Is now run by a right wing kleptocrat who uses identity politics to keep the country divided and stole 200-300 billion dollars from the country?
I mean on a cosmic scale you have to admire the humor in that.
I suppose there seems to be some level of irony, but, realistically, here is what Emma Goldman wrote 100 years ago (she was there in 1920):
Anyone who thought or said the Soviet Union was some sort of model communist paradise was deluded at best.
Sound familiar? She does not give an estimate of how much Lenin managed to steal from the country, is the only difference.
Very few people thought that, even in the early 1920s, before Stalin.
Even then there were major shortages of food and many other basic necessities, and a crisis situation.
However, Tsarist Russia was certainly no paradise either. WWI was a crushing blow to the Tsarist government. By 1917, Russia was totally exhausted, her resources depleted, and in a seriously desperate situation. There were major food shortages and people were starving even then, before the Revolution broke out. In fact, that’s a major reason it succeeded.
After WWI, with the West supporting the White Russian forces, and the new Communist government facing intense conflict on every side and a breakdown of the old systems of law and order, the internal situation got even worse. Early idealism fell by the wayside, and the Bolshevik government quickly became more and more authoritarian in an effort to control the situation.
With Russia in the condition it was, the only alternatives were totalitarianism or anarchy, regardless of what kind of government was in power. But what made it even worse were the Communist attempts at social engineering, based on a flawed ideology that didn’t work in practice.
Lenin certainly didn’t live in any kind of luxury, and had no personal wealth.
I’ve read two books written at the time, Russia in 1919 and The Crisis in Russia (1921), by Arthur Ransome.
Ransome was a British journalist who spoke fluent Russian, and had covered WWI in Russia from the beginning as a war correspondent. He knew Lenin and Trotsky and many other senior Bolsheviks personally, and covered the whole of the early Russian Revolution, though he wasn’t a Communist or Socialist himself. He sometimes acted as a go-between in negotiations between the British and the Bolsheviks.
He was in and out of the Kremlin all the time in the early days, and often meeting with top Bolshevik leaders. He describes below-freezing conditions in Trotsky’s office, with everyone working in heavy coats, and writing with blue hands, because there was no coal or firewood available. Even members of the Politburo were living on meagre rations of soup and black bread, and glad to get it. There was no sugar for tea, even in meetings with leaders in the Kremlin, and probably horse meat in the soup.
He gives a detailed and vivid account of just how bad things were, and goes into the whole question of why they were so bad. The total inadequacy of transport was a big factor, with the railways barely functioning and no way to repair or replace locomotives.
I’ve never seen any evidence that the Bolsheviks had ever planned to be anything other than authoritarian.
Really? Perhaps you haven’t looked for any evidence.
Read this article for a start:
Russia has always been a totalitarian country, in one form or another. I see no irony there.
Such as this passage, quoting Trotsky?
ANd this passage:
I think Lenin was sincere. I think he really believed communism would work and be good for people and he was trying to make it happen. He was wrong but I think he believed this.
Trotsky may have also been a true believer. Stalin might have had some belief in communism but he put his own interests ahead of communism. The people who survived Stalin and were leaders in the Soviet Union after him were basically working the system that existed in order to personally advance. Putin certainly is like this; at various points, he’s been a communist, a democrat, and a right wing dictator. He has no ideology beyond doing what benefits himself.
This just shows that we shouldn’t just hand over power to the leaders and trust they will do what’s best for us. Even if an occasional leader actually tries to do what’s best, he might be wrong in knowing what’s best. And regardless, once the system is in place that gives a leader power, other people will try to use this system for their own advantage. If a system makes abuse possible, somebody will come along to abuse it.
Any worthwhile political system needs to have its leaders held accountable to the people who are being led. And the people have to exercise control over their leaders. The problem is all the lazy people who feel that’s too much work and would rather just hand over power and be followers.
The point is that the more right-leaning parties (to some extent associated with the bourgeoisie) had a serious voice in government, until they tried to seize power in a violent coup and kill the Bolshevik leaders. They failed, and at that point the Bolsheviks cracked down and purged all other parties.
But up to that time, they had representation, and real power.
From Arthur Ransome’s autobiography:
[The attempted coup] was made possible by the composite nature of the government, which was still a coalition, a joint affair of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries. So genuine was its composite nature that even the Extraordinary Commission, whose work it was to keep order, to suppress counter-revolutionary action, and to carry out many of the functions of a secret police, included members of all parties.
This day’s work put an end to that. The Social Revolutionaries’ plan had been a dangerous one, but, as always, they had exaggerated the popular support on which they could count, and had mistaken the Russian readiness to applaud emotional oratory for a willingness to cut short a breathing-space and plunge once more into a state of war. They planned to make war inevitable by the murder of the German Ambassador.
They believed that they had enough support among the soldiers to surround the Bolshoi Theatre and arrest all the Bolshevik leaders in a body, sitting together on the stage. They further believed that the Germans would have to advance to avenge their murdered Ambassador, and that the entire population of Russia would find itself willy-nilly engaged in guerrilla warfare, which, the sympathies of the working classes being with them, would spread to every country in the world and bring about the final triumph of the revolution.
They did murder the German ambassador, but failed to arrest and execute the Bolsheviks or gain the support of the people for continuing the war. This was the end of power-sharing.
I think you are misunderstanding what Lenin meant by ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’. He didn’t mean a top-down dictatorship, but a bottom-up structure of soviets (councils) elected only by workers and soldiers. This structure is described in the wiki article. It was originally intended to be democratic, but with only workers and soldiers entitled to vote - hence rule by the proletariat over other classes.
I do understand what “dictarorship of the proletariat” meant - and excluding large portions from the electorate is not democratic.
As well, Lenin and Trotsky were not committed democrats. Even if there were attempts at assasination by political oppontents, a democratic response is not to shut down democratic institutions.
What Lenin said and what he actually did were two very different things. He was very much in favor of the rights of minority ethnic groups to secede from the Russian Empire…if only they would immediately agree to rejoin in cooperative proletariat internationalism, and encouraged Stalin to use military might to enforce “a theory that offered the ideal of autonomy and the right of secession without necessarily having to grant either.” In other words, you can have it your way, if and only if your way is the Soviet way, which is the very definition of autonomy. In any case, there was never any genuine “rule by the proletariat over other classes”, and all of the talk about class struggle of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie was window dressing for a regime that was always authoritarian and never ‘democratic’ in any real sense of the term. Under Stalin’s leadership, there was never anything but even the shallow pretense of a cult of personality dictatorship; forced migrations and starvation, prison labor camps for political dissidents, sham trials and summary executions were the norm.
The notion that there is some irony that Russia is now a kleptocracy ignores the continuum of venal, autocratic leadership going back to Tsardom of Russia. Russia’s brief, halting experiment with something akin to democracy at the end of the Cold War was a spectacular economic and social failure, in no small part because it was economically and politically undermined from both within and without, and the Russian people have never known anything other than autocracy and the stirring of ethnic conflicts and (often genuine) fear of invasion to bind them to the will of tsars, emperors, Party Chairmen, and now Vladimir Putin, who is as effective of a troll as any American alt-right figure.
Stranger
There has never been such a thing as a truly communist nation. Even North Korea, which is the closest there is, still has a thriving black market and its leader lives a billionaire lifestyle.
Yes, I think you are right.
Arthur Ransome has something very interesting thing to say about Lenin, with whom he had a number of long meetings over a period of several years. He even played chess with Lenin a few times.
Writing in 1919:
More than ever, Lenin struck me as a happy man. Walking home from the Kremlin, I tried to think of any other man of his calibre who had had a similar joyous temperament. I could think of none.
This little, bald-headed, wrinkled man, who tilts his chair this way and that, laughing over one thing or another, ready any minute to give serious advice to any who interrupt him to ask for it, advice so well reasoned that it is to his followers far more compelling than any command, every one of his wrinkles is a wrinkle of laughter, not of worry.
I think the reason must be that he is the first great leader who utterly discounts the value of his own personality. He is quite without personal ambition. More than that, he believes, as a Marxist, in the movement of the masses which, with or without him, would still move.
His whole faith is in the elemental forces that move people, his faith in himself is merely his belief that he justly estimates the direction of those forces. He does not believe that any man could make or stop the revolution which he thinks inevitable.
If the Russian revolution fails, according to him, it fails only temporarily, and because of forces beyond any man’s control. He is consequently free with a freedom no other great man has ever had.
It is not so much what he says that inspires confidence in him. It is this sensible freedom, this obvious detachment. With his philosophy he cannot for a moment believe that one man’s mistake might ruin all. He is, for himself at any rate, the exponent, not the cause, of the events that will be for ever linked with his name.
Stalin was a different story. Ransome knew Stalin, and strongly disliked him, long before he came to power. He wanted nothing to do with Stalin. After Stalin became leader, Ransome basically gave up on Russia.
That’s kind of a canard though. A lot of the West’s perceptions of Communism are heavily colored by both the Cold War and the early Soviet Union. The Soviet state specifically taught a form of utopian communism and a promise paradise at some vague point in the future in which there would be no state at all. That sort of communism is a fairy tale in modern times (although arguably some form of it governed many pre-state societies of human beings.) That being said, the philosophical backgrounds of Socialism / Marxism / Communism go back to the early 1800s and there are tons of different schools of thought and iterations of Communism out there. Most modern Communists that still exist, AFAIK, do not advocate or ascribe to the “utopian” Communism of the early 20th century rhetoric.
To my mind China’s Communist Party definitely is a Communist party, it just isn’t advocating the sort of fanciful “end of the state” style Communism the early Bolsheviks did, and that the Soviet regime would vaguely continue to promise for years after.
I also note that for some reason we in the West have always held Communist governments to this weird standard, where we frequently point out they weren’t “truly communist to the standard of some Communist intellectuals in the early 20th century.” But our own societies are imperfect market economies and imperfect democracies. No one says we aren’t market societies or that we aren’t democracies because of those imperfections. Many of our political leaders are also corrupt personally.
I think Putin is undoubtedly personally corrupt, but I actually think he is an ardent Russian nationalist and deeply cares about Russia’s strength and power on the world stage. I think he’s done a lot that in his mind has strengthened Russia. I think some of it, only time will tell if he has really done that or not, but I think that has been a major governing ethos of his. I actually think you can be an ardent nationalist strongman who wants your country to be strong, but also personally corrupt.
I’ll also note that if you visit many of the former SSRs, like Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, even some of the “bad parts” of the Baltic Republics (mainly the rural towns in the east of those States where 90-100% of the people speak and are ethnic Russian, and where the new economy of the coast has given them nothing), there are many locals who speak fondly of how life was much better under the Soviets. This will seem alien to us, but the reality is these people have never been major participants in any kind of participatory government, going back hundreds and hundreds of years. Some of their countries are now genuine democracies, but in which impoverished people outside of the new power centers have little real voice or power. It is unsurprising they might yearn for the Soviet era when life was actually better. There’s a lot of places that the Soviets funneled a lot of money and infrastructure efforts into that have basically collapsed into nothingness after the collapse of the USSR.
The Communists themselves do this. Whenever a revolutionary government turns into a totalitarian hellhole, western leftists just wave their hands and say “Well, that wasn’t really a Communist state. Real Communism has never been tried.”
Does a heretical post like that mean you can never go home, Mr/Ms Democratic People’s Republic of Korea?
“We need to cut him loose; he’s gone native.”
(I’ve been waiting for years to say that 
)
And they are correct. “True Communism”, as defined by Marx and Engels has never been implemented on a national level because it is fundamentally inconsistent with human behavior and social cognition. The idea that the “proletariat” is one big homogeneous class that will rise up in unison, overthrow their capitalism masters, and spontaneously join into a collective agreement to divide all resources and spoils “Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen” is risible to anyone actually familiar with human beings in all of their self-involved petty squables, greed, and protectiveness. Even if people wanted to be altruistic at a societal level, willing to give away all posessessions and comforts for the sake of the greater good, there would still be a minority who would take advantage of such largess to enrich themselves…as, of course, Soviet officials after Lenin’s death did, living like princes during literal famines and delving out brutal punishment to anyone who questioned or critiqued them.
It doesn’t take much reading of the history of the Soviet Union, and the Peoples Republic of China, and every other ‘national experiment’ in the adoption of Marxist philosophy to see that there are fundamental flaws in that socioeconomic theory, and that all remaining Communist nations have evolved into either market socialism or brutally repressive kleptocracies (or, in the case of China, both) is illustrative of those problems. It is interesting that as the current era of neo-robber baron capitalism has exposed the rampant, open faced corruption of the post-regulated US economy, there is a small but vocal minority of people who have decided that the appropriate correction is to swing to the other radical extreme despite lacking a single example of functioning Marxist-Communist state.
Stranger
Whatever do you mean?
The Eternal Leader both invented and perfected communism, as anyone who has visited the Glorious People’s Democratic Republic can testify. Those brutish Slavs, Germans, and Chinese not only ripped us off, but naturally fucked it up and falsely gave it a bad reputation which persists to this day thanks to the Great Satan.
But, like Koreans, you are too smart to fall for US imperialist propaganda, pervasive and insidious though it may be, and you are welcome to come witness real Communism, self-sufficiency, true Socialism, and economic prosperity in the liberated homeland under the leadership of true patriots. Despite the US puppet regime in South Korea and the sad history and hardships of the resulting Fatherland Liberation War, there was never any real infighting and authoritarianism like there was in Russia because Koreans love their country and carry the revolutionary spirit in their hearts and souls.