When Should We Put Our Flag Full Mass Again
Vladimir Lenin addresses supporters celebrating the start anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. (AFP)
Communist Party supporters with red flags and a flag with a portrait of Vladimir Lenin walk during a demonstration marking the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Moscow'southward Red Square on Nov. five. (Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP)
Anne Applebaum
At the first of 1917, on the eve of the Russian revolution, most of the men who would go known to the world as the Bolsheviks had very little to show for their lives. They had been in and out of prison house, constantly under police surveillance, rarely employed. Vladimir Lenin spent well-nigh of the decade preceding the revolution drifting between Krakow, Zurich and London. Joseph Stalin spent those years in the Caucasus, running protection rackets and robbing banks. Leon Trotsky had escaped from Siberian exile was to be constitute in Viennese coffee shops; when the revolution bankrupt out, he was showing off his glittering brilliance at socialist meeting halls in New York.
They were peripheral figures even in the Russian revolutionary underground. Trotksy had played a pocket-size role in the unsuccessful revolution of 1905 — the encarmine, spontaneous insurgence that the historian Richard Pipes has called "the foreshock" — but Lenin was abroad. None of them played a major office in the February revolution, the commencement of the 2 revolutions of 1917, when hungry workers and mutinous soldiers occupied the streets of Saint petersburg, every bit St. petersburg was so called, and forced the czar to abdicate. Alexander Shliapnikov, one of the few Bolsheviks to reach the Russian capital at the time, fifty-fifty dismissed the February street protests, at showtime, as inconsequential: "What revolution? Give the workers a pound of bread and the movement will peter out." Cluttered elections to the first workers' soviet, a kind of spontaneous council, were held a few days before the czar's abdication; the Bolsheviks got only a fraction of the vote. At that moment, Alexander Kerensky, who was to become the Provisional Government'south liberal leader, enjoyed widespread support.
Seven months later the Bolsheviks were in charge. A Russian friend of mine likes to say, in the spirit of Voltaire'south famous joke virtually the Holy Roman Empire, that the Great October Revolution, as it was always known in Soviet days, was none of those things: not corking (it was an economic and political disaster); not in October (co-ordinate to the Gregorian calendar information technology was really November. seven); and, above all, not a revolution. It was a Bolshevik coup d'etat. Just it was not an accident, either. Lenin began plotting a violent seizure of power earlier he had even learned of the czar's abdication. Immediately — "inside a few hours," according to Victor Sebestyen'due south excellent new biography, "Lenin: The Human being, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror" — he sent out a list of orders to his colleagues in Petrograd. They included "no trust or support for the new government," "arm the proletariat" and "make no rapprochement of whatever kind with other parties." More than a thousand miles away, in Switzerland, he could not peradventure have had whatsoever idea what the new government stood for. But as a man who had spent much of the previous xx years fighting against "bourgeois democracy," and arguing virulently against elections and parties, he already knew that he wanted information technology smashed.
His extremism was precisely what persuaded the German regime, and then at war with Russian federation, to aid Lenin comport out his plans. "We must now definitely try to create the utmost chaos in Russian federation," one High german official advised. "We must secretly do all that nosotros tin to aggravate the differences between the moderate and the extreme parties . . . since we are interested in the victory of the latter." The kaiser personally approved of the idea; his generals hoped it would lead the Russian state to collapse and withdraw from the state of war. And and then the German government promised Lenin funding, put him and xxx other Bolsheviks — among them his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya , likewise every bit his mistress, Inessa Armand — onto a train, and sent them to revolutionary St. petersburg. They arrived at the Finland Station on April 16, where they were welcomed past a cheering crowd.
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A few days later Lenin issued his famous April Theses, which echoed the orders that he had sent from Zurich. He treated the Bolsheviks' minority condition equally temporary, the product of a misunderstanding: "Information technology must exist explained to the masses that the Soviet of Workers' Deputies is the merely possible form of revolutionary government." He showed his contemptuousness for democracy, dismissing the idea of a parliamentary republic every bit "a retrograde step." He chosen for the abolition of the police, the regular army and the hierarchy, as well as the nationalization of all land and all banks.
Plenty of people thought he was crazy. Just in the weeks that followed, Lenin stuck to his extremist vision despite the objections of his more moderate colleagues, agitating for it all over the city. Using a formula that would be imitated and repeated past demagogues around the world for decades to come — up to and including the demagogues of the present, most which more in a moment — he and the other Bolsheviks offered poor people simplistic answers to complex questions. They chosen for "peace, land and bread." They sketched out beautiful pictures of an impossible hereafter. They promised not just wealth merely also happiness, a ameliorate life in a better nation.
Trotsky later wrote with an about mystical lyricism well-nigh this period, a time when "meetings were held in plants, schools and colleges, in theatres, circuses, streets and squares." His favorite events took place at the Leningrad Circus:
"I ordinarily spoke in the Circus in the evening, sometimes quite late at nighttime. My audience was equanimous of workers, soldiers, difficult-working mothers, street urchins—the oppressed under-dogs of the upper-case letter. Every square inch was filled, every man body compressed to its limit. Young boys sat on their fathers' shoulders; infants were at their mothers' breasts. No 1 smoked. The balconies threatened to fall under the excessive weight of human bodies. I made my way to the platform through a narrow human trench, sometimes I was borne overhead. The air, intense with breathing and waiting, fairly exploded with shouts. . . .
"No speaker, no matter how wearied, could resist the electric tension of that impassioned man throng. They wanted to know, to understand, to find their fashion. At times it seemed as if I felt, with my lips, the stern inquisitiveness of this crowd that had get merged into a single whole. So all the arguments and words idea out in advance would break and recede under the imperative pressure of sympathy, and other words, other arguments, utterly unexpected past the orator only needed past these people, would emerge in full array from my subconsciousness."
This feeling of oneness with the masses — the awareness, bizarrely narcissistic, that he was the authentic Vocalism of the People, the living embodiment of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat — supported Trotsky and propelled him onward. It besides bearded the fact that, similar Lenin, he was lying.
Power in chaos
Then were all his comrades. The Bolsheviks lied well-nigh the past — the relationships some of them had with the czarist police, Lenin's secret pact with Germany — and they lied near the future, too. All through the jump and summer of 1917, Trotsky and Lenin repeatedly made promises that would never be kept. "Peace, Country, and Breadstuff"? Their offering of "peace" curtained their faith in the coming world revolution and their determination to apply force to bring it well-nigh. Their offering of "land" disguised a plan to keep all belongings in state hands. Their offering of "bread" concealed an ideological obsession with centralized nutrient production that would keep Russians hungry or decades.
Just in 1917, the fairy tales told past Lenin, Trotsky, and the others won the solar day. They certainly did non persuade all Russians, or even a majority of the Russians, to support them. They did not persuade the St. petersburg Soviet or the other socialist parties. Only they did persuade a fanatical and devoted minority, i that would impale for the crusade. And in the political chaos that followed the czar'southward abdication, in a city that was paralyzed by nutrient shortages, distracted past rumors and haunted by an unpopular war, a fanatical and devoted minority proved sufficient.
Capturing ability was non difficult. Using the tactics of psychological warfare that would later get their trademark, the Bolsheviks convinced a mob of supporters that they were under assault, and directed them to sack the Winter Palace, where the ministers of the Conditional Regime were meeting. As Stalin later remembered, the political party leadership "disguised its offensive deportment behind a fume screen of defenses." They lied once again, in other words, to inspire their fanatical followers to fight. After a brief scuffle — the ministers put upwardly no real defense force — Lenin, without whatever endorsement from any institution other than his own political party, declared himself the leader of a country that he renamed Soviet Russian federation.
Keeping power was much harder. Precisely because he represented a fanatical minority and had been endorsed by no one else, Lenin'southward proclamation was just the commencement of what would become a long and bloody struggle. Socialists in other countries used the Marxist expression "form war" as a metaphor; they meant simply form rivalry, perchance conducted through the election box, or at virtually a bit of street fighting. Merely from the beginning, the Bolsheviks always envisioned actual course warfare, accompanied by actual mass violence, which would physically destroy the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, physically destroy their shops and factories, physically destroy the schools, the courts, the press. In October 1917, they began using that mass violence. In the subsequent Russian and Ukrainian civil wars that consumed the sometime empire between 1918 and 1921, hundreds of thousands of people died. Millions more would die in waves of terror in the years that followed.
In this photo taken in October 1917, members of the revolution Carmine Guards pose for a photo with their arms at the Smolny Institute building, which was chosen by Vladimir Lenin equally Bolshevik headquarters during the October Revolution in 1917. (Russian State Archive of Social and Political History via AP)
The anarchy was vast. But many in Russia came to embrace the destruction. They argued that the "system" was so corrupt, so immune to reform or repair, that it had to be smashed. Some welcomed the bonfire of civilization with something bordering on ecstasy. The dazzler of violence, the cleansing ability of violence: these were themes that inspired Russian poesy and prose in 1918. Krasnaya Gazeta, the newspaper of the Carmine Army, urged the soldiers of the Bolshevik cause to be merciless to their enemies: "Let them exist thousands, permit them drown themselves in their own blood . . . allow there be floods of blood of the bourgeoisie — more than blood, as much as possible." A young Ukrainian named Vsevolod Balytsky, ane of the early on members of the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police, published a poem in the Ukrainian edition of Izvestiya in 1919:
There, where even yesterday life was and then joyous
Flows the river of blood
And then? There where it flows
In that location will be no mercy
Cypher will salvage you lot, nothing!
Fourteen years later on, Balytsky, by then the secret law boss in Ukraine, would launch the mass arrests and searches that culminated in the Ukrainian famine, an artificially created catastrophe that killed nigh four 1000000 people. Four years afterward that, in 1937, Balytsky was himself executed by a firing squad.
Too in that yr, the peak year of the Peachy Terror, Stalin eliminated anyone in the country whom he suspected might have dissenting views of any kind. Lenin had already eliminated the other socialist parties. Stalin focused on the "enemies" inside his ain political party, both real and imaginary, in a bloody mass purge. Like Lenin, Stalin never accepted any grade of legal opposition — indeed he never believed that there could be such a thing as constructive opposition at all. Truth was defined by the leader. The direction of state policy was divers by the leader. Everyone and everything that opposed the leader — parties, courts, media — was an "enemy of the people," a phrase that Lenin stole from the French Revolution.
Within 2 decades of Oct 1917, the Revolution had devoured not only its children, only also its founders — the men and women who had been motivated past such passion for destruction. It created not a beautiful new civilisation but an angry, unhappy, and embittered social club, one that squandered its resources, built ugly, inhuman cities, and broke new ground in atrocity and mass murder. Even as the Soviet Union became less violent, in the years post-obit Stalin'southward expiry in 1953, it remained quack and intolerant, insisting on a facade of unity. As the philosopher Roger Scruton has observed, Bolshevism eventually became so cocooned in layers of dishonesty that information technology lost bear on with reality: "Facts no longer made contact with the theory, which had risen above the facts on clouds of nonsense, rather like a theological arrangement. The point was non to believe the theory, but to repeat information technology ritualistically and in such a fashion that both belief and doubt became irrelevant. . . . In this way the concept of truth disappeared from the intellectual landscape, and was replaced past that of ability." In one case people were unable to distinguish truth from ideological fiction, however, they were as well unable to solve or even draw the worsening social and economic problems of their society. Fear, hatred, cynicism and criminality were all around them, with no obvious solutions in sight.
So discredited was Bolshevism afterward the Soviet Marriage's demise in 1991 that, for a quarter of a century, it seemed as if Bolshevik thinking was gone for skillful. But suddenly, now, in the year of the revolution's centenary, it's back.
The neo-Bolsheviks
History repeats itself so practise ideas, simply never in exactly the aforementioned way. Bolshevik thinking in 2017 does non sound exactly the way information technology sounded in 1917. At that place are, it is true, nevertheless a few Marxists around. In Spain and Greece they have formed powerful political parties, though in Spain they accept however to win power and in Greece they have been forced by the realities of international markets, to quietly drop their "revolutionary" agenda. The current leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, likewise comes out of the old pro-Soviet far left. He has voiced anti-American, anti-NATO, anti-Israel, and even anti-British (and pro-IRA) sentiments for decades — anticipated views that no longer audio shocking to a generation that cannot recollect who sponsored them in the by. Inside his party at that place is a core of radicals who speak of overthrowing capitalism and bringing dorsum nationalization.
In the Us, the Marxist left has also consolidated on the fringes of the Democratic Political party — and sometimes not even on the fringes — also as on campuses, where it polices the speech of its members, fights to preclude students from hearing opposing viewpoints, and teaches a dark, negative version of American history, ane calculated to create doubts almost democracy and to cast shadows on all political debate. The followers of this new alt-left spurn basic patriotism and support America's opponents, whether in Russia or the Center East. Equally in Britain, they don't remember the antecedents of their ideas and they don't make a connection between their language and the words used past fanatics of a different era.
Simply so far, the new left, nonetheless fashionable it may be in some circles, is non in ability, and thus has non managed to create a real revolution. In truth, the nearly influential contemporary Bolsheviks — the people who began, like Lenin and Trotsky, on the extremist fringes of political life and who are now in positions of power and existent influence in several Western countries — come up from a different political tradition altogether.
Marine Le Pen, head of France's far-correct National Front political party, at an October. 22 news conference. (Fred Tanneau/AFP via Getty Images)
Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen and Jaroslaw Kaczynski: although they are often described as "far-right" or "alt-right," these neo-Bolsheviks have little to do with the right that has been part of Western politics since World War II, and they have no connection to existing conservative parties. In continental Europe, they scorn Christian Democracy, which had its political base in the church and sought to bring morality back to politics after the nightmare of the Second World State of war. Nor do they have anything to do with Anglo-Saxon conservatism, which promoted free markets, complimentary speech and a Burkean minor-c conservatism: skepticism of "progress," suspicion of radicalism in all its forms, and a belief in the importance of conserving institutions and values. Whether German or Dutch Christian Democrats, British Tories, American Republicans, Due east European ex-dissidents or French Gaullists, mail service-war Western conservatives have all been defended to representative democracy, religious tolerance, economic integration and the Western brotherhood.
By contrast, the neo-Bolsheviks of the new right or alt-right exercise not want to conserve or to preserve what exists. They are not Burkeans just radicals who want to overthrow existing institutions. Instead of the false and misleading vision of the future offered by Lenin and Trotsky, they offer a faux and misleading vision of the past. They conjure upwardly worlds fabricated upwardly of ethnically or racially pure nations, erstwhile-fashioned factories, traditional male-female hierarchies and impenetrable borders. Their enemies are homosexuals, racial and religious minorities, advocates of homo rights, the media, and the courts. They are oft not real Christians simply rather cynics who apply "Christianity" as a tribal identifier, a way of distinguishing themselves from their enemies: they are "Christians" fighting against "Muslims" — or against "liberals" if in that location are no "Muslims" available.
To an extraordinary degree, they have adopted Lenin'southward refusal to compromise, his anti-democratic superlative of some social groups over others and his hateful attacks on his "illegitimate" opponents. Police and Justice, the illiberal nationalist ruling party in Poland, has sorted its compatriots into "true Poles" and "Poles of the worst sort." Trump speaks of "real" Americans, as opposed to the "aristocracy." Stephen Miller, a Trump acolyte and speechwriter, recently used the word "cosmopolitan," an onetime Stalinist moniker for Jews (the total term was "rootless cosmopolitan"), to describe a reporter asking him tough questions. "Real" Americans are worth talking to; "cosmopolitans" need to exist eliminated from public life.
Surprisingly, given its mild and pragmatic traditions, even British politics is now saturated with Leninist language. When British judges declared, in November 2016, that the Brexit referendum had to be confirmed past Parliament — a reasonable determination in a parliamentary democracy — the Daily Mail, a xenophobic pro-Brexit newspaper, ran a cover story with judges' photographs and the phrase "Enemies of the People." Later, the same paper chosen on the prime government minister to "Crush the Saboteurs," choosing a word that was also favored by Lenin to draw legitimate political opposition.
Famously, Trump has as well used the expression "enemy of the American people" on Twitter. Though it is unlikely that the president himself understood the historical context, some of the people effectually him certainly did. Bannon, Miller and several others in Trump's immediate orbit know perfectly well that the delegitimization of political opponents as "un-American" and "elitist," and of the media every bit "fake news," is the outset step in a more ambitious direction. If some of what these extremists say is to be taken seriously, their endgame — the devastation of the existing political club, maybe including the U.Southward. Constitution — is one that the Bolsheviks would have understood. The historian Ronald Radosh has quoted Bannon'south comparison of himself to the Bolshevik leader. "Lenin," Bannon told Radosh, "wanted to destroy the land, and that'southward my goal too. I desire to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today'due south establishment." At a bourgeois gathering in Washington in 2013, Bannon as well called for a "virulently anti-institution" and "insurgent" movement that will "hammer this metropolis, both the progressive left and the institutional Republican Political party."
A view of the crowd at the U.Southward. Capitol during President Trump'south inauguration on January. 20. (Bill O'Leary /The Washington Post)
And what gives a president who did not win the popular vote the correct to do that? This, besides, is a familiar idea: the "People." It is a mystical notion, quite different from the actually existing population of America, but strikingly like to the "crowd" in whose name Trotsky spoke at the Petrograd Circus. In his nighttime, nihilistic inaugural accost, much of information technology written by Bannon and Miller, the president announced that he was "transferring power from Washington D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People" — every bit if the majuscule city had until 2017 somehow belonged to foreign occupiers. This un-American idea of the "People" bears more than a passing resemblance to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the strength that scientific Marxism once predicted would run the world. It also sounds a lot like what Le Pen means past "the Nation," as opposed to the "globalist elite," or what the Police force and Justice party in Poland hateful when they talk virtually "suweren," the sovereign nation, as opposed to the majority of Polish voters, who actually oppose them.
A nihilistic desire for disaster
Like their predecessors, the neo-Bolsheviks are likewise liars. Trump lies with pathological intensity most matters modest and large, and he lies so often and then obviously that it is not even necessary to cite his uncounted falsehoods again hither. But he is non alone. Recently Le Pen was charged in an investigation into her anti-European party for adulterous the European parliament out of coin. The Law and Justice party pretends that its attacks on the Polish constitution are null more than "judicial reform." Orban has subconscious the probably corrupt details of Russian investment in a nuclear establish in Republic of hungary. These are not coincidences. Nor is it a coincidence that the virtually successful neo-Bolsheviks have all created their own "alternative media," starting online and moving into the mainstream, specializing in disinformation, hate campaigns, racist jokes and organized trolling of opponents. (The old Bolsheviks used to phone call this propaganda, and they were brilliant at it.) Both the politicians and the "journalists" lie out of confidence, because they believe that ordinary morality does not use to them. In a rotten world, truth can be sacrificed in the name of "the People," or every bit a means of targeting "Enemies of the People." In the struggle for power, anything is permitted.
Finally, and most painfully, there is a hint, and sometimes more than a hint, of a reviving appreciation among the neo-Bolsheviks for the cleansing possibilities of violence. The vehement poetry of 1917 has morphed into the violent memes of 2017, the "Ultra Violence" threads on Reddit, the white nationalist groups seeking "race state of war," and the NRA videos urging Americans to arm themselves for the coming apocalyptic struggle to "save our country." Some of this dangerous trash has been around for a long time: far-right and far-left extremists in Europe have always savored the idea of violence. Only now some of that nihilistic desire for disaster has become mainstream, even reaching the White Firm. Every bit long ago as 2014, Trump, after railing confronting Obamacare, fantasized: "Y'all know what solves it? When the economy crashes, when the land goes to full hell and everything is a disaster. Then you'll accept a, you know, y'all'll have riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great."
Shocking though it is, that sentiment is mild past comparing with Bannon'south apocalyptic vision of a coming war — mayhap with Islam, perhaps with Cathay — that will cleanse the Western earth of weakness and restore Western greatness. This is how Bannon put information technology in 2010: "We're gonna have to take some dark days before we get to the blue sky of morn again in America. We are going to take to accept some massive pain. Anybody who thinks we don't accept to accept hurting is, I believe, fooling you." A HuffPost article included like Bannon statements. In 2011: "Confronting radical Islam, nosotros're in a 100-yr war." In 2014: "We are in an outright state of war against jihadist Islamic fascism. And this war is, I think, metastasizing far quicker than governments tin handle information technology." In 2016: "We're going to war in the South China Seas in the next five to ten years, aren't we?"
An echo of this lust for war tin can too be heard in the schizophrenic speech on "Western civilisation" that Bannon is said to have helped write for Trump in Warsaw in July. Amid some paragraphs that sounded almost like a normal foreign policy speech, someone inserted a passage describing the Warsaw uprising — a horrific and destructive boxing which, despite great courage, the Polish resistance army lost. Those heroes," Trump declared, "remind u.s. that the Westward was saved with the blood of patriots; that each generation must ascension up and play their role in its defense." Each generation? That ways our generation, too: Become your weapons set up, because these people want you and your children to bleed and die in the cause of civilizational renewal.
No excuse for complacency
Fortunately, we practise non live in 1917 Leningrad. There are no breadstuff shortages, or ragged barefoot soldiers, or aristocrats in thrall to mad monks. There volition be few opportunities to surround the authorities in a palace, enter and take it over. Our states are not, withal, that weak.
We likewise take, equally the Russians of 1917 did non take, the benefit of retrospect. In much of continental Europe, the demagogue who divides the nation into enemies and patriots creates bad connotations and triggers unpleasant memories. Over the by yr, French, Dutch and Austrian voters rejected the nihilism and xenophobia of Le Pen, Geert Wilders and Norbert Hofer, not least considering of what they resembled.
The French may fifty-fifty accept taken the first necessary step in the longer battle against faux revolutions by voting for Emmanuel Macron, the first major European politician to argue for a muscular revival of liberalism. Macron openly opposed the fear, the nostalgia and the nativism on the rise across the continent, and he won without offer impossible schemes or unattainable riches. Even if he fails in France, his formula hints at a way to fight dorsum against modern fake prophets. Offer a positive vision, both open and patriotic. Don't let the nationalists appeal to "the People" over the heads of the voters. Don't let extremists go mainstream.
Just the Anglo-Saxon world was less lucky. It may non be an accident that neo-Bolshevik language has and so far enjoyed unprecedented success in Britain and the Us, 2 countries that have never known the horror of occupation or of an undemocratic revolution that ended in dictatorship. They therefore lack the amnesty of many Europeans. On the other mitt, the Anglo-Saxon world has its own advantages: the bonds of old and long-standing constitutionalism, the habits created by decades of rule of law and relatively high standards of living. It may be that as Americans and Brits slowly learn to recognize lies, they will become less susceptible to the imitation nostalgia on offering from their leaders.
Merely at that place is no excuse for self-approbation. That is the lesson of this ominous centennial. Remember: At the beginning of 1917, on the eve of the Russian revolution, near of the men who later became known to the world equally the Bolsheviks were conspirators and fantasists on the margins of guild. By the cease of the year, they ran Russia. Fringe figures and eccentric movements cannot be counted out. If a arrangement becomes weak enough and the opposition divided enough, if the ruling order is corrupt enough and people are angry enough, extremists tin of a sudden step into the eye, where no one expects them. And subsequently that it can take decades to undo the damage. Nosotros accept been shocked too many times. Our imaginations need to expand to include the possibilities of such monsters and monstrosities. We were not fairly prepared.
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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/bolshevism-then-and-now/2017/11/06/830aecaa-bf41-11e7-959c-fe2b598d8c00_story.html
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