“Battling Bolshevism from Victoria to Vladivostok: The Siberian Expeditionary Force and Class Warfare in Canada, 1917-1919,” BA Honours Thesis: University of Victoria, 2001 Read Here (0.6MB PDF)
Canadian conscripts at a "Hands Off Russia" protest meeting in the Columbia Theatre, Victoria, BC, December 1918.Credit: Sidney Rodger Collection, Beamsville, Ontario
This thesis explores the relationship between revolution in Russia and labour unrest in Canada at the end of the First World War. While historians of this period make reference to Russia as a source of inspiration to Canadian workers, the connectedness of the two struggles has been scarcely studied. This thesis attempts to prove that the Russian revolution provided an ideological framework through which Canadian workers came to interpret their own position in Canadian society, a mechanism through which grievances inherent to the development of capitalism in Canada – heightened by the experience of war – found their expression. Domestic labour unrest was intimately tied to events that were unfolding on the international stage. While workers in Canada did not need Lenin to tell them how to think, the Bolshevik uprising resonated on the home front because it was seen as the practical manifestation of ideas that had previously existed only in theory. A source of inspiration to workers, revolution in Russia was viewed as a menace by those in Canada who benefited from the existing economic order. Soldiers were therefore deployed to Siberia and elsewhere in Russia as part of an Allied campaign to re-establish traditional class relations in that country, while radical labour in Canada was the target of repression by the state. This complex web of causality – of revolution and counter-revolution, both domestic and international – fundamentally informed class relations in the years 1917-1919, and defined the terrain of class conflict in Canada until the last decade of the twentieth century.
