The Bolshevik Revolution was one of the worst events in human history.
That scarcely seems debatable.
Some deluded folks try to pretend Joseph Stalin hijacked what had originally been a noble cause. This is what my professor of Russian history, Vladimir Brokvin, called the “Good Lenin, Bad Stalin myth.”
But Lenin had already laid the foundations for totalitarianism. A one-party state with suppression of dissent. A legal system in which training in the law was no longer necessary to qualify someone as a judge; a well-developed “revolutionary consciousness” — i.e., a willingness to rule in whatever way would benefit the Revolution — was sufficient.
Add to this: summary executions, concentration camps (with nearly 50,000 inmates by the time of Lenin’s death in the early 1920s), a concerted state campaign against religion, terror against the countryside — and on and on.
Not to mention a secret police sixteen times as large as anything the Tsar had ever built.
Two days ago, someone in my Supporting Listeners Facebook group brought this to my attention, from a group called The People for Bernie Sanders:
One hundred years ago today, Russian workers commenced ‘Occupy St. Petersburg’ and it spread like wildfire.
The Soviet Union wasn’t a worker’s paradise. But it’s [sic] founding revolution lit a spark of hope that swept the world. May that spark, and that hope, live on in our hearts.
Let me correct that.
It lit a “spark of hope” for destructive, envious, ignorant, evil SOBs.
I told the real history of the Russian Revolution in an episode of The Tom Woods Show drawn from the material I teach students in the Ron Paul homeschool curriculum.
Enjoy:
https://tomwoods.com/ep-399-lenin-and-the-russian-revolution-institutionalized-insanity/