NOT THE APPARAT BUT THE PLAN ITSELF:

When Goodness Won (Robert Conquest, Sep 22, 2005, New Republic)

We are inclined to forget that the Bolsheviks were a small section of a small, and often ill-educated, segment of Russian society. Rosa Luxemburg, from the far left, warned that the Leninist program of suppressing the freedom of ideas would lead to both brutalization and stultification. She was right. The result can be seen in a volume such as this one, in the meanness and the petty-mindedness of the ruling apparat.

After the imposition of this repressive order--largely by what we might now call Cheka death squads--came a more formalized terror state, inflicting on Russia a whole slew of human, intellectual, economic, and ecological disasters. But it is above all the effect of the dictatorship upon the Russian mind that has still not been fully understood in the West. As Anne Applebaum argued recently, it is important that we get this huge section of world history properly into the thinking of the West (and indeed of Russia). This book provides yet another extraordinary insight into the awful post-Stalinist heritage. Not only was genuine thought, as far as possible, destroyed, but something in the nature of Orwell's "newthink" was successfully put in its place.

From the late 1920s on, the country's politics and economy were run on the basis of what is now called "negative selection."

Amidst all the nattering about how Khrushchev's anti-Stalin speech was the key to ending the USSR, it's well to remember that it was, in fact, the dissidents pointing out that Lenin was just as evil that actually brought the whole edifice tumbling down.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 30, 2005 8:24 AM