100 Years of Communism—and 100 Million Dead

By David Satter

Monday, November 06, 2017

Armed Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace in Petrograd—now St. Petersburg—100 years ago this week and arrested ministers of Russia’s provisional government. They set in motion a chain of events that would kill millions and inflict a near-fatal wound on Western civilization.

The revolutionaries’ capture of train stations, post offices and telegraphs took place as the city slept and resembled a changing of the guard. But when residents of the Russian capital awoke, they found they were living in a different universe.

Although the Bolsheviks called for the abolition of private property, their real goal was spiritual: to translate Marxist- Lenin ist ideology into reality. For the first time, a state was created that was based explicitly on atheism and claimed infallibility. This was totally incompatible with Western civilization, which presumes the existence of a higher power over and above society and the state.

The Bolshevik coup had two consequences. In countries where communism came to hold sway, it hollowed out society’s moral core, degrading the individual and turning him into a cog in the machinery of the state. Communists committed murder on such a scale as to all but eliminate the value of life and to destroy the individual conscience in survivors.

But the Bolsheviks’ influence was not limited to these countries. In the West, communism inverted society’s understanding of the source of its values, creating political confusion that persists to this day.

In a 1920 speech to the Komsomol, Lenin said that communists subordinate morality to the class struggle. Good was anything that destroyed “the old exploiting society” and helped to build a “new communist society.”

This approach separated guilt from responsibility. Martyn Latsis, an official of the Cheka, Lenin’s secret police, in a 1918 instruction to interrogators, wrote: “We are not waging war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. . . . Do not look for evidence that the accused acted in word or deed against Soviet power. The first question should be to what class does he belong. . . . It is this that should determine his fate.”

Such convictions set the stage for decades of murder on an industrial scale. In total, no fewer than 20 million Soviet citizens were put to death by the regime or died as a direct result of its repressive policies. This does not include the millions who died in the wars, epidemics and famines that were predictable consequences of Bolshevik policies, if not directly caused by them.

The victims include 200,000 killed during the Red Terror (1918-22); 11 million dead from famine and dekulakization; 700,000 executed during the Great Terror (1937-38); 400,000 more executed between 1929 and 1953; 1.6 million dead during forced population transfers; and a minimum 2.7 million dead in the Gulag, labor colonies and special settlements.

To this list should be added nearly a million Gulag prisoners released during World War II into Red Army penal battalions, where they faced almost certain death; the partisans and civilians killed in the postwar revolts against Soviet rule in Ukraine and the Baltics; and dying Gulag inmates freed so that their deaths would not count in official statistics.

If we add to this list the deaths caused by communist regimes that the Soviet Union created and supported—including those in Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia—the total number of victims is closer to 100 million. That makes communism the greatest catastrophe in human history.

The effect of murder on this scale was to create a “new man” supposedly influenced by nothing but the good of the Soviet cause. The meaning of this was demonstrated during the battle of Stalingrad, when Red Army blocking units shot thousands of their fellow soldiers who tried to flee. Soviet forces also shot civilians who sought shelter on the German side, children who filled German water bottles in the Volga, and civilians forced at gunpoint to recover the bodies of German soldiers. Gen. Vasily Chuikov, the army commander in Stalingrad, justified these tactics in his memoirs by saying “a Soviet citizen cannot conceive of his life apart from his Soviet country.”

That these sentiments were neither accidental nor ephemeral was made clear in 2008, when the Russian Parliament, the Duma, for the first time adopted a resolution regarding the 1932-33 famine that had killed millions. The famine was caused by draconian grain requisition undertaken to finance Soviet industrialization. Although the Duma acknowledged the tragedy, it added that “the industrial giants of the Soviet Union,” the Magnitogorsk steel mill and the Dnieper dam, would be “eternal monuments” to the victims.

While the Soviet Union redefined human nature, it also spread intellectual chaos. The term “political correctness” has its origin in the assumption that socialism, a system of collective ownership, was virtuous in itself, without need to evaluate its operations in light of transcendent moral criteria.

When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, Western intellectuals, influenced by the same lack of an ethical point of reference that led to Bolshevism in the first place, closed their eyes to the atrocities. When the killing became too obvious to deny, sympathizers excused what was happening because of the Soviets’ supposed noble intentions.

Many in the West were deeply indifferent. They used Russia to settle their own quarrels. Their reasoning, as the historian Robert Conquest wrote, was simple: Capitalism was unjust; socialism would end this injustice; so socialism had to be supported unconditionally, notwithstanding any amount of its own injustice.

Today the Soviet Union and the international communist system that once ruled a third of the world’s territory are things of the past. But the need to keep higher moral values pre-eminent is as important now as it was in the early 19th century when they first began to be seriously challenged.

In 1909, the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev wrote that “our educated youth cannot admit the independent significance of scholarship, philosophy, enlightenment and universities. To this day, they subordinate them to the interests of politics, parties, movements and circles.”

If there is one lesson the communist century should have taught, it is that the independent authority of universal moral principles cannot be an afterthought, since it is the conviction on which all of civilization depends.

Russian Revolution: There’s nothing to celebrate about the 100th anniversary of Communism

By John Lewis-Stempel

Sunday, October 29, 2017

My late father-in-law was a very human symbol of the effect of the Communist Russian Revolution. In his swaddling his parents took him from Russia because, as grain merchants, they were the class enemy.

They settled in Germany, only to flee in 1938 because, as Jews, they were the race enemy. The hurricane of history unleashed by the events in Russia a century ago eventually blew the family to the quintessentially English suburb of Kew.

There Robert joined the British Army to fight Nazism, itself a reaction to the ideology of Communism. The world’s first Marxist experiment still has cheerleaders in the offices of Momentum but the reality is that the Russian Revolution, one of the most momentous and far-reaching events in history, began badly and ended worse.

There is nothing to celebrate. The year 1917 actually saw two revolutions in Russia. The February Revolution (in March, according to the modern calendar) deposed Tsar Nicholas II after more than 300 years of rule by the Romanov dynasty, ushering in a provisional government that implemented progressive reforms such as universal suffrage.

The Bolsheviks, a small band of Marxist diehards led by Vladimir Lenin, engineered a coup in October (November in the new calendar) that saw them grab power and found the Union Of Soviet Socialist Republics.

There is nothing to celebrate.

It is a familiar, sweat-inducing, essay question at school: What were the causes of the Russian Revolution? An hour is barely long enough to list them, let alone explain them.

The factors span the spectrum from the impoverishment of the industrial workers to Russia’s catastrophic performance in the First World War.

Political pundits, both inside and outside Russia, had long foretold the Romanovs’ downfall. The autocratic Tsar had resolutely refused democracy.

In 1917 in Russia there were grievances almost without end. Lenin promised a snake-oil solution of “land, bread and peace”.

In truth, the Bolsheviks exploited the fears of the workers, the poor and the peasantry for their own ideological ends. Famously, according to Marx’s theory of dialectical materialism, all history is “the history of class struggle” with the end result being the seizing of power by the “proletariat”, the workers, via revolution.

Lenin’s addition to Marxism was to claim that a “vanguard” was required to lead the workers into the new dawn. Happily for Lenin, the necessary vanguard was his entirely self-appointed Bolshevik party.

Lenin had one job and he was good at it. He was a revolutionist entirely convinced of the rightness of his Communist cause. The Germans, Russia’s opponents in the First World War, knew Lenin’s worth.

They arranged his train journey from exile in Switzerland to Russia, in the knowledge he would cause upset. As so often, Winston Churchill had the best lines. Lenin, wrote Churchill, was transported “in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus”.

Lenin did not disappoint his German sponsors. No sooner did he arrive at Bolshevik HQ in Petrograd than he lectured for two hours straight. This was at eight o’clock in the morning.

The Bolsheviks, previously aimless, became ardent and directed towards power. One observer likened the audience to “bewitched disciples”. On the night of November 6, the Bolsheviks launched their coup.

One must admire their daring. They and their allies, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, had majorities in the “soviets”, the workers’ and soldiers’ councils, of the nation’s capital, Petrograd, and the second city, Moscow.

But outside the industrial districts of these two metropolises, in the rolling vastness of rural Russia, the Bolsheviks were an insignificant political speck.

That dark night, small groups of soldiers loyal to Lenin stole through the two cities to take up key positions: telegraph offices, bridges and major banks.

In Petrograd the insurrectionists cut off the phone to the Winter Palace, the seat of the lawful – if chaotic – provisional government headed by Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky, a moderate socialist.

With no phone, Kerensky was farcically unable to summon loyalist Cossacks and army regiments to protect the legitimate government. The Petrograd Soviet issued a triumphant proclamation claiming, with some truth, “rarely has an insurrection succeeded so well”.

Kerensky holed up for a day then fled in a car, disguised as a sailor, never to see Russia again. Ten Days That Shook The World, the American reporter John Reed’s eyewitness account of November 1917, captured exactly the excitement the revolution aroused among sympathizers on the streets and in the factories of Petrograd (Reed was the subject of the 1981 Hollywood movie Reds, starring Warren Beatty).

If the actual coup was carried out by just a few hundred, hundreds of thousands of workers and soldiers anticipated a new and improved existence for themselves under Communism.

The future seemed to belong to them, not to bosses or emperors any more. Reed recounted a lorry tour around Petrograd’s outskirts in the feverish first days of the coup: “Across the horizon spread the glittering lights of the capital, immeasurably more splendid by night than by day, like a dike of jewels heaped on the barren plain.

“The old workman who drove held the wheel in one hand, while with the other he swept the far-gleaming capital in an exultant gesture. ‘Mine!’ he cried, his face all alight. ‘All mine now! My Petrograd!’.”

Such high hopes, so quickly and utterly disappointed. Once in power, the Bolsheviks abolished private ownership of land. Free and fair elections were promised.

When the Bolsheviks lost the elections with a paltry 24 per cent of the vote (and that was rigged), Lenin ordered the Red Guard – the party’s private army – to shut down the elected assembly.

Instead, he installed himself as dictator. Russia descended into civil war, eventually won by the “Red” Bolsheviks over their “White” opponents. The White Russians’ usual fate if captured was to be shot against the wall or, when the bullets ran low, hanged.

Everything material was in short supply in the brave new world of Communism. Except blood, which was the motif of the Revolution. In July 1918 the royal family, including the five children, were shot, bludgeoned and bayoneted to death in the basement of a building in Yekaterinburg.

Their corpses were mutilated before burning, doused in acid and dumped in a pit in the forest. The order for the deaths of the Romanovs came directly from Lenin, hand-delivered by his chauffeur.

Eventually, the Bolsheviks turned on their own. The sailors of the Kronstadt naval base, previously staunch advocates of revolution, asked for modest reforms, among them freedom of speech for all workers’ parties and the release of socialist political prisoners.

Lenin smeared the sailors as “Black Hundreds”, nationalist paramilitaries, and sent in his Red Guards. Thousands of sailors were killed or imprisoned. Kronstadt was incontrovertible proof that Bolsheviks ruled only for themselves.

Lenin had no real sympathy for the poor, or for them bettering their lot. Absolute power was his aim. Violence was his means. The Communist plan to boost the country’s ramshackle economy flunked.

By 1921, the year of the Kronstadt protests, the output of mines and factories was 20 per cent of the pre-Great War level. To prevent more protests Lenin introduced a New Economic Policy permitting kulaks, peasant farmers, to sell their surplus crop for profit.

But when his successor, Stalin, subjected them to enforced collectivization in the 1930s, two million kulaks died of starvation or brutality. Stalin opined: “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”

To consolidate his power, Stalin duplicated the state-terror practices of his predecessor: exile in Siberian forced-labor camps, torture, mass murder, execution, show trials of allegedly unfaithful party members. Russia rattled to the midnight knock on the door by the NKVD, the secret police.

The blood flowed and flowed. During 1932 and 1933, Stalin directed the Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine, a deliberate mass famine – intended to halt Ukrainian independence – that killed another four million Russian citizens.

The Black Book of Communism, edited by the French academic historian Stéphane Courtois, catalogues the number of people killed by the Communist dictatorship in Russia before its eventual fall, in 1991, as 20 million.

Every Marxist state since has likewise been an exercise in tyranny and terror, whether Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, Pol Pot’s Cambodia or Kim Il-Sung’s North Korea.

Worldwide, Communism has been responsible for the deaths of 96 million people. All the November Revolution brought the Russian people was a change of authoritarian regime.

They swapped the Romanovs for the Red Tsars of Communism. All 1917 brought the world was oppression, blood and tragedy.

Slavoj Žižek, Fashionable Revolutionary

By Christian Alejandro Gonzalez

Saturday, June 30, 2018

Communist philosopher Slavoj Žižek seems to publish at least one book every year, and as of this writing The Courage of Hopelessness: A Year of Acting Dangerously is his latest. It contains seven long essays on a wide range of political matters. The first essay offers a Marxist critique of global capitalism, the principles of which inform subsequent essays. Then follows commentary on the Greek debt crisis, the rise of China, the challenge of Islamic terrorism, the issues facing the LGBT community, the threat of populist movements, and the problems with U.S. foreign policy. Erudite if a bit meandering, Žižek manages to provoke but never to surprise — regardless of the question at hand, he always arrives at the same two conclusions: Capitalism is the disease, and Communism is the cure.

Like much of Žižek’s work, The Courage of Hopelessness seeks above all to convince us that the neoliberal world order is fatally deficient. In Žižek’s view it allows “politicians, bankers, and managers” to “realize their greed” by stashing their ill-earned wealth in offshore tax havens. It creates false scarcity and exacerbates already-savage income inequalities. It destabilizes the lives of working people. It establishes sweatshops (in Asia), resuscitates slavery (in Qatar), and necessitates oppressive policies of social control. The way to overcome these troubles, Žižek argues, is by reinvigorating the politics of the radical left, unabashedly embracing Communism, and confronting the behemoth of the capitalist economy.

In a review of Žižek’s oeuvre, Roger Scruton observes that his intellectual output is the product “of a seriously educated mind.” Scruton is right: Žižek’s books usually include many passages indicative of nothing less than sheer brilliance. Upon encountering them, even the most ardent anti-Communists might catch themselves reconsidering their positions. But one should be careful; Scruton notes that as readers “[nod] in time to the rhythm of the prose,” Žižek slips in “little pellets of poison.”

And so it is: Impressive insights are sometimes followed by poisonous pellets within the space of a single page. Thus, Žižek notes (correctly in my estimation) that while “the French colonized Haiti, the French Revolution also provided the ideological foundation for the rebellion that liberated the slaves and established independent Haiti.…In short, one should never forget that the West provides the very standards by means of which it (as well as its critics) measures its criminal past.” Fair enough, one thinks — Žižek lauds the power of Western ideals, and rightly. But a few paragraphs later we learn what Žižek really intends to commend. “Radical egalitarianism,” he writes, “is European; the notion of modern subjectivity is European; communism is a European event if there ever was one.” Insofar, then, as Žižek can find anything to praise in the Western heritage it is, bafflingly, the legacy of Communism.

Such remarks are par for Žižek’s Marxist course. He possesses an extraordinary analytic tool, inaccessible to most others and deployed frequently in The Courage of Hopelessness: He can discover ways to blame anything on capitalism. With a wave of Žižek’s wand any issue can be converted into a matter of class politics. Of the causes behind the Syrian civil war, for instance, Žižek writes that, “while the dominant factor is political (where Arab tensions play the main role), the determination in the last instance is exerted by the global capitalist economy.” (Those are his italics; you can tell because as elsewhere in his writing they serve no discernible purpose.) Wherever a problem arises in the world, Žižek is certain to be there, ever-ready to find a connection, however tenuous, to the dynamics of global capitalism.

It’s all part of Žižek’s overarching theory: He overstates the nature of the challenges we face and misstates their causes to create the intellectual space needed for the projects of the radical left. “The change required,” The Courage of Hopelessness explains, “is not political reform but a transformation of the social relations of production — which entails precisely revolutionary class struggle rather than democratic elections.” Liberal democracy is incapable of handling the disasters brought about by capitalism. Overcoming them requires a total departure from extant political and economic systems. But, asks Žižek, “Can such [a departure] remain within the confines of parliamentary democracy?” The answer for him is no. Extreme problems demand extreme solutions, which are not laid out in this book.

Žižek has, however, proposed specific solutions in the past. His clearest statement of how humanity might escape capitalism appears in “Robespierre or the ‘Divine Violence’ of Terror,” an essay published over a decade ago.

“Our task today,” Žižek writes in that essay, “is to reinvent emancipatory terror.” One cannot achieve true liberation without wanton violence, because “as Saint-Just put it succinctly: ‘That which produces the general good is always terrible.’” When Žižek elaborates on this idea his language is uncharacteristically lucid. He believes there come points in human history (France 1789, Russia 1917) when the masses awaken to their status as brutalized and degraded creatures, when extraordinary leaders (Robespierre, Lenin) recognize the critical importance of the times and take charge of said masses, when there arises an opportunity, at last, to shatter the systems that oppress us (feudalism, capitalism), and in those moments — in those precise moments — we must decide: Should we embrace “revolutionary-democratic terror?”

Žižek argues that we should, and that we must: During the moment of revolutionary fervor, passivity is tantamount to complicity with the forces of reaction. Anyone who does not participate in the terror is fit for elimination. To create a better world, destroy capitalism, and bring about liberation, one should not be reluctant to employ pitiless methods of political action. Those unwilling to inflict slaughter on behalf of revolution are “sensitive liberals” who long for “revolutions which don’t smell of revolution.” Such people want freedom without violent struggle, and for Žižek such a position is morally bankrupt: One must accept terror “as a bitter truth to be fully endorsed.”

Žižek in this essay is somewhat exceptional. Unlike other (perhaps more reserved) radical thinkers, Žižek makes the connection between utopianism and terrorism explicit: He demands utopia at the expense of terror despite knowing full well that utopia is unobtainable. Indeed, Žižek himself acknowledges that the Jacobin, Bolshevik, and Maoist utopian experiments failed utterly to bring about Communist bliss, yet he is willing nevertheless to encourage similar undertakings in the future. One more revolution, one more outburst of emancipatory terror, and we will finally arrive at the truly “just” society. He therefore contradicts himself when he says that he wants a revolution only so that the brutalities of capitalism can be washed away in the carnage. One comes to realize that he is not opposed to brutalities as such; he only objects to brutalities that he perceives to be caused by “the system.” When atrocities are committed for “correct” (i.e. Communist) causes, he morphs into their foremost intellectual apologist.

And yet, in my view what makes the Žižek phenomenon truly remarkable is not that he openly advocates the mass murder of civilians, not that he is taken seriously by the Western academic establishment (he has 100,00 citations on Google Scholar), not that despite all his writing on Stalinism he cannot muster an unambiguous moral condemnation of Stalin’s butchery. It is, rather, that the terror he endorses is ultimately nihilistic. If utopia is impossible, then any society born after a terrorist uprising is bound to be flawed in some way. Certain classes of people will continue to be excluded from the “benefits” of the revolution — Jews in the former Soviet Union are one obvious example. If Žižek will stop at nothing until full and perfect equality is attained, and if he sanctions terrorism to attain that perfect equality, then he must (and to be fair he does) endorse a perpetual cycle of revolutionary terror to achieve that which cannot be achieved. Seduced by the aesthetics of revolution rather than committed to a serious pursuit of justice, Žižek’s philosophy collapses under the weight of its incoherence.

In a world where his dreadful revolutionary project could be separated from his descriptive commentary, Žižek’s books would perhaps be useful interventions in public-policy debates. But we do not live in such a world. Book after book, Žižek applies the same Lacanian–Marxist theories to analyses of current events in a quixotic attempt to prove that doomsday nears, that capitalism is begetting catastrophe and only terror can save us. Bearing all this in mind, readers who engage The Courage of Hopelessness will find themselves captivated by its insights, furious with its absurdities, and repelled by its implicit proposals.