The Bolsheviks & their friends

[Gary Kern <gkern@alumni.Princeton.EDU>]

Umberto Rossi wrote:
> Ahem, the Allies did not accept even the Soviet takeover in Russia.  Remember
> their support of the White Army during the Russian civil war.  Some Western
> nations sent also troops in Russia, and I wonder if the isolationist trends of the
> Soviet Union do not derive from that episode.  After having fought a war which
> ended with an inglorious defeat, Russia was attacked and surrounded by enemies.
> You can say thta the purpose of the expeditionry corps was to "liberate" Russia,
> but try to explain that to Russians.  In moment of crisis Russians tend to stick
> together, to forget internal divisions and to fight with all their forces against the
> invasors. [...]

Maybe, had the Reds, that is the Communists won in 1918, both the
Russian and
> the German Bolshevik governments could hae been less violent and totalitarian.
> Who knows.  Maybe, given some basic tenets of the Bolshevik ideology you had to
> build a totalitarian regime, maybe not.  Lenin started the NEP, you know.  And built
> the first Gulag camps.  There's a lot of contradictions in what he did.  While surely
> there's a deadly coherence in Stalin's actions--much like what you can find in
> Hitler's deeds.
> 

> Umberto Rossi
> 
****************************
A few things need clarification.  The Bolshevik Party took power in
Russia by means of a planned strike, a coup d'etat.  Once in power, they
allowed national elections to proceed, since they had clamored for them
when the Provisional Government was in power.  When they lost the
election overwhelmingly to the Socialist Revolutionaries, they closed up
the Constituent Assembly and the planned parliamentary government by
force of arms.  The dispossessed winners naturally would form a
coalition and civil war would ensue.  The Bolsheviks, lacking a popular
mandate, created a secret police to protect them--the Cheka.  They
initiated a reign of Red Terror against enemies real and imagined.  They
confiscated property and ran industry under the rubric of "war
communism."  Lenin was nearly killed by an SR assassin's bullet.  The
anti-Bolshevik forces began attacking from various quarters, with
various foreign backing.  Foreign countries sent military forces to
protect their investments and stockpiles of weapons in Odessa.  There
were some skirmishes beyond, but not enough to speak of a foreign
intervention--that was a Bolshevik myth.  Only the Czech expeditionary
force, moving west from Vladivostok, engaged in real and decisive
combat.  After the Bolsheviks emerged from the civil war, still in
power, Lenin saw the need to lighten up in order to motivate the economy
and provide goods--there was nothing left for the central government to
steal from the peasants and manufacturers.  So he created NEP, but not
after giving the order to crush the Kronstadt sailors, petitioning for
observance of Communist principles and for bread.  From that point on,
it was the step by step establishment of totalitarian control--secret
police, concentration camps, closed borders, censorship, persecution of
religion, and so on.  Lenin started fading from the effects of his
wound, and Stalin started taking over.  He brought Marxism-Leninism to
full fruition.

Such, in outline, is how I see the first years of Bolshevism.  There is
nothing here to ameliorate the dictatorial nature and brutality of the
Bolsheviks--no foreign misunderstanding or intervention, no traditional
Russian suspiciousness and xenophobia, no lost opportunities for
cooperation, none of that.  It was a coup d'etat, a reaction and an
enforcement of terror.  The chief reason it succeeded as well as it did
for so many years was the incredible gullibility of the West, the
wishful thinking of fellow travellers and the spinelessness of foreign
governments.  "Friends of the Soviet Union," as they once called
themselves, helped the cause at every turn.  Lenin called them "poleznye
idioty"--"useful idiots."

I leave it to others to discuss Bolshevik-German relations, but wish
only to remove a few misconceptions before they do.

GK