Thomas Jefferson wrote that education should be “chiefly historical”, on the grounds that we should learn the lessons of the past. In his day, “history” may have been partial or have been seen in a rather local perspective, but it was not falsified, and the themes of actuality were generally understood.It is, for example, true to say that in the period following World War II the political Left of Europe and America was able to maintain credibility largely because of the perception, widely held, and not only on the Left, that the Soviet Communism was somehow less physically lethal and mentally or morally damaging than Nazism. This false perception was the result of “not fully abreacted distortions and even falsifications, and their acceptance by inadequately skeptical Western intellectuals.” The falsification entered into the realm of language, with a proliferation of “fine-founding general words”, the chief among which was “Revolutionary” – especially when referring to the cycle begun in Russia in October 1917.
Although the Bolshevik Revolution has been widely perceived for what it really was – a cynical coup which, in Conquest’s words, brought into being an “atavistic ideocracy”, an “empty sectarian mindset” and a “self-admitted…amorality of action”, the myth that it somehow represented a better alternative to the capitalist order of its time has still managed to vaguely persist in sections of the West’s intelligentsia, which is still hungry for “ideas-and-ideals”. For this unfortunate situation we also have to thank two of the best-known historians of the Revolution – Eric Hobsbawm and E.H. Carr – both of whom have been called “great”, or “good” historians, and each of whom has been regarded “as, to an important degree, the voice of a powerful section of the establishment.” While Carr is the more extreme case, in many ways accepting the Bolshevik Revolution as a “proletarian” overthrow of the bourgeois order, and the basis for a “planned economy”, Hobsbawm, while no longer representing the Revolution as wholly benign, still “holds it to be the crucial and critical event of the twentieth century.” While Conquest admits that there is a good case for such an interpretation, he suggests, rather sardonically, that “it is certainly of importance that [the Revolution] should be understood, and understood correctly.”
Far from being “made by the masses”, as Hobsbawm would have it, the Revolution found it hard to draw support even from its own supposed base: Lenin had great difficulty in getting his own Central Committee to back the seizure of power, “and reports from its own agents in the city districts spoke in most cases of a lack of enthusiasm for the coming revolution – as has been clear since the publication in Moscow of these reports in 1928.” Almost all the “proletarian” circles were pressing for socialist rather than Bolshevik rule, and no “mature” proletariat anywhere succumbed to “Leninism” – “indeed, the more settled section of the Russian working class – the railwaymen, the printers – were totally opposed to the Bolsheviks.”
There was an almost total lack of support even among the Bolsheviks themselves: On November 11, 1917, with Lenin and Trotsky absent, “the Bolshevik Central Committee… unanimously voted in favor of a coalition government.” It was only by playing for time, and waiting until the end of the month, when opposition had begun to fade, that Lenin was able to consolidate his power, create a Bolshevik government by means of political terror, and implement his “regime of the bayonet and the sabre”. There was still massive opposition to his rule, and the widespread strikes and demonstration were ruthlessly put down. In 1918, Lenin was almost overthrown by Social Revolutionaries, and was only saved by the intervention of Latvian regiments (the so-called “Latvian Riflemen”), as the Russian troops remained neutral.
Conquest sees the Western conception of the “proletariat” and its supposed involvement in the October Revolution, as an echo and inheritance from an earlier time – analogous to the idolatry of the “people”, which was the underpinning of the French Revolution and its adherents. Just as in the earlier revolution, the “people” often proved to be rather thin on the ground, so in 1917-18 “the party sought the proletarians in the provinces wherever it could find them.” Conquest quotes a passage from Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago:
In the first days, people like the soldier Panfil Palykh, who without any agitation hated intellectuals, gentry and officers brutally and rabidly, like deadly poison, seemed to be rare finds to the elated left-wing intellectuals and were greatly esteemed. Their total lack of humanity seemed to be a miracle of class-consciousness and their barbarism seemed an example of proletarian firmness and revolutionary instinct. This was what Panfil was famous for. He was in the good books of the partisan chiefs and the party leaders.
Conquest notes how even to this day, in books published by reputable academic presses, one can read sentences such as: “the Bolshevik Party was a product of idealistic, egalitarian and socially progressive strands in the Russian intelligentsia and working class.” He points to the misleading CNN documentary of 1999 (Cold War), which says of Lenin that “his socialist principles were meant to ensure decent education, free health care, common ownership of the land, and fairness for all under the tough guidance of the Bolsheviks.” And Conquest opens a window on the true motivations and attitudes of Lenin himself, who in his comment on the 1891-92 famine in Russia wrote: “psychologically, this talk of feeding the starving masses is nothing but the expression of saccharine-sweet sentimentality characteristic of the intelligentsia”. When Betrand Russell met Lenin when he was in power, he reported that “his guffaw at the thought of those massacred made my blood run cold.”
See also: Dragons and Democracy
Dragons and Democracy - II
Dragons and Democracy - III
Dragons and Democracy - IV
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