And you keeping repeating the tired lie that the state only did a small number of these things, while citizens or other bodies did the real nasty work. The fact is, if the state encourages it, shows some brutal examples, and waves the threat of force around, it’s amazing how many ‘private’ people will do your bidding.
Well, Sam, as my previous posts indicate, I’m more of a Menshevik than a Boshevik, but I agree with Olentzero that you’re seriously overestimating the power that Lenin had at the time. The newborn Soviet Union was stuck in the middle of civil war and anarchy, suffering from food shortages and famine, with armed factions going around killing each other and innocent people who got in the way, and foreign armies invading. For a lot of that time, in large sections of the country, there was no government at all.
Did you actually read that last letter? In it, Lenin passes an order to have the leaders of the clergy rounded up and executed, because Lenin wants to steal their valuables.
I can’t believe you guys are trying to defend this tyrant.
I’m having trouble believing you actually read the letter you quoted yourself. If you did, it’s apparent you know very little about the history of the period. This is what I mean by taking something out of context - even if you quote the whole letter, you need to examine the situation in which it was written, not just present it and say “There, this alone is proof of my argument.”
Lenin is not talking about the clergy in its entirety in this letter - he is talking about the “Black Hundreds” clergy. The Black Hundreds were some of the most viciously anti-Semitic reactionaries around, and it is fairly clear from the letter that they were still carrying out an active program of violent resistance to Soviet power.
Secondly, you assert that the Soviets sought to expropriate church property but you avoid any attempt at explaining why.
A couple of quotes from the letter will suffice:
There is a severe famine going on here. Russia needs money to feed its people and help them build themselves up again. The reactionary part of the clergy isn’t helping matters much by fomenting revolt; take their valuables and the revolt is left without a financial base of support and the Soviets get the money they need to get out of the mess they’re in.
I too think you’re overestimating the power the Bolsheviks had over people. If they weren’t strong enough to prevent 14 foreign armies and thousands of tsarist counter-revolutionaries running rampant around Russia for three years, what makes you think they were strong enough to terrorize people into doing their bidding at the same time? I note I neglected to add a quote from Lenin regarding the nationalization of factories from April 1918:
At the beginning of the civil war the Bolsheviks still thought they would be able to work through some sort of arrangement with the capitalists around running the factories. Events proved to them how impossible this was, but even then they did not charge full on into nationalization. Workers nationalized their factories as a response to the situation they found themselves in and on their own initiative, without any sort of ‘prodding’ or ‘convincing’ from the state.
Lenin was at the head of the first and so far only successful working-class revolution in history. I see such an event as a positive and progressive one, and I will defend it. Not uncritically, of course - but I am not ashamed of defending either Lenin or what the Bolsheviks did to safeguard the revolution.
BUT, you condemn the previous regime for doing the same thing.
I’m not saying that the Church was perfect and innocent.
http://search.britannica.com/magazine/article?content_id=12593&query=romania%20orthodox%20church%20of
From Britannica.com
http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/museum/his1g.htm
I just pulled these off the net-I’ll study them better in detail. However, I do find it ironic that the Tsarist and the Whites were horrible bloody murderers, but the Bolsheviks, who did the same things, were saviors of the state.
I don’t like extremes or violent regimes. I’m as liberal as you can get, but the Soviet Union was anything but. Yes, I know, I’m a leftist who hates the Bolsheviks. Is that an oxymoron?
I never said I was impartial. I’m definitely on the side of the Bolsheviks here.
The Bolsheviks didn’t kill off 100,000 people in the course of a single month, as happened in Finland in 1918. I don’t see the Bolsheviks as the saviors of the Russian state, either; they were counting on the spread of revolution across Europe - and eventually America - to overthrow their respective states. They were trying to create something radically different.
Why is it so hard to grasp that the measures they took in the first few years after the Revolution were defensive? Every single last capitalist country that had any power sent armies against them and supported the counter-revolutionary forces in Russia. The Bolsheviks did not do what they did out of any sort of programmatic approach to the revolution. They had to fight tooth and nail to hold on to what they did have, and even then there was still debates raging about whether or not the workers actually needed ways to defend themselves against the state they had helped create. The Old Bolsheviks (who were all wiped out in Stalin’s purges) more or less held the safety of the working class and their gains over anything else.
No, there were plenty of them in Russia at the time too. They either eventually sided with the capitalists or started committing individual acts of terrorism against the Bolsheviks. How constructive!
Let me see if I have your position correctly here, Olentzero:
The cause was just, and therefore any measures that aided the cause are acceptable by you. Murdering 8000 priests? Hey, you have to consider the context. Sending out regular orders to round up people in the countryside who resist your bidding and have them hanged? You have to consider the context.
You sound exactly like Lenin. I imagine that had you lived in those ‘glorious’ times, you might well have been one of the goons putting pistols to the back of children’s heads and pulling the trigger. Anything to further the cause, eh?
Let me repeat, in the most strenuous way I can: YOU make me sick.
And as for the need to take the relics from the church because there is a famine and the people are starving… PLEASE. There was a famine because Lenin ORDERED it. It was an intentional war on the peasantry, who were considered beneath contempt and a threat to the revolution. Gangs of thugs went through the countryside confiscating all the raw materials from these people. Those who resisted? Read Lenin’s first letter I posted. THAT is what happened to them. Round up 100 at random and HANG them, to set an example for the rest. They must all live in terror of us.
The rest of the country was not in great shape economically either, but that’s simply because the economy was being run by decree - Lenin would talk about how things *should be, (without knowing the full circumstances, of course) and then would send out an order to re-distribute labor and raw materials based on his back-of-the-napkin plans for an ‘ideal’ society. Then it would backfire, and people would die.
But hey, now that we’ve screwed up the economy so bad that people are starving, we’ll need to find some more money. The church is rich - time to bring them into the revolution, one bullet at a time.
[Moderator Hat: ON]
Sam said:
Let me note, in the most strenuous way I can: Take comments like this to the Pit. This area is for debates, not telling other people they cause you to be ill.
David B, SDMB Great Debates Moderator
[Moderator Hat: OFF]
Well, the same could be said for the other side.
I don’t really know how the Revolution could have been solved-and I’m not exonerating the White attrocities. BUT, I do have a problem with the brutality of the Bolsheviks. What else COULD you do?
I can defend socialists like Kerensky and others who were humane, and tried to rise above it, even if they failed. I cannot say the same of Lenin. I cannot for one minute defend him. Well, then again, he DID like cats, so he had THAT going for him at least. 
And in all fairness, the guy had a pretty rough childhood after his father died, and his brother was executed for trying to murder Nicky’s father.
(And Sam, let’s not let this get personal. I disagree with Olentzero, but I do like him as a poster.)
Sorry, it’s just tough to be civil when people are defending the murders of thousands of innocent people. I did open a thread in the pit, so I’ll tone it down here.
But while we’re making excuses for Lenin, let’s not forget about Hitler, okay? The country was an economic mess, and besides, the guy had a pretty tough childhood and was already injured in a war. And besides, he liked dogs. So let’s all cut him a little bit of slack, okay? Besides, you have to consider the holocaust in context. Hitler was engaged in the noble goal of building a thousand-year Reich, which is way more ambitious than Lenin’s paltry economic plans. And you’ve gotta break a few eggs to make an omellette, after all.
<Sarcasm mode off>
I have to go take a shower now. Just writing that sentence in sarcasm mode made me feel dirty.
Hmmm…Hitler was a different context. I’m not defending Lenin in anyway. I’m still saying Kerensky was the better choice, that’s all.
Please don’t hurry back. It’s fairly obvious by now you really have nothing to add to this debate.
The whole Kornilov affair gives the lie to Kerensky’s “humaneness”. If he hadn’t backed out and dismissed Kornilov at the last minute there would have been bloodshed in Moscow and Petrograd on the same level as that of the Finnish White Terror I’ve mentioned earlier. Kerensky did not rise above it all; he chose sides and vacillated.
At the same time, however, he did not have people lined up and shot just to prove an example.
Only because Kerensky was in power for just under six months and, again, because he backed out of supporting the Kornilov coup to save his own hide. If Kerensky had held on to power for years he would undoubtedly have had people shot, more likely than not revolutionaries of one stripe or another.
And no, Sam, I do not excuse the actions of the Bolsheviks through the claim that their ultimate goal was the achievement of an egalitarian and stateless society. Their actions are explained by the fact that the Revolution from day one was beset on all sides by counter-revolution, from without and within, which was willing to provoke civil war in order to assure its victory - and an economy (which in 1913 had a per capita income level less than England’s in 1688) previously devastated by four years of European warfare. The claim that Bolshevik policies were the direct cause of Russia’s economic collapse displays a profound ignorance of the history of the whole period. Don’t forget the Tsar was forced to abdicate as a result of the upheaval that had its origins in riots over the price of bread.
Olentzero, I find your defense of brutal dictators tiresome. “Lenin had no choice! After all, people were opposing his rule!” Yep. If someone opposes the dictator, then they deserve to get shot, according to you. You have explicitly endorsed murder as a political tool.
Let me ask you this. You have stated that Stalin was bad but Lenin was good. But, let us look at the context surrounding Stalin’s dictatorship. I’m glad that even you can’t stomach Stalinism. Fine. But, where did Stalin come from? How was he able to murder all those people? How was he able to use the apparatus of the state to crush his opponents?
The answer is that Lenin had already created the apparatus of dictatorship. OK, Lenin didn’t kill as many people as Stalin. Hell, I’ll even give you the fact that Lenin only killed people when the were inconvenient to him, while Stalin had whole populations exterminated on whims. But how did Stalin acheive this? Because Lenin instituted the dictatorship.
Lenin constantly went on and on about how dictatorship was the only possible form of government. After all, “democracy” was really only the dictatorship of the bourgeios! “Freedom of Speech” only gave the bourgeios the freedom to lie to the people!
All power had to be given to the proletariat. And of course, the Soviet State as representative of the proletariat would wield that power. And since Lenin was the leader of the Soviet State then true freedom lay in stamping out freedom of speech, in crushing democracy, and in the absolute dictatorship of one man. OK, suppose we stipulate that Lenin only used his dictatorial powers for good. Of course he really actually used them for evil, but let’s not quibble.
Don’t you think that perhaps instituting absolute dictatorship might have a teensy tiny leeeeettle something to do with Stalin’s dictatorship? Don’t you think that instituting absolute dictatorship, given that people like Stalin were waiting in the wings and that Lenin was mortal, was a little bit, oh, unwise?
Don’t you think that perhaps the sainted Lenin should have done a little bit more to protect future generations from Stalin?
This is a crass oversimplification and you damn well know it. WHO was opposing his rule? The Russian population as a whole? No. If that were the case the Bolsheviks would never have even been allowed into the soviets, let alone fight for majority support for their program within them. The opposition to Bolshevism was based almost exclusively in the White forces and the foreign armies sent in to crush the revolution. It would be suicide not to fight back against that.
So therefore I support the shooting of anyone opposed to the Tsar? Nowhere even close to true. Nor would I have supported the Narodniks in their attempts to assassinate any of the Tsars they plotted against. Your generalization is ill-founded indeed.
Because the Party had lost its class basis after the intervention and the civil war. 1917 saw a revolutionary party put into power on the initiative of, and with the support of, an organized and militant working class. 1928 found a party still in power but the class that had put it there decimated. Stalin, never having been one for a proper grasp of socialist perspectives, first came up with the idea of ‘socialism in one country’ and then proceeded to develop a program to defend it from the rest of the world. In short, he used the ideas and arguments of War Communism, which Lenin and Trotsky had argued were only necessary because of an actual war, in a time and place where they made absolutely no sense.
There is a difference between “dictatorship of the proletariat” and “dictatorship over the proletariat”. Both are forms of class domination, of course, but the former means to give real power over society to the proletariat so that they can reconstruct it to meet their needs. That does involve a struggle against the old ruling classes, since naturally they’re loath to give up what they held on to. Dictatorship over the proletariat comes about if the proletariat has no power in the first place, which was the case after the Civil War - the Russian working class had essentially ceased to exist and had to be re-created through Party initiative. A very bad basis overall.
Well, gee, there’s his Testament which said the Central Committee ought to seriously consider removing Stalin from the post of General Secretary, but by then he was too sick to do much of anything else except dictate it to his secretary. (Always the inveterate dictator, that Lenin, even on his deathbed.) It was decided not to publish the Testament - Zinoviev, another one with a poor grasp of perspective, was one of the more vocal supporters of keeping it a secret. Obviously a mistake. But what else could Lenin have done at that point? If he had been the infallible monolithic dictator you claim he is, the Central Committee would have published the Testament and Stalin would have been out on his ear. But surprise! The Committee was made up of men and women who made their own decisions and - horror of horrors! - they didn’t always agree with what Lenin said or did.
Olentzero, you really have to stop getting your historical information from Leninist sources. Your distortions of what took place are amazing to behold. You sound like an old red back in the Soviet days, back when history was whatever the government wanted it to be.
Sam, you’ve already had this explained to you once. You know where the Pit is; go insult me in there.