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| Lenin speaking in Red Square, 1920 |
Since the beginning of the centennial of World War I, I have
been writing a series of essays about the war as the memory of events passes us
by--a hundred years later. But as we approach the centennial of the Bolshevik
Revolution, I find it nearly impossible to delimit my thoughts on this profound
event in the history of the human race as if it were only a passage of the war,
like the Somme, or American intervention, or the internment of enemy aliens.
There are so many narrations of the "event"
itself. There are so many answers to the question "why." There are so
many clashing depictions of tectonic shifts in Russia and the world at that
time, of Lenin, Trotsky, Dzerzhinsky and the rest as actors, heroes, villains,
and (to some modern day sycophants) secular saints.
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| Buzuluk in the Volga Region: Victims of the famine created by Bolshevik food confiscations, 1920-21 |
The inhuman cruelty, the killing capacity of this Marxist-Leninist
movement which styled itself occasionally as the champion of the
"people" (though much more often and much more truthfully as the
vanguard of the proletariat on the march toward a revolutionary conflagration
that would produce the new man) truly tests the bounds of human comprehension.
Even if we take into account a group of recent historians who minimize standard
historical estimates of total non-combat, democidal totals of deaths (based in
part on recently found archival materials, but in part on soft hearts still
loyal to the Great Experiment), the median calculation of Communist mortality by
historians and demographers credits the Soviet Union of Lenin and Stalin with
somewhere between eighteen and sixty-two million deaths beyond technically
military losses. If we add up the democidal killings of spin-off Communist
regimes across the globe, the totals are astronomical, with the estimates by
historians, sociologists, demographers, and other serious analysts hovering
around a hundred million human beings.
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| Comrade Lenin sweeps away the kings, capitalists, priests |
These deaths were, in the view of Communist elites from
Lenin to Stalin to Mao to Pol Pot, necessary. The grist of History's mill, so
to speak.
Still, many persist in wearing Che Guevara t-shirts and
longing for the Great Experiment. In 2011, Rasmussen pollsters found that
eleven percent of Americans thought that a Communist regime would be better
than the current "system" of politics and economics in the United
States.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/march_2011/11_say_communism_better_than_u_s_system_of_politics_and_economics
Such attitudes come in part from the lack of much serious
study of history at any level in the schools in the United States and in other
parts of the world. My own history students read Solzhenitsyn, or Yevgenia
Ginzburg, or The Blackbook of Communism and
express surprise at the enormity of Communist mass murders and persecution
they have hardly been aware of
previously. But this phenomenon is by no means recent. In my own education,
which took place, from first grade to Ph.D., during the Cold War, only one or
two teachers dealt with Soviet and Communist mass murder in any way, and that
was not until I was well into university historical studies. And of course
Hollywood, that great shaper of popular historical awareness, has assiduously
avoided all of this murder and misery. No doubt because it offers so little in
the way of human drama.
In any case, the answer is not the schools, whose
bureaucracy and whose ideological and even pedagogical limitations will
never add to the curriculum a special chapter studying the bloody history of
the Great Experiment. Rather, the solution will come through individual reading
and learning among a growing subset of educated, and especially self-educated,
persons committed to the exploration of the total state and its
origins--outside and typically after the completion of formal schooling. The
materials of this kind of guerrilla education takes the form these days of
books, online seminars, special courses on economics and society, and myriad
other forms of information that somehow escape from and flow around the
historical narratives that avoid mentioning these profound crimes which took
place in the name of the Marxist historical dialectic.
So as we come to this particular grim centennial, we do well
to pay even more attention to the influence of the even through the whole hundred years. By any measure,
World War I shaped the century after it by institutionalizing and to some
extent normalizing mass violence, by unleashing the state in its
aggressiveness, acquisitiveness, and power. But the "contributions"
of the Bolshevik Revolution hold pride of place. As yet, the legacy of the Bolshevik takeover of the Russian Empire
beginning in October/November 1917 represents the single historical fact from
the Great War--of dreadfully many possible choices--that must be viewed as having
visited the most misery and death on the human race in its time and over the
century to come.
