Appendix IV: A Bloody Utopia and the Lessons of the Red Empire — On the 100th Anniversary of the Russian October Revolution (Part 6)

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After the collapse of the Soviet Union, what most profoundly shook the Russian people’s hearts was a vast, continuous wave of sorrow-laden Russian rites of mourning and remembrance. On January 11, 1994, President Boris Yeltsin of the Russian Federation issued a decree declaring all participants in the Kronstadt events not guilty. On July 16, 1998, another Russian Orthodox Church—the “Church on the Blood of Jesus Christ”—was built in Yekaterinburg. The following day, in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in Saint Petersburg, the funeral of the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II, and his entire family was solemnly held amid majestic hymns and austere prayers. President Yeltsin and his wife bowed deeply before the coffins of Nicholas II and his family, publicly repenting before the eyes of the world for “this extremely disgraceful page in Russian history, this shameless and utterly senseless atrocity.” This man, who a decade earlier had still held the lofty positions of member of the CPSU Politburo and First Secretary of the Moscow City Committee—the so-called “father of democratic Russia”—emphasized to a Russian society that had endured immense suffering that the burial of the victims’ remains was a judgment of human justice, a symbol of national reconciliation, and an act of atonement for crimes committed collectively. The twentieth century, he said, had been a century in which Russia lost harmony—a bloody century in which hatred and tyranny had turned the nation into a river of blood. Only through repentance, through tolerance and reconciliation among ethnicities, religions, and political beliefs, could this century be brought to an end. Historical truth must be told to future generations so that they themselves may build a free, democratic, peaceful, and happy world.

In fact, there are no historical experiences from which to draw lessons regarding the October Revolution and its subsequent transformations. The historical conditions that led to them have vanished forever; the theoretical environment that guided them has completely collapsed; and the people who propelled and led them will never reappear. What they have left to posterity is an unprecedented duality of utopian fantasy and tragedy. The American specialist on Russian affairs Robert V. Daniels once observed: “The history of the Soviet experiment is a history of the betrayal of great ideals and of the degeneration of great ideals. This fate is painful, yet logical, because two defects were present from the beginning: one material, the other spiritual. … Now all the signs have lost their meaning, and a new ghost once again wanders the earth, merely wearing a mask that is a hundred years old. Both its worshipers and its enemies are equally bewildered by it.”

All revolutions bring violence, bloodshed, and misfortune. The tragedy of the Russian Revolution lay in its obsessive fixation on its grand and sacred eschatological goals, to the point that it fully retreated into a Nechaev-style cult of revolutionary fanaticism: covering Russia with an iron revolutionary rule, subordinating everything to the revolution. The revolutionary became the legislator who determined destiny; he had no personal interests, no personal career, no personal feelings, attachments, property, or even a name. He was entirely governed by a single interest, a single idea, a single passion—the revolution. He lived in this world in order to overthrow it. For the revolutionary, all morality was the revolution—words repeatedly emphasized by Lenin and Stalin. The revolutionary destroyed all who obstructed the attainment of its goals; anyone who still cherished anything in this world was not a revolutionary, but an enemy of the revolution. … This inevitably led to the result that the revolution became an enemy of all that was kind and beautiful in Russian history, of all the achievements of Western capitalism, and ultimately of humanity and civilization itself. The means adopted therefore produced unprecedented violence, despotism, and catastrophe; the means replaced the ends and became ends in themselves.

The Russian Revolution did not, and could not, realize its splendid ideals. It never succeeded in establishing a modern society more civilized than those of the West. Universal values such as freedom, democracy, equality, justice, and fraternity increasingly became ever more distant illusions. Most tragic and indefensible of all was that it was not others, but the personal fates of the revolution’s own leaders that ended in collective tragedy. Trotsky, Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Rykov, Radek, Pyatakov, and the October Revolution’s founders and heroes such as Tukhachevsky, Blyukher, Gamarnik, and Yakir were swallowed en masse by the revolution itself. The deaths of Lenin, Sverdlov, Dzerzhinsky, Kirov, Kuibyshev, Menzhinsky, Tomsky, Frunze, and Ordzhonikidze were all shrouded in mystery and conspiracy.

Even more poignant for later generations is the fact that the wives of the revolutionary leaders could never possess life stories that inspired Russia with the reverence and pride accorded to the wives of the Decembrists. Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, died suddenly the day after her seventieth birthday; her files were ransacked, and during her lifetime she was not even able to voice protest. Stalin once threatened her, saying that if she failed to “know her place,” the Party could produce evidence proving that another woman was Lenin’s true wife. After Kirov’s death, his wife went mad. Although Malenkov and Bulganin themselves escaped Stalin’s iron grasp, their wives suffered imprisonment behind bars. After Bukharin was executed, his wife endured six months in a water cell, then eighteen years of imprisonment in labor camps and exile, and afterward spent nearly fifty years striving to rehabilitate her husband’s name, persevering until her final breath. Stalin’s own wife, unable to endure unbearable pain and despair, ultimately chose suicide.