To See the Dawn: Baku, 1920--First Congress of the Peoples of the East

The Struggle of the Oppressedby: 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 theargument that there are some populations in some countries that are just too backward, too beaten down, too victimized, todetermine 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 2000delegates of workers and peasants met to debate and discuss the critical questions of their day---issues like nationaloppression, women?s rights, and economic and social pressure in the midst of a worldwide depression. In this book you canread the actual transcripts of debates on Zionism and Palestine; the debates over religious freedom of Muslims and the right ofwomen to participate as equals at the conference itself. There are also wonderful photographs of the different participants tohelp put faces to the debates.You cannot read this book and not be inspired by what occurred at this historic conference. ..

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.