Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (22 April 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He is widely considered one of the most significant and influential figures of the 20th century. Yet whilst his embalmed body still lies in Red Square, the real Lenin has been buried by decades of dictatorship and Cold War, and a century of sanctification and vilification.
Lenin speaking to a crowd in Moscow’s Sverdlov Square with Leon Trotsky and Lev Kamenev beside him, May 1920
In That Howling Infinite has written often about Russian history. So, we couldn’t resist commemorating the centennial of Lenin’s death.
I first became acquainted with him in the fall of 1968 whilst reading politics at Reading University under the tutorship of émigré academic and historian of Russian and Soviet politics Tibor Szamuely. For a while,
Back then, I was a political ingenue and a naïve communist sympathizer and fellow traveler, although my evolving perspectives were transforming and expanding. As my tutor, he advised me to study with an open mind and to put off juvenile thinking. He hadn’t been well when I knew him, and he died a year after I graduated. Under his tuition, I’d resolved to specialize in Soviet Studies – but events intervened, and I ended up in the Middle East (and that is another story. see: Tanks for the Memory – how Brezhnev changed my life). I nevertheless retained an active interest in the history and politics of Eastern Europe.
Szamuely would always impress upon me the historical and political continuity of what he called The Russian Tradition – the title of his one and only book, The Russian Tradition, published shortly before his death, and now, regrettably, out of print. I purchased a first edition when it was published and it is on my bookshelf still.
He believed that the bloodstained drama of the revolutions of 1917 – there were two, the social democratic one in the February, the Bolshevik one in November – and the years that followed, including civil war, the establishment of the USSR and Stalinism largely obscured the underlying consistency of Russian history. He did not live to see the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, and the advent of Putin and Russia Redux, but the basic pattern persists, circular and repetitive. The frequent turmoils that have overtaken this vast continent have in their various ways made changes that were essentially superficial, leading in the end to the intensification, under new forms, of the old authoritarian structure. See The Russian Tradition – Russia, Ukraine and Tibor Szamuely.
Studying Soviet politics, I read quite a few of Lenin’s writings – the mercifully short paperbacks like What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of our Movement (1901), Imperialism, the highest state of Capitalism (1917), and The State and Revolution (1917), and Leftwing Communism, an Infantile Disorder (1920), the best title of them all. They cost very little at a Communist Bookshop, in Soho, I think – a source also, of posters from the Revolution and the Russian Civil War. In my Russian phase, I’d even bought a balalaika – though admittedly my purchase was inspired more by its use by Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull in a great concert in our hall of residence. I never did much with it and saw it last on the sideboard of my late mother’s house in Birmingham.
I still have those books, in addition to the panegyric 1942 edition of The Truth about Soviet Russia, by famous British socialists (and Stalinist apologists) Sydney and Beatrice Webb, which was everything but the truth, posing the rhetorical question “Is Soviet Communism a New Civilization based on the ethical principle of ‘From each man according to his faculty to each man according to his need’.
Better Read than Dead
Vladimir Lenin has a way of confounding Marxist and indeed other historians for he was that rare thing – an individual and singular instigator of historical change. A hundred years after his death, hagiographies and obloquies continue to pouring off printing presses as once did concrete to erect statues of Uncle Volodya. Even his most hostile critics would be churlish to dismiss his outsized role during the heady months leading to Red October.
The principal protagonist of the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 and the brutal and bloody civil war that followed, Lenin served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia, and later the Soviet Union, became a one-party socialist state governed by the Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, his additions to the ideology earned their own title: Leninism.
There is near universal consensus that Lenin had no use for “liberalism” in any form, or democracy which he regarded as a bourgeois delusion. He closed down the elected Constituent Assembly, when elections to it rejected his party, at gunpoint. He then proceeded to ban all other parties. He instigated the Red Terror via setting up the Cheka, the prototype KGB and brought about the deaths of hundreds of thousands, establishing the apparatus and mechanisms of terror so definitively exploited by Stalin. His administration laid the framework for the system of government that ruled Russia and the USSR for seven decades and provided the model for later Communist-led states that came to cover a third of the inhabited world in the mid-20th century.
As a result, Lenin’s influence was global. A controversial figure, he remains both reviled and revered, a figure who has been both idolized and demonized. Even during his lifetime, Lenin “was loved and hated, admired and scorned” by the Russian people. This has extended into academic studies of Lenin and Leninism, which have often been polarized along political lines.
Back in the day, I admired him for the smooth operator that he was, though I was shocked by his cold-bloodedness. No matter what his sophisticated musings in exile or during 1917 told his readers, he conducted the civil way to àl’outrance. See: Red and white terror – the Russian revolution and civil war. Today, I come not to bury Vladimir nor to praise him – Wikipedia provides a good overview of his life and times, and his legacy. It’s a good source for further reading: HERE
Detail of Man, Controller of the Universe, a fresco by Diego Rivera in the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City
I republish below and interesting article from Unherd, my favourite e-zine, on the debatable influence of Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution in British politics.
In the immediate wake of World War One, and the outbreak of civil war, Western Allies’ ideological perspective of the conflict was ambivalent. Many, politicians and military alike, were viscerally opposed to Bolshevism and what it stood for, and feared a Red contagion infecting their own countries, a fear that was not unfounded. After the Revolution, a concatenation of revolts detonated across the globe. Bolshevism spread westwards, from Vienna through Budapest and Sofia to Kiel. The Bavarian Soviet Republic was briefly established in April 1919, before the far-Right Freikorps did it in.
Britain wasn’t immune to the ferment. Between the February and October Revolutions, the Leeds Soviet did indeed appear to be the beginning of something, whilst strikes and demonstrations proliferated to be violently put down by the police and army. Winston Churchill alone of his cabinet colleagues wanted a full-on allied intervention and dreamed – some believed he was indeed dreaming but others claimed that he fantasized – of creating an effective White army and a borderlands alliance to defeat the Bolsheviks. But his aspirations were foiled by the imperialism of the White leadership and of White officers and the various national movements’ fear that that if the Whites prevailed, they would restore Russian rule. Britain’s rulers were reticent about shoring up and providing financial, material support and also, soldiers sailors and airmen to brutal to demonstrably homicidal Cossack brigades and revanchist and reactionary royalist autocrats.
The concern of His Majesty’s Government with the the Bolsheviks is the theme of series three of the superlative British crime saga Peaky Blinders. It is set in 1924, three years after the civil war, and not long after the fabricated Zionoviev Letter implicating the British communist party and by association, the Labour Party in a seditious plot, instigated a “Red Scare” that saw Britain’s first Labour Government defeated in a general election. Home Secretary Mr WS Churchill employs the services of Thomas Shelby and his Brummie brethren in a devious plot to fit-up and compromise the Soviet regime. The White Russian èmigrés, a cabal of revanchist aristocrats that Tommy has to do business with are an unsavory, unprincipled, bigoted and amoral crew.
The fear of this “Red contagion” after Revolution, saw conservative British governments preempt insurrection by mollifying, co-opting even, and caring for the workers and the disadvantaged. The interwar years saw major strides in universal education, healthcare, and insurance Post-war, all that was left for Labour to do was to extend it to one and all. Already covering some 80% of the population, welfare was brought to the remaining one-fifth of Britain by Clement Attlee and William Beveridge.
I qualify this by noting that the article ignores the trends that emerged in the UK during the 19th century, such as the Poor Law Amendment Act, the Factory Acts and the 1870 Education Act which were built upon during the 20th century.
Historian Anil Pratinav’s writes how paradoxically, Soviet communism unwittingly fortified British capitalism. The unintended upshot of Anglo-Marxism was to make the Establishment more heedful of working-class interests. The same went for the welfare state. Peace was preserved between the classes. Redistribution took the edge off class conflict. What’s more, an educated and healthy workforce proved good for business. Moderately progressive taxation was a tiny insurance premium to keep the workers in working condition and the barbarians at bay.
Lenin might’ve said there are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happens – but “these days, barring a few libertarian crackpots, Tory radicals, nostalgics, and campus Marxists, nearly everyone is united in confirming the wisdom of this arrangement. The simple fact is that most Brits like their politics dull.
Vladimir Lenin has a way of confounding Marxist historians, many of whom generally — and with good reason — attach odium to Great Man History. For he was that rare thing: an individual instigator of historical change. A hundred years after his death, hagiographies and obloquies continue pouring off presses as once did concrete to erect statues of Uncle Volodya. But even his most hostile critics would be churlish to dismiss his outsized role during the heady months leading to Red October.
Yet there is another achievement that Lenin was inadvertently, indeed perversely, responsible for: the Western welfare state. That we rarely recognise this owes to a common misperception. Very many of us regrettably buy that Labour conceit, hawked by spin doctors and court historians, that celebrates Clement Attlee and William Beveridge as the co-fathers of our welfare jstate. But as the historian David Edgerton reminds us, it is in fact the Liberal-Tory coalition of David Lloyd George in the immediate aftermath of the First World War that we ought to be thanking. These were the years when the major strides in education, healthcare, and insurance were made. Post-war, all that was left for Labour to do was to extend it to one and all. Already covering some 80% of the population, welfare was brought to the remaining one-fifth of Britain by Beveridge.
More importantly, it was neither paternalism nor prodigality that prompted these early stirrings of dirigisme. Rather it was red contagion. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, a concatenation of revolts detonated across the globe. Bolshevism spread westwards, from Vienna through Budapest and Sofia to Kiel. The Bavarian Soviet Republic was briefly established in April 1919, before the far-Right Freikorps did it in. Britain wasn’t immune to the ferment. Between the February and October Revolutions, the Leeds Soviet did indeed appear to be the beginning of something. That nothing came of it was down to Lloyd George’s unsentimental pragmatism. Many of the workers’ demands were duly conceded, taking the sting out of union radicalism, even as many leaders were put behind bars.
Two years later, Lloyd George’s Bolshevik bugbear was to return with a vengeance, when shipbuilders stormed the Glasgow City Chambers. With hindsight, it is obvious that “Red Clydeside” was never, in any meaningful sense, a harbinger of “Red Britain”: the radicalism of Glaswegian trade unions on either side of the River Clyde was never going to spread to the rest of the country. Yet at the time, the red threat was all too real. “This country was nearer to Bolshevism that day than at any time since,” Lloyd George would later recall of the police and prison officers’ strike. London and Birmingham were spared, but Merseyside had rocked to the sound of rioting and looting. Violence was brought to a halt only when the army was brought in.
It is difficult for us to conceive what the “peace” after the armistice actually looked like. Yet Simon Webb’s 1919: Britain’s Year of Revolutions reconstructs a society teetering on the brink of collapse: soldiers roughing up workers; martial law in Luton; tanks cruising the streets of Liverpool. The Italians call the two years immediately following the war the biennio rosso, and it seems fair to speak of a red biennium in Britain as well. For one thing, it would be impossible to understand British domestic and foreign policy without reference to that singular neurosis of the interwar ruling class. While cavorting with the antisemitic Whites to crush the Reds in Russia, Westminster and Whitehall were at the same time crushing the unruly bolshies back at home. Churchill, then minister for war, put forward the government line with characteristic crassness: “kill the Bolshie, kiss the Hun.”
As it must in democracies, with the stick also came the carrot. Yes, the workers were brutally put down. But they hadn’t protested in vain. Gone were the Gladstonian days of cheese-paring Liberalism. Lloyd George’s Liberals were an altogether different beast: by turns technocratic, interventionist and ambitious. They were, no doubt, building on pre-war precedent, in particular the health and insurance schemes of 1911, and making good on wartime promises, but they were above all trying to make peace with the bad, mad and dangerous Brits on the streets.
To begin with, they gave a great many people a greater share in government, shepherding them from the barricades into polling stations. Universal male suffrage in 1918 enfranchised unpropertied men — that is, two in five men — as well as propertied women over 30. The same year, the Education Act, lobbied by Lancashire unionists, raised the school-leaving age from 12 to 14 to forestall cotton bosses from battening on benighted boys. And in 1919, the Housing and Town Planning Act put in motion the construction of what became that instantly recognisable feature of the British urban landscape: the council estate.
Bettered by Attlee and Harold Wilson, battered by Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron, the early interwar consensus around the welfare state survives to this day. Both under Labour and the Tories, truculent workers with ideas above their station have been shown their place: from Ramsay MacDonald’s disciplining of the “communistic” trade unions in 1924 through Thatcher’s thwarting of the miners in 1984 to Keir Starmer’s disavowal of organised labour in 2024. Likewise, since 1945, both parties have shown a general commitment to public spending around the 40% of GDP mark. Creaking, underfunded, “our NHS” continues nevertheless to be spoken of only in hallowed whispers.
Time and again, our rulers have let slip the real reason why welfare matters. Here’s Attlee in Margate in 1950: “our policy of democratic socialism is the only dynamic alternative to totalitarian communism.” Is it any surprise that two of the most robust welfare states across La Manche were created in societies that boasted a formidable communist presence? The Parti Communiste Français in 1946 counted some 800,000 members, and the Partito Comunista Italiano nearly two million. It is true that the Communist Party of Great Britain never had much to recommend it, but the strength of the post-war British Left — independent of Labour — is undeniable. It was the miners who brought down Edward Heath in 1974.
As with the British welfare state, so with British intellectual life. Our republic of letters would have been a dreary landscape of conformity were it not for the Russian Revolution, which fired three generations of Anglo-Marxists. The interwar years were a time when communists could rise to the very top of the cultural establishment. E.H. Carr, for example, became a leader writer and deputy editor of The Times, a perch from which he preached the gospel of collectivist planning and conciliation with Stalin. His monumental History of Soviet Russia — running to 7,000 pages and 14 volumes — remains the best account of the early years of the revolutionary regime.
Even such a sceptic of the state as George Bernard Shaw was swept away by Russomania. By 1931, with Britain reeling from the Depression, he was singing Stalin’s praises. Fabian gradualism, his old creed, wasn’t going to cut it in the 20th century. MacDonald’s Labour had evidently failed, he reflected in a new preface to Fabian Essays in Socialism. What was needed was “swift effectiveness” — Soviet-style. A trip to Moscow was written up in glowing terms in The Rationalisation of Russia.
In a manner of speaking, the remoter reaches of the ivory tower, too, succumbed to the Soviets. G.E.M. de Ste. Croix inaugurated what was by far the most arresting development in classical studies. A child of empire born in Macau, “Croicks” turned his back on his “thoroughly Right-wing upbringing” on the “lunatic fringe of Christianity” — as he later put it — in the Twenties. A romp across the Soviet Union in 1937 with Intourist, the Soviet travel agency, left him critical of Stalinism but committed to Marxism, on the strength of observing the peasants of the Caucasus. Thereafter, he became a “thoroughgoing Marxist”, tutoring a generation of students at New College, Oxford, who, in their own writings, were to remain alert to class in the classics. The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World appeared in 1981.
Such profiles can be indefinitely multiplied. Suffice it to say that most of the smartest minds of the interwar period were on the Left. This would soon change with the emigration of Eastern and Mitteleuropean conservatives to Britain — Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, Lewis Namier, Ernest Gellner — producing a more balanced intellectual division of labour. But before that, Left hegemony was unrivalled. John Strachey was undoubtedly among the most important political commentators of the Thirties. His father was the editor of The Spectator for nearly 40 years, and Strachey’s best man was Oswald Mosley, then still on the Left. When Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists, Strachey led some of the largest demonstrations against him.
As it was, the Marxist Strachey lost the battle of ideas to the Liberal John Maynard Keynes, who famously had no truck with communism: “How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and intelligentsia who, with all their faults, are the quality of life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement?” Yet Keynes could do little to prevent one of his Cambridge protégés, Maurice Dobb, from taking up the cudgels for the boorish proletariat.
Communism gained a bridgehead in Cambridge thanks to Dobb, who edited The Plebs, a Marxist magazine, in the Twenties. He extolled Lenin as a “stern realist” blessed “with all the Jesuit’s sincerity and idealism”. By contrast, “non-Marxists” were “as silly as pre-Darwinian biologists”. He helped found the Communist Party Historians Group, and set up Kim Philby — of the Cambridge Five ring of spies — with the NKVD. Later students included Amartya Sen and Eric Hobsbawm, whose own Oxbridge appointments were blocked by Tory dons.
Paradoxically, then, Soviet communism unwittingly fortified British capitalism. The unintended upshot of Anglo-Marxism was to make the Establishment more heedful of working-class interests. The same went for the welfare state. Peace was preserved between the classes. Redistribution took the edge off class conflict. What’s more, an educated and healthy workforce proved good for business. Moderately progressive taxation was a tiny insurance premium to keep the workers in working condition and the barbarians at bay. These days, barring a few libertarian crackpots, Tory radicals, Bridesheady (Saltburny?) nostalgics, and campus Marxists, nearly everyone is united in confirming the wisdom of this arrangement. The simple fact is that most Brits like their politics dull.
Pratinav Anil is the author of two bleak assessments of 20th-century Indian history. He teaches at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.
I wrote on Facebook regarding his article Horrible Histories, a Marxist plot?,:
“I am a lifelong history tragic and I’ve degrees in history and politics. Now I’ve heard about horrible histories, I’ll have to look further. All history is, in a manner of speaking, storytelling, its validity and verification changing with the perspectives, perspicacity and prejudices of the storyteller. And on a potentially controversial tangent, all history is political – exhibit one is the proliferation of the culture wars and their corollary, the history wars.
If HHs can bring young folk to history and encourage them to learn more, so much the better. From what I read here, the histories are a more detailed and graphic version of that old, corny chestnut 1066 And All That. Which I still dip into now and then, for its perspective on what we’re owecievd back in the day as “good kings” and “good things”. Bad kings were more often than not the stuff of Shakespeare, whilst there were remarkably few bad things. I share the view of one commentator – that Deary is probably no Marxist, but was taught by a history teacher with Marxist leanings. History can and should be fun as well as serious, and not just the bailiwick of crusty academics and history snobs and culture warriors.
There’s a Canadian writer who tells similar stories about world history called Sweary History or The Day Shit Went Down – I’m sure you get the drift. By the way, I highly recommend Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland’s excellent podcast The Rest is History – a gift that keeps on giving. Solid and well researched stories from history’s back pages with bad impersonations , lots of friendly banter, and loads of humorous irreverence regarding assorted shibboleths and sacred cows”.
… as a policeman, I would say, get hold of a man’s brother and you’re halfway home. Nor was it admiration for a better man than me. I did admire him, but I didn’t think he was a better man. Besides, I’ve executed better men than me with a small pistol.
She’d come to Moscow to look for her child. I helped her as best I could, but I knew it was hopeless. I think I was a little in love with her. One day she went away and didn’t come back. She died or vanished somewhere, in one of the labor camps. A nameless number on a list that was afterwards mislaid. That was quite common in those days.
Yevgraf Zhivargo, in David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Some books can be unrelentingly bleak and brutal, so grim and graphic in fact that you have to push yourself to finish them. Cormac McCarthy’s odyssey tale The Road is one such. But one doesn’t often say that about history books. Usually it is time, ennui or both that cry “enough, already!” You set it aside, promising to return to your bookmark – but you never do. I persevered with English author and historian Anthony Beevor’s latest foray into Russian and Soviet history, a veritable catalogue of the horrors that men can inflict upon their fellow humans (and yes, the perpetrators are apparently exclusively male and the victims are males and females of many ethnicities). His previous, highly acclaimed books Stalingrad and Berlin 1945 are chilling, but Russia – Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921 takes top prize. And finish it I did …
The following is not a review of Beavor’s grim opus as such, but rather a thematic compendium of thoughts and observations derived from or inspired by the book.
Most academic accounts and university courses focus on the ideological and geopolitical dimensions of the origins, rise and consolidation of the Soviet Union, and its ultimate disintegration seventy years later. General public knowledge of the Russian Revolution and the civil war which followed it is relatively limited and cursory, often derived and books like Mikail Sholokhov’s saga of the Don Cossacks, Quiet Flows the Don and The Don Flows Home To The Sea, and Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Indeed, it was these novels and David Lean’s powerful adaptation of Doctor Zhivago that first attracted my interest in Russia as a school student in Birmingham. I majored in Politics at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, and Soviet history and politics were an important part of my studies. Between those days and today, I’ve read widely about Russia’s history, past and present, and I am familiar with the events, ideas and personalities, their role in the broader and longer tableau of history, and the reverberations that are still felt today.
I have written often in In That Howling Infinite on Russian and Ukrainian history. Although I am no expert, and profess an amateur interest only, I do possess a short and humble pedigree. My tutor in Soviet Studies at Reading was exiled Hungarian academic and historian Tibor Szamuely, Like many refugees from Communism, he was descended from both perpetrators and victims. An uncle of the same name served in the Hungarian Soviet Republic that took power for six months under Béla Kun in 1919 and died violently that year when the revolution failed. He was among that government’s most bloodthirsty ministers and was called “Butcher Szamuely”. Szamuely’s family wound up in Moscow, where Tibor was born, and where his father was executed in Stalin’s purges. Young Tibor served in the Red Army, and he too was arrested and sent to a labour camp. Rehabilitated, he served as Chancellor of Budapest University. In 1964, then nearing 40, he was teaching in the “ideological institute” of Ghana’s Marxist president Kwame Nkrumah when he defected to England.
Back then, I was a political ingenue and a naïve communist sympathizer and fellow traveler, although my evolving perspectives were transforming and expanding. As my tutor, he advised me to study with an open mind and to put off juvenile thinking. He hadn’t been well when I knew him, and he died a year after I graduated. Under his tuition, I’d resolved to specialize in Soviet Studies – but events intervened, and I ended up in the Middle East (and that is another story. see: Tanks for the Memory – how Brezhnev changed my life). I nevertheless retained an active interest in the history and politics of Eastern Europe.
He would always impress upon me the historical and political continuity of what he called The Russian Tradition – the title of his one and only book, The Russian Tradition, published shortly before his death, and now, regrettably, out of print. I purchased a first edition when it was published and it is on my bookshelf still.
Szamuely believed that the bloodstained drama of the revolutions of 1917– there were two, the social democratic one in the February, the Bolshevik one in November – and the years that followed, including civil war, the establishment of the USSR and Stalinism largely obscured the underlying consistency of Russian history. He did not live to see the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, and the advent of Putin and Russia Redux, but the basic pattern persists, circular and repetitive. The frequent turmoils that have overtaken this vast continent have in their various ways made changes that were essentially superficial, leading in the end to the intensification, under new forms, of the old authoritarian structure.
You – Bolshevik recruiting poster 1918
Contemplating civil wars
A civil war can emerge from the ashes of a wider, ongoing conflagration when factions or parties dispute the nature and terms of the post-bellum status quo and fracture along political and ideological lines. Many civil wars have arisen from the ashes of a prior war when there are what are perceived as existential issues unresolved and the availability of weapons and materièl and experienced and discontented men to use them.
There is a view that civil war can retrospectively be seen as a crucible of nation, a fiery furnace through which the righteous must walk – an ex post facto rationalization of the Nietzschean paradox of “that which does not kill us makes us strong”. Abraham Lincoln verbalized this in his Gettysburg Address in 1863 on a battlefield where the fallen had been only recently interred. Franco made a similar play as he laid claim to the wreckage that was Spain in the wake of three years of carnage, but then petrified his riven, country in autocratic stone until his death many decades later. The Russian Civil War was not accorded such a nation-building ethos as it was viewed by the Bolshevik victors as the crushing of a counter-revolution against a new world already being born.
Given Russia’s vast expanse, long history of restive regions, and large non-Russian ethnicities – all a result of centuries of imperial conquests – there is always the potential for the disintegration of centralized control and fragmentation. There is a rich history of state collapse following wars, revolutions, system breakdowns, economic crises, and other epochal events. Napoleon’s empire collapsed after his disastrous march on Moscow and subsequent defeat at the Battle of Leipzig. In 1918, the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires all collapsed in military defeat. Of course, people, decisions, and policies played a role, but ultimately it was war and the attendant economic and social crises that pushed these states over the edge into political chaos and often violence.
Once thing for sure, civil war, the Hobbesian “war if all against all” (Hobbes was thinking England’s) is undoubtedly the saddest, bloodiest and most visceral of all conflicts. I leave the last words to WB Yeats:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
Revolutions are unpredictable. They never run in straight lines. They reverberate, the shockwaves expanding and impacting on their vicinity, and way beyond. The shots ricochet, like drive-by shootings and crossfires, and you never know who will be hit, where the bullets will come to rest, and who will be damaged or destroyed. Many people will be liberated, and many enslaved. Many peoples will prosper, and many, many will perish. As TS Elliot wrote, “between the idea and the reality falls the shadow”.”
When the Tsarist Russian empire collapsed halfway through the First World War, it was the first of four great empires to disintegrate. By war’s end, the conflict had destroyed the German, Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. But unlike these three, though the imperial house perished, the empire it ruled did not disintegrate. A handful of national movements, Finnish, Polish, Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian succeeded in breaking free, but most of murdered Tsar’s realm emerged from the convulsions of world war, revolution and civil war within a new Soviet empire, one that still ruled millions of square miles and a multitude of peoples.
The Russian Revolutions – the two in 1917, and a failed rising in 1905 in the wake of the disastrous (for Russia) of Russo-Japanese War – and the civil war that followed can be said to have defined the contours of modern European geopolitics, setting the stage for the Cold War and also, the current Ukraine war. The 20th Century was not kind to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Historian Timothy Snyder called them “the blood lands”.
The USSR was officially declared in the Bolshoi Theatre on 30th December 1922. Most people find this slightly surprising, because we assume that the Soviet Union must have been proclaimed immediately after The Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917. In fact, it only came into existence after a horrendous civil war that killed an estimated 10 million people, in which the deep national and ethnic tensions inside the old Russian Empire had been laid bare for all to see.
Historian Orlando Figes says in his seminal book about the Bolshevik revolution, A People’s Tragedy, that the failure of democracy in 1917 was deeply rooted in Russian culture and social history and what had started as a people’s revolution contained the seeds of its degeneration into violence and dictatorship.
In Russia, the revolution of February 1917 did not provoke a counterrevolution. The initial absence of any attempt to fight back was illustrative not so much apathy, as a feeling that there was very little of the ancien regime left that was worth defending. The overthrow of the czarist regime prompted a variety of reactions amongst the former ruling class: a resignation to events, bitterness at the incompetence and obstinacy of the Imperial Court, yet also an initial optimism among its more liberal and idealistic members. Most of the nobility and bourgeoisie supported the Provisional Government in the hope that it would at least restrain the worst excesses and keep the country together.
Soon after the November 1917 revolution, Lenin made it clear to the Bolsheviks that civil war was necessary to cleanse Russia of reactionary forces and old ways and to rebuild as a communist state and society. Moreover, he was confident that the Bolsheviks’ example would ignite revolution in the countries of Western Europe. German and Hungarian communists obliged, establishing people’s republics, which in turn invited counter revolution, the ousting of the revolutionaries, and reactionary military and police exacting bloody revenge on any leftists that could find.
The determination to resist only crystallized when the Bolshevik programme in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 polarized opinion. The question is important when it comes to the origins of the Civil War itself, which led to the deaths of up to 12,000,000 people, the impoverishment of the whole country, and suffering on an unimaginable scale.
In June 1918 the Bolshevik regime was enjoying a brief respite from the rigors of revolution and civil war. Although surrounded on all sides by hostile forces, the Bolsheviks were in no immediate military danger. This welcome hiatus, lasting from the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918) to the collapse of the Central Powers at the end of the year, allowed the Bolsheviks to consolidate their political and military strength.
In an uneasy alliance with the Bolsheviks were leftwing Socialist Revolutionaries who still dreamed of a constituent assembly and the anarchists who regarded Brest-Litovsk represented the watershed of the Revolution. In coming to terms with the Central Powers, the Bolsheviks had paid a staggering price in territory and resources. But, more importantly, they had preferred to make a pact with the imperialists rather than attempt to propagate the Revolution through popular initiatives, in particular, by partisan warfare.
Shortly after Brest-Litovsk the Bolsheviks turned against their erstwhile allies. The Cheka (the successor to the Czar’s Okrana secret police and the precursor to the NKVD, the KGB and the FSB) ostensibly created to suppress counterrevolutionaries, was unleashed on the Bolsheviks’ critics on the left. There were fierce battles between Chekists and anarchists in Petrograd and many other Russian cities.
It was game on.
It is difficult to comprehend to scale of the civil war that broke out in Russia in terms of its territorial extent, the numbers of nations and would-be states engaged in the conflict, and the destruction and carnage it wrought to soldier and civilian alike. Nor the ongoing relentlessness. Western European invaders had been defeated in the past (and indeed, the future) by what Mikhail Kutuzov, the Russian general who defeated Napoleon, called General Winter, but within the empire and its Soviet successor, weather did not stop play. Certainly, it complicated military operations, played havoc with logistics and supply-chains, and inflicted indescribable suffering upon soldiers and civilians. And the war went on …
The last of the Romanovs – Tsar Nicholas and his family, murdered by the Bolsheviks in July 1918
Revolution and reaction
If Lenin was politically flexible with foreign powers, he was ruthless with his own people, including rival parties on the left. He grabbed power when the hapless provisional government lost its way in setting up a constituent assembly that was intended to be a democratic representation of all Russians. Lenin initially paid lip service to the assembly, while calling for power to go the “soviets” – people’s councils. In reality he had no intention of allowing any diminishment or oversight of his control of the Bolshevik party and, through its Council of People’s Commissars, the battered Russian state.
But no sooner had the Bolsheviks cemented their rule than they were fighting a civil war on multiple fronts against a mind-boggling array of enemies, stretching from revolutionary socialists and anarchists to unreconstructed “White Russian” tsarists, nostalgic for a corrupt and flagrantly unjust regime and in between the Reds and Whites were the Greens or Partisans, mainly deserters from all sides who hated both Reds and Whites and attacked both, increasingly so as the war continued. And a range of foreign powers dealt themselves into the game to further their own strategic and ideological interests. [the featured picture of this piece is an idealized manga depiction of charismatic Ukrainian anarchist and Green Nestor Makhno, a larger-than-life figure who miraculous survived the civil way and died in his bed in exile]
The Whites were a confused, fractured and often dysfunctional coalition with rapid changes of command occasioned by personal ambitions and fluctuating military fortunes. White generals were committed to restoring the integrity of the Russian Empire, a self-defeating handicap that alienated potential allies on the fringes, like Finland, the Baltic states and Poland. Churchill underestimated this imperial obsession which prevented the alliances he wanted to defeat the Bolsheviks. The Greater Russia obsession also hampered efforts in the Caucasus where Georgians stirred regions like Ingushetia, Chechnya and Dagestan, giving Britain nightmares of Bolshevism spreading through Central Asia towards India, an obsession that continued through the twenties as described in Peter Hopkirk’s Setting the East Ablaze – Lenin’s Dream of an Empire in Asia.
Out on the edge of the old empire, White warlords endeavoured to carve out kingdoms for themselves. Many commanders spent more time terrorizing locals than fighting the Red partisans who were operating behind enemy lines across the war zone, creating a legacy and tradition the persist to this day.
The diffusion of opponents played into the Bolsheviks’ hands, as their differences were so extreme that a unified opposition fighting force was never a viable option. But if the battle lines were often blurred, the hatred felt by the combatants for each other was nightmarishly vivid.
The White’s defeat in the civil war wasn’t for lack of outside moral and materiel support. It was due largely to their inflexibility, including their refusal to contemplate land reform until it was far too late, and their refusal to grant any autonomy to nationalities of the Czarist Empire. Their administration was so useless that it’s barely existed. Paradoxically, they lost for reasons very similar to the way the Republicans lost the Spanish Civil War two decades later. In Spain, the antifascist alliance of the Republic could not prevail against Generalissimo Franciso Franco‘s disciplined and militarized regime. In Russia, the utterly incompatible alliance of socialist revolutionaries and reactionary monarchists didn’t stand a chance against the single-minded Communist dictatorship.
A leftist libertarian with St. George’s Cross, and a Sister of Mercy nurse, 1916.
World War 1.2
It in many ways it became World War 1.2. The idea of a purely Russian Civil War is misleading simplification, prompting one historian recently to describe it instead as ‘a world war condensed’.
It was waged across European and Asian Russia, including present day Belarus and Ukraine and the successor states of the Soviet Union in the Baltic, the Caucasus, and Central Asia – from Warsaw and Eastern Europe to the Urals and eastwards through the vastness of Siberia’s forests, deserts and tundra to Vladivostok in the Far East, from the arctic north to Crimea and the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea and the borders of what in 1918 ceased to be the Ottoman Empire. Fronts stretched for thousands of miles and advances and retreats likewise. The Trans-Siberian Railway, stretching the length of the former empire from Moscow to Vladivostok, was almost six thousand miles long, and it’s tributary lines served as strategic and logistical thoroughfares for all protagonists who weren’t mounted like the innumerable Cossacks tribes and the nascent Red Cavalry, bringing to prominence the armoured trains that became a symbol of the revolution.
It drew in most of Russia’s contemporary neighbours and more far-flung nations, including The USA, Britain, France, Germany Italy and Japan – the latter providing the largest contingent, estimated by British Intelligence as some 85,000 soldiers, more than many of the various White armies. Combatants included soldiers from these countries, the British dominions of Canada, Australia, South Africa, and India, and Chinese and Mongolian troops. And a multitude of ethnicities fought for their own warlords, their national place in the sun or else their very survival. Caught up in the transcontinental maelstrom were Slavs, Cossacks, Tartars, Turkmen, Arabs, Azeris, Persians, Turks, Armenians, Chechens, Kazakhs, Buryat Mongols, Kalmyks (Europe’s only Buddhist nation) and Jews. White divisions were augmented in Siberia by Mongolian, Chinese, Uighur and Kirghiz mercenaries.
Various nationalist movements arose, successfully and unsuccessfully in all parts of the former Russian Empire. The aftermath of the First World War and the collapse of the Russian Empire saw Polish, German, Italian, Hungarian, Romanian, Czech, and myriad other nationalities fighting for disparate sides, and Beevor skillfully frames the bizarre impact of this on the ethnic nationalist dimensions of the conflict.
The scale of military manoeuvres was unprecedented, as were the physical and supply difficulties over vast distances, and the extremities in climate, particularly the bitter Russian winter. The conflict became very much a cavalry war and indeed, a “railway war” notable for its armoured trains and the logistical lifeline of the Trans-Siberian Railway, protected for much if the conflict by the Czechoslovak Legion, a force of Czech and Slovak nationalists who having fought in the Czarist army, joined the Whites who controlled many towns in Siberia.
In addition to the Czechs, there was also a Polish Legion operating in the Far East. The commanders of both forces became increasingly disenchanted with the White officers who refused to countenance the independence of the border states and who shocked many with their brutality towards prisoners and civilians, and though thousands of miles from Europe, demanded repatriation – ostensibly by sea from Vladivostok.
Western Allies’ ideological perspective of the civil war was ambivalent. Though many, politicians and military alike, were viscerally opposed to Bolshevism and what it stood for, and feared a Red contagion infecting their own countries, a fear that was not unfounded. In the wake of the Revolution, a concatenation of revolts detonated across the globe. Bolshevism spread westwards, from Vienna through Budapest and Sofia to Kiel. The Bavarian Soviet Republic was briefly established in April 1919, before the far-Right Freikorps did it in. Britain wasn’t immune to the ferment. Between the February and October Revolutions, the Leeds Soviet did indeed appear to be the beginning of something, whilst strikes and demonstrations proliferated to be violently put down by the police and army. Winston Churchill alone of his cabinet colleagues wanted a full-on allied intervention and dreamed – some believed he was indeed dreaming but others claimed that he fantasized – of creating an effective White army and a borderlands alliance to defeat the Bolsheviks. But his aspirations were foiled by the imperialism of the White leadership and of White officers and the various national movements’ fear that that if the Whites prevailed, they would restore Russian rule. Britain’s rulers were reticent about shoring up and providing financial, material support and also, soldiers sailors and airmen to brutal to demonstrably homicidal Cossack brigades and revanchist and reactionary royalist autocrats.
British regiments were nevertheless deployed in Siberia and in the Far East as well as the Arctic and Caspian Sea. Royal Navy flotillas blockaded Petrograd in the Baltic, floated up the Volga in the south and down the Dvina in the arctic north, and controlled the Caspian Sea and the waters around the Crimean Peninsula. The Royal Air Force deployed Sopwith Camels and sea planes in surveillance and surveillance missions against the Red forces, who British officers called the “Bolos”. And artillery units and armoured car squadrons were attached to the various White armies.
Wider imperial concerns were in play too. Churchill rang alarm bells as the Reds pushed the Whites back in Siberia and Central Asia, alarming even his reticent cabinet colleagues with prospect of Reds on the borders of the Raj. The Great Game still had over a quarter of century to run before the final whistle blew. In the Far East, Britain and the US, and Reds and Whites alike, were nervous about the designs imperial Japanese was revealing with regard to the resources and the empty lands of eastern Siberia, the island of Sakhalin, the pacific littoral and Manchuria. Intelligence reports revealed that Japanese forces in the region exceeded all others involved, including the warring Russians.
Pogrom
Fratricidal wars are bound to be cruel because of the lack of definable front lines, because of their instant extension into civilian life, and because of the terrible hatreds and suspicions which they engender. The fighting ranged right across the Eurasian landmass was violent beyond belief, especially the unspeakable cruelty of the Cossack atamans in Siberia. Even that archconservative politician VV Shukgin believed that one of the major reasons for the failure of the whites what is a “moral collapse” – that they behaved as badly as their enemy.
There was nevertheless one subtle yet important difference. All too often, whites represented the worst examples of inhumanity, yet on that score, the Bolsheviks were unbeatable. It has been said that their ruthlessness has few parallels in recorded European history up until that time – believing that history was on their side, and that a new world was being created. The almost religious zeal with which they brutalized and killed combatants and innocents alike could be likened to the Albigensian Crusade in the early thirteenth century. [The Crusaders were accompanied by an official representative of the Pope, a French Cistercian monk named Arnaud Amalric. According to accounts written decades later, as the attack began, a soldier asked Amalric how they would be able to tell which Beziers townspeople were Catholics and which were Cathars. Some sources give the alleged quote as “Kill them all, for the Lord knows his own” or as “Kill them all. The Lord knows his own.”]
The focus on ordinary people also means their suffering is brought to the fore. And Beevor is unsparing in showing the chaotic violence of the conflict, and unrelenting in showing the sheer violence of both sides. Reds and Whites are both revealed as more than comfortable burning villages, shooting traitors, suspected or real, and torturing and massacring prisoners, and men women and children caught in the crossfire.
There were many instances of racist violence mainly on the White side – particularly towards Jews. The Whites’ antipathy towards Jews was to some degree due to their perception that most senior Bolshevik were Jewish, but mostly it was that old devil that never went away, antisemitism. The fall of the Romanovs and the ancien regime and the anti-Semitic pogroms they perpetuated continued. Retreat from the major cities brought out the worse in the Whites, with terrible massacres of Jews – although they were not the only perpetrators. Playwright And author Isaac Babel, attached as a correspondent and propagandist to the Red Cavalry on the Polish Soviet front in late 2020 posed the question: “what sort of person is our (Red) Cossack? Many layered: looting, reckless daring, professionalism, revolutionary spirit, bestial cruelty. The population await their saviors. The Jews look for liberation – and in ride the Kuban Cossacks”.
It is estimated that there were some 1300 anti-Semitic pogroms in the Ukraine during the civil war, with some 50000 to 60000 killed by both sides. There were pogroms in Belarus also, but these were not nearly as murderous as in Ukraine. A Soviet report of 1920 mentions 150,000 dead and as many again badly injured.
Churchill was well aware of the effect of the pogroms on public opinion in the West and sought in vain to exert pressure on white leaders to restrain their forces.,
Terror begat terror, leading to greater acts of conspicuous cruelty. After a particularly hard-fought battle in early 1919, a young White horse artillery officer recalled “for the first time since the start of the civil war, prisoners were not shot. There were too many of them”. This did not happen often – and such was the brutality meted out to captives on both sides, shooting was actually a blessing. An Odesa women witness after the fall of the city to the Whites, “Urrrraaa! Four and a half months under these five-pointed star oppressors”. Two days later, Beevor notes, she noted that all the Jews were in hiding. When a city held by the Reds fell to the Cossacks, a a female surgeon observed that fearing a program, two Jewish doctors in her hospital wisely ran to hide in the attic.
Bolshevik leaders and commanders on the field eventually realized that brutality did not endear their cause to the general populace and moderated their behaviour. Some Whites too came to that conclusion, and sought to prevent it at least limit atrocities, but reactionary officers and uncontrollable Cossacks persisted in burning, looting, torturing and murdering, inflicting irreparable damage to the anti-Bolshevik cause. Beevor reports instances when allied forces actually fired on Cossack perpetrators.
The End
As the whites retreated, support for the red army amongst the populace grew, as did its numbers as deserters returned to its ranks encouraged by the announcement of an amnesty and as defections from the White forces grew. Peasants grew less reluctant to serve in the Red Army Fear that with white advances and victory, old landlords would reclaim their land. Success bred success. The Whites’ ranks thinned with desertions defections and the need to transfer troops to defend its rear from attacks by partisans and freelance militias units. The Cossacks, disappointed and tired of war, turned about and headed home to their stanitsas laden with loot. The size of the frontline Red Army was eventually twice that of the Whites, as it eliminated the White armies in the north and east and closed in on the last remaining area under White control, Crimea, where rearguards held out long enough to ensure the evacuation of 150,000 soldiers and civilians by sea protected by the British and French navies.
In the aftermath of total Soviet victory, starvation struck the towns and cities across the land. Food requisitioning detachments scoured the countryside for supplies, their rapaciousness and brutality igniting peasant rebellions from Belarus to Siberia; tens of thousands of peasants rose in revolt, dealing brutally with any Bolshevik that came into their hands. The Red Army and Cheka reciprocated in spades with burning and looting, rape and torture, execution and exile to the emergent Gulag. Workers went on strike in the starving cities, and with the Whites vanquished and the civil war won, the call for democratization of Soviet rule grew louder.
And then, the sailors of the Baltic Fleet at the Kronstadt naval base, who’s guns had heralded the fall of the Romanovs, and whom Trotsky had called “the pride and glory of the Russian Revolution”, rebelled. The regime responded with lies – that the sailors had been suborned and were now Whites – and that White forces in Finland would be crossing the ice to help them. When this didn’t work, I resolved to crush them without mercy, dispatching trustworthy forces against them.
At the end, of 16000 sailors and their families, most were able to cross that ice to final and. But some 3000 fought a last stand and died by assault or firing squad. One of the last cries of protest by the Kronstadt sailors was “All of Soviet Russia has been turned into a Russian penal colony”.
Thus ended the Russian Civil War in November 1920.
… all wars come to an end. And that’s where history restarts.
British war and foreign correspondent Robert Fisk
Evacuees board ship in a Crimean portEpilogue
Epilogue … history repeats
Whilst there were many active fronts during the civil war, often simultaneously, extending for thousands of kilometers, around Archangelsk and Murmansk in the arctic, along the great rivers the Volga, the Don and the Dniester in the south, in the Baltic provinces, and in Belarus, and along the length of the Trans-Siberian Railway. And as during WW2 and the present-day Ukraine war, opposing armies advanced and retreated across Ukraine. Kiev was occupied, often several occasions, by Reds, Whites and Greens, and finally, the Polish Army which invaded Russia and Ukraine in 1920 to reclaim and defend the independence of the onetime Polish state, long divided between the now destroyed Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian empires. The names of the war-torn cities are today tragically familiar. Mariupol and Melitopol, Karchiv and Kherson. Kiev, Odessa and Lvov are now Kyiv, Odesa and Lviv.
We’ve poured the wine of anger On the graves of honest men. We’ve raised the banner once before We’ll raise it once again. In the holy ground of memory The dragon’s teeth are sown. We’ll send our sons to die again So far away from home.
Paul Hemphill, I Gotta Book
Eighty four years ago last month, the Spanish cities of Madrid and Valencia fell to the nationalist forces of Francisco Franco. Victory was proclaimed as Franco placed his sword to rest upon the altar of a church declaring that he wouldn’t raise the blade again until Spain was in peril. The Spanish Civil War that had claimed hundreds of thousands of lives (upwards of half a million, possibly up to two) was at an end; the long march of the generalissimo was over and the reign of the Caudillo had begun. It endured until his death in 1975.
The Spanish Civil War was long, brutal and bloody, and medieval in its savagery. It was a war of armies and of militias, of men and women, of skirmishes and set-piece battles, of massacres and reprisals, and of wars within wars. It saw cities besieged and starved into surrender and towns destroyed by bombers and heavy artillery. It cut a swathe across the country leaving scars that endure to this day.
It became a proxy war for three dictators – Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin – who dispatched men and machines to fight under false flags in what would appear in retrospect to be a rehearsal for wars to come. It was a magnet for idealists and activists of disparate political creeds and from many lands who were to fight and die on both sides, including the celebrated International Brigades. It lured writers and poets who were to chronicle its confusion and carnage, including Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, WH Auden, André Malraux and Arthur Koastler. Many perished, the most famous being the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, murdered by Nationalist militia and buried in an unmarked grave, one of many unquiet graves scattered throughout the land.
We republish below a remarkable story of that long forgotten army in a long-forgotten war, and also, an article about the International Brigades.
In a televised address on September 30th last year, Vladimir Putin said: Russia is a great, 1000-year-old power, a whole civilisation, and it is not going to live by such makeshift, false rules … What, if not racism, is the West’s dogmatic conviction that its civilisation and neoliberal culture is an indisputable model for the entire world to follow?”
Now, one might not agree with Putin, and today, he is certainly persona non grata in Western forums, but one thing is for sure: Russian history mines its own unique seamWe republish below an article by American author, journalist and editor Christopher Caldwell. He advocates that we adopt a cautious and open minded perspective on historical memory, contemporary perceptions, lexicological differences, the dangers of making assumptions, and coming to conclusions and adopting opposing positions on the basis of incomplete and inadequate knowledge of other countries than our own with their distinct but not hermetically sealed histories and cultures.
Caldwell’s central focus is the colourful life and legacy of exiled Hungarian academic Tibor Szamuely.
Like many refugees from Communism, Szamuely was descended from both perpetrators and victims. An uncle of the same name served in the Hungarian Soviet Republic that took power for six months under Béla Kun in 1919, and died violently that year when the revolution failed. He was among that government’s most bloodthirsty ministers, and was called “Butcher Szamuely”. Szamuely’s family wound up in Moscow, where Tibor was born, and where his father was executed in Stalin’s purges. Young Tibor served in the Red Army, and he too was arrested and sent to a Labour camp. Rehabilitated, he served as Chancellor of Budapest University. In 1964, then nearing 40, he was teaching in the “ideological institute” of Ghana’s Marxist president Kwame Nkrumah when he defected to England.
He taught at the University of Reading in England and befriended Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, and Anthony Powell, among other literary anti-Communists. His book, unfinished when he died of cancer in 1972, was edited into its final form by Conquest and published two years later.
Szamuely taught me Russian and Soviet history and politics at Reading University. Back then, I was a political ingenue and a naive communist sympathizer and fellow-traveler, although my evolving perspectives were transforming and expanding. As my tutor, he advised me to study with an open mind and to put off juvenile thinking. He hadn’t been well when I knew him and he died a year after I graduated. Under his tuition, I’d resolved to specialize in Soviet Studies – but events intervened and I ended up in the Middle East (and that is another story. see: Tanks for the Memory – how Brezhnev changed my life).
He he would always impress upon me the historical and political continuity of what he called The Russian Tradition – the title of his one and only book, published shortly before his death, and now, regrettably, out of print. I purchased a first edition when it was published and it is on my bookshelf still.
Szamuely believed that the bloodstained drama of the revolutions of 1917 – there were two, the social democratic one in the February, the Bolshevik one in November – and the years that followed, including civil war, the establishment of the USSR and Stalinism largely obscured the underlying consistency of Russian history. He did not live to see the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, and the advent of Putin and Russia Redux, but the basic pattern persists, circular and repetitive. The frequent turmoils that have overtaken this vast continent have in their various ways made changes that were essentially superficial, leading in the end to the intensification, under new forms, of the old authoritarian structure.
From medieval times, autocracy has coexisted with a revolutionary traditionalism – a contradiction in terms as only Russia could sustain, a unique Russian capacity to seek revolution and discover regression, to invoke liberty merely to reinforce repression. if he were with us today, Szamuely would explain that the Soviet Union under Lenin and his successors and the Russia of Vladimir Putin bears so disconcertingly close a resemblance to Russia under the most savage of its tsars. His people, it turned out, had wanted freedom but wanted to retain the idea of their old Russian empire more. They ended up with the would-be czar, Vladimir Putin. And so the world turns.
There’s nothing wrong with being cautious. Since 1709, when Peter the Great routed the troops of Swedish King Charles XII at Poltava, smack-dab in the middle of modern-day Ukraine, Europeans have understood Russia as a military threat. Never has this required us to close our minds to the glories of Russian culture or to forget that Russia’s strategic posture always has an explanation — and sometimes even a rationale.
But what was intellectually possible for Westerners in the winter of 1943, when Hitler’s troops and Stalin’s were killing each other by the millions on the Eastern front, is apparently beyond our powers today. In the wake of Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine, many Europeans will not be content with anything less than wiping Russia and its culture off the map. In April, novelist Oksana Zabuzhko, writing in the TLS that it was the morality of Tolstoy and other Russian writers that “wove the camouflage net for Russia’s tanks”, urged us to “take a long, hard look at our bookshelves”. In early August, the Russian-language novelist Wolodymyr Rafejenko declared he now felt a “revulsion” when he conversed in Russian, and vowed never again to write in it.
These are Ukrainians — one can understand their anguish and rage. But Western Europeans, who are not even at war, have been even more zealous. A Milan university cancelled its Dostoevsky class last spring. The EU and UK have blacked out the Russian internet channel RT. Russians have been declared unwelcome at venues from Wimbledon to Estonia.
Back in the middle of the 20th century, when Russia was capable of far worse, the Russian-born historian Tibor Szamuely wrote an extraordinary book. The Russian Tradition explained how Russian political behaviour (about which Szamuely was wary to the point of hostility) arose from Russian history and culture (about which Szamuely was respectful to the point of reverence). This is the right balance. It has not been struck so well since. Too bad the book is out of print, because it is strangely relevant to a lot of this decade’s preoccupations: slavery, political correctness and Ukraine, for starters.
Like many refugees from Communism, Szamuely was descended from both perpetrators and victims. An uncle of the same name served in the Hungarian Soviet Republic that took power for six months under Béla Kun in 1919, and died violently that year when the revolution failed. He was among that government’s most bloodthirsty ministers, which is really saying something. Szamuely’s family wound up in Moscow, where his father was executed in Stalin’s purges. In 1964, Szamuely, then nearing 40, was teaching in the “ideological institute” of Ghana’s Marxist president Kwame Nkrumah when he defected to England. He taught at Reading and befriended Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, and Anthony Powell, among other literary anti-Communists. His book, unfinished when he died of cancer in 1972, was edited into its final form by Conquest and published two years later.
The simple question that animates it is how Russia came to be the centre of Marxist revolution and late 20th-century totalitarianism. Did aggressive Communism subvert blameless Russia? Or was aggressive Russia using blameless Communism as a pretext?
The beginnings of an answer lie in geography. Lacking frontiers, Szamuely writes, Russia has faced “a history of armed struggle against invaders that, for length, intensity and ferocity has no parallel in the annals of any other nation”. That is a large claim. Russia is always vulnerable someplace — at least for as long as it takes to gather and concentrate its killing power. And it is always fighting for its life, which tends — at least in domestic Russian debates — to empty of meaning our concepts of just and unjust war. “Despotic government,” Szamuely writes, “was the instrument she shaped to cope with the everlasting emergency.”
For Szamuely, the central problem in Russian history is slavery. Yes, slavery. Using the word “serf” to describe its put-upon agricultural workers leads us to think of the society as merely backward, quaint, feudal. But this is wrong. Russian slavery was a creation of modernity. Once-free agricultural labourers somehow got buried under debt about 500 years ago, and in the mid-16th century the government bound them to the land, the better to tax them. The owner of the serfs was the state, not the notables on whose land they toiled. There was an equality in this, for the notables were beholden to the state, too. The upper crust owed the tsar military service. Until recent centuries, Russia was one of the rare countries where nobles could be publicly flogged.
But this changed, as Peter the Great tried to modernise the system — Russia got rum, minuets, a navy and of course St. Petersburg. For aristocrats it meant Western connections and new opportunities, for serfs an overload of labour and hard discipline. That was an end to society’s old “mystic unity” and the mumbo-jumbo that had surrounded it. Serfs could now be sold or lost at cards. Russia now had not one people, Szamuely writes, but two: “the Westernised upper classes, and the masses, whose way of life became ever less distinguishable from that of the population of the great Asian empires.” As middle classes in America and France were forging republics, aristocrats were living a Golden Age under Catherine the Great (1762-95). “The most striking feature of 18th-century Russian social history,” Szamuely writes, “was the great expansion and intensification of peasant bondage at the precise moment when, with the emancipation of the nobility, it finally lost any vestige of moral, political or legal justification.”
Szamuely’s preoccupation with slavery anticipates a lot of the “woke” discussion of our own time. If slavery warped the development of the United States (which was one-eighth slave at the start of its civil war in 1861), Szamuely asks, then why has there been so much less soul searching about Russia (which was seven-eighths slave at the time of emancipation that same year)? He may misunderstand the parallel: The difference lies not in the size of the enslavement but in the identity of the rememberer. Progressive white America is wracked by guilt over what it did to “them”. Russia feels no such guilt because the misdeeds were done to “us”. The moral tenor of its soul-searching is more like that of Sicily, or Ireland, or black America.
But it is not as if Russia had no reckoning with serfdom. As access to higher education and newsprint spread, “gradually the idea began to sink in that every Russian of education and leisure was an accomplice in a crime unparalleled in its enormity”. This was the cause around which a revolutionary and often violent intelligentsia arose in the late 19th century, a class unique in Europe until the rise of political correctness. “The Russian intelligentsia was an instrument of destruction,” Szamuely writes. “Unlike the European bourgeoisie it had no constructive purposes, neither was it equipped to fulfil any such tasks.”
There was something Messianic in the intelligentsia’s role. Szamuely recognises that it used others’ suffering as a rationale for autocracy. But he never entertains the idea that the intelligentsia was an outright racket. He even praises the “intellectual honesty” of the critic Nikolay Chernyshevsky, who saw that equality would be won only at a very steep price in liberty: “What a contrast he provides to certain Western ‘progressive’ intellectuals, who worship at the altar of egalitarianism yet refuse to recognise that their dream… can only be realised by an arbitrary dictatorial government. Chernyshevsky and his followers, down to the present day, have never harboured any illusions about this.”
He is nonetheless struck that the great 19th-century Russian novelists (“men of sensibility, compassion and humanity”) were almost unanimously contemptuous of the intelligentsia (“with their joyless utilitarianism, their dogmatic intolerance, their fanatical devotion to a messianic vision”).
The modern enslavement of Russia’s peasantry was not, strictly speaking, a capitalist project. But it felt like one. More than the exploitation undergone in advanced industrial countries, it resonated with the exploitation Marx described. In the end, the Russian revolution was a matter of adjusting Marx’s teaching to powerful Russian folk-institutions, above all the autonomous peasant cooperative known as the obshchina. Marx himself wound up backing peasant “populists” against his own more orthodox followers. It actually turned out to be a piece of good fortune for the revolutionaries that the Marxist spark caught in what Szamuely considers the most conservative country on earth.
That is where Szamuely’s book ends. It is a shame he was never able to write at book-length about the 20th century, of which he was a passionate chronicler. He considered Lenin “the supreme political genius of the century”, and was impressed with the way he and his followers allied Russia’s interests abroad to Asian and African nationalism, not Communism. It was, in a way, the same judgment Marx had made in backing the populists.
Szamuely was fascinated with Ukraine. “Perhaps no other historical experience,” he writes in The Russian Tradition, “has left as lasting an impression on the folk-memory of the Russian people as the horrors of [the] interminable struggle against the slavers and killers of the south. For centuries the steppe remained a source of constant menace, a land of terror, death, destruction and degradation. It was called the Wild Plain, or, as we would say today, the Frontier; the greater part of this region is now called the Ukraine…”
He was highly sympathetic to Ukraine’s modern struggles. In 1968 he wrote a fascinating and well-informed account of the nationalist protests and ensuing prosecutions that had then been going on in Ukraine for much of the decade. While granting that the Ukrainians welcomed the Nazis as liberators in June 1941, he wasn’t surprised by this nationalist sentiment, given the decade of famine and purges they had endured. He noted, too, the “methodological dilution” of Ukraine’s ethnic composition by Russia, insisting that Russian dominance of the country’s high culture was a recent and unnatural phenomenon. Only 41% of books published in Ukraine were in Ukrainian, it is true, but in 1930, before Russification and famine, that figure had been 84%.
Szamuely never let justified fear of Russia drive out justified fascination. Vastly well read in the country’s history, he still found it ambiguous, describing the policies of Ivan the Terrible at one point as “a strange mixture of farsightedness and paranoia — a combination frequently reproduced by his successors through the centuries”. Few historians have been better equipped than Szamuely to understand the paradoxes of Russia, where the novelists are sublime and the politics are unendurable, and often for the same reasons.
Tsar Nicholas the Last
The last of the Romanovs – Tsar Nicholas and his family, murdered by the Bolsheviks in July 1918
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
WB Yeats, Easter 1916
On the morning of August 5th 1939 thirteen young women were put against the walls of Madrid’s La Almudena Cemetery and shot…
They were: Carmen Barrero Aguado (age 24), Martina Barroso García (age 22), Blanca Brissac Vázquez (age 29), Pilar Bueno Ibáñez (age 27), Julia Conesa Conesa (age 19), Adelina García Casillas (age 19), Elena Gil Olaya (age 20), Virtudes González García (age 18), Ana López Gallego (age 21), Joaquina López Laffite (age 23), Dionisia Manzanero Salas (age 20), Victoria Muñoz García (age 19), and Luisa Rodríguez de la Fuente (age 18).
They sang the “Youthful Guardsmen,” the anthem of the JSU, as they were taken from the prison they shared with other members of the organization to the cemetery.
Eighty years ago this month, the Spanish cities of Madrid and Valencia fell to the nationalist forces of Francisco Franco. Victory was proclaimed as Franco placed his sword to rest upon the altar of a church declaring that he wouldn’t raise the blade again until Spain was in peril. The Spanish Civil War that had claimed hundreds of thousands of lives (upwards of half a million, possibly up to two) was at an end; the long march of the generalissimo was over and the reign of the Caudillo had begun. It endured until his death in 1975.
The Spanish Civil War was long, brutal and bloody, and medieval in its savagery. It was a war of armies and of militias, of men and women, of skirmishes and set-piece battles, of massacres and reprisals, and of wars within wars. It saw cities besieged and starved into surrender and towns destroyed by bombers and heavy artillery. It cut a swathe across the country leaving scars that endure to this day.
It became a proxy war for three dictators – Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin – who dispatched men and machines to fight under false flags in what would appear in retrospect to be a rehearsal for wars to come. It was a magnet for idealists and activists of disparate political creeds and from many lands who were to fight and die on both sides, including the celebrated International Brigades. It lured writers and poets who were to chronicle its confusion and carnage, including Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, WH Auden, André Malraux and Arthur Koastler. Many perished, the most famous being the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, murdered by Nationalist militia and buried in an unmarked grave, one of many unquiet graves scattered throughout the land.
Since Franco’s death, successive Spanish governments have endeavoured to heal the wounds of the war and the dictatorship by condoning what could be described as historical amnesia. And yet, such official forgetfulness, well-intentioned as it might be, is often suborned by our species’ instinctive need to remember and to memorialize our dearly departed.
Valle de los Caidos, the Valley of the Fallen, in the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains near Madrid, is one such monument. This grandiose necropolis hosts a mass grave of some 34,000 war dead of all sides, as well as the tombs of an embalmed Franco and of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the fascist Falange Española. It is a shrine and a place of pilgrimage for nationalists andFalangists old and young, and a bitter reminder for the families and friends of the vanquished.
The current socialist government has shattered the deafening silence. it is determined to move Franco’s remains out the basilica and to make the Valley of the Fallen a more neutral place to honour the victims of the war and its vengeful aftermath.
The mass graves of Spain’s civil war victims is a live issue as the nation comes to terms with its history. Even the weather compels the soil to give up its dead, revealingthe scale and the savagery of the slaughter that followed the victory of Franco’s Nationalists. Recent storms have swept away soil in an area of Madrid’s La Almudena public cemetery, exposing the bones of three thousand people executed on the orders of Francoist military courts in the five years after Spain’s civil war ended in 1939. They include, it is believed, the remains of Las Treces Rosas, the Thirteen Roses.
Outside the history books and the stories, songs and folk memories of ageing socialists and anarchists, there is but limited interest, knowledge and understanding of the causes, chronology and consequences of the civil war – and I am not about to rectify that in this post. Click here to and hereto read reasonable synopses.
Rather, I will take the opportunity to publish a story about the war – one tragedy among so many – that illustrates its systematic ruthlessness. Here is the story of those thirteen young victims.
By Rafael Narbona. Translation by Diarmuid Breatnach; original version published in Spanish in Rafael Narbona’s blog August 2013, also republished by kind permission in Rebel Breeze.
On the morning of August 5th 1939 thirteen women were shot dead against the walls of Madrid’s La Almudena Cemetery.
Nine were minors, because at that time the age of majority was not reached until twenty-one. Ranging in age from 18 to 29, all had been brought from the Sales women’s prison, a prison that was designed for 450 people and in 1939 contained 4,000. Apart from Brisac Blanca Vazquez, all belonged to the Unified Socialist Youth (JSU) or PCE (Communist Party of Spain). Although they had not participated in the attack that killed Isaac Gabaldon, commander of the Civil Guard, they were charged with being involved and conspiring against the “social and legal order of the new Spain”.
The trial was held on August 3rd and 56 death sentences were issued, including the perpetrators of the attack. The Thirteen Roses went to their execution hoping to be reunited with their JSU comrades. In some cases it would have meant a boyfriend or husband but their hopes crumbled upon learning that the men had been shot already.
The brick wall clearly showed the bullet holes and the earth had been turned dark by blood. Some days, the death toll exceeded two hundred and machine guns were used to facilitate the work. Between 1939 and 1945, four thousand people were shot in the Eastern Cemetery, including Julián Zugazagoitia, Minister of the Interior with Juan Negrín and remarkable writer and socialist politician.
According to Maria Teresa Igual, prison officer and eyewitness, the Thirteen Roses died with fortitude. There were no screams or pleas. In an eerie half-silence, only the steps of the firing squad were heard, the sound of the guns striking the straps and the voice of the commanding officer. Lined up shoulder to shoulder, after the shooting all received the coup de grace, which was clearly heard in the Sales women’s prison. Apparently, one of the condemned (whether Anita or Blanca is not known), did not die immediately and had shouted, “Am I not to be killed?”
Antonia Torre Yela was spared execution by a typing error. In transcribing her name, the letters danced and became Antonio Torres Yera. The error only postponed death for Antonia, a member of the JSU and only 18. She was shot on February 19th, 1940, becoming the 14th Rose. In her farewell letter, Julia Conesa, nineteen and member of the JSU, wrote: “Let my name not be erased from history.” Her name and that of her comrades has not been forgotten, unlike those of their tormentors, who enjoyed impunity for 38 years of dictatorship and a shameful amnesty which only helped to deepen the hurt suffered by all victims of Francoism.
The PSOE (main social-democratic party — DB) tried to appropriate the Thirteen Roses, concealing that at the time of the executions the PSOE had split from the JSU to found the Socialist Youth of Spain (JSE), with the purpose of clearly distancing themselves from the Communist Party of Spain (PCE). In fact, the Law of Historical Memory of Zapatero’s government (the first PSOE government after Franco — DB) did not even consider overturning the dictatorship’s judicial verdicts. It should be remembered that nearly fifty men were also shot dead that sad August 5th, the “43 Carnations”. Franco showed the same ruthlessness to men and women.
A hell
Sales jail was a hell, with children, elderly and mothers with children huddled in hallways, stairs, patios and bathrooms. Manuela and Teresa Basanta Guerra were the first women executed against the walls of the Eastern Cemetery. They shot them on June 29th 1939 along with a hundred men. Some historians claim that other women preceded them but their names were not recorded in the cemetery’s files. Like others on death row, the Thirteen Roses could only write to their families after receiving confession. If they did not take confession, they gave up the opportunity to say goodbye to their loved ones.
Brisac Blanca was the eldest of the thirteen and active in no political organization. Catholic and one who voted for the Right, she nevertheless fell in love with a musician who belonged to the PCE, Enrique Garcia Mazas. They married and had a son. Both were arrested and sentenced to death in the same trial. In fact, Enrique was in Porlier prison and would be shot a few hours before her. Blanca wrote a letter to her son Enrique, asking him not to harbour ill-will towards those responsible for her death and to become a good and hardworking man.
In postwar Madrid there was vicious persecution and resentment of any citizen suspected of “joining the rebellion”, the technicality that was used to reverse the law, accusing supporters of the Second Republic of violating the law in force. Only the military, the clergy, the Falange and the Carlists could breathe easily. No one dared to walk around in workers’ overalls or wearing the traditional local bandanna (worn by men around the neck and by women as a kerchief around the head, it is still worn today at festival in Madrid — DB).
The city was a huge prison where “hunt the red” was taking place. The earlier militia-women aroused particular animosity. The Arriba newspaper edition of May 16th 1939, featured an article by José Vicente Puente in which his contempt does not mince words: “One of the greatest tortures of the hot and drunk Madrid were the militia-women parading openly in overalls, lank-haired, with sour voice and rifle ready to shoot down and end lives upon a whim to satiate her sadism. With their shameless gestures, the primitive and wild, dirty and dishevelled militiawomen had something of atavism, mental and educational. … …. They were ugly, low, knock-kneed, lacking the great treasure of an inner life, without the shelter of religion, within them femininity was all at once extinguished.”
In this climate of hatred and revenge, denunciations proliferated — they were the best means of demonstrating loyalty to the fascist Movement.
The interrogations …. copied Gestapo tortures
The interrogations in police stations copied Gestapo tortures: electric shock on the eyes and genitals, the “bathtub”, removing fingernails with pliers, mock executions. Women suffered especially because the torture was compounded by sexual abuse, castor oil and hair cut down to the scalp. In some cases they even shaved eyebrows to further depersonalize. Rapes were commonplace. The testimony of Antonia Garcia, sixteen, “Antoñita” is particularly chilling: “They wanted to put electric currents on my nipples but since I had no chest they just put them in my ears and burst my eardrums. I knew no more. When I came to I was in jail. I spent a month in madness”.
Among those responsible for the interrogations was General Gutierrez Mellado, hero of the Transition and Captain in the Information Service of the Military Police (CPIS ) during the toughest years following the war. He regularly attended executions, seeking last-minute confessions. On August 6th 1939 he pulled Cavada Sinesio Guisado, nicknamed “Pioneer”, military chief of the JSU after the war, out of the execution line. “Pioneer” had been lined up against the Eastern Cemetery wall and was awaiting the discharge of lead along with the rest of his comrades. Gutiérrez Mellado stepped forward and ordered his release. He forced him to witness the executions and asked for more information about PCE clandestine activity. Although he was cooperative and diligent, he was shot in the end on September 15th. Some claim that Gutierrez Mellado witnessed the execution of the Thirteen Roses but I was not able to verify the data.
The women’s prison in Sales was run by Carmen Castro. Her inflexibility and lack of humanity found expression in the conditions of life of the children in prison with their mothers. No soap or hygienic facilities — almost all had ringworm, lice and scabies. Many died and were placed in a room where the rats were trying to devour the remains. Adelaida Abarca, JSU activist, said the bodies were only skin and bones, almost skeletons, for hunger had consumed them slowly. Another prisoner said: “The situation of the children was maddening. They were also dying and dying with dreadful suffering. Their glances, their sunken eyes, their continuous moans and stench are branded on my memory.” (Testimony given to Giuliana Di Febo in Resistance and the Women’s Movement in Spain [1936-1976] , Barcelona 1979).
The prisoners lived within the shadow of the “pit”, the death penalty. Since the execution of the Basanta Guerra sisters, they knew that the regime would have no mercy on women. On the morning when the Thirteen Roses were shot, Virtudes Gonzalez ‘s mother was at the jail doorway. When she saw her daughter climbing into the truck that was carrying prisoners to the cemetery walls, she began shouting: “Bastards ! Murderers ! Leave my daughter alone!” She chased the truck and fell. Alerted by the commotion, the Sales jail officers went outside and picked her off the ground, taking her into the prison. She was kept inside as yet another prisoner.
“If I had been sixteen they would have shot me too”
No less dramatic were Enrique’s repeated attempts to find out the whereabouts of his parents, Blanca and Enrique Garcia Brisac Mazas. In an interview with journalist Carlos Fonseca , author of the historical essay Thirteen Red Roses ( Madrid, 2005 ), Enrique gave his bitter account: “I was eleven years old when they shot my parents and my relatives tried to conceal it. They said they had been transferred to another prison and therefore we could not go to see them, until one day I decided to go to Salesas and there a Civil Guard Brigadier told me they had been shot and that if I had been sixteen they would have shot me too, because weeds had to be pulled up by the roots.
My grandmother and my aunts, my mother’s sisters, who had fallen out with my mother, ended up telling me that if Franco had killed my parents it would be because they were criminals. They even concealed my mother’s farewell letter for nearly twenty years.”
I will not end this article by invoking reconciliation, because the Transition was not based on repairing the pain of the victims, but rather on the acquittal of the executioners. In fact, the reform of the criminal dictatorship was designed by those as low as Manuel Fraga, Rodolfo Martín Villa and José María de Areilza. Martín Villa concealed and destroyed documents to bury the crimes of Francoism and the dirty war he organized against anarchist and pro-independence activists of the Basque, Catalan and Canaries areas, from his post as Minister of the Interior between 1976 and 1979. Among his achievements one should list the Scala case (an attack that killed four workers, which was blamed on the CNT), the attempted assassination of Canaries independence leader Antonio Cubillo, the machine-gunning of Juan Jose Etxabe, historic leader of ETA and his wife Rosario Arregui (who died from eleven bullet wounds), also the murder of José Miguel Beñaran Ordeñana, “Argala”.
The impunity of the perpetrators
He is now a successful businessman, who gets excited talking about his role in the Transition. He lives quietly and no one has called for his prosecution. His example is an eloquent one of the impunity of the perpetrators, who continue to write the narrative while demonizing those who dared to stand against the miseries of the dictatorship and false democratic normalization.
No justice has been done. So it is absurd to talk of reconciliation, because nobody has apologized and repaired the damage. Franco committed genocide but today Manuel Gonzalez Capón, Mayor of Baralla (Lugo), of the Partido Popular (the main right-wing party), dares to declare that “those who were sentenced to death by Franco deserved it.” The Biographical Dictionary of the Royal Academy of History, funded with nearly seven billion euros of public funds, says Franco “set up an authoritarian but not totalitarian regime”, although in his speech in Vitoria/ Gastheiz, Franco himself said that “a totalitarian state in Spain harmonises the functioning of all abilities and energies of the country …”. The current scenario is not a reconciliation but instead is a humiliation of the victims and society, obscenely manipulated by a media (ABC, El País , El Mundo, La Razón), playing a similar role to newspapers of the dictatorship (ABC, Arriba, Ya, Pueblo, Informaciones, El Alcázar), covering up and justifying torture cases and applauding antisocial measures that continue reducing working class rights.
Let us not remember the Thirteen Roses as passive and submissive but instead for their courage and determination. With the exception of Blanca, trapped by circumstances, all chose to fight for the socialist revolution and the liberation of women. I think that if they were able to speak out today, they would not talk of indignation and peaceful disobedience, but would ask for a rifle to stand in the vanguard of a new anti-fascist front, able to stop the crimes of neo-liberalism. Let us not betray their example, forgetting their revolutionary status, they who sacrificed their lives for another world, one less unjust and unequal.
Postscript
Just as the Civil War stirs Spain’s historical memory, so the spectre of the Paris Commune of 1870 haunts still the French soul. One can walk through the centre of modern Paris from the Louvre to the celebrated Père Lachaise cemetary Père Lachaise retracing the steps of defeated communardes as retreated to to last stand among the tombstones. It was there, in front of laMurdes Fédérés that the bloodied and ragged survivors were lined up and shot.
The beautiful church of Sacre Coeur was built as a penance for, and a solemn reminder of the bloodletting of what is aptly called la semaine sanglante – in much the same way as Justinian raised the glorious Hagia Sophia in Constantinople as a form of contrition after the Nika Riots when his soldiers slaughtered tens of thousands of his rebellious citizens and buried their bodies under the Hippodrome.
80 years ago today in 1939, as the world waited with bated breathon Hitler’s next move in Central Europe, in Spain, with the help of allies within the city, Madrid fell to the Nationalist forces of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. The next day, beleaguered Valencia would also fall and a few days after that victory was proclaimed as Franco placed his sword to rest upon the altar of a church declaring not to raise the blade again until Spain was imperiled. The Spanish Civil War that had claimed hundreds of thousands of lives was thus at an end, and the reign of the Caudillo had begun in earnest that was to last until his death in 1975.
Born in 1892 in Galicia, Franco belonged to a devoutly Catholic upper class family with a long tradition of serving in the Spanish navy. Unable to follow in the footsteps of his forefathers, Franco had chosen the army instead at the age of 14 and conducted himself with disciplined excellence from the outset, swiftly gaining a reputation as a highly professional and trusted leader of fighting men at a time when the Royal Spanish army was characterized by a general sloppiness and lack of discipline. A severe and austere man who placed his faith in tradition, Catholicism, and the monarchy, Franco had risen up through the ranks as the youngest officer in the army in Spain’s colonial wars in Morocco as an example to them all. When the Spanish monarchy was abolished in 1931 Franco was disgusted, not least because shortly afterwards the new republic laid him off and placed him on the inactive list. Franco accepted his fate like a soldier and patiently waited until a conservative government came to power and he was called back to service, jumping back into military life with alacrity as Spain’s political system steadily disintegrated. By 1936 however he could stand by no longer and watch his country fall apart, after much hesitation he joined with his fellow officers and rebelled against the Republic, marching an army into Spain from North Africa and starting the long and bloody struggle against the Republicans supported by the USSR and the International Brigades whilst Franco received aid from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. With the death of all the other major military leaders by late 1936, Franco was chosen as the man to lead the Nationalists to victory and as the war drew to a close his government was recognised by the British and French governments.
Despite popular depictions of him as a Fascist dictator akin to Hitler and Mussolini, Franco in truth had little time for Fascism. While he certainly presided over a one-party state, unlike in Italy and Germany, the party firstly was not on a par with the state and secondly only a component of it, the Phalange, were Fascists, the rest were Carlist monarchists, traditionalists and conservatives. As a committed Catholic and monarchist, Franco had no time for the esotericism and mysticism of National Socialism and Fascism. While Hitler and Mussolini both had experience of war along with much of their inner circle, they were not of the upper officer echelons as Franco was. He was a military dictator, not a messianic god-like figure of a mass movement. The characterization of his regime as totalitarian is also problematic too since totalitarian would imply that he ruled through terror, annihilating segments of the population beyond those who were openly opposed to his regime. Tens of thousands did indeed perish under his regime with summary executions in the White Terror that followed his Civil War victory coupled with the brutal campaigns against sporadic rebellions and expressions of dissent in subsequent years, however he did not go beyond crushing those he did not need to to stay in power, he did not seek out a helpless ‘objective enemy’ that was to be continuously exterminated as was the case in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. His interest was not a radical reshaping of the world but as might be expected of a man of his background and career, order, stability, and a restoration of traditional norms.
That all being said he was undoubtedly predisposed towards the Axis powers due to his hatred of Communism and no doubt a certain degree of debt he owed to them after their help in the Civil War. Despite his country having gone through three hellish years of war he was more than eager to join the Axis after the Fall of France in 1940. He envisioned the formation of a Latin Bloc to dominate the Mediterranean consisting of Spain, Italy, the Vatican, Vichy France, and Portugal. That year he met Hitler in Hendaye to discuss this possibility. At this meeting between the Caudillo and the Führer, Franco laid down his conditions: he wanted food, fuel and supplies for his country in the event of an Allied naval blockade, in expectation of Britain’s defeat he wanted Gibraltar along with French Morocco, a portion of Algeria and the colony of Cameroon. This proved too high a price to pay, the demand on Cameroon was especially jarring to Hitler since this had been a German colony prior to 1919. Mussolini moreover had his eye on Algeria. In the end the three dictators could not reconcile themselves to one another and Spain remained neutral though volunteers were sent to aid the Axis against the USSR in the form of the Blue Division. Franco likewise refused any prospect of the Wehrmacht being allowed to march through Spain to take Gibraltar themselves, a move which had it been made could have crippled the British position in the Mediterranean and altered the course of the war completely. Spain remained independent, remaining friendly with the Axis but not so much as to be roped into their ungodly self-destruction. During the war he was credited by having given sanctuary to tens of thousands of Jews fleeing the Nazi Empire.
Spain found itself isolated in the immediate aftermath of the war and was excluded from the Marshall Plan. With the mounting tensions of the Cold War however the Western powers slowly started to align themselves with the conservative anti-communist military dictator. In 1953 President Eisenhower visited the country and concluded the Pact of Madrid which brought Spain out of isolation and eventually led to the country joining NATO. Many of the old guard in charge of the economy were replaced by technocrats who brought in a free market economy. By the 1960s economic growth rocketed upwards, resulting in the Spanish Miracle, giving rise to a new middle class. The colonial empire moreover which Franco had so passionately fought for in the past was steadily let go of with both Morocco and Equatorial Guinea let go of by the end of the 1960s. Behind this economic prosperity however the regime remained as traditional as ever, with strict Catholic morality on abortion, divorce, homosexuality and prostitution holding sway in both law and society. Women were confined to the home and had practically no rights, their financial affairs managed by their fathers and husbands. Any languages or traditions not considered Spanish enough were systemically suppressed. When university students protested in the 1960s and the 1970s against the regime, Franco resorted to his old ways and crushed them.
The Caudillo was an old man now though and by the early 1970s he recognised that death was moving upon him. Before death could claim him he decided to restore the monarchy – even though the country had always officially been a monarchy since he had taken power. Though he initially offered the throne to Otto von Habsburg, the last Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary, in a bid to restore Spain to her Habsburg Golden Age and to avoid another Carlist War of succession. In the end however he gave it to the Carlist pretender, Juan Carlos of the House of Bourbon. Franco died in late 1975. His regime was swiftly converted to a democracy with the help of the new king.l
At the root of all this is freedom of speech. If we wish to preserve and extend our liberties or maintain our democracies, we need to understand this. We must equip ourselves to practice it well, educate our young to understand how unusual such liberty has been in human history and how difficult it is to maintain. Paul Monk
Every once in a while, The Australian commissions an articulate and respected conservative commentator to pen a piece on a topic dear to its editorial heart. He (these worthy souls are invariably old, white blokes) duly oblige, for kudos or cash or both, and yet are careful not to become ensnared in the NewsCorp echo-chamber that houses the more virulent and predictable of its opinionistas. Historian Geoffrey Blainey recently managed such as arabesque when writing about the controversial Ramsay Centre (see The Oz’s Lonely Crusade). Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson did likewise in a tribute to Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn (see Ghosts of the Gulag).
Australian author Paul Monk has done likewise when invited to ruminate on free speech in western universities. Instead of laying into left-wing uni students and the so-called Green Left, the bêtes noir of columnists like Chris Kenny, Gerard Henderson and Janet Albrechtsen, Monk refused to sing their song. Instead, he reminds us of our history and of our responsibility as democrats and reasonable folk to maintain dialogue with and endeavour to understand the reasoning (or its dearth) of our ideological opponents. History has shown us that once the shouting stops, the shooting often starts.
Often, I am disappointed, saddened even, by the ignorance, naivety, and self-absorption of electorates, left and right: their lack of historical knowledge and of curiosity, an unhealthy and self-defeating habit of accepting facts, narratives and theories based upon their preconceptions and prejudices.
Nowadays, it often seems as if the reasonable middle has been excised from political discourse, drained out by the shrill voices of the extremes with their identity politics, virtue signalling, and vested interests. Social media has exacerbated the situation as folk lock themselves into their own echo chambers, listening only to those with whom they agree, ignoring or even avoiding contrary opinions and perspectives. It is a self-defeating, delusional, zero-sum form of groupthink that erodes trust and goodwill and prevents the development of consensus and cooperation.
Meanwhile, opportunistic politicians and commentators build their constituencies by appealing to the particularistic, even atavistic wants and fears of their followers. Too often this reduces things down to atavistic lowest common denominators. They literally seize the low moral ground. Peoples problems and fears are real enough, and do need to be solved or allayed, but too often they are gulled, manipulated and recruited by modern-day snake-oil salesmen and show-tent shysters.
Monk’s piece is a timely reminder as he enjoins is to teach our children well.
Five Rules for Civil Engagement
Paul Monk, The Australian, 8th December 2018
There seems to be an extraordinary amount of confusion around these days regarding freedom of speech in our universities and more generally. But civil society and constitutional government require freedom of speech. And freedom of speech requires sound meta-rules regarding the way it is conducted.
Suppress freedom of speech and you move towards authoritarian government. Without sound meta-rules you move towards anarchy and violence.
Around the world right now we can see a disturbing drift in each of these directions.
What do I mean here by “meta-rules”? I mean the overarching political and civil rules that govern the conditions under which debates are conducted and dissent or protest permitted.
Ever since the Greek city-states pioneered democratic government and freedom of speech 2500 years ago, there has been a long struggle over the nature of the rules and how to uphold them.
Our present debates about freedom of speech, “hate speech”, censorship and “deplatforming” belong squarely within this tradition. It was, after all, the Athenian democracy that condemned Socrates to death for “impiety” and “corrupting the youth”; but we tend to admire him rather than those who condemned him.
The meta-rules we need now, in the interests of science as well as democratic governance and civil peace, are five in number. 1. That there is such a thing as truth and that the whole point of civilised and patient discourse is to elicit the truth. 2. That, since this may prove difficult and time-consuming, we agree to disagree while the inquiry and discourse are pursued, rather than simply insisting on our prior opinion being the truth. 3. That the search for truth itself be conducted according to workable principles of reason and evidence, not dogma or vehement assertion. 4. That we strive to see the distinction between opinion and truth and accept that truth, once grasped, will generally require that we alter our opinions. 5. That we agree to open contentious subjects up to discussion under the above four rules, not shut them down.
These are pretty basic ideas. One would have hoped that they would not be challenged in any 21st-century liberal democracy. Yet, as Michiko Kakutani has written in The Death of Truth, even the first rule — accepting that there is such a thing as truth — is now under challenge from a bewildering variety of sources.
Holding the scientific and philosophical line on this is made more difficult by the fact human beings generally are prone to confirmation bias and other cognitive weaknesses, which obstruct the search for truth even in the best and most important cases.
Anarchic social media exacerbates these problems, creating thought bubbles, viral “road rage” and avenues for the rapid dissemination of confused, mendacious or inflammatory claims.
There are also deliberate attempts to sabotage the factual and philosophical foundations of truth seeking. Michael Lewis’s latest book, The Fifth Risk, in his gentle and lucid manner, exposes the institutional vandalism of the Trump administration in this regard. Contempt for or shameless denial of fact and truth is endemic in undemocratic governments around the world in our time: Russia, China, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia.
But our liberal democracies should be bastions of the meta-rules. This is especially so in our universities, which are supposed to be the schools of reason and the havens of open exploration of ideas. George Orwell famously wrote: “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
But that gets us only to the starting gate. All too often people insist on telling us things that we do not want to hear for the good reason that it is abusive, ignorant, banal, degraded or otherwise objectionable.
Are we obliged to listen, much less agree? And if we are not disposed to do so, what happens next?
That’s where the meta-rules have to come in. We must be prepared to uphold them and call our interlocutors on them when they are violated. That’s demanding work; but it is the indispensable work of democratic politics and a scientific culture.
It is for this reason and not because one has any sympathy for bigoted or harebrained ideas that many of us are dismayed by the rise of “grievance studies”, the insistence on “safe places”, “trigger warnings” and the suppression of lines of “hate speech” at all too many of our universities.
There seem to be a growing number of things one cannot be allowed to say publicly or teach, or say within teaching, at universities. Is this what the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s has come to at universities? Is this the proving ground for well-informed and articulate practitioners of free speech and democratic principles?
I attended university between 1977 and 1987. My purpose was to learn enough to be able to participate intelligently in public discourse about the forces shaping our world. I didn’t go to university to agitate but to inquire, though I was aware of the student radicalism of the 60s.
I encountered people, including teachers, of many different opinions and ideological or religious persuasions and read as widely and deeply as I could concerning where these different beliefs had come from and why anyone would adhere to them. No political correctness or ideological straitjacket was in evidence. That appears to have changed.
I did, however, encounter individuals with strong opinions. I recall a tutorial during the 1979 course Classical Social Theory (on Marx, Weber, Durkheim and other modern social theorists) in which a fellow student declared bluntly and humourlessly that “come the revolution” people who thought as individualists like me “will all be shot”.
He didn’t threaten to assault me on the spot, though, and it never occurred to me to insist that he be expelled from the class or the university for saying such a thing. The meta-rules were in place and I disagreed with his politics. I was bemused by what these days one might dub his “hate speech” but not intimidated. I knew perfectly well that my classmate’s attitude was not merely some strange fantasy on his part.
Pol Pot had been overthrown in Cambodia only very recently, after having huge numbers of his country’s educated elite tortured and shot. Deng Xiaoping had just crushed the Democracy Wall movement in Beijing and had Wei Jingsheng imprisoned for — as the trial judge put it — “using so-called freedom of speech to stir up trouble”. The ruthless practice of Marxist-Leninist tyrannies throughout the 20th century was well known to me.
But being at a university in a liberal democracy, I felt safe enough to absorb such violent language in the tutorial room.
This extended to public lectures. In 1980, I attended a forum in the famous Public Lecture Theatre at the University of Melbourne, at which several well-known speakers addressed an audience of hundreds on the subject of Malcolm Fraser’s economic policies and the problem of relatively high unemployment.
David Kemp (Liberal), Tom Uren (Labor Left), Don Chipp (Australian Democrats) and Albert Langer (Monash University Marxist radical) all spoke. None was shouted down. Langer, however, gave a decidedly inflammatory address. The first three had all advocated various competing approaches to macro-economics and unemployment relief. Langer declared openly: “Those are all bourgeois solutions. If you want to do something useful, go and learn how to use a rifle. What this country needs is a revolution.”
There’s freedom of speech for you: used to advocate violence rather than the deepening of inquiry and debate. Langer was not so much a far-right Proud Boy as a Proud Leninist.
Afterwards, I approached him and asked would he care for a coffee. He cheerfully agreed and, as we strolled over to the Student Union, I conducted an exercise in freedom of speech. “Albert,” I said to him, “let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that you were able to organise the revolution you’ve just called for and seize power in this country. What exactly would you then do?”
“That’s a good question,” Albert responded.
“Sure, it’s a good question,” I replied, “so what’s your answer?” He remained silent. “OK,” I went on, “let’s assume you pursued a standard policy of nationalisation, state planning and indoctrination, but things got gummed up and the economy hit the skids. What would you do then?”
“Oh,” he said airily, “we’d have to have another revolution … And why not? After all, if things worked out, it’d get boring. Revolutions are fun.”
We proceeded to the Student Union and ordered our coffees. He described himself as a “Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist”, which struck me as absurd and objectionable but not sufficiently so as to derail the conversation. I have never since, however, been able to take Langer seriously. He remained at liberty, carrying on with his ratbaggery for years. Fortunately, though, he wasn’t able to organise an armed revolution and I was able to pursue my studies without being purged or shot.
The year after that public forum, curious about student radicals such as Langer, I undertook an honours thesis on the student rebellion and general strike in France in May of 1968. The soixante-huitards (sixty-eighters), as they have been dubbed, had quite anarchic ideas about freedom of speech and social change. “All power to the imagination,” was one of their most fetching slogans.
From a conservative point of view, they were assorted imbeciles, suffering from various Castroite or Maoist fantasies and Marcusean delusions. Charles de Gaulle derided them as “bed wetters”.
I was interested in the wellsprings of their revolt and how it played out in advanced industrial society. My inquiry was unhindered and I drew my own conclusions, critically evaluating the full spectrum of ideological opinions about les evenements de Mai. It was a valuable learning experience.
The Free Speech Movement as such had arisen at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964-65 among restive students who had come to believe that learning at university was not enough. Agitation for social change was incumbent upon them and should be accommodated by the academic authorities.
There was a struggle over this. The FSM was part of a groundswell of such activism in the early 60s, not least through the nationwide American movement called Students for a Democratic Society. As the problems of war in Vietnam and racism heated up, elements of the SDS threw the meta-rules of democratic social order overboard and opted to attempt violent revolution. They formed the Weather Underground Organisation, inspired by the insurrectionism of Che Guevara and Carlos Marighella in Latin America. I studied all of this in the 80s when it was still a matter of recent history; during doctoral studies on American counterinsurgency strategy throughout the Cold War.
I identified to some considerable extent with Tom Hayden and the founders of the SDS and empathised with armed rebels in countries such as El Salvador and The Philippines. I was wary of the Marxist-Leninist brand of violent revolution, given its appalling history in the 20th century, but appalled by the death squads that plagued Central and South America in those years. My investigation itself, after all, required the meta-rules of liberal democracy.
Robert Redford’s 2012 film The Company You Keep, starring Redford, Susan Sarandon, Julie Christie, Nick Nolte, Stanley Tucci, Sam Elliott, Chris Cooper and Shia LaBeouf, romanticises the Weather Underground and its radical politics. The film’s worth seeing, but it’s not a good introduction to what happened back then.
Brian Burrough did a vastly better job in Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence(2015). Crucially, for our present purposes, he shows how the FSM and SDS struggled with the meta-rules regarding freedom of speech and civil society and how the impatient and “radical” wing threw away those rules and opted for violence of the kind Langer extolled.
Such would-be revolutionaries, like neo-Nazis or violent anarchists or religious fanatics, pose a direct threat to the meta-rules. It’s all very well, after all, to seek truth in congenial, intelligent, well-informed and professional company. But what do we do when we confront venom, ignorance, hostility, entrenched resistance — when we confront one kind or another of what Churchill called “the fanatic”: someone who cannot change his mind and will not change the subject?
Well, that’s exactly when defence of the meta-rules, including by police protection if necessary, is most important.
Nadine Strossen, the first female national president of the American Civil Liberties Union and professor of constitutional law at New York University, has just given us a fine reflection on this challenge: Hate: Why We Should Resist it With Free Speech, Not Censorship. She makes a powerful case that when we find ideas objectionable, we need to have the courage to stand up and challenge them, not merely shout them down or try to ban them.
An unimpeachable “liberal” on race, class and gender, she states forthrightly: “On many campuses … students complain that they have been ‘assaulted’ when they are exposed to ideas that offend them, or even if they learn that a provocative speaker has been invited to campus. This false equation between controversial ideas and physical violence fuels unwarranted calls for outlawing and punishing ideas, along with violence.”
For reasoned debate and fruitful inquiry to take place, it is necessary that violence be outlawed, but it is counter-productive for ideas to be outlawed. What’s required is to foster the opportunity for strenuous debate and what may often be painful and difficult learning. If we cannot agree on that, our political and intellectual culture is in trouble.
Unfashionable as it is to state this these days, the ideas of freedom (eleutheria), political equality (isonomia), equality of speech (isegoria), freedom of speech (parrhesia) and democracy (demokratia) derive from classical Greece. They were imperfectly realised in the ancient world and the Greek and Roman republics gave way to autocratic rule. But we derive our key modern ideas about freedom and responsible government from those beginnings.
Plato, Aristotle and the School of Athens
As Josiah Ober wrote in The Athenian Revolution: “Some 2500 years after the revolution that made it possible, democracy is widely regarded as the most attractive form of practical (as opposed to utopian) political organisation yet devised. Among democracy’s virtues is its revisability — the potential of the political regime to rethink and to reform itself, while remaining committed to its core values of justice, equality, dignity and freedom.”
At the root of all this is freedom of speech. If we wish to preserve and extend our liberties or maintain our democracies, we need to understand this. We must equip ourselves to practise it well, educate our young to understand how unusual such liberty has been in human history and how difficult it is to maintain. Doing these things itself demands that we adhere to the meta-rules that make it possible. And here’s the kicker: so will building any realisable “utopia” be worth striving after? Martin Luther King Jr knew that and spoke faithfully to it, calling for the American republic to live up to its founding meta-rules.
Paul Monk (paulmonk.com.au) is the author of 10 books. The most recent is Dictators and Dangerous Ideas: Uncensored Reflections in an Era of Turmoil (Echo Books, 2018).
You were taken away at dawn. I followed you As one does when a corpse is being removed. Children were crying in the darkened house. A candle flared, illuminating the Mother of God… The cold of an icon was on your lips A death-cold sweat on your brow – I will never forget this; I will gather To wail with the wives of the murdered streltsy Inconsolably, beneath the Kremlin towers.
Anna Akhmatova, Moscow 1935
Russian author and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn‘s three volume The Gulag Archipelagowas completed fifty years ago. It was published five years later, with an English translation the following year. It covered life in the gulag, the Sovietforced labour campsystem, in a narrative constructed from a variety sources – reports, interviews, statements, diaries, legal documents – and Solzhenitsyn’s own experience as a zek, a gulag prisoner – famously if excruciatingly retold in his chilling, literally and figuratively, and yet brief, autobiographical OneDayInTheLifeofIvanDenisovich.
Following its publication in the west, the book circulated in underground samizdat publication in the Soviet Union until its appearance in the literary journal Novy Mir in 1989. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, The Gulag Archipelago has been officially published in Solzhenitsyn’s own country, and since 2009, it has been mandatory reading in Russian school curricula.
A 50th anniversary edition was released on November 1st, 2018 with a forward by Jordan Petersen, the Canadian psychologist, author, and poster-boy – a kind of thinking person’s Milo Yiannopoulos – for many on the conservative side of politics who rant and rave about the existential threat to western civilization and Judeo-Christan values posed by the triple headed Cerberus of political correctness, identity politics and value signaling that has ensorcelled the hearts and minds of the youthful, radical, emotional, university left and their mentors and their sinister svengalis in academe and media. There is almost a “Reds under the beds” paranoia at play here in which is that communism and all it’s works are a kind of secular succubus, and that impressionable youngsters and deluded oldsters must be exorcised of false and failed promises.
Petersen’s forward is actually a good read, if somewhat overblown, slanted, jumbled and repetitive, long on opinion and short on historical memory. For example, whilst Karl Marx, Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong, and also Cuba, Cambodia and Venezuela come in for a predictable and justified bollocking, there is no mention at all of their ideological opposites, the equally repugnant and brutal authoritarian regimes of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, and numerous right wing tyrants the world over – although admittedly, these in no way matched the rigour and discipline and the pervasive and pernicious social and psychological control of the ‘peoples’ republics’. Nor, apart from an acknowledgement that brutal excesses are common to all regimes, is there a balanced recognition that capitalism can be as corrupt and exploitative and as red in tooth and claw as communism.
I’ve republished an edited extract of the forward below as it is worth reminding readers of Solzhenitsyn’s significant contribution to our understanding of recent history and of the resilience of the human spirit and the courage of the flesh and blood “souls in torment” who run the gauntlet of man’s inhumanity to man and emerge at the far end bloodied but unbowed. But Bob Dylan said it better in his shimmering anthem Chimes of Freedom;
Tolling for the aching whose wounds cannot be nursed For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
I have included the online comments on Petersen’s piece as these encapsulate the good, the bad and the ugly of ostensibly informed opinion among the readership of Rupert Murdoch’s redoubtable and often cogent flagship, The Australian. Some display binary groupthink and an almost Pavlovian approbation replete with predictable, tired epithets about left-wingers and Labor/Labour politicians. Others are more nuanced and better informed. Most surprising and indeed disturbing is that few readers appear to know much about the subject matter – namely the history of the Soviet Union and of Solzhenitsyn’s journey, including the story of the Bolshevik revolution, of Lenin and Stalin, the purges of the ‘thirties and ‘forties, and the gulag itself – an institution that was actually initiated by the Czars. Few appear to have heard of let alone read any of Solzhenitsyn’s novels, nor indeed any of the many published accounts of the Stalin years. I would wager that this dearth of knowledge and perspective is a reflection of the weakening of historical memory among the wider populace as such momentous events and eras recede further and further into the past.
By strange symmetry, I have recently reread historian Robert Conquest’s tombstone of a book, The Great Terror, a relentless narrative of arrests, trials, fabricated confessions, hostage-taking, deportations, torture and executions as Stalin consolidated his rule, eliminated enemies real and imagined, and created his own model of a socialist state.
It commenced with the elimination of the Old Bolsheviks, his former comrades in arms, and then expanded to embrace all in the party and society at large who may or may not have shared his vision. Intellectuals, philosophers, writers, poets, musicians, priests, scientists, academics, teachers, civil servants, workers and peasants, and the Red Army’s Officer Corps – a contributing factor to the Soviet Union’s need to make a pact with Nazi Germany in 1939 and its disastrously slow response to Hitlers invasion in June 1941.
An estimated death toll is difficult to determine. In those dark days, people simply disappeared, and the NKVD covered its tracks well. The official number for the “Great Purge” of 1936 to 1938 stands at 1,548,366 detained persons, of whom 681,692 were shot – an average of 1,000 executions a day. Various historians claim that the real number of victims could be twice as much.
But the the arrests, executions, and deportations commenced as early as 1930 and continued right up until Stalin’s death in 1953. Conquest, in his The Great Terror: A Reassessment does the gloomy math: 1930-36, 7 million; 1937-1938, 3 million; 1039-53, 10 million. The number of deaths in the Soviet Union that were explicitly ordered by someone – in other words, the number of executions – is actually relatively low at around 1.5 million. The majority of the deaths were caused by neglect or repressive policies – for example, those who died in the Soviet gulags, those who died while being deported, and German civilians and Prisoners of War are believed to have perished while under Soviet guard.
The numbers who were transported, exiled, displaced, and scattered to concentration camps or far-eastern towns and villages were likewise incalculable. as the brother of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago comments in the final scenes of David Lean’s beautiful but flawed movie)
There is a myriad of books and films about these events. Wikipedia is as good a place as any to start. Robert Conquest’s is the most acclaimed – and rightly so. Then there is Arthur Koestler’s chilling novel, Darkness at Noon, published in 1940, which recounts the thoughts of an Old Bolshevik as he awaits death in the execution cells:
A shapeless figure bent over him, he smelt the fresh lrather of the revolver belt: but what insignia did the figure wear on the sleeves and shoulder-straps of its uniform – and in whose name did it raised the dark pistol barrel?
As for movies, there’s always David Lean’s DoctorZhivago, which realistically albeit melodramatically portrays the choices and compromises confronting ordinary, intellectual Russians in the years of revolution and civil war. But I would highly recommend the poignant but powerful Burnt by the Sun, a 1994 film by Russian director and screenwriter Nikita Mikhailkov and Azerbaijani screenwriter Rustam Ibragimbekov. The film depicts the story of a senior officer (played by Mikhalkov) and his family during the purge of the Red Army.
And there was the poet Anna Akhmatova, whose words open this piece, bearing sad witness to the imprisoned, the deported, the disappeared and the dead – including in their number, two husbands and her only son – memorializing the suffering of herself, her family and millions of her compatriots in her tortured testament, Requiem.
Russia’s Stations of the Cross did not cease with the end of the Terror. Three years latrer came Operation Barbarossa and the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the rapid blitzkreig that took the Wehrmacht to the gates of Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad, and the bloody clawback that brought the Red Army to Berlin and to take captive the peoples of Eastern Europe.
Over twenty five million Soviet citizens died during the Great Patriotic War, of which just under ten million were military. Most died as a direct result of the military conflict that ranged from the Baltic to the Caucasus. But miilions also perished at the hands of the NKVD and in the forced mass deportations of “suspect” peoples, including the Volga Germans and the Crimean Tartars.
At wars’ end, the Terror rolled on, albeit at a lower setting. Josef Stalin remained suspicious, vengeful and paranoid, and the purges continued right up until the moment he departed this mortal coil (as depicted in dubious slapstick in Armando Iannucci‘s recent TheDeath ofStalin).
Many, many Red Army soldiers who had been taken captive by the Nazis were arrested on their return from captivity. Many were shot for ‘desertion’, and thousands sent to the Gulags. Whether they had surrendered or had been subdued and taken captive, often as fast-moving battle fronts left them stranded, abandoned and entrapped behind enemy lines, they were deemed cowards, traitors and enemies of the Soviet Union and its people. They were moreover doubly damned. Whether from behind the wire of concentration camps or as slave labourers in German mines, fields and factories, they had witnessed, come into contact with, and had been contaminated by the world outside.
Which is where Solzhenitsyn came in.
But but first, English songwriter Al Stewart’s tribute to Solzhenitsyn and those like him who were ill-paid for their service and sacrifice.
I’m coming home, I’m coming home, now you can taste it in the wind, the war is over And I listen to the clicking of the train-wheels as we roll across the border And now they ask me of the time that I was caught behind their lines and taken prisoner “They only held me for a day, a lucky break, ” I say they turn and listen closer I’ll never know, I’ll never know why I was taken from the line and all the others To board a special train and journey deep into the heart of holy Russia And it’s cold and damp in the transit camp, and the air is still and sullen And the pale sun of October whispers the snow will soon be coming And I wonder when I’ll be home again and the morning answers “Never” And the evening sighs, and the steely Russian skies go on forever
The Gulag Archipelago confirmed the horrors of the Soviet Union
Jordan Petersen, The Australian 17th November 2018
First, you defend your homeland against the Nazis, serving as a twice-decorated soldier on the Eastern front in the criminally ill-prepared Soviet Red Army. Then you’re arrested, humiliated, stripped of your military rank, charged under the auspices of the all-purpose Article 58 with the dissemination of “anti-Soviet propaganda”, and dragged off to Moscow’s infamous Lubyanka prison. There, through the bars of your cell, you watch your beloved country celebrating its victory in the Great Patriotic War. Then you’re sentenced, in absentia, to eight years of hard labour (but you got away easy; it wasn’t so long afterwards that people in your position were awarded a “tenner” — and then a quarter of a century!). And fate isn’t finished with you yet — not by any means. You develop a deadly cancer in the camp, endure the exile imposed on you after your imprisonment ends, and pass very close to death.
Despite all this, you hold your head high. You refuse to turn against man or God, although you have every reason to do so. You write, instead, secretly, at night, documenting your terrible experiences. You craft a personal memoir — a single day in the labour camps — and, miracle of miracles! The clouds part! The sun shines through! Your book is published, and in your own country! It meets with unparalleled acclaim, nationally and internationally. But the sky darkens, once again, and the sun disappears. The repression returns. You become (once again) a “non-person”. The secret police — the dread KGB — seize the manuscript of your next book. It sees the light of day, nonetheless; but only in the West. There your reputation grows beyond the wildest of imaginings. The Nobel committee itself bestows upon you its highest literary honour.
The Soviet authorities, stripped of their camouflage, are enraged. They order the secret police to poison you. You pass (once again) near death. But you continue to write: driven, solitary, intolerably inspired. Your The Gulag Archipelago documents the absolute and utter corruption of the dogmas and doctrines of your state, your empire, your leaders — and yourself. And then: that is printed, too! Not in your own country but in the West — once again — from copies oh-so-dangerously hidden and smuggled across the borders. And your great book bursts with unparalleled and dreadful force into the still naive and unexpecting literary and intellectual world. You are expelled from the Soviet Union, stripped of your citizenship, forced to take residency in a society both strange to you and resistant, in its own way, to your prophetic words. But the power of your stories and the strength of your morals demolish any remaining claims to ethical and philosophical credibility still made by the defenders of the collectivist system that gave rise to all that you witnessed.
Years pass (but not so many, from the perspective of history). Then? Another miracle! The Soviet Union collapses! You return home. Your citizenship is restored. You write and speak in your reclaimed homeland until death claims you, in 2008. A year later The Gulag Archipelago is deemed mandatory reading by those responsible for establishing the national school curriculum of your home country. Your impossible victory is complete.
The three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago — one continuous, extended scream of outrage — are, paradoxically, brilliant, bitter, disbelieving and infused with awe: awe at the strength characterising the best among us, in the worst of all situations. In that monumental text, published in 1973, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn conducted “an experiment in literary investigation” — a hybrid of journalism, history and biography, unlike anything written before or since. In 1985 the author bestowed his approval upon Edward E. Ericson Jr’s single-volume abridgment — republished here on the 50th anniversary of the completion of the full three-volume edition and centenary of the author’s birth — and sold 30 million copies in 35 languages. Between the pages of Solzhenitsyn’s book — apart from the documentation of the horrors of the legions of the dead, counted and uncounted, and the masses whose lives were torn asunder — are the innumerable soul-chilling personal stories, carefully preserved, making the tragedy of mass betrayal, torture and death not the mere statistic Stalin so disdainfully described but individual, real and terrible.
It is a matter of pure historical fact that The Gulag Archipelago played a primary role in bringing the Soviet Empire to its knees. Although economically unsustainable, ruled in the most corrupt manner imaginable, and reliant on the slavery and enforced deceit of its citizens, the Soviet system managed to stumble forward through far too many decades before being cut to the quick. The courageous leaders of the labour unions in Poland, the great Pope John Paul II and the American president Ronald Reagan, with his blunt insistence that the West faced an evil empire, all played their role in its defeat and collapse. It was Solzhenitsyn, however, whose revelations made it positively shameful to defend not just the Soviet state but the very system of thought that made that state what it was. It was Solzhenitsyn who most crucially made the case that the terrible excesses of communism could not be conveniently blamed on the corruption of the Soviet leadership, the “cult of personality” surrounding Stalin or the failure to put the otherwise stellar and admirable utopian principles of Marxism into proper practice. It was Solzhenitsyn who demonstrated that the death of millions and the devastation of many more were, instead, a direct causal consequence of the philosophy (worse, perhaps: the theology) driving the communist system. The hypothetically egalitarian, universalist doctrines of Karl Marx contained hidden within them sufficient hatred, resentment, envy and denial of individual culpability and responsibility to produce nothing but poison and death when manifested in the world.
Solzhenitsyn, the day of his release in 1953 after 8 years in prison.
For Marx, man was a member of a class, an economic class, a group — that, and little more — and history nothing but the battleground of classes, of groups. His admirers regarded (continue to regard) Marx’s doctrine as one of compassion — moral by definition, virtuous by fiat: “consider the working classes, in all their oppression, and work forthrightly to free them”. But hate may well be a stronger and more compelling motivator than love. In consequence, it took no time, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, for solidarity with the common man and the apparently laudable demand for universal equality to manifest its unarticulated and ever-darkening shadow. First came the most brutal indictment of the “class enemy”. Then came the ever-expanding definition of that enemy, until every single person in the entirety of the state found him or herself at risk of encapsulation within that insatiable and devouring net. The verdict, delivered to those deemed at fault, by those who elevated themselves to the simultaneously held positions of judge, jury and executioner? The necessity to eradicate the victimisers, the oppressors, in toto, without any consideration whatsoever for reactionary niceties — such as individual innocence.
What can be concluded in the deepest, most permanent sense, from Solzhenitsyn’s anguished Gulag narrative? First, we learn what is indisputable — what we all should have learned by now (what we have nonetheless failed to learn): that the Left, like the Right, can go too far; that the Left has, in the past, gone much too far. Second, we learn what is far more subtle and difficult — how and why that going too far occurs. We learn, as Solzhenitsyn so profoundly insists, that the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And we learn as well that we all are, each of us, simultaneously oppressor and oppressed. Thus, we come to realise that the twin categories of “guilty oppressor” and “justice-seeking victim” can be made endlessly inclusive. This is not least because we all benefit unfairly (and are equally victimised) by our thrownness, our arbitrary placement in the flow of time. We all accrue undeserved and somewhat random privilege from the vagaries of our place of birth, our inequitably distributed talents, our ethnicity, race, culture and sex. We all belong to a group — some group — that has been elevated in comparative status, through no effort of our own. This is true in some manner, along some dimension of group category, for every solitary individual, except for the single most lowly of all. At some time and in some manner we all may in consequence be justly targeted as oppressors, and may all, equally, seek justice — or revenge — as victims. Even if the initiators of the revolution had, therefore, in their most pure moments, been driven by a holy desire to lift up the downtrodden, was it not guaranteed that they would be overtaken by those motivated primarily by envy, hate and the desire to destroy as the revolution progressed?
Thus the doctrine of group identity inevitably ends with everyone identified as a class enemy, an oppressor; with everyone uncleansibly contaminated by bourgeois privilege, unfairly enjoying the benefits bequeathed by the vagaries of history; with everyone prosecuted, without respite, for that corruption and injustice. “No mercy for the oppressor!” And no punishment too severe for the crime of exploitation! Expiation becomes impossible because there is no individual guilt, no individual responsibility, and therefore no manner in which the crime of arbitrary birth can be individually accounted for. And all the misery that can be generated as a consequence of such an accusation is the true reason for the accusation. When everyone is guilty, all that serves justice is the punishment of everyone; when the guilt extends to the existence of the world’s misery itself, only the fatal punishment will suffice.
It is much more preferable instead — and much more likely to preserve us all from metastasising hells — to state forthrightly: “I am indeed thrown arbitrarily into history. I therefore choose to voluntarily shoulder the responsibility of my advantages and the burden of my disadvantages — like every other individual. I am morally bound to pay for my advantages with my responsibility. I am morally bound to accept my disadvantages as the price I pay for being. I will therefore strive not to descend into bitterness and then seek vengeance because I have less to my credit and a greater burden to stumble forward with than others.”
Is this not a, or even the, essential point of difference between the West, for all its faults, and the brutal, terrible “egalitarian” systems generated by the pathological communist doctrine? The great and good framers of the American republic were, for example, anything but utopian. They took full stock and full measure of ineradicable human imperfection. They held modest goals, derived not least from the profoundly cautious common-law tradition of England. They endeavoured to establish a system the corrupt and ignorant fools we all are could not damage too fatally. That’s humility. That’s clear-headed knowledge of the limitations of human machination and good intention.
But the communists, the revolutionaries? They aimed, grandly and admirably, at least in theory, at a much more heavenly vision — and they began their pursuit with the hypothetically straightforward and oh-so-morally-justifiable enforcement of economic equality.
Wealth, however, was not so easily generated. The poor could not so simply become rich. But the riches of those who had anything more than the greatest pauper (no matter how pitiful that “more” was)? That could be “redistributed” — or, at least, destroyed. That’s equality, too. That’s sacrifice, in the name of heaven on earth. And redistribution was not enough — with all its theft, betrayal and death. Mere economic engineering was insufficient. What emerged as well was the overarching and truly totalitarian desire to remake man and woman, as such — the longing to restructure the human spirit in the very image of the communist preconceptions. Attributing to themselves this divine ability, this transcendent wisdom — and with unshakeable belief in the glowing but ever-receding future — the newly minted Soviets tortured, thieved, imprisoned, lied and betrayed, all the while masking their great evil with virtue. It was Solzhenitsyn and The Gulag Archipelago that tore off the mask, and exposed the feral cowardice, envy, deceit, resentment and hatred for the individual and for existence itself that pulsed beneath.
Others had made the attempt. Malcolm Muggeridge reported on the horrors of “dekulakization” — the forced collectivisation of the all-too-recently successful peasantry of the Ukraine and elsewhere that preceded the horrifying famines of the 1930s. In the same decade, and in the following years, George Orwell risked his ideological commitments and his reputation to tell us all what was truly occurring in the Soviet Union in the name of egalitarianism and brotherhood. But it was Solzhenitsyn who truly shamed the radical leftists, forcing them underground (where they have festered and plotted for the last 40 years, failing unforgivably to have learned what all reasonable people should have learned from the cataclysm of the 20th century and its egalitarian utopianism). And today, despite everything, and under their sway — almost three decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the apparent collapse of communism — we are doing everything we can to forget what Solzhenitsyn so clearly demonstrated, to our great and richly deserved peril. Why don’t all our children read The Gulag Archipelago in our high schools, as they now do in Russia? Why don’t our teachers feel compelled to read the book aloud? Did we not win the Cold War? Were the bodies not piled high enough? (How high, then, would be enough?)
Why, for example, is it still acceptable — and in polite company — to profess the philosophy of a communist or, if not that, to at least admire the work of Marx? Why is it still acceptable to regard the Marxist doctrine as essentially accurate in its diagnosis of the hypothetical evils of the free-market, democratic West; to still consider that doctrine “progressive” and fit for the compassionate and proper thinking person? Twenty-five million dead through internal repression in the Soviet Union (according to The Black Book of Communism). Sixty million dead in Mao’s China (and an all-too-likely return to autocratic oppression in that country in the near future). The horrors of Cambodia’s killing fields, with their two million corpses. The barely animate body politic of Cuba, where people struggle even now to feed themselves. Venezuela, where it has now been made illegal to attribute a child’s death in hospital to starvation. No political experiment has ever been tried so widely, with so many disparate people, in so many different countries (with such different histories) and failed so absolutely and so catastrophically. Is it mere ignorance (albeit of the most inexcusable kind) that allows today’s Marxists to flaunt their continued allegiance — to present it as compassion and care? Or is it, instead, envy of the successful, in near-infinite proportions? Or something akin to hatred for mankind itself? How much proof do we need? Why do we still avert our eyes from the truth?
Perhaps we simply lack sophistication. Perhaps we just can’t understand. Perhaps our tendency towards compassion is so powerfully necessary in the intimacy of our families and friendships that we cannot contemplate its limitations, its inability to scale and its propensity to mutate into hatred of the oppressor, rather than allegiance with the oppressed. Perhaps we cannot comprehend the limitations and dangers of the utopian vision given our definite need to contemplate and to strive for a better tomorrow. We certainly don’t seem to imagine, for example, that the hypothesis of some state of future perfection — for example, the truly egalitarian and permanent brotherhood of man — can be used to justify any and all sacrifices whatsoever (the pristine and heavenly end making all conceivable means not only acceptable but morally required). There is simply no price too great to pay in pursuit of the ultimate utopia. (This is particularly true if it is someone else who foots the bill.) And it is clearly the case that we require a future towards which to orient ourselves — to provide meaning in our life, psychologically speaking. It is for that reason we see the same need expressed collectively, on a much larger scale, in the Judeo-Christian vision of the Promised Land, and the kingdom of heaven on earth. And it is also clearly the case that sacrifice is necessary to bring that desired end state into being. That’s the discovery of the future itself: the necessity to forgo instantaneous gratification in the present, to delay, to bargain with fate so that the future can be better; twinned with the necessity to let go, to burn off, to separate wheat from chaff, and to sacrifice what is presently unworthy, so that tomorrow can be better than today. But limits need to be placed around who or what is deemed dispensable.
Here’s some thoughts — no, some facts. Every social system produces inequality, at present, and every social system has done so, since the beginning of time. The poor have been with us — and will be with us — always. Analysis of the content of individual Paleolithic gravesites provides evidence for the existence of substantive variance in the distribution of ability, privilege and wealth, even in our distant past. The more illustrious of our ancestors were buried with great possessions, hoards of precious metals, weaponry, jewellery and costuming. The majority, however, struggled through their lives and were buried with nothing. Inequality is the iron rule, even among animals, with their intense competition for quality living space and reproductive opportunity — even among plants, and cities — even among the stellar lights that dot the cosmos themselves, where a minority of privileged and oppressive heavenly bodies contain the mass of thousands, millions or even billions of average, dispossessed planets. In equality is the deepest of problems, built into the structure of reality itself, and will not be solved by the presumptuous, ideology-inspired retooling of the rare free, stable and productive democracies of the world. The only systems that have produced some modicum of wealth, along with the inevitable inequality and its attendant suffering, are those that evolved in the West, with their roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition; precisely those systems that emphasise above all the essential dignity, divinity and ultimate responsibility of the individual. In consequence, any attempt to attribute the existence of inequality to the functioning of the productive institutions we have managed to create and protect so recently in what is still accurately regarded as the free world will hurt those who are weakest and most vulnerable first. The radicals who conflate the activities of the West with the oppression of the downtrodden therefore do nothing to aid those whom they purport to prize and plenty to harm them. The claims they make to act under the inspiration of pure compassion must therefore come to be regarded with the deepest suspicion — not least by those who dare to make such claims themselves.
The dangers of the utopian vision have been laid bare, even if the reasons those dangers exist have not yet been fully and acceptably articulated. If there was any excuse to be a Marxist in 1917 (and both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche prophesied well before then that there would be hell to pay for that doctrine) there is absolutely and finally no excuse now. And we know that mostly because of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and The Gulag Archipelago. Thank heaven for that great author’s outrage, courage and unquenchable thirst for justice and truth. It was Solzhenitsyn who warned us that the catastrophes of the Soviet state were inextricably and causally linked to the deceitful blandishments of the Marxist utopian vision. It was Solzhenitsyn who carefully documented the price paid in suffering for the dreadful communist experiment and who distilled from that suffering the wisdom we must all heed so that such catastrophe does not visit us again. Perhaps we could take from his writing the humility that would allow us to understand that our mere good intentions are not sufficient to make us good men and women. Perhaps we could come to understand that such intentions are instead all too often the consequence of our unpardonable historical ignorance, our utter wilful blindness and our voracious hidden appetite for vengeance, terror and destruction. Perhaps we could come to remember and to learn from the intolerable trials endured by all those who passed through the fiery chambers of the Marxist collectivist ideology. Perhaps we could derive from that remembering and learning the wisdom necessary to take personal responsibility for the suffering and malevolence that still so terribly and unforgivably characterises the world. We have been provided with the means to transform ourselves in due humility by the literary and moral genius of this great Russian author. We should all pray most devoutly to whatever deity guides us implicitly or explicitly for the desire and the will to learn from what we have been offered. May God himself eternally fail to forgive us if in the painstakingly revealed aftermath of such bloodshed, torture and anguish we remain stiff-necked, incautious, and unchanged.
Jordan Peterson is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and author of the bestseller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. This is an edited extract from the foreword to the new edition of The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, published by Vintage Classics.
As I have noted above,the online comments reflect on the range of opinions among the ostensibly informed opinion among the readership of The Australian. One entertaining characteristic is how often commenters lay into each other.
t’s much easier and more comforting to accept the narrative of the Left that you are oppressed, the victim of others. But I’m wondering where is this Oppression today in Australia? There are so so many helping hands out there for those who want to have a go. But then, to many, nothing beats being told you are oppressed and getting paid for it (Centrelink).
A powerful and thought-provoking read, this. I’ll be reading it over again and again to be sure I’ve got it right. If any man alive within the last hundred years deserves the title of ‘prophet’, it must be Solzhenitsyn and yet most ‘ordinary’ people have hardly heard of him let alone read his prophetic words.
This week the Greens have announced they want to jail anyone exporting coal (Currently or biggest export). Who else will be sent to the Greens gulag under the new left regime?
Word salad from a master of over oily pre-packaged 1000 Island dressing drenched word salads, Last week it was how Raskolnikov somehow proved the existence of objective morality or something like that. This time another false literary allusion to bolster the illusions of those right wingers who like to pretend they have read a book that doesn’t have pictures. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was very good, the rest was self serving attempts to get money from Yank publishers hoping to reinforce Yank prejudices during the Cold War.
The Canadian Peterson is part of the same racket.
Fantastic article by a man whose work should be studied and viewed in Unis worldwide. A totally brilliant mind whose moniker of Psychologist merely understates the depth and breadth of his anyalysis of humanity. Please keep his stuff coming in the MSM. The world really needs more like this.
One is so used to having a full page advertisement on the back page of the Weekend Australian Inquirer hardcopy, that it took me sometime to wake up that here was an article for the ages. It wasn’t until I retired to my bed that I was able to read it.
So much to think about and reflect on of our past for many of us.
What is so terrifying is that there is now a generation who do not know and understand.
Yet, this time next week, Victorians will have just gifted a further four year reign to the most Socialist Government this state has ever seen.
Marxism is essentially evil but democracy is not a Christian invention
The Greeks were the mothers of democracy but the Christians modernised it to what we have today.
It’s modern application certainly is. Bearing in mind there were well over a thousand years (two thousand, perhaps) between its origins in ancient Greece (but only for the elites) to its widespread adoption in what we now call the West, in what were all Christian nations at the time of its adoptions, it’s not drawing a long bow to describe democracy as a christian construct.
Wow excellent article and still today left winger activists are trying to stifle his voice and ban him from universities
Jesus spoke straightforwardly of the devil or Satan as a real spiritual personality, not a metaphor. And he knew and demonstrated practical authority over him.
Richard Wurmbrand makes a reasonable case that the envy and and desire to destroy that characterise communism historically already had a spiritual presence in Marx’s personal life following a souring of his early Christian faith.
A kindred visceral hatred, routinely transcending the rational, has manifested time and again in the world against Christians, Jews and Israel, through a variety of agencies. There’s no coincidence nor natural justice in the fact that Christians are statistically far and away the most persecuted group on earth (not least in communist China today).
Yet the same malice manifests less obviously in the neo-Marxism much closer to home. Activists are aggressively pushing an agenda to erode biblical morality, destroy Judaeo-Christian institutions and subvert godly authority structures and even the natural order, including the sexes and natural family. This is no less dangerous in the long run than the communism of Solzhenitsyn’s era.
While I agree with much that you have said, reality is Christian Institutions have been doing as much of those you accuse, to destroy the Judeao Christian place in the world through their own immoral behaviour and confusion about what they now stand for.
I see that Jesus/ Christianity would have been Marxist in ideology. However experiments in Marxism have failed usually ending up with totalitarian leadership living the high life while the peasants work their guts out. China is a little different in that they have a free market economy whilst pursuing socialism and totalitarianism. No one knows how it will end. The US with its plutocracy (not really democracy) pursuing a military state is hardly an ideal. We are mere corks bobbing on the ocean!
In the seventies Alexandre S was taught in Victorian schools as was Orwell. Suspicion lies on leftist leanings for their demise. Be sure they outnumber the democrates. You have to overcome that hurdle first. In other words Daniel Andrews has to go before you get any voice about recommending AS to be on the mainstream English curriculum which it was. Makes his meeting with the Chinese recently and keeping the supposed agreement secrete revealing about his leftist agenda. Daniel Andrews wouldn’t know about AS and less about George Orwell. Andrews is the biggest treat to our sovereignty and human rights than any leftist labour premier in recent history.
The elite who govern us now is an unhealhy blend of unions, public servants and big business. The next elite will be the same eccept worse.
Public servants are the most unionised of employees (I nearly said workers!), so no need to distinguish.
Great article JP. Best discussion for some time.
My thoughts: I have always seen Russia as a corrupt society run by an elite 1 to 2 million rich, with 150m poor. Given the hit Russia took defending against Nazi Germany I think it’s a bit simplistic to say Marxism failed, when given circumstances it never had a chance. Western Europe had the Marshall Plan to revive war torn economies, Russia didn’t. Regardless 60 years on, the Communist system, the leaders paranoia with the West, and the over expenditure on military does largely explain Russia’s ongoing underperformance. JP is right to call them out as a failure. Totalarian leadership doesn’t have a good record.
Right on, JP! In my experience, having had close association with members of the Labor Party in the early 70s, many immediately previously having graduated from university, and they having toasted “the revolution!” at joint dinners/lunches which appeared to be possible at that time, the prevailing thought was “why should we miss out?” I know from personal experience that there was not a scintilla of idealism present, and that they were craven opportunists (Labor lawyers, MPs, Ministers and union officials). They were the true entrepreneurs of our time, and have become rich beyond the most hopeful dreams of their conservative counterparts.
Also read “One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich”. A classic. And Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita”. Bravo Jordan Petterson, bravo.
And this is supposed to be original? Where’s this guy been. Robert Conquest laid it out in 1968 in The Great Terror. And Marx doesn’t have a lot to do with it. He was just a pretext for neo-Tsarist dictatorship, particularly under the Red Tsar Stalin. Stick to psychology,
Peterson has informed my secularly enforced ignorance of history, has framed for me the importance of understanding our cultural/political errors. Given your right to express complete knowledge on this topic, will you now meet your responsibility to individually do something about it. We wouldn’t be in this mess if you had in 1968.
There was nothing miraculous about the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was inevitable, at a predictable time It is a fundamental fact of human nature that first hand information takes precedence over second hand information. The hatred that drove government in the USSR depended on first hand memory of how bad things were before the revolution. Only that memory could suppress recognition of how bad things were after the revolution. Once the old guard faded from influence that veil would be lifted, and sanity would start to get a look in. And so it was lifted, Thirty years on, it’s a good time to be republishing The Gulag Archipelago.
The “evil empire” and its underpinning Marxist ideology, would not have gained traction without the wide spread acceptance of Darwin’s (atheistic) Evolution Theory. Without God their is no moral authority or compass; life really is all about the “survival of the fittest”. Stalin embraced communism after he read Darwin book on Evolution. He even went so far as to try to create “Ape Warriors” to populate his depleted army. Moreover “racism” is intrinsically linked to evolution theory. The historical and scientific evidence is overwhelming that God created this earth and mankind, but the lefty intelligentsia have turned their backs on truth to promote their own dark & dangerous agenda. Its ugly manifestation has been Marxism. (b47)
Communists are merely a political gang of very well organised criminals who want to kill the rich so that they can replace them.
Essential reading for all. And a clear reason why we need to abolish both the Labor and Greens Party’s.
Brilliant if not a long read, well worth it mind you. How do you dare abbreviate the piece to a comment, to my simple mind it is do not ignore the past, do not forget, do not think there is a magic solution. The extremists left and right have left a trail. Neither is correct, but we must be able to discuss the issues that matter without being branded.
Orwell and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn should be mandatory reading in every High School and in every Arts course. I read Animal Farm at school, then 1984 after graduating and finally The Gulag. Unfortunately I didn’t read the latter two until after twice voting for EG Whitlam and his ALP disaster team. But never again. If you don’t like Peterson’s introduction to TGA then read those 3 books. Read then before voting for BS and his bs.
I see the ‘usual suspects’ are absent from this discussion.
Who?
No. All the moderator’s favourites appear to be here, as usual. Ray.
What astonishing writing by Jordan Peterson. Astonishing because nothing like it has graced the pages of newspapers in my memory. He puts truth to the reasons why the Soviet’s mass murdered millions upon millions of Russians during its 74 year rule. As he says, it had nothing to do with egalitarianism and everything to do with pure hatred for fellow human beings. Stalin’s deliberate starvation of Ukrainians in 1930’s because he did not like them is a hard fact for committed socialists to compute. Such people have debated me on this topic in these Comments columns in the past accusing me of fabricating a story. Jordan Peterson has I hope begun a long overdue conversation into the real history of Soviet rule as written by a man who experienced the worst of it. Luckily for the West, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn escaped death more than once to write The Gulag Archipelago and many other books after that. My thanks to Jordan Peterson for unmasking and highlighting the truth of the Communist rule of the USSR 1917-1991.
Socialism – yet shorten and his receycled gillard government still believe this is the height of wisdom
It should be a compulsary in school history curriculum of what happened to millions who suffered and died in pursuit of communistic utopia.
I’m a teacher in public schools and I hand a copy of that book (the cut down version) to any thoughtful but naive student who seriously considers Communism to be a legitimate political system.
The author talks about the Stalinist period in USSR but fails to compare it to the historical periods both before and after it (e.g., the Hrushev ‘ottepel’ period, etc.). He also talks about a few examples of bad things happening in a few other countries. He then uses this selective evidence to come to his conclusions. He mentions, briefly, that extremes on either right or left are bad, but that is the only mention of any alternative views or any facts that do not accord with his opinion. After mentioning that both left and right extremes are bad, he still illogically concludes that left-wing views are bad based on what he is saying (but not the right-wing views). Furthermore, he somehow extrapolates what was happening during the Stalinist period and in a few other countries during certain historical periods into claims that the left-wing views are bad in general even if they are not extreme. The author ignored what was happening in right-wing Spain during the same period (where people were killed rather than sent to hard labour camps). The author also ignored examples of other right-wing states similar to Spain in the 20th century in South America, Asia, and other parts of the world. I understand the article can at the most support that certain manifestation of ideological extremes, either on the right or left are bad but clearly that is not what the author is trying to convey. The author is biased in a sense that he provides examples of bad governments in certain left-wing communist/socialist states in particular historical periods (ignoring other periods of these states and other communist/socialist countries) but does not provide examples of bad governments of extreme right-wing capitalist states in corresponding or other historical periods of the 20th century. This comment is not meant to support left or right, communism, socialism or capitalism. However, if the author meant to support capitalism he could have done a better job.
The author wrote the forward to The Gulag Archipelago, not an analysis of comparative political systems. One of his central points is that there is no excuse for continuing to believe and teach that Marxism is a legitimate and desirable system of social organisation. It has been, is and always will be a miserable, murderous failure. The books of Solzhenitsyn and the background to those books, along with works on democratic theory and practice, must, in future, be foundational texts in every Australian high school.
You are obviously confused and need to read more carefully. “A few examples of bad things happening….”? Do you not understand the momentous nature of those few ‘bad things’, the horrific death toll, the economic devastation, the extermination of intellectual capacity, the depravity of the slaughter? Sorry, anyone who claims that the socialist record can be discounted as ‘a few bad things’ is grossly ignorant or just an apologist!
The Marxist/communist doctrine begins with the rejection of the God of the Bible & His authority over us. Then it proceeds to put the State in the place of God. It uses the theory of evolution as its excuse for the rejection of God. The results of this Marxist belief are seen in the working out of this belief in Russia & all other communist countries. The Marxist philosophy put into practice actually proved the truth of the Bible where God reveals that every person has a depraved, sinful nature & is under the just condemnation of a Righteous & Holy God. the Lord Jesus came into this world & died in the place of sinful men & women so that they could be forgiven & cleansed from their guilt & condemnation & so receive eternal life. That in turn leads to a Christian living according to the precepts laid out in the Bible. Our way of life in the Western World & the freedoms, the system of law & order are based on that Judeo/Christian foundation. Those who follow Marxist/Communist doctrine destroy that Christian foundation & the end result is seen in the terrible consequences that took place in Communist Russia, China etc. One can only hope that Australians see this before it is too late & latter day Marxists (as seen in the Labor party & Greens etc) destroy what we have here.
Marxist indoctrination and oppression has succeeded in nations which are not Christian, China being the most obvious example. The theological and philosophical underpinnings of the society are forcefully removed by Marxism and replaced by it. People don’t throw away their religion to embrace Marxism! As for evolutionary theory, this is not an essential part of Marxism and many Christians and adherents of other faiths accept its validity without abandoning their religion.
I happen to agree with the content of what you say, but you shoot yourself in the foot with your stilted and pompous ‘elevated’ language. It makes your comment read as being all about yourself, rather than anything you might be trying to express.
God’s got nothing to do with it. Fairy tales.
How wonderful it would be if we had academics/professors with the wisdom of Professsor Peterson resident in our universities instead of the virtue signalling do gooders we seem to have in some universities in this country.
You make an error here, Bruce. The word should have been “all” universities here. Given time, our universities will destroy everything that Australia stands for and, sadly, most people don’t even realise it’s happening. Evil by stealth is the worst kind of evil.
As George Orwell said “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”
This should be mandatory reading for all voting citizens. Wonderfully articulated.
You can’t even get them to read ‘1984’ or ‘Animal Farm’
But long winded!
I read those books in 1973 and it opened my eyes to the evil of Communism. Jordan is the new Alexsandr in shining the light back on Totalitarian terror.
This was a good article from Peterson due to the content but he’s not a very good writer for this format. Peterson favours a “tossed salad” of words. He is verbose, well meaning but not a clear thinker, writer or talker (three kinds of clarity that go together).
Peterson’s ideas tumble. He is not able to make them coherent, to give them shape and purpose. His heart is in the right place but his expression lets him down.
Ok, so show us how it’s done. I find his clarity appealing but am ready to be awestruck by yours.
If only we can secede to the Taxpayers Republic of Australia and let the Progressive Republic of Australia have its own future! I am even happy to let the PRA have first pick of the best 3 States of their own choosing. The only condition of living in the TRA is that you pay more tax than you get from the Government or if you don’t then you forego your vote, and the only rule for leaving to the PRA is that once gone you may never come back. The PRA people can create their Utopia in whatever image they fit! Imagine how awesome life would be for you to let go of your hate and negativity in being freed from the burden of us oppressive and uncaring conservatives??! Surely it would be absolute heaven for you?? I wonder what people would choose? Ultimately it wouldn’t matter though – I guarantee that we would have war inside 20 years as the embittered and envy-ridden swill of the PRA seek to batter down the gates and overrun the TRA to escape the barren and destitute world that they will create for themselves and need to get their hands on other people’s money yet again. Where are you out there you compassionate and perfect Progressives who want to take me up on my ridiculously generous offer?? You can even have Queensland or wherever else you want as first pick??! Please I am begging you to come forward – no price is too big to be rid of you so that once gone we can concentrate on real nation building for the good of all once again….but I am sure that it will be sadly the case that pigs might fly first. ;-(
A free one way ticket to Venezuela would sufice:
For me, First Circle was better. Solzhenitsyn did indeed issue the warning. All of the frenetic “socialism must be tried again” fan club should read it before they condemn their own societies to such outrages against humanity. Wrong Mr Peterson the Left constantly reminds us that Russia, Venezuela, Cuba etc got socialism wrong, but they’ll get it right this time. Now for the facts. If you think socialism is the answer to your problem, you’ve never lived under socialism to know better. Equality of poorness, corruption when you’ve run out of other people’s money, war crimes. No innovation, no choices, basically one state produced brand of chocolate, oil, clothing etc. West Germany produced the BMW, East Germany just forget that lemon write-off. I’m in a rare position to witness this from an Aussie perspective, having grown up in Sydney’s inner west and then moving to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia for 3 years with my father, the differences could not have been so stark. I opened my wallet with candy money to buy some, but such a display of wealth was considered offensive. You had to look equally poor. Landline phones mostly non-existent, roads unsealed. Corruption paying off police and bribing teachers at schools for favours was rife. Bread rations for students, we had to pick it up from the UN several km’s away from school. Then modern day Croatia was born. The transition to capitalism gave them sealed roads, women discovered gossiping when landline phones first came. Mercs and BMWs started replacing those flimsy Yugo state produced socialist lemon cars. Now back in Sydney’s inner west, what do they want? Posters are rife with “kill capitalism”, “Turn Left”, socialist conferences etc. The “progressive” Left here obviously have never lived under socialism, and clearly they know no better.
A typically erudite rebuttal from a socialist. An individual so limited in thinking, he is incapable of comprehending he has conclusively proved his own cretiny.
It seems when people have freedom of speech, so many of them just want to ignore the lessons of history (or simply don’t read history) and dream of yet another socialist utopia. And whinge! How they like to whinge.
Solzhenitsyn’s work (which deserves more respect) is treated by Professor Peterson as a convenient peg on which to hang another of his long-winded, rambling statements about Jordan Peterson saving the world.
Did you bother actually reading the entire article?
Have you read the book Tom ?
This was written as a forward to the book. Do you not understand the context?
The rambling is the “edited extract”?
Despite a globalist agenda to segregate & secularise humanity into groups for identity processing, there is a profound thankfulness that we not only have Peterson as a instrument of forewarning the mass indoctrination techniques of past political regimes, but a national masthead that vigilantly advocates our right to individualism and freedom of speech, even whilst postmodern tendrils of the communist seed continue to attempt to strangle our western democratic way of life.
He’s totally opposite to identity politics but that’s cool.
Communism might be possible with lots and lots of God’s grace, an abundance of it to make it work. Unfortunately those who impose communism are atheists.
A one legged man could convert to Christianity, tomorrow. He’d still have to hop to the church on Sunday, same as he hopped to the pub, yesterday.
You need to ask Nick Vujicic, who was born with no arms or legs, whether having Christ in his life makes a difference.
Thank you. An academic who can communicate with reason. An educator that inspires us to think for ourselves not just about ourselves.
Of our elaborate plans, the end Of everything that stands, the end No safety or surprise, the end
Jim Morrison
For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son. John 3:16
The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 saw an end to four years of carnage on the western front and the end of of the First World War. The armies were demobbed and men went home to lives that were changed utterly: British and French, Austrian and German, Belgian and Italian, Serbs and Bulgarians, Turks and Arabs, and also, soldiers from across the ocean – Americans and Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders, South Africans and Indians. Friends and foes.
The victors retired to a restless peace, but the vanquished, Germany, Austria, and Hungary, descended into revolution and civil war for a time as gangs of former soldiers fought on the left and the right. In eastern Europe, the crumbling of empires, the Russian revolution, civil war and the struggle to establish the borders of newly established states meant that armed violence continued, leaving deep scars and bitterness that many ways set the stage for the autocracies of the 1930s and further bloodshed.
The Polish-Soviet war lasted until 1921. The Russian Civil War, ending in 1923, raged across most of today’s Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and the Baltic region. British, Australian, American and French soldiers were dispatched to Murmansk and Archangel to fight the Red Army; Poles fought Ukrainians and Lithuanians, and defeated the Soviets at the gates of Warsaw; pogroms were perpetrated against Jews just as they had been for years, decades, centuries prior, accelerating , with subsequent consequence, Aliyah to Palestine.
The Greek-Turkish war of 1919-1922, which saw the Greeks, with British and French support, endeavouring to seize Constantinople, led to terrible massacres, and a forced exchange of populations that uprooted one and a half million Greeks and Turks from towns and villages they had occupied for a millennium. Armies marched back and forth across the Great European Plain, bringing devastation and starvation and destroying millions of lives. Central Asia, the lands now covered by the once Soviet ‘’stans likewise became battlegrounds for Reds, Whites and local warlords.
And in ‘John Bull’s Other Island’, as expat GBS Shaw called it, a “terrible beauty was born” – WB Yeats’ exquisite words – the doomed intifada that was the rebellion of Easter 1916, launched, opportunistically yet quixotically whilst English eyes were elsewhere, led exponentially into open rebellion, a qualified victory, and a civil war and partition that rested, roused and then resurrected in Derry in 1968 and decades termed somewhat innocuously ‘The Troubles’.
For some, there was light at the end of the terrible territorial tunnel. Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Finns, Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, achieved statehood, or the restoration of nationhood, as did, fleetingly, Ukrainians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis. Poland reappeared on the map after over a century of having been carved up by empires. Hungarians lost two-thirds of their territory and more than half of their population. “Little” Serbia, which had ignited the Balkan powder keg in 1914, with Gavril Princip’s famous shot that ricocheted through complacent, twitchy and mightily armed Europe, was united with its Slav but religiously fractured Balkan neighbours in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia – and we now know how well that worked out.
Beyond Europe too, a bitter ‘Peace’ sowed dragon’s teeth. Last year, we commemorated the centenaries of the infamous Sykes Picot Agreement, the first draft of a colonial dispensation that established borders that remained unchallenged until Da’ish assaulted the status quo in 2014, and the Balfour Declaration, which set in train the rise and rise of the state of Israel and the long descent of Palestinian hopes for a land of their own. Ironically, the most militant Zionist pioneers and later, soldiers, terrorists and statesmen, emigrated from Poland and the Tsarist empire. These many legacies resonate today.
The end of WW1 saw the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and left Britain in control of Palestine and Mesopotamia. The peace conferences that followed led to the creation of modern Turkey, and, though for decades under French and British colonial rule, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Jordan. The Kurds turned up at the conference table but were denied a seat and thereafter, a state.
The war changed more than maps, frontiers and regimes. The needs of modern warfare brought women into the workforce, galvanizing the movements that won them the vote in many democracies. The pace of technological change already underway in industrialized countries was quickened by the demands of war, and advances in land transportation and aviation continued exponentially, as did the development of weaponry, together with the insatiable demand for fossil fuels. Economic privation precipitated the first successful Communist revolution and many failed ones, whilst the peace, resentments, reparations, and recession prompted many to turn to far-right authoritarians in Italy and then Germany. The mass movements of populations helped spread the deadliest epidemic the world has ever known: the 1918 influenza virus or Spanish Flu, which quietly killed possibly up to a hundred million souls – more than both world wars combined.
In the last decades of the Twentieth Century, historians would observe with the benefit of hindsight how the Second World War rose ineluctably from the ashes of the first, just as the division of Europe and the Soviet enslavement (and I say this as a lifelong leftist) of those Eastern European countries that emerged after 1918 led to the Europe of today, and as the peoples of the Middle East reaped the whirlwinds of both conflagrations. Many look back on the tumultuous decades that followed the Great War, and sensing signals and signposts in contemporary temporal tea leaves, advise is to be afraid, be very afraid.
We like to identify patterns in history that help us understand and explain our contemporary world. But we should exercise caution. To continue the hindsight riff, remember that things we see in the rear view mirror appear closer than they really are. The world is very much different today, as is our knowledge, our perception, our hopes and fears, and so also, our prognostications and expectations. If we can do it all over again, we’ll do it differently, and much more dangerously and destructively. Having learned so much, we have, one fears, understood so little.
As we remember that moment in Western Europe and the Levant when the guns at last fell silent, let us contemplate melancholy mathematics of the human toll poignantly described by American economist and academic Patrick Chovanec in a fine article in the New York Review of Books, which I have reproduced below:
“In the Great War itself, over sixteen million people died, including almost seven million civilians. The US got off relatively lightly, with 117,465 people killed, just 0.13 percent of its population. In Serbia, somewhere between 17 and 28 percent of the country’s population was killed. But even numbers like these leave little concrete impression on our minds … people would (tell) me about a grandfather or great-uncle who fought and died in the war, and is forever twenty-four-years old in some field in France, or Turkey, or Italy, or at sea. For most people, that absence is what defined the war: someone left and never came home. The world that they shaped, by their presence and their absence, is the one that we live in, whether we realize it or not. And we, like them, can only grope our way forward, day by day, into an unknown future”.
Gavrilo Princip arrested after his assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, Sarajevo, June 28, 1914
Four years ago, I went to war. Like many of the people whose stories I followed in my daily “live-tweets” on World War I, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. What began as an impulsive decision to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand’s death at the hands of a Serbian assassin, in June 1914, snowballed into a blood-soaked odyssey that took me—figuratively and literally—from the rolling hills of northern France, to the desert wastes of Arabia, to the rocky crags of the Italian Alps, to the steel turret of a rebel cruiser moored within range of the czar’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia. And like the men and women who actually lived through it, now that the Great War is ending I find myself asking what, if anything, I’ve learned from it all.
In the American mind, World War I typically occupies an unimpressive place as a kind of shambolic preamble to the great good-versus-evil crusade of World War II, a pointless slugfest in muddy trenches for no worthy purpose, and no worthwhile result. Its catchphrases—“The War to End All Wars,” “Make the World Safe for Democracy”—evoke a wry and knowing chuckle. As if. But the war I encountered, as it unfolded day by day, was far more relevant, passionate, and unpredictable.
Posting daily newspaper clippings and photographs, found mainly in books and online archives, I began to see the Great War as a kind of portal between an older, more distant world—of kings with handlebar mustaches, splendid uniforms, and cavalry charges—and the one that we know: of planes and tanks, mass political movements, and camouflage. It snuffed out ancient monarchies in czarist Russia, Habsburg Austria, and Ottoman Turkey, and gave birth to a host of new nations—Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Armenia, Azerbaijan—that, in their struggles to survive and carve out an identity, continue to shape our world today. The British declared their intent to create a national homeland in Palestine for the Jews.
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Russian infantry marching to battle, Poland, August 1914
The needs of the war brought women into the workforce, and helped win them the right to vote. The huge privations it inflicted triggered the world’s first (successful) Communist revolution, and the frustrations it unleashed prompted many, afterward, to turn to far-right authoritarians in Italy and then Germany. And finally—though many have forgotten it—the comings and goings of people caused by the war helped spread the deadliest epidemic the world has ever known: the 1918 influenza virus, which quietly killed an estimated 50–100 million human beings in their homes and in hospitals, more than both world wars combined.
I also encountered a cast of characters more varied and amazing than I thought possible. Rasputin, the dissolute Russian mystic who warned Czar Nicholas that going to war would destroy his dynasty, and was murdered in part because he was (falsely) suspected as a German agent. The Austrian Emperor Karl, who inherited a war he didn’t want, and tried fruitlessly to make peace. T.E. Lawrence, a scholarly young intelligence officer whose affinity for the Arabs helped turn them to the Allied cause, and shaped the modern Middle East. Mata Hari, a Dutch-born exotic dancer who played double-agent, seducing high-ranking Allied and German officers for valuable information, until she was caught and shot by the French as a spy.
Some of the names are familiar, and offer hints of future greatness—or infamy. A young anti-war journalist named Benito Mussolini, sensing the way the wind blows, changes his tune and aggressively advocates for Italy to enter the war, before signing up himself. A young Charles De Gaulle is wounded at Verdun and taken prisoner for the rest of the conflict. A relatively young Winston Churchillplans the disastrous Gallipoli Campaign and pays his penance by serving in the trenches, before making a political comeback. A young Harry S. Truman serves as an artillery officer on the Western Front, alongside (and outranked by) a young George C. Marshall (his future Army Chief of Staff and Secretary of State) and Douglas MacArthur (his future general in the Pacific and Korea). A young George S. Patton develops a fascination with tanks. A young Walt Disney doodles cartoons on the side of the ambulances he drives, in the same unit as a young Ray Kroc (the founder of McDonald’s). Another young ambulance driver, Ernest Hemingway, finds inspiration on the Italian Front for his novel A Farewell to Arms. A young Hermann Göring (later head of the Luftwaffe) becomes a dashing flying ace, while a young Erwin Rommel wins renown fighting at Verdun and in the Alps. Meanwhile, an odd young German corporal, who volunteered in the very first days of the war, is blinded by poison gas in its final days, and wakes up in hospital to the bitter news that Germany has lost. His name is Adolf Hitler.
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French troops under shellfire during the Battle of Verdun, 1916
The dramatic panoply of people, places, and events, however, only occasionally rises to the fore. For the most part, the war is a steady stream of ordinary people doing ordinary things: washing their clothes, attending a concert, tallying supplies, fixing a car. History books give us a distorted sense of time, because they fast forward to major events. A day may take a chapter, a month may be passed over in a sentence. In fact, there were periods where nothing much happened—plans were being made, troops trained, supplies positioned—and when you live-tweet, you experience that waiting. Sometimes, it led to intriguing surprises, like photographs of dragon dances performed by some of the 140,000 Chinese laborers brought over to France to lend muscle to the Allied war effort. Mostly, it was a matter of endurance. Each winter, the fighting came to almost a complete stop as each country hunkered down and hoped its food would last. The “turnip winter” of 1916–1917, when the potato crop failed, nearly broke Germany; the increasingly desperate craving for “bread and peace” did break Russia the following year.
The future president Herbert Hoover made his reputation by coordinating food relief shipments to German-occupied Belgium, and later as the US “food czar” ensuring Allied armies and populations were fed. The vast mobilization was effective: by 1918, the Allies were able to relax their food rationing, while Germany and its confederates, strangled by an Allied naval blockade, were on the verge of starvation. America’s war effort was accompanied by a vast expansion in the federal government’s power and reach. It nationalized (temporarily) the railroads and the telephone lines. It set prices for everything from sugar to shoes, and told motorists when they could drive, workers when they could strike, and restaurants what they could put on their menus. It seized half a billion dollars of enemy-owned property, including the brand rights to Bayer aspirin, and sold them at auction. The US government also passed espionage and sedition laws that made it illegal to criticize the war effort or the president. Some people were sent to prison for doing so, including the Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs, who ran for president for a fifth and final time from a cell.
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A woman munitions worker operating a machine in an armaments factory, Britain, circa 1915
Winning the war, however, was far from a sure thing. For three years, the Allies threw themselves against an evenly-matched enemy on the Western Front, without making any breakthroughs, while the Eastern Front gradually crumbled. An early Allied foray to take out Turkey, at Gallipoli in 1915, ended in bloody disappointment. Inducing Italy to enter the war on the Allies’ side, that same year, was supposed to swing the entire conflict in their favor; instead, the catastrophic Italian rout atCaporetto, in the autumn of 1917, put the Allied effort in greater jeopardy. When Lenin seized power in Russia, at the end of 1917, he took it immediately out of the war and ceded immense land and resources to German control. True, the US had by then entered the war, in response to Germany’s submarine campaign against merchant ships and its clumsy diplomatic scheming in Mexico. But with the war in the East essentially won, the Germans saw a window in which they could shift all of their armies to the West and crush the exhausted British and French before enough American troops could arrive to make a difference. Their spring offensive, or “Kaiser’s Battle,” in early 1918 drove deep into Allied lines, prompting the French government to evacuate Paris.
The Germans’ big roll of the dice failed. The Allies held, and the US mobilized much faster than anyone expected. By the summer of 1918, a perceptible change had taken place. Hundreds of thousands of American troops were arriving every month at French ports, and their first units were taking part in battles, piecemeal at first, to push the Germans back. Even in September, however, nearly everyone expected the war to continue into 1919. That was when a huge US army of 3 million men would be ready to take part in a big Allied offensive that would drive all the way to Berlin. It never happened. That fall, the German army—and those of Turkey, Austria, and Bulgaria—first buckled, then collapsed like a rotten log. By November 11, the war was over.
The fact that nobody saw the end coming, the way it did, highlights the value of going back, a hundred years later, and reliving events day by day, as they took place. What may seem obvious now was anything but so then, and we do the people who lived through it, and our understanding of them, a real disservice when we assume that it was. “Life can only be understood backwards,” the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard observed, “but it must be lived forwards.” The British historian C.V. Wedgewood elaborated on the same idea: “History is lived forwards but is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was like to know the beginning only.” We can’t entirely forget that we know what happened next, but when we at least try to identify with people who did not know, we shed new light on them, and on what did happen.
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Leon Trotsky with the Soviet delegation to negotiate a peace treaty with Germany, Brest-Litovsk, 1918
Take the Russian Revolution. We see it as the birth of a Communist superpower, and struggle to make sense of the seemingly half-baked, half-hearted effort by the Allies to intervene by sending troops, including Americans, to Russia’s ports in the far north and far east. People at the time, however, saw it almost entirely through the prism of the Great War. At first, the Allies welcomed the overthrow of the czar, and believed it would rejuvenate the failing Russian war effort. By replacing an infamous autocrat on the Allied roster with a fledgling democracy, it made “making the world safe for democracy” a more credible call to arms, and helped pave the way for the US to enter the war. When Lenin took over and made a ruinous peace with the Central Powers, he was seen as simply a German puppet. And when Bolshevik forces, augmented with released German and Austrian prisoners of war, attacked a unit of Czech soldiers crossing Siberia to rejoin the Allies on the Western Front, those suspicions blossomed into fear of a full-fledged German takeover of Russia. The Allies sent troops to key Russian ports to secure the war supplies stockpiled there and provide an exit route for the loyal Czechs. They considered trying to “reopen” the Eastern Front, but realized it would take far too many men. They assumed that when Germany was defeated, their proxy Lenin would eventually fall, and when the war ended, they naturally lost interest. It all makes sense, but only if you see through the eyes that people saw through at the time.
Did it really matter who won the war? In its aftermath, the Great War came to be seen as a colossal waste, a testament to the vanity of nations, of pompous older men sending foolish younger men into the meat-grinder for no good reason. War poems like “Dulce et decorum est” and novels like All Quiet on the Western Front have crystalized this impression. But this was not how people felt at the time. German atrocities in Belgium and on the high seas—some exaggerated, but others quite real—convinced many people that civilization, as they knew it, really was at stake. I was consistently and often surprisingly struck by the sincerity of support, not just on the home front, but among soldiers who had seen the worst of combat, for pursuing the war unto victory. The tone matures, but remains vibrant: these were, for the most part, people who believed in what they were fighting for. At what point the bitter cynicism set in, after the war ended, I cannot say. But at some point, that enthusiasm, and even the memory of it, became buried with the dead.
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Boys wearing bags of camphor around their necks to ward off influenza, 1917
Though, in fact, in many places the war did not actually end. An armistice was declared on the Western Front, and the armies there were disbanded and sent home. But Germany, Austria, and Hungary all descended into revolution and civil war for a time, with gangs of demobilized soldiers fighting on all sides. In Russia, the Soviet regime and its multiple enemies would battle for several years, while trying to reconquer territory surrendered when it quit the war against Germany. The Greeks tried to reclaim Constantinople from the Turks, and would be massacred when the Turks succeeded in reconsolidating their country. The Poles fought wars with the Ukrainians and the Soviets to define the boundaries of their newly independent country. Jews and Arabs continue to fight over the new lands liberated from the Ottoman Empire to this day.
In the Great War itself, over 16 million people died, including almost 7 million civilians. The US got off relatively lightly, with 117,465 people killed, just 0.13 percent of its population. In Serbia, somewhere between 17 percent and 28 percent of the country’s population was killed. But even numbers like these leave little concrete impression on our minds. Some of the most touching parts of my experience live-tweeting were the times when people would tweet back to me about a grandfather or great-uncle who fought and died in the war, and is forever twenty-four-years old in some field in France, or Turkey, or Italy, or at sea. For most people, that absence is what defined the war: someone left and never came home. The world that they shaped, by their presence and their absence, is the one that we live in, whether we realize it or not. And we, like them, can only grope our way forward, day by day, into an unknown future.
Historica Graphica Collection/Heritage Images/Getty Images
When do satire and comedy cross the line and become tasteless? Some find this black comedy hilarious, whilst others think otherwise. Many whose families lived and suffered under totalitarian regimes, and those knowledgeable of the events might have a different view to those whose knowledge and experience is limited. And those who’ve actually lived under the Soviets might display the wry gallows humour of the oppressed. As a Ukrainian friend commented: ‘I think the film is better dubbed into Russian – they really worked on the dialogue. The English version is somewhat farcical. But watching it in Russian, you want to cry and laugh at the same time (not easy to do – it takes practice)”.
In the small, beautiful Art Deco Capitol cinema in Auckland, New Zealand, we watched this blackest of black comedies: the wise-cracking, slap-sticking, foul-mouthed, Machiavellian maneuvering of the Soviet politburo on the death of venerated and feared dictator for life Joseph Stalin in 1953. The shorts promised a cinematic treat, a “comedy of terrors” replete with malice aforethought as great actors have a good time with sharp one-liners, language worthy of The Thick of It’s Malcolm Tucker (the same script-writing and production team, after all) and gags of dubious taste. The cast includes Steve Buscemi (Boardwalk Empire), Michael Palin (Monty Python) and Robert Friend (Homeland’s Peter Quinn). Critics have acclaimed it as uproarious and wickedly irreverent, and devastatingly funny (that’s the Sydney Morning Herald).
But I personally didn’t find it funny at all. A friend commented that there was little difference between the black humour of this film and that of, say, Black Adder and Monty Python’s The Life of Brian. Quite so, but it is a matter of degree, content, the descriptions of sexual assault, and the explicit depiction of violence. From the opening scenes, the NKVD, the all-powerful Soviet internal security service, was a constant, threatening presence. Against a predictable, seedy but picturesque backdrop of Red Square, the Kremlin and Saint Basil’s cathedral, dingy and darkened apartments, incongruously inappropriate rococo dachas, and brooding pine forests, and a soundtrack of soulful Russian music, midnight arrests, brutal interrogations and summary executions were an ongoing leitmotif for this comedy of Soviet bad manners.
The Independent reported in January this year that the film has been banned in Russia. Whilst some commentators see this as symptomatic of th state of democracy in Putin’s Russia, critics and filmmakers supportive of the ban have called it variously unpatriotic, blasphemous and unprofessional; hateful, vile and repugnant; and “insulting our national symbols. The trailer goes out using our national anthem and it shows our great war marshals as … I don’t know how else to put it … idiots.”
My primary emotion was one of sadness – for the victims, so many nameless, who perished during the Soviet Union’s two decades of terror, and for the millions – from the Baltic to ththe Crimea- who were transported to the labour camps of the distant Gulags, to work, to starve, and to die.
By strange symmetry, I had been rereading historian Robert Conquest’s tombstone of a book, The Great Terror: a relentless narrative of arrests, trials, fabricated confessions, hostage-taking, deportations, torture and executions as Stalin consolidated his rule, eliminated enemies real and imagined, and created his own model of a socialist state.
It commenced with the elimination of the Old Bolsheviks, his former comrades in arms, and then expanded to embrace all in the party and society at large who may or may not have shared his vision. Intellectuals, philosophers, writers, poets, musicians, priests, scientists, academics, teachers, civil servants, workers and peasants, and the Red Army’s Officer Corps – a contributing factor to the Soviet Union’s need to make a pact with Nazi Germany in 1939 and its disastrously slow response to Hitlers invasion in June 1941.
An estimated death toll is difficult to determine. In those dark days, people simply disappeared, and the NKVD covered its tracks well. The official number for the “Great Purge” of 1936 to 1938 stands at 1,548,366 detained persons, of whom 681,692 were shot – an average of 1,000 executions a day. Various historians claim that the real number of victims could be twice as much.
But the the arrests, executions, and deportations commenced as early as 1930 and continued right up until Stalin’s death in 1953. Conquest, in his The Great Terror: A Reassessment does the gloomy math: 1930-36, 7 million; 1937-1938, 3 million; 1039-53, 10 million. The number of deaths in the Soviet Union that were explicitly ordered by someone – in other words, the number of executions – is actually relatively low at around 1.5 million. The majority of the deaths were caused by neglect or repressive policies – for example, those who died in the Soviet gulags, those who died while being deported, and German civilians and Prisoners of War are believed to have perished while under Soviet guard.
The numbers who were transported, exiled, displaced, and scattered to concentration camps or far-eastern towns and villages were likewise incalculable. as the brother of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago comments in the final scenes of David Lean’s beautiful but flawed movie)
There is a myriad of books and films about these events. Wikipediais as good a place as any to start. Robert Conquest’s is the most acclaimed – and rightly so. Then there is Arthur Koestler’s chilling novel, Darkness at Noon, published in 1940, which recounts the thoughts of an Old Bolshevik as he awaits death in the execution cells.
As for movies, there’s always David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago, which realistically albeit melodramatically portrays the choices and compromises confronting ordinary, intellectual Russians in the years of revolution and civil war. But I would highly recommend the poignant but powerful Burnt by the Sun, a 1994 film by Russian director and screenwriter Nikita Mikhailkov and Azerbaijani screenwriter Rustam Ibragimbekov. The film depicts the story of a senior officer (played by Mikhalkov) and his family during the purge of the Red Army.
On our return from New Zealand, I retrieved from my archive a paper I wrote as an undergraduate at Reading University in 1970, under the wise tutorship of eminent Sovietologist, historian and former political prisoner Tibor Szamuely, entitled How Rational Was The Great Purge? My writing style, the content and the conclusions I drew have changed little over the years. I shall publish it soon on Into That Howling Infinite.
You were taken away at dawn. I followed you As one does when a corpse is being removed. Children were crying in the darkened house. A candle flared, illuminating the Mother of God… The cold of an icon was on your lips A death-cold sweat on your brow – I will never forget this; I will gather To wail with the wives of the murdered streltsy Inconsolably, beneath the Kremlin towers.
Anna Akhmatova, Moscow 1935
And first, English songwriter Al Stewart’s tribute to Solzhenitsyn and those like him who were ill-paid for their service and sacrifice.
I’m coming home, I’m coming home, now you can taste it in the wind, the war is over And I listen to the clicking of the train-wheels as we roll across the border And now they ask me of the time that I was caught behind their lines and taken prisoner “They only held me for a day, a lucky break, ” I say they turn and listen closer I’ll never know, I’ll never know why I was taken from the line and all the others To board a special train and journey deep into the heart of holy Russia And it’s cold and damp in the transit camp, and the air is still and sullen And the pale sun of October whispers the snow will soon be coming And I wonder when I’ll be home again and the morning answers “Never” And the evening sighs, and the steely Russian skies go on forever
I fought in the old revolution on the side of the ghost and the King. Of course I was very young and I thought that we were winning; I can’t pretend I still feel very much like singing as they carry the bodies away. Leonard Cohen, The Old Revolution
‘Thermidorian’ refers to 9th Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794), the date according to the French Republican Calendar, when Robespierre, Danton and other radical revolutionaries came under concerted attack in the National Convention, resulting in their downfall and execution.
Grim travelers butt each other to establish dominance. One lot plays Danton to another’s Robespierre, with the moderate Manon Roland and her Girondins trampled underfoot in the melee. Robespierre destroys his erstwhile friends and slaughters thousands, precipitating the Jacobin meltdown as the ascetic and purist Marat is murdered in his bath. Robespierre and Saint-Just are guillotined by those who believe “the Terror” had gone too far.
I would argue that this “Thermidorian Reaction” – the ostensibly “better angels of our nature” (Abraham Lincoln said that) reasserting themselves – is a rare bird indeed. Inevitably, things get worse, much worse, before they get better. As WH Auden observes in Age of Anxiety, “many have perished: more will”.
Revolutions are unpredictable. They never run in straight lines. They reverberate, the shock-waves expanding and impacting on their vicinity, and way beyond. The shots ricochet, like drive-bys and crossfires, and you never know who will be hit, where the bullets will come to rest, and who will be damaged or destroyed. Many people will be liberated, and many enslaved. Many peoples will prosper, and many, many will perish. As TS Elliot wrote, “between the idea and the reality falls the shadow”.”
Stalin seizing Lenin’s crown as the father of the revolution lay dying. Trotsky launching the Red Army against the sailors of Kronstadt whose guns had heralded the fall of the Romanovs, and who then fought to last man against their former comrades. Stalin and Trotsky wrestling for control of party and power as the old Bolsheviks disappeared into the gulags and the execution cells. Stalin’s long arm putting an ice pick through his rival’s skull in Mexico decades later. Trotsky knew a thing or two about “permanent revolution”!
Adolf Hitler making his move against the corrupt and sybaritic Rohm and his Brown Shirt bully boys, a threat to his control of party and state, in the “Night of the Long Knives”, and setting the course for a Germany’s slow spiral to damnation with the plausible deniability of the similarly dramatically named Kristalnacht. The German language has surely given the world ominous words of iron – Nacht und Nebel; Storm und Drang; Weltanschauung – none of them boding well for tyranny’s unwelcome attentions.
It is a zero-sum play book well thumbed by latter-day revolutionists like the Baathists Saddam Hussein and Hafiz Assad in their relentless and merciless accession to power in Iraq and Syria respectively, like the cruel and vengeful but infinitely pragmatic regime that has ruled Iran’s Islamic Republic for these past forty years, and the kleptocratic dictators who Lord over much of South Saharan Africa. In the manner of revolutions past and present, each one has “devoured its children”, harrying, jailing, exiling and slaughtering foes and onetime allies alike.
The sad reality in so many countries is that when the going gets tough, the mild get going, and the hard men ride roughshod over their people.
Vengeful, vindictive. Merciless. Unforgiving and never forgetting. Do no deals. Take no prisoners. Give no quarter.
In That Howling Infinite 