APOLOGISTS FOR SLAUGHTER

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-called intellectuals. How terrifying, th

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