Two years ago, on
the centennial anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia that ushered
in a century of mass murder and misery, the Trump administration declared a
National Day for the Victims of Communism. The New York Times, meanwhile, predictably
celebrated the blood-soaked milestone with a series of opinion pieces touting
the many upsides of Communism, such as better orgasms for
women. The series was titled, with stunning tone-deafness, “Red Century.”
Also on that
anniversary in 2017, Bucknell University, a private liberal arts college in
Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, held a symposium titled “Legacies of the October
Revolution,” organized by Bucknell professor of sociology Alexander Riley and
associate professor of English Alfred Kentigern Siewers. That symposium spawned
an important new book titled The
Totalitarian Legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution, edited by Riley
and Siewers and featuring essays from three participating scholars. Contrary to
the New York Times’ whitewashing, the book’s evaluation of the
October Revolution is unequivocally damning.
“Now, a century
later, the historical evidence on the nature and legacy of the Bolsheviks and
the regime they established is indisputable,” writes editor Riley in the
foreword, “Challenging Bolshevik Myth and the Poetry of Totalitarianism”:
None of the utopian goals to which they
purported to aspire – the end of inequality and want, an efflorescence of
humane cultural values, a more just and democratic social order – were
realized. Instead of these noble ends, the Bolsheviks produced the world’s
first totalitarian state, a one-party dictatorship whose political power rested
almost entirely on the threat and frequent implementation of mass violence.
It gets harsher
from there. The book’s essays by a trio of scholars offer “a summary analysis
of the historical record books on the Bolshevik reign of terror, a working
hypothesis on what produced the distorted and malevolent ideologies and
practices that sustained Bolshevism, and an effort at understanding how
considerable numbers of intelligent and conscientious individuals could have
come to believe such intrinsically unbelievable things” about it, Riley writes.
In the first of
three brilliant essays, “Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution: The Invention of
Totalitarianism,” French historian and former Maoist militant Stéphane Courtois,
author of more than 30 books on communism and totalitarianism (including lead
authorship of the essential work on global communism, The
Black Book of Communism), undertakes to explain how Vladimir Ilyich
Ulyanov, aka Lenin, became the founder of totalitarianism. Courtois demonstrates
that Lenin shared with his successor Stalin “the same merciless, amoral, dehumanizing
view of political opponents.” It is a strategy familiar to anyone who has been demonized
by today’s Democrat Party.
In the second
piece, “The Russian Revolution and the Soviet System: Assessments, Impact, and
Western Perceptions,” Hungarian-born scholar Paul Hollander explores the nature
of the Bolshevik Revolution, the attraction it holds for Western intellectuals,
and the reason for its eventual collapse. He points out the religious impulse
underlying the revolution, which promised paradise on earth – what Thomas
Sowell has called “the quest for cosmic justice.” Hollander quotes Bertrand
Russell as saying that “Bolshevism is not merely a political doctrine; it is
also a religion, with elaborate dogmas and inspired scriptures.” (David
Horowitz has often noted that Progressives – rebranded Communists – are not
merely political activists but religious fanatics.) As Alexander Riley puts it
in his foreword, “All the injustice of the old world is to be undone by the
totalitarian moralizing leader and government, and so these figures and their
regimes are praised as religious saviors and heavens on earth.”
Historian Ron
Radosh, professor emeritus of history at the City University of New York and a
friend of (and former fellow traveler with) David Horowitz before their
political conversion from radical left to right, is the author of the third
essay, “Soldiers for Stalin: Why American Communists Betrayed Their Own Country
and Spied for the Soviet Union.” In it he tells the story of such “soldiers of
Stalin” as Whitaker Chambers, Alger Hiss, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who
all believed they were helping their own country by helping the Soviet Union create
a peaceful world community. “They proved by their actions that they were
patriots – but Soviet patriots, not American
ones,” Radosh concludes. “Their actions prove the lengths to which some
Communists and fellow travelers went when guided by ideology.”
Editor Siewers
closes the slim (but dense with ideas) volume with an afterword titled, “The
Valley of Dry Bones: Towards a Rhetoric of True Resistance,” in which he argues
that the contributors to the book “represent the most vital genre of modern
literature: A rhetoric of resistance to totalitarianism,” to the self-destructive
nihilism of Communism. They stand on the shoulders of such giants as
Slozhenitsyn, Orwell, Arendt, and Dostoevsky in a resistance to the collective,
willful amnesia too many of us have embraced a century after the brutal
execution of the Russian royal family (at Lenin’s command).
As evidence of this
“great forgetting” and the staying power of Bolshevik myth, editors Riley and
Siewers cite the left-leaning obstruction they themselves experienced organizing
the symposium that gave birth to this book: “When we solicited material support
from university departments for the events, some members of one department
attacked what they viewed as our intrusion into a topic they claimed as
exclusively their own, though not a single member of that department publishes
on the Russian Revolution… Not content with accusations about our intentions,
their department mocked our request for support by pledging the sum of… $19.17,”
a reference, of course, to the year of the October Revolution.
After the event,
another group of colleagues complained to a faculty discussion board that the symposium’s
participating scholars were mere “narrow ideologues” who lacked the proper perspective
on the topic. In another response, colleagues wrote a letter cheering
Bolshevism and Lenin as models for contemporary social revolution. “Seemingly
of no importance in our colleagues’ vision of the proper way to mark the
centenary was the investigation of the political methods by which tens of
millions of human beings were put by Lenin’s policies and his secret police
into a condition in which they would never dream of anything again,” Riley
states.
The editors go on
to note that although it may be “hard to believe that there can still exist
such aggressive defenders of Lenin and his revolution in this day and age,” such
intellectual delusions about the Bolshevist Revolution dominate the Bucknell
campus and extend far beyond it, which makes The Totalitarian Legacy of the
Bolshevik Revolution and its authors and editors all the more essential
to resist the
great forgetting.
From FrontPage Mag, 12/16/19
