APOLOGISTS FOR SLAUGHTER
SATURDAY ESSAY by Dominic Sandbrook The Russian Revolution, 100 years ago this month, spread a blood-soaked ideology that’s killed tens of millions of people, imprisoned countless more in poverty – and, disgustingly, has been defended by Britain’s so-call
THE date was October 26, 1917, and the Russian capital of Petrograd — now known as St Petersburg — was sleeping soundly. As the clocks tolled 2am, the Red Guards struck.
When the revolutionaries broke into the vast Winter Palace, once the centrepiece of Tsarist power and now the headquarters of Russia’s Provisional Government, they found it virtually undefended.
The garrison surrendered almost at once, and as the Red Guards rampaged through the cold, empty corridors, they found ministers huddled in an imperial dining room.
By the time the sun rose over Petrograd, the coup was complete.
Six months earlier, amid growing weariness with World War I and fury at bread shortages, riots had erupted in Petrograd. When troops mutinied and joined rioters, the Tsar, Nicholas II, agreed to abdicate.
In a matter of hours, the gilded, repressive regime of the Tsars was swept away, to be replaced by a liberal republican government. Now that government was gone, too.
Its replacement was a revolutionary regime led by a tiny band of fanatics, known as the Bolsheviks, dedicated to the ideas of a long-dead German philosopher.
Their leader was a pale intellectual named Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, who called himself Lenin. He saw himself as the heir of the late Karl Marx, the author of the Communist Manifesto, who had foretold the overthrow of the capitalist order and the advent of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.
What followed was perhaps the greatest turning point in modern world history.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 saw the birth of a vast Soviet superpower with aspirations to export Communism across the planet. It ushered in a new society, inspired would-be revolutionaries in every corner of the globe, and brought suffering and slaughter on a scale unprecedented in human history, with a death toll stretching into the tens of millions.
Inside Russia, the transformation could hardly have been more spectacular.
Almost overnight, the old order was swept away, replaced by a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Millions of peasants were encouraged to occupy the vast landed estates. Banks were nationalised and the homes of the rich occupied and divided into flats.
BUT right from the start, the revolution was stained by mendacity, fanaticism and bloodshed. In July 1918, the Bolsheviks horrified world opinion with the slaughter of Nicholas II, and his wife, son, four daughters and faithful retainers, who were shot, bayoneted and beaten to death in a cellar in Yekaterinburg.
Yet this was just a taste of the barbarism set to become the regime’s trademark. Like so many utopian projects for ‘improving’ society, Marxism depended upon the threat of violence. How else, after all, could the family, the church, private interests and private property be swept away, other than at the point of a bayonet?
Today, Left-wing intellectuals love to present Karl Marx as a kindly German refugee. But it is easy to forget that bloodshed and violence was always part of his mission.
‘There is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated,’ Marx wrote in 1848, ‘and that way is revolutionary terror.’
As Marx’s self-appointed heir, Lenin had learned his lesson well. Within less than a year, he was urging his comrades to ‘introduce mass terror’ in the countryside.
Aristocrats, landowners, officials, priests and especially wealthier peasants (known as kulaks) were dragged off for execution. In one notorious telegram, Lenin ordered his subordinates in the countryside to show no mercy.
‘You must make an example of these people,’ he wrote. ‘Hang (I mean hang publicly, so that people see it) at least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known bloodsuckers... Do all this so that for miles around people see it all, tremble, and tell themselves that we are killing the bloodthirsty kulaks and will continue to do so.’
He added a chilling postscript: ‘Find tougher people.’ Lenin’s orders set the tone. In the next five years, as civil war and revolution swept the Russian Empire, perhaps ten million people died in battle, were executed or succumbed to famine and disease.
Yet even after Lenin’s victory was assured, the shadow of terror still lay across Russia.
After Lenin’s death in 1924, he was succeeded by the party’s general secretary, Joseph Stalin, who forced through the collectivisation of Soviet agriculture — the consolidation of peasant farms and smallholdings — at the cost of perhaps 12 million lives lost to famine, cannibalism, lawlessness and state executions.
Then Stalin turned on his own Communist Party, determined to purge any last trace of opposition. In the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938, his secret police arrested more than 1.5 million people, some 682,000 of whom were shot.
Among them were many of Stalin’s old colleagues, as well as almost the entire leadership of the Red Army, who were humiliated in public show trials before being dragged away for execution.
Today, as in the Thirties, many on the Left blame this on Stalin’s paranoid personality. They present him as a monstrous aberration, who perverted the otherwise noble vision of Marx and Lenin. But this is nonsense.
As the brilliant historian Stephen Kotkin has shown, Stalin was a genuinely faithful Marxist. Like his mentors, he believed terror was the only way to destroy the old order and build a classless society.
In other words, it was the vision that was monstrous, not the man. And by the time of his death in 1953, Stalin had exported his vision to the captive states of Eastern Europe, which had been occupied by the Red Army at the end of World War II.
For the people of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the rest, the long-term legacy of the Russian Revolution was malign. Having emerged from the shadow of Nazism, they saw their fledgling democracies crushed beneath the Communist jackboot. For Eastern Europe, as for the Soviet Union, the next 40 years were a long, dark night
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.