Summary: an account of how an abortive insurrection in Georgia irrevocably split the Left

There is an anecdote in Cyril Cusack’s short book, The Humour is on Me, about a TV cameraman filming pro-British, loyalist, rioting in Belfast during the 1970s. The unfortunate journalist was set upon by a woman armed with an umbrella, offended by the fact that he was “filming things that were not actually happening.”

Similar attitudes have surfaced in other wars and conflicts before and since, including the Bolshevik onslaught on Georgia, the subject of Eric Lee’s The August Uprising. This fine book recounts the doomed 1924 revolt against Soviet rule and the moral choices it exposed, which ultimately divided the socialist movement itself.

Lee shows how those habits of denial, later seen on the streets of Belfast, flourished among Stalin’s defenders. He records some particularly shameful examples of propaganda from apologists for whom partisan loyalty mattered more than facts, decency, or human life.

Lee’s book follows the chronology of Georgian history, roughly from the outset of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, through the overthrow of the government of Georgia in 1921 to the bloody crushing of Georgian independence efforts in 1924. In describing the machinations of the Bolsheviks, Lee shows that the brute force used by Stalin and his associates in suppressing Georgian independence prefigured later atrocities, including Stalin’s murderous assault on the Russian people, the Holodomor in Ukraine, and the massacre of Polish officers at Katyn.

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.

While the facts on the ground created by battles, torture chambers and execution grounds may have been decisive in establishing the nature of many Eastern European societies, the ideas that diverse leaders used to justify such violence were also of vital importance to many. 

Trotsky, writing an introduction to one such work, noted it was composed “in the car of a military train and amid the flames of civil war.” One suspects that, as commander of the Red Army, he might have had more urgent matters than writing a work of political philosophy. But perhaps reassuring himself of his righteousness helped him sleep at night.

Stalin, of course, needed no such soporifics, and his own writing may have amounted to little more than execution lists. Yet, even as the corpses mounted he still had enough useful idiots, including on one occasion a delegation from the British TUC, to obey and reassert the Party’s final, most essential command, as Orwell put it, to “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” 

Such fantasy-island politics can endure only so long in the face of atrocity. Eventually there must be a reckoning. In Lee’s telling, the suppression of Georgia and its social democratic movement became an object lesson for the entire European Left, showing that there could be no meaningful alliance between democratic socialists and the “red fascists”, as the German communist Otto Ruhle branded the Bolsheviks. 

That lesson has lost none of its relevance. The temptation to mistake ideology for truth, and moral certainty for moral rightness, remains as potent as ever