The August Uprising, 1924: The Georgian Anti-Soviet Revolt and the Birth of Democratic Socialism

by Eric Lee
Published by McFarland Books

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News

23 December 2025: Second podcast interview -- this time with the Foreign Press Association USA. Watch it here on YouTube.

5 December 2025: A brilliant review of the book by Dr. Aidan McQuade - Read it here. There a video version of this here.

4 December 2025: More than 50 people come to central London for the first book launch event. The text of what the author said is available here.

3 December 2025: "Lee writes off the Bolsheviks as a whole. He is wrong to do this ..." The first hostile review appears -- as expected -- in Solidarity. Read it here.

30 November 2025: Great new review of the book appears - by Roger Darlington.

11 November 2025: Our podcast interview goes live on the New Books Network - listen to it here.

10 November 2025: Our first review on Amazon - and it's five stars.

8 November 2025: We did our first podcast interview -- and it's over an hour long! Details coming soon.

6 November 2025: Amazon.co.uk is now offering the book with a 13% discount.

19 October 2025: The Kindle edition of the book appears -- and it's considerably less expensive than the print edition. Download a free sample or buy the book from Amazon - United Kingdom or USA.

19 October 2025: Eric Lee's article, "Serendipity: the historian’s secret weapon", appears in Historia, the online magazine of the Historical Writers' Association.

9 October 2025: Official publication date.

About the book

For three years following the Russian Revolution, the small South Caucasian country of Georgia was a democracy, but Stalin later ordered the Red Army to invade and to bring the country back under Russian rule. Communist attacks on political opponents, trade unions, cooperatives, and even the church sparked resistance, and an armed uprising broke out across the nation in 1924. It was swiftly crushed, with massacres of thousands, including hostages. Social Democratic and Labor parties across Europe reacted with shock and indignation. Soviet opponents began to describe communism as “red fascism” and their own movement as “democratic socialism.” What followed—including Socialist support for the creation of NATO—resulted from the Georgian uprising and its aftermath. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine a century later, the long-forgotten Georgian experience seems more relevant than ever.

Reviews

Dr Aidan McQuade, UK: "What makes Lee’s account compelling is not simply its chronicling of another crushed national movement, but its portrayal of a deeper struggle, between democratic socialism and the totalitarian impulses that would consume it." read it here.

Paul Abbot, UK: "Lee writes off the Bolsheviks as a whole. He is wrong to do this ..." Read the full review in Solidarity here.

Roger Darlingon, UK: "Lee skilfully uses this 'small' event as a prism to shed light on major, contemporaneous shifts in the European balance between totalitarian communism and democratic socialism, a disruption in political tectonic plates that reverberates through to today when Russia and Ukraine present such different visions of how society should be run and other European powers have to decide whether and how to become involved." Read the full review here.

Roy Nitzberg, USA: "So, here it is: the first showdown between Soviet totalitarianism and an independent democratic state — the difference between Communism and Democratic Socialism. Now, a century later ... the distinction is still quite real." (Amazon.com)

Other books by Eric Lee

Britain's Plot to Kill Hitler: The True Story of Operation Foxley and SOE Greenhill Books, 2022

Night of the Bayonets: The Texel Uprising and Hitler's Revenge - April-May 1945 Greenhill Books, 2020

The Experiment: Georgia's Forgotten Revolution, 1918-1921 Bloomsbury / Zed Books, 2017

Operation Basalt: The British Raid on Sark and Hitler's Commando Order The History Press, 2016