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Title: Russia Revolution Books – Review Author: Peter Werbe Date: 2018, Spring Language: en Topics: Russian Revolution, repression, Fifth Estate #400, Fifth Estate, review Source: Fifth Estate #400, Spring, 2018, retrieved Decembeer 31, 2020 from https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/400-spring-2018/russia-revolution-books-review/
a review of
Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution eds.
Friends of Aron Baron; Luigi Fabbri, Rudolf Rocker, Nestor Makhno, Iain
McKay, Alexander Berkman, Maurice Brinton, Ida Mett, Otto Wile, Emma
Goldman, et al. AK Press akpress.org, 2017
The Kronstadt Uprising by Ida Mett. Theory and Practice, 2017
theoryandpractice.org.uk
Anarchist Encounters: Russia in Revolution by Emma Goldman, Gaston
Leval, Angel Pestana and Jack Wilkens. The Merlin Press
merlinpress.co.uk, 2017
These books, and many others, make it clear that when communists,
socialists, and academics commemorated the centenary of the 1917 Russian
Revolution, it was actually a celebration of the seizure of the state by
Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party.
Right from the beginning, the communists began a process of eliminating
their opponents, establishing state capitalism, and erecting the police
state perfected under Stalin.
What is detailed in these volumes, many written during that era in which
the newly created Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, were rounding up
anarchists by the hundreds and executing them in prison basements, means
that Bolshevik supporters needed to ignore, then and now, a lot of
information that was always available.
Anarchist sources particularly, but also liberal, and Trotskyist (once
their leader lost his bureaucratic power struggle with Stalin) exposed
the ruthless, authoritarian Soviet government that usurped worker and
peasant control.
It is curious that leftists who know the history of the Revolution so
well, find nothing peculiar about the fact that the panorama of millions
of workers, peasants, and soldiers overthrowing their masters and
practicing direct democracy over their lives, are quite quickly marched
deliberately off the stage of history to be replaced by internecine
political machinations among powerful, elite politicians, particularly,
Stalin and Trotsky.
Communism’s two Lasting achievements:
1) organizing and developing large scale state capitalist economies and
their technological/industrial infrastructure in areas where private
entrepreneurial efforts were inadequate; then turning them over to
private sector ownership such as in Russia, China, and Vietnam;
2) creating the apparatus for dismantling and destroying authentic
revolutionary thrusts to the point where the original scenario for
revolution currently seems impossible. Bloodstained is particularly good
on this point detailing the murderous treachery of Leninist parties.
The Mett title recounts the last battle against the communist
dictatorship and should erase any affection for Trotsky who was known as
the Butcher of Kronstadt for his command of the repression of the last
bastion of the revolution in 1921.
Millions of Russians, animated with the spirit of a new world, were
suppressed by the Bolshevik bureaucrats into a single entity—the
masses—a hideous term indicating a return of people to their traditional
status as objects of history whose fate is determined by Great Men.
This is well illustrated in a photo showing Russian peasants holding
Orthodox icon boards from which paintings of saints have been stripped
and replaced by ones of Bolshevik leaders.
Not only is the psychological submission of the ruled sadly illustrated,
but think, in the midst of a civil war following the Revolution, the
Bolsheviks had printing presses cranking out Large photos of party
members for adulation.
People sometimes ask why we are so hostile to communists and socialists.
These books give the answer.