Left out in the cold: British Labour witnesses the Russian Revolution

This article follows the journeys to Soviet Russia and Menshevik Georgia that were made by members of the British Labour Party in 1920. It examines what George Lansbury and the official Labour Party-TUC delegation found during their trips to Russia, and also the findings of Ramsay MacDonald who travelled to Georgia. These visits were important to British socialists, as they were crucial sources of information about the construction of socialism. But, as the article shows, no definitive viewpoint of the Soviet system emerged in the visitors' reports, books and articles. This allowed the travellers to use the Soviet system to prove that their own individual interpretations of socialism were correct, thus justifying their own political position at a time when interest in Soviet Russia was growing.