QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Why Isn’t Lenin As Condemned As Hitler?
It is a curious phenomenon that Lenin is acceptable and even approved of whereas Hitler is beyond the pale. It is not exactly a secret that Lenin started off seventy years of communist rule in Russia which included two major famines, the Red Terror, the Great Terror and continuing poverty. The death toll of Soviet communism was in the order of twenty million. So how do people manage to think favorably of him?
I discovered from our SOAS conversations that the first thing admirers of Lenin do is kid themselves that he led a popular revolution removing a corrupt, tyrannical Tsarist regime. This is just not true. The February revolution could indeed be considered a popular revolution and the Tsar was indeed removed from power. But Lenin took no part in it. He was in Zurich and had to read about it in the Swiss newspapers. He did lead the so-called October Revolution, later the same year, but that was not a revolution. The fact that it is referred to as that in Britain is one of several ways in which Soviet propaganda has entered British textbooks. In reality it was a coup. In a rather chaotic series of events, some 10,000 Red Guards took control of Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) and arrested the provisional government.
Then there is the idea that the coup somehow represented the “will of the people.” We have clear proof that it did not.
The Bolsheviks got only 24 percent of the vote in the elections to the constituent assembly. The more moderate socialist revolutionaries received 39 percent. To put it bluntly, the Bolsheviks lost. But Lenin did not care. Rather like Hitler, whose party incidentally got a higher percentage of the vote in Germany than the Bolsheviks did in Russia, he closed the constituent assembly and deployed armed soldiers to prevent anyone reopening it. The lie Lenin fans choose to believe is that if only Lenin had lived, communist rule would have succeeded. Lenin’s replacement by Stalin ruined it all.
But Lenin did all the things that Stalin did. Lenin began government control of agriculture, setting a fixed price that the government would pay for corn and other grains. The price was absurdly low because of the high rate of inflation. A shortage of food ensued. Lenin then requisitioned grain from peasants at gunpoint. These disastrous policies contributed heavily to death by starvation of at least three million people in 1920-21. Lenin implicitly recognized the part his policies had played by reversing them in 1921.
Meanwhile, he took advantage of the famine to steal from the church, seizing half a ton of gold along with a vast quantity of silver and precious stones in November 1921 alone. He stated that this was an opportunity to kill members of the bourgeoisie who resisted this expropriation. “The confiscations must be conducted with merciless determination… the greater the number of clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing for this reason… [i.e. resisting church looting], the better.’ In two years, more than thirty bishops and 1,200 priests were killed.
Lenin created the Cheka, the Soviet secret police. His on-the-record instructions to kill include this written order following a revolt in Penza province: “Hang (absolutely hang, in full view of the people) no fewer than 100 known kulaks [peasants owning a little land], filthy rich men, bloodsuckers.” Lenin did not engage in class war. He engaged in class murder.
Lenin set up the concentration camps which eventually became the Gulag. He issued a decree in 1918 stating that it was “imperative to safeguard the Soviet Republic from class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps.” Every provincial city was ordered to create one and by the end of 1920 there were 107 of them. Lenin authorized the use of poison gas in 1921 to kill peasants in the Tambov uprising. Vyacheslav Molotov, a senior Soviet politician under both Lenin and Stalin, remarked that both leaders were “hard men… harsh and stern. But without a doubt Lenin was harsher.”
But Lenin was lucky in one sense — because Stalin was just as bloodthirsty, historians, the media, and the entertainment industry have been thrilled to use him as an aberrant scapegoat rather than admit that the Soviet Union was poisoned right from the start, all the way to 2017’s otherwise brilliant satire, The Death of Stalin.
In his 1976 article, “The Intelligent Co-Ed’s Guide to America,” Tom Wolfe wrote:
The publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, however, was a wholly unexpected blow. No one was ready for the obscene horror and grotesque scale of what Solzhenitsyn called “Our Sewage Disposal System”—in which tens of millions were shipped in boxcars to concentration camps all over the country, in which tens of millions died, in which entire races and national groups were liquidated, insofar as they had existed in the Soviet Union. Moreover, said Solzhenitsyn, the system had not begun with Stalin but with Lenin, who had immediately exterminated non-Bolshevik opponents of the old regime and especially the student factions. It was impossible any longer to distinguish the Communist liquidation apparatus from the Nazi.
Yet Solzhenitsyn went still further. He said that not only Stalinism, not only Leninism, not only Communism — but socialism itself led to the concentration camps; and not only socialism, but Marxism; and not only Marxism but any ideology that sought to reorganize morality on an a priori basis. Sadder still, it was impossible to say that Soviet socialism was not “real socialism.” On the contrary — it was socialism done by experts!
Intellectuals in Europe and America were willing to forgive Solzhenitsyn a great deal. After all, he had been born and raised in the Soviet Union as a Marxist, he had fought in combat for his country, he was a great novelist, he had been in the camps for eight years, he had suffered. But for his insistence that the isms themselves led to the death camps — for this he was not likely to be forgiven soon. And in fact the campaign of antisepsis began soon after he was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974. (“He suffered too much — he’s crazy.” “He’s a Christian zealot with a Christ complex.” “He’s an agrarian reactionary.” “He’s an egotist and a publicity junkie.”)
Solzhenitsyn’s tour of the United States in 1975 was like an enormous funeral procession that no one wanted to see. The White House wanted no part of him. The New York Times sought to bury his two major’ speeches, and only the moral pressure of a lone Times writer, Hilton Kramer, brought them any appreciable coverage at all. The major television networks declined to run the Solzhenitsyn interview that created such a stir in England earlier this year (it ran on some of the educational channels).
And the literary world in general ignored him completely. In the huge unseen coffin that Solzhenitsyn towed behind him were not only the souls of the zeks who died in the Archipelago. No, the heartless bastard had also chucked in one of the last great visions: the intellectual as the Stainless Steel Socialist glistening against the bone heap of capitalism in its final, brutal, fascist phase. There was a bone heap, all right, and it was grisly beyond belief, but socialism, had created it.
As Tony Rennell asks in the London Daily Mail today, “Why does the gullible Left still lionize Lenin as a benign intellectual and the acceptable face of Communism when he ruthlessly murdered his opponents in their thousands, starved two million Russians to death and wrote the playbook for Stalin?” “There are those who will point to [Lenin’s] successor, Stalin, as the real devil in Russia’s 20th Century history, and there is no doubt that the repression, the violence, show trials, gulags and butchery of that monster’s 30 years as the dictator of the Soviet Union far exceeded Lenin’s – nastier, more brutal, insanely contemptuous of human life, totally beyond rational understanding. In his paranoia, he murdered friend and foe alike. And yet the truth – however much it may offend those who regard Lenin’s as the acceptable face of Communism – is that Stalin was Lenin’s protege and took his lead from him.”
UPDATE: The Young Communist League of Britain “fondly” remembers one of history’s great monsters:
