An old and beloved comrade is no more.

Though it was not unexpected, for he had been sick and ailing for some time, the death of Tovarich Ivan comes as a shock to all throughout the world who had been inspired by his example.

But all things die. Clausius' law of entropy that determines a finity to the universe, that kettles cool when removed from the flame, that institutions atrophy when not constantly reinvented and invigorated, spares neither revolutions nor revolutionaries. Rather than beating our breasts in despair, we should rather rejoice that he survived so long past the three score years and ten laid down as the life of a man, and try to understand how he managed to resist that inevitable law so long.

His predecessors did not fare so well; nor did his successors.

In Jerusalem, the followers of Jesus took the city and drove out the money changers from the temple, but the forces of religion plotted with the occupying forces to hang Jesus on a cross between two thieves, and a trusted comrade pocketed thirty silver coins for betraying his Lord. In May 325, the Christians acknowledged the pagan Constantine as their earthly leader, paving the way for the concordat between Mussolini and the Vatican sixteen centuries later.

In 1381, Wat Tyler was cut down at Smithfield when discussing terms with the king he trusted, and the vengeance that pursued the men of Kent to their homesteads was instant and bloody. Three hundred years later, the Levellers sought to consummate at Putney the revolution they had fought for in church, parliament and battlefield, but Cromwell sent Lilburne to the block, and the dark mills of industry began to grind the bones of the poor ever finer.

The champion of the poor people of Paris, Marat, was murdered in his bath, and in 1871 the communards spared the rich to see them return behind the Prussian cannon and wreak another terrible vengeance.

Ivan learnt those lessons well. Perhaps too well, but who could blame him with 14 foreign armies within his borders, the Patriarch of all the Russias declaring the Bolsheviks to be the anti-Christ, and the British agent, Reilly, conniving with armaments kings and disaffected revolutionaries to destroy their hopes? It was Reilly's creature, Savinsky, who provided the poisoned bullets that Fanny Kaplan put into Lenin's chest on the steps of the Michelson factory in Moscow in 1918, from which he died eventually six years later.

Ivan mourned, as we now mourn him, but he didn't despair. The Lenin recruitment expanded the ranks of the fighters, and his land grew strong, prepared to resist the fascist power that British and American cash was building up to strangle him and all his children in their cradle.

Working people throughout the world rallied to his cause. In England, Harry Pollitt got the Jolly George blacked, and in denying arms to the counter-revolutionary armies the British workers learned something of their own strength, which they sought to apply in the General Strike. Our leaders betrayed us then, but leaders, too, are subject to the law of entropy.

Ivan had a leader after Lenin, a man of steel from Georgia, whose name is blackened now. But English factory workers scrawled it on the bombs they made, saying "This one's for Uncle Joe". The same message was on the tanks the convoys carried through the icy waters to Murmansk, and when the airmen mutinied at the end of the war, "Joe for King and Pollitt for Pope" was their half-humorous slogan. Ivan and his leader were an inspiration to a world in arms, and the city with his name marked the turning point of war, when the battle turned against the forces of entropy, and the Red Army drew an arrow to Berlin upon their maps.

Ivan changed the name of Stalingrad a decade after, as was his right, and we tried to understand, though Volgograd could never occupy the hole the changed name left within our hearts. The crimes they told us of could not unwrite our recollection of the long nights of struggle when the bells of the Kremlin rang out a promise of liberation to short-wave radios in every land and preserved us from despair.

Nor could the crimes of leaders erase the other names who gave us inspiration: Mayakovsky moving Gorki to tears with his Cloud in Trousers, Makarenko showing young criminals the road to life, Ostrovsky inscribing the objective of the liberation of humanity upon our YCL membership cards, Sholokhov reciting a hymn to the waters of the Don, Stakhanov placing sheer muscle power where machines were not yet ready, Gagarin circling round the world, first man in space.

And all the nameless heroes, Ivan's brothers and sisters, millions of them dead not only to save themselves but the entire world, among them the one million three hundred thousand who perished in the 900-day blockade of Leningrad, which Hitler had vowed to erase from the banks of the Neva. But the city of the Aurora survived, and Shostakovitch wrote his greatest symphony in that place of cooked rats and empty bellies, music to inspire generations into the next millenium.

It was not the example only which inspired us. Fidel's young revolution was blockaded by the Yankee navy, but Ivan bought his sugar, and kept the Cuban revolution rolling. The weapons carried down the Ho Chi Minh trail had Ivan's factories' names upon them, and the greatest army on earth had to admit itself bested by a bunch of hungry peasants. Freedom fighters from Zimbabwe to Colombia learnt their craft in Ivan's schools and universities, and the revolution that grew out of the barrel of Mao's gun came from a Kalashnikov.

And all the time the most precious weapons -- ideas -- in little books inscribed with the names of Marx and Engels and Lenin, showing us how Ivan had made his revolution, and what had made it successful.

Well . . . for a time.

Others fared worse. Spain went down fighting against the Stukas that assassinated Guernica, a town murdered by the same forces that closed down Jarrow. British bullets mowed down the resistance heroes of Greece. India was set against itself, and the same divide-and-rule trick was worked in Palestine and Cyprus. In Malaya, headhunters protected the rubber planters who had let the Japanese armies into Singapore. In Africa, Kenyatta came out of jail to found a state that jailed his successors, and Nkrumah's experiments were destroyed in coup and counter-coup. The US Marines destroyed the hopes of Guatemala at Santa Domingo and Che was killed in the jungles of Bolivia. Allende died at the hands of an army he'd tried to trust and in the stadium they broke the hands of Victor Jara so he couldn't play his guitar, but still he kept on singing. Millions vanished in Indonesia's long years of long knives, and in Argentina the death squads roamed unchecked, American and Israeli weapons in their hands. Nicaragua was bled white in a war funded by the crack on the ghetto streets of Detroit and the Bronx, and in Aghanistan, those who taught the village women to read and write were skinned alive by those proclaiming Jihad over radios made in USA. Police bullies clubbed down the miners of South Yorkshire, and a prime minister in drag called upon us all to rejoice.

Entropy rules. No victory is assured. Even as we toast the defeat of the enemies of hope, the poison gas of their false promises and lies is seeping under the door, and we die, choking, wondering where we went wrong.

It is tempting to ask this question now, and in the fullness of time we must pursue it, not to sit in judgement on Tovarich Ivan and his comrades, but to learn from their mistakes.

But remember this.

We were not wrong to be joyous when you, Ivan our brother and comrade, stood up on the streets of Petrograd and Moscow and Kiev and Tbilisi and Tashkent and took possession of the lands whose riches you had made. We were not wrong to be jealous of your good name, and to explain to our brothers and sisters what you were trying to do, and the difficulties you faced. We were not wrong to be grateful for the way you tore the guts out of the Nazi armies.

Whatever mistakes you made, whatever crimes were committed in your name, however tired and corrupt your revolution became, however you were betrayed by leaders who themselves became the creatures of the bureaucratic tradition you inherited from the Czar, you saved our lives.

Without your revolution, the swastika flag would fly over Buckingham Palace, and the Communists and Socialists and Liberals and Christians and Jews and Gypsies and Blacks and homosexuals would be feeding gas ovens on Blackheath and Ikley Moor. Without your revolution, girls in Havana would have the sole choice between performing circus tricks with donkeys in American brothels and starvation on the sidewalks outside the smart hotels. Without your revolution, Ho Chi Minh city would still be R&R for GI Joe, under rulers first placed in power and then assassinated by the CIA. Without your revolution, Joe Slovo and Nelson Mandela would not be sitting down to negotiate the transfer of power to the majority in Azania.

All this could change, not just because one comrade has died, but if we allow his death to dispirit us and lose faith in our capacity to overcome the rule of entropy. That is what they want! That is why they blacken your name, and tell us that no revolution can ever succeed, that all effort is worthless, that we are doomed to live and die in slavery to a world of greed that is rotting in its own garbage.

Yes, death is the only constant, but so is birth, for out of corruption breeds new life, and out of the crash of the falling statues comes the sound of new resistance to the culture of hamburger bars and sex shops, at first so quiet you can hardly hear it, but a true miracle of the human spirit as it grows and swells.

It does not happen just because we hope it will, but out of the economic fact that you cannot steal from workers a portion of their labour and evade the inevitable crisis. St James condemned the owners of the fields for withholding their wages from the labourers, but it was Marx who showed that it was contradiction, not injustice, which fuelled change.

The men who build a stock exchange on Tovarich Ivan's grave will prate of market forces, but if the workers turn out more than the boss can sell them, because he has robbed them of some of the value they have produced, then factories must close, people must starve, and cells of resistance must grow.

The men who appropriated Tovarich Ivan's party may declare it liquidated, but the need will require a new party. In Cuba, the Communists declared Fidel a dangerous adventurer -- and the dictator, Batista, allowed them the legality to make such declarations. But their names are forgotten, and Fidel's revolution keeps the faith, against all odds, growing longer all the time.

If we allow the death of Tovarich Ivan to turn us from the task history has set us, then history will sigh -- it has been long-suffering, ever since Eden -- and rise up new forces to turn the wheels of change.

Don't mourn -- organise. Write it on Ivan's grave, and in your hearts.

And our next revolution could outlast a century.