Apr 10 2018
Ken Tarbuck was a member of several different Trotskyist groups in the until the early 1970s. He went to Ethiopia to work as a university lecturer in 1977 and published this analysis in 1992.
Mengistu Haile Mariam was a bloody militarist and nationalist dictator; how is it then that for a period in the 1970s he was hailed as some sort of socialist by many on the left? That indeed is the puzzle and I hope to indicate in this essay the type of confusion which led to this predicament.
The fall of the military regime of Mengistu in Ethiopia which had effectively ruled the country since 1974 poses a number of extremely important questions for socialists, both at the level of theory and in practical activity. The regime in Ethiopia had been a self-proclaimed ‘socialist government’ which had attracted considerable support among the left in the capitalist countries during the 1970s. It was touted as being a regime worthy of support, since it was alleged to have had a socia
For three-quarters of a century, anarchists and other opponents of the 1917 Bolshevik putsch and subsequent counterrevolution have cited the uprising of the mutinous Baltic Fleet sailors and garrison soldiers at Kronstadt as one of the final social eruptions of the Russian Revolution.
The March 1921 events at the naval base on Kotlin Island, situated in the Gulf of Finland twenty miles west of St. Petersburg, are one of the landmark occurrences in the history of revolutionary resistance to the authoritarian state. In the wake of Kronstadt’s suppression, Lenin and his cabal were left in uncontested command of the solidified “dictatorship of the proletariat.”