Lenin and the "4 million killed"

Great Debates
81

I’m trying to follow your thinking here. Do you condemn the violent suppression of armed revolts in general, or only when the Bolsheviks did it?

The taking of hostages wasn’t simply for the sake of doing so; it was an attempt at coercion of those who had declared themselves avowed enemies of the revolution in the first place. Execution of hostages was a last resort - the most well-known example of such was the execution of Nikolai II and his family when it became quite clear that the Whites were fighting to release the Tsar and use him as a rallying point for the counterrevolution. This isn’t just war here; this is class war at its sharpest and most vicious. Furthermore, given the lack of research into the Penza situation, the issue of guilt of anti-Bolshevik acts is not something you have sufficient evidence to make any statements on.

I note the use of “apparently” in there. There’s no definite proof, short of further analysis of the events following the letter being sent, of who was executed and why. In fact it’s not even clear how many were executed under order of this letter.

No, not as far as this letter is concerned. But that doesn’t mean the issues didn’t arise at all. Whose families were taken hostage? Why? Who was executed as a result of this letter being written and sent? What had they done to make them candidates for execution in the first place?

Really, all this letter proves is that the Bolsheviks did not shy from harsh measures in the thick of the civil war. Are they to be condemned for doing what any other government would do in the same circumstances? I should think not. We need to know a lot more about the situation in Penza both before and after this letter was written in order to more fully judge if this letter justifies or condemns either the Bolsheviks or Lenin himself. This letter by itself doesn’t paint anything close to a complete and coherent picture of the Penza revolt.

82

American history is certainly not without its atrocities (just like all other cultures and countries) and the crimes against the American Indians was at its worst unqualified genocide/democide. However, in the 20th century I cannot think of a single president who would order the deliberate execution without trial of the FAMILIES of his political enemies. (Again, we’re not talking CIA assassinations or bugging political opponents, but the deliberate murder of spouses and minor children in order to send a message.) If that were Lenin’s sole and only crime, it would be enough to send him down to Sheol as a vile murderer no better than Manson or Cunanan.

Has anybody ever read David Sedaris’ “Great Leap Forward” essay, incidentally? He recounts his adventures working for a moving company owned by a Marxist who was the only Communist he ever knew who actually did manual labor. “All the Communists I knew in college seemed to think their job after the revolution would involve walking around with a clipboard giving orders.”

83

From Sandino

Taken like this, why should Hitlers murdering (sorry, spilling of treacherous and inferior jewish blood for the good of the German people) of the Jews be considered a ‘crime’…HE thought he was doing the right thing, removing racial impurities from Europe, as well as traitors (as he saw it) from their midst. On your basic, we can’t call HIM a ‘mass murderer’ either. I’m dead serious about this…if Lenin is NOT a mass murderer, then neither is Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot…the list goes on and on. They ALL thought they were doing the right thing, the necessary thing, what they had to do, blah blah blah. And they were ALL evil murdering scum that I hope are burning in the lowest reaches of hell (well, if I believed in hell).

There is simply no way that ANYTHING will convince you other wise, and its absolutely pointless for anyone to try…your mind is made up and completely closed. You are immune to argument, fact, etc. Anything presented you simply either justify (poor Lenin did what he had to do) or dismiss out of hand with nothing to back it up.

-XT

84

Let us see now. Raegan bombs Libya. No trial, Gadaffi’s son killed.
Bush Dubya invades Iraq. Husseins (admiteddly adult) sons killed.

Sure you can argue that these were’nt political enemies, that it was a war on terror, that these people were enemies of the state and that fabricated evidence and rhetoric was used as justification for the killing, without trial, of the families of these leaders.

Lenin would have said the same thing.

Before we can evaluate your belief you will need to define a political enemy. If Hussein was not a political enemy because he could realsitically never gain control of the USA then the Kulaks were not political enemies because they could never gain control of Moscow. If the Kulaks were political enemies because they spoke out aginast the leader, refused to follow his orders and rejected his ideologies and encouraged other to the same then Hussein is a political enemy of Dubya.

At least one US Presidents has ordered the deliberate execution without trial of the FAMILIES of his enemies. The only question is whether it was a political enemey and whether that excuses the act.

Of course it’s all rather beside the point. Bush can be the biggest mass murdering son of a bitch ever. That doesn’t mean that Lenin wasnt also a mass murdering son of a bitch, which he was.

85

Let us see now. Raegan bombs Libya. No trial, Gadaffi’s son killed.
Bush Dubya invades Iraq. Husseins (admiteddly adult) sons killed.

Sure you can argue that these were’nt political enemies, that it was a war on terror, that these people were enemies of the state and that fabricated evidence and rhetoric was used as justification for the killing, without trial, of the families of these leaders.

Lenin would have said the same thing.

Before we can evaluate your belief you will need to define a political enemy. If Hussein was not a political enemy because he could realsitically never gain control of the USA then the Kulaks were not political enemies because they could never gain control of Moscow. If the Kulaks were political enemies because they spoke out aginast the leader, refused to follow his orders and rejected his ideologies and encouraged other to the same then Hussein is a political enemy of Dubya.

At least one US Presidents has ordered the deliberate execution without trial of the FAMILIES of his enemies. The only question is whether it was a political enemey and whether that excuses the act.

Of course it’s all rather beside the point. Bush can be the biggest mass murdering son of a bitch ever. That doesn’t mean that Lenin wasnt also a mass murdering son of a bitch, which he was.

86

cite?

87

I think you are missing the point. Sam was lying. Lenin never wrote any such letter.

88

I would agree with that.
I also would like to point out that nobody has so far even attempted to address the question of why the measures taken by the Bolsheviks should be considered specifically as crimes. The reason for this is obvious–only a monster can call it a crime when workers defend themselves against the combined attack of 14 capitalist states.

There are such monsters on this board (Sam Stone, am looking your way) but they generally try to mask their rage at the temerity of the Soviet workers in claptrap and lies.

89

Sandino, one of these days I’d like to see you do an “Ask the hard-core Marxist thread.” I’d like to hear your “story,” for lack of a better word. Were you raised Marxist, did you just start reading on your own, did someone/thing “open your eyes,” what?"

Leaving aside the validity of your views, surely you’d agree that you are something of minority in 2003? What brought you to such fervent belief in a philosophy that so many (rightly or wrongly) regard as out-of date?

90

There is no convincing these people. Olentzero is willing to contextualize any atrocity into irrelevance. Sandino will just flat-out call it it a lie.

I’ve been fighting people like this for 25 years. Back when the Soviets were invading Afghanistan, the excuse was that the Soviets just needed some breathing space. They were surrounded by enemies, so it was understandable that they’d want a buffer zone. The memory of WWII caused them to do these things, surely you understand, yada yada yada.

When the Soviets crushed rebellions in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Marxists in the U.S. either fell silent, or bought the Soviet line about no-goodniks and enemies of the revolution.

In the 1940’s and 50’s, Stalin was ‘Uncle Joe’. The U.S. was full of apologists for him. In the 1960’s, the Marxists in the U.S. grudgingly admitted that Stalin might have been a bastard, but Kruschev and Brezhnev were new men, with the best interests of the worker at heart.

In the 1970’s, all we heard about was how ‘progressive’ the Soviet Union was. Did you know that they have 100% literacy, and public health care for everyone? What a great country! When I’d ask why such a great country needed walls and machine gun nests to keep its people from leaving, I’d get either blank stares or vague handwaving about troublemakers. Or flat-out denials - anyone could leave if they wanted - the walls were there to keep out the evil influence of Capitalism.

I can’t remember how often I had to listen to some professor or earnest young Marxist student prattle on about how the Soviet way was the wave of the future, and how glorious their society would really be if the evil U.S. didn’t force them to spend so much money on defense.

Then Gorbachev came along, and suddenly he was the new saviour of Communism, and it turned out that the other leaders were all corrupt men, and the failures of the system were their fault. Then Gorby turned out to be somewhat more of a reformer than they thought, and Communism collapsed under its own weight.

Today, of course, we’re told that the Soviet Union wasn’t *really Communist, and that the faults of that society were because it strayed from Communism, rather than being caused by Communism.

Blah. True believers willl never change their minds. The rationale changes, the arguments change, but the belief remains. No amount of evidence will shake them from their belief.

91

Like I stated on another thread, there are probably no more than 500 Marxists in the U.S. Of course, it is a minority position.

I was won to Marxism by a long process of arguing, reading, and thinking. My experience is similar to others, in that I started off as very hostile to Marxism. I had to go step by step through each point, until I finally made a conscious break with bourgeois ideology.

For whatever it’s worth, one of the things that forced me to re-examine my position on a lot of things was looking at the Russian Revolution. I believed what we are all told to believe, that Lenin was a monster, that the Bolsheviks were totalitarians, blah, blah, blah. When I started doing some research, and particularly reading the actual writings of Lenin and Trotsky, I discovered that I had been fed a monstrous pack of lies.

Then you find out that everything you have ever been told about everything was a lie. Then you are really on the path to Marxism…

92

Because you’ve become so used to believing lies that a few more can’t hurt?

93

Careful, now, bit of a trap in that sort of absolutism. It is utter nonsense to make such a statement. You’ve been told there was a revolution in Russia in 1917. That’s not a lie. You’ve been told there was a leader in Germany, from the mid-thirties on, launched wars against Germany’s neighbors. That wasn’t a lie. I could go on, but the remake of Battlestar Galactica is about to come on. Cheers.

94

Yes, but what was the mechanism? Did you just wander into the library and start reading Russian history? Was there a person that gave you a push, a teacher, parent, freind? I’m really not trying to bait you or anything, and I don’t want you to think I’m some sort of potential convert, either. ($12,000 a year and a still a capitalist; yes, it’s sad) I’m just honestly curious. Like I said, maybe another thread would appropriate. We have a sort discontinued tradition of “Ask the ____” threads where people can field whatever questions come up.

95

Irrelevance my foot, Sam. Showing these scraps of evidence you triumphantly wave around to be far less than you make them out to be, sure. There is no one letter or telegram or statement that will bring down the whole Marxist house of cards and send me skulking off into the shadows of the Pit, futilely swearing merciless revenge like Tolkein’s Gollum. All you’re doing is highlighting your extreme ignorance of the situation on the ground in Russia at the time the documents* you present were written.

Like this one, for example. The telegram is dated 11 Aug 1918 - a mere nine months after the October Revolution. What was going on at that time around Penza? A simple chronology should tell us something. And sure enough, under the entry for 29-30 May 1918, we see

Ah, occupation of a Russian city by a foreign army! An act of war! Seems as though things weren’t all that peaceable. So what happens next? Under 10 Sep we find

and under 12 Sep we find

(Map provided for reference.) Essentially, then, for 3-1/2 months Penza, Simbirsk, and Kazan were on or near the front line of the Russian Civil War.

So - you have a situation in which there are two armies fighting each other for possession of territory, and naturally the inhabitants of the territory are going to side with one army or the other, to various degrees. The Czechoslovak army, being opposed to the Red Army, is therefore going to attract the sort of people whom the revolution threatened to dispossess - the rich peasants, for example. Thus they’re going to render material assistance to the Czech army and do everything they can to halt, neutralize, or destroy the Red Army. What else would you have the Soviet government do under such circumstances?

*I’ve done a bit of Googling on this particular telegram and can find no solid references to it aside from one mention of its display at an exhibition in either the Smithsonian or the Library of Congress - I don’t have the site at hand and I’ve been focusing on other work. All other sites merely reprint the document verbatim with no further reference. Do you still have the link to the photo of the document?

96

I can’t figure out why so many posters are bashing Sandino.

We should be grateful for this manifestation of a bygone era - a veritable mastodon has emerged from the mists of time, a remnant of the prehistoric past. It is to be viewed with awe and treated with delicacy.

As someone whose feelings about Marxism and the glories of Bolshevism probably reflect my subconscious fear of the working class - I must wonder what reception Sandino gets when he goes amongst the workers nowadays, advising them to throw off their chains and smash those bourgeois eggs to make an omelet we can all be proud of.

97

Olentzero–
For me, governments are a necessary evil, necessary for the purpose of minimizing human rights violations. All governments violate human rights to some degree. But some violate them much more than others.

I would say that any government that engages in the human rights violations mentioned in the Lenin letter as a matter of deliberate policy (rather than rogue agents who are punished by the same State) has no claim to legitimacy over the people whose human rights it is abusing so grossly.

Any population subjected to such human rights violations has a right to justly rebel against their oppressors. Any outside power has the right to topple such a state if in so doing it can improve the human rights situation of the population. In the most extreme cases, this right of intervention comes close to being an obligation to intervene.

The massively rights-violating State is an aggressor against its own people, just as surely as if it were a foreign power invading the area. The moral onus for all casualties in fighting between the justly rebelling people and the State rests on the State.

All this applies equally to fascist, communist, theocratic, monarchial, and democratic states.

Martin Latsis, one of the first leaders of the Cheka (forerunner of the KGB) Nov 1, 1918
“We don’t make war against any people in particular. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. In your investigations don’t look for documents and pieces of evidence about what the defendant has done, whether in deed or in speaking or acting against the Soviet authority. The first question you should ask him is what class he comes from, what are his roots, his education, his training, and his occuptation.”

If I recall correctly, Hitler was very careful not to leave a paper trail that would prove he had directly ordered the Final Solution. But we all justifiably hold him responsible for the Nazi atrocities. The same standard of proof should be applied to Lenin.

98

Of course, this is cynical nonsense. The leaders of all the advanced capitalist states have committed far worse atrocities than what Lenin is accused of. Even granting that this letter is not a forgery, you cannot possibly be serious. The U.S., for example, has committed terrorism on an unprecedented scale, from the funding, training and equipping of the contra terrorists in Nicaragua, to the support of genocidal right wing dictatorships in Guatemala and El Salvador, to the funding, supplying and support of the genocidal Indonesian dictatorship, and so on and so forth. The U.S. has propped up right wing dictatorships around the world in order to ensure that the profits of Wall Street keep flowing.

Seriously, the comparison of the U.S. butchers to the Bolsheviks is really quite insane.
Then there is the little question of the legitimacy of this purported letter, which naturally you accept without question. Don’t you find it a bit strange, though, that nobody can find a damaging letter among Lenin’s actual archives? You know, Lenin’s works run to 45 volumes. Yet, none of the anti-communists have been able to find a letter like the one above in his actual collected works? They miraculously “find” this letter somewhere in the soviet archives? Added to the fact that the phraseology is totally unlike Lenin. Here are Lenin’s works for 1918. I encourage people to browse through these, which include some actual letters. See if the wording and phraseology sounds anything like what Lenin is purported to have said above.

Then there is the fact that the book was written by Richard Pipes, a notorious anti-communist, a professional anti-communist for many decades. Pipes is basically at the same level as a Conquest or a Rummell.

For something like this, a letter found several decades after it was supposed to have been written, which is in a style totally unlike everything else the author wrote, and which also serves a very useful ideological purpose, extreme skepticism is in order. I mean, even if you are an anti-communist, but you have some integrity, this should be treated with skepticism. It’s appearance in a book by Richard Pipes is not sufficient.
And really, it truly is monstrous to compare the Bolsheviks to the U.S.

99

What is it about the quote from Latsis (I’ll assume for the sake of argument it is legitimate) that bothers you so? The Bolsheviks were trying to exterminate the bourgeoisie as a class. That was the whole point!

I think what you were intending to imply, though, was that this meant killing every member of the bourgeoisie. Of course, that was not at all what was intended. Those members of the bourgeoisie who submitted to the rule of the workers would be granted the same rights as everyone else. Those who resisted were expropriated by force, but they were not deprived of their civil liberties.

While it is disgusting for you to compare the Bolsheviks to the U.S., it is really grotesque to compare them to the Nazis. This shows your utter lack of integrity. It also shows that you hate and fear working people more than the fascists.

100

Just for shits and giggles, I’ll respond a little to the Great Sandino(Didn’t I see him in Vegas as the opening act for Siegfried and Roy?) He’s certainly a master of obfuscation and sleight of hand.

I don’t think the US has ever claimed to be the legitimate government of any of those countries named. C’mon, a good Marxist should be better at rhetoric and dialectics than that. Your antithesis was orthogonal and irrelevant to my thesis.

More seriously, Sandino, you say

I’ll definately sign onto skepticism being a ** Good Thing.** You point out that the claims of anti-communist writers that say bad things about Communists should be taken with a grain of salt. Surely, then, the claims of Communist writers who say bad things about non-Communists should be also taken with a grain of salt?

No, of course not.