大象传媒

This year is the hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution - actually two revolutions - which marked the birth of the communist Soviet Union. In the second of two programmes, historian Peter Stead explores the link between the then-growing Marxist movement and the socialist workers' education movements in the South Wales coalfield.

He follows the route to revolution back to 1909, when a strike by socialist militants changed the course of social and political thinking in the South Wales coalfield. And it didn't happen in the Welsh cauldron of socialism, but under the far away dreaming spires of Oxford when students at Ruskin College, a 'College of the People' created to empower its students to act more effectively on behalf of the working class, went on strike in protest at the pro-establishment leanings of their curriculum.