Just What Was Fundamentally Wrong with Bolshevism?
November 29, 2012
By Steven Plaut
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Hunger and starvation have so often accompanied political revolution that it would be safe to suggest that they are intrinsic parts of it. Communist revolutions have invariably produced famines and terror. The immediate trigger for revolutionary terror in early Soviet Russia was the same as in the French Revolution: the inability of the regime to obtain food for urban residents.
The Bolsheviks had never had very much interest in the peasants in the first place. As great believers in Marxist theology, they advocated the imposition by the proletariat of urban workers of its will upon the country, including upon the agricultural laborers who constituted the bulk of the population. Even if the Bolshevik party could seriously be thought to represent the urban proletariat, they would still have constituted a movement representing only a very small portion of Russian society. Thus bolshevisms most basic operating principles were anti-democratic.
The Bolsheviks represented a movement seeking to impose the interests of this minority class over the interests of the bulk of Russian society (and later over non-Russian populations in the Soviet empire).
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The most violent terrorists and oppressors of others have always been the utopians. The French Revolution turned violent and the guillotine was introduced to attempt to terrorize actual humans into behaving according to the expectations of the utopianists. The leaders of the Soviet Revolution were no slower or more squeamish in following the same route.
Just What Was Fundamentally Wrong with Bolshevism?
November 29, 2012
By Steven Plaut
---
Hunger and starvation have so often accompanied political revolution that it would be safe to suggest that they are intrinsic parts of it. Communist revolutions have invariably produced famines and terror. The immediate trigger for revolutionary terror in early Soviet Russia was the same as in the French Revolution: the inability of the regime to obtain food for urban residents.
The Bolsheviks had never had very much interest in the peasants in the first place. As great believers in Marxist theology, they advocated the imposition by the proletariat of urban workers of its will upon the country, including upon the agricultural laborers who constituted the bulk of the population. Even if the Bolshevik party could seriously be thought to represent the urban proletariat, they would still have constituted a movement representing only a very small portion of Russian society. Thus bolshevisms most basic operating principles were anti-democratic.
The Bolsheviks represented a movement seeking to impose the interests of this minority class over the interests of the bulk of Russian society (and later over non-Russian populations in the Soviet empire).
---
The most violent terrorists and oppressors of others have always been the utopians. The French Revolution turned violent and the guillotine was introduced to attempt to terrorize actual humans into behaving according to the expectations of the utopianists. The leaders of the Soviet Revolution were no slower or more squeamish in following the same route.
Just What Was Fundamentally Wrong with Bolshevism?
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