"Canadian Bolsheviks is a book that cannot be overlooked by
anyone interested in Canadian labour history and part played in its
development by Canadian Communists. It is a story too little known,
and Angus, to his credit, has done much to rectify that
imbalance."
William Rodney, author of Soldiers of the International, in the
Globe & Mail
Canadian communism did not spring out of the ground suddenly at
the end of World War I, and it was not smuggled into the country by
Russian agents. The men and women who built the new movement were
long-time socialist and labour militants in Canada. Inspired by the
Russian Revolution and by their own experiences as leaders of the
post-war labour revolt in Canada, they set about to create a new
kind of party, one that could lead the fight for workers'
power.
The new Communist Party, formed between 1919 and 1921, quickly
became the largest party on the left, with strong roots and
influence in the unions and basic industry. Its members led heroic
strikes. They fought for labor unity, and engaged in united
electoral activity with other currents in the workers movement.
They were in the forefront of the struggle for democratic
rights.
Ten years later, the party was destroyed. Most of its founding
leaders were expelled, and three quarters of its membership dropped
out. The Communist Party abandoned the program it had adopted in
its early years, and turned its back on its principles.
The organization still called itself Communist, but it was now
"Tim Buck's Party." It had been transformed from a revolutionary
party into an agent of the new ruling caste in Moscow. In Canadian
Bolsheviks, Ian Angus describes and explains the first attempt to
build a Leninist party on Canadian soil, showing why it succeeded
so well at first, and why it ultimately failed. The SecondEdition
of a book that has been widely hailed as a path breaking work, "the
best yet to appear" on the origins of Canadian communism.