Walter Rodney - The Russian Revolution - A View From The Third World

Live Through a Revolution

In the first years of the 1960s, Walter Rodney went to the Soviet Union. He was in his early twenties, a young man from a working-class Guyanese family who had read history at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. He arrived in the airport in Moscow and knew he had arrived somewhere different:

When I travelled to the Soviet Union, I was struck on arrival at the airport by the physical demeanour and the social aspect of the people in the airport. They were workers and peasants, as far as I could see, who were flying on those TU-104s to Moscow, to Leningrad, etc., as though they were using a bus. And my understanding of an airport was that it was a very bourgeois institution. There were only certain of us who were supposed to be in an airport. But the Soviets seemed to have ascended beyond that. That was what one confronted going into the country. And then, having left the airport, one goes into the streets and one is amazed at the number of books they sellin the streets, on the pavement, all over. In my society, you have to search for

Rodney had visited Cuba as a student, the year after the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Things were not settled in Cuba, as they had become in the Soviet Unionnearly fifty years after the October Revolution of 1917. The familiarity to him of Cuba as a Caribbean society and the actuality of its revolution pleased Rodney. The Cubans were up and about, talking and bustling and running and jumping and really living the revolution in a way that was completely outside of anything that one could read anywhere or listen to or conceptualize in an island such as Jamaica, where Rodney was still a student. One has to live with a revolution to get its full impact, Rodney said in 1975, but the next best thing is to go there and see a people actually attempting to grapple with real problems of development. Rodney made this comment on April 30, the precise day that the Vietnamese people watched the US imperialists retreat from their country. Another revolutionin a different formhad triumphed.

Times of Transformation

Rodney taught at the University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) in 1967 and then again from 1969 to 1974. This was the high point of the countrys experiment with self-reliance and non-alignment, with what was then called African socialism across the continent and Ujamaa in Tanzania. These were times of transformation.

In November 1967, not long after Rodney began to teach at the university, the radical students from across the region formed the University Students African Revolutionary Front, led by Yoweri Museveni (the president of Uganda since 1986). The students had been inspired by the February 1967 Arusha Declaration, which urged Tanzanian society to move in the direction of socialism and self-reliance. For a country to be socialist, the Declarationdrafted by Tanzanias president Julius Nyererenoted, it is essential that its government is chosen and led by the peasants and workers themselves. The centrality of the workers and peasants was a fact established not only by the Marxists at the university or the students, but also by the governing party in Tanzania. The energy toward serious transformation had become clear. As the Arusha Declaration pointed out,

We have been oppressed a great deal, we have been exploited a great deal and we have been disregarded a great deal. It is our weakness that has led to our being oppressed, exploited and disregarded. Now we want a revolutiona revolution which brings to an end our weakness, so that we are never again exploited, oppressed or humiliated.

A revolution against weakness was at the heart of the national liberation project. It is what the students also understood in their desire to produce a front that would not only consolidate their concerns but also provide an avenue for them to stimulate debate about the way forward. Students at the University of Dar es Salaam who came from Sudan, Zambia, Ethiopia and Rhodesia brought with them the energy of their anti-colonial movementsmany far more radical than Nyereres Tanganyika African National Union (TANU). Dar es Salaam was the headquarters of the Liberation Committee, a platform urged on by Nyerere within the Organisation of African Unity in 1963. One of the key players in the Liberation Committee was the anti-colonial Mozambican political movement FRELIMO (Mozambique Liberation Front), which was then based in Dar es Salaam. FRELIMO had begun to move from an inchoate national liberation ideology toward Marxism. The presence of FRELIMO revolutionaries such as Marcelino dos Santos and Samora Machel, alongside Marxist intellectuals such as A. M. Babu, John Saul, Issa Shivji andfor a brief periodRuth First, provided an avenue for the students to read about and bend toward Marxism and Leninism.