Red Star Glows Brighter...

The Red Star over the Kremlin spires will shine brighter this week when on November 7 the world celebrates the grand jubilee of the greatest revolution in history.

The pilgrimge to Moscow today is indeed the triumphant proclamation of man’s unending quest for building a better and a nobler world, in which the blood and toil of the many can never be turned into the greed and gold of a few, where the meek and the humble shall inherit the earth. Those who will gather in the the Red Square on this sacred day—and those in distant corners of the world who will be joining them in spirit—shall remember that with this revolution man set out to build a many-splendoured edifice of civilisation—more enduring and purposeful than any that history has witnessed. For, it is a civilisation that truly translates into reality the motto of the greatest good for the greatest number.

In this respect, this great revolution has been the inexhaustible treasure-house for all peoples striving to build a new and better life, striving to break the chains of slavery in any form. Here was a revolution which did not come like an accident, whatever the apologists of Reaction might have said. It was the most magnificent operation of human ingenuity, a planned revolution, a revolution which was vindicated the claim of Marx that social developments, the forces at work in human society, are subject to laws of nature, and therefore can be mastered. A revolution that did not just come, it was made.

And it was made by men and women whose labour has created all the riches of the world. The working class, the producer of all the world’s wealth, was its conscious author, with its advance detachment, armed with the science of revolution, leading and guiding it.

That is why it did not just come and go like a thunder-clap. Its guns have boomed throughout these fifty years and they have come in aid of every people fighting for the common man. From the barricades in Berlin to the walls of Madrid, from the underground in Shanghai to the maqui’s hide-out in France, from the picket-lines in Detroit to the villages in Telengana—and today from the Suez Canal to the Vietnam swamps—every soldier of freedom acknowledges the power and the glory of that Red Star of Revolution.

Calumniators have worked overtime through decades to malign and mislead, but they have always failed, because the toiling men and women recognise their friend, philosopher and guide. They can never be confounded by the traducers from Washington nor by the howling dervishes from Peking. The Great Revolution is majestic in its supreme confidence in the final victory of the working man.

This has been a unique revolution. Its wheels have never stopped in these fifty long years: it has never ceased to advance. Not even the mighty phalanx of Hitler could halt its march forward nor could the war-machine of the dollar overawe it. The more difficult the task the greater has been the challenge for it—and that has always been true of its votaries, whether fighting on the war front or in the fields and factories. One unrelenting struggle for the building of a better world is the saga of this mighty endeavour of socialism.

The frontiers of this revolution have never ceased to extend. From the defence of the first socialist state fifty years ago, it freed new states and millions of humanity from the thraldom of capital in less than three decades, and today its serried legions can be counted in every country. For, the Russian Revolution, the honoured heirloom of the Soviet people, is the common heritage of every land wherever men and women toil and strive. That is why it has always inspired countless martyrs to face the gallows or the firing-squad, confident in the ultimate liberation of man from the bondage of class society. And today its domain literally extends to the kingdom of the stars.

As the world this week will salute the fiftieth anniversary of this great revolution, it will pay its homage to the millions of martyrs who have given their dearest possession, life, at its clarion call. Such martyrs have come from all nations, transcen-ding all barriers of clime and community. And everyone of those noble martyrs knew, in the words of Gabriel Peri as he faced the Fascist firing squad, that Communism shall usher in the Morrow of Song.

And the men and women in the Soviet Union, who are the worthy custodians of the priceless treasure of the Great Revolution, are toiling hard in the confidence that they, as the true followers of Lenin, shall lead the world to that beautiful Morrow of song.

The Red Star shall glow brighter—for ever.

(Mainstream, November 4, 1967)