Appendix IV: A Bloody Utopia and the Lessons of the Red Empire — On the 100th Anniversary of the Russian October Revolution (Part 4)

V

Before his death, Lenin had already sensed that the Russian Revolution might produce extremely grave consequences as a result of divisions among the Bolshevik leaders. With his final strength, he repeatedly warned that the achievements of the revolution were still insignificant, and that in a country dominated by a small-peasant economy it was unworkable—and sheer Bolshevik arrogance—to attempt to govern the state directly through proletarian decrees according to communist principles. He organized the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (history mercilessly mocked this practice of hauling utterly ignorant workers and peasants into the highest levels of state power, revealing it to be pure formalism and a historical farce). In his testament, he analyzed one by one the “personal qualities” of the Bolshevik leaders (it is not hard to see that none of Lenin’s comrades and students possessed extraordinary virtue or genius), and he explicitly demanded that Stalin be “removed,” because this “semi-Asiatic” figure was “too rude” and had “concentrated unlimited power” in his hands. Lenin doubted whether Stalin would “always be able to use this power with sufficient caution.”

Lenin cannot be judged by generalized moral standards or ordinary political psychology. Even Western anti-Soviet and anti-communist figures, deeply biased against the Russian Revolution, acknowledged that Lenin himself was not a power fanatic; his ideals and spirit of self-sacrifice were the most moving aspects of his character. Yet, faced with the immense force of power and the fragile, mutable nature of human beings, Lenin neither had the time nor the possibility to design a system capable of ensuring that revolutionary authority would not be usurped, revolutionary power would not be sold out, and revolutionary goals would not be betrayed (history has shown that in Russia the conditions for establishing such a system simply did not exist).

Lenin never worried about how much suffering the Russian people would endure under the revolution he led and the regime he founded. Churchill did not deny that Lenin’s aim was to save the world, but he believed that Lenin’s method was to destroy the world first.

VI

Almost simultaneously, debates over the historical destiny of the Russian Revolution began to emerge. Rosa Luxemburg, founder of the German Communist Party, was the first European revolutionary to cheer and defend the Russian Revolution: “The Russian Revolution is the most momentous event of the World War… The brilliant men who led the Russian Revolution, Lenin and Trotsky… would never imagine that everything they were compelled to do under the pressure of circumstances would be taken internationally as a lofty model of socialist politics, nor that such a model should be praised without criticism and imitated with fanaticism.” This figure, labeled by the bourgeoisie as “Bloodthirsty Rosa,” was also the first Western Marxist to issue a grave warning to the Bolshevik leaders: “Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinions, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep; a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless idealism direct and rule; among them, in reality, a dozen outstanding heads do the leading, and an elite of the working class is summoned from time to time to meetings to applaud the speeches of the leaders… This is, in essence, rule by a clique—certainly a dictatorship, but not the dictatorship of the proletariat; rather, the dictatorship of a handful of politicians… Moreover, such conditions must inevitably lead to the brutalization of public life: assassinations, the shooting of hostages, and so forth. This is an extremely powerful objective law, from which no party can escape.”

In 1921, Karl Kautsky—Engels’s private secretary and a leader of the Second International—published The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (also translated as Terrorism and Communism), predicting that the Russian Revolution would “lead to a new Thermidor”: “They had been the most resolute defenders of a Constituent Assembly elected by equal and universal suffrage, but once the Assembly became an obstacle, they kicked it aside. They had been resolute opponents of the death penalty, yet established a bloody rule… They proclaimed at the beginning of their reign that their mission was to smash the old bureaucratic state machine, yet replaced it with a new bureaucratic machine. They seized power because of the disintegration of military discipline… only to build a new, strictly disciplined and massive army. They intended to abolish class distinctions, yet created new ones…”

A century later, it has become clear that these anxieties and warnings—originating not from the bourgeoisie but from European communist figures themselves—though harsh and piercing, were in fact accurate descriptions of an alternative fate awaiting the Russian Revolution, genuine prophecies later verified by scenes of terror. A revolutionary leader like Lenin, almost devoid of personal bias and not obsessed with power, never accepted this “painful and profound truth—the truth directed at the revolution and the revolutionaries themselves” (in Gramsci’s words). Lenin’s curses directed at Kautsky and his sarcasm toward Luxemburg reveal that the Russian Revolution recognized no Western moral boundaries: once power in Russia had been seized, everything depended on defending the regime, until the ultimate goal of communism was achieved.

In reality, given Russia’s historical circumstances and the post–October Revolution situation, Lenin could only devote himself wholeheartedly to defending and consolidating the revolution’s gains, almost involuntarily submitting to the powerful internal logic of revolutionary despotism and totalitarianism, and openly advocating dictatorship: “In the history of the revolutionary movement, individual dictatorship… is not at all uncommon. Any large-scale machine industry… requires unconditional and strict unity of will, which can only be achieved by subordinating the will of hundreds or thousands to the will of one… such subordination may be realized through the most severe forms of dictatorship.”

Although Marx and Engels had already become the spiritual leaders and political mentors of the global proletarian revolution during their lifetimes, they never once exercised actual power, let alone supreme power in a non-Western country that had not undergone the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, or the Enlightenment. They were therefore utterly incapable of designing a system to supervise, restrain, adjudicate, or remove revolutionary leaders. (The experience of the Paris Commune was a classic example of utopian romanticism; its ideas regarding power, wages, the army, and the police did not go beyond the level of Thomas More or Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen.) In fact, no matter how unique Russia’s historical, geographical, and cultural traditions may have been, the Bolsheviks, in their fundamental worldview and objectives, could only follow Marxism.