A hundred years ago
This year marks the centenary of the greatest calamity of the modern age—the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. It was, of course, a calamity borne out of another calamity, the Great War (we didn’t call it World War I until we had a second).
The creaking, archaic Romanov dynasty had gone to war unprepared for what was to follow and suffered accordingly, with the punishment coming on the evening of Oct. 25, 1917, when Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and their unsavory comrades seized government ministries and communication centers in the capital of Petrograd.
So would begin the great struggle between democratic capitalism and communism (more precisely, “Marxism-Leninism,” a hybrid combination of Karl Marx’s “historical materialism” and Lenin’s distortions of Marx in his will to power).
From Lenin came Joseph Stalin’s “dekulakization,” the Great Purges and an estimated 20 million dead in the 1930s. And thereafter Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” (which was actually the biggest leap backward in history, claiming 30 million to 40 million lives); the killing fields of Cambodia; the Vietnamese boat people; the continuing menace of the (badly misnamed) Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and so on.
The late R.J. Rummel, author of Death by Government, would conclude that governments have killed far more of their own people than wars have over time, with communist governments responsible for about three quarters of that killing. Communism would claim over 100 million dead at the hands of Stalin, Mao and junior varsity acolytes like Nicolai Ceausescu, Erich Honecker, Fidel Castro, and Pol Pot.
Thus, Lenin’s middle of the night coup d’etat would produce not the promised classless utopia on earth but the greatest ideological justification for and engine of mass murder in history.
Apart from the bodies that would pile up wherever communism was established, it was the Soviet Union that would give the world its first gory glimpse of what would become known as totalitarianism, an all-consuming, dystopic form of government that relied upon modern technology and mass communications to control as much of human life as possible, and which would be admiringly emulated in many of its institutional features just a few years later by Adolf Hitler.
And lest we forget, the deadliest war in human history, the Second World War, would be touched off by the aggression committed by the members of the Anti-Comintern Pact, suggesting the degree to which communism and fascism/Nazism fed off each other in the interwar years in their competition to destroy liberal democracy.
Indeed, without the threat of Bolshevism emanating from Moscow, it is difficult to see how we could have ever gotten fascism or German National Socialism, at least in the virulent forms they took. And even then it would take that ultimate partnership between devils, the shocking announcement of the Nazi-Soviet Pact on Aug. 23, 1939, to ignite the joint dismemberment of Poland and secure Hitler’s eastern front for the invasion of the low countries and France.
After the Axis was defeated at staggering cost, we would be in store for more than four decades of Cold War with Stalin’s successors, featuring the enslavement of Eastern Europe (including miserable Poland), bloody proxy wars in places like Korea and Vietnam, and the ruinous expenditures, close calls (Cuba!), and anxieties of the nuclear arms race.
The Great War begat Bolshevism, and it was the existence of Bolshevism that determined so much of the conflicts and tragedies which followed in the bloody 20th century.
The hunch is that Marxism, despite its troubling endorsement of a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” would never have evolved in such a brutal and destabilizing direction without Lenin and his attempt to impose it upon a Russia that had only recently entered the industrial capitalist stage that Marx himself claimed had to be passed through to get to socialism/ communism. Because of the place, time and way Lenin seized power, the “premature” nature of it all by Marxist standards, “red terror” would be necessary there and everywhere else the “vanguard party” would gain power.
Lenin was history’s first political gangster, in the sense of the first who fully mated ideological fanaticism and certitude to ruthlessness and love of violence. War, tyranny and injustice had always characterized the human experience, but the Bolsheviks and their followers would be the first to sanction unprecedented mass murder as a means of curing humanity of it. For those bent upon remaking the world, all means were justified and no crimes would be prohibited.
In the end, that would be perhaps the most tragic consequence of 1917—the creation of a secular religion, with its own icons, scripture, and proselytizing clergy, unleashed upon the world with the goal of remaking it through terror and coercion, even to the point of attempting to alter human nature itself and bring about Marx’s “new socialist man.”
That combination of ideological fervor and bloodlust would afflict politics up to the present day, introducing a profoundly Manichean orientation to the political left in which opponents were not simply wrong and in need of correction but evil and in need of “liquidation.”
God protect us from those who wish to wield absolute power and are willing to commit any crimes in order to make our lives better.
Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.