Writing in NRODT as the centenary of the Bolshevik revolution approaches (read the whole piece, incidentally), Douglas Murray had this to say:
[W]herever you turn in the world today, it seems that the virus of Communism — in every Marxist, socialist strain — remains alive and well. Conditions for its spreading range from moderate to good.
Indeed they are. And they probably always will be. As I noted the other day:
It’s often said that Communism is doomed to fail because it runs up against the realities of human nature. Economically speaking, that may be true. But economics isn’t everything. Communism is, in reality, little more than a twist on ancient millenarian ideas so enduring that there must be something about them that does indeed appeal to human nature, or, at least aspects of it, whether spiritual, a simple craving for revenge or both.
It was clear from a recent article that The Economist is worried by developments in the UK (as is Murray) where a Labour Party led by the hard left is now dangerously close to power. But while the writer of the piece took an unduly kindly view of the mid-century Labour Party (which contained elements far less unfriendly to the Soviet Union than they should have been), he also stumbled a little when claiming this:
The gravest intellectual malady on the left is its habit of making judgments on the basis of people’s intentions rather than their results. This finds its purest form in the idea that the failures of the Russian revolution can be justified, or partially excused, by the nobleness of the intentions of the people who launched it. This not only applies the wrong metric to judging progress (Adam Smith’s great insight was that economic progress usually proceeds regardless of the intentions of businesspeople). It prepares the way for the pursuit of traitors when noble intentions fail to produce noble results. The Labour Party was on safer ground when it spoke the language of priorities, rather than the language of millenarianism.
Much of that is true, but it still seems to accept, at least partially, the premise that the intentions of those early Bolsheviks were “noble”. They were anything but. The Bolsheviks might have talked about building a better world, and some of them might even have believed it, but like millenarians before and since (ISIS is a recent example) they believed that that world could only be achieved by a cleansing so terrible that, to any reasonable observer, any notion of ‘nobleness’ must be drowned in the sea of blood that any such cleansing was always intended to create.
Here’s Zinoviev, one of the leading Bolsheviks, speaking in 1918, just a year after the revolution:
To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.
Here’s Paul Mason, writing in the Guardian in 2017:
As we approach the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, responses will come in three flavours: conservative condemnation; the liberal mixture of admiration and regret; and enthusiastic commemoration. Though I reject Bolshevism, and date the degeneration of the revolution to the early 20s, I will be among those celebrating.
If there are any liberals (in the true sense of the word) who view the Bolshevik coup with anything other than disgust, they are, shall we say, deeply confused.
But then we turn to the admiration that Mason feels for the revolution (in a tweet passing on his article he describes it as “a beacon to the rest of humanity, no matter how short lived”) at least until its ‘degeneration’ “in the early 1920s”, an admiration apparently undisturbed by the fact that Lenin and his accomplices always had mass murder in mind.
But the reference to the ‘degeneration’ (and its dating) are interesting. After all, the early months of the revolution saw the dissolution of the popularly elected Constituent Assembly (up until the Yeltsin years, the only democratically elected parliament in Russian history) and the Red Terror, a policy of massacre repeated again and again in territories that fell under Bolshevik control, including in those nations struggling to break free from the ancient Russian domination that the Bolsheviks (nominally) opposed.
So, at what point in the early 1920s, did the revolution degenerate far enough to earn Mason’s disapproval?
Was it the Bolsheviks’ crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion (March 1921) by disillusioned sailors–early supporters of the revolution horrified at the direction it had taken?
Was it the Bolsheviks’ gassing of the peasants of Tambov (June 1921)?
Was it Lenin’s exploitation of the 1920/21 famine (for which the Bolsheviks bore no small part of the blame) and its aftermath to loot the church?
Now and only now, when people are being eaten in famine-stricken areas, and hundreds, if not thousands, of corpses lie on the roads, we can (and therefore must) pursue the removal of church property with the most frenzied and ruthless energy and not hesitate to put down the least opposition…. We must pursue the removal of church property by any means necessary in order to secure for ourselves a fund of several hundred million gold rubles.
Was it the establishment of the Solovki concentration camp (the tumor that metastasized into the Gulag) in 1923, while Lenin, architect and inspiration of the revolution, was still alive?
For a rather more honest look at Soviet history, go to Jacob Heilbrunn’s review of the latest volume of Stephen Kotkin’s biography of Stalin. The review (and the book) should be read in full, but, in the context of an examination of the early years of the revolution, it’s worth noting this passage on the leading ‘old Bolsheviks’ annihilated by Stalin in the mid-1930s.
There should be no illusions about the sordid character of Stalin’s antagonists. Their hands were imbrued in blood. The Old Bolsheviks never shrank from extreme violence during the Civil War. They had disbanded the 1917 Constituent Assembly and helped establish the Cheka and the prison labor camps in Siberia. They had played a leading role in constructing the totalitarian state that Stalin now headed.
One of those executed was that same Zinoviev who had called for the annihilation of millions. Biter bit.