ABSTRACT
There seems to be scarcely a chapter in this volume in which revolution is not either attempted or achieved. It begins with the Russian Revolution of 1905, which did not depose the autocracy. Among the opposition to the Russian autocracy there were already Marxists, and the first Soviet, or Council, of Workers' Deputies ever to be formed was elected during the strikes in St. Petersburg of October 1905. Marxist-Leninists brought Communist Russia, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, into being in 1917. Marxists and Socialists were the agents of revolution in Germany in 1918–19. Marxists, with the Anarchists, Syndicalists and Socialists, in 1936 attempted but failed to achieve revolution in Spain, and brought about instead civil war. They divided France, but were represented in her Government in 1936. They were persecuted in Fascist Italy and persecuted almost to extinction in the Third Reich of Germany. After the second World War, the western states took into public ownership some parts of production and distribution and instituted schemes of public support which equalised access to education at all levels, to health and to security and tended to equalise wealth. The ideas behind these measures were derived from Socialism. Meanwhile the whole of eastern Europe had fallen under Communist rule. Towards the end of the volume successive risings occurred among East Germans, Poles, Hungarians and Czechs. These were to some extent, at least, revolutions attempted within the Marxist-Leninist world itself.
