It's like when you're hungry, you know, it's worse to get a symbol of a cheeseburger than no cheeseburger at all. It doesn't do you any good, you know. I often wish my mother had died so that at least I could get some people's sympathy. But there she was, a perfectly beautiful mother.
JL: And Yoko's family were middle-class Japanese but it's all the same repression. Though I think middle-class people have the biggest trauma if they have nice imagey parents, all smiling and dolled up. They are the ones who have the biggest struggle to say, 'Goodbye mummy, goodbye daddy'.
TA: What relation to your music has all this got?
JL: Art is only a way of expressing pain. I mean the reason Yoko does such far out stuff is that it's a far out kind of pain she went through.
RB: A lot of Beatle songs used to be about childhood...
JL: Yeah, that would mostly be me...
RB: Though they were very good there was always a missing element...
JL: That would be reality, that would be the missing element. Because I was never really wanted. The only reason I am a star is because of my repression. Nothing else would have driven me through all that if I was 'normal'...
YO: ... and happy ...
JL: The only reason I went for that goal is that I wanted to say: 'Now, mummydaddy, will you love me?'
TA: But then you had success beyond most people's wildest dreams...
JL: Oh, Jesus Christ, it was a complete oppression. I mean we had to go through humiliation upon humiliation with the middle classes and showbiz and Lord Mayors and all that. They were so condescending and stupid. Everybody trying to use us. It was a special humiliation for me because I could never keep my mouth shut and I'd always have to be drunk or pilled to counteract this pressure. It was really hell ...
YO: It was depriving him of any real experience, you know...
JL: It was very miserable. I mean apart from the first flush of making it--the thrill of the first number one record, the first trip to America. At first we had some sort of objective like being as big as Elvis--moving forward was the great thing, but actually attaining it was the big let-down. I found I was having continually to please the sort of people I'd always hated when I was a child. This began to bring me back to reality. I began to realise that we are all oppressed which is why I would like to do something about it, though I'm not sure where my place is.
RB: Well, in any case, politics and culture are linked, aren't they? I mean, workers are repressed by culture not guns at the moment ...
JL: ... they're doped ...
RB: And the culture that's doping them is one the artist can make or break...
JL: That's what I'm trying to do on my albums and in these interviews. What I'm trying to do is to influence all the people I can influence. All those who are still under the dream and just put a big question mark in their mind. The acid dream is over, that is what I'm trying to tell them.
RB: Even in the past, you know, people would use Beatle songs and give them new words. 'Yellow submarine' , for instance, had a number of versions. One that strikers used to sing began 'We all live on bread and margarine' ; at LSE we had a version that began 'We all live in a Red LSE'.
JL: I like that. And I enjoyed it when football crowds in the early days would sing 'All together now'--that was another one. I was also pleased when the movement in America took up 'Give peace a chance' because I had written it with that in mind really. I hoped that instead of singing 'We shall overcome' from 1800 or something, they would have something contemporary. I felt an obligation even then to write a song that people would sing in the pub or on a demonstration. That is why I would like to compose songs for the revolution now ...
RB: We only have a few revolutionary songs and they were composed in the 19th century. Do you find anything in our musical traditions which could be used for revolutionary songs?
JL: When I started, rock and roll itself was the basic revolution to people of my age and situation. We needed something loud and clear to break through all the unfeeling and repression that had been coming down on us kids. We were a bit conscious to begin with of being imitation Americans. But we delved into the music and found that it was half white country and western and half black rhythm and blues. Most of the songs came from Europe and Africa and now they were coming back to us. Many of Dylan's best songs came from Scotland, Ireland or England. It was a sort of cultural exchange. Though I must say the more interesting songs to me were the black ones because they were more simple. They sort of saidshake your arse, or your prick, which was an innovation really. And then there were the field songs mainly expressing the pain they were in. They couldn't express themselves intellectually so they had to say in a very few words what was happening to them. And then there was the city blues and a lot of that was about sex and fighting. A lot of this was self-expression but only in the last few years have they expressed themselves completely with Black Power, like Edwin Starr making war records. Before that many black singers were still labouring under that problem of God; it was often 'God will save us'. But right through the blacks were singing directly and immediately about their pain and also about sex, which is why I like it.
RB: You say country and western music derived from European folk songs. Aren't these folk songs sometimes pretty dreadful stuff, all about losing and being defeated?
JL: As kids we were all opposed to folk songs because they were so middle-class. It was all college students with big scarfs and a pint of beer in their hands singing folk songs in what we call la-di-da voices-'I worked in a mine in New-cast-le' and all that shit. There were very few real folk singers you know, though I liked Dominic Behan a bit and there was some good stuff to be heard in Liverpool. Just occasionally you hear very old records on the radio or TV of real workers in Ireland or somewhere singing these songs and the power of them is fantastic. But mostly folk music is people with fruity voices trying to keep alive something old and dead. It's all a bit boring, like ballet: a minority thing kept going by a minority group. Today's folk song is rock and roll. Although it happened to emanate from America, that's not really important in the end because we wrote our own music and that changed everything.
RB: Your album, Yoko, seems to fuse avant-garde modern music with rock. I'd like to put an idea to you I got from listening to it. You integrate everyday sounds, like that of a train, into a musical pattern. This seems to demand an aesthetic measure of everyday life, to insist that art should not be imprisoned in the museums and galleries, doesn't it?
YO: Exactly. I want to incite people to loosen their oppression by giving them something to work with, to build on. They shouldn't be frightened of creating themselves--that's why I make things very open, with things for people to do, like in my book [Grapefruit]. Because basically there are two types of people in the world: people who are confident because they know they have the ability to create, and then people who have been demoralised, who have no confidence in themselves because they have been told they have no creative ability, but must just take orders. The Establishment likes people who take no responsibility and cannot respect themselves.
RB: I suppose workers' control is about that...
JL: Haven't they tried out something like that in Yugoslavia; they are free of the Russians. I'd like to go there and see how it works.
TA: Well, they have; they did try to break with the Stalinist pattern. But instead of allowing uninhibited workers' control, they added a strong dose of political bureaucracy. It tended to smother the initiative of the workers and they also regulated the whole system by a market mechanism which bred new inequalities between one region and another.
JL: It seems that all revolutions end up with a personality cult--even the Chinese seem to need a father-figure. I expect this happens in Cuba too, with Che and Fidel. In Western-style Communism we would have to create an almost imaginary workers' image of themselves as the father-figure.
RB: That's a pretty cool idea--the Working Class becomes its own Hero. As long as it was not a new comforting illusion, as long as there was a real workers' power. If a capitalist or bureaucrat is running your life then you need to compensate with illusions.
YO: The people have got to trust in themselves.
TA: That's the vital point. The working class must be instilled with a feeling of confidence in itself. This can't be done just by propaganda--the workers must move, take over their own factories and tell the capitalists to bugger off. This is what began to happen in May 1968 in France...the workers began to feel their own strength.
JL: But the Communist Party wasn't up to that, was it?
RB: No, they weren't. With 10 million workers on strike they could have led one of those huge demonstrations that occurred in the centre of Paris into a massive occupation of all government buildings and installations, replacing de Gaulle with a new institution of popular power like the Commune or the original Soviets--that would have begun a real revolution but the French C.P. was scared of it. They preferred to deal at the top instead of encouraging the workers to take the initiative themselves...
JL: Great, but there's a problem about that here you know. All the revolutions have happened when a Fidel or Marx or Lenin or whatever, who were intellectuals, were able to get through to the workers. They got a good pocket of people together and the workers seemed to understand that they were in a repressed state. They haven't woken up yet here, they still believe that cars and tellies are the answer. You should get these left-wing students out to talk with the workers, you should get the schoolkids involved with The Red Mole.
TA: You're quite right, we have been trying to do that and we should do more. This new Industrial Relations Bill the Government is trying to introduce is making more and more workers realise what is happening...
JL: I don't think that Bill can work. I don't think they can enforce it. I don't think the workers will co-operate with it. I thought the Wilson Government was a big let-down but this Heath lot are worse. The underground is being harrassed, the black militants can't even live in their own homes now, and they're selling more arms to the South Africans. Like Richard Neville said, there may be only an inch of difference between Wilson and Heath but it's in that inch that we live....
TA: I don't know about that; Labour brought in racialist immigration policies, supported the Vietnam war and were hoping to bring in new legislation against the unions.
RB: It may be true that we live in the Inch of difference between Labour and Conservative but so long as we do we'll be impotent and unable to change anything. If Heath is forcing us out of that inch maybe he's doing us a good turn without meaning to...
JL: Yes, I've thought about that, too. This putting us in a corner so we have to find out what is coming down on other people. I keep on reading the Morning Star [the Communist newspaper] to see if there's any hope, but it seems to be in the 19th century; it seems to be written for dropped-out, middle-aged liberals. We should be trying to reach the young workers because that's when you're most idealistic and have least fear. Somehow the revolutionaries must approach the workers because the workers won't approach them. But it's difficult to know where to start; we've all got a finger in the dam. The problem for me is that as I have become more real, I've grown away from most working-class people--you know what they like is Engelbert Humperdinck. It's the students who are buying us now, and that's the problem. Now The Beatles are four separate people, we don't have the impact we had when we were together...
RB: Now you're trying to swim against the stream of bourgeois society, which is much more difficult.
JL: Yes, they own all the newspapers and they control all distribution and promotion. When we came along there was only Decca, Philips and EMI who could really produce a record for you. You had to go through the whole bureaucracy to get into the recording studio. You were in such a humble position, you didn't have more than 12 hours to make a whole album, which is what we did in the early days. Even now it's the same; if you're an unknown artist you're lucky to get an hour in a studio--it's a hierarchy and if you don't have hits, you don't get recorded again. And they control distribution. We tried to change that with Apple but in the end we were defeated. They still control everything. EMI killed our album Two Virgins because they didn't like it. With the last record they've censored the words of the songs printed on the record sleeve. Fucking ridiculous and hypocritical--they have to let me sing it but they don't dare let you read it. Insanity.
RB: Though you reach fewer people now, perhaps the effect can be more concentrated.
JL: Yes, I think that could be true. To begin with, working class people reacted against our openness about sex. They are frightened of nudity, they're repressed in that way as well as others. Perhaps they thought 'Paul is a good lad, he doesn't make trouble'. Also when Yoko and I got married, we got terrible racialist letters--you know, warning me that she would slit my throat. Those mainly came from Army people living in Aldershot. Officers. Now workers are more friendly to us, so perhaps it's changing. It seems to me that the students are now half-awake enough to try and wake up their brother workers. If you don't pass on your own awareness then it closes down again. That is why the basic need is for the students to get in with the workers and convince them that they are not talking gobbledegook. And of course it's difficult to know what the workers are really thinking because the capitalist press always only quotes mouthpieces like Vic Feather* anyway. [Ed. Note: Vic Feather 1908-76 was General Secretary of the TUC from 1969-73.] So the only thing is to talk to them directly, especially the young workers. We've got to start with them because they know they're up against it. That's why I talk about school on the album. I'd like to incite people to break the framework, to be disobedient in school, to stick their tongues out, to keep insulting authority.
YO: We are very lucky really, because we can create our own reality, John and me, but we know the important thing is to communicate with other people.
JL: The more reality we face, the more we realise that unreality is the main programme of the day. The more real we become, the more abuse we take, so it does radicalise us in a way, like being put in a corner. But it would be better if there were more of us.
YO: We mustn't be traditional in the way we communicate with people--especially with the Establishment. We should surprise people by saying new things in an entirely new way. Communication of that sort can have a fantastic power so long as you don't do only what they expect you to do.
RB: Communication is vital for building a movement, but in the end it's powerless unless you also develop popular force.
YO: I get very sad when I think about Vietnam where there seems to be no choice but violence. This violence goes on for centuries perpetuating itself. In the present age when communication is so rapid, we should create a different tradition, traditions are created everyday. Five years now is like 100 years before. We are living in a society that has no history. There's no precedent for this kind of society so we can break the old patterns.
TA: No ruling class in the whole of history has given up power voluntarily and I don't see that changing.
YO: But violence isn't just a conceptual thing, you know. I saw a programme about this kid who had come back from Vietnam--he'd lost his body from the waist down. He was just a lump of meat, and he said, 'Well, I guess it was a good experience.'
JL: He didn't want to face the truth, he didn't want to think it had all been a waste...
YO: But think of the violence, it could happen to your kids ...
RB: But Yoko, people who struggle against oppression find themselves attacked by those who have a vested interest in nothing changing, those who want to protect their power and wealth. Look at the people in Bogside and Falls Road in Northern Ireland; they were mercilessly attacked by the special police because they began demonstrating for their rights. On one night in August 1969, seven people were shot and thousands driven from their homes. Didn't they have a right to defend themselves?
YO: That's why one should try to tackle these problems before a situation like that happens.
JL: Yes, but what do you do when it does happen, what do you do?
RB: Popular violence against their oppressors is always justified. It cannot be avoided.
YO: But in a way the new music showed things could be transformed by new channels of communication.
JL: Yes, but as I said, nothing really changed.
YO: Well, something changed and it was for the better. All I'm saying is that perhaps we can make a revolution without violence.
JL: But you can't take power without a struggle...
TA: That's the crucial thing.
JL: Because, when it comes to the nitty-gritty, they won't let the people have any power; they'll give all the rights to perform and to dance for them, but no real power...
YO: The thing is, even after the revolution, if people don't have any trust in themselves, they'll get new problems.
JL: After the revolution you have the problem of keeping things going, of sorting out all the different views. It's quite natural that revolutionaries should have different solutions, that they should split into different groups and then reform, that's the dialectic, isn't it--but at the same time they need to be united against the enemy, to solidify a new order. I don't know what the answer is; obviously Mao is aware of this problem and keeps the ball moving.
RB: The danger is that once a revolutionary state has been created, a new conservative bureaucracy tends to form around it. This danger tends to increase if the revolution is isolated by imperialism and there is material scarcity.
JL: Once the new power has taken over they have to establish a new status quo just to keep the factories and trains running.
RB: Yes, but a repressive bureaucracy doesn't necessarily run the factories or trains any better than the workers could under a system of revolutionary democracy.
JL: Yes, but we all have bourgeois instincts within us, we all get tired and feel the need to relax a bit. How do you keep everything going and keep up revolutionary fervour after you've achieved what you set out to achieve? Of course Mao has kept them up to it in China, but what happens after Mao goes? Also he uses a personality cult. Perhaps that's necessary; like I said, everybody seems to need a father figure. But I've been reading Khrushchev Remembers. I know he's a bit of a lad himself--but he seemed to think that making a religion out of an individual was bad; that doesn't seem to be part of the basic Communist idea. Still people are people, that's the difficulty. If we took over Britain, then we'd have the job of cleaning up the bourgeoisie and keeping people in a revolutionary state of mind.
RB: ...In Britain unless we can create a new popular power-and here that would basically mean workers' power--really controlled by, and answerable to, the masses, then we couldn't make the revolution in the first place. Only a really deep-rooted workers' power could destroy the bourgeois state.
YO: That's why it will be different when the younger generation takes over.
JL: I think it wouldn't take much to get the youth here really going. You'd have to give them free rein to attack the local councils or to destroy the school authorities, like the students who break up the repression in the universities. It's already happening, though people have got to get together more. And the women are very important too, we can't have a revolution that doesn't involve and liberate women. It's so subtle the way you're taught male superiority. It took me quite a long time to realise that my maleness was cutting off certain areas for Yoko. She's a red hot liberationistand was quick to show me where I was going wrong, even though it seemed to me that I was just acting naturally. That's why I'm always interested to know how people who claim to be radical treat women.
RB: There's always been at least as much male chauvinism on the left as anywhere else--though the rise of women's liberation is helping to sort that out.
JL: It's ridiculous. How can you talk about power to the people unless you realise the people is both sexes.
YO: You can't love someone unless you are in an equal position with them. A lot of women have to cling to men out of fear or insecurity, and that's not love--basically that's why women hate men...
JL: ... and vice versa ...
YO: So if you have a slave around the house how can you expect to make a revolution outside it? The problem for women is that if we try to be free, then we naturally become lonely, because so many women are willing to become slaves, and men usually prefer that. So you always have to take the chance: 'Am I going to lose my man?' It's very sad.
JL: Of course, Yoko was well into liberation before I met her. She'd had to fight her way through a man's world--the art world is completely dominated by men--so she was full of revolutionary zeal when we met. There was never any question about it: we had to have a 50-50 relationship or there was no relationship, I was quick to learn. She did an article about women in Nova more than two years back in which she said, 'Woman is the nigger of the world' .
RB: Of course we all live in an imperialist country that is exploiting the Third World, and even our culture is involved in this. There was a time when Beatle music was plugged on Voice of America....
JL: The Russians put it out that we were capitalist robots, which we were I suppose...
RB: They were pretty stupid not to see it was something different.
YO: Let' s face it, Beatles was 20th-century folksong in the framework of capitalism; they couldn't do anything different if they wanted to communicate within that framework.
RB: I was working in Cuba when Sgt Pepper was released and that's when they first started playing rock music on the radio.
JL: Well hope they see that rock and roll is not the same as Coca-Cola. As we get beyond the dream this should be easier: that's why I'm putting out more heavy statements now and trying to shake off the teeny-bopper image. I want to get through to the right people, and I want to make what I have to say very simple and direct.
RB: Your latest album sounds very simple to begin with, but the lyrics, tempo and melody build up into a complexity one only gradually becomes aware of. Like the track 'My mummy's dead' echoes the nursery song 'Three blind mice' and it's about a childhood trauma.
JL: The tune does; it was that sort of feeling, almost like a Haiku poem. I recently got into Haiku in Japan and I just think it's fantastic. Obviously, when you get rid of a whole section of illusion in your mind you're left with great precision. Yoko was showing me some of these Haiku in the original. The difference between them and Longfellow is immense. Instead of a long flowery poem the Haiku would say 'Yellow flower in white bowl on wooden table' which gives you the whole picture, really....
TA: How do you think we can destroy the capitalist system here in Britain, John?
JL: I think only by making the workers aware of the really unhappy position they are in, breaking the dream they are surrounded by. They think they are in a wonderful, free-speaking country. They've got cars and tellies and they don't want to think there's anything more to life. They are prepared to let the bosses run them, to see their children fucked up in school. They're dreaming someone else's dream, it's not even their own. They should realise that the blacks and the Irish are being harassed and repressed and that they will be next. As soon as they start being aware of all that, we can really begin to do something. The workers can start to take over. Like Marx said: 'To each according to his need'. I think that would work well here. But we'd also have to infiltrate the army too, because they are well trained to kill us all. We've got to start all this from where we ourselves are oppressed. I think it's false, shallow, to be giving to others when your own need is great. The idea is not to comfort people, not to make them feel better but to make them feel worse, to constantly put before them the degradations and humiliations they go through to get what they call a living wage.
Tariq Ali is editor of London's New Left Review, a filmmaker and novelist, and has written more than a dozen books on world history and politics, including 1968 and After: Inside the Revolution (1978) and the 1987 Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties. He was prominently involved in 60s antiwar and radical politics; Jagger, a personal friend, is said to have written "Street Fighting Man" in his honor.
26 February 2019, EU Cities against Radicalisation
Belgium - Brussels - February 2019
© European Union / Giedre Daugelaite
Sir Julian KING, Commissioner for the Security Union
“Even though we may leave the European Union, we are not leaving Europe,” said London Mayor Sadiq Khan visiting the Parliament on 28 March. “For issues from security and defence to finance and culture, we are still going to be a part of the European family.” Khan met Parliament President Antonio Tajani to discuss issues such as security and Brexit. “It’s in nobody’s interest for London or the UK to be punished,” said Khan. “Not in London’s interest, not the UK’s interest, nor the EU’s interest.”
The meeting was followed by a brief press conference. On behalf of the Parliament Tajani expressed sympathy with all those affected by the terrorist attack in London on 22 March: “The attack is a tragic reminder that we must work more closely than ever to fight terrorism and prevent radicalisation.”
Saying he had a good meeting with Khan, Tajani added: “On Saturday, while we celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, thousands of citizens showed their support for the European Union in the streets of London. This showed us that London is truly open and multicultural and a real European city. It should make us proud.”
This photo is free to use under Creative Commons licenses and must be credited: "© European Union 2017 - European Parliament".
(Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives CreativeCommons licenses creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
For bigger HR files please contact: webcom-flickr(AT)europarl.europa.eu
In response to the fast-growing presence of Wahhabis in India, Mehdi Foundation International will be holding a protest against the radical preacher, Zakir Naik, and Peace TV, calling for them to be banned in India. This is an initiative to help save India’s youth from becoming radicalised. All patriotic Indians are invited to join us.
His Holiness Younus AlGohar introduces the Religion of God (Divine Love) by HDE Gohar Shahi (thereligionofgod.com/) - the complete authoritative textbook on spirituality. He also explains in light of this book why people become terrorists.
- The Religion of God covers everything. There is nothing that exists that doesn’t exist in this book. It contains the untold mysteries and secrets of God.
- Answers people spend years seeking are found in The Religion of God. An important aspect of this book, which is the case with any divine book: you will feel connected to the author.
- Everyone who reads this book, whether they are a Hindu, Jew or atheist, will feel as if they are being directly addressed. If an atheist reads this book they will see that the author is a fair mediator who is impartial, building a bridge between man and God.
- For someone to become radicalised, they do not need a special hateful knowledge or doctrine. There are two types of knowledge: the outer and the inner. HDE explains, ‘The outer knowledge hardens the heart. The inner knowledge softens the heart.’ If you only have outer knowledge, you have the spoken word of God but don't know the intention or reason of God. Inner knowledge connects your heart to God.
- The fundamental definition of terrorism is to keep people under terror and disturb their quality of life. We have people in every street who like to terrorise. To spread terror is in human nature, whether it's on a local level or on a larger level.
- The only way to overcome the negative aspects of human nature is to adopt spirituality which will soften the heart and transform you into a good human being.
You can watch the live recordings of these videos every day at 22:00 GMT on younusalgohar.com
Can't access this video? Watch it on Daily Motion: www.dailymotion.com/mehdifound...
Listen to this speech on the go with SoundCloud: soundcloud.com/younusalgohar/
The Last Generation – Moves of Hope
A young woman sits at the chessboard, her red hair neatly braided, her delicate face marked by thoughtfulness and a quiet, weary despair. An open book lies before her, like a silent accusation or a final attempt to understand.
She belongs to a generation between ten and twenty-five years old, born into a world already unravelling: the climate crisis, the erosion of trust in institutions, the gradual unpicking of the ties that once held communities together. Change is always difficult—it demands sacrifice, discomfort, letting go of habits. So many simply carry on, telling themselves, “It will probably be fine… the catastrophe won’t come in my lifetime.”
And yet, anger grows. Peaceful protest drifts towards radicalisation, hope gives way to exhaustion, solidarity dissolves into conflict. How far should one go to be heard? At what point does resistance begin to destroy what it aims to protect?
As the chess pieces hold their positions on the board, she wonders: Are there still moves left that do not merely mean sacrifice, but offer perspective? How can life be made bearable, even meaningful, when so much feels already lost?
From the outside, I can only glimpse fragments of their experience – moments of urgency, fatigue, determination and doubt – that have inspired these images.
She sits by the chessboard,
counting the moves that remain.
Outside, the hedges grow unchecked,
the air thick with a heat
no one calls unusual anymore.
She reads, pauses,
not expecting clarity.
Perhaps there is no strategy—
only the slow recognition
of what will not be saved.
Three Haikus
Silent afternoon
pages turn without promise
pieces wait, unmoved
Warm air, brittle light
nothing demands her reply
only small questions
In the quiet room
a book, a cracked white teacup
no easy ending
A procession carried out by MFI, calling for Wahhabism, Zakir Naik and Peace TV to be banned in India, in order to stop radicalisation of Indian youth.
A procession carried out by MFI, calling for Wahhabism, Zakir Naik and Peace TV to be banned in India, in order to stop radicalisation of Indian youth.
Hundreds of people took to the streets of central London on Sunday to protest against the US backed removal from office and arrest of former PM Imran Khan for his refusal to bend to Western pressure to cut off ties with Moscow.
اتوار 13 اگست کو سینکڑوں لوگ وسطی لندن کی سڑکوں پر نکل آئے اور ماسکو کے ساتھ تعلقات منقطع کرنے کے لیے مغربی دباؤ کے سامنے جھکنے سے انکار کرنے پر سابق وزیر اعظم عمران خان کی امریکی حمایت یافتہ عہدے سے برطرفی اور گرفتاری کے خلاف احتجاج کیا۔
On 10 April 2022, Khan was forced to step down as prime minister after he lost a no-confidence motion backed by Pakistan's military, and on 5 August 2023 he was sentenced to three years in prison on corruption charges.
As the Intercept reported on 9 August, four days prior to the protest, a classified Pakistani government document leaked to the news agency, confirmed previous suspicions that 'The US State Department encouraged the Pakistani government in a March 7 2022 meeting to remove Imran Khan as prime minister over his neutrality on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.' Washington was also not happy when Imran Khan had led vocal opposition to the American use of drones over Pakistan, which he argued was fermenting radicalisation.
'Encouraged' is perhaps a generously polite term to describe the advice given by a senior State Department Official to Asad Majeed Khan, the Pakistani Ambassador -
'If the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister (Imran Khan) succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington because the Russia visit is being looked at as a decision by the Prime Minister. Otherwise, I think it will be tough going ahead.'
theintercept.com/2023/08/09/imran-khan-pakistan-cypher-uk...
That was a clear threat of economic and political isolation and the cutting off of Washington’s significant amounts of aid to the country.
On 13 August 2023, infuriated by the role of the military and Washington in toppling Khan, hundreds of protesters in London, led by student Shayan Ali, marched from Trafalgar Square to Avenfield House just off Park Lane, where Pakistan’s former prime minister and bitter rival Nawaz Sharif allegedly has a multimillion pound home.
The Daily Mail reported in April 2022 that ‘Avenfield is where Pakistan’s super-rich former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, has lived when in London since 1992, knocking four luxury flats together to make a single mansion, now worth at least £7 million.’
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10705387/Hundreds-Imran-...
Protesters were also worried by the UK’s continued support of Pakistan and its willing collusion with Pakistan’s political and business elite. Over the last forty years, London seems to have become a prime location for their wealth.
As the Guardian’s Jasper Jolly pointed out in June 2023
‘The chaos in Pakistan also raises serious questions for the UK itself. Khan’s arrest and the turmoil of the past decade in Pakistani politics are deeply entangled with the movement of money between Islamabad and London and Britain’s awkward status as haven for political elites and their fortunes.’
www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jun/03/why-two-luxury-l...
In 2016, the Panama Papers revealed that Sharif’s children were, according to the International Consortium of INvestigative Journalists, ‘linked to offshore companies that owned four flats in a luxury apartment block in London.’
www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/former-pakistan...
Forbes has noted that at the time the flats were purchased in the mid 1990s, 'the children were minors and the purchase is assumed to have been made by Sharif,' and reported Bisnow's estimate that (at the time of the article's publication in 2017) that they would probably be worth about £8 million.
www.forbes.com/sites/bisnow/2017/08/01/the-london-propert...
Despite the coup and the deteriorating human rights situation in Pakistan, the United Kingdom continues to actively support the country’s military and security forces. According to journalists Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis, ‘Britain has long trained Pakistan’s military intelligence establishment,’ and that ‘MI5 and MI6 train senior Pakistani intelligence officers at a British army base north of London.’
They note that in 2009, the British parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, stated it was ‘very concerned by allegations that the nature of the relationship UK officials have with the ISI (Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence) may have led them to be complicit in torture.’
declassifieduk.org/britain-supported-pakistan-as-it-helpe...
The UK also has a long history of supplying Pakistan's military with aircraft, helicopters and vast quantities of arms and ammunition and, despite the coup, there is no sign of that relationship ending.
An advertising postcard published by S. Hildesheimer & Co. Ltd. of London and Manchester.
The card was posted in London E.C. on Friday the 6th. April 1906 to:
Mrs. Venning,
Rosendale,
Chase Green,
Enfield.
The address stretches across the undivided back of the card which is perhaps surprising, because divided backs for postcards were introduced in the UK in 1902.
The Sale and Removal of London Bridge
By 1896 the bridge was the busiest point in London, and one of its most congested, with 8,000 pedestrians and 900 vehicles crossing every hour. To designs by engineer Edward Cruttwell, it was widened in 1904 by 13 feet (4.0 m), using granite corbels.
However subsequent surveys showed that the bridge was sinking an inch (about 2.5 cm) every eight years, and by 1924 the east side had sunk some three to four inches (about 9 cm) lower than the west side. It was concluded that the bridge would have to be removed and replaced.
Council member Ivan Luckin put forward the idea of selling the bridge, and recalled:
"They all thought I was completely
crazy when I suggested we should
sell London Bridge when it needed
replacing."
Subsequently, in 1968, Council placed the bridge on the market and began to look for potential buyers. On the 18th. April 1968, Rennie's bridge was purchased by the Missourian entrepreneur Robert P. McCulloch of McCulloch Oil for $2,460,000.
The claim that McCulloch believed mistakenly that he was buying the more impressive Tower Bridge was denied by Ivan Luckin in a newspaper interview.
Before the bridge was taken apart, each granite facing block was marked for later reassembly. The blocks were taken to Merrivale Quarry at Princetown in Devon, where 15 to 20 cm (6 to 8 in) were sliced off the inner faces of many, in order to facilitate their fixing.
Stones left behind were sold in an online auction when the quarry was abandoned and flooded in 2003. 10,000 tons of granite blocks were shipped via the Panama Canal to California, then trucked from Long Beach to Arizona.
They were used to face a new, purpose-built hollow core steel-reinforced concrete structure, ensuring that the bridge would support the weight of modern traffic. The bridge was reconstructed at Lake Havasu City, Arizona, and was re-dedicated on the 10th. October 1971 in a ceremony attended by London's Lord Mayor and celebrities.
The bridge carries the McCulloch Boulevard and spans the Bridgewater Channel, an artificial, navigable waterway that leads from the Uptown area of Lake Havasu City.
Terror Attacks on London Bridge and Nearby
There have been four terror attacks on or near London Bridge dating back to 1884. They are as follows:
(1) The 1884 London Bridge Terror Attack
On Saturday 13th. December 1884, two American-Irish Republicans carried out a dynamite attack on London Bridge as part of the Fenian dynamite campaign.
The bomb went off prematurely while the men were in a boat attaching it to a bridge pier at 5.45 pm during the evening rush hour. There was little damage to the bridge, and no casualties other than the bombers.
However, there was considerable collateral damage, and hundreds of windows were shattered on both banks of the Thames. The men's boat was so completely destroyed that the police initially thought the bombers had fled.
On the 25th. December 1884 the mutilated remains of one of the bombers were found. The body of the other man was never recovered, but the police were later able to identify the dead men as two Americans, William Mackey Lomasney, and John Fleming.
The men were identified after a landlord reported to police that dynamite had been found in the rented premises of two American gentlemen who had disappeared after the 13th. December, enabling police to piece together who was responsible for the attack.
The men had already been under surveillance by the police in both America and Great Britain.
(2) The 1992 London Bridge Bombing
On Friday the 28th. February 1992, the Provisional IRA exploded a bomb inside London Bridge station during the morning rush hour, causing extensive damage and wounding 29 people. It was one of many bombings carried out by one of the IRA's London active service units. It occurred just over a year after a bomb at Victoria station.
-- The 1992 Bombing
At around 8:20 am, someone rang Ulster Television's London office warning that a bomb was going to explode in a London station, without saying which one.
About ten minutes later, the bomb detonated, which made debris fly almost 50 feet (15 m) away from the blast area. Twenty nine people were hurt in the explosion, most of them from flying glass and other bits of debris; four were seriously hurt, but nobody was killed.
The victims were treated at Guy's Hospital.
-- Aftermath of the 1992 Explosion
The head of Scotland Yard's anti terrorist squad, George Churchill-Coleman, said that the 2 lb (910 g) bomb of high explosives was "clearly designed to kill."
Investigations suggested that the bomb had been placed in the men's restrooms. Churchill-Coleman added that the IRA's warning was "deliberately vague," and was given too late to act upon.
Prime Minister John Major said that the bombing would not change British policy in Northern Ireland:
"It was pointless. It was cowardly. It was
directed against innocent people and it
will make absolutely no difference to
our policy -- no difference at all."
Fearing additional IRA attacks on public transport, the security services warned commuters "more than ever" to stay on guard at all times. The next day, another bomb went off in London, by the Crown Prosecution Service office, injuring two more people and bringing the total injured to 31 in the space of just over 24 hours.
This was one of dozens of bombs that detonated in London that year, the biggest of which was the Baltic Exchange bombing, killing three people and causing almost £1 billion worth of damage.
The IRA maintained this pressure, bombing mainland Britain and especially the City of London as much as possible until the ceasefire of 1994.
(3) The 2017 London Bridge Attack
On the 3rd. June 2017, a terrorist vehicle-ramming and stabbing took place in London when a van was deliberately driven into pedestrians on London Bridge, and then crashed on Borough High Street, just south of the River Thames.
The van's three occupants then ran to the nearby Borough Market area and began stabbing people in and around restaurants and pubs. They were shot dead by Metropolitan and City of London Police authorised firearms officers, and were found to be wearing fake explosive vests.
Eight people were killed and 48 were injured, including members of the public and four unarmed police officers who attempted to stop the assailants. British authorities described the perpetrators as radical Islamic terrorists.
The Islamic State (ISIS) claimed responsibility for the attack.
-- Background to the 2017 Attack
In March 2017, five people had been killed in a combined vehicle and knife attack at Westminster. In late May, a suicide bomber killed 22 people at an Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena.
After the Manchester bombing, the UK's terror threat level was raised to "critical", its highest level, until the 27th. May 2017, when it was lowered to severe.
-- The 2017 Attack
The attack was carried out using a white Renault Master hired earlier on the same evening in Harold Hill, by Khuram Butt. He had intended to hire a 7.5 tonne lorry, but was refused due to his failure to provide payment details.
The attackers were armed with 12-inch (30 cm) kitchen knives with ceramic blades, which they tied to their wrists with leather straps. They also prepared fake explosive belts by wrapping water bottles in grey tape.
At 21:58 on the 3rd. June 2017, the van travelled south across London Bridge, and returned six minutes later, crossing over the bridge northbound, making a U-turn at the northern end and then driving southbound across the bridge.
It mounted the pavement three times and hit multiple pedestrians, killing two. Witnesses said the van was travelling at high speed. 999 emergency calls were first recorded at 22:07. The van was later found to contain 13 wine bottles containing flammable liquid with rags stuffed in them, along with blow torches.
The van crashed on Borough High Street after crossing the central reservation. The van's tyres were destroyed by the central reservation, and the three attackers, armed with knives, abandoned the vehicle.
Then they ran down the steps to Green Dragon Court, where they killed five people outside and near the Boro Bistro pub. The attackers then went back up the steps to Borough High Street and attacked three bystanders.
Police tried to fight the attackers, but were stabbed, and Ignacio Echeverría helped them by striking the terrorist Redouane and possibly Zaghba with his skateboard. Echeverría was later killed outside Lobos Meat and Tapas.
Members of the public threw bottles and chairs at the attackers. Witnesses reported that the attackers were shouting:
"This is for Allah".
People in and around a number of other restaurants and bars along Stoney Street were also attacked. During the attack, an unknown man was spared by Rachid Redouane, but despite many efforts the man was never found.
A Romanian baker hit one of the attackers over the head with a crate before giving shelter to 20 people inside a bakery inside Borough Market.
One man fought the three attackers with his fists in the Black and Blue steakhouse, shouting:
"F*** you, I'm Millwall."
His actions gave members of the public who were in the restaurant the opportunity to run away. He was stabbed eight times in the hands, chest and head. He underwent surgery at St Thomas' Hospital, and was taken off the critical list on the 4th. June.
A British Transport Police officer armed with a baton also took on the attackers, receiving multiple stab wounds and temporarily losing sight in his right eye as a consequence.
Off-duty Metropolitan police constables Liam Jones and Stewart Henderson rendered first aid to seriously injured members of the public before protecting over 150 people inside the Thameside Inn and evacuating them by Metropolitan marine support unit and RNLI boats to the north shore of the Thames.
The three attackers were then shot dead by armed officers from the City of London and Metropolitan police Specialist Firearms Command eight minutes after the initial emergency call was made.
CCTV footage showed the three attackers in Borough Market running at the armed officers; the attackers were shot dead 20 seconds later. A total of 46 rounds were fired by three City of London and five Metropolitan Police officers.
-- Aftermath of the 2017 Attack
The Metropolitan Police issued 'Run, Hide, Tell' notices via social media during the attack, and asked the public to remain calm and vigilant.
All buildings within the vicinity of London Bridge were evacuated, and London Bridge, Borough and Bank Underground stations were closed at the request of the police.
The mainline railway stations at London Bridge, Waterloo East, Charing Cross and Cannon Street were also closed. The Home Secretary approved the deployment of a military counter terrorist unit from the Special Air Service (SAS).
The helicopters carrying the SAS landed on London Bridge to support the Metropolitan Police because of concerns that there might be more attackers at large.
The Metropolitan Police Marine Policing Unit dispatched boats on the River Thames, with assistance from the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), to contribute to the evacuation of the area and look for any casualties who might have fallen from the bridge.
A stabbing incident took place in Vauxhall at 23:45, causing Vauxhall station to be briefly closed; this was later confirmed to be unrelated to the attack.
At 01:45 on the 4th. June, controlled explosions took place of the attackers' bomb vests, which were found to be fake.
An emergency COBR meeting was held on the morning of the 4th. June. London Bridge mainline railway and underground stations remained closed throughout the 4th. June. A cordon was established around the scene of the attack. London Bridge station reopened at 05:00 on Monday the 5th. June.
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan said that there was a surge of hate crimes and islamophobic incidents following the attack.
New security measures were implemented on eight central London bridges following the attack, to reduce the likelihood of further vehicle attacks, with concrete barriers being installed. The barriers have been criticised for causing severe congestion in cycle lanes during peak hours.
Borough Market reopened on the 14th. June.
-- Casualties of the 2017 Attack
Eight civilians died in the attack: one Spaniard, one Briton, two Australians, one Canadian and three French citizens were killed by the attackers, and the three attackers themselves were killed by armed police.
Two of the civilian fatalities were caused in the initial vehicle-ramming attack, while the remaining six were stabbed to death. One body was recovered from the Thames near Limehouse several days after the attack.
48 people were injured in the attack, including one New Zealander, two Australians, two Germans and four French citizens.
Of the 48 people admitted to hospital, 21 were initially reported to be in a critical condition.
Four police officers were among those injured in the attack. A British Transport Police officer was stabbed, and suffered serious injuries to his head, face and neck. An off-duty Metropolitan Police officer was seriously injured when he was stabbed.
Two other Metropolitan Police officers received head and arm injuries. As a result of police gunfire, a bystander received an accidental gunshot wound, which was not critical.
-- The 2017 Attackers
On the 4th. June the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, said that:
"We are confident about the fact that
they were radical Islamic terrorists, the
way they were inspired, and we need
to find out more about where this
radicalisation came from."
Amaq News Agency, an online outlet associated with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), said the attackers were ISIS fighters.
On the 5th. June, two of the attackers were identified as Khuram Shazad Butt and Rachid Redouane. The third of the three attackers, Youssef Zaghba, was identified the following day.
(a) Khuram Shazad Butt
Butt (born 20th. April 1990) was a Pakistan-born British citizen whose family came from Jhelum. He grew up in Great Britain, living in Plaistow.
He had a wife and two children. Neighbours told the BBC that Butt had been reported to police for attempting to radicalise children; he had also expressed disgust at the way women dressed.
He was known to police as a "heavyweight" member of the banned extremist group al-Muhajiroun. A BBC interviewee said he had a verbal confrontation with Butt in 2013 on the day after another Al-Muhajiroun follower had murdered Fusilier Lee Rigby.
Butt was part of an al-Muhajiroun campaign in 2015 to intimidate Muslims who planned to vote in the UK general elections of that year, on the basis that it was forbidden in Islam.
He was known for holding extreme views, having been barred from two local mosques. He appeared on a 2016 Channel 4 Television documentary, The Jihadis Next Door, which showed him arguing with police over the unfurling of an ISIL black flag in Regent's Park.
According to a friend, he had been radicalised by the YouTube videos of the American Muslim hate preacher Ahmad Musa Jibril. Butt was known to have taken drugs before he became radicalised.
After radicalisation, Butt started to stop his neighbours on the street and ask them whether they had been to the mosque.
Butt had worked for a man accused of training Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the July 2005 London bombing. The police and MI5 knew of Butt, and he was investigated in 2015. The investigation was later "moved into the lower echelons", and his file was classed as low priority.
Butt sometimes manned the desk of the Ummah Fitness Centre gym, where he prayed regularly. CCTV footage was released of Butt, Redouane and Zaghba meeting outside the gym days before the attack. A senior figure at a local mosque had reported the gym to police.
The New York Times said that Butt and his brother were part of the UK government's Prevent programme, which aims to stop people from becoming terrorists, and which reports suspected radicals to police programmes.
At the time of the attack he was on police bail following an allegation of fraud, though the police had intended to take no further action due to a lack of evidence. He had previously been cautioned by police for fraud in 2008 and common assault in 2010.
(b) Rachid Redouane
Redouane (born 31 July 1986) was a failed asylum seeker in the UK, whose application was denied in 2009, and not previously known to police. He had claimed to be either Moroccan or Libyan.
Redouane worked as a pastry chef, and in 2012 he married an Irish woman in a ceremony in Ireland. He beat and bullied his wife.
He used to drink alcohol. He lived variously in Rathmines, a suburb of Dublin, also in Morocco and the UK. According to his wife, Redouane was most likely radicalised in Morocco. Later the couple stayed in the UK on an EU residency card where they had a daughter in 2015.
The couple separated in 2016 and she divorced him after he tried to force his extremist beliefs on her.
At the time of the attack, he was living in Dagenham, East London.
(c) Youssef Zaghba
Zaghba (born 1995 in Fez, Morocco) was at the time of the attack living in east London where he worked in a fast-food outlet. He also worked for an Islamic television channel in London.
Zaghba was born to a Moroccan Muslim father and an Italian Catholic Christian mother who had converted to Islam when she married. Zaghba had dual Moroccan and Italian nationality.
When his parents divorced, he went to Italy with his mother. In 2016, Zaghba was stopped at Bologna Guglielmo Marconi Airport by Italian officers who found ISIS-related materials on his mobile phone; he was stopped from continuing his journey to Istanbul.
Italian authorities said Zaghba was monitored continuously while in Italy and that the UK was informed about him. Giuseppe Amato, an Italian prosecutor, said:
"We did our best. We could just monitor
and surveil Zaghba and send a note to
the British authorities, that's all we could
do and we did it.
Since he moved to London, he came back
to Italy once in a while for a total of 10 days.
And during those 10 days we never let him
out of our sight."
According to The New York Times, the Italian branch of Al-Muhajiroun had introduced Butt to Zaghba.
-- Investigation of the 2017 Attack
On the morning of the 4th. June, police made 12 arrests following raids in flats in the Barking area of east London, where one of the attackers lived; controlled explosions were carried out during the raids.
Those held included five males aged between 27 and 55, arrested at one address in Barking, and six females aged between 19 and 60, arrested at a separate Barking address. One of the arrested males was subsequently released without charge.
Four properties in all were searched, including two in Newham in addition to the two in Barking. Further raids and arrests were made at properties in Newham and Barking early on the morning of the 5th. June.
On the 6th. June, a man was arrested in Barking, and another in Ilford the following day. By the 16th. June, all those arrested had been released without charge.
-- The Inquest Into the 2017 Attack
On the 7th. May 2019, an inquest into the deaths of the victims opened at the Old Bailey in London. Judge Mark Lucraft QC, Chief Coroner of England and Wales, presided, and people related to the dead gave accounts of what happened and who they had lost.
The inquest concluded on the 16th. July 2019 that all three attackers had been lawfully killed.
(4) The 2019 London Bridge Stabbing
On the 29th. November 2019, five people were stabbed, two fatally, in Central London. The attacker, Briton Usman Khan, had been released from prison in 2018 on licence after serving a sentence for terrorist offences.
Khan was attending an offender rehabilitation conference in Fishmongers' Hall when he threatened to detonate what turned out to be a fake suicide vest.
He started to attack people with two knives taped to his wrists, killing two of the conference participants by stabbing them in the chest.
Several people fought back, some attacking Khan with a fire extinguisher, a pike and a narwhal tusk as he fled the building and emerged on to London Bridge, where he was partially disarmed by a plain-clothes police officer.
He was restrained by members of the public until additional police officers arrived, pulled away those restraining him, and shot him.
-- Background to the 2019 Attack
A conference on offender rehabilitation was held on the 29th. November 2019 in Fishmongers' Hall, at the northern end of London Bridge, to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Learning Together. This is a programme run by the Cambridge Institute of Criminology to help offenders reintegrate into society following their release from prison.
Learning Together was set up in 2014 by University of Cambridge academics Ruth Armstrong and Amy Ludlow from the Faculty of Law and Institute of Criminology:
"To bring together people in criminal justice
and higher education institutions to study
alongside each other in inclusive and
transformative learning communities."
The programme served to enable students and prisoners to work together.
Former prisoner Usman Khan had been invited to the conference as a previous participant in the programme, and although banned from entering London under the terms of his release, he was granted a one-day exemption to attend.
-- The 2019 Attack
At 13:58 on the 29th. November, the police were called to Fishmongers' Hall after Khan, wearing a fake suicide vest, threatened to blow up the hall. The police reported that there had been no prior intelligence of the attack.
Holding two kitchen knives taped to his wrists, Khan began stabbing people inside the building. Several fought back, including a South African-born Londoner, Darryn Frost, who grabbed a 1.5-metre-long (4.9 ft) narwhal tusk from the wall to use as a weapon, former prisoner John Crilly, and Steven Gallant, a convicted murderer attending the conference on day release from prison.
Khan fled and began stabbing pedestrians outside on the north side of the bridge.
Several people were injured before members of the public, including a tour guide and a plain-clothes British Transport Police officer, later seen walking away with a knife, restrained and disarmed Khan on the bridge.
One of the people who stepped in to fight the attacker drove him back by spraying a fire extinguisher.
Armed officers of the City of London Police arrived at 14:03 and surrounded the attacker, who at the time was being restrained by a Ministry of Justice communications worker attending the rehabilitation meeting.
The officers pulled this person away to provide a clear shot, before one fired twice. Around 10 minutes after this, Khan started to get up; he was then shot 9 further times by 6 firearms officers. Khan had not been secured after the initial shooting due to the suicide vest. Khan died at the scene.
A Transport for London bus which had stopped adjacent to the site of the shooting was found to have damage to both its front and rear windows, possibly caused, according to the Metropolitan Police, by a ricocheting bullet.
-- The Victims of the 2019 Attack
Three of the victims were associated with Cambridge University's Learning Together prison-rehabilitation programme; two died and one was injured.
The two who died from their stab wounds were Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones.
Merritt was a 25-year-old law and criminology graduate from Cottenham, Cambridgeshire who had studied at the Universities of Manchester and Cambridge. He worked as a University of Cambridge administration officer, and was a course coordinator for Learning Together.
Jones was a 23 year old former Anglia Ruskin University and University of Cambridge student from Stratford-upon-Avon.
Funeral services for Merritt and Jones were conducted on the 20th. December 2019.
Two other women were seriously injured, while a chef who was working at the event was stabbed but had less serious injuries.
-- The Terrorist Usman Khan
Usman Khan was a 28-year-old British national from Stoke-on-Trent, of Pakistani descent. Khan appears to have left school with no qualifications after spending part of his late teens in Pakistan.
He was known to police, and had links to Islamist extremist groups. In December 2018 he had been automatically released from prison on licence, where he was serving a 16-year sentence for terrorism offences, and was wearing an electronic tag.
Khan had been part of a plot, inspired by Al-Qaeda, to establish a terrorist camp on his family's land in Kashmir and bomb the London Stock Exchange. The plot was disrupted by MI5 and the police, as part of MI5's Operation Guava (police Operation Norbury), and Khan was given an indeterminate sentence.
Of the nine men involved, Khan was the youngest at 19 and according to Mr Justice Wilkie, Khan and two others were “more serious jihadis” than the others.
In 2013, Khan's sentence was revised after an appeal, and he was ordered to serve at least 8 years of his new 16-year sentence, with a 5-year extended licence allowing recall to prison.
According to the anti-extremism group Hope not Hate, Khan was a supporter of Al-Muhajiroun, an extremist group with which scores of terrorists were involved. He was a student and personal friend of Anjem Choudary, an Islamist and terrorism supporter.
Post-mortem examination showed evidence of occasional use of cocaine by Khan.
-- Aftermath of the 2019 Attack
The news of the attack was broken live as it happened on the BBC by one of its reporters, John McManus, who witnessed members of the public fighting Khan as he crossed the bridge, and heard two shots being fired by police officers.
McManus said that he was certain that more than two shots were fired during the incident.
The police, ambulance, and fire services attended the scene, and a major incident was declared. A large police cordon was set up in the area and residents were told to stay away. Police closed both Monument Underground station and London Bridge station after the attack.
The Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, returned to Downing Street following the incident, after campaigning in his constituency for the forthcoming general election. Johnson commended the "immense bravery" of the emergency services and members of the public, and claimed that anyone involved in the attack would be hunted down.
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, thanked the emergency services and members of the public who helped to restrain the attacker, saying they had shown "breathtaking heroism".
The Conservative Party, Labour Party and Liberal Democrats temporarily suspended campaigning in London for the general election. A parliamentary election hustings event scheduled to be held at Great St. Mary's Church in Cambridge on the 30th. November was cancelled and replaced by a memorial vigil for the victims of the attack.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick made a statement following the attack. She said that there would be an increased police presence on the streets, and that cordons in the London Bridge area would remain in place. An appeal was made for the public to submit any film or picture evidence or information that could assist the investigation.
In Pakistan, publication of Khan's Pakistani origins by the leading newspaper Dawn were deemed unpatriotic and defamatory, and led to demonstrations demanding that the publisher and the editor be hanged.
The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack. Its news agency, Amaq, claimed Usman Khan was one of its fighters. A janaza prayer for Khan was held at a mosque in Birmingham, and he was buried in his family's ancestral village in Pakistan, following objections to his burial in the UK by local Muslims in his native Stoke.
In 2021, following an inquest, Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation Jonathan Hall QC called for those involved in the planning or preparation of terrorist attacks to be given automatic life sentences. Hall stated:
"It is hard to underestimate how serious
Usman Khan’s original offence was."
-- Investigations Into the 2019 Attack
London Bridge was closed until the early hours of the following Monday for forensic investigation of the scene. A property in Stafford and one in Stoke-on-Trent were searched by police.
An inquest into the deaths of Merritt and Jones was opened on the 4th. December 2019 at the Central Criminal Court in London, and was subsequently adjourned.
A pre-inquest review hearing took place at the Old Bailey on the 16th. October 2020, before the Chief Coroner of England and Wales, Mark Lucraft QC.
The inquest re-opened on the 12th. April 2021, presided over by Lucraft. On the 28th. May 2021 the jury concluded that the victims had been unlawfully killed.
They further concluded that insufficient monitoring of Khan, unreasonable belief in his rehabilitation, a lack of information sharing between agencies, and inadequate security planning at the event were all contributing factors in their deaths.
Khan's inquest, also overseen by Lucraft, found in June 2021 that Khan was lawfully killed by the police.
-- Royal Prerogative of Mercy for Steven Gallant
Steven Gallant was granted the Royal prerogative of mercy by the Lord Chancellor on behalf of the Queen in October 2020, in order to bring his parole hearing forward by ten months to June 2021.
The Ministry of Justice stated that:
"This is in recognition of his exceptionally
brave actions at Fishmongers’ Hall, which
helped save people's lives despite the
tremendous risk to his own".
Though the parole board still has to decide on whether to release him, it was reported that it would be unlikely for his case to be denied after the Queen's intervention. The families of both Merritt and of Gallant's 2005 murder victim approved the action due to his heroic deeds and efforts to turn his life around since the murder.
Johnny Ramensky
So what else happened on the day that the card was posted?
Well, the 6th. April 1906 marked the birth of Johnny Ramensky.
Born Jonas Ramanauckas in Glenboig, North Lanarkshire, Scotland, Johnny Ramensky MM, also known as John Ramsay, Gentleman Johnny, and Gentle Johnny, was a Scottish career criminal who used his safe-cracking abilities as a commando during the Second World War.
A popular song about him, "The Ballad of Johnny Ramensky", was written in 1959 by Norman Buchan, later to become a Labour Party member of parliament, and recorded by singer Enoch Kent, Buchan's brother-in-law.
Though a career criminal, Ramensky received the nickname "Gentle Johnny" as he never used violence when being apprehended by the police.
Johnny Ramensky - The Early Years
Johnny was the son of Lithuanian immigrant parents. His father died when Ramensky was about eight and the remaining family moved to the Gorbals, in the south side of Glasgow.
In Glasgow, he attended Rutherglen Academy, and by eleven he had begun committing crimes. Eventually, he was sent to Polmont Borstal, spending three years there.
Johnny initially worked down the coal mines, similar to his father who had been a clay miner, and it was there he became familiar with the uses of dynamite.
Johnny Ramensky's Criminal Career
Throughout his life, Ramensky demonstrated great strength and gymnastics skills which he used in a career as a burglar, followed by graduating to safe-cracking, also known in the underworld as a Peterman.
During his criminal career, Ramensky maintained that he never targeted individuals' houses, but only businesses, and he became known for never resorting to violence despite being arrested numerous times, resulting in the nickname "Gentleman (or Gentle) Johnny".
Detective Superintendent Robert Colquhoun, one of his old adversaries, when taken ill, was sent a message by Ramensky wishing him a speedy recovery, suggesting he had been working too hard in pursuing him.
In October 1931, Ramensky married Margaret McManus and appears to have stayed out of trouble until March 1934 when he was sentenced to five years at HM Prison Peterhead.
Margaret died in 1934 and, after being denied parole to attend her funeral, Ramensky made his first escape on the 4th. November 1934. His escape, the first ever from Peterhead Prison, was short lived. He was caught 28 hours after his escape.
After being returned to prison he was placed in solitary confinement and shackled. Later in 1934, Labour MP for Glasgow Shettleston, John McGovern, brought up the shackling issue with the Secretary of State for Scotland. In December 1934, Ramensky was released from his shackles, making him the last man to be shackled in a Scottish prison cell.
Johnny Ramensky's Military Career
Ramensky was released after serving a sentence in Peterhead Prison on the 8th. October 1942. During his time there, he had written to officials seeking references to join the army.
Due to the intervention of a senior police officer from Aberdeen, he had attracted the interest of Robert Laycock who was seeking people with skills which could be used in commando raiding forces.
As a result, he was enlisted with the Royal Fusiliers in January 1943, and transferred immediately to the Commandos, where he was trained as a soldier whilst also instructing on the use of explosives. Although being officially enlisted with the Royal Fusiliers, he never actually served with them, spending his entire wartime service with the No. 30 Commando.
Ramensky, using his safe-blowing skills, performed sabotage missions, being parachuted behind enemy lines to retrieve documents from Axis headquarters. This culminated during the Italian campaign, where 14 embassy strong boxes or safes were opened in a single day.
Johnny's exploits may have been exaggerated, as they include obtaining documents from Erwin Rommel's headquarters in North Africa and items from Carinhall, the country home of Hermann Göring in the Schorfheide-Chorin Reserve.
However, the raid on Rommel's headquarters occurred in 1941 while Ramensky was still in prison, and Carinhall's treasures were removed before the home was destroyed by a Luftwaffe demolition squad, on Göring's orders, while Ramensky was in Italy.
Johnny remained in the army after the war as a translator for the allied forces who were repatriating approximately 70,000 Lithuanians from camps in the Lübeck area. Following this, he had a short spell as an officer's batman before being demobbed in 1946.
Johnny Ramensky - The Later Years and Death
Despite his war service and being awarded the Military Medal, Johnny did not give up his safe-cracking lifestyle, and spent the time after the war in and out of jail, including HM Prison Barlinnie and Saughton Prison.
In 1955, he married to Lily Mulholland.
He was later sentenced to a year in Perth Prison, after being caught on a shop roof in Ayr.
After suffering a stroke Johnny died at the age of 66 on the 4th. November 1972 in Perth Royal Infirmary.
Hidden Loot
Ramensky's friend Sonny Leitch, also a career criminal who served in the armed forces, said that Ramensky told him that he had stolen a hoard of Nazi plunder during the Allied march on Rome in 1944.
Johnny also said that this hoard was later kept at the Shepton Mallet military prison in Somerset, and at the Royal Navy supply depot at Carfin, Lanarkshire, after the war.
He claimed that the hoard contained portraits of Hitler, Eva Braun, Göring, Goebbels and Himmler, and a treasure trove of jewellery and gold.