The best laid plans sometimes don't exist.

Why didn't the Bolsheviks have a plan, or indeed any idea about what to do after they took power in 1917? Why didn't Hitler have anything more than broad policy objectives and rhetoric when he took power in 1933?

A month before the October Revolution, Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev told a meeting of the Military Revolutionary Committee that whilst it would be comparatively easy to take power, holding on to it and wielding it would be next to impossible. Leon Trotsky, in the same month announced that the role of the Bolsheviks would be to issue decrees on the abolition of the Czarist State, private property and to end the war, and also to publish the secret communiques of the Czar and the Provisional Government to the Allies, discrediting both parties permanently. After that, he famously stated, the Bolsheviks could 'shut up shop'. This seemed to fit in with the line that Marx had taken in Das Kapital, the notion that the bourgeois state would cease to exist after a socialist revolution. A brief period of the dictatorship of the prolateriat would allow for all state mechanisms to be dismantled, and something much closer to anarchism would represent the ultimate form of social organisation. One can hardly be surprised at the Bolsheviks antipathy to the idea of the state, as far as active revolutionaries were concerned, the state was something to hate and fear, an organisation that either imprisoned, exiled or censored them. Kamenev and Zinoviev were perhaps more circumspect than Trotsky, who's arrogance and faith in doctrine allowed him to make a number of assumptions and mistakes throughout the revolutionary and civil war period.
Both of them realised that running Russia even in the short term, post 1917 would be difficult because of the shattered economy, food shortages, failing transport infrastructure and continuing war against the Germans. Lenin seems to have been in no doubt how to deal with post revolutionary Russia, while he ommitted to mention it in speeches he had long envisioned a revolutionary terror and desired a civil war in order to legitimise that terror. Lenin's ability to abandon doctrine when it suits him and to adopt the most pragmatic and brutal methods in order to safeguard the revolution were qualities that were present later on in Hitler in the 1930s.

Like Lenin, Hitler believed that he was appointed by history in order to drive forward some version of historic destiny, Lenin's change had been social, Hitler's would be racial. It is curious how two atheists endorsed beliefs which were bordering on mysticism. The notion of having been chosen by powerful invisible forces to bring history to its logical conclusion, in one instance a worker's utopia, and in the other a 1,000 Year Reich, seems ill at ease with the powerful rationalist (or irrationalist) ideas both espoused. Hitler was pragmatic in his anti democratic, anti socialist, anti semitic acts, acting where opportunity presented itself and backing off when presented with sufficient opposition. He, like the Bolsheviks, seems to have been gifted only with some very hazy notions of how a future Reich should be run, prefering to focus on rhetoric and speech making, watching films and dreaming about the size and shape of his future capital Germania. Hitler had little interest in day to day administration and yet he also looked upon civil servants who did the work he felt was beneath him with an undisguised contempt. In the manner of many autocrats before and since, he thought that a civil service was an effective block between him and the German people, a spiritual barrier. One of the things that is most curious about popular perceptions of Hitler today is the notion that whilst he was capable of unspeakable cruelty, he was, in essence, a brilliant organiser. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was not lacking plans for the same reasons as Trotsky, because he had based his beliefs about society rather naievely on a theory that was as yet untested, no Hitler's disorganisation has more banal roots, and roots that are deeply personal to him.
Firstly Hitler seemed to reject every change in the policy of government since the end of the middle ages, with Der Fuhrerprincip, or leadership principal. He felt that societies would operate as they should simply through blind obedience to the right 'visionary' leader ie him. Hitler was sure that any failings in a democracy existed because it was a democracy, and that the German people had a higher perpose, that perpose could only be achieved if he led them. Hitler once said that he would never have children because they would only turn out to be dissapointments to him, none could be the genius that he clearly was. The source of this delusional megalomaniacal thinking is probably deeply embeded in childhood, a violent father and an overly protective, smothering mother, a life of acute failure and disappointment, rejection and self loathing. The results of this megalomania for Germany was catastrophic. Hitler ruled like a feudal lord, playing off Nazi party bosses against one another, duplicating offices, tasks and positions and watching as they fought amongst themselves for his favour. Access to Hitler was also very difficult and often his personal secretary would convey whether or not the Fuhrer approved of a policy or not.

It seems that both Bolshevik and Nazi Leaders viewed their plans to get into power as being extraordinarily important, and their plans on what to do when in power as rather trivial. Both viewed parliamentary democracy as an anathema, and neither seem to have had any sort of relationship with their civil servants, other than one of mutual antagonism. Perhaps the route cause of their thinking is their confidence in differing kinds of utopian visions, and the notion that once power was siezed and a workers or aryan utopia was commenced, nothing else would matter. For our times, with the resergance of a far right that still admires Hitler, any claims they might have to some sort of visionary leadership on his part must be exposed as the myths they are. Hitler may well go down as the laziest dictator in history, spending half the day in bed or watching hollywood movies. Similarly on the left, who still fete Trostsky, and to some extent Lenin as visionary heroes, not the men who encouraged a civil war that killed nearly 10 million people (these are the same people who are quick enough to damn Bush and Blair for starting a war that killed 1 million) the myth of their competence must also be exposed.

Rock History week Part 5: Dark Side Of The Moon

Without question one if the most successful albums of all time, what was it about Dark Side of the Moon that resulted in such extraordinary success. Well it's something that has cropped up several times this week, when we looked at bowie we saw that his successes relied upon him reading the social and cultural changes of the 1960s and reflecting them in his new incarnations, but as the 60's became the 70's he neatly abandoned the rather clumsly attempts at donovan-eque folk music and adopted a more science fiction influenced look, combined with androgeny and sexual ambiguity. The abandonment of the hippy movement in 1969 by many in Britain and America due the seeming exceeses of the lifestyle and the feeling that the protest movement was peetering out again saw a departure by many artists from the counter culture and into areas such as country music. Dark Side of the Moon was a rejection of the heady social optimism of the mid 1960s and was a damning attack on mass society and culture. Songs like Money, Us and Them, and Time were collectively described by lead singer Roger Waters as 'An expression of political, philosophical and humanitarian empathy that we were desperate to get out.'
What does he mean by this? The album features five long continual pieces of music that each signify different life stages of human beings. The album concentrates on the idea of the futility of aspects of human existence, particularly life in modern consumerist society. The ever present possibility of alienation and madness is a clear inheritence from the post marxist thinkers and post freudians of the 1960s.

Perhaps the most successful song on the album, later referenced in the film version of The Wall is Money. Opening with the sound of cash registers and loose change, the first track on side two, "Money", mocks greed and consumerism using tongue-in-cheek lyrics and cash-related sound effects ("Money" has been the most commercially successful track from the album, with several cover versions produced by other bands).

The sequel to this album is, as everyone knows, OK Computer by Radiohead.

Rock History week Part 4: Woodstock and Altamont

The Hippy era, in essence runs for about two and a half to three years, as with all great musical and cultural trends, it had a fairly brief lifespan. The era was at its zenith in 1969 with the Woodstock Musical Festival, in New York State, at its time, the largest free music festival in history. It was billed as 'Five Days of Music and Peace', implicit in the title was an opposition to the Vietnam War. The Who were one of the headlining acts.



Rolling Stone has called it "the most famous event in rock history." The Woodstock Music and Art Fair, on a 600-acre farm in the township of Bethel, New York, from August 15-18, 1969, represents more than a peaceful gathering of 500,000 people and 32 musical performances. Woodstock has become an idea that has suffused popular culture, politically and socially, as much as musically. Joni Mitchell, who didn't attend but wrote an anthemic song about it, once said, "Woodstock was a spark of beauty" where half-a-million kids "saw that they were part of a greater organism." According to Michael Lang, one of four young men who formed Woodstock Ventures to produce the festival, "That's what means the most to me – the connection to one another felt by all of us who worked on the festival, all those who came to it, and the millions who couldn't be there but were touched by it."

Lang met Artie Kornfeld, a Capitol Records A&R man and songwriter, in late 1968, and the two envisioned producing a festival in Woodstock, New York.and building a building a recording studio there. In search of financing they connected with John Roberts and Joel Rosenman, a pair of young venture capitalists who were already building Media Sound studios, a large-scale recording facility in New York City. In February of 1969, the four men incorporated Woodstock Ventures, Inc., and they began work on the festival. Soon, the conservative townsfolk of Wallkill became alarmed by the growing number of longhairs arriving to prepare the festival grounds, and a number of lawsuits were filed to stop the festival. After weeks of tension, town meetings, and legal maneuverings, Woodstock Ventures were refused permission to produce the festival.The studio project was put on hold so they could focus all their energy on saving the festival. Miraculously, 600 bucolic acres belonging to White Lake dairyman Max Yasgur, in the township of Bethel, New York, were discovered after Lang recieved a call from a local motel owner Elliott Tiber the day after the Wallkill site was lost. Work rapidly got underway to turn the rural acreage into a concert site with camping areas for 200,000. Three weeks later, during the week of August 11, thousands of people from all over the country began flocking to the festival site.

By Wednesday, August 13, the lush green bowl in front of the massive 75-foot stage was already filled with some 60,000 people. On Friday the roads were so clogged with cars that the only way most artists could reach the festival was by helicopter from a nearby airstrip. Though over 100,000 tickets were sold prior to the festival weekend, they became unnecessary: The fences and gates were never finished and people simply swarmed over those that were in place. "It's a free concert from now on!" was announced from the stage. As John Roberts later pointed out, "It took us eleven years to break even, but it was a success in every other way."

The music was scheduled to start at 4 p.m. on August 15, and just after 5 it did, thanks to New York-born folksinger Richie Havens. His improvised and rhythmic "Freedom" set the tone for the weekend. "The vibe at Woodstock was an expression of the times," says Joel Rosenman. "Energized by repugnance for a senseless war and for the entrenched discrimination of the establishment, a spirited but nonviolent counterculture was sweeping the country. That counterculture burst into bloom like the mother of all Mother's Day bouquets at Woodstock."

The occasional cloudburst delayed the primarily acoustic music as Friday night wore on, but eight acts, plus a swami, made it to the stage. Around 2 a.m, Joan Baez closed the first night with the spiritual "We Shall Overcome."

Saturday boasted the most music of the weekend, starting just after noon and continuing until Sunday at dawn (with Jefferson Airplane performing "morning maniac music," as described by Grace Slick). Highlights included the then-unknown Santana in mid-afternoon, and that night spectacular back-to-back performances by Sly and the Family Stone and The Who. Blues-rock was featured via Canned Heat and Mountain, followed by such legendary California-based artists as the Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Janis Joplin. Sunday featured another long span of music, though violent thunderstorms wreaked havoc just after Joe Cocker and The Grease Band's finale of "A Little Help From My Friends." The music was delayed until late afternoon but carried on throughout the night with more highlights including the Texas bluesman Johnny Winter and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (their second gig). On Monday morning at 8:30, Jimi Hendrix closed out the festival. His magnificent, improvisational version of "The Star Spangled Banner" has come to symbolize the weekend.

Around 10:30 a.m. on August 18, the festival came to an end. The innovative concert film Woodstock, directed by Michael Wadleigh, was released in March of 1970 and took the festival's message around the world. The movie documented a community of a half million people who managed to peacefully co-exist over three days of consistent rain, food shortages, and a lack of creature comforts. "Woodstock is a reminder that inside each of us is the instinct for building a decent, loving community, the kind we all wish for," according to Joel Rosenman. "Over the decades, the history of that weekend has served as a beacon of hope that a beautiful spirit in each of us ultimately will triumph."

Recordings of the music played that weekend still evoke the magic and power felt by those who were there. "It was a privilege to help found something that has meant so much to so many," adds Rosenman. "Woodstock turned out to be a sort of permanent relative of the Family of Man—the adventuresome, kind-hearted uncle you're always happy to see at Thanksgiving and graduation. I'm really grateful that we both ended up in the same family."

Two days after Woodstock ended, the New York Times ran an editorial praising what had happened at Bethel (a reversal from a previous editorial condemning the festival). It concluded with a quote from Shakespeare's Henry V, which seems appropriate upon the fortieth anniversary of Woodstock: "He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, will stand a-tiptoe when this day is nam'd."


If The Woodstock Festival captured the counterculture of the 1960s, Altamont Festival, later in 1969, killed it.
In a response to the success of Woodstock, the Rolling Stones planned a music festival at Altamont Speedway in California. The event had a line up that included the Rolling Stones themselves, the Greatful Dead and Carlos Santana. However the decision by the Stones to employ Hells Angels as security after the other security contractors pulled out proved fateful.
By some accounts, the Hells Angels were hired as security by the Rolling Stones, on the recommendation of the Grateful Dead, for $500 worth of beer — a story that has been denied by parties who were directly involved. According to Rolling Stones' road manager Sam Cutler, "the only agreement there ever was ... the Angels would make sure nobody tampered with the generators, but that was the extent of it. But there was no 'They're going to be the police force' or anything like that."



Hells Angels member Sweet William recalled this exchange between Cutler and himself at a meeting prior to the concert, where Cutler had asked them to provide security:
"We don't police things. We're not a security force. We go to concerts to enjoy ourselves and have fun."
"Well, what about helping people out - you know, giving directions and things?"
"Sure, we can do that."

Since LSD evangelist Ken Kesey had invited the Hells Angels to one of his outdoor Acid Tests, the bikers had been perceived by the hippies as akin to "noble savages", a naieve assessment if the book Hells Angels by Hunter S. Thompson is anything to go by. These were members of California's most marginalised underclasses and had not taken part in the great peaceful intellectual flowerings of the 1960s, civil rights and ban the bomb had very much passed them by. They were considered "outlaw brothers of the counterculture". They had provided security at Grateful Dead shows without reported violence. Further, the Rolling Stones may have been misled by their experience with a British contingent of self-described "Hells Angels", a non-outlaw group of admirers of American biker-gear, who had provided nonviolent security at a free concert the Stones had given earlier that year in Hyde Park, London.

Although peaceful at first, over the course of the day, the mood of both the crowd and the Angels became progressively agitated, intoxicated and violent. The Angels had been drinking their free beer all day in front of the stage, and most were highly drunk. Fueled by LSD and amphetamines, the crowd had also become antagonistic and unpredictable, attacking each other, the Angels, and the performers. By the time the Rolling Stones took stage in the early evening, the mood had taken a decidedly ugly turn as numerous fights had erupted between Angels and crowd members and within the crowd itself. Denise Jewkes of local San Francisco rock band the Ace of Cups, six months pregnant, was hit in the head by an empty beer bottle thrown from the crowd and suffered a skull fracture. The Angels proceeded to arm themselves with sawed-off weighted pool cues and motorcycle chains to drive the crowd further back from the stage.

Some of the Hell's Angels got into a scuffle with 18-year-old Meredith Hunter when he attempted to get onstage with other fans. One of the Hell's Angels grabbed Hunter's head, punched him, and chased him back into the crowd. Footage from the documentary that was filmed at the concert shows Hunter drawing a long-barreled revolver from his jacket, and Hells Angel Alan Passaro, armed with a knife, running at Hunter from the side, parrying the gun with his left hand and stabbing him with his right. In the film, Passaro is seen delivering only two stabs, but he is reported to have stabbed Hunter five times in the upper back. Witnesses also reported Hunter was stomped on by several Hells Angels while he was on the ground. Passaro was eventually tried for murder but acquitted.

Many people looked at the Altamont festival as the end of the hippy dream, it was the argument that conservatives put forward, that too much freedom, too much experimentation led to man's worst instincts coming to the fore. The argument of the hippy generation was that man set free was inherently good and peaceful. The establishment pointed to Altamont and begged to differ. It seems that the Hippy era was drawing to a close anyway, in three years America's direct involvement in Vietnam had ended, many people who had experimented with drugs either moved on from them or beccame lost in addiction, and for many great acts of the 1960s, The Greatful dead, the Byrds, Bob Dylan and Crosby Stills and Nash, psychedlia had had its day, the next albums all the above acts made were country albums.

Rock music critic Robert Christgau wrote in 1972 that "Writers focus on Altamont not because it brought on the end of an era but because it provided such a complex metaphor for the way an era ended"

Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music Director's Cut (40th Anniversary Two-Disc Special Edition)Music from the Original Soundtrack and More: WoodstockWoodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music Director's Cut (40th Anniversary Ultimate Collector's Edition and BD-Live) [Blu-ray]Woodstock: 40 Years on: Back to Yasgur's Farm (6CD, Limited Edition)Woodstock 69 Music Festival 3 Days of Peace & Music Charcoal T-shirt Tee (Medium)

Rock History Week Part 3: Give Peace A Chance....

This was one of the most controversial episodes in John Lennon's Career. at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s the movement against the war in Vietnam convulsed American society. On their Honeymoon in 1969 John and Yoko Ono Lennon staged this unusual protest against the war. They stayed in bed and held a press conference, indicating their opposition to the conflict. when asked by a reporter what he was trying to achieve by staying in bed, Lennon answered spontaneously "All we are saying is give peace a chance"



This video is another example of John Lennon's increasing radicalism two years later in 1971. The John Sinclair in question was the manager of punk band MC5, who had been arrested for supplying two joints to an undercover police officer, and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Lennon asks the question in the song, was Sinclair arrested and jailed so harshly for a drugs offence or because he represented a culture that was repugnant to the Nixon regime. Many strongly suspected the latter, and it was John Lennon who was approached by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin of the Youth International Party, a counterculture anarcho-syndicalist group, to take part in a benefit conference for Sinclair. John Sinclair was released three days after the concert.

Rock History Week! 1965 Don't Follow Leaders

Was this the first rap music? Inspired by Bob Dylan's reading of Jack Kerouac and Fyodor Dostoevsky, Subterannean Homesick Blues was recorded for Dylan's 1965 Bringing it All Back Home album. Since his emergence in the bohemian underground of early 60's Greenwich Village, Dylan had been an iconic figure for the American Counterculture, just as Kerouac had been an inspiration for them in the 1950s. As the 50's became the 60's the 'beats' were replaced by Hippies, Yippies and the LSD culture, the civil rights and anti war movements heavily influenced the tone of the song particularly the line 'Don't follow leaders'. This was a clear break with the stiffling and authoritarian conformity of the 1950s. The Rabbi in the background is beat poet Allen Ginsburg

Rock History Week! 1972

Why did this cause a stir to British music fans in July 1972?



Born in 1947, David Jones (later Bowie) had tried verything he could think of to be famous. Throughout the 1960s he'd been a mod, a failed hippy and by the 1970s the times were changing again and Bowie decided to change with them. The 60's were a decade of rapid social change in Britain, attitudes towards gender, sexuality and appearance had been very conservative at the start of the decade, but by 1969 had begun to be challenged. In the 1970s these social changes continued.

The early 1970s reflected this with a pop fad known as glam. Performers like David Bowie, Mark Bolan and Roxy Music experimented with 'glamorous' stage personas, Bowie reinvented himeself as Ziggy Stardust, an alien who visits a dying earth and who is greeted as a rock messiah but ultimately undone by a people unworthy of him. When this performance of Starman from the Ziggy Stardust Album was broadcast in 1972, Bowie went from a figure on the fringes of avante garde pop music to a household name, he was shocking to some as he wore makeup and had his arm draped over guitarist Mick Ronson (just showing us how our attitudes towards intimac and personal space have changed since 1972, if nothing else) but to millions of teenagers up and down the land he was something else, captivating, exciting and subversive.

Here is another interview with Bowie in 1964 where the contentious issue of long hair and its socially subversive connotations are discussed

Guest Contributors Sought.

I'm looking to expand the content of the history blog in the next few months and so I need a team of good dependable writers and essayists to help out. If you are an armchair historian, history pupil, student, teacher, PhD student or professor I'd love to hear from you. I am particularly interested in people who would like to write essays and articles on modern world history, but I am open to ideas from all contributors. In the next few months I hope to showcase the best new historical writing on a seperate web page, so if you've got an argument you're passionate about, if you've researched something or read something you think you can put across to the blog readers in an interesting and accessable way, drop me a line at misterlazlo@gmail.com and let me know about your idea, or just email me an article. Also the best articles will go out in the weekly blog page news letter.