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Eric Lee, "The August Uprising, 1924: The Georgian Anti-Soviet Revolt and the Birth of Democratic Socialism" (McFarland, 2025)
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- [00:00]
Eric Lee
Hello, everybody.
- [00:01]
Marshall Po
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
Samantha Lam
Hello, my name is Samantha Lam. Welcome to the New Books in Russian and Eastern European Studies channel. Today we have a guest, Eric Lee, to talk about his new book, The August Uprising, 1924, the Georgian Anti Soviet revolt and the birth of Democratic socialism. So, Eric, would you like to start out by saying a couple of words about yourself?
- [01:34]
Eric Lee
Yeah, sure. This is the third book in my Georgian trilogy that I've written all of them in the last nine or 10 years. They weren't written in sequence, but the first was 19, 18, 21. Then I did one about Georgian soldiers in the Second World War, and this is the third one. I'm based in London. I'm a historian and journalist and activist in the labor movement.
- [01:55]
Samantha Lam
So what got you interested in this topic? Specifically this topic?
- [01:59]
Eric Lee
You mean specifically this book or Georgia more broadly?
- [02:02]
Samantha Lam
Let's go with the topic of this book.
- [02:04]
Eric Lee
Okay. This book, obviously is a kind of sequel to the first book, right? Because my first book ends in 1921, where Georgia becomes, as needs to say, part of the happy family of Soviet nations.
- [02:16]
Samantha Lam
And that is the experiment.
- [02:18]
Eric Lee
Yeah, the experiment. So that covers the first three years of Georgian independence. Then Georgia was invaded by the Red army under Stalin's orders, interestingly, and became part of the Soviet Union. But the story doesn't end there. Right. That's not the whole story. So this book takes that story forward three years and gives it an international dimension. The first story didn't have. The first story is very much a Georgian story. A little bit of international stuff there, but this one is almost equally divided between the Georgian story and the international story.
- [02:47]
Samantha Lam
So what kind of sources did you use? I know from talking to other Georgian historians like Tim Blauvelt, that the party archives are closed now. Are there other archival sources that are difficult to get to?
- [03:00]
Eric Lee
There are, or they were. When I was working on this, I had the assistance of a brilliant Georgian postgrad student in history who did all the translations. We went together first of all to the National Library. The National Parliamentary Library had lots of sources. He went into state archives and found lots of things. I'm sure there are things we couldn't see, but there's lots that we could see. It gives one side of the story right. You can see what the state was doing. But if you want to know what happened, what the rebels were doing, because it's a different story, you wouldn't go to the same places. In addition to archival stuff, look, one of the things I stumbled on, I just read an article about this, about the serendipity of discovering things you didn't know existed. The whole point of the. The whole idea for the book comes out of one sentence in an obscure mid-1970s book published by a Dutch historian about the biography of a long forgotten Georgian, Menshevik. And in the book he casually mentions. Don't ask why I have this book. I have all kinds of books. I don't know why I bought them. It was on my shelf. And he mentions this uprising, and he mentions that there was a meeting of the leadership of the Second International, to make it really short. And Carl Kautsky happened to be in the room and Kautsky volunteered to write the resolution on what we would do after this terrible brutality, the crushing of this uprising. And that's the birth of democratic socialism. No one else had written. It was by chance I stumbled to this idea, and that is the core idea of the book, is that democratic socialism, communism are two different things. And they come out of this sprint. That's a long answer to yours. Short question about sources.
- [04:32]
Samantha Lam
Can you give our listeners some background information on Georgian history from about 1917 till it came under Soviet control in 1921? Just to give us some background.
- [04:44]
Eric Lee
Yeah. Georgia, like most of the Russian Empire, wasn't actually part of the Russian Revolution. They sort of sat back and watched the Russian Revolution happen in St. Petersburg in Georgia. What essentially happened was when the Tsar abdicated his Viceroy basically called in the leaders of the Social Democrats who were by far the largest party in the country. Everyone knew this and handed them the keys to the palace and fled back to Russia. So they didn't even have to overthrow Czariz literally the keys were handed to them and they established a society that Karl Marx would have instantly recognized. They were social democrats taking control of a poor country. So their ambition was not to create full on socialism. Their ambition was to create a liberal democracy with a very strong public and state sector, strong trade unions, multi party system. It was all socialists agreed upon was what you do when you come to power under those circumstances. Except for the Bolsheviks, Bolsheviks had a somewhat different idea of what you would do if you came to power. So they came to power, they created this model state under constant threat of invasion by the Turks and by the Russians and by just about everybody, the Armenians decided to launch a war against Georgia. I mean everybody was attacking Georgia. And this thing was quite a success. And by the end, end of 1920, just before the Soviet invasion, leaders of socialist parties from all over Europe including Ramsay MacDonald became the British Labour Prime Minister, the first Labor Prime Minister and Kautsky, they all went to Georgia, they all wrote about it, they all absolutely loved it. Said this is a model example of what social democracy can be like in power. And then Stalin, who was Georgian but was not living there had been Russianized. Stalin basically ordered the Red army to go in and put an end to this nonsense. And they did brutally well.
- [06:21]
Samantha Lam
They were Mensheviks running Georgia though, right. So I mean there was that issue.
- [06:26]
Eric Lee
That's right. These are guys who, they were orthodox Marxists, right? In the sense that Lenin and Trotsky weren't. I mean they would, they could, they could quote Marx much more than Lenin and Trotsky. Could it justify what they were doing? And they detested the Bolsheviks. So when the Bolsheviks came to power and instantly banned social democratic newspapers and arrested social democratic activists, established the dictatorship, they established the Cheka and the Gulag within weeks of seizing power and banned all the newspapers. So the Georgians took the view as did the Azerbaijanis and the Armenians and many others. Okay, we want no part of this. We don't recognize this coup d' etat that's just happened in St. Petersburg. We're going to sit this out. And eventually became an independent country. Realized we couldn't be part of the Russian Empire anymore.
- [07:09]
Samantha Lam
So what are some of the issues that lead up to August 1924. So we talked about. You said this independent state doesn't recognize Bolshevik power, but I guess they are conquered by the Red Army. Do you want to say a couple of words about that and then move forward?
- [07:28]
Eric Lee
Yes. Look, first of all, they were conquered. They didn't raise the white flag of surrender immediately without wanting to put down. My friends in Azerbaijan and Armenia, they didn't put up much of a fight. Right. You could argue that the Bolsheviks walked in and took the other two places. Georgia put up a fight. It lasted for maybe six weeks. They're a little tiny army with no foreign support. There's a mythology the Bolsheviks said the French and the British, they had no foreign support at all, fought very bravely until they were forced to capitulate. And the Georgian leadership, this is significant for the rebellion we're going to talk about. Georgian leadership all got on boats and fled the country. They left the port of Batumi and went off to Istanbul and eventually Paris. What led to the revolt was a whole list of things. And the first several chapters of the book are basically topic by topic. One that almost nobody talks about is the attack on the church. Socialists historically were not anti church. They took a strong view of what we Americans would call separation of church and state. It was a basic idea. The term they would use was religion as a private matter. Everyone acknowledged this. You could be a socialist and still a believer in Christianity or Judaism or whatever you wanted. No problem with that. The Bolsheviks took a much harder line on that. So the Bolsheviks cracked down on the Georgian church, and that in itself is a trigger for revolt. Many people, they burned churches, they killed priests. They declared war on the whole leadership of the church and jailed church leaders. I document this in the book. That itself would have triggered a revolt, but while they were at it, they attacked Georgian nationalism. Georgian nationalism had thrived during the three years of independence. Georgia had not been an independent country since the 18th century. So they've been independent. Lots of little sparks. They screwed up the economy really badly. They jailed popular leaders. They forced the use of Russians instead of Georgian. I mean, they did everything imaginable wrong to get the Georgian people to turn to them. The surprising thing about the revolt is not that it happened, but that took so long to happen. You think, why didn't this happen two years earlier?
- [09:24]
Samantha Lam
Well, why didn't it happen two years earlier?
- [09:27]
Eric Lee
Because they kept the Cheka. The Soviet secret police kept catching them out. They formed a Committee for the Independence of Georgia, and they set up a military committee. All these Ex generals and stuff. They were arrested immediately arrested and shot. I mean, one of them, famously, Koti Abkhazi, made this. The final words, like, I'm proud to give my life for Georgia. That's great. But it meant that the Cheka was on top of them. And there's a mythology about how much the Cheka knew the Beria, who's a leading figure in the Cheka at that time, a young Beria, they were saying, we know everything. There are no secrets from us, the Mensheviks, We've penetrated the organization. We know all their plans. That wasn't true. But the Mentovics themselves believe that, that the Cheka was all knowing and all seeing. So they kept postponing this revolt until they couldn't postpone it any longer.
- [10:17]
Samantha Lam
Well, the Caucasian Cheka does have a reputation for being special, for being cliquey, for being on the ball, for being clannish. I mean, there's a whole lot written on them as, you know, a special type of Czechist. I mean, there's some truth to that.
- [10:38]
Eric Lee
And look. And also, there were different things. First, a lot of them were brought in from Russia. There wasn't an indigenous Bolshevik movement to speak of, so a lot of people were imported. Beria, though born in Georgia, Beria had been based in, I think in Baku. He was in Azerbaijan, and he was brought in. And there was more than one Cheka. There was a Transcaucasian Sheka and there was a Georgian Cheka, and there was the Soviet Cheka. And they didn't share secrets. And they would arrest each other's agents. And there were a lot of that going on as well. And the fact that they were. You could argue that they were all knowing and all seeing as they pretend to be, but they weren't, because first they didn't see this revolt coming, and they panicked. We can talk about that as well. The Soviet leadership, when it happened, especially Ojonikidze, who was Stalin's viceroy in the area, panicked when this revolt happened. Now, they shouldn't have panicked. The Czech was fully in charge. There were no grounds for panic. But they did panic. They were very worried about this.
- [11:29]
Samantha Lam
Well, the Cheka was also, in many ways, outgunned. I mean, I study, like, Siberia and stuff in the borderlands, and these are people, like, wandering through the bushes with a pistol. And they don't know the land, they don't know the people. I'm like, oh, my God, dude, this is how you end up murdered in a ditch. What are you doing?
- [11:50]
Eric Lee
And the Cheka Was looked what they had going for them was not that they were smarter or had more intelligence or is they were much more ruthless than their opponents. So famously during the revolt, the rebels took prisoners like high ranking Soviet officials and didn't kill them. And the Cheka did during the revolt and particularly after the revolt just had no constraints on them barrier particularly would just tell people just like, sign this paper and we guarantee you'll live. And they would shoot them all and their families and hostages and people who had no connection to the revolt. Literally thousands and thousands killed. And that was unheard of in this region. I mean, the czarist police never did stuff like that, not on that scale.
- [12:32]
Samantha Lam
I guess, you know, having, you know, seeing what they did in the 1930s like this does not surprise me. I mean, this was common in the early 1930s too, when they were hunting, hunting bandits and whitest in, you know, Siberia. They would tell them that they were going to like, turn on your mates and like, help me. But then they'd arrest them and take them and subsequently execute them after running them briefly through a troika. You know.
- [12:56]
Eric Lee
In comparison to the Great Terror, obviously this isn't, you know, it's not a big deal. Right. But of course, at the time, and I've been thinking about this, why didn't the Mensheviks fight harder? Why didn't they show more brutality and stamina and determination? And part of it is they had no idea what was coming. Nobody does like the Russian people when people ask German Jews, why didn't you flee Germany when Hitler came to power? They didn't know what was going to happen. Nobody expected that, never happened before. So these Georgians have to be what they did have to be measured against what they knew at the time, not what happened later in the 30s, which they could not have foreseen. Totalitarianism was new, was a new idea.
- [13:31]
Samantha Lam
Well, let's talk briefly about the ideological issues at play. Do you want to explain the difference between Menshevism and Bolshevism and socialism and communism for our listeners? Because these are terms that often get abused in political discourse.
- [13:48]
Eric Lee
First of all, the Mensheviks in Georgia didn't really call themselves Mensheviks. I mean, it may be examples with. Yeah, but generally they call themselves social democrats and the Bolsheviks love to call them Mensheviks, first because the word Menshevik means minority and put them in the same category as all these lovely Mensheviks like Martov, who had zero influence, zero Power easily defeated, outgunned by the Bolsheviks. Whereas the Mensheviks in Georgia were not. They had the power, they were the armed forces. They were much larger than the local Bolsheviks. So they didn't like the term Menshevik. It wouldn't have been used. But the basic argument between social democrats or socialists and communists at its core doesn't hang on economic reforms. People sometimes say, oh, the communists, they wanted much more equality. You know, they were much more of an. In much more, much more of a hurry to create a perfect society. That was my.
- [14:37]
Samantha Lam
I'm American, like giving children free food is considered communism and bad. So you may need to be a little bit, you know, clearer for the American audiences here.
- [14:48]
Eric Lee
Americanism is important and it's one of my audiences. I hope we'll actually read the book. The socialists believed above all in democracy. That was their core belief. It even appears in the Communist Manifesto, which could be very confusing to people who only know 20th century communism. Why would a book called the Communist Manifesto advocate for democracy when the communist cultures were anything but democracies? Well, different sense. Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto the first battle the working class needs to win is the battle for democracy. And he was a lifelong democrat, opponent of censorship, believed in representative institutions, freely elected. And the Georgian social democrats with very strong Venice opposition political parties, free elections, women had the right to vote. They opposed all forms of ethnic repression, rivalry. They gave, you know, liberated everybody. It was. They believed in freedom and in liberty.
- [15:39]
Samantha Lam
Can they also commit like genocide in Abkhazia and Asiati too? I mean, just really like.
- [15:45]
Eric Lee
That's an interesting question because that depends who you ask, right?
- [15:49]
Samantha Lam
If I remember your book, though you did talk about them carrying out at.
- [15:54]
Eric Lee
Least murders were not perfect and they were fighting nasty wars against bitter opponents. And they did stuff that they're probably not proud of unless the Zhugeli, head of their special forces, it was kind of proud of what he did generally. I wouldn't call it genocide, first of all. And what they were doing was. It's the same issue Georgia faces now. This is the shocking thing when you look at the maps and politics now. Georgia now claims that Abkhazia is a Russian controlled province, that 20% of their territory is in the hands of the Russians. They do not acknowledge that Abkhazia and Osafez have any right to self determination. Even now that's never changed. They look at it as these are parts of our country and we know in that part of the world, a lot of countries say Armenia has this idea that it should be much bigger. It's like this is like the rump tiny Armenia. They should actually be bigger. We know that we just ended a war between Armenia and Zer Bashan over who gets what territory, who has a right to this territory. Abkhazia and South Ossetia were then and now manipulated by the Russians to use against Georgia. So of course there emerged in Abkhazia a genuine nationalist movement with quite prominent leaders. But I don't think whatever crimes the Georgian regime committed are minuscule compared to what the Soviets later did to them.
- [17:10]
Samantha Lam
That still doesn't answer our question of what is socialism or what is communism, though. So let's socialism.
- [17:15]
Eric Lee
Socialism is a social system in which the working class is in power, which strives for greater and greater equality and human freedom. And communism is a form of totalitarianism that is in its essence no different from fascism. And this is a whole section of the book on the term Red Fascism, which became almost invented by the Georgians. They're among the earliest users of this term. They were arguing, and this is in the early 1920s. It's not about Hitler, it's about Mussolini. But they were arguing that the system they've created in the Soviet Union is essentially no different from Mussolini system in fascist Italy. You can argue that that's not true, but that's what they believed. So I think it is true that communism, certainly the Soviet form, was a form of totalitarianism that did not recognize human rights, did not believe in democracy. Working class institutions like trade unions were crushed and replaced by labor fronts. I wish people could see the video because your facial expression is that.
- [18:16]
Samantha Lam
Well, my first book is on the 1936 Stalinist constitution and participatory democracy in the Soviet Union. And I personally don't believe that the term totalitarianism has any use whatsoever because the Soviet government simply didn't have the capabilities to dominate people's lives like that. They just didn't.
- [18:38]
Eric Lee
Okay, look, I know there are different views on this and there are scholars who share that view and the scholars who share the views of Cold War idea Hall Arendt and others that Nazism and communism are both forms of totalitarian rule. You may disagree. I think that's basically a true idea. And certainly that explains how I view the difference between socialism and communism.
- [18:59]
Samantha Lam
Okay, how was Bolshevik rule and people like Stalin and Orjon Akinse received in post Menshevik or post independent Georgia? So, post 1921 Georgia.
- [19:14]
Eric Lee
Yeah. So look, I have a chapter about this, about Stalin's first visit. Now, Stalin had been when he lived in Georgia. He wasn't well liked. Right. And there's a reason why he wound up eventually when he was released from Siberian exile and even earlier moved his look, his career to St. Petersburg, not Georgia. He had no future in Georgia. He knew this. There's stories I tell when I think in the book about his first meeting with Noj Yardani, leader of the Georgian Social Democrats, which Jordania basically interviewed him. Stalin was offering his services. Jordania basically said, go back, read some books, come back when you know something. Bad idea. To me, it's going to become the future dictator of the world's biggest empire. You don't say stuff like that. But Jordania didn't know. He was just. Stalin was just an annoying, not well informed bully. Stalin had not been in Georgia for a very long time. So after the Red army went in under his instructions, Trotsky claimed to know nothing about the invasion. Hey, friends, it's Karamo. Talk show host, life coach and your next best friend. You just don't know it yet. I'm hosting a new podcast called Started on Brotherhoods. We're going around the world to explore male friendships and all the wins, challenges and bonds that are made in WhatsApp group chats. And that's exactly where you can listen to it, right in the app. It's streaming on the official WhatsApp channel. Just open the app and go to the updates tab to start listening. While you're at it, message your best friend and make sure they listen too. I'll see you there.
- [20:39]
Samantha Lam
Well, when did Trotsky claim that? When did Trotsky claim that? Because Trotsky's not exactly the world's most honest human either. And he's a very good at spinning things for his own advantage.
- [20:52]
Eric Lee
But we have, we have cables and things. Both Trotsky and Lenin acted as if they didn't know what's going on. And we're asking people to please ask so and so to find out what's happening in Georgia. Whereas Stalin Thorzonkidze had actually arranged this entire invasion. So Stalin goes back to Georgia, just, I don't know, four months after the invasion, thinking conquering hero, right? He's now in charge his guys there and the first thing he does, he addresses a huge public meeting of workers, thinking, as would have been the case in Russia, the urban working class is going to be solidly Bolshevik. Maybe he wouldn't be welcomed in some small village, but there they're going to rally behind him and they start heckling and booing him and eventually, they pull some famous old Menshevik leader out on stage with wild applause. It's like the nightmare scenario for Stalin. Stalin storms off the stage, surrounded by his Cheka guards, and goes immediately to the party headquarters and says, what the hell is going on here? You're supposed to be in charge. I'm a member of Soviet People's Council, people's Commissars, I'm a senior figure in the Bolshevik Party, and I'm fucking Georgian. Like, why are you acting this way? People were just yelling at him that, you didn't free us from anything, you liar, scoundrel. Like, all these incredible insults at him. And he yelled at the. And he had a meeting with the party leadership where he said to them that nationalism is like this cancer here. It's a sickness that spread through the party, and it didn't exist when I was in Georgia many years ago. This nationalism has to be crushed. He anticipated that this was going to be a real problem. The Georgians had become nationalistic in a way that hadn't been before. They didn't like Russians telling them what to do. They didn't like the Russians. Russians told them, you're not an independent country anymore. You're part of a Transcaucasian Republic now. Something they did not like being told, and many, many things like that. So his reception there was extraordinary and made it very clear to him how defective Soviet armies controlled Georgia did not mean Georgia was a fully Sovietized society yet.
- [22:50]
Samantha Lam
And how did the Bolsheviks go about implementing rule in Georgia?
- [22:55]
Eric Lee
Yeah, look, they were. You can argue whether they were totalitarian or not. At first they weren't, because their leadership was deeply divided in Georgia. There were many of them who Lenin had given instructions to be gentle on the Mensheviks, on Jordani and his. And his people, because Lenin understood how incredibly popular they were in Georgia even after the military defeat. And so at first, there was a bit of that. The Georgian Social Democrats were not outlawed yet. The Georgian Communist Party had lots of internal debates with different factions. The triumphant leading faction was seen as nationalistic and didn't like to kowtow to Stalin. There was massive fight and dispute there. A lot of this is documented in histories of Lenin's last days and years, where Lenin eventually took the side of the Bolshevik, the more nationalistic Bolsheviks in Georgia. He was defeated. Stalin eventually triumphed in that. What were we talking about?
- [23:45]
Samantha Lam
How rule was implemented? Bolshevik rule.
- [23:47]
Marshall Po
Yeah.
- [23:49]
Eric Lee
They did their own. This is the time of the new economic policy in Russia. So they weren't collectivizing the farms yet or anything like that. They were bringing all the aspects of Soviet rule there. So, for example, the attack on the trade unions. I think you're gonna ask me about this. Anyway, the Georgian unions were very powerful, right? Obviously, under the Tsar, there were barely any unions. They weren't really legal. Five minutes after the czar abdicated, there were like hundreds of thousands of Georgians who were union numbers. And this is a real problem for the Bolsheviks. And it's going to be a problem for the next several decades. I was raised politically on Solidarity in Poland. I was aware of what was going on Poland before Solidarity emerged, was writing about it and reading about it. And you realize it's kind of interesting fact that the first real challenge to communist rule in Eastern Europe came from trade unions, not from the church and not from exile organizations, not from underground political parties, but unions organized on economic issues, not organized on political issues. They became the biggest challenge. They eventually toppled what we know as communism. This was true in Georgia. Unions were powerful and did not want to be told what to do. And they were independent of the state. They were so powerful that they forced the Georgian politicians under Menshevik rule to include the right to strike in the Georgian constitution. Even though they hardly ever went on strike. They didn't have to go on strike because they sort of could tell the bosses what to do. They were that powerful. They would force prices to be lower so working people could have access to basic foodstuffs and they could force wages to go up. And they really had a lot of influence. They weren't even going on strike. They demanded their right to strike, that it be part of the constitution, which was an extraordinary thing. And they were of course, dominated by the social democrats. Obviously there are hardly any Bolsheviks.
- [25:30]
Samantha Lam
And I assume this is the mid to late 20s that this is going on.
- [25:34]
Eric Lee
No, no, the early, early twenties. This on the menstrual. So the first thing the Bolsheviks do is they basically ban these unions and they bring in their own unions, as they would do in places like Poland. Everywhere else. Their unions were, as we grew to call them in the years of the Cold War. They were state labor fronts. They weren't actually unions in the sense that we understand them. They were there as transmission belts of the Communist Party. They would asset.
- [25:57]
Samantha Lam
Again, as an American, you're going to have to explain how you understand unions, because Americans tend to be very anti union. We tend to hear things like unions are where everybody doesn't work and it makes the prices go up and they protect lazy people. So Maybe you could explain your understanding of unions and how that changed in Soviet Georgia.
- [26:20]
Eric Lee
Of course. So, look, first of all, we both left the US a while ago, and one thing has changed in the US in recent years is that unions have become much more popular, the polls. So unions have become infinitely more popular than they were. And there's lots of strikes and things where union members who are seen as really, really underpaid and exploited, who do really, really good work, are usually popular. So people organizing unions now, like at Amazon or at Starbucks, those are popular. People love them. They get a lot of support from the public. That's changed. That's a change in America. Didn't used to be true.
- [26:50]
Samantha Lam
I was going to say, it depends on who you ask.
- [26:54]
Eric Lee
The public opinion post shows significant support for highly exploited workers forming unions. People do understand that in the last 150 years of capitalism, unions are really the only tool we have for working people to defend rights. So the unions need to be independent of the state. This is a core idea that all socialists agreed on up until the Bolshevik seizure of power, that unions were independent institutions not controlled by political parties or anyone else. They were controlled by their own members, and they existed to defend their members, like any institutions. Even universities, they're not perfect. They don't always do what you're supposed to do. But on the whole, they were understood to play, broadly speaking, a positive role.
- [27:37]
Samantha Lam
I'm a member of my university's union, and all it does is give me money on holidays. It's not very effective.
- [27:45]
Eric Lee
This is a Russian union, right?
- [27:46]
Samantha Lam
Yeah.
- [27:47]
Eric Lee
Okay. But all the unions in post Soviet world have real problems. They have real problems because they don't have a history of independent trade unionism. So when those countries ended communist rule, they didn't know what's a union. So it's been a long struggle in all those countries. I know the Georgian labor movement today very well. I've been to Georgia many times. I know many of the senior trade union officials, because my other hat is as a trade unionist. And I see the struggles that some of them totally get what independent trade unionism is, and leading really heroic strikes, including over the Chiatura minors. I'll return to them. They play a role in my story. And you're also union leaders. They're just the old stodgy, bureaucratic types who want to get a fat paycheck and do nothing. There's that as well. In Soviet Union, especially in his final years, unions were not seen by anybody as positive institutions. They would literally give you some money on A holiday or maybe help you find a cheap vacation somewhere. But they didn't defend your rights. They didn't get you what you wanted. They weren't on your side against the state, they were inside the state against you. That's how they were seen. That's the role unions play even today in any authoritarian society. You go to Iran. The official unions in Iran do nothing for the workers. They represent the state to the workers.
- [28:58]
Samantha Lam
So that's just hr. It's just basically HR Union.
- [29:02]
Eric Lee
Basically hr. It's used by the bosses. The bosses in many cases being the state or that's their role. But unions didn't always play in the American labor movement. Is a history of real struggle, often violent struggle to defend the rights of workers.
- [29:15]
Samantha Lam
Yeah, but that's one that's not well taught, if we're going to be honest. Of course not covered in pretty good.
- [29:22]
Eric Lee
As is the history of these countries. If you were raised in Georgia, you probably know very little about the history of your country. It said. It certainly was always. When I first visited Georgia in 2010, I was really shocked. I've been talking to really educated, smart people, trade union leaders, journalists, who knew really nothing about the history of their country. They had never been taught it. In Soviet times they were taught a fable. Nobody actually believed in the fable. And so there's very limited history that they knew about the country. And one of this I heard repeatedly about them. When you ask what did you think about the Social Democrats and the leader Noah Jordania, Many people said, yeah, they were cowards, they ran away instead of fighting like men. Which gives you a clue what they were taught, right?
- [30:03]
Samantha Lam
Yeah. So the trade unions, why are they dismantled? Because they act independently of the states.
- [30:11]
Eric Lee
And they pose a threat. Just like why did the communist government of Poland fight so hard against Solidarity, take such risks and eventually lost the fight, bringing on martial law and arresting thousands and doing things that isolate Poland completely. Why would you do that? Because you think unions are a threat. The self organized institutions are threatening and unions more than any. Well, so the church obviously was a threat, but the unions really stood out as being. And also the unions, they were supposed to be pro Bolshevik. The people who joined these, who members of these unions, railway workers or whatever was supposed to be the bastion of strength of the Communist Party in Georgia. They were nothing of the sort. They were dominated by the Social Democrats. So they were dismantled quickly and they maintained an apparatus of communications, even underground. I tell stories in my book about their attempts to meet delegations of foreign workers. The documents they would Issue listing names of their trade union leaders who were arrested and killed. They were quite. They were the opposition inside Georgia.
- [31:09]
Samantha Lam
It's interesting because in Kirov, it's the unions, particularly railway workers and stuff, that tend to get picked off as Trotskyists in the 1930s, again as opposition. So maybe it's just that they were a little too radical.
- [31:26]
Eric Lee
Just doing their job. Their job was where independent democratic organizations. We listen to our members. Our members tell us they want, you know, better health and safety or better wages or whatever. That's a threat to an authority. I won't even call it totalitarian because you're in the room. An authoritarian regime feels threatened by that kind of behavior and doesn't tolerate. And remember, there was a huge debate inside the Russian Communist Party at this time about unions, where Trotsky took the view that we should have an army of labor. Military discipline, which is all he knew from the Red army, and unions, effectively as we know them, shouldn't exist. And even Stalin, but that was going too far. Can you imagine at Trotsky was more authoritarian than Stalin was. On the question of labor rights, I.
- [32:04]
Samantha Lam
Am not surprised about that. I'm just laughing because in the 1930s, like, I get people that are essentially workers, opposition wanting things like higher wages, wages that go up and market prices go, better housing, and they're all labeled Trotskyists. I'm like, this guy is a like Lithuanian Baptist who isn't even a Communist Party member. I don't think he's a Trot. But everybody becomes a tribe.
- [32:29]
Eric Lee
You were in Menshevik and you were an opponent of the self Soviet power if you called for independent trade unions.
- [32:36]
Samantha Lam
So let's talk about the actual Mensheviks. What role do the Mensheviks in exile play in all of this mess?
- [32:43]
Eric Lee
Well, it's one thing I learned, which was a surprise to me, was when you talk to Georgians 15 years ago and they all have all they know about the maestrics where they weren't sufficiently manly. But I didn't realize that at the time. The Menshevik leaders, I'll call them Mensheviks, Social democratic leaders like Jordania were actually quite popular in Georgia even after they fled into exile. And one of my sources had a report there was some play theater that the Bolsheviks produced, like a traveling theater troupe that did this play making fun of Jordania in exile, like living the high life in Paris. I think it was called Mensheviks in Paris. And people were furious. Were BOOING they had to stop the performances because people liked. They liked the Menshevik leadership. Why wouldn't they? So the Mensheviks abroad had strong connections to the homeland. When we think of again, like the Cold War era, you can't even imagine how could you have a connection to Georgia. It's on the other side of the Cold War. It's on the other side of the Iron Curtain. But there wasn't an Iron Curtain there. You could enter Georgia through Turkey with almost no difficulty. There were no borders, not real ones. And if you were like, had a reason to cross the border, the borders were porous. So the Mensheviks, the Sochnoks, maintained very strong connections with their supporters there. And they didn't always agree on things, but. So the idea of the rebellion was an idea that was agreed upon by the leadership abroad and by the local leadership that was underground in Georgia.
- [34:11]
Samantha Lam
And can you name for our listeners specific players abroad? I mean, you mentioned Kalski, Jordania. Are there a couple other people that are notable?
- [34:20]
Eric Lee
Kautsky, of course, is not a Georgian. He's in the German party. But Jordani is the unquestioned leader of the Georgian nation at this time. He's seen as the president. Some people say you shouldn't use the term president to describe it. He was the leader of the Georgian Social Democrats and the former leader of the Georgian government. He was in charge. Two of his top people were Noe Homariki, who had been the Minister of Agriculture, which if you were to America, you'd say, really the Secretary of Agriculture is an important figure, but this is Georgia. He was the architect of the Georgian land reform. He was an enormously popular, well known figure in Georgia. And it was the greatest success of the Socialist Democrats in power was this land reform. It was sort of like what NEP did in Russia to land there. It was just suddenly there was food. Suddenly there was no more unrest in the countryside. Enormously popular leader. And the other one was Zhugeli. Zhugelli was the leader of what was called the National Guard and the People's Guard and whatnot. Even the Red Guard. This was the Praetorian Guard of the Social Democratic Party. They were under party control. He was the ruthless guy. If there were war crimes committed, Abkhazia, he's your man. He did it right and was proud of it. But Jugueli was popular. He was seen as the really the tough guy of the Mansheviks. So these two men who were up there with Rodani in Importance. They were sent into Georgia in 1924 knowing there would be a rebellion later in the year, and they were trying to agree the date. They were there to take charge of it. These are the central figures in the story. Among the social democrats there were also. The other one was the former mayor of Tbilisi. Then Tiflis, also a social democrat, was also brought into Georgia secretly. They were all caught by the Cheka before the rebellion. Not one of them made it to the first day one of the rebellion. They were all in jail.
- [35:59]
Samantha Lam
Although to be fair to the Chika, that means that they're not entirely paranoid of just crazy about foreign sides running operations.
- [36:08]
Eric Lee
No, they weren't paranoid at all. They're obviously right. There was going to be an uprising. The Metroiks were not hiding this, that there was going to be an uprising. They intended all along to do it. They believed it would be a popular uprising. Austhmostrophes well, the problem with the Cheka is they exaggerated. They used their all seeing, all knowing the idea. It wasn't always true. That's the point. They didn't always know. Yes, they caught these guys, but they didn't catch everybody. And the panic was important because Stalin and Ojonokidze should have known the extent of the uprising and how easy it was going to be to defeat. And they didn't. Especially Ojonikids. Panic was palpable when you read the things he said. So they themselves weren't sure the Cheka was on the ball. And it's hard. They were outgunned, the Cheka.
- [36:55]
Samantha Lam
So let's pick up with what is the initial spark behind the uprising? What is our inciting event here?
- [37:01]
Eric Lee
Okay, so this wasn't the kind of uprising where something happened and it triggered an uprising. This uprising had been in the works for three years, right. And they kept setting new dates and creating new committees and new organizations and the Checker would arrest some of them and. And it just didn't. So eventually they settled on to do it at the end of August 1924. Apparently, according to one source, they chose a date the morning after a festival when they said all the Soviet troops would be drunk and hangovers. This is the best time to launch an uprising. That was, by the way, the way that date was chosen. You can't say there was a particular trigger, that somebody was arrested or something happened. It was a general long list of reasons why people really wanted to start the uprising. So the plan was for a national uprising that would start initially, apparently around Tiflis, that rebel troops would Pour into Tiflis under the leadership of the well known Kakuza, who was not a social democrat, he was a liberal Democrat, a national democrat. Sorry. And nothing went according to plan?
- [38:03]
Samantha Lam
Well, nothing ever does.
- [38:05]
Eric Lee
Nothing ever does. Should we talk about what actually happened?
- [38:10]
Samantha Lam
Yes.
- [38:11]
Eric Lee
So the plan was national uprising would start on a single day. And according to almost all accounts, it starts accidentally a day early in Shiatura in western Georgia, which is the heart of the manganese mining districts. These are miners. Problem is, first of all, even though everyone sort of says this, there are other sources that say they actually started the uppercase on the right day and everyone else was a day behind.
- [38:35]
Samantha Lam
Was it a calendar issue or they didn't coordinate or communications were terrible.
- [38:41]
Eric Lee
It's not like, first of all, they get out their smartphone and send a WhatsApp message to somebody. I mean, can you imagine what communications are like across Georgia for an underground organization with no resources? Right.
- [38:51]
Samantha Lam
I assume that they were writing messages or tying them to pigeons or something.
- [38:55]
Eric Lee
There would have been some way, but this was a very hard thing under conditions in Georgia at that time, to organize a coordinated uprising. So the miners in Chia Torah arose first and seized the town. Now, these miners, they were like Chiatura is to Georgia what Kronstadt was to the Russian Revolution. This is the core group of the Social Democratic Party. It's western Georgia, which had been people like Jordani. They were all born there. It's their part of Georgia. And the miners were in a union early on. They went on strike early on in 1905. They played a critical role. They were big supporters of the government during Georgia's years of independence. So they were the first to. And they just seized control of all these institutions, telegraph lines, whatever. And it began to spread. The ones closer to Tiflis in eastern Georgia, led by this guy called Kakuza, who had a band, they called him the Sworn Men. The men who had sworn loyalty to came into Georgia. They'd been dwindling over the years. I think they were no longer really a significant force. They were the ones that Bolsheviks worried about. So Tiflis was an armed camp ready for an attack by rebels. And they basically couldn't do it. So they made some smaller attacks and were not able to really disrupt things. And Shiitura uprising, which spread a bit, was fairly quickly suppressed by the local Cheka, by Abkhazians, who came in to show their support for the Bolshevik government. And many of the places there are various accounts of how long it lasted. The official Soviet line is that it Lasted a day. The entire revolt was one day. And the Minishviks behaved brutally. And they were monsters. It seems that hostages were taken or people were arrested among the Soviet leadership who were not killed. The Soviet unknowns had a clear policy. We're not going to kill them. Not necessarily because they were more humane, but also they understood that would lead to reprisals against them.
- [40:45]
Samantha Lam
Well, dead hostages aren't particularly useful.
- [40:49]
Eric Lee
Yeah, there's that just in general they behave more humanely, but it's not clear exactly why they were so much more humane in the Bolshevikskirk, but they were. And the Bolsheviks tell stories that the princes returned and demanded their lands back and their estates back then. All this happened in the 25 period, which is complete nonsense because the whole claim to fame of the Social Democrats was their land reform, that the peasants had land, and that's kind of silly. And the revolt fizzled out very quickly overall, maybe lasted a week and no time.
- [41:23]
Samantha Lam
How many regular people, like everyday normal citizens joined? Was this mainly just the coordinated rebels or were regular people involved?
- [41:34]
Eric Lee
It seems to be mainly the rebels and relatively small groups. So loads of people. Like in Tiflis, there would have been large numbers of supporters of the former government who did not rise up because the conditions didn't exist for them to rise up. They were under very tight military control. The Georgian forces otherwise were fairly divided. The leaders who had been sent in, like Zhugeli, was a military man and a bit of a brute. They were in jail. So there was no. So as a military event, the rebellion is not particularly significant. There was no chance it was going to succeed.
- [42:06]
Samantha Lam
And so there wasn't a lot of popular support for these people.
- [42:09]
Eric Lee
I think there was, but I think there was nothing they could do. Right. They were up against the Soviets, had been in power for three years. They had their own Cheka, they had police forces, they had the Red army present. They were not going to give up power easily. They were known for their brutality. They had done killed many people in those three years. They jailed many people. There were many hostages being held already, even before the revolt. So people looked at it and thought, wow, I'm not going to risk my life here. There are many comparisons. Maybe we can come back to this to the east rebellion in Ireland being these two revolts, same thing there. The number of people who actually fought against the British was tiny. But the people of Ireland probably by and large were fairly supportive of the rebels, as we saw later.
- [42:55]
Samantha Lam
Although I get the impression in Ireland that's more because of the brutality of the British response and the fact that the British implemented a draft that could have sent them to fight and die in France that same year.
- [43:06]
Eric Lee
There's lots of differences, but there's also lots of similarities. The argument has been made that by Timothy Blavet and others that the Georgian Social Democrats were well aware of the Irish example and thought that we should do this even if we know we can't win, that there are reasons to do it and they model themselves in a way on what happened there. So I think support for it, to answer your question, was probably considerably larger than the actual number of fighters. And the Bolsheviks were well aware of this, which is part of the reason that explains their panic. They knew that if all the Georgians who supported the rebels grabbed guns, this would be a much bigger fight. Any of the experience, the recent experiences which they compared this revolt to, of the Tambov rebellion and the Kronstadt uprising which really terrified the Bolsheviks on their scale. And this was ozonekidze, which compared this little tiny week long rebellion in Georgia to those rebellions which were much larger and more frightening. So they were a bit afraid of.
- [43:58]
Samantha Lam
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- [44:42]
Samantha Lam
Experian Save over $200 when you book weekly stays with VRBO this winter. If you haven't seen your college besties since, well college you need a week to catch up in a snowy cabin. Take a week long vacation and save over $200. Book now@vervo.com were they getting state support from anti Soviet countries? Were the British, the French, the Americans funding any of this?
- [45:08]
Eric Lee
Absolutely not. There were there were stories that the Georgians were meeting with French military officials. There was nothing in the in 1921 the only support they got was first the French I think helped evacuate the Georgian government on a boat, got them out of Batumi and one French warship off the coast may have fired some shells at the advancing Bolsheviks and then left. There was no other military support given. They were on their own. They had some support in 21 from the Armenians who rose up against the Bolsheviks. But basically they were really on their own. The Georgians, very much like Ireland. I mean, they really. Nobody was going to help them because.
- [45:42]
Samantha Lam
I knew the whites actually got a fair amount of support from the French government. They allowed them to set up headquarters, run terror networks and that sort of thing.
- [45:52]
Eric Lee
Absolutely. Look, all the non Bolshevik powers from the Japanese and Americans and the French and British all did their best and all acquired friends. Friends. They also, they felt an ideological sympathy for. If you were a British monarchist, right wing, Tory type, you'd look at these characters like Denikin or Kolchak and you'd think, hey, we know these kind of guys. They're like monarchists and right wingers. We can get along with them. The Georgian were like Mensheviks. They had no allies in governments at that time. That changed in 1924 though.
- [46:24]
Samantha Lam
Why was the Soviet response. What was the Soviet response and why was it so harsh response?
- [46:30]
Eric Lee
This is the story, right? The story of my book is not the story of this pathetic, unsuccessful, poorly planned, poorly executed revolt. It's what Soviets did. And their reaction could have been, this is a minor thing, this is jail. A few people, maybe shoot a couple of them. But their reaction was absolute panic. They decided that they were first. Everybody they captured they lied to. And Beria himself played a role. They captured the whole leadership of the rebellion in a monastery outside of Tiflis. Beria meets with them, says to them, if you guys call and everybody is surrendering, you know, blah, blah, blah, nothing will happen to you, everybody will be fine. And they all sign all these papers, then he has them all shot.
- [47:06]
Samantha Lam
I mean, in fairness, we're making the comparison to the Irish to the Easter Rising. The British brought in heavy guns and flattened the center of Dublin.
- [47:14]
Eric Lee
That's right.
- [47:16]
Samantha Lam
They didn't use heavy weapons. Who surrendered too? I mean.
- [47:22]
Eric Lee
The British were awful. There's no question there. You know, I tell people, if you ever go to Dublin, go visit the courtyard of the prison where James Connolly and the leaders of these three uprising were shot in cold blood, brutally. The British behavior was abysmal. Now the Russian behavior, they didn't have to use tanks and artillery to flatten because towns weren't being held by the rebels. They could actually just arrest them. Now they had thousands of people already in jail. They'd been arresting over the years. I document in the book poets and writers and anybody was critical or independent of the Soviet rule, they had them in jail already. So they decided after they'd captured everybody they wanted to capture, they had them all shot. And they shot Zhugeli and they shot Khomoriki and they shot, I forgot his name, the mayor of Tiflis. All of these guys were shot. The one famous guy from the revolt who didn't get shot was this national Democrat, Kakuzu managed to flee. He got out of the country. Everybody else was arrested and shot. Their families were shot, their children were shot. There were mass graves dug in tiflis, which by 1930s, when they were doing construction, they would find these mass graves, thousands of deaths. There's a lot of dispute at how many were killed, with the Soviets basically saying hardly any and the opponents of the regime saying 10,000.
- [48:32]
Samantha Lam
Okay, so I take it they did not have show trials for them like you see later in the 30s.
- [48:36]
Eric Lee
No trials. No trials at all. This was a military justice, right? Executing them all. Barrier, who's not the head of the checkup, he's one, he's a senior figure. He's very young. He's like taking charges and he's relishing the role. He's proving what he's able to do.
- [48:53]
Samantha Lam
And so many weird, because he's actually a break, sort of a break on ya job's craziness in the 30s, which.
- [49:01]
Eric Lee
Is you're like, that's 15 years later. This is the young. Yeah. Rising in the ranks of the Cheka. Knowing that in a cynical way, knowing that this is how you get people like Stalin to pay attention to you. It's effective. Also, there's a biography of him by his son. It's like, it's a dictated interview. I don't think the son actually wrote the book where he's interviewed and he tells a whole story, which I cite in my book. Dad Barry was this great guy who was doing everything he could to avert bloodshed. Okay, this stat story, I mean, in.
- [49:33]
Samantha Lam
Fairness, you probably wouldn't tell your small children, hey, you know, I just went out and shot a whole bunch of people. Today.
- [49:40]
Eric Lee
Even this story written decades after Barrier's death, this story goes on about how Zhugeli was captured because he was visiting his mistress in Tbilisi, rather than the metrics, all these weaklings, and they did stuff like that. And they're all corrupt. Then the Bolshevik response was over the top, crazy. So much so that. And I opened the book of a quote There's a story that Ojo Nakisi was called to, I believe, the Central Committee or the Politburo to report on this, like, what the fuck is going on in Georgia? And he says, basically, we couldn't stop. We were just in the middle of this bloodbath and we couldn't stop. And you're sorry. We may have. Acknowledging that it was over the top, but then we have these speeches from Stalin and Zinoviev. This is the time when Zinovich and Stalin was still playing on the same team, both of them saying this was a threat to the Soviet state on a scale like Tambov, the Tambov revolt, and like the Kranz rebellion, which is extraordinary comparisons to make. Stalin should have known that it was not a threat on that scale at.
- [50:40]
Samantha Lam
All, in theory of how would he have known that if he's getting reports from Berea and people like Berea that this is a real threat? This is what I see in the discussion of the elections after the Constitution is the reports coming out of, like, the NKVD are insane. They're like, oh, my God, all these people are coming back and all of these bad people are being elected again. And it's a threat, threat, threat. So if that's the information you're getting, how would he know that it was not serious?
- [51:11]
Eric Lee
He would know, because also the reports they had about the actual rebellion was that they knew that the rebellion had been suppressed very quickly.
- [51:18]
Samantha Lam
Does he get those reports or are those internal within the nkvd and locally.
- [51:23]
Eric Lee
They get in the reports because Ojrada Kidze is sending these cables, which we have. We had access to those, and the cables are to Moscow, and they're basically saying, rebellion crushed very swiftly. They're being picked up by foreign media. The New York Times is running news stories based on these cables at the time, what they're being told by the Bolshevik leaders in Moscow.
- [51:40]
Samantha Lam
Although, in fairness, the cable you would send to the New York Times may not be the exact same one you would send us.
- [51:45]
Eric Lee
No, but they are both. We have both. And they're in line. The line was this rebellion was swiftly suppressed. But you asked earlier, the people in Georgia didn't participate in the rebellion. Were they supporting it? Kind of quietly. And this, I think, was their fear, that they knew how unpopular the regime was in Georgia for a lot of reasons. They knew that as even if the armed rebellion was tiny, there was always a fear. What if all the people in Georgia who didn't like the Soviet regime joined the rebels? What would that mean? That the Regime was weak and unpopular. And so I think their behavior was shocking. And it got out. Again, there's no Iron Curtain. There are people in Georgia who can get the word out, as it's happening, of what's happening. And it's quite shocking, this behavior, because they were killing unarmed, defenseless hostages largely. They weren't having pitched armed battles with people who were shooting back. So they were killing people who. Again, looking at the Great terror in the 1930s and whatever, these are tiny numbers, but at the time, it was quite shocking.
- [52:48]
Samantha Lam
Are you sure that the reaction was motivated by fear as opposed to trying to make an example? Drawing again to the Easter Rising. Most of the people that die in the Easter Rising are civilians that get bombed by the British. And there. I think the goal was to have an absolute show of force so that people don't try this shit again.
- [53:09]
Eric Lee
I think it's both. I think it's both. There's no question that they wanted to make sure that Georgia would never rise up again. In Georgia. Never did. This is the final armed uprising in Georgia. Georgians never. Yeah. When's there another armed uprising in Georgia?
- [53:23]
Samantha Lam
Wasn't there under Khrushchev as part of de Stalinization?
- [53:26]
Eric Lee
No, it was a. No, there was a demonstration. It was, oddly enough, a pro Stalin demonstration because Stalin was being.
- [53:32]
Samantha Lam
Don't they get shot at? I believe. Right.
- [53:36]
Eric Lee
They were demonstrating and Soviet troops fired on them. That wasn't an arms uprising. But, I mean, there was violence in Georgia. There's always violence. There were always bandits and the occasional odd terrorists. But an actual nationwide armed rebellion never happened again in Georgia. So it was effective. I mean, the slaughter was effective. They were absolutely terrified. But the regime was also quite afraid. And they talk about it in the aftermath of it. They would have known by the end of 1924, when Zinoviev and Stalin are making their speech at Stalin was a speech to Communist Party people in Georgia. And he's saying to them, where was the rebellion strongest? Where were the people most against us in the areas where the Communist Party was strongest. He's saying, you completely failed everywhere where you were strong, you pissed people off. He was blaming the local Communists. He was furious at them for their failures. So I think the regime was scared, and the regime wanted the Georgians to be scared. I think both things were true.
- [54:26]
Samantha Lam
Okay, and you said that this was international news. How does the international community react?
- [54:32]
Eric Lee
Okay. The reaction of governments initially is as they would do now. They try to convene the League of Nations. At first, that sounds a bit Funny. Like, what the hell is the League of Nations going to do? But they didn't know at the time how weak the League of Nations was.
- [54:47]
Samantha Lam
They can't suck any less than the un.
- [54:51]
Eric Lee
No way. It was even worse than the un. So the point is why they changed the name, they rebranded it, because the League of Nations really was a disaster. But who knew in 1924, right, that the League of Nations would be so impotent? So initially, the British government and others do go to the League of Nations and demand this be addressed. League of nations, of course, can do nothing. No one can do anything. So there's a bit of a flutter of this. And interestingly, this all changes within a few weeks, when the rebellion was long over and Soviet rule is clearly established again in Georgia. The British labor government, which the Georgians had put a lot of trust in, changes its line and says, we've done what we could to League of Nations. This is an internal matter for the Soviets. We have nothing to say about it. And I found the debate in Parliament where Tory MPs are getting up and saying, but weren't there? We have reports of hundreds of people being killed and all this. And the Labour Party leaders, they're in government, say, no, those reports are not true. There were other massacres taking place there.
- [55:49]
Samantha Lam
I mean, that makes sense. The Tories are probably trying to discredit anything remotely Soviet socialist communist.
- [55:56]
Eric Lee
Ramsey McDonald, who was prime Minister at the time, had been to Georgia. He was a big fan. This is significant. If we go back two years. Ramsey McDonald attended this historic meeting in Berlin of the socialists and Communists together. The last big international meeting where socialists and Communists could discuss possibilities of reconciliation. MacDonald was seen as a friend of Georgia. He loved Georgia. When he visited, he went through everything he could to help the Georgians. But when push came to shove, it the crunch moment, 1924, he did not support the Georgians. And the French socialists, their sister party, did the same. In that case, it was even worse, because not only did they betray the Georgians, do nothing to help them, even diplomatically, they were encouraged by the Russian Mensheviks to do nothing.
- [56:37]
Samantha Lam
Realistically, what could they have done?
- [56:39]
Eric Lee
Sanctions. No, more importantly, not sign the trade deals they were just about to sign. Same thing. They had economic power. The Russians desperately want to trade deals with the British. The British wanted them with the Russians as well. Both sides wanted this to happen. MacDonald weighed all this and said, you know what? We're gonna go ahead with this detente with the Russians. We're gonna recognize them and we're gonna do, you know, trade with them and blah, blah, blah. The Georgians are finished anyway. And I think that was cynical and nasty and not all, but a couple of the socialist parties, the British slave party, the French socialists, were affected by it, but not all, not all the parties had that reaction.
- [57:15]
Samantha Lam
I mean, I'm just not surprised at all. We've been watching live stream genocide for the past two and a half years and no one gives a shit. I just can't really imagine a world where people put conscience over economic or personal benefit.
- [57:34]
Eric Lee
Well, one might say that sounds a bit cynical, but. Yeah, no, you're right. But remember, we hadn't had labor governments before. McDonald was the first labor prime minister, so there was a no doubt naive sense that he would do things a little bit differently, which he didn't.
- [57:49]
Samantha Lam
I was going to just, you know, the labor government I'm most familiar with is the current one, which is not particularly. It's neoliberal at best and pro Ukrainian party members.
- [58:03]
Eric Lee
So I, I'm, I see everything you see, and I'm less critical of it because I know what the alternative is. With McDonnell, there was a lot of hope that this would be a little bit different. And it was a weak government, right. And it was kicked out of power fairly shortly after this, involving the Zinoviev letter. But that was a bit shocking. But what was interesting was the reaction of the other socialist parties. Should I go into that a little bit? This is the core of the book. So look, I discovered this is one of these things. I say, there's a lot of serendipity in the research for the book. I stumble on this little booklet in the depths of the London Library, which is a remarkable institution from 1922, in English, is the Protocols, the full transcript of the meeting that took place in Berlin of the second, third and two and a half internationals. And all the superstars are there, Bukharin and Clara Zetkin and Carl Radek on one side and Sen Katayama, the founder of the Japanese Communist Party, they're all there. And the other side is Ramsay MacDonald and van der Wilde from Belgium and Martoff. And just all these. Everybody in the world on the left is in the room and they're discussing for three days how socialists and communists can work together. And Georgia comes up immediately. Van de Velde raises it and Carl Radek, who's a Bolshevik polemicist, loves this. He jumps at the bait. You want to talk about Georgia? And he goes into this we call whataboutism. He says, what about the Congo?
- [59:22]
Samantha Lam
I was going to say Belgium kind of walked into that one.
- [59:24]
Eric Lee
What were you thinking? He's battled on for three days and MacDonald is trying to offer compromises. And they all agree. We'll have a commission. We'll discuss this, we'll investigate what's happening. They're all talking about Georgia. This tiny little country in the periphery of Europe is at the center of this debate between them. So you fast forward two years. The Russians kind of, as it were, re invade Georgia. They reconquer Georgia for Bolshevism. Then McDonnell's in power. He betrays them immediately. But the other socialist leaders meet the two and a half International and the Second International have merged and they call the labor and Socialist International lsi and they have an executive in the meets. And just after the invasion, the 1924 uprising has been suppressed. And they're discussing what do we do? What's our view of this? An armed rebellion against Soviet rule. The Russian Manshevik view is they shouldn't be armed rebellion against Soviet rule. It's not how you change Soviet rule. We're against armed rebellions. They discussing a document. They can't agree on anything. Kaunsky by chance is in the room and Kautsky almost raises his hand and says, I'd be happy to draft a resolution. And he is the most notorious anti Bolshevik who ever lived. He came out against the Leninist regime the first week of the Bolshevik Revolution. One week into it, he wrote his first article denouncing Lenin. He was way ahead of the curve on all this stuff and not in any sense or any mainstream view of social democratic parties. He writes the resolution, it gets adopted. In his resolution, he says, in the event that populations rise up against Bolshevik rule. While we may not encourage this, when once it happens, of course we render them support. I mean, it's extraordinary. Later on, again, looking back from the perspective within a Cold War era, it's not surprising socialists and Communists hated each other. Most of the Social Democrats had kind of mixed feelings about the Bolsheviks. Many were quite sympathetic. Otto Bauer quite sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, even though he was not a Bolshevik. Kautsky seizes the opportunity, also has a little book about this. And the line changes globally from we and the Communists are like sister parties. We have small disagreements to. We are bitter enemies and we've nothing in common. And I trace this to the beginnings of the Cold War when Kautsky's words virtually word for word, are adopted. When the internationals refounded after the Second World War, they take a Kautsky in view, based on 1924 resolutions which were the response to the Georgian uprising. This Georgian uprising triggered a Kounskite takeover of social democracy and how it viewed the Communists, which persists to this day. That view.
- [61:49]
Samantha Lam
So why is this revolution largely forgotten today?
- [61:53]
Eric Lee
Well, first of all, it happened in Georgia. I mean, how many people know where they find Georgia on a map or know what's ever happened there? So it's happened in a very small country. The Georgians themselves don't remember, and that's a significant thing. You ask people in Ireland, what's the Eastern rebellion? Every person around it, every trial will tell you about the Easter rebellion. They all know it. They have historical memory. Georgians did not have that. It's very recently that some younger Georgian academics and historians have taken an interest in all this stuff. That's part of the reason. The other part of the reason, which is even more important is the Georgian government today is not interested in this at all. They did not commemorate this, this point made by people in the opposition saying, if we claim to be a democracy on a pathway to Europe and we can't talk about these things, what is wrong with it? The Georgian government is not interested in its history. They weren't even interested in the anniversary of Georgian independence in 1918. Hundredth anniversary came and went with hardly anything in Georgia did the same 1921. They could have used that year. Talk about what happened. Hardly anything in 1924 completely glossed over people, some of the demonstrators, some of the younger demonstrators, out on the streets of Tbilisi every night protesting for democracy and for a European future for Georgia. They stand there waving European flags and Georgian flags, and many of them are waving the flag of the 1918 Republic. Many of them. And you see it, it's quite moving to me because these are younger people who have learned about Georgian history in recent years and see the 1918 Republic, something to be proud of and as an alternative for the country, just as it would have been an alternative future for Georgia had it remained intact. They would have had a different future completely.
- [63:32]
Samantha Lam
So what is your takeaway for our listeners?
- [63:34]
Eric Lee
Well, they should buy lots of copies of the books.
- [63:38]
Samantha Lam
I don't know.
- [63:39]
Eric Lee
Why do I say that? That's what wealth doesn't want to say.
- [63:41]
Samantha Lam
I mean, in fairness, your book is pretty reasonably priced for an academic book. My book, when it came out, was like 110 books, which is insane.
- [63:50]
Eric Lee
Well, there's a story that my first book in Jerusalem was published by a small left wing press, a cooperative that was very successful Oddly enough, very profitable. It was bought out by Bloomsbury, which is one of the biggest publishers in the world. So my first book is now officially a Bloomsbury book. Has their logo on it. So I contacted them and said, I've gotten the kind of sequel. Great. They read it. We love it. Here's a contract. Wow. I'm going to publish Bloomsbury. What's the book going to cost? £85. I said, well, I wrote them. He said, well, then nobody will buy it. I won't make a penny and nobody will read it, so why would I even write it? I said, well, that's the way we do things. It's academic accomplishment.
- [64:26]
Samantha Lam
Yeah. My book was translated into French by a bunch of French communists. And I think it sold for like €20. I'm like, how do we go from 110 bucks to like €20?
- [64:36]
Eric Lee
I didn't know that we're going to do an academic pricing on mine because this is not an academic publisher. Published nonfiction and my earlier book was cheaper and. But they've knocked off. They've knocked the price down and we're going to sell it at our launch event at a much lower price and it become reasonable. I want lots of people to read it. I want people in the British Labour Party and people in the Democratic Socialists of America, the people who just got Mamdani elected mayor of New York. I want them to know what's in this book. Because there's a lot of confusion now that even a century later about what is the difference between socialism and communism. Is there a difference? Why are you smiling?
- [65:14]
Samantha Lam
Well, I was gonna say, I just thinking about Mom, Donnie and all the people who are like screaming about communism and Sharia law at the same time.
- [65:22]
Eric Lee
I know, I know. I mean, that's all wrong.
- [65:25]
Samantha Lam
There was no way in hell that those two things would ever go together. Like what?
- [65:29]
Eric Lee
That's what. There's a lot of hysteria, Islamophobic hysteria, but also anti left hysteria. But the American Socialists of America grew out of Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, which came out of the old Socialist Party. And I was a member of those groups. I was never actually in dsa, but I was in those groups. And those groups identified with this social democratic tradition, this Kautskian tradition, where we have nothing in common with the communists. They're a totally separate movement. We don't agree. We're not going to reconcile with them. That was the view that changed radically about 10 years ago. DSA suddenly grew from 5,000 members to 100,000 overnight due to the Sanders campaign. Sanders himself identifies as a democratic socialist. He never says socialists without the word democratic first, meaning he identifies with a particular tradition that rejects communism and sees socialism as an alternative to communism. You can like it or not, but.
- [66:19]
Samantha Lam
That'S a. I was just thinking that there are some significantly problematic things about Sanders, but it's more about his external policies.
- [66:28]
Eric Lee
Sanders catalyzed the American left in a way we've never seen before. I mean, no American socialist politician ever got anything close to the support Sanders got, especially among young people. But then you meet DSA today and the young people there, it's quite shocking. There are a number of organized factions. Many of them use red stars and hammers and sickles and Marxist revolutionary this, that. And you're thinking, but these guys are basically from the communist camp. They may be right. They may be wonderful people, they may be absolutely right in every issue. But why are they in a democratic socialist organization? The lines have been blurred and here as well. So you'll find in Britain, you go to a Labour Party event, there's a lot of support for Cuba. Cuba's happy to be seen as a Cuban Communist party, as the ruling party. They're part of that communist region. Why would a democratic socialist party like labor have all that sympathy for communist government? You can be all in favor of anything. The embargo in Cuba, I'm in favor of that. You can be all in favor of having.
- [67:23]
Samantha Lam
I was just saying I think it's largely because the US has behaved like an utter shitlord.
- [67:27]
Eric Lee
Well, exactly. The US has done more drama, support for the Cuban regime than anybody else could. Right. Like Venezuela now. But this blurring of the lions is a bad thing because, you know, the New York posted a cover two days ago about mom Donnie winning with an enormous hammer and sickle on the COVID Right.
- [67:46]
Samantha Lam
I stopped reading the New York Post years ago. They're terrible. I mean, they. They also brought like an article, did women ruin the Workplace? So, I mean, it's just utter fucking trash.
- [67:59]
Eric Lee
No, but. But the. Everybody, everybody shared this on Facebook, right? Some people loving it. This is great. Other people say, this is what's wrong with these people. But it's blurring the distinction. Donald Trump calling Mamdani a communist all the time.
- [68:09]
Samantha Lam
Trump's a fucking moron.
- [68:11]
Eric Lee
He's a fucking nerd. He deliberately chooses the word communist because in an American context, people understand communism means dictators.
- [68:18]
Samantha Lam
Anything I don't like is calm. That is honestly any doesn't like.
- [68:24]
Eric Lee
And socialism, especially saying democratic socialism sounds a bit milder and nicer and There's a real historical difference between the two movements. There has to be conflict. People have to understand this. And with all my books, one of the big problems I have is that my books, while they're read by small numbers of people in the English speaking world, are bestsellers in Georgia. I never intended. I mean, I don't speak a word of Georgia. My books would have an impact on Georgia, but they do. And there people will find this interesting. The alternative to the current regime in Georgia, which is neoliberal and authoritarian, the alternative to them is not the old Soviet regime. The alternative to them is social democracy, is liberal democracy, is European future for Georgia. And they have lessons to learn from when the Menshe were in power.
- [69:10]
Samantha Lam
I mean, in fairness, your book is not really an academic book. You have very short chapters, very accessible language. So I would not have expected it to carry an academic price. So I was surprised when you said Bloomberg wanted to do that, because it's not really an academic book. It's like a.
- [69:29]
Eric Lee
And the publisher of this one, MacFarlane, also categorizes academic. That's why it's. Look, it is. It is heavily footnoted. Resources, bibliography, lots of stuff translated from Georgian and Russian. So it's semi academic, right?
- [69:44]
Samantha Lam
Yeah, but you also have like three page chapters and like sentences that are not an entire paragraph.
- [69:53]
Eric Lee
I know. Look at. Because I'm a popular writer, I'm a journalist, I want people to read the books, academic books. As you know, nobody reads them. So it was important to me to do a popular book. And the Georgians themselves have no tradition of popular history. They're beginning it now. So all the books on this period were academic books, researchers. And they all have all the disadvantages of academic books. So nobody reads them. So this book has had an impact. And my first book, very widely read in Georgia, everybody I meet in Georgia, people come up to me on the street, which is really quite embarrassing, who know who I am, which would never happen in London. I'm completely anonymous in London, but in Tbilisi, not so much. So I think that I want the book to have an impact on particularly a younger generation of people who see themselves as socialists and have to learn what the differences are from the different schools of socialist thought, Democratic, socialist on one side, communist on the other. I think the differences are real between them. I think Kautsky had it right.
- [70:45]
Samantha Lam
I think that Lenin and Stalin would have definitely agreed with you that they're different.
- [70:49]
Eric Lee
I know, but Stalin and I don't agree on a lot. But this is what Stalin. I would absolutely agree with. Yeah, absolutely. Communists never pretended otherwise. They acknowledged there was a split. The movements are very different in their goals and methods. And this is real. And the 1924 plays a critical role.
- [71:04]
Samantha Lam
Okay, well, thank you for coming on our podcast today. It has been lovely to have you. I will let you go now. So thanks for being here.
- [71:12]
Eric Lee
Thank you. Bye Bye. Sa.