Why I wrote this book — and why this story matters.

At first, this is not obvious.

Spoiler alert: The August 1924 uprising in Georgia did not succeed in overthrowing Soviet rule.  It took another more than six decades for that to happen.

In fact, the 1924 uprising barely got off the ground and was completely over within just a few days.

It was a footnote to history, nothing more.  In Georgia, it was largely forgotten.  As one Soviet historian pointed out, strangely no one thought to write a book about it.

BUT …

And here’s where serendipity comes in — according to a long-forgotten biography of the Georgian Social Democratic politician Irakli Tsereteli, translated from the Dutch and published fifty years ago, which I happen to own for some reason, the 1924 uprising played a critical role in splitting the international Left into Socialist and Communist factions.

Just to be clear: in 1917, there were no Socialist and Communist parties; they were all part of the same broad movement.

Lenin’s party called itself Social Democratic right up until the time it seized power in a coup d’etat (which has been mis-labelled as a ‘revolution’).

They were all members of an international organisation known as the Second International.

From 1917 until 1924, the pro- and anti-Bolshevik wings of the international Left were drifting apart.  In many countries, including Britain and the USA, separate Communist parties were formed and competed with existing Labour and Social Democratic parties.

In my book, I devoted an entire chapter to the historic 1922 meeting in the Reichstag in Berlin when leaders of Socialist and Communist parties — including some quite famous individuals such as the British Labour Party’s Ramsay MacDonald and the German Communist firebrand Clara Zetkin — met to try to bridge the divide.  They did not succeed.

Even then, as I discovered to my surprise, little Georgia played an outsized role in the debates.

There was a reason for this: a number of the key Socialist leaders at that meeting in Berlin, including MacDonald, had visited Georgia in 1920 as guests of the Social Democratic government.

They came away enamored — and were shocked when the Russian Soviet Army, acting on Stalin’s instructions — invaded Georgia the following year

For them, Georgian had become a personal matter.

At that 1922 event, attended by the Bolshevik firebrand Karl Radek, we also saw what may have been the first recorded example of “what-aboutism” which became a staple of the Communist party line.  It went something like this: if a Socialist made reference to Soviet Russia’s illegal aggression in Georgia, Radek would answer — “What about the Congo?”

Things came to a head in early September 1924 when news came out not only that the Georgian uprising had failed, but that a massacre had followed.

On the orders of an ambitious young officer of the Soviet secret police, the Cheka, Lavrenty Beria, who later became head of the secret police across the entire Soviet Union, hundreds and possibly thousands of unarmed, defenceless Georgians were shot.

Georgians who had been in prison before the uprising and had nothing to do with it were shot.

Writers and artists who had expressed criticism of the new regime were shot.

Family members, including children were shot.

Leading Social Democrats who had returned covertly to Georgia to assist in the uprising, including the former Minister of Agriculture — architect of the successful agrarian reform, the popular Mayor of Tbilisi, and the commander of the People’s Guard, all of them were arrested before the uprising, and they too were shot.

The entire leadership of the insurrection was found by the Bolsheviks holed up in a monastery.  They were all shot.

In contrast, the Communist prisoners taken by the rebellions had their lives spared.  To Chekists like Beria, that was a sign of weakness.  The tough, manly Bolsheviks happily machine-gunned their unarmed opponents in the district of Vake, today one of the loveliest parts of Tbilisi.  Mass graves were uncovered there years later.

Why was there such a cruel and murderous over-reaction by the Soviet authorities?

Part of the reason for the bloodbath was that the Soviet leaders — including Stalin and his crony Ordzhonikidze — panicked at the time of the uprising, and months afterwards as well.

The encrypted telegrams sent from the local Soviet leadership in Georgia to their bosses in Moscow showed just how worried they were.  Ordzhnokidze, claimed that the entire country was in the grip of armed rebellion — when in fact nothing of the sort had taken place.

They were convinced, as Stalin said months later, that the tiny, poorly organised rebellion in Georgia posed an existential threat to the Soviet regime.

Stalin and others compared the tiny Georgian uprising to the famous Kronstadt revolt of 1921 which really did shake the Soviet regime to its core.  They compared it as well to the little-remembered Tambov revolt which was a large scale peasant insurgency that mobilised thousands of fighters and captured vast territories from the Soviets before being bloodily suppressed.

Why Stalin and his comrades felt that is something we can speculate on and discuss.

It may have to do with the enduring power in Georgia — and not only in Georgia — of  the ideas and ideals of democratic socialism.

The Communist regime, even after three years in power, was not popular.

The Social Democrats and their government in exile were seen by many as the country’s legitimate leaders.

As we know from the subsequent history of Communist regimes, democratic socialist ideas and values remained deeply popular and occassionally resulted in mass outbreaks and revolutions — think only of Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the rise of Solidarnosc in Poland in 1980.

Why does any of this matter today?

Because even now, a century after these events, there is much confusion on the Left about what ‘democratic socialism’ means — and where it differs from Communism.

In the US today, we are about to get a new mayor in New York City, my hometown, who is a self-described ‘democratic socialist’ and an ally of Bernie Sanders.

But the organisation he belongs to, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — which is the largest socialist organisation in American history — is quite confused on these essential questions.

As one activist explained it, DSA’s membership includes supporters of “Trotskyism, anarchism, reformism, orthodox Marxism, libertarian Marxism, the democratic road to socialism, Marxism–Leninism, and more”.  The one group explicitly excluded is, apparently, “socialist Zionism”.

We see similar developments in the new party launched by Jeremy Corbyn last weekend. Side by side with democratic socialists, “Your Party” will include many who identify more with the Communist tradition.

I think these differences matter, and that open discussion about what we mean when we say “socialism” is important

The Georgian republic of 1918-1921 was, as I have written before, an experiment.  It tested whether socialist values of greater equality and social justice were compatible with political democracy and human rights.

I think that it proved in its short history that socialism does not mean dictatorship, concentration camps, secret police, and crushing of the human soul.  Another revolution was possible.

And that’s why I’m proud to identify with that tradition and to call myself, as the Georgian leaders like Noe Zhordania did, a Social Democrat.