▲ 80 points
back
114 comments
All these anti-Bolshevik treatises of late merely profit from the decay and ruin of Left-wing consciousness and culture that has taken place in the last century. The old Bolsheviks I once knew would have laughed at this "thesis". But who is around anymore to argue against it?
Against? TBH, I'm not sure there's a need to argue against a political movement with such a record.
It's interesting how a lot of people tries to defend the unambiguously totalitarian party and, at the same time, criticizes autoritarian trends of western democracies.
>Against? TBH, I'm not sure there's a need to argue against a political movement with such a record.
And yet people don't have issues with political movements with the same or even worse records (from colonialism to slavery), and can swipe their issues under the carpet (what does capitalism has to do with some such countries enslaving 2/3rds of the world causing untold suffering and deaths, that's just human nature, some bad apples, some greedy leaders, etc) whereas issues with other systems they present as "inherent".
It's mostly the winners getting to write history.
it's not uncommon in some countries/cultures to see people defend an abstract "communist" ideology while acknowledging the evils of the actual regimes.
So, it seems likely that if specifically more bolsheviks were around, they might take issues with the characterization of TFA, as grandparent says.
For folks who don’t know and want to learn more:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communis...
Note: please no what aboutism as a response to this. I’m aware that this isn’t the only ideology that has committed atrocities, but we are discussing this one in this thread.
> All these anti-Bolshevik treatises of late merely profit from the decay and ruin of Left-wing consciousness and culture that has taken place in the last century
I don't think so; Bolshevism itself was the decay and ruin in left-wing consciousness. The emphatic rejection of Leninism and it's descendants by many on the left, even many who remain committed to Marxism and non-Leninist derivatives thereof, is a renaissance in left-wing consciousness and thought, and an escape from the swamp in which much of it was mired for much of the twentieth century.
Compared to what, though? Leninism had a lot of adherents because it had actually worked on multiple occasions, whereas the economist/trade unionist approach hasn't panned out so well for the working class, or indeed the middle class in developed countries.
This _renaissance_ is at least as old as the Bolsheviks, though. You could even go all the way back to Eduard Bernstein.
You knew old Bolsheviks? Or did you know some Western sympathesizers? Big difference, but either way you’d have to be north of 80 years old.
Chomsky on Leninism:
Hint: he’s not a fan
How? A Bolshevik could have died at 80 or 90, and the OP could have met them at age 20, making them 60ish now. There is plenty of wriggle room for the OP to be younger.
>All these anti-Bolshevik treatises of late merely profit from the decay and ruin of Left-wing consciousness and culture that has taken place in the last century. The old Bolsheviks I once knew would have laughed at this "thesis". But who is around anymore to argue against it?
So are you saying the thesis is wrong, but you are not going to offer us any arguments as to why?
Of course they would have laughed, just as the Mormon leadership laughs at The Book of Mormon, the musical.
Shocking to see something like this here. Could moderators explain why defending these vile people is allowed here? Next someone starts a story about misunderstood old nazi friends.
If you believe a post is inappropriate for HN, you can flag the submission (if you have sufficient karma). You can also contact the mods directly via the Contact link in the footer. Help make HN the place you want it to be.
Weren't the Bolsheviks just a minor faction that ended up winning the civil war? Bolshevism became the party in the USSR.
I understand your complaint were it about communism, but it's hard to defend a group (Bolshevism) that was loaded with cowardly and narcissistic mass murderers. There's no one to defend them because they're all dead, in many instances killed off by each other. Their form of government collapsed. What's there to defend? Does anyone really want to associate themselves with the actions and mistakes of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Beria, etc. at this time?
Is this incorrect? Were there Bolshevik communities elsewhere that you may have been part of? I thought most of the Bolsheviks were dead by the 1950s.
>Weren't the Bolsheviks just a minor faction that ended up winning the civil war? Bolshevism became the party in the USSR.
Nope. It was a majority faction ("bolshevik" literally means "member of majority" as opposite to "menshevik", "member of minority") in the Russian Social-Democratic Worker Party (РСДРП). They took power during the October Revolution. Soon after the revolution the party was renamed into Russian Communist Party (of Bolsheviks). A year later the Communist International (Commintern) was created by Lenin's order and its first congress in 1919 was attended by delegates from 21 different countries.
So, it seems to me, it was not a minor faction in a single country but a member of the international Communist movement.
Marxism-Leninism is certainly not dead, although the fall of the USSR was a harsh blow. In my Western European country, the Communist Party still gets almost 10% of the votes, and while they no longer openly defend Stalin's legacy, Leninism is still very much at the core of their identity.
> Does anyone really want to associate themselves with the actions and mistakes of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Beria, etc. at this time?
For Lenin at least, yes, absolutely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_Democratic_Front_(Kerala)
There are many people today that want to associate themselves with Trotsky. They are called trotskyists.
Weren't the Bolsheviks just a minor faction that ended up winning the civil war? Bolshevism became the party in the USSR.
No. They were the largest left faction, and the word bolshevik translates to 'majority', while menshevik means 'minority' - so named because the Bolsheviks pursued a majority-rule policy while the Mensheviks wanted a more parliamentarian system that preserved the rights of minority parties. There were two communist revolutions in 1917; the first, in February, toppled the Tsar but the provisional government led by Kerensky didn't deliver on its promise of pulling Russia out of the war and made so many compromises with the conservative and militarist interests that eventually it lost the confidence of the working class, and the Bolsheviks were able to take power in an almost bloodless second revolution in October.
Lenin was in hiding at the time, having been accused of sedition (I think, I forget the exact charge) against the provisional government, and Trotsky's execution of the takeover went so smoothly that when Lenin turned up at the Bolsheviks' HQ a couple of days alter he demanded of Trotsky to know why they weren't fighting and was astonished to learn that they had already won. Having seized power, the Bolshevik's first task was to get Russia out of the war, and they sent Trotsky off to negotiate the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. This didn't go as well as they hoped, and to get Russia out of the war they had to make huge compromises, but they succeeded in signing a peace treaty thereby fulfilling their primary objective.
The Russian civil war began after the exit from WW1, but the Bolsheviks were legitimately in power before it began and remained in power the whole time. Civil wars in any country are bitter and destructive, partly because many of the issues are personal and partly because both sides know the territory well and are able to wage war more intimately and effectively than a foreign invader, who is more constrained by logistical and infrastructural considerations.
I think the Bolsheviks and the left revolutionaries in general were quite justified in seizing power; Tsarism was dreadful and World War 1 was a horrific waste of life and treasure which the Bolsheviks were quite right to oppose (and which many socialist parties around europe cynically sold out the working class to promote). Having achieved victory and pulled russia out of the war, I don't know why you'd expect them not to defend the government they'd just established against its White Army challengers.
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James had to define religion.
So he defined it as "the sense that there is an unseen order to things, and that one must conform to it harmoniously."
Bolshevism obviously qualifies.
Sorry, this is just to easy. Bolshevism was not a religion. Not at all. It was a political party modeled on the German SPD, modified to fit the political conditions of Tsarist Russia.
No serious scholar or historian would treat Bolshevism as a religion. It was always about politics.
"Patriotism", "Racism", "Functional programming", and many other things will qualify too then, at least for a non-negligible number of people.
We tend to get unreasonably attached and put our faith into stuff like that.
Patriotism: plenty of ethno-specific religions out there. I was born into one.
Racism: "race is our religion" - an explicit slogan for more than one neonazi movement.
Functional programming: when an advocate moves past "one must" to "you must", the allusions to religion and holy wars get pretty justified.
A good summary of the faults of political orthodoxy. You can safely experience the downsides first hand by hanging around with certain groups of Maoists, who are especially fond of quoting their favorite texts in lieu of developing or critiquing them.
On the other hand, the review (and possibly the book) are a little unfair in ignoring the daunting scope of the task the Bolsheviks undertook - the transformation of a feudal kingdom with only two large industrial centers into a modern state. They were not the only party seeking to overturn that order, but took and maintained power in October 1917 because they were willing to follow through on their basic aims, such as taking Russia out of the Great War - even though they had to accept significant short-term losses like abandoning control of Ukraine.
It's absolutely true that a collectivist ethos like Bolshevism was massively destructive to the establishment of the time and resulted in an enormous loss of freedom - for them. But reading a review like this, it's easy to forget that the vast majority of the population there did not enjoy anything like the freedoms people take for granted in a developing country, but lived either in squalid urban conditions or primitive rural ones. And yet, mere decades later, it was the USSR that first ventured into outer space.
Communism, as outlined by Marx, is a philosophy of abundance - Marx imagined that everyone would work a bit, maybe half-days, to maintain society, and that the rest of the day could be given over to study and leisure. In practice, this egalitarian utopia remained a distant aspiration as countries like russia and China sought to both maintain their newly-seized economic and political independence and to reap the fruits of industrial development for themselves. As we've seen, both countries have slid back towards nationalism; Russia as an autocracy and China as a weird sort of state capitalism - Xi has concentrated power almost as effectively as Putin, but wields it through more conventional institutional channels.
It may be relevant that both countries abandoned internationalism after their Communist revolutions - Stalin to pursue 'socialism in one country' (with himself very much in charge) and China to alter pursue 'socialism with Chinese characteristics' under Deng. One could argue that today China practices a form of economic imperialism while seeking to establish a peaceful counter-hegemony opposite the United States and to a lesser extent the EU. Communism as an international movement is moribund, and left-wing Communists (ideologically democratic ones) would argue that the failure to prosecute an international strategy made such an outcome inevitable.
TBH the USSR got into space not because of its government but because it had captured enough expertise and manufacturing ability from the remains of Nazi Germany. If not for the end of WW2 and all they confiscated its very likely they would never have catapulted so far ahead of where they were so fast.
the issue with all ideal forms of each government type is that people in charge elevate themselves above the tenets of said government.
The same can be said about the USA though; after all, Wernher von Braun wasn't exactly born in Kansas. Still, both the US and USSR managed to provide enough industrial and scientific base to expand on the research they captured.
> they were the only apocalyptic sect that had ever taken over an “existing heathen empire”: they ruled over the population of the former Russian Empire, which was overwhelmingly ignorant of or unreceptive to their teachings
I think the Jacobin take over of the French Revolution was similar, both in the totalist philosophy of the revolutionaries, the apocalyptic fervor of it and in the bloody consequences of it.
According to Lichtheim's book on Marxism, Marx was inspired by the French Revolution and wanted to succeed where it had failed.
I really wonder why this was downvoted so much. Anyone care to elaborate?
Sheila Fitzpatrick's review of The House of Government is less gushing, or at least it maintains a critical distance from the work:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n15/sheila-fitzpatrick/good-commun...
And don't forget that Lenin was a mushroom.
Religions are like political parties, you say?
Politics is the opiate of the people.
Here's another review
www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/11/23/bolshevisms-new-believers/
To understand why the Bolsheviks failed achieve their idealistic goals, you need to look at the larger history of Marxism.
To start, in the mid-19th century Marx believed that capitalism has inherent contradictions that would lead to its weakening and being overthrown through violent workers revolution and replaced by communism, a utopia in which everyone would work together and the state would disappear. And he thought this would happen within a few decades.
But then decades went by and capitalism instead continued to grow, and this lead to a crisis in the Marxist movement. One faction, lead by Eduard Bernstein, decided revolution would never occur and decided to instead promote socialism through democratic elections and gradual reform. This group joined up with socialist democratic parties throughout Europe.
The other group, lead by Lenin, decided to double down on revolution. They thought the workers had been brainwashed and needed to be lead by a tight group of disciplined revolutionaries, a doctrine known as "vanguardism"
Lenin also believed that capitalism had escaped the consequences of its alleged internal contradictions by expanding to overseas markets through European imperialism. But he thought that this process had reached its limit and the result would be a world war, after which Europe would be ripe for communist revolution.
Finally, Lenin believed, contrary to conventional Marxism, that the peasants in agrarian, pre-industrial, pre-capitalist societies like Russia were naturally communal, and so it would be possible to go directly from feudalism to communism without having to pass through a capitalist phase.
Based on all these beliefs, Lenin lead the Bolsheviks in a successful takeover of Russia. The problem was that the communist revolutions in the rest of Europe never occurred, and so Russia found itself all alone and very vulnerable to its Western industrialized neighbors.
There followed a debate as to whether Russia should become a liberal capitalist and industrialize the traditional way,and eventually become socialist or push ahead with a dictatorial form of socialist industrialization. Stalin was initially for the first option, but after gaining power he switched to the second, with enormous brutality.
Then followed WWII, where the Soviet Union basically rescued the world from Fascism, and then Stalin's death, and a very dreary dictatorship that dragged on for decades until communism finally collapsed under Gorbachev.
In the meantime, a great many pre-industrialized countries, starting with China, were inspired by Marxism and the Soviet Union and also tried to move directly to socialism and then communism, and also failed. Even many nations that did not label themselves as communist, like much of the Middle East and Africa, still were inspired to follow authoritarian, semi-socialist paths. And all failed to achieve their goals.
Leftists say none of this matters because none of the nations were true communism. But in dozens of cases a group of smart and apparently sincere communists took power, and in every instance what they produced was not true communism, so the conclusion seems to be that true communism simply is not possible.
> To start, in the mid-19th century Marx believed that capitalism has inherent contradictions that would lead to its weakening and being overthrown through violent workers revolution and replaced by communism, a utopia in which everyone would work together and the state would disappear.
Wrong, he thought that capitalism would be replaced by socialism, which would itself transition over time to communism; Marx’s socialism is not a utopian state, and Marx did not see workers revolutions replacing capitlaism directly with utopian communism.
> Leftists say none of this matters because none of the nations were true communism
No, non-Leninist Leftists say none of this is relevant to non-Leninist communism and the broader non-Leninist Left, because all these systems were Leninist vanguardism, and non-Leninists on the Left reject vanguardism and generally also the Leninist deviation from classical Marxism in bypassing capitalist democracy as a necessary part of the path.
Much of this is easily debunked in accessible books and even YouTube videos. The original Bolsheviks had indeed read their Marx. They knew that a revolution needed to happen not in Russia (which everyone knew was a pre-industrial state), but in industrialized Germany and potentially Britain. Merely decimating Russian society was never the end goal of the Bolsheviks.
Russia was considered by Lenin to be a staging ground for the more meaningful revolutions to follow. It wasn't until Stalin emerged as the Soviet leader that this strategy was abandoned in favor of "socialism in one country", where the exploitation of pre-industrial Russia was deemed good enough.
I doubt anyone would even describe Stalin's reign in religious terms (although his upbringing was deeply religious)...but just another manifestation of history's most reliable anti-pattern: the folly of investing total power in one person.
Does the article disagree with any of that?
>Slezkine is by no means the first person to draw the analogy between the Bolsheviks and sectarians (Lenin himself is reported to have taken an interest in the Münster Anabaptists and Cromwell’s Puritans as he pondered Russia’s revolutionary potential in the early twentieth century), but no one before him has extracted such analytical mileage from it. This intellectual framework allows him to explain the Bolsheviks’ striving to bring self and society, individual and history, into perfect alignment; their relentless study and exegesis of their own version of scripture (Marx and Engels, later Lenin); their jealous guarding of their purity and integrity; and their embrace of violence, which was a welcome sign of the apocalyptic confrontation that would herald the “Real Day”.
Maintaining ideological purity (Lenin's policy of no collaboration with any bourgeois or other leftist elements after the February revolution and the program of immediate communist revolution after the bourgeois one were considered foolish and impractical by many); the belief in the soon-to-come apocalyptic worldwide civil war and revolution (as you said yourself); and the embrace of violent narratives on how to go about it; all of this describes Lenin's policies ~1917 quite well.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'belief in the soon-to-come apocalyptic worldwide civil war and revolution'? As a Marxist, Lenin certainly expected revolution to break out around the world, but World War 1's global scope and vast destruction were incontrovertible facts which seemed like definite evidence in support of Marx's economic predictions.
I mean, the destruction of so much life and wealth in that war was fundamentally irrational; it was a bunch of opportunist colonial powers vying for dominance over each other. It seems rather cheeky to label the Bolsheviks as a quasi-religious sect for acting in accordance with an economic hypothesis with several years of evidence to back it up.
You may recall that when WW1 broke out most of the participants were (at least publicly) optimistic about it being a short honorable affair. Trotsky, who was an astute journalist, correctly predicted that the combination of trench construction and industrialization would instead lead to a long war of attrition, and was proved entirely right about this - though he did fail to predict the innovation of tank development that would eventually break the deadlock on the Western front. But I think you have to say the Bolsheviks had more evidence for their political-economic thesis going into the revolutionary year of 1917 than the 'great powers' did for their policy in 1914. Further, the Bolsheviks succeeded in taking power not by rushing into the fray at the first opportunity, but by sticking to their political position and waiting out the other parties after the February revolution. After all kerensky's government had failed to deliver on the goal of getting russia out of the war, and it seems odd to blame the Bolsheviks for sticking to their principles on this rather important issue.
Slezkine might well be right to draw his sectarian analogy based on subsequent events, but it doesn't seem fair to apply this to the 1917 policies which seem eminently rational and strategic.
I agree, especially Stalin was fighting with Trotsky who promoted ideas of the permanent revolution.
So just like any religion then ;)
Calling the Bolsheviks "an apocalyptic sect" is wrong, because they were full of what we might call "the social optimism". They tried to build a "new, happier" society on the ruins of the imperial Russia which was rotten to the core. Too bad they chose the "Red Terror" as the means to that end.
"Apocalypse" literally means "unveiling", but it refers to the biblical book of Revelation. Revelation describes the total destruction of the existing world, but ends with the creation of a new, better one.
In the same way, the Bolsheviks were about the total destruction of the current social, economic, and political order, in order to build the new. So "apocalyptic" is a fairly accurate term.
In fairness, their options in the civil war were either 'red terror' or a swift defeat, since the White forces (led by the aristocracy and financed and supported from abroad) had no qualms about initiating a 'White terror' to raise manpower.
Forced conscription and hostage-taking among the peasantry was the historical norm and the Red Guards (the all-volunteer force that was the product of the soviets and supported the Bolsheviks) was simply too small to serve as an effective defense force. I don't know what other options they had.
Mind, I'm not excusing subsequent totalitarianism, Stalinist purges etc. if you meant to include that in your post; I'm just commenting on the strategic conditions that obtained during the civil war.
> which was rotten to the core
It was still in all senses better that anything Bolsheviks had at any point of their rule. It's too easy to kick a fallen giant.