The Bolshevik Betrayal
How the war in Ukraine tells us a story about the legacy of authoritarianism
Like many around the world last fall, I watched the first few episodes of HBO’s blockbuster series, House of the Dragon, the studio’s attempt to revive a franchise that drew widespread acclaim during its years on the air. With fire-breathing dragons and undead zombies, George R. R. Martin’s fantasy world nonetheless portrays itself as a sort of alternate history of the European Middle Ages (a fact used by the shows’ producers to justify on-screen violence that many have perceived as gratuitous). Sticking with this thematic aim, the new installment follows the court intrigue of ambitious and calculating nobles. Writing for The Independent, Amanda Whiting commented that “The battle for the Iron Throne is pointless when everyone in House of the Dragon is this evil.” In this op-ed, she touches on the fact that the primary motivating factor behind the characters’ actions is that they each see the possibility of their rivals rising to power as an existential threat, despite having far more in common with each other than with the average resident of the lands over which they intend to rule. In their dealings with each other, our “protagonists” tend to read volumes into every gesture, attempting to weaponize the inherent complexity of human interaction in order to gain for themselves a reputational leg up. Essentially, a key takeaway of the show could be said to be that those in power are afraid of losing it, and often see threats to their positions where none may exist.
On the surface, Westeros and Soviet Russia may appear to have little in common. However, those leading the nation that attempted to portray itself as the savior of the world’s working people — as well as those who replicated their experiment from China to Cuba — easily fell victim to the same mentality as their pseudo-medieval counterparts. Many of them believed proper political ideology to be something on which there could be no compromise or debate, and saw any attempts to take a more nuanced perspective as subversive efforts to reassert capitalist rule that had to be quelled before they could take hold. This has impacted the lives of hundreds of millions of people and, at least in the United States, left behind a deep-running skepticism of government’s ability to improve the lives of its citizens. The Soviet era most notably continues to haunt the people of Ukraine, as they valiantly repel Vladimir Putin’s campaign to wipe them off the map. Overcoming the legacy of authoritarianism in the name of justice is a challenge that today’s left must rise to meet if it hopes to inspire confidence in an alternative to the world of inequity and distrust that the right has to offer.
The Enlightenment in the Old and New Worlds
In order to understand how the communist movement spread its influence over a third of the planet, we have to take a brief tour of the history, back to a revolution that many don’t necessarily associate with the left — the American Revolution — and more generally, the era that provided us with the foundation of the ideals that have shaped political debates ever since, the Enlightenment. After the groundbreaking achievements of the Scientific Revolution, which had discredited the Catholic church as the highest academic authority, the divine rights of the nobility to rule were naturally next to be questioned by the intelligentsia of Europe. On the island of Corsica, General Pasquale Paoli had led and won the fight for independence from their Genoese mercantile oligarchs, subsequently drafting a remarkably progressive constitution for the year 1755 (creating a legislative assembly elected every three years, via universal male and female suffrage from the age of 25). Not long after, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who openly supported Paoli’s experiment, penned the highly influential Social Contract, arguing in essence that the ideal society would operate not according to a class hierarchy in which might makes right, but instead an equitable agreement made by every citizen to contribute to the collective. (What he was ambivalent on, however, was whether or not such a society could sustain itself naturally, or if its perpetuation would have to be forced.) In this context, the rhetoric of the American colonists prior to and during their uprising (i.e. “no taxation without representation,” etc.) can be clearly seen as the continuation of trends already fairly well underway.
What set their success apart from that of the Corsicans, however, was that they had dislodged one of the most well-established royal families in Europe, whose centralization of power had made it singularly emblematic of tyranny. It’s well known today that the Framers didn’t exactly embody the principle that all people are created equal, due to their combined ownership of over a thousand enslaved people, but that didn’t make the idea that they had released into the world as the rock upon which this new nation would be founded any less powerful or significant for its time.
As a consequence of their assistance to the Thirteen Colonies during the war, the French economy fell into shambles, a situation which the aristocracy addressed by changing little about their luxurious lifestyle and rather raising taxes on the impoverished vast majority of the population. Eventually, in 1789 (a year after the Constitution’s ratification), facing growing discontent, King Louis XVI agreed to call for the first assembly of the Estates-General in nearly two centuries, so named for the three “estates” represented by the attending delegates: the clergy, the nobility, and everybody else. Over the weeks of the assembly’s session, a trend emerged where supporters of the traditional status quo sat on the right side of the room, while those in favor of democratization and a greater redistribution of power and wealth found themselves on the left. This is in fact where we derive our modern definitions of the left and right wings of the political spectrum, which can be encapsulated thus:
Left-wing politics supports social equality and egalitarianism, often in critique of social hierarchy. Left-wing politics typically involves a concern for those in society whom its adherents perceive as disadvantaged relative to others as well as a belief that there are unjustified inequalities that need to be reduced or abolished.
Right-wing politics embraces the view that certain social orders and hierarchies are inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable, typically supporting this position on the basis of natural law, economics, or tradition. Hierarchy and inequality may be seen as natural results of traditional social differences or competition in market economies.
Each of the estates received a single vote, despite the first two accounting for a tiny fraction of the population, meaning that the Third Estate had no realistic chance of having their voices heard. The French Revolution broke out shortly after, ultimately resulting in the decapitation of the King and the abolishment of his Ancien Régime. In its place, the revolutionaries attempted to enact their vision for a new kind of society, enshrining the values of liberté, égalité & fraternité into their constitution, constraining the power of the church and even going so far as to introduce a new metric calendar.
However, this unity soon gave way to factionalism, as leaders began to suspect each other (often not incorrectly) of harboring tyrannical ambitions, while foreign powers attempted to destabilize the new government. In this volatile environment, Maximilien Robespierre, who had been an outspoken advocate for universal suffrage and the abolition of slavery, rose to lead the so-called Committee of Public Safety, which tasked itself with guarding against perceived counter-revolutionary threats. During the subsequent Reign of Terror, an estimated 300,000 people were arrested by the Committee’s “revolutionary armies,” 17,000 of whom were given the death penalty. Individuals targeted for arrest included:
1º Those who, either by their conduct, or their relations, or by their words or writings, have shown themselves to be partisans of tyranny or of federalism, and enemies of freedom;
…
5º Those former nobles, with their husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, son or daughters, brothers or sisters, and agents of émigrés, who have not consistently demonstrated their commitment to the Revolution;
6º Those who have emigrated during the interval between 1 July 1789 and the publication of the law of 8 April 1792, even if they have returned to France within the time prescribed by that law, or earlier;
7º Those who have been considered a vagabond or cannot pay local and federal taxes decreed by the National Assembly.
Within a year, even Robespierre himself met the sharp end of the guillotine, and serious questions had been raised about the wisdom of the Revolution’s implementation. A provisional government was able to lower the temperature, but struggled to maintain the economy, while a young general Napoléon Bonaparte achieved widespread popularity after a string of battlefield victories against monarchist powers attempting to intervene. By the turn of the century, Napoléon had established himself as a dictator, later conferring the title of emperor upon himself, while still claiming to be exporting the values of the Revolution throughout the European lands he conquered.
The Emergence of Socialism
After Napoléon was eventually defeated and sent into exile, many intellectuals and activists, who in the 1830s began to refer to themselves as “socialist,” continued to develop these ideas. Coinciding with a series of popular uprisings that broke out across Europe in the spring of 1848, the Communist Manifesto was published by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, criticizing the model of economic development that had begun to take hold with the spread of industrialization as exploitative and unjust. Marx presented a worldview in which history followed an arc from the earliest forms of society to his imagined utopian future, with each stage along this progression defined by a struggle between an oppressor class and an oppressed class. According to this belief, the end stage of this process, communism, was not just possible, but would be the inevitable result of the natural tendency of oppressed people to rise up and demand equality. (Importantly, this is why communist countries would always refer to themselves as merely socialist, since they did not believe they had yet reached this endpoint.)
Indeed, as the 19th century unfolded, peasants who had previously subsisted off of agriculture shifted to factory labor, enduring significantly harsher working conditions in the process, often necessitating extreme hours in dangerous workplaces in order to barely make enough to afford food. At the same time, the wealth accumulated by business owners skyrocketed, exemplified by the creation of a new aristocratic class during the first American Gilded Age. Many modern left-wing organizations, such as the Social Democratic Party of Germany, date back to this period of accelerating societal development, and some made real progress improving standards of living, such as by securing the abolition of child labor. As a result of this progress, some in the socialist movement began to question the necessity of a revolution, given that people didn’t seem to be angry enough about their situation to want one. This position was promoted by one of Engels’s protégés, Eduard Bernstein, who wrote in 1899 that “it is [based on tax data] quite wrong to assume that the present development of society shows a relative or indeed absolute diminution of the number of the members of the possessing classes. Their number increases both relatively and absolutely.” Bernstein also criticized the standard Marxist view of the working class as a monolith. Bernstein’s beliefs were foundational to what became known as social democracy, the set of principles that would eventually be embraced by the Social Democratic Party, but were deemed by other Marxists of the time to be a form of “revisionism.” Nowadays, this set of principles can be encapsulated thus:
Social democracy is a political, social, and economic philosophy within socialism that supports political and economic democracy. As a policy regime, it is described by academics as advocating economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a liberal-democratic polity and a capitalist-oriented mixed economy.
The First World War, however, saw these accomplishments largely wiped out, as national economies were thrown into turmoil. The Russian Empire, being the least industrialized of the major European powers due to its relatively late retention of serfdom and its absolute monarchy, was plagued by food shortages, military incompetence and crushing poverty, which Tsar Nicholas II had no idea how to alleviate, even as he exercised full control over the government. In response to this combination of factors, the capital city of St. Petersburg (then known as Petrograd) erupted into protests that, despite being met with violence, forced the Tsar to abdicate in what became known as the February Revolution of 1917.
The Russian Civil War
Seeking to take advantage of the upheaval, the Germans made arrangements for Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin to travel from his residence in Switzerland back to Petrograd, in the hopes that the chaos he would stir up might lead Russia to drop out of the war. Within the model of his signature contribution to the socialist tradition, referred to as Marxism-Leninism, it was not enough simply to accomplish a workers’ revolution, but it would also be necessary to safeguard it from “reactionary” capitalist forces seeking to restore the stratified status quo, which would be done through the creation of a “vanguard party” to rule over their new society, to ensure that the final stage of Marx’s history could be reached uninterrupted. Upon Lenin’s arrival in Petrograd, he denounced the provisional government that had been set up by a coalition of somewhat more moderate socialist and liberal parties (primarily the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries — or SRs — as well as the Mensheviks), as practitioners of “bourgeois democracy,” and called for power to instead be transferred to a rival series of workers’ councils, or soviets, which would form the basis for his vanguard party. Lenin also openly expressed hope for Russia’s defeat in the war, which he viewed as a capitalist endeavor that could deliver no benefits to the working class. As the SR president, Alexander Kerensky, chose to continue to pursue the struggling war effort, the rising tensions ultimately culminated in the October Revolution, a Bolshevik coup d’état seizing the levers of power and placing the provisional government’s members under arrest. The previously scheduled parliamentary election (in which men and women from age 20 were able to vote) that was due to take place a few days later was still allowed to occur, as the Bolsheviks naturally expected to receive a popular mandate. (The names Bolshevik and Menshevik were in fact derived from the words bol’shinstvo and men’shinstvo, meaning “majority” and “minority” respectively, although neither side held a consistent numerical advantage.) When they instead only won 23% of the vote compared to the SRs’ 38%, Lenin simply disregarded the results, had the assembly dissolved after its first meeting, and (despite having previously called for police abolition) established a secret police force known as the Cheka, identifiable by their black leather coats.
Openly aiming to emulate Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, the Cheka wasted no time in striking new fear into the heart of Russian society, while a brutal civil war unfolded across the Empire’s less central territories, from Kyiv to Chukotka. Despite agreeing with the Bolsheviks on the majority of issues, the SRs and other leftists were the first to be targeted, not unlike the violent resolutions of petty rivalries in fictional Westeros. Some sources from this era are somewhat apocryphal, but there are several well-documented instances of wholesale massacre at the hands of the Cheka, which Lenin personally encouraged. The victims of these measures were painted as “class enemies” or “enemies of the revolution,” particularly those peasants slightly more affluent than their neighbors, who were referred to as kulaks, meaning “tight-fisted.” In an infamous August 1918 telegram, Lenin ordered his agents to put down a so-called kulak revolt in the following terms:
“Comrades! The insurrection of five kulak districts should be pitilessly suppressed. The interests of the whole revolution require this because ‘the last decisive battle’* with the kulaks is now underway everywhere. An example must be made.
Hang (absolutely hang, in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, fatcats, bloodsuckers. Publish their names. Seize all grain from them. Designate hostages — in accordance with yesterday’s telegram.
Do it in such a fashion, that for hundreds of verst** around the people see, tremble, know, shout: ‘the bloodsucking kulaks are being strangled and will be strangled.’
Telegraph receipt and implementation. Yours, Lenin.
P.S. Find tougher people.”
* The “last decisive battle” makes reference to a lyric from the revolutionary anthem, L’internationale.
** A unit of distance roughly equivalent to a kilometer.
Another core Bolshevik leader, Grigory Zinoviev, concisely summarized the goal of their operation:
To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.
Around this same time, a more left-leaning faction of the SRs that had managed to escape the Bolsheviks’ ire until this point decided to break off their coalition with them over issues including land ownership, the behavior of the Cheka, and the Bolsheviks’ willingness to give away swathes of land to the Germans in exchange for an end to the war (land which the Bolsheviks then tried to get back later that year in order to “spread the revolution” after Germany lost to the Western allies, prompting my Lithuanian family to flee to the United States). Writing from a Moscow prison, the leader of the Left SRs, Maria Spiridonova, expressed her grievances with these totalitarian practices:
Never in the most corrupt of Parliaments, never in the most venal papers of capitalist society has hatred of opponents reached such heights of cynicism as your hatred. […] These nightly murders of fettered, unarmed, helpless people, these secret shootings in the back, the unceremonious burial on the spot of bodies, robbed to the very shirt, not always quite dead, often still groaning, in a mass grave — what sort of Terrorism is this? This cannot be called Terrorism. In the course of Russian revolutionary history, the word Terrorism did not merely connote revenge and intimidation (which were the very last things in its mind). No, the foremost aims of Terrorism were to protest against tyranny, to awake a sense of value in the souls of the oppressed, to rouse the conscience of those who kept silence in the face of this submission. Moreover, the Terrorist nearly always accompanied his deed by a voluntary sacrifice of his own liberty or life. Only in this way, it seems to me, could the Terrorist acts of the revolutionaries be justified. But where are these elements to be found in the cowardly Cheka, in the unbelievable moral poverty of its leaders? … So far the working classes have brought about the Revolution under the unblemished red flag, which was red with their own blood. Their moral authority and sanction lay in their sufferings for the highest ideal of humanity. Belief in Socialism is at the same time a belief in a nobler future for humanity — a belief in goodness, truth, and beauty, in the abolition of the use of all kinds of force, in the brotherhood of the world. And now you have damaged this belief, which had inflamed the souls of the people as never before, at its very roots. (emphasis mine)
Whereas the Red Army was motivated to fight by their revolutionary ideology and had the resources of the most industrialized regions of Moscow and Petrograd at their disposal, their opponents, the White Army, were made up of a disparate coalition of SRs, liberals, monarchists, and nationalists who were often forced to operate from the remote Siberian countryside. Although they came close to dislodging the Bolsheviks, their lack of organizational cohesion and discipline ultimately held them back. One general, Peter Wrangel, nicknamed “the Black Baron” and particularly reviled by the Bolsheviks, was able to boost the popularity of the Whites by forbidding his soldiers from participating in looting of conquered areas and by implementing much-wanted land reform, similar to what the Bolsheviks were offering, but without the accompanying iron-fisted rule. But it was too little too late, and Wrangel eventually led an evacuation of over 145,000 soldiers and refugees from Crimea in November 1920 across the Black Sea, in the wake of which further harsh reprisals fell upon much of the civilian population that stayed behind.
Early Days of the Soviet Union
Once the war was decisively won, things eventually calmed down to a certain extent as the civilian population settled into their new routines in the first ever communist society. Similar to the “Roaring 20’s” experienced in the West, it was an era of artistic and cultural development, accompanied by the beginning of proper industrialization facilitated by the New Economic Policy, a temporary relatively capitalist measure intended to resuscitate the post-war economy by allowing individuals to own and manage small-to-medium-size businesses. Under the policy of korenizatsiya, or “indigenization,” the practice of local cultures and use of local languages was encouraged, based on the revolutionary principle of international brotherhood and self-determination upon which the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics attempted to establish itself as a union of equals, in contrast from the Russian Empire. However, in the power struggle following Lenin’s death, despite Lenin’s documented distrust of one Joseph Stalin, it was just that Georgian-born leader who ultimately assumed the Secretariat of the Communist Party. Stalin’s approach was a little different, in that he promoted the Russian language and culture as the central unifying identity of the Union, despite being of an ethnic minority himself, just as Lenin suspected he would.
This was accomplished through a series of purges carried out by the successors to the Cheka, who suspected ethnic minorities of posing potential separatist threats. These crackdowns were most severe in Ukraine and Belarus (whose cultures are most similar to that of Russia), where they resulted in the virtual elimination of both countries’ intelligentsia and cultural leaders. (This was practice for what became known as the Great Purge of 1936–38, which solidified the Stalinist cult of personality, while many original Bolshevik revolutionaries, who could have posed a threat to Stalin’s authority, were taken out, which Italian dictator and inventor of modern fascism Benito Mussolini actually praised Stalin for.) This coincided with the strict implementation of agricultural collectivization policies that resulted in a devastating famine known as the Holodomor, or “hunger-killing” in Ukrainian. Across Ukraine, southern Russia and Kazakhstan, peasants who had benefitted from Lenin’s New Economic Policy were rebranded as kulaks, whose food and equipment were subsequently confiscated and exported abroad to fund Russia’s industrialization. One officer involved in this process, Lev Kopelev, who later defected to the West, described his experience defying his cognitive dissonance:
I persuaded myself, explained to myself. I mustn’t give in to debilitating pity. We were realizing historical necessity. We were performing our revolutionary duty. We were obtaining grain for the socialist fatherland. For the five-year plan.
Another writer, Vasily Grossman, wrote of a similar phenomenon:
I’m no longer under a spell, I can see now that the kulaks were human beings. But why was my heart so frozen at the time? When such terrible things were being done, when such suffering was going on all around me? And the truth is that I truly didn’t think of them as human beings. “They’re not human beings, they’re kulak trash” — that’s what I heard again and again, that’s what everyone kept repeating.
Although Stalin’s intent at this time is unknown, this is widely seen in modern Ukraine as a genocidal attempt to wipe out Ukrainian identity, as it resulted in the death of between 3.5 to 5 million people during late 1932 and 1933, out of a population of 32.7 million. In order to prevent the spread of knowledge of this disaster, the western border was closed, blocking the flow of refugees. When the 1937 Soviet census discovered this “unexpected” population decline, the researchers who carried it out were arrested, and the results were discarded as having been influenced by “enemies of the people” who had provided the researchers with inflated death counts. At the same time, ordinary citizens were also at risk from the purges, such as a case recounted by Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn of an engineer originally of bourgeois heritage named Nikolai von Meck, who was accused of being a “wrecker” and shot for his recommendation that freight trains carry heavier loads, which was seen as a veiled attempt to wear down the Soviet rail system.
Collaboration with Nazism
While the Soviet economy was mostly unaffected by the Great Depression due to its relative isolation, the situation was very different in Germany. As the pluralistic and progressive society of the late 1920s came crashing to a halt, people turned to both extremes of the political spectrum, with the far-right National Socialist German Workers’ Party experiencing a surge in popularity. Don’t be fooled by the nomenclature; Adolf Hitler himself took pride in this inversion of the meaning of these terms, and used it in order to redefine who was or was not a member of the “German nation”:
Socialism is the science of dealing with the common wealth. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists.
Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is patriotic… We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfillment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us, state and race are one.”
In their statements and in their policies, the Nazis unambiguously and uncompromisingly denounced communism and left-wing ideology, painting it as a Jewish plot to destroy civilization, because of course that’s how they framed it. But that didn’t stop the leader of the German Communist Party, Ernst Thälmann, from helping the Nazis take power, imagining that the subsequent deterioration of social conditions would be sufficient to trigger a communist revolution. Just as orthodox Marxists had seen Eduard Bernstein as a revisionist due to his belief in the possibility for capitalism to be reformed rather than abolished, and just as Stalin had earlier described social democracy as “objectively the moderate wing of fascism” for the same reason, Thälmann saw the Social Democratic Party of Germany as being even worse than the Nazis, since at least Hitler was willing to openly state his objectives, whereas the Social Democrats were pretending to fight for the working people. It was only once Hitler had taken power that Thälmann seemed to recognize the danger of the situation and proposed to organize a general strike alongside the Social Democrats, but they wanted nothing to do with him at this point. Within months, all opposition parties, including the Communist Party, had been outlawed. In an even greater irony, the Communists and the Social Democrats, who in reality shared many of the same goals, together represented a greater share of the Reichstag than the Nazis, who merely held the plurality.
Despite this catastrophic blunder, communist leaders in general had not yet had enough collaboration with fascists. After negotiations to form a military alliance with Britain and France fell through, the Soviet Union turned to Germany, becoming party to the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact, wherein the two great powers agreed to divide Eastern Europe between them. When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the USSR followed suit two weeks later, even holding a joint military parade in the city of Brest-Litovsk. While the Nazis were conquering France, the Soviets staged coups in the Baltic countries of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, the new governments of which subsequently requested to join the USSR, which was of course granted. Ultimately, as Hitler planned to backstab the Soviets and seize the rest of Eastern Europe for himself, Stalin ignored intelligence reports indicating that this was the case, instead carrying out mass deportations of his newly incorporated territories to Siberia, leading many in the region to initially welcome the Germans as liberators when they arrived a few weeks later.
This first impression was of course mistaken, as some of the most vile crimes against humanity in history were perpetrated in Eastern Europe under the Nazi boot, which the Soviets then fought valiantly and desperately over the course of the Second World War to dislodge. (Ironically, their survival may have been thanks to the existing degree of industrialization in the country, which might have been absent had Stalin not made the decisions that caused the Holodomor.) Together with the United States and Great Britain, from which they received aid that some high-ranking officials admitted may have been decisive, the Soviets emerged victorious as a founding member of the post-war order, helping to create the United Nations, which aimed to ensure that no such atrocities as the world had just seen could be committed ever again. However, Stalin also allowed the Red Army to embark on a campaign of rape and looting in the territories that they captured, remarking: “Can’t you understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?” Later in 1947, the Soviet Union and the governments it propped up in Eastern Europe abstained from the vote ratifying the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, on the pretense that it lacked an explicit condemnation of Nazism (although Eleanor Roosevelt speculated that the real reason was its clause that citizens must retain the right to leave their countries). Indeed, Kurt Schumacher, who became the leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and who had visited the Soviet occupation zone, termed the Communist Party of Germany in that region as “red-painted Nazis.”
The Post-War Order
The UDHR was and is quite a progressive document, declaring among its provisions:
- the equality of all human beings without distinction based on such factors as race, gender or creed (Articles 1 & 2),
- the right to live without bondage (Article 4),
- the right to be treated fairly by law enforcement and the courts (Articles 6–11),
- the right to a nationality (Article 15),
- the rights to freedom of speech, religion and assembly (Articles 18–20),
- the right to participate in the government of one’s country (Article 21),
- the right to just working conditions, paid holidays, and to a standard of living adequate to provide for the needs of one’s family (Articles 23–25),
- the right to an education (Article 26),
- and the right to live in a social and international order conducive to the realization of these rights (Article 28).
Many, if not all, of these goals have still yet to be reached in much, if not all, of the world today, 75 years after their proclamation. As mutual distrust between the West and the Soviets (fueled in part by Stalin’s perennial paranoia) led to the descent of what became known as the “Iron Curtain” and the beginning of a “Cold War,” an opportunity to establish a shared set of worldwide values came and went. Of course, the United States, which voted to ratify the UDHR, continued to allow the former Confederacy to practice its apartheid-style Jim Crow laws, while Britain and France, who also ratified it, continued to attempt to hold onto their stratified colonial empires, facts which the Soviets rightly criticized the West for. Due to these fundamental disagreements on the meaning of freedom, both sides believed in their model as that which veritably allowed people to live freely, and both sides often enacted policies betraying their professed ideals, either at home or as part of the effort to contain the influence of the other side by any means necessary.
In the wake of the defeat of the Japanese Empire marking the end of the Second World War, the Chinese Civil War drew to a close in 1949 with the decisive victory of Mao Zedong’s Communist Party over Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist Party (the latter of which subsequently escaped to Taiwan). A civil war flared up in Korea the next year, when Stalin gave his approval for Kim Il-Sung, their hand-picked leader of the provisional government for the northern half of the peninsula who would effectively rule as a monarch, to attempt to incorporate their American-backed southern counterpart. The U.S. was able to obtain United Nations approval to formally intervene on behalf of the South, since the Soviets were ironically boycotting the U.N. Security Council over the fact that China’s seat had not been transferred to Mao’s government, one of the only times when the Security Council has approved such an intervention. In response, China joined the war on the North’s side, leading to a stalemate ceasefire that has yet to be resolved to this day. Both communist governments adopted Stalinist models (although their capitalist counterparts, South Korea and Taiwan, were also run as harsh military dictatorships for decades until eventually democratizing in the late 80’s and early 90’s), which would bring China into conflict with the Soviet Union in the mid-60’s as Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khruschev, denounced his totalitarian methods in a secret speech that was leaked to the outside and adopted a somewhat less heavy-handed approach. (Stalin’s paranoia was ultimately what led to his demise, as his doctors were too afraid to enter his room for several hours when he suffered a stroke after having asked not to be disturbed.) Mao Zedong, for his part, had by this time engaged in what some historians see as a premeditated attempt to draw out dissidents by temporarily relaxing free speech laws and a disastrous attempt to modernize China’s agriculture by eliminating the sparrow population, which caused a locust infestation and subsequent famine that cost anywhere from 15 to 55 million lives, out of a population of 650 million, which even the Chinese government today admits was a mistake. Suffering from reduced political influence as a result of the latter, Mao unleashed another catastrophic decision upon the Chinese people, which remains a fairly sensitive topic in China today: the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
Unchecked Violence in China and Cambodia
Arguing that despite having been overthrown 17 years earlier, the bourgeoisie had infiltrated the Communist Party and were sabotaging his great experiment, the Chairman called on the Chinese people to return to a state of revolution in order to quash this clandestine influence. In truth, it would take an entire article on its own to do justice to the Cultural Revolution, but what you need to know about it is that it represented an all-encompassing effort to essentially purify society of any elements deemed insufficiently loyal to the ideals laid out in Mao’s Little Red Book, led by grassroots student-led Red Guard squads competing with each other to show the most revolutionary zeal. The stated goal of this effort was to eradicate the “Four Olds,” i.e. old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits. Starting in Beijing in August 1966, this process quickly spiraled outward, as scores of supposed “class enemies” were brought up in publicly humiliating “struggle sessions” in which they were forced to confess to imaginary crimes and denounce themselves for a chance at rehabilitation, or if they managed to avoid this often deadly fate, became social pariahs with whom it would be dangerous to associate. Society was stratified into the Five Red Categories (peasants, workers, revolutionary soldiers, revolutionary cadres, and family members of revolutionary martyrs), and the Five Black Categories (landlords, rich farmers, “counter-revolutionaries”, “bad elements”, and “rightists”), with only members of the first five allowed to join the Red Guard. According to the account of Chen Qigang, a composer who left China for France in 1984,
I have always been a very direct speaker. When the Cultural Revolution was starting, I spoke out about what I was seeing. The day after I said something, a big-character poster appeared on campus overnight: “Save the reactionary speechmaker Chen Qigang.” I was so young. I didn’t understand what was going on. Yesterday we were all classmates. How come today all of my classmates are my enemies? Everyone started to ignore me. I didn’t understand. How could people be like this? Even my older sister, who was also at my school, came to find me and asked, “What’s wrong with you?” You saw in one night who your real friends were. The next day I only had two friends left. One of them is now my wife.
At the time, no one really knew who was for or against the revolution. It was completely out of control. The students brought elderly people into the school and beat them. They beat their teachers and principals. There was nothing in the way of law. There was a student who was two or three years older than me. He beat two elderly people to death with his bare hands. No one has talked about this even until this day. We all know who did it but that’s the way it is. No one has ever looked into it. These occurrences were too common.
As alluded to above, intellectuals were particularly reviled for their perceived connection to bourgeois society, painted with the epithet “Stinking Old Ninth” in reference to the historical status of intellectuals as the ninth caste within Confucianism. Whereas the revolutionary anthem, L’internationale, sang that “There has never been any savior of the world / Nor deities, nor emperors on which to depend,” another just as popular melody declared “China has brought forth a Mao Zedong / He works for the happiness of the people / He is the people’s great saving star.” Even Mao’s favorite fruit, the mango, was treated as if a religious icon. Mao himself saw all of this violence as a good thing, and his wife went on record saying that
If good people beat bad people, it serves them right; if bad people beat good people, the good people achieve glory; if good people beat good people, it is a misunderstanding; without beatings, you do not get acquainted and then no longer need to beat them.
At this same time, however, as relations between China and the Soviet Union continued to deteriorate, splitting the communist world in two, President Nixon began to normalize relations with China, famously visiting Mao in Beijing in 1972, a year after the U.N. voted to transfer China’s seat to the mainland from Taiwan. (After Mao’s death in 1975, just as in the Soviet Union post-Stalin, party leaders took a series of steps to distance themselves from the excesses of his rule.) As the Americans continued to fight against the Soviet-backed Viet Cong, they embarked on a massive bombing campaign of neighboring countries Laos and Cambodia, through which the Vietnamese supply lines ran, encouraged by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. This directly contributed to the recruitment efforts of communists in both countries, as radicalized peasants who had lost their livelihoods took up arms. After the Khmer Communist Party marched into Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia in April 1975, and declared the beginning of a new “Year Zero,” the rivers of blood in which they drenched the countryside in an effort to outdo Mao’s Cultural Revolution would truly earn them the sobriquet of the Khmer Rouge (“red Cambodia”).
Officially known as “Democratic Kampuchea,” led by Pol Pot, who had studied Marxism in Paris two decades prior (but admitted that he didn’t actually understand some of Marx’s writings that well), the Khmer Rouge immediately moved the populations of the major cities out to farms in the countryside, including hospital patients who were in no condition to travel. These people, representing 3 million out of Cambodia’s population of 8 million, were regarded as “new people” for their supposedly bourgeois lifestyles and would receive the least food going forward, as opposed to those who were already living rurally, referred to as “old people.” Upon arrival in the countryside, people were organized into units of ten to fifteen families supervised by a three-person committee handpicked by the party. They were then forced to work in the fields, sometimes as long as twelve hours per day, to produce rice that was often sent to the party elite, who were living large in Phnom Penh, rather than feeding the desperately malnourished workers themselves. Pol Pot revived the symbolism of the old Cambodian Empire, portraying the government as a pseudo-divine entity known as “Angkar,” making reference to the Angkor Wat temple located in Cambodia’s historical capital. Like in China, intellectuals were seen as class traitors (and more importantly, threats to the regime), to the point where anyone wearing glasses or who spoke a foreign language was in danger of summary execution, and education was essentially abolished, since the logic went that everything one needed to know in life, one could learn working in the fields. Culturally prominent figures such as musicians were purged as well. Starving peasants were prohibited from even foraging in the countryside for food, since this reflected an individualistic and hoarding mindset. Ethnic minorities making up 15% of the population were simply wiped out, since the land of Cambodia was seen as belonging to the Khmer people only. When citizens who had been arrested for totally arbitrary reasons asked what their offense was, their guards were instructed to simply reply, “Angkar does not make mistakes!” They were then forced to provide the names of their friends and family as “co-conspirators,” who were then next to be arrested. This process was fatal for the vast majority of its victims, who were often beaten to death given a premium on bullets. The sites where this was carried out became known as the Killing Fields, where it’s estimated that a quarter of Cambodia’s entire population lost their lives. Ultimately, in response to a Cambodian attack against the Vietnamese border in 1979, the Viet Cong invaded and put the Khmer Rouge regime out of its misery within two weeks, meeting no civilian resistance in the process. Although many government officials were found guilty of crimes against humanity over the coming decades, Pol Pot died of old age with a clear conscience.
Despite these stunning atrocities, the United States, the same country of which Pol Pot’s victims were often made to confess to being capitalist agents, indirectly supported his regime during this time, since it was aligned with China, which meant that it was against the Soviet Union. Other examples of antidemocratic action taken on both sides of the Iron Curtain include the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 in response to the attempt of the latter’s government to democratize by implementing what they called “socialism with a human face,” and the United States’ funding of a right-wing coup against Chile’s democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, in 1973. Meanwhile, one of the competing Communist Parties of Peru abandoned working within the political system entirely in 1980, preferring to wage a guerrilla war under the name “Shining Path” (from the slogan “Marxism–Leninism will open the shining path to revolution”), claiming to represent the vanguard party for the entire worldwide communist movement, unhesitatingly brutalizing peasants who disagreed with them, other communists, and ultimately accomplishing none of their goals.
Dissolution of the Soviet Union
After the post-war economic boom had run its course in both the Soviet Union and the United States, the former and its satellite states gradually fell behind in terms of standards of living. Whereas the Soviet authorities had once claimed that the final stage of Marx’s history would be reached by 1980, they shifted to promising the population that their children would one day live under communism, and adopted the somewhat laughable descriptor of “actually existing socialism” for some of the slight modifications to their economic policies that they made. The situation was not helped by the Soviets’ decision to commit to a costly invasion of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989 in the interest of propping up a socialist government there, which was ultimately unsuccessful. However, what Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev himself later described as the potential first nail in the coffin for the USSR was none other than the infamous Chernobyl accident (properly referred to as “Chornobyl” in Ukrainian).
At 1:23am on April 26, 1986, the fourth reactor of what was officially known as the Vladimir Lenin Nuclear Power Plant exploded due to a meltdown of its nuclear fuel caused by a botched test of the station’s backup power generation system in the event of an emergency. The design flaw in the reactor that caused the explosion to occur as a result of pressing the “scram” button had already been known, but was kept as a state secret. After the explosion took place, the nearby towns were not evacuated for 36 hours out of an impulse to avoid causing a panic, and farmers were ordered to keep working in the fields during that time to avoid promoting rumors that something was wrong. Exposure to the fallout proved fatal to thousands of people, including civilians and those who were tasked with putting out the fires and cleaning up the disaster site. In the same interest of preventing a panic, textbooks on nuclear physics were taken off of the bookshelves in the libraries of Kyiv, and the general Soviet population was only informed of what had happened two weeks later, which prompted an outrage over the fact that the government had sought to keep this vital information from them, despite claiming to have their best interests at heart. Indeed, despite the communist movement’s perennial obsequious praise of the potential of the working people, its leaders demonstrated very little trust in them to do the right thing when it actually mattered, instead treating them as expendable resources in much the same way as their capitalist counterparts might have.
In response to this outrage, Gorbachev gradually implemented a series of policies known as demokratizatsiya, aimed at loosening many of the tight restrictions that had previously been enforced in Soviet society. These measures included glasnost’, or “openness,” which allowed the media to operate independently of government censorship and allowed political parties other than the Communist Party to operate, and perestroika, or “restructuring,” which legalized a limited degree of free-market activity. However, as a consequence of glasnost’, Soviet citizens learned the truth that had been kept from them for decades — that the West really did have significantly higher living standards — which struck a critical blow to the people’s confidence in the entire socialist project. At the same time, while Hungary decided to open its western border with Austria, many of the other communist governments in Eastern Europe continued to hold to their prior authoritarian practices, their populations’ tolerance of which had reached a breaking point. In the incident that many see as decisively winning the Cold War for the West, a spokesperson for the East German government accidentally implied in November 1989 that the much-reviled Berlin Wall would be opened immediately, rather than gradually, leading to a crowd of thousands of people to spontaneously descend on the wall and force it open, as nobody was willing to issue an order for the border guards to fire into the crowd. Officially known as the “Antifascist Protection Rampart,” the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961 to stem the flow of migrants from communist East Berlin to capitalist West Berlin in pursuit of the latter’s higher standards of living, in response to which President Kennedy remarked in his famous West Berlin speech, “Democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in.” At this moment, families that had been separated by this political chess piece for nearly three decades were finally reunited, and the socialist movement’s promise of freedom was ultimately fulfilled by its resignation.
A few weeks after the Berlin Wall fell, a KGB officer stationed at the Soviet embassy in East Berlin named Vladimir Putin was confronted with a crowd of protesters surrounding the establishment. To prevent them from breaking in, Putin and his colleagues bluffed, pretending that they were armed and willing to use force to protect themselves. In response to their frantic requests for instructions from their higher-ups, they received this response: “We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow, and Moscow is silent.” For someone who thoroughly believed in the authoritarian model as the correct approach to maintaining order and Russian international influence, many see this moment as a profound shock that has likely informed Putin’s actions to this day. In fact, it was hard-liners like Putin who, in their last-ditch attempt to stop the wind of change, would doom the USSR themselves.
As the Soviet system limped into the 1990s, the Baltic countries which had been forcefully annexed five decades prior declared independence outright, while most of the other constituent republics issued “declarations of state sovereignty,” which signified that local laws would take precedence over Union-wide laws. This even included the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, which was at this point led by the non-communist Boris Yeltsin, who was pushing for continued democratization. At this point, Gorbachev proposed a new, more federalized model for the Union going forward, known as the New Union Treaty, which would replace the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics with the Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics.
In March 1991, a referendum was held in the nine remaining republics, including Ukraine, all of which voted in favor of adopting the new treaty. One day before it was set to take effect in August, however, members of the gerontocratic old guard of the Communist Party staged a coup and kidnapped Gorbachev, throwing the whole system into disarray. Although Yeltsin was able to take control of the army and freed Gorbachev after a few days, the leaders of the Ukrainian republic saw all of this unfold and decided in an eleven-hour-long session that they could no longer take the risk of remaining in a union with Russia, and declared independence. A few months later in the referendum on this declaration, an overwhelming 92% of the people of Ukraine agreed with this judgement, carrying a majority in every single district (although with the margin being closest in Crimea, which had been part of Russia until 1954). With Gorbachev’s standing diminished to the point that he couldn’t have used force to hold onto Ukraine even if he wanted to, any pretense that the Union would stick together without its second most important member was gone. Not long after, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the Belovezha Accords, formally replacing the USSR with a much looser association, and Gorbachev stepped down from his post on Christmas Eve.
Aftermath
Let’s take a moment to step back and review what we’ve just seen. Arising from the work of Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century, inspired by the American and French revolutions against their respective monarchies, socialism emerged as an economic model and philosophy offering an optimistic vision of humanity that aimed to resolve the inequalities that existed across the world as a result of systematic oppression, and was transformed into a rigid, hypervigilant ideology at the hands of whose disciples countless working people had their freedoms stripped from them in the name of realizing the arc of history. As flawed and unjust as American capitalism was and is, can you really blame the people of the McCarthy and Reagan eras for being suspicious of what the communist movement would have done had they ever had the opportunity in the West? Just as Maria Spiridonova wrote in her letter back in 1918, the actions taken by the Bolshevik zealots and those who were inspired by them “damaged this belief [in the promise of socialism], which had inflamed the souls of the people as never before, at its very roots.” And of course, they have also provided propaganda wins to the right, whose ideologues receive a free excuse to harp on about “cancel culture” and other buzzwords that they can use as rhetorical bludgeons to argue against progress. However, it is just as understandable that many people in the year 2023 have heard the appeal of far-left (and, of course, far-right) ideologies, given the dismal failure of governments in the post-Cold War order to provide for the needs of their citizens.
Although many in the West and even some in Russia greeted Christmas Day of 1991 with jubilation and optimism, not everyone wanted to give up the socialist model. (Indeed, leaders of some of the Central Asian republics, such as Kazakhstan, were upset that they had not been consulted in the Belovezha Accords, as independence would come at an economic cost to them.) As the new President Yeltsin implemented wide-reaching free-market reforms, upon which Russia’s potential receipt of aid from the International Monetary Fund was predicated (in the absence of a Marshall Plan-style program for the former Soviet countries from the West), previously state-owned industries were swept up in a wave of privatization, which led directly to the emergence of the oligarch class. At the same time, while the populations of many Eastern European countries were beginning to enjoying the benefits of integration with the Western economy, living standards for average Russians plummeted to a degree even more severe than the Great Depression had been in America, as prices ballooned and state-sponsored social programs evaporated, leaving behind an environment bereft of opportunity. Yeltsin’s commitment to democracy also wavered, as he resolved a constitutional crisis between himself and the Parliament in 1993 through the use of tanks opening fire on the latter’s headquarters. The 1996 presidential election between Yeltsin and the Communist Party’s Gennady Zyuganov, which was won by the former in a 54.4%-40.7% result, was colored by the impression that many had of the media coverage of the campaign as being biased in favor of Yeltsin. On New Year’s Eve 1999, Yeltsin resigned in the wake of an out-of-control war in the Caucasus and an attempted impeachment procedure that came within a handful of votes of success. As a result, Yeltsin’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin, was promoted to acting president, and subsequently ran in and won the special election that was held a few months into the new millennium.
Putin, of course, despite his service in the KGB, was no communist, but what he was was an (at the time closeted) authoritarian. He campaigned on arresting what he saw as a decline of Russia’s international standing, and on the revival of a strong state as the “source and guarantor of order; the initiator and main driving force of all change.” Under his administration, the Russian economy gradually recovered, with a sizeable middle class emerging as cooperation and integration with the West initially made progress. However, the optimism of the first few years of his term gave way to suspicion, as Putin’s expressed view of Russia as an integral part of European culture shifted to an emphasis on the distinct nature of a Russian-led Eurasian civilization, and Putin’s support for Russia’s eventual membership in NATO was replaced by expressions of dissatisfaction at NATO expansion into Eastern Europe. After briefly trading the presidency off with his prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, Putin infamously authorized the annexation of Crimea in 2014 in response to a pro-EU protest movement that had ousted the previous pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, and funded a separatist movement in the Donbass region that resulted in a precipitous drop in living standards for civilians. At the same time, Putin embarked on a well-documented campaign of supporting far-right movements in the United States, Hungary and France, just to name a few, contributing to the elections of Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, and to the campaign of Marine Le Pen respectively. Ultimately, after what some speculate to be a deeply isolating quarantine period during the COVID pandemic, during which time he spent his free time poring through Soviet archives and reminiscing about the days of Russian greatness, Putin attempted to effectively annex Ukraine in its entirety, the country that had nailed the USSR’s coffin with its declaration of independence. In doing so, Putin unleashed war in Europe on a scale not seen since Hitler, a figure with whom he has as a result invited frequent comparisons.
There is an idea in political science known as horseshoe theory, which posits that the far left and the far right have more in common with each other in terms of their rhetoric and their methods than either has with the center. Personally, I was skeptical of this idea for a while, since I felt like it was a cynical way to frame progressives as being just as extreme as the MAGA movement. However, what I’ve since come to learn is that the extent to which this theory holds true is the embrace of uncompromising authoritarianism by both extremes, from Lenin’s order to the Cheka to Putin’s orders to his army in Ukraine. Having drawn a line through the 20th century connecting the latter to the former, the true irony of the communist experiment and its aftermath becomes apparent.
In the world of the 21st century, there exists a myriad of forces committed to the entrenchment of the capitalist system, arguably more so than in Lenin’s era, so it’s understandable that Lenin would believe in the necessity of a strictly regimented system to prevent these forces from undoing all of the progress that he and his comrades had fought for. I can even respect him for the passion with which he believed in building a new, forward-thinking society on top of the old one, a vision that I think many young people like myself can relate to. That being said, I cannot get on board with a model that explicitly calls for the creation of a one-party state, with no possibility for the ruling party to be voted out of office, that has the audacity to portray itself as the truest form of democracy. It makes no sense to imagine that the people of any country will always choose communism, ten times out of ten, and that any other choice that they might make is somehow an illegitimate result of capitalist interference or brainwashing. A culture that adheres to its traditional ways and a culture that embraces social change are both the product of the historical circumstances that pushed them to develop in the way that they did, and the former cannot be transformed into the latter overnight. That doesn’t mean that one should give up on trying to change such a culture, just the opposite; it means that one should build on smaller victories and meet people where they are. (Indeed, some argue that Russia was unready for socialism in 1917, given that it had in many ways not yet reached Marx’s “capitalism” stage of history, still remaining in “feudalism.”) Especially given the track record that they accumulated during the 20th century, it should be clear that communists are no exception to the rule that power tends to corrupt, and that they can find a state of perpetual revolution preferable to allowing people to live peacefully and potentially see the shortcomings of their regime. The defining characteristic of authoritarianism is an inability to hold people in power accountable for injustices that they perpetrate, and for a movement whose raison d’être is to fight injustice, this style of governance ought to be seen as incompatible with its vision for society. But of course, authoritarian leaders don’t think of themselves as the kind of people who might be at risk of perpetrating injustice, making them much less different from squabbling Westerosi nobles locked in a perpetual struggle for dominance than they would have you believe.
Because the United States is always seen as the polar opposite to the Soviet Union, and because the proponents and detractors of socialism both tend to point to the actions of the United States to make their arguments, it becomes necessary at this point to better understand the role that this country has played during these eras, to find the extent to which we bear responsibility for various present injustices around the world. Because this article is already long enough, please tune back in in a few days for the next part of this series, which will explore this question in detail. I will leave off on a note that has been played in solidarity by people appreciating the value of freedom on every continent:
Slava Ukraïni!
