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(Jeez, I thought she was talking about Bhaskar Sunkara, not Steve Bannon.)
Washington Post, Nov. 6 2917
100 years later, Bolshevism is back. And we should be worried.
By Anne Applebaum
At the beginning of 1917, on the eve of the Russian revolution, most of
the men who would become known to the world as the Bolsheviks had very
little to show for their lives. They had been in and out of prison,
constantly under police surveillance, rarely employed. Vladimir Lenin
spent most of the decade preceding the revolution drifting between
Krakow, Zurich and London. Joseph Stalin spent those years in the
Caucasus, running protection rackets and robbing banks. Leon Trotsky had
escaped from Siberian exile was to be found in Viennese coffee shops;
when the revolution broke out, he was showing off his glittering
brilliance at socialist meeting halls in New York.
They were peripheral figures even in the Russian revolutionary
underground. Trotksy had played a small role in the unsuccessful
revolution of 1905 — the bloody, spontaneous uprising that the historian
Richard Pipes has called “the foreshock” — but Lenin was abroad. None of
them played a major role in the February revolution, the first of the
two revolutions of 1917, when hungry workers and mutinous soldiers
occupied the streets of Petrograd, as St. Petersburg was then called,
and forced the czar to abdicate. Alexander Shliapnikov, one of the few
Bolsheviks to reach the Russian capital at the time, even dismissed the
February street protests, at first, as inconsequential: “What
revolution? Give the workers a pound of bread and the movement will
peter out.” Chaotic elections to the first workers’ soviet, a kind of
spontaneous council, were held a few days before the czar’s abdication;
the Bolsheviks got only a fraction of the vote. At that moment,
Alexander Kerensky, who was to become the Provisional Government’s
liberal leader, enjoyed widespread support.
Seven months later the Bolsheviks were in charge. A Russian friend of
mine likes to say, in the spirit of Voltaire’s famous joke about the
Holy Roman Empire, that the Great October Revolution, as it was always
known in Soviet days, was none of those things: not great (it was an
economic and political disaster); not in October (according to the
Gregorian calendar it was actually Nov. 7); and, above all, not a
revolution. It was a Bolshevik coup d’etat. But it was not an accident,
either. Lenin began plotting a violent seizure of power before he had
even learned of the czar’s abdication. Immediately — “within a few
hours,” according to Victor Sebestyen’s excellent new biography, “Lenin:
The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror” — he sent out a list of
orders to his colleagues in Petrograd. They included “no trust or
support for the new government,” “arm the proletariat” and “make no
rapprochement of any kind with other parties.” More than a thousand
miles away, in Switzerland, he could not possibly have had any idea what
the new government stood for. But as a man who had spent much of the
previous 20 years fighting against “bourgeois democracy,” and arguing
virulently against elections and parties, he already knew that he wanted
it smashed.
His extremism was precisely what persuaded the German government, then
at war with Russia, to help Lenin carry out his plans. “We must now
definitely try to create the utmost chaos in Russia,” one German
official advised. “We must secretly do all that we can to aggravate the
differences between the moderate and the extreme parties . . . since we
are interested in the victory of the latter.” The kaiser personally
approved of the idea; his generals hoped it would lead the Russian state
to collapse and withdraw from the war. And so the German government
promised Lenin funding, put him and 30 other Bolsheviks — among them his
wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya , as well as his mistress, Inessa Armand — onto
a train, and sent them to revolutionary Petrograd. They arrived at the
Finland Station on April 16, where they were welcomed by a cheering crowd.
A few days later Lenin issued his famous April Theses, which echoed the
orders that he had sent from Zurich. He treated the Bolsheviks’ minority
status as temporary, the product of a misunderstanding: “It must be
explained to the masses that the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies is the only
possible form of revolutionary government.” He showed his scorn for
democracy, dismissing the idea of a parliamentary republic as “a
retrograde step.” He called for the abolition of the police, the army
and the bureaucracy, as well as the nationalization of all land and all
banks.
Plenty of people thought he was crazy. But in the weeks that followed,
Lenin stuck to his extremist vision despite the objections of his more
moderate colleagues, agitating for it all over the city. Using a formula
that would be imitated and repeated by demagogues around the world for
decades to come — up to and including the demagogues of the present,
about which more in a moment — he and the other Bolsheviks offered poor
people simplistic answers to complex questions. They called for “peace,
land and bread.” They sketched out beautiful pictures of an impossible
future. They promised not only wealth but also happiness, a better life
in a better nation.
Trotsky later wrote with an almost mystical lyricism about this period,
a time when “meetings were held in plants, schools and colleges, in
theatres, circuses, streets and squares.” His favorite events took place
at the Petrograd Circus:
“I usually spoke in the Circus in the evening, sometimes quite late at
night. My audience was composed of workers, soldiers, hard-working
mothers, street urchins—the oppressed under-dogs of the capital. Every
square inch was filled, every human body compressed to its limit. Young
boys sat on their fathers’ shoulders; infants were at their mothers’
breasts. No one smoked. The balconies threatened to fall under the
excessive weight of human bodies. I made my way to the platform through
a narrow human trench, sometimes I was borne overhead. The air, intense
with breathing and waiting, fairly exploded with shouts. . . .
“No speaker, no matter how exhausted, could resist the electric tension
of that impassioned human throng. They wanted to know, to understand, to
find their way. At times it seemed as if I felt, with my lips, the stern
inquisitiveness of this crowd that had become merged into a single
whole. Then all the arguments and words thought out in advance would
break and recede under the imperative pressure of sympathy, and other
words, other arguments, utterly unexpected by the orator but needed by
these people, would emerge in full array from my subconsciousness.”
This feeling of oneness with the masses — the sensation, bizarrely
narcissistic, that he was the authentic Voice of the People, the living
embodiment of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat — supported Trotsky
and propelled him onward. It also disguised the fact that, like Lenin,
he was lying.
Power in chaos
So were all his comrades. The Bolsheviks lied about the past — the
relationships some of them had with the czarist police, Lenin’s secret
pact with Germany — and they lied about the future, too. All through the
spring and summer of 1917, Trotsky and Lenin repeatedly made promises
that would never be kept. “Peace, Land, and Bread”? Their offer of
“peace” concealed their faith in the coming world revolution and their
determination to use force to bring it about. Their offer of “land”
disguised a plan to keep all property in state hands. Their offer of
“bread” concealed an ideological obsession with centralized food
production that would keep Russians hungry or decades.
But in 1917, the fairy tales told by Lenin, Trotsky, and the others won
the day. They certainly did not persuade all Russians, or even a
majority of the Russians, to support them. They did not persuade the
Petrograd Soviet or the other socialist parties. But they did persuade a
fanatical and devoted minority, one that would kill for the cause. And
in the political chaos that followed the czar’s abdication, in a city
that was paralyzed by food shortages, distracted by rumors and haunted
by an unpopular war, a fanatical and devoted minority proved sufficient.
Capturing power was not difficult. Using the tactics of psychological
warfare that would later become their trademark, the Bolsheviks
convinced a mob of supporters that they were under attack, and directed
them to sack the Winter Palace, where the ministers of the Provisional
Government were meeting. As Stalin later remembered, the party
leadership “disguised its offensive actions behind a smoke screen of
defenses.” They lied again, in other words, to inspire their fanatical
followers to fight. After a brief scuffle — the ministers put up no real
defense — Lenin, without any endorsement from any institution other than
his own party, declared himself the leader of a country that he renamed
Soviet Russia.
Keeping power was much harder. Precisely because he represented a
fanatical minority and had been endorsed by no one else, Lenin’s
proclamation was only the beginning of what would become a long and
bloody struggle. Socialists in other countries used the Marxist
expression “class war” as a metaphor; they meant only class rivalry,
perhaps conducted through the ballot box, or at most a bit of street
fighting. But from the beginning, the Bolsheviks always envisioned
actual class warfare, accompanied by actual mass violence, which would
physically destroy the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, physically
destroy their shops and factories, physically destroy the schools, the
courts, the press. In October 1917, they began using that mass violence.
In the subsequent Russian and Ukrainian civil wars that consumed the
former empire between 1918 and 1921, hundreds of thousands of people
died. Millions more would die in waves of terror in the years that followed.
The chaos was vast. But many in Russia came to embrace the destruction.
They argued that the “system” was so corrupt, so immune to reform or
repair, that it had to be smashed. Some welcomed the bonfire of
civilization with something bordering on ecstasy. The beauty of
violence, the cleansing power of violence: these were themes that
inspired Russian poetry and prose in 1918. Krasnaya Gazeta, the
newspaper of the Red Army, urged the soldiers of the Bolshevik cause to
be merciless to their enemies: “Let them be thousands, let them drown
themselves in their own blood . . . let there be floods of blood of the
bourgeoisie — more blood, as much as possible.” A young Ukrainian named
Vsevolod Balytsky, one of the early members of the Cheka, the Bolshevik
secret police, published a poem in the Ukrainian edition of Izvestiya in
1919:
There, where even yesterday life was so joyous
Flows the river of blood
And so? There where it flows
There will be no mercy
Nothing will save you, nothing!
Fourteen years later, Balytsky, by then the secret police boss in
Ukraine, would launch the mass arrests and searches that culminated in
the Ukrainian famine, an artificially created catastrophe that killed
nearly four million people. Four years after that, in 1937, Balytsky was
himself executed by a firing squad.
Also in that year, the peak year of the Great Terror, Stalin eliminated
anyone in the country whom he suspected might have dissenting views of
any kind. Lenin had already eliminated the other socialist parties.
Stalin focused on the “enemies” inside his own party, both real and
imaginary, in a bloody mass purge. Like Lenin, Stalin never accepted any
form of legal opposition — indeed he never believed that there could be
such a thing as constructive opposition at all. Truth was defined by the
leader. The direction of state policy was defined by the leader.
Everyone and everything that opposed the leader — parties, courts, media
— was an “enemy of the people,” a phrase that Lenin stole from the
French Revolution.
Within two decades of October 1917, the Revolution had devoured not only
its children, but also its founders — the men and women who had been
motivated by such passion for destruction. It created not a beautiful
new civilization but an angry, unhappy, and embittered society, one that
squandered its resources, built ugly, inhuman cities, and broke new
ground in atrocity and mass murder. Even as the Soviet Union became less
violent, in the years following Stalin’s death in 1953, it remained
dishonest and intolerant, insisting on a facade of unity. As the
philosopher Roger Scruton has observed, Bolshevism eventually became so
cocooned in layers of dishonesty that it lost touch with reality: “Facts
no longer made contact with the theory, which had risen above the facts
on clouds of nonsense, rather like a theological system. The point was
not to believe the theory, but to repeat it ritualistically and in such
a way that both belief and doubt became irrelevant. . . . In this way
the concept of truth disappeared from the intellectual landscape, and
was replaced by that of power.” Once people were unable to distinguish
truth from ideological fiction, however, they were also unable to solve
or even describe the worsening social and economic problems of their
society. Fear, hatred, cynicism and criminality were all around them,
with no obvious solutions in sight.
So discredited was Bolshevism after the Soviet Union’s demise in 1991
that, for a quarter of a century, it seemed as if Bolshevik thinking was
gone for good. But suddenly, now, in the year of the revolution’s
centenary, it’s back.
The neo-Bolsheviks
History repeats itself and so do ideas, but never in exactly the same
way. Bolshevik thinking in 2017 does not sound exactly the way it
sounded in 1917. There are, it is true, still a few Marxists around. In
Spain and Greece they have formed powerful political parties, though in
Spain they have yet to win power and in Greece they have been forced by
the realities of international markets, to quietly drop their
“revolutionary” agenda. The current leader of the British Labour Party,
Jeremy Corbyn, also comes out of the old pro-Soviet far left. He has
voiced anti-American, anti-NATO, anti-Israel, and even anti-British (and
pro-IRA) sentiments for decades — predictable views that no longer sound
shocking to a generation that cannot remember who sponsored them in the
past. Within his party there is a core of radicals who speak of
overthrowing capitalism and bringing back nationalization.
In the United States, the Marxist left has also consolidated on the
fringes of the Democratic Party — and sometimes not even on the fringes
— as well as on campuses, where it polices the speech of its members,
fights to prevent students from hearing opposing viewpoints, and teaches
a dark, negative version of American history, one calculated to create
doubts about democracy and to cast shadows on all political debate. The
followers of this new alt-left spurn basic patriotism and support
America’s opponents, whether in Russia or the Middle East. As in
Britain, they don’t remember the antecedents of their ideas and they
don’t make a connection between their language and the words used by
fanatics of a different era.
But so far, the new left, however fashionable it may be in some circles,
is not in power, and thus has not managed to create a real revolution.
In truth, the most influential contemporary Bolsheviks — the people who
began, like Lenin and Trotsky, on the extremist fringes of political
life and who are now in positions of power and real influence in several
Western countries — come from a different political tradition altogether.
Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen and Jaroslaw
Kaczynski: although they are often described as “far-right” or
“alt-right,” these neo-Bolsheviks have little to do with the right that
has been part of Western politics since World War II, and they have no
connection to existing conservative parties. In continental Europe, they
scorn Christian Democracy, which had its political base in the church
and sought to bring morality back to politics after the nightmare of the
Second World War. Nor do they have anything to do with Anglo-Saxon
conservatism, which promoted free markets, free speech and a Burkean
small-c conservatism: skepticism of “progress,” suspicion of radicalism
in all its forms, and a belief in the importance of conserving
institutions and values. Whether German or Dutch Christian Democrats,
British Tories, American Republicans, East European ex-dissidents or
French Gaullists, post-war Western conservatives have all been dedicated
to representative democracy, religious tolerance, economic integration
and the Western alliance.
By contrast, the neo-Bolsheviks of the new right or alt-right do not
want to conserve or to preserve what exists. They are not Burkeans but
radicals who want to overthrow existing institutions. Instead of the
false and misleading vision of the future offered by Lenin and Trotsky,
they offer a false and misleading vision of the past. They conjure up
worlds made up of ethnically or racially pure nations, old-fashioned
factories, traditional male-female hierarchies and impenetrable borders.
Their enemies are homosexuals, racial and religious minorities,
advocates of human rights, the media, and the courts. They are often not
real Christians but rather cynics who use “Christianity” as a tribal
identifier, a way of distinguishing themselves from their enemies: they
are “Christians” fighting against “Muslims” — or against “liberals” if
there are no “Muslims” available.
To an extraordinary degree, they have adopted Lenin’s refusal to
compromise, his anti-democratic elevation of some social groups over
others and his hateful attacks on his “illegitimate” opponents. Law and
Justice, the illiberal nationalist ruling party in Poland, has sorted
its compatriots into “true Poles” and “Poles of the worst sort.” Trump
speaks of “real” Americans, as opposed to the “elite.” Stephen Miller, a
Trump acolyte and speechwriter, recently used the word “cosmopolitan,”
an old Stalinist moniker for Jews (the full term was “rootless
cosmopolitan”), to describe a reporter asking him tough questions.
“Real” Americans are worth talking to; “cosmopolitans” need to be
eliminated from public life.
Surprisingly, given its mild and pragmatic traditions, even British
politics is now saturated with Leninist language. When British judges
declared, in November 2016, that the Brexit referendum had to be
confirmed by Parliament — a reasonable decision in a parliamentary
democracy — the Daily Mail, a xenophobic pro-Brexit newspaper, ran a
cover story with judges’ photographs and the phrase “Enemies of the
People.” Later, the same paper called on the prime minister to “Crush
the Saboteurs,” choosing a word that was also favored by Lenin to
describe legitimate political opposition.
Famously, Trump has also used the expression “enemy of the American
people” on Twitter. Though it is unlikely that the president himself
understood the historical context, some of the people around him
certainly did. Bannon, Miller and several others in Trump’s immediate
orbit know perfectly well that the delegitimization of political
opponents as “un-American” and “elitist,” and of the media as “fake
news,” is the first step in a more ambitious direction. If some of what
these extremists say is to be taken seriously, their endgame — the
destruction of the existing political order, possibly including the U.S.
Constitution — is one that the Bolsheviks would have understood. The
historian Ronald Radosh has quoted Bannon’s comparison of himself to the
Bolshevik leader. “Lenin,” Bannon told Radosh, “wanted to destroy the
state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down,
and destroy all of today’s establishment.” At a conservative gathering
in Washington in 2013, Bannon also called for a “virulently
anti-establishment” and “insurgent” movement that will “hammer this
city, both the progressive left and the institutional Republican Party.”
And what gives a president who did not win the popular vote the right to
do that? This, too, is a familiar idea: the “People.” It is a mystical
notion, quite different from the actually existing population of
America, but strikingly similar to the “crowd” in whose name Trotsky
spoke at the Petrograd Circus. In his dark, nihilistic inaugural
address, much of it written by Bannon and Miller, the president
announced that he was “transferring power from Washington D.C. and
giving it back to you, the American People” — as if the capital city had
until 2017 somehow belonged to foreign occupiers. This un-American idea
of the “People” bears more than a passing resemblance to the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the force that scientific Marxism once
predicted would run the world. It also sounds a lot like what Le Pen
means by “the Nation,” as opposed to the “globalist elite,” or what the
Law and Justice party in Poland mean when they talk about “suweren,” the
sovereign nation, as opposed to the majority of Polish voters, who
actually oppose them.
A nihilistic desire for disaster
Like their predecessors, the neo-Bolsheviks are also liars. Trump lies
with pathological intensity about matters small and large, and he lies
so often and so obviously that it is not even necessary to cite his
uncounted falsehoods again here. But he is not alone. Recently Le Pen
was charged in an investigation into her anti-European party for
cheating the European parliament out of money. The Law and Justice party
pretends that its attacks on the Polish constitution are nothing more
than “judicial reform.” Orban has hidden the probably corrupt details of
Russian investment in a nuclear plant in Hungary. These are not
coincidences. Nor is it a coincidence that the most successful
neo-Bolsheviks have all created their own “alternative media,” starting
online and moving into the mainstream, specializing in disinformation,
hate campaigns, racist jokes and organized trolling of opponents. (The
old Bolsheviks used to call this propaganda, and they were brilliant at
it.) Both the politicians and the “journalists” lie out of conviction,
because they believe that ordinary morality does not apply to them. In a
rotten world, truth can be sacrificed in the name of “the People,” or as
a means of targeting “Enemies of the People.” In the struggle for power,
anything is permitted.
Finally, and most painfully, there is a hint, and sometimes more than a
hint, of a reviving appreciation among the neo-Bolsheviks for the
cleansing possibilities of violence. The violent poetry of 1917 has
morphed into the violent memes of 2017, the “Ultra Violence” threads on
Reddit, the white nationalist groups seeking “race war,” and the NRA
videos urging Americans to arm themselves for the coming apocalyptic
struggle to “save our country.” Some of this dangerous trash has been
around for a long time: far-right and far-left extremists in Europe have
always savored the idea of violence. But now some of that nihilistic
desire for disaster has become mainstream, even reaching the White
House. As long ago as 2014, Trump, after railing against Obamacare,
fantasized: “You know what solves it? When the economy crashes, when the
country goes to total hell and everything is a disaster. Then you’ll
have a, you know, you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be
when we were great.”
Shocking though it is, that sentiment is mild by comparison with
Bannon’s apocalyptic vision of a coming war — perhaps with Islam,
perhaps with China — that will cleanse the Western world of weakness and
restore Western greatness. This is how Bannon put it in 2010: “We’re
gonna have to have some dark days before we get to the blue sky of
morning again in America. We are going to have to take some massive
pain. Anybody who thinks we don’t have to take pain is, I believe,
fooling you.” A HuffPost article included similar Bannon statements. In
2011: “Against radical Islam, we’re in a 100-year war.” In 2014: “We are
in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism. And this war is, I
think, metastasizing far quicker than governments can handle it.” In
2016: “We’re going to war in the South China Seas in the next five to
ten years, aren’t we?”
An echo of this lust for war can also be heard in the schizophrenic
speech on “Western civilization” that Bannon is said to have helped
write for Trump in Warsaw in July. Amid some paragraphs that sounded
almost like a normal foreign policy speech, someone inserted a passage
describing the Warsaw uprising — a horrific and destructive battle
which, despite great courage, the Polish resistance army lost. Those
heroes,” Trump declared, “remind us that the West was saved with the
blood of patriots; that each generation must rise up and play their part
in its defense.” Each generation? That means our generation, too: Get
your weapons ready, because these people want you and your children to
bleed and die in the cause of civilizational renewal.
No excuse for complacency
Fortunately, we do not live in 1917 Petrograd. There are no bread
shortages, or ragged barefoot soldiers, or aristocrats in thrall to mad
monks. There will be few opportunities to surround the government in a
palace, enter and take it over. Our states are not, yet, that weak.
We also have, as the Russians of 1917 did not have, the benefit of
hindsight. In much of continental Europe, the demagogue who divides the
nation into enemies and patriots creates bad connotations and triggers
unpleasant memories. Over the past year, French, Dutch and Austrian
voters rejected the nihilism and xenophobia of Le Pen, Geert Wilders and
Norbert Hofer, not least because of what they resembled.
The French may even have taken the first necessary step in the longer
battle against false revolutions by voting for Emmanuel Macron, the
first major European politician to argue for a muscular revival of
liberalism. Macron openly opposed the fear, the nostalgia and the
nativism on the rise across the continent, and he won without offering
impossible schemes or unattainable riches. Even if he fails in France,
his formula hints at a way to fight back against modern false prophets.
Offer a positive vision, both open and patriotic. Don’t let the
nationalists appeal to “the People” over the heads of the voters. Don’t
let extremists become mainstream.
But the Anglo-Saxon world was less lucky. It may not be an accident that
neo-Bolshevik language has so far enjoyed unprecedented success in
Britain and the United States, two countries that have never known the
horror of occupation or of an undemocratic revolution that ended in
dictatorship. They therefore lack the immunity of many Europeans. On the
other hand, the Anglo-Saxon world has its own advantages: the bonds of
old and long-standing constitutionalism, the habits created by decades
of rule of law and relatively high standards of living. It may be that
as Americans and Brits slowly learn to recognize lies, they will become
less susceptible to the fake nostalgia on offer from their leaders.
But there is no excuse for complacency. That is the lesson of this
ominous centennial. Remember: At the beginning of 1917, on the eve of
the Russian revolution, most of the men who later became known to the
world as the Bolsheviks were conspirators and fantasists on the margins
of society. By the end of the year, they ran Russia. Fringe figures and
eccentric movements cannot be counted out. If a system becomes weak
enough and the opposition divided enough, if the ruling order is corrupt
enough and people are angry enough, extremists can suddenly step into
the center, where no one expects them. And after that it can take
decades to undo the damage. We have been shocked too many times. Our
imaginations need to expand to include the possibilities of such
monsters and monstrosities. We were not adequately prepared.
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