Generally I try to eschew controversial topics on this site. However, I hope you won't take exception if I make an exception (just this once). Unless you've been living under a rock for the last year or more, you'll have noticed that incendiary rhetoric and contempt for facts have become common features of political discourse. In this guest post Tanel Vahisalu of Smart Histories argues that a century ago Vladimir Lenin was using very similar methods to achieve his goals...
MOSCOW KREMLIN, February 1919 – Vladimir Lenin receives a telegram from the Commissar of Transport claiming many provincial roads are inaccessible due to snow. Lenin responds abruptly: “Immediately arrest someone from the local executive committee! Also take a handful of random hostages from among local peasants and have them shot unless the matter is resolved quickly!”
This is but one striking example of the violence, inhumanity, and irrationality of the Communist leader in the face of “obstacles” to his revolution. Obedience through fear were staples in his leadership arsenal.
Historians and political scientists have long told us that Stalin was the ruthless tyrant, while Lenin was held up as an idealized father figure with far less blood on his hands.
This is far from the truth.
As a teacher, Lenin urged for, and incited, class violence through terror. His philosophies on the ruling class, bourgeoisie, and his political rivals were nothing short of hate speech. By today’s standards, the use of similar language would send any alt-right member to jail.
“The kulaks are the rabid foes of the Soviet government… These leeches have sucked the blood of the working people and grown richer as the workers in the cities and factories starved… Ruthless war on the kulaks! Death to them!”, wrote Vladimir Lenin in 1918.
Lenin’s calls to violence could be heard even in his early political writings, mobilizing the masses to wage war against the Tsar. There was no subtext or sentiment in his orders to rob bankers and lynch class enemies, according to their social statures alone. Making use of the well-worn slogan of Karl Marx, “Expropriate the expropriators!” Lenin used it as a catalyst to revolutionary violence.
Specifically, in the early days of the 20th century, Bolsheviks routinely robbed banks to obtain cash for the party. The money was then smuggled abroad, exchanged for European currencies, and used to fund their political activities, including detonators to support terrorist activities.
The most notorious bank robbery took place in Tiflis (modern-day Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia) in 1907. Under the command of Joseph Stalin and the future Foreign Minister, Maxim Litvinov, money worth over 4 million United States dollars was stolen from a bank’s cash shipment. Forty innocent people were killed during the robbery and over fifty were injured.
In 1906, in his “Lessons of the Moscow Uprising” Lenin concludes: “We would be deceiving both ourselves and the people if we concealed from the masses the necessity of a desperate, bloody war of extermination, as the immediate task of the coming revolutionary action.”
Once Lenin assumed power on 7 November 1917, the Bolsheviks now had to defend their cause in what turned out to be the bloodiest civil war ever to take place on Russian soil.
When an uprising occurred against the forced seizure of grain in 1918, Lenin sent instructions to local authorities of Penza Gubernia region: “Hang (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers. Publish their names. Seize all their grain from them, and designate hostages…!”
Furthermore, Lenin’s ruthless methods to enforce power were put to use by the secret police, known as Cheka. On 14 June 1918, Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of Cheka, summarized their objectives and practices in an interview with “Novaya Zhizn” (i.e. New Life): “We stand for organized terror – this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution.” Nikolai Krylenko, the Soviet Commissar for Justice added: “We must execute not only the guilty. Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more.”
That was the face of the new regime, born of Vladimir Lenin.
In the centennial year of the Russian Revolution, hate speech and fake news are making headlines yet again. Lenin’s role as one of the first masters of post-truth politics cannot be overlooked. As a brilliant propagandist, his masterful skill of combining hate speech with political adeptness gave him a critical advantage against the more democratic, less impudent political forces that still had a chance to remain in power in 1917. The Soviet system that Lenin’s successors inherited still bears an uncanny resemblance to its father-figure.
On 29th May Smart Histories published a 300-page book on the history of Russia. It is available in from Amazon in the US and in the UK in .pdf, eBook and paperback format. For more about the project, follow this link or check out the YouTube video below.
