Remember the Victims of Communism

May 6th, 2017

Awake Goy

Like the United States, the Soviet Union is a nation founded on a distinct ideology. In the case of America, the ideology was fundamentally Lockean liberalism; its best expressions are the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. The Ninth Amendment, in particular, breathes the spirit of the worldview of late-18th-century America. The Founders believed that there exist natural, individual rights that, taken together, constitute a moral framework for political life. Translated into law, this framework defines the social space within which men voluntarily interact; it allows for the spontaneous coordination and ongoing mutual adjustment of the various plans that the members of society form to guide and fill their lives. The Soviet Union was founded on a very different ideology, Marxism, as understood and interpreted by V. I. Lenin. Marxism, with its roots in Hegelian philosophy, was a quite conscious revolt against the individual rights doctrine of the previous century. The leaders of the Bolshevik party (which changed its name to Communist in 1918) were virtually all revolutionary intellectuals, in accordance with the strategy set forth by Lenin in his 1902 work What Is to Be Done? They were avid students of the works of Marx and Engels published in their lifetimes or shortly thereafter and known to the theoreticians of the Second International. The Bolshevik leaders viewed themselves as the executors of the Marxist program, as those whom History had called upon to realize the apocalyptic transition to Communist society foretold by the founders of their faith. The aim they inherited from Marx and Engels was nothing less than the final realization of human freedom and the end of the “prehistory” of the human race. Theirs was the Promethean dream of the rehabilitation of Man and his conquest of his rightful place as master of the world and lord of creation. In August 1917 three months before he took power this is how Lenin, in State and Revolution, characterized the skills needed to run a national economy in the “first phase” of Communism, the one he and his associates were about to embark upon:

The accounting and control necessary for this have been simplified by capitalism to the utmost, till they have become the extraordinarily simple operations of watching, recording and issuing receipts, within the reach of anybody who can read and write and knows the first four rules of arithmetic.

Nikolai Bukharin, a leading “Old Bolshevik,” in 1919 wrote, together with Evgeny Preobrazhensky, one of the most widely read Bolshevik texts. It was The ABC of Communism, a work that went through 18 Soviet editions and was translated into 20 languages. Bukharin and Preobrazhensky “were regarded as the Party’s two ablest economists.” According to them, Communist society is, in the first place, “an organized society,” based on a detailed, precisely calculated plan, which includes the “assignment” of labor to the various branches of production. As for distribution, according to these eminent Bolshevik economists, all products will be delivered to communal warehouses, and the members of society will draw them out in accordance with their self-defined needs.11 Favorable mentions of Bukharin in the Soviet press are now taken to be exciting signs of the glories of glasnost, and in his speech of November 2, 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev partially rehabilitated him.12 It should be remembered that Bukharin is the man who wrote, “We shall proceed to a standardization of the intellectuals; we shall manufacture them as in a factory”13 and who stated, in justification of Leninist tyranny:

Proletarian coercion, in all its forms, from executions to forced labor, is, paradoxical as it may sound, the method of molding communist humanity out of the human material of the capitalist period.14

The shaping of the “human material” at their disposal into something higher the manufacture of the New Soviet Man, Homo sovieticus was essential to their vision of all the millions of individuals in society acting together, with one mind and one will,15 and it was shared by all the Communist leaders. It was to this end, for instance, that Lilina, Zinoviev’s wife, spoke out for the “nationalization” of children, in order to mold them into good Communists.16 The most articulate and brilliant of the Bolsheviks put it most plainly and best. At the end of his Literature and Revolution, written in 1924, Leon Trotsky placed the famous, and justly ridiculed, last lines: Under Communism, he wrote, “The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.” This dazzling prophecy was justified in his mind, however, by what he had written in the few pages preceding. Under Communism, Man will “reconstruct society and himself in accord with his own plan.” “Traditional family life” will be transformed, the “laws of heredity and blind sexual selection” will be obviated, and Man’s purpose will be “to create a higher social biological type, or, if your please, a superman.”17 (The full quotation can be found in the article on Trotsky in this volume.) I suggest that what we have here, in the sheer willfulness of Trotsky and the other Bolsheviks, in their urge to replace God, nature, and spontaneous social order with total, conscious planning by themselves, is something that transcends politics in any ordinary sense of the term. It may well be that to understand what is at issue we must ascend to another level, and that more useful in understanding it than the works of the classical liberal economists and political theorists is the superb novel of the great Christian apologist C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength. Now, the fundamental changes in human nature that the Communist leaders undertook to make require, in the nature of the case, absolute political power in a few directing hands. During the French Revolution, Robespierre and the other Jacobin leaders set out to transform human nature in accordance with the theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This was not the only cause but it was surely one of the causes of the Reign of Terror. The Communists soon discovered what the Jacobins had learned: that such an enterprise requires that Terror be erected into a system of government.18 The Red Terror began early on. In his celebrated November 1987 speech, Gorbachev confined the Communist Reign of Terror to the Stalin years and stated:

Many thousands of people inside and outside the party were subjected to wholesale repressive measures. Such, comrades, is the bitter truth.19

But by no means is this the whole of the bitter truth. By the end of 1917, the repressive organs of the new Soviet state had been organized into the Cheka, later known by other names, including OGPU, NKVD, and KGB. The various mandates under which the Cheka operated may be illustrated by an order signed by Lenin on February 21, 1918: that men and women of the bourgeoisie be drafted into labor battalions to dig trenches under the supervision of Red Guards, with “those resisting to be shot.” Others, including “speculators” and counter-revolutionary agitators, were “to be shot on the scene of their crime.” To a Bolshevik who objected to the phrasing, Lenin replied, “Surely you do not imagine that we shall be victorious without applying the most cruel revolutionary terror?”20 The number of Cheka executions that amounted to legalized murder in the period from late 1917 to early 1922 including neither the victims of the Revolutionary Tribunals and the Red Army itself nor the insurgents killed by the Cheka has been estimated by one authority at 140,000.21 As a reference point, consider that the number of political executions under the repressive Tsarist regime from 1866 to 1917 was about 44,000, including during and after the Revolution of 190522 (except that the persons executed were accorded trials), and the comparable figure for the French Revolutionary Reign of Terror was 18,000 to 20,000.23 Clearly, with the first Marxist state something new had come into the world.

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ut the guilt of Lenin and the Old Bolsheviks and of Marx himself does not end here. Gorbachev asserted that “the Stalin personality cult was certainly not inevitable.” “Inevitable” is a large word, but if something like Stalinism had not occurred, it would have been close to a miracle. Scorning what Marx and Engels had derided as mere “bourgeois” freedom and “bourgeois” jurisprudence,25 Lenin destroyed freedom of the press, abolished all protections against the police power, and rejected any hint of division of powers and checks and balances in government. It would have saved the peoples of Russia an immense amount of suffering if Lenin and Marx and Engels before him had not quite so brusquely dismissed the work of men like Montesquieu and Jefferson, Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville. These writers had been preoccupied with the problem of how to thwart the state’s ever-present drive toward absolute power. They laid out, often in painstaking detail, the political arrangements that are required, the social forces that must be nurtured, in order to avert tyranny. But to Marx and his Bolshevik followers, this was nothing more than “bourgeois ideology,” obsolete and of no relevance to the future socialist society. Any trace of decentralization or division of power, the slightest suggestion of a countervailing force to the central authority of the “associated producers,” ran directly contrary to the vision of the unitary planning of the whole of social life.26 The toll among the peasantry was even greater under Stalin’s collectivization27 and the famine of 1933 a deliberate one this time, aimed at terrorizing and crushing the peasants, especially of the Ukraine. We shall never know the full truth of this demonic crime, but it seems likely that perhaps ten or 12,000,000 persons lost their lives as a result of these Communist policies as many or more than the total of all the dead in all the armies in the First World War.28 One is stunned. Who could have conceived that within a few years what the Communists were to do in the Ukraine would rival the appalling butcheries of World War I Verdun, the Somme, Passchendaele?

They died in hell, They called it Passchendaele.

But what word to use, then, for what the Communists made of the Ukraine?

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As glasnost proceeds and these landmarks of Soviet history are uncovered and explored to a greater or lesser degree, it is to be hoped that Gorbachev and his followers will not fail to point an accusing finger at the West for the part it played in masking these crimes. I am referring to the shameful chapter in 20th-century intellectual history involving the fellow travelers of Soviet Communism and their apologias for Stalinism. Americans, especially American college students, have been made familiar with the wrongs of McCarthyism in our own history. This is as it should be. The harassment and public humiliation of innocent private persons is iniquitous, and the U.S. government must always be held to the standards established by the Bill of Rights. But surely we should also remember and inform young Americans of the accomplices in a far different order of wrongs those progressive intellectuals who “worshiped at the temple of planning”37 and lied and evaded the truth to protect the homeland of socialism, while millions were martyred. Not only George Bernard Shaw,38 Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Harold Laski, and Jean-Paul Sartre, but, for instance, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times, Walter Duranty, who told his readers, in August 1933, at the height of the famine:

Any report of famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda. The food shortage which has affected almost the whole population in the last year and particularly in the grain-producing provinces the Ukraine, North Caucasus, the lower Volga region has, however, caused heavy loss of life.39

For his “objective” reporting from the Soviet Union, Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize.40 What would it mean to reveal the entire truth? Could the Communist leaders admit, for instance, that during World War II, “the losses inflicted by the Soviet state upon its own people rivaled any the Germans could inflict on the battlefield”? That “the Nazi concentration camps were modified versions of Soviet originals,” whose evolution the German leadership had followed with some care. That, in short, “the Soviet Union is not only the original killer state, but the model one”?44 If they did that, what might the consequences not be this time? But the fact that the victims of Soviet Communism can never be fully acknowledged in their homelands is all the more reason that, as a matter of historical justice, we in the West must endeavor to keep their memory alive.