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.
