October 2017 was the centennial anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and its environs. Yet, with all the chaos in the United States, and of course, corporate media's continuing onslaught against memory and solidarity of people, nary a word has been said in the fast-moving, outrage-driven cable news. It affected even me as I frankly did not even think about it. I recall being more touched by the 145th birthday of Ralph Vaughan Williams that month. Shame on me.
This may be the best article I have read so far on the centennial memorialization of the Bolshevik Revolution. It appears informed by Isaac Deutscher's works on Trotsky and Stalin, and perhaps some Victor Serge. It is not because I agree with every insight or every part of the narrative, however. It does, though, capture the overriding arc that led to the Bolshevik Revolution, which was the chaos arising from the First World War, known then as the Great War (with the word "Great" then being seen as much less of being a complete positive). It shows that the Bolsheviks, though victorious in what the article's author correctly recognizes as a counter coup, were winging it, and hoping for a more broad set of revolutions throughout Europe.
I think the author, Sunkara, could have given more emphasis to the capitalist encirclement (as the Revolutionaries of the time often called it) that occurred starting in 1918 and continuing into 1921. The attack against the nascent Soviet Russia by U.S., Britain, France, and other nations was somewhat similar to the manner and the attacks by Britain, Russia, and other nations in the early 1790s against the French Revolutionaries.
For me, the most fascinating and penetrating book I have ever read on the topic of the Bolshevik Revolution and its immediate aftermath remains Victor Serge's "Year One of the Russian Revolution." It shows something I think Sunkara, the author of the article in Jacobin, should have noted. The Cheka, the secret police organization the nascent Soviet government set up, was also a response to the naivety of Lenin and his band of Revolutionaries in that first six months' period. The White government (Tsar and other forces) were brutal in their earliest tactics, killing every soldier from the Bolshevik side. Twice, in those first months following the events of October 1917, Bolshevik forces captured two leading White government side generals--and let them go unharmed on the generals' false promises of laying down their arms and not continuing to fight the "Revolution." Lenin, meanwhile, was dithering for months over the fate of the Tsarist leaders, the Romanovs, including their family, and, as the brutality of the Civil War grew, finally gave the order which the peasants holding them long wanted--retribution in the form of murder of the Tsar, Tsarina and their children.
As I have long told our own children, it is difficult for me, as I grow older, and see what war and oppression do to so many untold millions, to feel too much sadness about the murder of the Romanovs when one considers how easily and sometimes joyously the Tsar and Tsarina (Nicholas and Alexandria) pushed for pogroms that killed plenty of women and children, and terrorized millions. We should feel so badly for little Anastasia, when she was, above all, a mere victim of peasant retribution in a time of madness? It remains stunning to me how most of my generation and my parents' generation are shaped by the propaganda of the novel and film "Doctor Zhivago" (well, mostly the film, rarely the book, as this is, after all America!) and the focus on Anastasia and the Tsar's family as if we are talking about Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Charles, and Princess Diana. The Tsarist system was a system based upon brutality, enforcement of ignorant, obscurant hatred and oppression, and continued terrorism and murder against millions of people over centuries. Oh, and the best novel of the Russian Revolution? Try "Conquered City" for starters, again it's Victor Serge.
That the Soviet Union became itself a murderous, oppressive regime that continued in style (but with far more effective technologies at its disposal) the Tsarist regime is the cruelest irony of history. For Stalin most resembled Ivan the Terrible and other horrible Tsars in the manner of his governance, the intrigue he engendered, and the poor leadership decisions that could only be covered up with executions of his own subordinates.
As Chomsky has pointed out, there are a variety of left traditions, and to view the Russian experience, born in war and retribution, as "The Left" is to betray any real hope for a better society and better world. The Russian experience, however, should be much more studied and analyzed in American culture, and we should do well to learn its lessons, if they can be learned.
