Remnant Review
On October 25, 1917, the precursor to the Communist Party
in Russia launched a 24-hour revolution against the revolutionary government of
socialist Alexander Kerensky. This became known as the October Revolution in
order to distinguish it from the revolution that had overthrown the Czar the
previous February. In the October Revolution, two people were killed while the
revolutionaries were capturing the Winter Palace, where the Provisional
Government met. By the evening of October 26, it was clear just how provisional
the government had been.
On August 21, 1991, eight leaders of the tattered
remnants of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union launched a coup against the
government of Communist Mikhail Gorbachev. They had placed him under house
arrest at his dacha 900 miles away. Boris Yeltsin was visibly in charge of the
existing government at what was known as the White House: the parliament
building. The Communists sent in troops to remove him and his supporters.
Thousands of citizens then lined up to resist the troops. The troops refused to
fire on them. That ended the Communist Party’s power. Three civilians were
killed by armored personnel carriers.
A total of five people were killed at the beginning and
the end of the Bolshevik revolution. In between, Lenin and Stalin (mainly
Stalin) executed or starved at least 15 million people, according to the 2007
edition of Robert Conquest’s 1968 book, The Great Terror. Conquest had
initially estimated 20 million. We will never know for sure, he said in 2007.
Out of the Bolshevik Revolution came the Chinese
Communist revolution under Mao. There were more: North Vietnam, North Korea,
Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, Cuba, Albania, and the Soviet satellite nations in
central and eastern Europe. The grand total of those who died under Communist
tyranny was between 85 million and 100 million, as reported by The Black
Book of Communism (1997). This may have been as high as 150 million.
Without Lenin, there would not have been Hitler. Hitler
positioned his National Socialist German Worker’s Party as the only reliable
bulwark against Bolshevism. Add another 60 million for World War II.
His real name was not Lenin. It was Vladimir Ulyanov. He
was a follower of Karl Marx in 1887. That was the year that his older brother
was executed for having been the chemist who was constructing a bomb to be used
to assassinate Czar Alexander III.
Lenin spent the rest of his career as a Marxist
revolutionary. He achieved his goal in a rural nation in which there was no
developed capitalist system. Marx had taught that it was necessary for the
Communist revolution to take place in a capitalist nation: the next stage of
the mode of production after feudalism. That did not bother Lenin or the other
Marxists who were involved in the October Revolution.
From 1897 to 1900, he spent three years in western
Siberia under “hut arrest.” Wikipedia reports: “Deemed only a minor threat to
the government, he was exiled to a peasant's hut in Shushenskoye, Minusinsky
District, where he was kept under police surveillance; he was nevertheless able
to correspond with other revolutionaries, many of whom visited him, and
permitted to go on trips to swim in the Yenisei River and to hunt duck and
snipe.” The authoritarianism of the Czarist state was a mild-mannered precursor
of the terrorist state that Lenin built.
Lenin was a voluminous writer, just as Marx had been.
Imitating Marx, he wrote his books and pamphlets on issues of interest to only
hard-core Marxist revolutionaries. He did not write for the masses. He was
involved in constant power struggles and constant debates, verbal and in print,
over the fine points of revolutionary theory and practice. The groups that he
belonged to were tiny. In this way, his career was a carbon copy of Marx’s
until October 25, 1917. Then everything changed – for him, Russia, and the
world.
THE POWER TO RENAME
Ulyanov assumed the alias Lenin in 1901.
In 1903, he was engaged in a struggle with a rival
faction inside the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. He demanded
that party members devote time and money to the movement. His opponents allowed
some members to attend meetings without making major commitments. A showdown
took place at the Second Party Congress in London. The meeting was so small
that it was held in a chapel. Lenin’s faction won. He named his faction the
Bolsheviks: majority. He named his rivals the Mensheviks: minority.
Naming things was basic to Lenin’s concept of revolution.
This is reminiscent of the story of the tower of Babel. “And they said, Go to,
let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us
make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth”
(Genesis 11:14).
He was joined by men with new names: Josef Stalin (aka
Josef Jughashvili ), Leon Trotsky (aka Lev Bronstein), Grigory Zinoviev (aka
Hirsch Apfelbaum), Lev Kamanev (aka Lev Rozenfeldt). The latter two were
executed by Stalin in the purges of 1934-36. The head of the NKVD who oversaw
their execution was Genrikh Yagoda (aka Yenokh Gershevich Iyeguda). Stalin had
him executed in 1938. He had Trotsky assassinated in Mexico in 1940.
Conclusion: an apostate Christian atheist used the Communist state to murder
apostate Jewish atheists. I appreciate the insight of Jacques Mallet du Pan,
who in 1793 described the French Revolution: "Like Saturn, the revolution
eats its children." I add this: "But not soon enough."
A side note: Stalin was a very serious seminarian. He
studied for five years. He was the best student in the school. Then he
left. It is not clear why. This was a replay of Marx's early years. Up until he
went to college, Marx was a self-conscious Christian. His senior thesis was
explicitly Christian. Then, without warning or explanation, over the summer he
became an atheist, and soon thereafter, a revolutionary. (I discussed this in
my 1968 book, Marx's
Religion of Revolution, p. xxv.)
The Russian word “stalin” means “man of steel.” It sounds
powerful. Jughashvili was 5'6", one inch taller than Lenin. He weighed 165
lbs, or so official figures reveal. He always wore a heavy coat in public that
made him look like a person with more bulk. He was not a Russian. He was
Georgian. He crafted his own image. The image was fake. He was a skinny shrimp
who got his start in politics as a bank robber.
When the Bolsheviks came into power, they renamed cities.
St. Petersburg had become Petrograd in 1914 after the war with Germany began.
This meant Peter’s City. The authorities wanted to avoid two German words,
Sankt and Burg. The Communists changed Petrograd to Leningrad in 1924, five
days after Lenin’s death. They changed the name of Tsaritsyn to Stalingrad in
1925.
In 1961, Stalin's former toady Nikita Khrushchev
instructed his toadies, who ran the USSR, to change Stalingrad to Volgograd. He
wanted to show his independence. From 1953, the year Stalin died, until his
removal in 1964, Khrushchev was the General Secretary of the Communist Party.
He had been Stalin’s enforcer in Ukraine in 1946–47 during the famine. At least
300,000 died. It may have been five times this. In 1956, Khrushchev delivered a
four-hour speech on the cult of personality of Stalin. It was a blistering
attack. He vilified the memory of his boss, who had told him what to do for
years. Renaming Stalingrad was the culmination of his rebellion. He understood
what the Bolsheviks had always understood: the power of renaming.
Throughout the entire history of the USSR, the government
changed the names of cities and towns. On the morning of December 25, 1991,
Gorbachev announced on television the end of the USSR. The four-day-old
Commonwealth of Independent States had replaced it, he said. He resigned as
President. The Soviet flag was lowered for the last time that evening. For the
next few years, the government changed the names of hundreds of Soviet cities and towns back to
their pre-1917 names. The importance of this was missed by old-line American
anti-Communists, some of whom insisted that the public suicide of the USSR was
fake: a Communist-orchestrated deception. Those name changes persuaded me that
the anti-Revolution revolution was real.
OBSCURE MEN UNTIL 1917
Today, we are told that Marx re-shaped the world. Prior
to December 25, 1991, Marx was taken seriously by Western intellectuals.
University instructors assigned the Communist Manifesto, as if it had
shaped the thinking of millions of people. But its influence among the masses came
only after the Bolsheviks began assigning it to Russian school children. Almost
no one, then or now, who has not been forced to read it by a teacher has ever
read it, cover to cover. Anyone who has had to read it knows why. It is
excruciatingly boring.
In was published in late February 1848. It was anonymous.
It was written in German. A tiny group of German socialists, the Communist
League (formerly the League of the Just), in mid-December 1847 asked Marx to
write a pamphlet that might trigger the looming revolution, which
revolutionaries across Europe expected would come in early 1848. Marx agreed,
but then dithered. He got sidetracked by giving lectures. In late January, the
League issued an ultimatum: submit the manuscript by February 1. He did, but it
was too late. The revolutions had begun across Europe before it got printed.
Incredibly, it began in Bavaria on February 9, with a public protest by conservative Catholics against the
King's mistress, who was a liberal. Liberal students then went into
the streets. Then other revolts began. No one paid any attention to Marx's book until the 1870's.
It was not used to guide any revolutions.
Marx never described what the final Communist society
would look like. In a large manuscript of a book unpublished in his lifetime, The
German Ideology (1845), he wrote this unspecific forecast. It was on the
division of labor in society.
For as soon as the distribution of labour
comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity,
which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a
fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not
want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody
has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any
branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it
possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the
morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after
dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman,
herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of
what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our
control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is
one of the chief factors in historical development up till now.
This was the only thing he wrote about final-stage
Communism. The now-famous ten planks of the Communist Manifesto
applied to the earlier phase of communism: the transition period after the
proletarian revolution but before the final stage.
Marx was known in London only by obscure revolutionaries
and the police. He spent his days in the British Museum. He wrote long articles
and books attacking rival socialists. He never wrote refutations of Adam Smith,
David Ricardo, J. B. Say, John Stuart Mill, William Stanley Jevons, or Carl
Menger. He barely or never mentioned any of them. He did not interact with the
major thinkers of his era. He wrote in obscurity for obscure immigrants in
London. A dozen people attended his funeral in 1883.
As for Trotsky, this story appears in British historian
A. J. P. Taylor’s book, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe (1980). In
1915, Austrian Leftist political leader Victor Adler objected to a statement by
Count Berchtold, foreign minister of Austria-Hungary, that war would provoke
revolution in Russia. Adler replied: "And who will lead this revolution?
Perhaps Mr. Bronstein sitting over there at the Cafe Central?" Ludwig von
Mises repeated a variant of this story in Notes and Recollections
(1940).
The February Russian revolution caught the Czar by
surprise. Kerensky’s July coup caught Prince Lvov by surprise. Lenin’s
revolution caught Kerensky by surprise.
Then Lenin was caught by surprise: the complexity of
planning the entire economy from Moscow. There was no socialist blueprint.
There still isn’t. Mises in 1920 explained why. There are no consumer-driven
prices in socialism. There are no capital markets. Central planners are flying
blind. They do not know what to order producers to produce. They do not know
how to balance quality and quantity in production. They do not know how to
price producers’ output. Socialist economic planning is irrational. The
Soviet Union never solved these problems. It went bankrupt in 1991. Beginning
on August 21, Yeltsin hammered a "going out of business" sign on the
USSR. Gorbachev closed the corporate doors for the last time on Christmas day
in the West. That was the merriest Christmas since the first one.
BUREAUCRACY
The two most successful Communist revolutions took place
in the two largest nations on earth: Russia and China. Both of these nations
had long been governed by bureaucrats. They were top-down societies. A tiny
elite in the respective capital cities ran the countries. Neither of these
societies had a tradition of political participation by the middle class,
meaning Marx's bourgeoisie.
Lenin took control of the Czar's massive bureaucracy. He
did not purge most of them initially. Instead, he gave them orders. They
dutifully followed orders. Here was a nation that covered 11 time zones, and it
was controlled by Moscow. This was in a society with only telegraphy to connect
the administrative units on short notice. The USSR had to be administered by an
army of bureaucrats. Lenin controlled this army.
A revolution in China organized by Sun Yat-sen in 1911
replaced the Emperor. The Emperor had overseen the oldest bureaucracy on the face
of the earth. The disruptions that followed his departure led to political and
military vacuums across the country. Sun Yat-sen’s wife was the sister of the
wife of Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang was one of the contenders for political power.
He was defeated by the Communists in 1949. China was used to bureaucratic
administration, so Mao inherited a comprehensive system of control. The Chinese
people were familiar with top-down rule. The political transition was smooth.
All it took was systematic, government-operated terrorism, just as it had in
Russia. These Communist revolutions, which were supposed to take place in
highly developed urban societies in Western Europe, took place in a semi-feudal
agricultural society in Russia, and in the most heavily populated rural society
on earth, China.
The Communists took over the existing bureaucracies, and
they imposed a centrally planned economy. This led to the militarization of
both societies. Both societies remained poor. (Journalist Richard Grenier in
the mid-1980's described the USSR as Bangladesh with missiles.) Both had
enormous military bureaucracies. Centralization is basic to military
operations. What they did not have was output of consumer goods.
In 1951, Mises wrote an Epilogue to his 1922 book, Socialism. He described the Soviet
experiment as non-Marxist.
They resorted to a new modification of
Marxism according to which it was possible for a nation to skip one of the
stages of historical evolution. They shut their eyes to the fact that this new
doctrine was not a modification of Marxism, but rather the denial of the last
remnant which was left of it. It was an undisguised return to the pre-Marxian
and anti-Marxian socialist teachings according to which men are free to adopt
socialism at any time if they consider it as a system more beneficial to the
commonweal than capitalism. It utterly exploded all the mysticism inwrought
into dialectical materialism and in the alleged Marxian discovery of the
inexorable laws of mankind’s economic evolution.
Having emancipated themselves from Marxian determinism,
the Russian Marxians were free to discuss the most appropriate tactics for the
realization of socialism in their country. They were no longer bothered with
economic problems. They had no longer to investigate whether or not the time
had come. They had only one task to accomplish, the seizure of the reins of
government. (Yale University Press, pp. 546-47).
They seized the reins of government. They became mass
murderers. They set the pattern for other Communist mass murderers in rural
Asian societies.
And then, on Christmas day, 1991, it all came tumbling
down. The Soviet Union went out of existence in a way that Marx did not
foresee, but what T. S. Eliot described so memorably: “Not with a bang but a
whimper.” (Concluding line of The Hollow Men)
CONCLUSION
The world has now seen first-hand the results of central
economic planning and one-party political rule. The promised Communist New Man
did not appear. It was the same old man, but without any significant
institutional restraints.
It will be far more difficult in the future for
revolutionary socialists to persuade intellectuals that a replay of these experiments
will turn out differently. Their class died at Stalin’s hands and Mao’s hands.
They were purged – liquidated, as Stalin described it.
The masses never did favor these experiments. The
experiments were imposed on them by intellectuals who were mass murderers. The
masses do not favor the destruction of capitalism. They just want a larger
share of the pie. They will not favor "new, improved" Communism next
time. It is highly unlikely that there will ever be a next time. The
decentralization of technology and communication will prevent it. Lenin and
Stalin did not have to deal with smartphones and Facebook, let alone Amazon.