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Jolly Slugg
Jr. Member
Posts: 604
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« Reply #1 on: November 08, 2017, 09:03:34 AM » |
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The Bolshevik coup d'etat in Russia, known to its admirers as the Great October Revolution. ("October" because it happened on 25 October according to the Julian calendar in use in Russia at that time.) at 100. Today many people think that the Bolsheviks overthrew the Tsarist regime. They didn't - the Tsar had abdicated in February and a Provisional Government had been formed by the democratic parties, pending free elections to be held in November. It was that government which the Bolsheviks led by Lenin and Trotsky overthrew. They were able to do so because the Provisional Government had failed to extricate Russia from the World War, and the war-weary Army rank-and-file mutinied against their officers and the government. When the elections were held, the Bolsheviks were soundly defeated, but they retained power anyway, and soon imposed a ruthless dictatorship of the Bolshevik (Communist) party, which held power for the next 73 years.
The Bolshevik revolution was the greatest man-made calamity of the 20th century, although it was itself a product of the calamity of World War I. It had two fateful consequences.
First, the prestige attached to Lenin and Trotsky, as the founders of the world's first socialist regime, enabled them to impose their model of the revolutionary vanguard party - unquestioning obedience to a self-perpetuating leadership answerable only to Moscow - on the word's communist parties, which Lenin and Trotsky insisted must split off from the existing socialist parties. This produced a permanent and fatal split in the world socialist movement, with terrible short-term consequences in many countries, and contributing in the longer term to the failure of the whole socialist project.
Second, the Bolshevik expropriation of private property, the driving of 4 million, mostly middle-class, Russians into exile, and the violent suppression of the peasantry (80% of the population), with the attendant mass executions and establishment of the labour camp system, terrified the middle classes of the rest of Europe. The result was the rise of fascism, first in Italy and then across the continent. Fascism would not have existed except as a reaction against communism. Mussolini, Franco, Horthy and Hitler rode to power on the back of middle-class fear of communism. In Germany in particular, where the Communist Party (KDP) continued the threaten the "bourgeoisie" with expropriation and worse as the Depression struck, middle-class and peasant voters flocked to the NSDAP, and the labour movement was unable to resist Hitler's rise because of the fatal hostility between the SPD and the KPD.
So the Bolshevik coup not only led directly to the establishment of the Soviet police state of Lenin, Stalin and Brezhnev, with the consequent civil war, famines, purges, mass executions and deportations, resulting in tens of millions of deaths. It also led to the victory of Nazism in Germany, and thus to World War II and the Holocaust, with tens of millions more dead. Soviet support also helped the Chinese communists to come to power, with many millions more deaths.
Even 26 years after the final bankruptcy and collapse of the Communist regime in 1991, the dire consequences of the Bolshevik coup of 1917 are still with us. North Korea -which may yet drag us all into World War III - is the last true Leninist regime, but China's hybrid "market Stalinist" regime, Putin's bellicose mafia state, the post-Soviet dictatorships in Central Asia, the war in Ukraine, and even the spread of global Islamist terrorism (which initially arose as a response to the Soviet attempt to impose communism on Afghanistan): all these are part of the continuing legacy of October. How different, how much better, 20th century history might have been if the revolution had been strangled at birth!
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