APOLOGISTS FOR SLAUGHTER
of the soul. Private enterprise was outlawed and thousands of dissenters were murdered or imprisoned; others were declared mad and dragged off to psychiatric hospitals. This was Communism in action — the principles of Marx and Lenin turned into reality. And for the Russian people in particular, the legacy of the Revolution was nothing short of a tragedy. In other circumstances, there was no reason why the Russians could not have enjoyed a century of reform, democracy and economic progress. Yet they disappeared down an ideological black hole, a chasm of repression, cruelty and economic stagnation. Even now, more than a quarter of a century after the end of the Soviet Empire, the Revolution poisons Russian politics. Vladimir Putin, who remains a KGB man to his fingertips, called the collapse of the Soviet Union the ‘greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century’. Putin also believes Stalin, a man who presided over the deaths of millions of his people, has been much maligned. The West, he said this summer, had orchestrated the ‘excessive demonisation of Stalin’ as a ‘means of attacking the Soviet Union and Russia’.
Few observers doubt Putin would love to rebuild the Soviet Empire, starting with Ukraine — which has been partly occupied by his army since 2014 — and the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which have been plagued by Russian cyber-attacks.
But Russian imperialism is only one of the baleful legacies of 1917.
For here in Britain, the principles that underpinned the Revolution — a hatred of capitalism, disdain for democracy, the rejection of history and an obsessive desire to tear down the existing order and build a new world — are threatening to become mainstream once again.
From the beginning, there was a tendency among Left-wing intellectuals to see the Russian Revolution as the start of a glorious new chapter in history.
Perhaps most famously, socialist thinkers Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who were key figures in the rise of the Labour Party, wrote Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?, a book hailing the regime as heaven on earth.
In Britain’s universities, Leftwing intellectuals were often quick to find excuses for the butchers in the Kremlin. The historian Eric Hobsbawm, who happily accepted the Companion of Honour from the Queen, never failed to defend the Soviet experiment.
AS LATE as 1994, in an interview, Hobsbawm insisted that despite the horrific suffering caused by Lenin and his heirs, it was worth it for ‘the chance of a new world’. So would the ‘loss of 15 million, 20 million people’ have been justified? He did not waver: ‘Yes.’
Almost incredibly, plenty of academics still worship at the shrine of Professor Hobsbawm, who died in 2012. Indeed, at almost any student demonstration you can see Communist flags amid the sea of placards excoriating ‘Tory scum’.
In the Nineties it was easy to dismiss this as juvenile silliness. But as memories of Stalin’s prison camps begin to fade, so Marxist ideas have become fashionable.
Maybe this is hardly surprising. Economic growth has stalled, millions of youngsters struggle to get onto the property ladder and, in the wake of the financial crash of 2007-8, even sober analysts argued something has gone wrong with capitalism, which often seems to serve the interests of the richest.
This explains unlikely bestsellers such as the French economist Thomas Piketty’s book Capital, published in 2013 — an attack on inequality which evokes Marx’s most celebrated work, Das Kapital.
But it has played directly into the hands of the more malevolent elements of the hard Left.
Having spent the Cold War on the fringes of the Labour Party, they now find themselves within touching distance of government itself.
Jeremy Corbyn has never seen a revolutionary Communist dictatorship that he doesn’t like — from Fidel Castro’s Cuba to the bloodstained regime running oil-rich Venezuela into the ground.
His Shadow Chancellor and chief puppet-master, John McDonnell, wrote in Who’s Who that his hobby was ‘fermenting the overthrow of capitalism’. (He presumably meant ‘fomenting’ rather than ‘fermenting’: people on the hard Left tend not to be terribly bright.)
PERHAPS most tellingly, Mr Corbyn’s media chief, the public- schoolboyturned-Guardian-columnist Seumas Milne, has openly written of his admiration for Stalin’s Soviet Union. It was outrageous, he once told his readers, that Western historians insisted on painting Stalin as a tyrant.
Lenin and Stalin’s regime, Milne argued, encompassed ‘genuine idealism and commitment … For all its brutalities and failures, Communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and advances in social and gender equality’.
One day, he hoped, Russia would again offer an ‘alternative to the new global capitalist order’. I can’t believe I am alone in finding it disgusting that such a man, an apologist for terror, a defender of tyranny, speaks for the same Labour Party whose leaders were once instrumental in building Nato and acquiring our nuclear deterrent.
But in a society that no longer values history as it should, we are in danger of forgetting the lessons of the past century.
It is true that the Russian Revolution was provoked by repression, corruption and gross inequality. But what followed was not, as Mr Corbyn and his allies seem to think, a noble experiment that unfortunately went wrong.
Like so many utopian visions, it was poisoned from the start by fantasies of violence and slaughter.
Lenin, Stalin and their fellow Marxists saw themselves as an educated elite, dragging the people kicking and screaming into a new world. They saw them as guineapigs in a grotesque experiment.
They believed the ends justified the means; worse, they gloried their own cruelty, which they saw as proof of revolutionary faith.
As the death-toll mounted, they dismissed criticism as fake news and stifled dissent. And when all else failed, they turned, as utopians always do, to the gun.
We are, I think, in danger of forgetting the single greatest lesson of the last century, a terrible tutorial in what happens when you sacrifice history, tradition, social order and individual rights at the altar of utopian fanaticism.
And at a time when many young people have lost faith in the free market, with Russian imperialism emboldened and with one of Britain’s parties under the sway of latter-day Marxists, what happened in St Petersburg in 1917 can hardly be a more chilling warning.