It is a commonplace wisdom that from the authoritarian roots of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 grew the gulags and the police state of the Stalinist epoch. The Dictator, the Revolution, The Machine overturns that perspective once and for all by showing how October was inspired by a profound mass movement comprised of urban workers and rural poor – a movement that went on to forge a state capable of channelling its political will in and through the most overwhelming form of grass-roots democracy history has ever known.

It was a single, precarious experiment whose life was tragically brief. In a context of civil war and foreign invasion the fledgling democracy was eradicated and the Bolshevik party was denuded of its social basis – the working classes. While the party survived, its centrist elements came to the fore as the power of the bureaucracy asserted itself. From the ashes of human freedom there arose a zombified, sclerotic administration in which state functionaries took precedence over elected representatives. One man came to embody the inverted logic of this bureaucratic machine, its remorseless brutality and its parasitic drive for power. Joseph Stalin was its highest expression, accruing to himself state powers as he made his murderous, heady rise to dictator. This book examines his historical profile, its roots in Georgian medievalism, and shows why Stalin was destined to play the role he did. In broader strokes Tony McKenna raises the conflict between the revolutionary movement and the bureaucracy to the level of a literary tragedy played out on the stage of world history, showing how Stalinism’s victory would pave the way for the ‘Midnight of the Century’.

Cover illustration courtesy of flickr.com;

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jbrazito/8401681543/;

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/

Tony McKenna is a writer whose work has been featured by The Huffington Post, ABC Australia, The United Nations, New Statesman, The Progressive, New Internationalist and New Humanist. His first book, Art, Literature and Culture from a Marxist Perspective, was published by Macmillan in 2015.

“In this brilliant, moving and inspiring book, Tony McKenna provides a compelling analysis and portrayal of the historical causes of the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution, Stalin’s psychological development into a monstrous murderer of millions, and the gritty fearful realities of the lives his regime extinguished. The Dictator, The Revolution, The Machine also shows that the Russian experience doesn’t seal the fate of humankind with respect to the prospects for the creation of a genuinely democratic socialist world. It concludes by affirming the desirability and feasibility of working-class self-emancipation and socialist participatory democracy. By fully confronting the horrors of Stalinist dictatorship while providing a sophisticated account of the historically unique combination of factors that give rise to and sustained it, Tony McKenna affirms the continuing vitality and relevance of revolutionary Marxism. Utterly compelling, a must read.”

Brian S. Roper, Associate Professor in Politics at the University of Otago, author of The History of Democracy – A Marxist Interpretation

“Tony McKenna is a bona fide public intellectual who contributes to Marxist journals without having any connections to academia or to the disorganized left. This gives his writing a freshness both in terms of political insight and literary panache … Although I think that McKenna would be capable of turning a Unix instruction manual into compelling prose, the dead tyrant has spurred him to reach a higher level … his study is both an excellent introduction to Stalin and Stalinism as well as one that gives any veteran radical well-acquainted with Soviet history some food for thought on the quandaries facing the left today. Drawing upon fifty or so books, including a number that leftist veterans would likely not be familiar with such as leading Soviet military leader Gregory Zhukov’s memoir, McKenna synthesizes it all into a highly readable and often dramatic whole with his own unique voice. It is a model of historiography and one that might be read for no other reason except learning how to write well.” Louis Proyect, writer and activist, proprietor of The Unrepentant Marxist blog and moderator of Marxmail.org.