Communism gave rise to bloodshed
Aband of political radicals seized the reins of power in post-tsarist Russia a century ago this week, installing Vladimir Lenin as their first leader and setting in play some of the forces that made the 20th century the bloodiest in human history. It’s hard, in fact, to imagine just how different today’s world would be had Lenin and his comrades failed in their coup and had the Soviet Union never been established.
World War I likely would have ended about the same — Lenin withdrew Russia from the war only nine months before the general armistice — but the politics of Europe would have played out much differently, especially after the murderous Josef Stalin succeeded Lenin. But would any of the other forces vying for power after the fall of the tsar have ruled Russia less harshly or more democratically than the Bolsheviks, whose rise sparked a five-year civil war? Had democracy prevailed, would Russia have colluded with Adolf Hitler in invading Poland in 1939, sparking World War II?
The postwar shape of Europe, with communist satellites in the east facing off against the Western democracies, would not have been the same if the Soviet Union had not been vying with the rest of the Allied nations for territory at the dawn of the Cold War. But without Stalin, might fascism have taken a firmer, broader root across Eastern Europe, perhaps even in Russia itself, with its history of anti-Semitic pogroms?
Throughout, communism enabled brutal totalitarians — Stalin’s reign of terror killed millions through forced collectivization of agriculture and ethniccleansing programs, as well as the execution of perceived rivals and resisters. The Cold War became a struggle by the Soviet Union to spread communism and by the West — led by the United States — to spread democratic capitalism around the world. But in the end, it was economic collapse and emboldened citizenry that led to the Soviet Union’s demise in 1991.
When the Great Depression eroded faith in capitalism, President Franklin D Roosevelt turned to quasisocialistic policies such as Social Security, public jobs programs (the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps) and the Rural Electrification program that extended power to remote areas through local cooperatives using federal loans to hire the unemployed. If communism hadn’t been rivaling capitalism for political support, those New Deal programs might not have gained political traction.
How else do the Bolsheviks echo today? Through the communist regimes that remain from Cuba to Vietnam to China. And in Americans’ almost Pavlovian distrust of government-led communal action.
Never mind that such things as pooled-risk insurance, the national park system and interstate freeways we rely on are born of the recognition that shared risk and shared wealth can provide broad benefits without threatening individual liberty. But the Bolsheviks echo in the reminder that democracy lives and dies on the faith and willingness of the people to embrace and sustain it.
As Hitler’s political rise in a democratic Germany taught us, even democracy is not safe from totalitarianism.