The following is the text of a speech I gave today in Newcastle at the 50th annual conference of the Study Group on the Russian Revolution. It is an abridged version of a paper I presented to them, which in turn is part of the broader project that has already been published in Georgian as a book, with the English version coming out later this year.

First of all, thank you for the opportunity to present my paper

This is the second time I have participated in a conference of the Study Group on the Russian Revolution — the first was in 1992 when I presented a paper on the question of whether Stalin had been an agent of the tsarist police, focussing on the so-called “Eremin letter”. It is good to be back.

My full paper, and the book I have just written on the subject, are about Georgia but also about something larger. So while I will speak about events that took place in Georgia during the years 1917 – 1924, these are always to be understood in the context of developments on the international Left.

At its simplest, this is the story of why the Socialist and Communist movements drifted apart and eventually became enemies. And the argument I will make is that Georgia, a small country bordering Russia, which was independent in the years 1918 – 1921, played a surprisingly important role in those international developments.

In this summary, I want to focus on just three moments, inflexion points that helped lead to the Socialist-Communist split and the role of Georgia in each of them.

These moments are as follows:

• The 1920 visit of Social Democratic and Labour leaders from around Europe to Georgia.
• The 1922 meeting in Berlin of the Second, Third and Vienna Internationals.
• The Georgian uprising of August 1924 and the reaction of the Social Democratic and Labour parties.

I should begin by saying a few words about the Georgian Democratic Republic, which existed from May 1918 until February 1921.

Elsewhere, I have described its brief existence as an “experiment” in democratic socialism.

And by that, I don’t mean that it was a perfect society — far from it. Georgia, like most European countries, had been shattered by the First World War. The economy was in ruins. Its neighbours — not only Russia but Turkey and even Armenia — had designs upon it.

Nevertheless, independent Georgia had quite a few achievements. It was, first of all, a democracy, with a multi-party system, and free and fair elections in which women could vote — this was before women had the right to vote in the United States. It had a strong, independent trade union movement. The Georgian cooperatives thrived and after a short time, the cooperative and state-owned businesses were the main providers of employment in the country. The agrarian reform was a huge success and as a result, the peasants were strong supporters of the Social Democratic government.

Karl Kautsky, who was not uncritical of the Georgian Social Democrats, wrote: “In comparison with the hell which Soviet Russia represents, Georgia appeared as a paradise.”

In 1920, Kautsky was part of a delegation to Georgia that included some of the best-known European Social Democratic and Labour leaders. The delegation included Ramsay MacDonald, the future Labour Prime Minister, Emile Vandervelde from Belgium, and others. Just a few weeks after the delegates left Georgia, the Red Army launched an invasion and brought an end to the Georgian experiment.

That delegation is important to our story because it gave these leaders a personal stake in what happened to Georgia, as we shall see.

The second inflexion point was a meeting that took place in room 25 of the Reichstag in Berlin in early April 1922. At the invitation of the Vienna International, leaders of the three Internationals met to see if they could find any common ground, any possibility of working together.

They could not. And a part of the reason why they could not was Georgia. Among the ten representatives from the Second International, four had been part of the delegation to Georgia. They were joined by a leading figure from the Georgian Social Democratic Party, Irakli Tsereteli. The Austrian Socialist Victor Adler opened the meeting pointing to its historic character and his hopes for success. But very early on, it became clear that Georgia stood in the way. In the very first moments that the first speaker from the Second International spoke, Georgia was on the agenda. Emile Vandervelde and Ramsay MacDonald came down hard on the Soviets.

It fell to Karl Radek to respond on behalf of the Communist International and he attacked both the Georgian Social Democrats and their European friends with vigour. By the end of the meeting, which dragged on for several days, an agreement was reached to collect material on Georgia so that the three Internationals could reach some kind of conclusion.

But there was no follow-up, the Internationals never met again, and the Second International shortly thereafter merged with the Vienna International. The rift between Socialists and Communists had now deepened and the non-Communist Left had come together into a single organisation know as the Labour and Socialist International.

The third and final inflexion point came two years later, in 1924. By then Georgia had been under Soviet control for more than three years, but it had not been easy for the Communists who had no real roots in the country. In 1921, Stalin and Orjonikidze were behind an invasion that came as a surprise to both Lenin and Trotsky. They pretended that a revolution had broken out in Georgia and the assistance of the Red Army was needed.

When Stalin visited Tbilisi a few months after the Bolshevik victory, he was greeted by hecklers and booed. The Georgians, it seemed, did not welcome the Soviets as liberators. There were peaceful protests and there were occasional armed uprisings in response to the behaviour of what was seen as an occupying force.

Moscow ordered the Georgians to enter the newly-formed USSR as part of a Transcaucasian Federation which infuriated not only the opposition but Georgian Communist leaders as well. They cracked down on the unions and seized control of the cooperative movement. As they had done in Russia, the Bolsheviks also launched a war on the Georgian church, which had been given autonomy from Moscow during the years of Georgian independence.

Meanwhile, the Georgian Government-in-Exile, now located outside of Paris, working together with all the opposition parties, formed a secret organisation in Georgia to lead a planned national uprising. It was called Damkom and it was fairly quickly penetrated by the Cheka, leading to the arrest and execution of all the leading members of its military wing. The Social Democrats sent several of their best-known leaders back into Georgia to take charge of the uprising. These included the architect of the agrarian reform, the head of the People’s Guard and the mayor of Tbilisi. They were all arrested.

Despite all that, the opposition groups decided to go ahead with the planned uprising in August 1924. It broke out — a day early — in the manganese mining town of Chiatura, a stronghold of the Georgian Social Democrats.

The uprising was not a success. Within just a few days it had been crushed in every part of the country. The original plan to stage a rising in Tbilisi did not take place — even though the underground had learned the home addresses of the local Communist leaders and in some cases had copies of their keys.

The defeated rebels were rounded up and imprisoned with many other opposition figures who had no involvement in the rebellion, including writers and politicians. Leading the suppression of the rebellion was a young Cheka officer named Lavrenty Beria. Under his leadership, the Social Democratic leaders in jail were shot. Hundreds of others were rounded up and machine-gunned, their bodies dumped in mass graves in the Vake neighbourhood of Tbilisi.

Beria made his name in those weeks with his ruthlessness — which caused even Stalin to ask for a halt to the killings.

As news of the brutal repression and mass killings got out, to the West, proving to be a huge embarrassment to the Soviet state which was keen to sign trade deals with European countries.

This brings us to our third inflexion point — the response of the European Social Democratic and Labour parties to the Georgian uprising and its aftermath.

In the nearly seven years since the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd, opposition to them had been growing in the Socialist parties. Just days after the Bolsheviks took power, Karl Kautsky had already written and published his first public criticism of the new Soviet regime. It was a voice in the wilderness, but Kautsky was persistent and his articles and books triggered long and detailed responses by Lenin, Trotsky and even Karl Radek.

Over time, others began to look at the Bolsheviks the way Kautsky did, and by the autumn of 1924, the Labour and Socialist International decided it needed to adopt a resolution expressing their views on the Soviet regime following the events in Georgia. The British Labour government was initially horrified by developments in Georgia and raised it at the League of Nations. But once it became clear that the rebellion had ended with a clear Soviet victory, Ramsay MacDonald changed course. In an extraordinary debate in the House of Commons, Tory MPs raised the question of massacres in Tbilisi and Labour MPs stood up to deny that any such massacres had taken place. The French Socialists, several of whose leaders had been part of the 1920 delegation to Georgia, also failed to show any solidarity with the Georgian comrades. They asked the Russian Mensheviks in exile what to do, and were advised to do nothing.

But many others on the Left were appalled at the scale and the brutality of the Soviet Russian response to the rebellion. At a meeting of its Executive, the Labour and Socialist International asked Karl Kautsky to draft the resolution that they were keen to adopt, to clarify their views regarding the Communists. In choosing Kautsky, they had already made it clear that the anti-Bolshevik view which the venerable Marxist had held since 1917, was now to be the view of all Socialists.

Kautsky’s draft resolution and his book defending it were a turning point in relations between the Socialist and Communist movements. To Kautsky, the Bolsheviks were essentially “red fascists” — a term pioneered by anarchists but now embraced by the Georgian Social Democrats as well. While he did not think that armed uprisings were the best approach to toppling the Bolsheviks, his view was that if they did happen, Socialists should support them. He made the comparison to Mussolini’s Italy. Kautsky had embraced and popularised the idea of totalitarianism.

Gradually, over decades, most of the Socialists came around to Kautsky’s view. When the Second World War ended, the member parties of the old Labour and Socialist International decided to once again pick up the pieces and launch a new International. They decided that a new Manifesto was needed, and launched a world-wide discussion among Socialists on the draft.

It was adopted at their founding congress in Frankfurt in 1951 and though he was long dead, it was the voice of Karl Kautsky, speaking as a friend and defender of the Georgian Social Democrats, that could be heard in the document.

“Communism falsely claims a share in the Socialist tradition,” it said. “International Communism,” the declaration continued, “is the instrument of a new imperialism.” In words that could have been written by Karl Kautsky, it declared: “Without freedom there can be no Socialism. Socialism can be achieved only through democracy.”

The adoption of the Frankfurt Declaration was part of a process that included the creation of NATO by governments led, in some cases, by Social Democrats — including the British Labour Party. The Socialists had chosen sides and increasingly believed that they had nothing in common with the Communists.

The split between Socialists and Communists is a complex story and there are many reasons why the two wings of the international Left split apart. We cannot claim that it was only because of what the Communists did to Georgia. There was much more to it.

And yet the story of the split must include the story of what happened to Georgia, a country that attempted to create a humane and democratic socialist society but was prevented from doing so by Soviet Russian aggression.

That is the story of the Georgian uprising of 1924 and the rise of democratic socialism.