Part of the well-researched series "The Communist International in Lenin's Time," this book contains the original manifestos, articles, documents and transcribed speeches that define the first congress of the Third (Communist) International in Moscow in 1919.

Inspired by the achievements of the workers and peasants in Russia under the leadership of the Bolsheviks, 51 workers' leaders representing 35 revolutionary organizations in 22 countries gathered in Moscow to launch a new world leadership organization to unite the toilers internationally.

These were fighters, striving to come together in order to strengthen one another's struggles against the capitalists and landlords in their home countries. They looked to the Bolsheviks as uncorrupted exemplars of the working people, courageous warriors of the oppressed. They sought to learn from the Bolsheviks how to accomplish in their own countries what had been achieved in Russia, that is, the destruction of the regime of the exploiters.

They launched a new international workers' organization which lasted for about six years before succumbing to the paralyzing effects of the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian revolution. But those six years saw the working out of a new form of revolutionary political activity which still stands as the model for the present generation of anti-capitalist fighters to absorb and emulate. The first four congresses of the Communist International were the revolutionary congresses, and subsequent volumes in this series continue the presentation of the original documents from those gatherings.

The task documented in this book is to form an international organization based on revolutionary, working-class parties; the goal is to replace the rule of imperialist war and slaughter with the rule of working-class solidarity. The task and the goal are paramount for humanity today as they were in1919 when the Russian Communist Party initiated this project after breaking the stranglehold of the Russian czars and forcing an end to the horror of World War I. Lenin, Trotsky and fifty other representatives from twenty-two states converged to launch the communist international. Their words, recorded in this well-annotated book, are totally relevant to today's young antiwar fighters.

The Struggle of the Oppressed
by: barbaragreenway 04/27/03 02:27 pm
rating:
This is the perfect book to be reading right now with the current situation in the Middle East! It quite dramatically refutes the
argument that there are some populations in some countries that are just too backward, too beaten down, too victimized, to
determine their own destiny.
The account is of the First Congress of the People of the East that took place in 1920 in Baku, Azerbaijan. Here some 2000
delegates of workers and peasants met to debate and discuss the critical questions of their day---issues like national
oppression, women?s rights, and economic and social pressure in the midst of a worldwide depression. In this book you can
read the actual transcripts of debates on Zionism and Palestine; the debates over religious freedom of Muslims and the right of
women to participate as equals at the conference itself. There are also wonderful photographs of the different participants to
help put faces to the debates.
You cannot read this book and not be inspired by what occurred at this historic conference.
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Here we are fresh into a new year with the world bitterly divided over a region and over issues that, under different leaders, were cooperatively addressed more than 70 years ago. That's the essence of what I take from reading "To See the Dawn."

The book is a collection of reports and proceedings from 1920, from when the First Congress of the Peoples of the East was held in Baku, a port city on the Caspian Sea in Central Asia.

At the time, Baku was the capital of Soviet Azerbaijan, and the congress was called by the Azerbaijan Communist Party in cooperation with the Communist International under the leadership of Lenin and the Bolshevik Party.

The congress drew more than 2,000 delegates from workers' parties and anticolonial groups from across the region, including Afghanistan, Turkestan, India and elsewhere. These delegates attended the gathering to learn more about the revolutionary process unfolding in the Soviet Union, and inspired by the Bolshevik leadership's support for self-determination and the anticolonial struggle.

That was key, the reports in this collection show, because the Russian czar and the old colonial powers of Great Britain and France played up religious, ethnic and national differences as a big part of their strategy of keeping working people divided. When the delegates realized that these differences masked much of what they had in common as working people and farmers, it opened the road to cooperation and trust.

This book illustrates how powerful that lesson could be once again in that still-divided part of the world.

This book is about the founding of an international revolutionary workers organization after the triumph that resulted in the world's first workers' republic: Soviet Russia. The delegates' reports of the revolutionary events in their countries, inspired by the workers' and peasants victory in Russia-in Finland, in Hungary, in Germany-read like a novel. The reports by the leaders of the Russian Revolution to the assembled delegates of the founding congress of the Communist International speak clearly to us today, to those who want to act for fundamental social change, about how capitalism and imperialism can't be reformed or tamed into "peace" but only make perpetual war for perpetual profits, the need to look at the world as part of an international class with interests in common across national boundaries (not whine about "our government" doing terrible things that "we" must feel guilty about and vote in some other criminal 'cause he/she is a Democrat and his/her wars will be "nicer", and maybe most important all: workers' democracy, like they had in Soviet Russia then, before it was rubbed out by Stalin-who was NOT any kind of communist-workers' democracy, like they have in Cuba to this day, is the "dictatorship" of the overwhelming majority, just like capitalist "democracy " is really the dictatorship of the billionaires. If this sounds to you anything like answers we need for today's world and what to do about it, then you are on the side of humanity against the side of the gods profit and dollar. So check this book out.