100 years since the October Revolution

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The Great October Socialist Revolution marked a new era for humanity
Speech by José Ramón Machado Ventura, second secretary of the Party Central Committee and a vice president of the Councils of State and Ministers, in the political-cultural act to mark the centennial of the Great October Socialist Revolution, held at Havana’s Karl Marx Theater, November 7, 2017

Author: José Ramón Machado Ventura | informacion@granma.cu
november 9, 2017 14:11:42


“The principles of equality, solidarity, internationalism, social justice, the peoples’ right to self-determination, independence and sovereignty, which were the basis of the October Revolution, will also continue to be ours,” stated José Ramón Machado Ventura, second secretary of the Party Central Committee and a vice president of the Councils of State and Ministers. Photo: Juvenal Balán
Compañero Army General Raúl Castro Ruz, First Secretary of the PCC Central Committee

Compañeras and compañeros:


We are gathered to commemorate one of the most significant events of the twentieth century: the Great October Socialist Revolution, with which a new era for humanity commenced.

Today, in some media there is a tendency to diminish the importance of the Revolution that led to the founding of the world’s first socialist state and opened a path of hope, giving way to a new social regime that would show that a world free of exploiters and the exploited was possible. Attempts are made to diminish and even disregard the role played by its eminent leader, Vladimir Ilich Lenin.

Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro Ruz, on referring to Lenin stated: “He was a brilliant revolutionary strategist who did not hesitate to assume Marx’s ideas and implement them in a vast and only partially industrialized country... Lenin was a truly exceptional man, capable of interpreting all the depth, essence and value of Marxist theory,” end of quote.

He had the merit of taking advantage of a moment of crisis of imperialism, provoked by its own war, and the growth of the labor movement in Czarist Russia, to carry out the socialist Revolution. He was the man who was met with incomprehension in his own surroundings, but at the same time he had, like no other at that time, the greatest understanding of the humble, of the workers aware that the seizure of political power was the only way to lead them to their emancipation.

It was precisely Lenin’s brilliant leadership that gave rise to that great Revolution, with which important changes ensued for the oppressed of this world.

One hundred years later, it is impossible to deny the immense contribution and legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution, which gave way to other great social revolutions of the 20th century, which emerged a few years after the victory against fascism, like that of China, the Vietnamese and the Cuban.

The events that followed October, the implementation of Marxist theory in the specific conditions of the time, demonstrated the relevance of the global social revolution, for which, in the words of Lenin, the Russian (Revolution) was just the prologue or a step.

The process of decolonization would not have been possible without the enormous influence of the October Revolution, in that it decisively contributed to the right of the peoples to self-determination and independence becoming a reality in many countries of the world.

An undeniable contribution of this great feat was the beginning of the process of political-economic structuring of a new system: socialism.

The Revolution favored the drastic change in the correlation of world forces, demonstrated that the elimination of exploitation was possible, that there were other forms of government and democracy, and that alternatives existed beyond the formulas offered by capitalism, generating wars and divisions, overwhelming peoples and nations.

In the field of international relations, it inaugurated a new way of doing and acting. In the Decree on Peace and in the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia, expressed were the principles that should govern the relations between states and peoples, which are still fully valid today.

The USSR achieved, in a historically very short period, technological and industrial development. It eradicated illiteracy, generalized schooling, reached a high scientific level, ensured employment and social protection, eliminated discrimination against women and proclaimed their rights, as well as those of children and young people.

These achievements were obtained in the midst of military, economic and political aggression. The nascent socialist state made the postulates of its Revolution a reality through blood and fire, and began to build itself in a country totally ruined, bled dry and blockaded, which required no less hard and heroic efforts.

There were many contributions and efforts from the peoples that made up the USSR, but none more significant than the defeat of fascism, which deserves eternal gratitude.

The influence of the October Revolution and the battle for multifaceted development being waged in what was the most backward imperial country of its time, also reached Latin America, where the ideas of the Revolution were disseminated and communist parties began to emerge, including that of Cuba, in the midst of the conditions of first an invaded, and later a neocolonial republic.

In this and other Cuban revolutionary groups that confronted imperialist domination and its complicit governments of the day, present were, along with the ideas of Martí, the ideas of the October Revolution, the ideas of Marxism-Leninism.

In 1970, on the occasion of commemorating the centenary of Lenin’s birth, the historic leader of the Cuban Revolution stated: I quote “Without the October Revolution of 1917, Cuba could not have been constituted as the first socialist country in Latin America.” Later, in 1972, in a profound reflection on the roots of our socialist Revolution, he specified: “the revolutionary process of Cuba is the confirmation of the extraordinary strength of the ideas of Marx, Engels and Lenin,” end of quote.

During these 100 years, but mainly since the disappearance of the socialist system in Europe, much has been written and debated, from very different ideological positions, about this Revolution. Regrettably, extreme positions converge to point out that its ideas failed, with a marked distortion of the causes and consequences, with the intention of imposing a single mindset destined to highlight the supremacy of capitalism against socialism.

The October Revolution initiated an extraordinarily complex process, with achievements and mistakes, but to judge it we must take into account, first of all, the historic conditions in which it was developed, the international context and the contradictions generated by any revolutionary process. It was also the first great attempt to transform the world, to turn utopia into reality.

Imperialism today seeks new alliances and attempts by all possible means to stifle and destroy any attempt at social change.

In this historical context we can affirm that the ideas that inspired it and socialism as a system maintain full force. The principles of equality, solidarity, internationalism, social justice, the peoples’ right to self-determination, independence and sovereignty, which were the basis of the October Revolution, will also continue to be ours.

Long live the Great October Socialist Revolution!

Thank you.

http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2017-11-09/the ... r-humanity

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Massive Meeting in Rome dedicated to the October Revolution


The Communist Party and Front of Communist Youth organized a massive meeting and march on Colosseum Square of Rome.

The Communist Party and Front of Communist Youth organized a massive meeting and march on Colosseum Square of Rome. Dedicated to the centenary of the October Revolution, the event promoted communism as the only real alternative against capitalist barbarity. With the participation of thousands of people, city of Rome was decorated with red flags.

Around 5 thousand workers and students got together on Colosseum Square of Rome with their red flags for honouring the centenary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, in respect to the call from the Communist Party (PC) and Front of Communist Youth (FGC) against the anti-popular policies of the EU, NATO and the Italian government. Before the event, thousands of people marhced on the streets of Rome with their chants and slogans.

Last week, the PC and FGC were exposed to political attacks of the main stream media and the physical attack of fascist groups during their propaganda works for this event. However, they stood still against any reactionary tentative and declared, "If they are afraid of communism on the centenary of 1917, it is because communism is still the only alternative against the system of exploitation. High ratios of unemployment, decreasing wages, worsening living conditions for millions... Capitalism is not able to solve these questions. We will get together on Colosseum Square against anti-popular policies of the government and for the disengagement of our country from the EU and NATO."

http://icp.sol.org.tr/europe/massive-me ... revolution

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Tuesday, November 21, 2017
Interview with Ástor García (PCPE): "The antidote for nationalism is class identity"

SoL news portal interviewed Astor Garcia, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the People of Spain (PCPE), who was in Izmir, Turkey for the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution event by the Communist Party of Turkey (TKP). You can see the video of the interview in the end of the transcript.

soL: Wellcome to Izmir. How were the activities on the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution in your country and what were its repercussions?
Astor Garcia: We organized a number of activities in several cities in Spain on commemorating the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution. It started with the activity in Madrid on October 7 which aroused great interest among Party members, the Communist Youth Collective (CJC) and our sympathizers. The other activities are taking place in the regional capitals.
We published a special issue of Nuevo Rumbo which is a publication of our Party. Prepared in September by the Party's Central Committee, this issue discussed claiming of the achivements of the October Revolution, analyzing the Revolution and taking the struggle of the Bolsheviks for socialist construction as an example for today.
soL: How do you express the timeliness of socialism?
AG: Basically we refer to the social achivements provided by the socialist countries whose absence is felt by the workers in capitalist countries. We also explain the timeliness of socialism by indicating that the former socialist block had been the guarantee of the achivements realized in capitalist countries.
The loss of social rights, worker's rights and gains following the dissolution of the socialist block as a result of the counter-revolutionary attack confirms this proposition. The working class once again faces the severe consequences of capitalism.
soL: How does your Party analyze the issue of Catalonia? How do you observe the future of this issue?
AG: One cannot deny the complexity of the situation in Catalonia. It is a serious crisis in the development of the state with historical, political and economical roots. It would take too long to explain it here but we could summarize today's situation. The small and middle bourgeois sections in Catalonia, faced with the consequences of the economic crisis and especially the contradictions of Spanish capitalism owing to the escalation of capitalist crisis, saw an opportunity to manipulate the national feelings and identity of the Catalan people and ventured to use it to start a bargain in reinforcing their own economical and political status within capitalist Spain.
During the last 40 years this situtation has persisted. Yet until now, it had been an issue which would end up in a compromise based on unity and struggle. In fact, there are many instances in history when the Catalan nationalist bourgeois forces have supported the Spanish government.
Today, the two forces challenge each other, the Catalan forces of independance led by the Catalan petty bourgeoisie and the Spanish government implementing the plans and programmes of the Spanish big bourgeoisie.
The current plan and program implies the dissolution of certain legal and economic features of the regions and the lifting of barriers amounting to a national centralization. The working class and the popular classes find themselves dragged into this challenge where the two sections of the bourgeoisie try to prevail against each other in the sharing of surplus value and exploitation.
We, as the Communist Party, point out that Catalan nationalism and Spanish nationalism mean to regulate capitalism in different ways rather than demolish capitalism itself. In view of this fact and analysis, we have openly called the working class and popular classes of our country and of Catalonia to create our own alternative.
We explained the necessity to seek the independance of the working class in order to construct a country for the working class. These are the main guidelines of our political activities. We oppose nationalism that poses a serious threat and has inflicted great pain to the people of Spain in history. We stand against the escalation of both Spanish and other nationalist movements with these argument.
soL: How do you see the European Union (EU)? What is your line of struggle against the EU?
AG: The EU is a bourgeois union whose main aim is improve its position in the rivalry among imperialists. It is a union of imperialist states and it promises nothing in favor of the European people and for the people around the world, as it can be clearly seen in Libya, Syria, Iraq.
From the very begging, before the European Economic Community (EEU) had turned into the EU and even before that, since Spain joined the EEC in 1986, we have firmly opposed to be a part of this union.
Today, as the EU glosses over the policies of the Spanish government against the working class and its anti-popular policies that aim to intensify exploitation, since it serves as a guise for these policies, our position is reinforced.
We observe that EU is in a crisis. Beyond doubt the alternative in favor of European peoples is for each member to leave this union of imperialist states and this is clearly what we need to fight for. We are seriously challenging and struggling against the political position which seems to be critical towards the EU and the euro but proposes reforms, the position which claims that EU may be turned into an instrument in favor of the people but is incapable of understanding the fact expressed by Lenin that a union of capitalist states in Europe would only be reactionary.
Besides giving false hopes to popular masses the EU institutions are also used in distorting history and spreading anti-communism. In this respect we insist on immediately leaving the EU by constructing a socialist economy in our country in favor of the working class and the popular masses.


soL: Could you tell us about your policies on the immigrant problem and on the issue of unemployment?
AG: In our daily political activities we always try to connect strategic issues to tactical issues. Capitalist forces, the capitalist media and the capitalist government, at times when unemployment dramatically increases, especially as it's happening at this moment in Spain as a result of the crisis, hold out that having a job and creating employment is important.
However, our perspective is stable, we don't attribute an abstract meaning to employment. Very basically, when talking about reclaiming work, we don't say that people should have a job, shouldn't be unemployed, but we refer to employment in conditions denied by capitalism, enabling workers and popular masses to have rights, to realize a project of life providing self-sufficiency in a way that will enable them to achieve their expectations from life.
On the other hand it should be pointed out that even though unemployment figures in Spain are phasing out, this is achieved by ruining working conditions. Just as defending the October and the Bolshevik Revolution signifies, we say that it was possible and it is still possible for a worker to have a profession and a job and take part in organizing social tasks while welfare conditions are enhanced rather than worsened. We put the socialist model against capitalist development; the model where workers are free from the pains they suffer under capitalism.
Our political activity on the immigration issue is based on one idea; we explain that most of the immigration that we see in Europe today is caused by the interventions of the European imperialist forces towards other countries.
If the European imperialist forces had not intervened and plundered African and Asian countries and had not manipulated their governments, the phenomena of immigration would be far from its present form which has been shaped in recent years.
In all circumstances our claim as communists is clear, we believe that the working class is a single class internationally. We regard the working class struggle, as communists, as equal whatever the workers' homeland or origin.
Even though it has hardships, another one of our tasks is to struggle against the idea that foreign workers have come to our country to worsen the living conditions of the Spanish working class. Our main acitivity on this issue is to struggle against racism and xenophobia while unifying the working class, I emphasize, with all its sections whatever their origin, in the struggle against capitalism and the capitalist class.
soL: What is the main slogan of your youth activities?
AG: Since September the CJC is carrying out a campaign named 'The Youth is Organizing the Attack'. In this sense, our intention is to show the working class youth that it is not only the time to resist against capitalist government's attacks but also it is the time to organize and struggle for new gains. This is true for gaining new rights both in education and in work.
For instance, in recent years many rights and gains have been abolished under cover of the crisis. The CJC conducted an intense activity within the student movement and made an important organisational achivement. In fact, they not only organize 'The Youth is Organizing the Attack' campaign but meanwhile they play a complementary role in the Party's campaign carried out with the slogan 'A Country for the Working Class'.
soL: How do you analyse the parties such as Podemos and what is your stance regarding them?
AG: We analysed the establishment and development of the phemonenon of Podemos and explained it again and again at great length. Podemos could be identified in general as the Spanish version of new social democracy.
It was an organisation founded by capitalizing on the protests known as 'the movement of the furious' in Spain in 2011. It gained ground among the discontentedness which had arisen not with a working class character but rather as the reaction of the petty bourgeoisie and middle strata against the proletarianization they were facing.
Podemos realized itself as an agent institutionalizing this discontentedness in the perpetuation of capitalism. When conditions necessitate, they are ready to replace and fulfill the mission of PSOE, the ex-social democrats existing since the 70's. The PSOE is now in deep crisis and is facing an uncertain future precisely because of its dilemma of addressing the working class with an abstact discourse while practically perpetuating the system of exploitation in recent years.
No matter how much Podemos uses new tools and adopts a more young and fresh style and no matter how much they use a discourse closer to the previous social democrats, their parliamentary activities and their policies indicate that, just like their role in maintaining the continuity of PSOE in certain localities, despite their first impression of bringing about change they are in the last instance sustaining the capitalist system in Spain.
To be precise, let me give a classical example; we may say that Podemos is exactly the SYRIZA of Spain. Just as SYRIZA chose the financial forces when it had to decide between the popular masses and the financial forces, Podemos would also make such a choise since it has the very same character.
Via International Communist Press.
Αναρτήθηκε από In Defense of Communism

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Dimitris Koutsoumbas: "Socialism in the 20th century proved its superiority in comparison with capitalism"

The Secretary General of the CC of the Communist Party of Greece, Dimitris Koutsoumbas, delivered the central speech during the KKE's political and cultural event for the 100 years since the Great October Socialist Revolution that took place on Sunday 26th November in Athens / Source: inter.kke.gr.



In his speech, the SG of the CC of KKE noted that “The October Revolution is neither an accident of history, nor a Bolshevik coup d’etat, as the capitalists declare and write, nor immature and early, as all kinds of apostates and oportunists-adventurists declare and write” and added that “The October Revolution has been the climactic world-historic event of the 20th century that sounded the start of the era when the working class would become the protagonist of the developments and would push forward the wheel of history, taking over the power and organizing the new socialist-communist relations of production, reforming the whole society. (…) The October Revolution gave impulse to the international revolutionary movement and filled with optimism the struggle of the peoples around the world, accelerated the process for the founding of a series of communist parties. Our Party, is a product of the revolutionary flame of October. In a few days we will welcome year 2018, year of climax for the celebration of the 100 years of the honored and heroic Communist Party of Greece.”

D. Koutsoumbas underlined that “The Bolsheviks won because they worked with patience, with audacity, primarily because they worked with a plan of political, organizational and military preparation for the revolt in conditions of revolutionary situation” and added: “We hold up high the flag of revolutionary struggle. In our 20th Congress we placed the marker even higher, we put the urgent duty of consolidating the KKE. A strong KKE so that our party becomes able, as a party of social overthrow, to succeed in his historical vanguard role, utilizing and deepening the contradictions and antitheses of the capitalist system with the class struggle. A Party able to lead the struggle of the working class and of the whole people, for the regroupment of the trade-union movement, for the forward push of the social alliance in an antimonopoly – anticapitalist direction, against imperialist war, for the working class power.”

The SG of the CC of KKE underlined that “The working class has proved that it can, it has the ability and possibility, as the only truly revolutionary class, to bring about its historical mission, to lead the cosmogonia of the building of socialism-communism. Our eyes, our mind and our way of thinking, are not blurred by the counter-revolution and the overthrows that took place. That is why, today, our priority is the regroupment of the working class movement from the situation of recession that is in today, that today more and more workers realize who is the real enemy and where their struggle should be directed to. (...) No struggle gains class orientation, stability and endurance, when the worker adopts the aims of the capital, of the national and international bourgeoisie for “bigger competitiveness” as his own. (...)

In order for the working class to assert the power, it must form its own social alliance with the poor peasants, the oppressed strata of the city. With the struggle of the Bolsheviks, it became possible, that the poor peasantry ally with the revolutionary vanguard of the working class. That alliance came up victorious, the alliance of all the oppressed with which the soldiers sided, the sons of the people that where serving in the war.

This experience confirms that the hope, the alternative are not to be found in the summit agreements but in the alliance of all the oppressed, in the movement, where all can meet together and walk towards the road of clash in order to really ascend to power.

The experience of October has confirmed that the working class due to its place in capitalist production is objectively the only revolutionary class, the builder of the socialist-communist society and consequently the leading force in relation to the rest of the popular forces.

Only the working class movement can assume complete revolutionary characteristics, can transform in a revolutionary movement.

Our proposal of the social alliance corresponds to the effort that the popular strata, through the struggle, as potential allies of the working class, and their respective movements, to be pulled more or less actively in the revolutionary struggle, or to become neutralized.

The Social Alliance that the KKE is proposing, in anticapitalist-antimonopoly direction, has to do with social forces, namely, the working class, the salaried employees of the public sector, the self-employed professionals, small craftsmen, small tradesmen, scientists, self-employed farmers.”



D.Koutsoumbas in his speech made reference to the imperialist interventions and wars that are breaking out today and maintained that: “October practically confirmed that the struggle for the exit of the imperialist war is inextricably connected with the struggle for worker’s power, and this strategy of the Bolsheviks was confirmed 100 years ago. That is the experience that we want to discuss, particularly today that the contradictions, the antagonisms, among powerful forces of the international capitalist establishment passes through our region: the Balkans, the Aegean Sea, the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. In the focus of the antagonism there are the routes of transport of energy and commodities between monopoly groups of powerful imperialist states, regarding which will prevail in the share that is already developing in our country. We have already told that the Greek bourgeois class, through the SYRIZA-ANEL government, is claiming share, selling the new dangerous “great idea”, of the so-called “geostrategical upgrading of the country” in the context of NATO. We warn: It is only an upgrade of the geostrategical implication of the Greek ruling class in wars and interventions in the area, in missions of Greek troops out of the national borders, in upgrading the US death-dealing bases, including the ones that host nuclear weapons. And this is what the SYRIZA-ANEL government sold during the recent visit of Tsipras in the USA, apart from praises for Trump.”

The SG of the CC called “our people to not take position “under foreign banners”, to not shed its blood for foreign interests.” and added: “In the case of a more direct participation of Greece in an imperialist war, the working class should chart its own struggle along with the popular strata and their movement, in order to defend the territorial integrity of the country and in order for the people to win against the bourgeois power of exploitation and of wars or of the so-called peace with the peoples’ at gun-point.”



D. Koutsoumbas highlighted the achievements of socialism and made extensive reference to them undelining that “Socialism in the 20th century proved its superiority in comparison with capitalism, the immense advantages that provides for the work and the life of the workers. The Soviet Union and the international socialist system comprised the only true counter-weight to imperialist aggression.” Talking about the advantages of socialism he noted that “All the economic tools come under the service of the people. The mineral wealth, the infrastructure and machinery of industry, energy, telecommunications, transports, commerce, land, industrialized agricultural and livestock production become social property. The natural wealth producing resources become social property, the commerce becomes state-owned. With these tools the new power can plan centrally its economy, galvanize the development of the sectors of economy, of the peripheries. That is exactly why it can absorb all the unemployed, can guarantee the right to work. To abolish economic activity in health-care and prevention, to develop an exclusively free and public system of health-care-prevention, to develop people’s culture and sports. In can develop agricultural production next to the socialized sector of economy, organizing firstly a transitional form of productive cooperatives, provide the people with enough healthy food products and provide industry with raw materials. It can shape the conditions to expunge the causes of women's inequality and support the relations between the two genders with complete infrastructures, their willingness to form a family, without any economic motive, protecting motherhood, the children, the elderly. The workers’ power, disentangling our country form the shackles of EU and NATO, will intend to develop interstate relations with mutual benefit, among Greece and other countries, particularly with countries that their level of development, the nature of their problems and of their immediate interests can guarantee such a beneficial cooperation. The working class of Greece is not alone. It has and will have the workers of the whole world at its side. Our slogan is “Proletarians of all countries, Unite!”

The SG of the CC of the KKE, expressing the steadfast conviction of the Communists of Greece noted that “The era of socialist revolutions is ahead of us. The dashing entry of the working class and popular forces in the revolutionary struggle will sweep away sooner or later capitalist barbarism, imperialism aggressiveness. October illuminates the struggle of the peoples, socialism is a necessity of our times”.

https://communismgr.blogspot.com/2017/1 ... -20th.html

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“Eradicating the Bacillus”
by worker
- by Greg Godels is available at:
http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/

“Eradicating the Bacillus”

Thursday, November 30, 2017
“Eradicating the Bacillus”
In the US, the last few months have seen a host of celebratory salutes to, tributes to, and commentaries on the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Serious research and thought were reflected in many, reminding us of both the sacrifices and achievements made by the workers of many nationalities who established the first sustained workers’ state, the USSR. Authors and speakers touched on many aspects of the Revolution and its rich legacy of fighting for socialism and ending imperialism.
Needless to say, little (or none?) of the victories of twentieth century socialism spawned by the Russian Revolution found its way into the monopoly media; the fete for the Bolshevik Revolution was held on alternative websites, by small circulation journals, and in small meeting halls and venues. This would neither surprise nor disappoint Vladimir Lenin; rather, it would conjure memories of the difficult and stubborn work of the small, often disputatious Russian Social Democratic Party in the years leading up to the revolutions of 1905 and 1917.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that the mainstream capitalist media had no commentary on the Russian Revolution. They did.
And it was relentlessly and uniformly negative. No warm words of any kind were spared for Russian workers of 1917 and their cause. In fact, in a year when the media and its wealthy and powerful collaborators decided to resurrect the spectre of Soviet Russia in a new, hysterical anti-Russia campaign, moguls mounted a lurid, anti-Communist campaign unseen since the Cold War.
The New York Times unleashed their rabid neo-McCarthyite commentator (Communism Through Rose-Colored Glasses), Bret Stephens, to spew his venom and unsparingly and gratuitously denounce anyone that he could even remotely connect with the Revolution, from those wearing “Lenin or Mao T-shirts” to Lillian Hellman. Progressives, Jeremy Corbyn, and, predictably, Bernie Sanders are condemned, part of the “bacillus” yet to be “eradicated,” to reference his clumsy, vulgar paraphrase of Winston Churchill. They, like any of us who find any merit at all in the Soviet experience, are “fools, fanatics, or cynics.”
Then there was the nutty Masha Gessen-- the favorite of NPR’s resident bootlicker to wealthy patrons, Scott Simon-- who analyzes the Soviet experience in a strange brew of mysticism and psycho-babble. Even The Wall Street Journal reviewer of her new book (The Future is History) concedes that she “puts forth a[n]... argument full of psychospeak about ‘energies’ and an entire society succumbing to depression.” He goes on: “She begins with the dubious assertion that one of Soviet society’s decisive troubles derived from the state prohibition against sociology and psychoanalysis, which meant the society ‘had been forbidden to know itself.’”
“Dubious” assertion? Or whacky assertion?
But Gessen will always be remembered for embracing the term “Homo Sovieticus,” a term that will undoubtedly prove attractive to those mindlessly active in the twitter universe.
For reviewing Gessen’s book, reviewer Stephen Kotkin had the favor returned with a glowing review in The Wall Street Journal of his book, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler 1929-1941. Joshua Rubenstein-- himself the author of another catalogue of Stalin’s evil, The Last Days of Stalin-- engages the usual verbal histrionics: “despotism,” “violent and catastrophic,” “ruthlessness and paranoia,” “draconian,” “remarkable cruelty,” “calamitous,” “crimes,” “ideological fanaticism.” These, and other shrill descriptions, pile up in a mere ten paragraphs. Rubenstein clearly reveals his anti-Soviet bias when he describes Soviet aid and assistance to the elected Spanish anti-fascist government in 1936 as an “intervention.” The interveners were the Italian and German fascists; the Soviets were, unlike the Western “democracies,” the only opponents of intervention.
Kotkin’s service to the WSJ and the anti-Soviet cause were rewarded with a long op-ed piece in the Journal in the weekend Review section (November 4-5, 2017). The Princeton and Stanford professor tackled the topic, The Communist Century, with great vigor. He sets the tone with the dramatic claim that ...communism has claimed at least 65 million lives, according to the painstaking research of demographers.”
The victims-of-Communism numbers game was elaborated and popularized by Robert Conquest, a writer whose career overlapped on numerous occasions with the Cold War propaganda efforts of the UK Information Research Department, the US CIA, and the CIA’s publishing fronts. Conquest owned the estimate of 20 million deaths from the Soviet purges of the late 1930s. At the height of the Cold War, this astounding figure met no resistance from “scholars” at elite universities. Indeed, every schoolgirl and schoolboy in the crazed, rabid 1950s “knew” of the tens of millions of victims of Stalin’s purges.
Unfortunately for Conquest (though he never acknowledged it) and the many lemming-like academic experts, the post-Soviet archives revealed that his numbers were vastly inflated. In fact, they had no relationship whatsoever to the actualities of that nonetheless tragic period.
Kotkin’s claimed 65 million victims of Communist misdeeds should, accordingly, be taken with less than a grain of salt, though it is curiously and mysteriously well below the endorsed estimate of his mentor, Martin Malia. Malia, the author of the preface to the infamous Black Book of Communism (1994), endorsed that sensationalized book’s claim that 94 million lives were lost to Communism. Some contributors to the Black Book retracted this claim, noting that it was arrived at by an obsession with approaching the magic number of 100 million victims. They subsequently “negotiated” (or manufactured) a tally between 65 and 93 million. Such is the “rigor” of Soviet scholarship at elite universities.
Kotkin, like most other anti-Communist crusaders, gives away the numbers endgame, the purpose behind blaming uncountable victims upon Communism. For the arch-enemies of Communism like Conquest and the participants in the Black Book, it is imperative that Communism be perceived as equally evil with or more evil than Nazism and fascism. This charge of moral equivalence is targeted at the liberals who might view Communism as a benign ally in the defense of liberal values or social reforms. No one has done more to promote this false equivalency than Yale professor Timothy Snyder with his shoddy, ideologically driven book, Bloodlands.
Of course, the Washington Post also has its resident guardians of anti-Soviet dogma in Marc Thiessen and the incomparable Anne Applebaum. Applebaum has enjoyed a meteoric career from graduate student to journalist covering Eastern European affairs to the widely acknowledged leader of anti-Soviet witch-hunters. Her marriage to an equally anti-Communist Polish journalist-turned-politician further strengthened her role as the hardest charging of the hard-charging professional anti-Communists. Her consistent work denouncing everything Soviet has earned her a place on the ruling class Council of Foreign Relations and the CIA’s “active measure,” the National Endowment for Democracy.
She “celebrated” the Bolshevik Revolution on November 6 with a several-thousand-word Washington Post essay raising the feverish alarm of a return of Bolshevism (100 years later, Bolshevism is back. And we should be worried.) Applebaum repeats a favorite theme of the new generation of virulent anti-Communists: the events of November 1917 were a coup d’etat and not a revolution. Of course, this claim is hard to square with another favorite theme-- the Bolsheviks numbered only two to ten thousand followers. How do you reconcile such a tiny group “overthrowing” the government and the security forces of the fourth most populated empire in the world?
The Bolsheviks lied. Lenin was a liar. Trotsky was a liar. “So were his comrades. The Bolsheviks lied about the past… and they lied about the future, too. All through the spring and summer of 1917, Trotsky and Lenin repeatedly made promises that would never be kept.” Further, Lenin’s henchmen used the “tactics of psychological warfare that would later become their trademark” to mesmerize the population. That same easily charmed population was to later fight for socialism against counter-revolutionary domestic reaction and foreign intervention in a bloody five-year war (1917-1922), the same supposedly easily tricked population that laid down their arms and refused to fight for the Czar or his “democratic” successors. This neat picture of perfidy surely exposes a belief in both superhuman, mystical powers possessed by Lenin and an utter contempt for the integrity and intelligence of the Russian masses.
But it is not really the historical Bolsheviks who are Applebaum’s target, but today’s “neo-Bolsheviks.”
And who are the “neo-Bolsheviks”?
For Ms. Applebaum, they are everyone politically outside of her comfortable, insular world of manners and upper-middle class conservatism. First and foremost, she elects to smear the social democrats in Spain and Greece, along with Jeremy Corbyn, who may consider “bringing back nationalization.” Similarly, their US counterparts “on the fringes of the Democratic Party” (Bernie Sanders!) are condemned because they embrace “a dark, negative version of American history” and “spurn basic patriotism and support America’s opponents, whether in Russia or the Middle East.” (Sadly, my social democratic friends will likely not allow these ravings to shake their confidence in Applebaum’s equally inane pronouncements on Communism.)
But the “neo-Bolsheviks” exist on the right as well! She identifies them as those rightists who “scorn Christian Democracy, which had its political base in the church and sought to bring morality back to politics…” “If some of what these extremists [on the right] say is to be taken seriously, their endgame-- the destruction of the existing political order, possibly including the U.S. Constitution-- is one that the Bolsheviks would have understood.” In Applebaum’s bizarre world, there are Bolsheviks of both the left and right lurking under our beds! Safety is only found in the bosom of Christian democracy, that post-war artifact cobbled together by the Western powers to counter the parliamentary rise of Communism.
The anti-Communist graffiti artists, the professional defacers of the Soviet legacy, are legion. Books and commentaries by others, like Victor Sebestyen, Serhii Plokhy, Douglas Smith, Svetlana Alexievich, Amy Knight, and Catherine Merridale, join the authors reviewed here in churning out new grist for the anti-Communist, anti-Soviet mill.
With many Soviet sources now available, the practice of Cold War defamation has become a riskier business, an enterprise possibly bringing embarrassment to the most outrageous fabricators. Accordingly, the most sophisticated among the new generation of Cold Warriors have turned in a new direction: the 1930s famines in then Soviet Ukraine. With little risk of exposure and eager cooperation from the virulently anti-Communist, extreme nationalists now installed to govern Ukraine, they have started a new victim-numbers race to rally the cause of anti-Communism, a new narrative of Red wickedness.
Applebaum is right about one thing. There is evil in the air.
But it is the vicious slander of everything Red, especially the legacy of the Soviet Union.
Greg Godels (Zoltan Zigedy)