October 24, 2017
WHAT ANDROPOV UNDERSTOOD BUT GORBY DIDN'T:
The Sickening Cost of Lenin's Revolution : Victor Sebestyen's engaging 'Lenin' and Anne Applebaum's meticulous 'Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine' help explain why a century later the central amorality of the unfulfilled Utopian ideal is still with us (David Mikics, October 24, 2017, Tablet)
When Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, later known as Lenin, was 21, famine hit Russia's Volga region, near the Ulyanovs' hometown of Simbirsk. Vladimir's sister raised money for the relief effort and visited the sick. But Vladimir, nearly alone among Russian radicals, scorned the effort to save lives. The future Lenin hoped that a truly enormous death toll would weaken the czarist regime--so the more starvation, the better. "He conducted systematic and outspoken propaganda against the relief committees," his comrade Trotsky said much later. Four-hundred thousand people died of starvation, typhus, and cholera.On the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power, we need to remember that Lenin was not just a proponent of mass terror, but also a man who wanted to turn moral values on their head. For him, as for his heir, Stalin, the dead were just numbers. Human life counted for nothing next to the distant, all-important goal of a Communist future. "Our morality is new," Lenin said in 1918. "To us, all is permitted. ... Blood? Let there be blood ... for only the complete and final death of th[e] old world will save us from the return of the old jackals." As it turned out, the new revolutionary jackals were worse than the old czarist ones.
Lenin pioneered the use of mass terror for political control. A post-truth leader, he invented fake news. He proclaimed dazzlingly simple solutions: Destroy legal and institutional norms, expropriate the property of the rich, and Russia would be on the path to Utopia. "The peasants must seize the estates," Lenin announced in the spring of 1917. "They must be masters now." "Break the resistance of a few dozen millionaires," he added, and workers could take over the factories. It was that simple.But these were lies. No workers were given power, and the peasants got no land. Dealing in wish-fulfillment instead of real politics, inventing enemies to cement one's power, broadcasting tailor-made facts through subservient news outlets: In all these respects Lenin's revolution is still with us a century later. Though the West is in few ways comparable to the Soviet Union under Lenin, today's populists left and right have studied his rulebook, which is why Steve Bannon has reportedly boasted of being a "Leninist."The Bolshevik coup disproves the Marxist idea that social and economic forces rule history, as Victor Sebestyen comments in his engaging, highly readable new life of Lenin (Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror). Without Lenin's shrewd tactics, his movement would have been just as feeble as the rest of Russia's political parties. The Bolsheviks never enjoyed wide support, but they had Lenin's Machiavellian individual brilliance. Lenin's tactics were masterful: Encourage schisms; castigate your opponents; make no compromises; refuse all coalitions. He held fast to the key plank that the Mensheviks foolishly rejected: He would end the war immediately upon taking power.
Gorbachev was trying to save not just the regime but the Revolution. He believed that allowing dissidents to criticize Stalin would serve his own purposes. Instead, they went after Lenin and delegitimized the Russian Revolution in its entirety.
Posted by Orrin Judd at October 24, 2017 6:21 AM