Appendix IV: A Bloody Utopia and the Lessons of the Red Empire — On the 100th Anniversary of the Russian October Revolution (Part 5)

VII

The Bolsheviks, newly arrived on the stage of history, quickly displayed a style of rule utterly different from that of tsarist Russia. Without Lenin, the October Revolution would have been unlikely to occur; even if it had occurred, it would have been entirely different. In fact, from Lenin’s acceptance of Marxism in St. Petersburg in 1893, to the founding of the party in 1903, to the overthrow of the Russian Republic in 1917, and until his death in 1924, Lenin had already laid down the basic institutions and governing style of the Soviet Union: the establishment of the Communist Party’s absolute rule (the democratic constitutionalists who had once worked to overthrow tsarism were all arrested, exiled, or executed; the Soviet Constitution was promulgated in 1924); the Party’s absolute control over all resources (the Land Decree of September 1917 immediately abolished private ownership); the creation of a regime of secret police (the “All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage” was established on December 20, 1917, and endured for seventy-four years); the eradication of religious faith (large numbers of religious figures were imprisoned or killed); the suppression of thought and the supremacy of ideology (the expulsion of intellectual elites in 1922 and the establishment of the Department of Agitation and Propaganda); the elimination of all opposition (the killing of Nicholas II and his entire family; the suppression of the Kronstadt sailors’ uprising); the establishment of a permanent system of forced labor (the “Gulag Archipelago” spread across Russia); the slander and subversion of Western liberal democracy; the subordination of means and tactics to unchanging goals (the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the implementation of the New Economic Policy); the export of revolution and the instigation of rebellions (the founding of the Third International), the establishment of a unified international communist front, and the slogan “Workers of the world and oppressed nations, unite!” (supporting communist parties in various countries, including the Chinese Communist Party); … History shows that neither Marx and Engels, nor Luxemburg and Kautsky, nor even Lenin himself, foresaw that the choice between democracy and despotism, freedom and dictatorship within the communist movement would become the most fatal decision of all. None of them imagined to what grotesque, pathological, terrifying, and horrific extremes personal cults, arbitrary personal rule, and personal dictatorship would develop under Stalin.

On January 30, 1990, the Soviet Committee for State Security announced that during the twenty-five years from 1928 to 1953, when Stalin held absolute power, 3,778,243 people died unnatural deaths; on June 14, 1991, KGB chairman Kryuchkov declared that 4.2 million people had been repressed during this period. It is now known worldwide that the lower estimate of victims of Stalin’s repression is 22 million (calculated by Russian historian Volkogonov), and the upper estimate is 66 million (calculated by Professor Kurganov of Leningrad University), not including the several million who died in the early stages of the Great Patriotic War due to Stalin’s errors. These figures are likely hundreds or even thousands of times greater than the total number of progressive Russians eliminated during three centuries of Romanov autocratic rule; they are also dozens or even hundreds of times greater than the total number of communists killed by capitalists, landlords, and reactionaries in all countries combined since the emergence of “scientific communism” from Marx to Lenin.

The seventy-four-year history of Soviet Russia is a history of the betrayal of great ideals. The most humane, most just, and most sacred doctrine and cause in human history degenerated, over three quarters of a century, into the most despotic, most hypocritical, and most brutal system in history. Nearly a century of Russian redemptive spirit and a historical movement aimed at liberating all humanity sank into a thoroughgoing Asiatic restoration of total despotism. Stalin, in accordance with his own style and tastes, transformed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union into an instrument of personal dictatorship. From that point on, the Party’s highest statutory organs—the Central Committee and the National Congress—eventually even the Politburo itself, became mere formalities. Party leadership, the worker–peasant alliance, people’s congresses, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—all these grand-sounding terms lost any real meaning.

The cult of Stalin’s personality and personal worship towered completely above the Party, the people, and the state. For the first time in the history of the communist movement, idol worship and leader fetishism appeared. The most cloying, hypocritical, and shameless expressions in the history of human civilization were manufactured. Stalin was praised as “the great leader of the working people of the entire world,” “the most brilliant of geniuses,” “the greatest among the great,” “the wisest among the wise,” an omniscient and omnipotent “god,” “the dearest father of the peoples of all nations,” “the leader and teacher of the world proletarian revolution and the liberation movements of oppressed nations,” “the greatest figure of all peoples and all great men in history,” “the genius architect of the edifice of communism,” “the greatest figure on our planet,” “the great savior of humanity,” “the sun of the whole world” … Without Marxism-Leninism, the most notorious legacy of Stalin—personality cult—could not have come into being.

VIII

In 1946, Berdyaev wrote in Paris: Communism is Russia’s destiny; it is a component of Russia’s inner destiny. It will be abolished by Russia’s own inner forces. Communism should be overcome, not destroyed. The higher stage that comes after communism should incorporate the truth of communism, but a truth freed from error. The Russian Revolution awakened and liberated the immense力量 of the Russian people—this is its principal significance; at the same time, it betrayed Russian messianic salvationism and caused despotism, darkness, and enslavement to rise again—this is its fundamental lesson.

Seventy years later, it is not difficult to conclude that Berdyaev’s prediction of the Russian Revolution’s fate, though cast in the terms of historical philosophy or even religious idealism, more precisely and fairly outlined the historical–spiritual “trilogy” of the October Revolution than all Eastern and Western experts on the Russian question. For Russia, communism was not merely a practical choice but a historical quest, a great dream of a thousand years in Russia’s search for the world of truth, the spiritual lifeline of the nation rising from below. It is also a question bearing on future destiny. Berdyaev pointed out that communism in Russia was the spiritual modernism of Russia after the mid-nineteenth century. From Radishchev, Chaadaev, Herzen, Belinsky, the Petrashevsky Circle, Ogarev, to Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, Pisarev, Bakunin, Mikhailovsky, Kropotkin, as well as Khomyakov, Solovyov, Dostoevsky, Danilevsky, Tolstoy … all pondered the spiritual meaning and social ideal contained in the word “communism.”

From Russian national character and the historical destiny of the Russian spirit, they came to believe that communism must conform to several basic principles: fraternal cooperation among human beings; humanism and high-quality individual rights; democratic and just social relations; and an integrated, noble virtue. They grew increasingly skeptical of the actual course of the Russian Revolution. After the New Economic Policy was halted in 1929 and Stalin launched “total collectivization” and the “sharpening of class struggle,” Russians had already become disillusioned with the revolution, believing that it had lost both Russia’s national character and its human and universal character, degenerating into a despotic empire led by Stalin and a clique of power-hungry bureaucrats and executioners, morally and spiritually inferior even to tsars such as Peter the Great, Catherine II, and Alexander I.

On September 5, 1973, Solzhenitsyn published his open letter “To the Soviet Leaders.” This Nobel laureate in literature, a survivor of the Gulag Archipelago, said to the Soviet leadership: “When we see women carrying heavy loads while paving roads and railways, how can our hearts not tighten with shame and pity? How can we still find the heart to support Cuba and revolutionaries around the world? All of world history proves that peoples who build empires always suffer; the goals of great empires are incompatible with morally noble peoples. If we still consider ourselves children of Russia, then let us stop inventing international missions and first save Russia—our homeland and our people are in a state of spiritual bankruptcy!”

Eighteen years later, the Soviet Union collapsed, and Solzhenitsyn’s warnings and prophecies were fulfilled. In June 1994, Solzhenitsyn returned to his homeland after twenty years away. He crossed Siberia from end to end, kissing the Russian soil at every stop. His final public words to his people were: only when Russia frees itself from imperial prejudice and the prison of despotism can the Russian soul be revived. Russia has repeatedly fallen into terrible conditions; yet the star that guides us in our spiritual kingdom still shines with true brilliance—never let it disappear…