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The 1886 Presser v. Illinois Supreme Court case established that “state legislatures may enact statutes to control and regulate all organizations, drilling, and parading of military bodies and associations except those which are authorized by the militia laws of the United States.”
It was Most who took the politics of violence into new directions. He advocated what he called “the propaganda of the deed,” the idea that murder could be a useful technique to ensure given ends.
Yet Wilson was hardly the only politician given to brazen chicanery. General Erich Ludendorff of Germany knew that there were several ways to win a war. The most obvious of course was on the battlefield. But getting the enemy to withdraw—or even lose his nerve—was also an effective mechanism. The crafty Ludendorff accordingly sought “to improve peace possibilities through the internal weakening of Russia,”[li] one of Germany’s foes at the time.
By 1917 Lenin was thus both a has-been and a joke—but still a possible troublemaker. As historian Edward Crankshaw put it, “the German government…saw in this obscure fanatic one more bacillus to let loose in tottering and exhausted Russia to spread infection”.[liii]
Financed by Kaiser Wilhelm, Lenin was put on a sealed train with a group of comrades from his exile in Zurich, Switzerland—one can’t let the pathogen spread throughout Europe, mind you—and taken on a circuitous route back to Russia.
Bolsheviks had refused to take part in the provisional government from the beginning, and their control of the Petrograd Soviet was a sticking point for the government’s ability to do much of anything. On October 24th things came to a head. Lenin and Trotsky’s forces seized control of Petrograd, proclaiming themselves as the new government.
Chesterton had argued that if one came upon a fence crossing the road, it must have been put there for some reason at some point. It is perfectly possible that the reason no longer existed. But until one knew what that reason had been, one should err on the side of maintaining structures which had once served some purpose. They might still be performing some function not entirely apparent.
The Bolsheviks’ other major priority, however, was to get Russia out of the Great War. Communism was meant to be a worldwide class revolution, not simply a Russian experiment, and warring with Germany was certainly antithetical to that goal—and to the goal of Lenin gaining greater power.
Apart from the territory they had already lost they were forced to give up the Baltic states, Finland and nearly all Ukraine to the Central Powers and the ports of Kars, Andalan and Batum to the Turks—1.8 million square kilometres, sixty-two million people, around 32 per cent of its best agricultural land, 54 per cent of its industry and 89 per cent of its coalmines.[lxvii]
Socialists in America were strongly opposed to entering the Great War. For Goldman and Berkman, the entire situation was absolute madness, government at its lowest and most evil. The various heads of state at war included the King of Italy, the Czar of Russia, the German Kaiser, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and Franz Joseph, who was both an emperor and a king. This is who the working classes should give their lives for? Men without a pot to piss in should die so that sultans and kings maintained their hold on power?
It would have been no surprise to anarchists that in the Supreme Court there was a bipartisan, unanimous consensus in favor of the powers of the government and against the rights of the individual citizen.
The Haymarket martyrs had been regarded by socialists of all stripes as victims of an evil oppressive regime, innocents who had been killed simply for having unpopular anarchist ideas. Now the Tcheka was doing the same thing on a scale one hundred times over, and supposedly doing so in the name of a working-class revolution.
The czar too had a secret police force called the Okhrana, and it had served as a badge of honor among the first Bolsheviks to have been imprisoned by them or even targeted by them. But the Okhrana’s scope and methods didn’t come close to what Lenin had in mind.
“The Bolsheviki have turned the intelligentsia into a class of hunted animals,” one of his comrades told him. “We are looked upon as even worse than the bourgeoisie. As a matter of fact, we are much worse off than the latter, for they usually have ‘connections’ in influential places, and most of them still possess some of the wealth they had hidden. They can speculate; yes, even grow rich, while we of the professional class have nothing. We are doomed to slow starvation.”[lxxxviii]
I saw the Bolsheviki reflect the Revolution as a monstrous grotesque; I saw tragic revolutionary necessity institutionalized into irresponsible terror, the blood of thousands shed without reason or measure. I saw the class struggle, long terminated, become a war of vengeance and extermination. I saw the ideals of yesterday betrayed, the meaning of the Revolution perverted, its essence caricatured into reaction.
I saw the workers subdued, the whole country silenced by the Party dictatorship and its organised brutality. I saw entire villages laid waste by Bolshevik artillery. I saw the prisons filled—not with counter-revolutionists, but with workers and peasants, with proletarian intellectuals, with starving women and children.[lxxxix]
With the defeat of the Kronstadt rebellion, the Bolshevik victory was now complete and total. “The time has come,” Lenin decreed, “to put an end to opposition, to put the lid on it; we have had enough opposition.”[xcix] A mere nine days after Kronstadt fell, Lenin publicly declared war on those former allies who had been useful in putting over Bolshevism to the Russian people: “An open proof of one’s Menshevism should be sufficient ground for our revolutionary courts to confer the highest punishment, that is, shooting.”
Man’s instinctive sense of equity was branded as weak sentimentality; human dignity and liberty became a bourgeois superstition; the sanctity of life, which is the very essence of social reconstruction, was condemned as unrevolutionary, almost counter-revolutionary.
I should have been content if the Russian workers and peasants as a whole had derived essential social betterment as a result of the Bolshevik régime.[cvi] […] Two years of earnest study, investigation, and research convinced me that the great benefits brought to the Russian people by Bolshevism exist only on paper, painted in glowing colours to the masses of Europe and America by efficient Bolshevik propaganda.
“The fact is that the Communists are the forerunners of fascism,” she wrote in 1933. “Neither Mussolini nor Hitler have made a single original step. All they had to do is follow and copy faithfully the steps taken by Lenin and Stalin.”
To communist ears all this sounded suspiciously like a return to capitalism, and Lenin admitted as much by referring to this strategic retreat as “State capitalism.” To the true believers this was both utter madness and a complete betrayal.
Without the capitalists growing rich on the backs of the workers, the argument went, there would be plenty of food for everyone. Yet the capitalists were crushed in Russia, and there remained plenty of hunger for everyone.
Yet it was precisely Lenin’s fanatical ideology that permitted him to engage in public acts of great humility. It was the Revolution and the people that mattered far more than him. While at first insisting that “one must punish Hoover, one must publicly slap his face so the whole world sees” (how dare he try to keep millions from starving!), by the summer of 1921 Lenin was persuaded to accept help from abroad.
Eventually they had to pull out of their relief efforts after discovering the Bolsheviks were simply taking the grain and selling it for export. The rebellions in towns rife with starvation throughout the country were put down with complete mercilessness, with more than one village being razed and all its inhabitants slaughtered. At least one million people died, and almost certainly far more. But all this terror and suffering was a mere practice run for what was to come in the following decade.
This left the Soviet Union at a crossroads. Would it continue the vision as a beacon of hope around the earth, inspiring revolution within one nation after another? Or would the focus become more internal? Stalin strongly favored the latter view, campaigning on a vision of “socialism in one country.” On the other side—far more in line with the ideas of Marx and Lenin—remained Leon Trotsky and his followers.
Families became crammed into apartments that had already been occupied by other families, and both eviction and trying to find a new place to live effectively became impossible. Some of this was by design in keeping with communist ideology: The ultimate vision was to have homes without kitchens so that everyone would eat communally in government-run cafeterias. True-believer communist architects designed buildings where everyone would have to share bathrooms as well, as part of an assault on bourgeois concepts such as shame, privacy and individualism.
This created an enormous incentive for families to turn in those living with them to the authorities for the most specious of reasons, if not downright lies. One phone call and the living quarters for one’s family instantly doubled. What’s the harm? If they weren’t guilty of one thing then surely they were guilty of another.
Stalin revived internal passports, which allowed for more efficient deportation of both individuals and populations—as well as de facto trapping people in the villages where they were. Travel within the Soviet Union became a matter of permission, not a right—but it also became a punishment.[cxxvii]
Like something out of Exodus, government-approved activists descended onto the Ukraine’s villages like a biblical plague in the winter of 1932-33. Everything that was edible they were to take, and they were given special tools to make sure that every nook in every home could be searched for the slightest crust of bread or grain of wheat.
If a person somehow managed to find and conceal food, that only forestalled the inevitable. Their own body would betray them. Starvation was not simply a consequence: it was the goal, and it was the law. Stalin intended to break the Ukrainians once and for all.
It thus became common for villagers to spy and inform on one another. Turning in a neighbor for having a sack of grain might be the easiest and safest way to procure food for one’s family. Not only was there a guarantee of a meal, but there was also now a guarantee that said meal wouldn’t be seized by the requisitioners.
The Soviet media accordingly began a campaign portraying the kulaks as illiterate, selfish, subhuman hicks. If you were hungry—and everyone was hungry—it’s because the greedy kulaks were hoarding food. After all, everyone knew that the Ukraine was the breadbasket of Europe. It is little surprise that those few who managed to make their way to the cities, destitute and barely clothed, were therefore often treated with unmitigated contempt and as worse than animals.
As one 1934 Soviet novel later put it regarding the kulaks, “Not one of them was guilty of anything; but they belonged to a class that was guilty of everything.”
Pregnant women trying to steal food were beaten to death, with their remaining children invariably starving. Children who tried to feed themselves were shot as well. Digging mass graves became grueling work, and barely-living kids and the elderly were tossed alongside the dead in order to save the extra trips.
“It was so easy to do a man in,” recalled one Ukrainian writer. “You wrote a denunciation, you did not even have to sign it. All you had to say was that he had paid people to work for him as hired hands, or that he had owned three cows.”[cxxxiv] Worse, the poorest could do little to defend themselves, while the wealthier residents could afford to bribe their way out of baseless accusations.
It is easy to see why the Russian population at large was oblivious to what was being done to the rural Ukrainians, and how they could be led to regard them as the villains instead of the victims—especially after centuries of rivalry or outright animosity between the two peoples.
There was thus an enormous incentive for Western journalists to write stories sympathetic to the Soviet point of view. In addition, there were very many Western journalists who genuinely were sympathetic to the Soviet point of view. A country built on equality, where everyone is provided for, where hunger and poverty were abolished, certainly sounded like a noble goal irrespective of what was transpiring all around.
As people went insane from hunger and were driven to, in some cases, eat their own children, New York Times readers could rest assured this was simply a new form of farming.
The current historical consensus of what has become known as the Holodomor is that almost four million people starved in Ukraine alone, with over one million others in the broader Soviet Union.
The media in the USSR had been boasting for several years about the booming economy, naturally leading to increased population growth. Statistically, the predicted population was expected to be 170 million in 1937. Yet when the census came in, the number came in at a far lower 162 million.[cliii]
In the leader’s desk were two letters from his predecessor. One day, when things got terribly bad, he took out one of the letters and read it. “Blame everything on me,” his predecessor had advised. The advice worked. By claiming that the current crisis was due to his predecessor, the Russian leader once again persuaded the masses of his greatness. But it didn’t last that long. A while later, crisis hit the Soviet Union again. Desperate, the leader opened up the second missive. It just said: “Sit down and write two letters.”
The Society of Old Bolsheviks was among the many groups targeted with mass arrest. Their collective memoirs had discussed their fellow comrades during the days of anti-czarist struggle—and Stalin’s name was conspicuously absent more often than not. He had not been a major player, and they were all living eyewitnesses to that very simple fact. One by one, they began to disappear. Many were transferred to new jobs in other cities—but they never arrived.
Not only did the confessions serve to implicate the defendants of their alleged crimes, they also served a further purpose: scapegoating for the ongoing and enormous economic hardships. The greater the number of men who confessed to plotting with Trotsky for every crime imaginable—and several that were objectively unimaginable—the greater Stalin looked in comparison, and the more justified the purge of society became.
Once again, they were caught in a blatant lie, and worse: one forced into the mouth of yet another defendant. What had been done to Pyatakov, to all these men, to get them to confess to things they didn’t do and couldn’t have done?
It was not only impermissible to be a critic but one could not even be an agnostic, let alone a skeptic. The freedom of speech and expression that had long been a promise of socialism had given way to a system where even freedom of thought was intolerable, and grounds for execution.
His “proletarian” science (which was good linguistics, as opposed to the bad “bourgeois” linguistics) held that all the languages of the earth not only derived from one original language but from just four sounds, specifically rosh, sal, ber, and yon.
Meteorologists were imprisoned for failing to predict weather that would harm crops. An epidemic one year resulted in many horses losing their lives, and the vaccines offered did not work to stem the plague. Several bacteriologists were accordingly arrested.[clxxii] Astronomers were rounded up, since some of their theories of sunspot development were decreed to be decidedly un-Marxist.
As a result of Lysenko’s influence Soviet biology became regarded worldwide as an ideologically-driven joke, including Lysenko’s claim that he managed to cross a tomato with a potato.[clxxiv] A creative mind cannot function in an environment where just thinking outside the box can have literally deadly consequences.
The problem with communism is that eventually you run out of possible scapegoats for failure—at which point acknowledging or even noticing that something was wrong itself becomes a form of treason.
As the kulaks were to blame for issues with food and agriculture, so too emerged a class of invisible foes responsible for problems in industry: the wreckers. Because the Soviet system was a perfect one and the ideology not just correct but scientifically correct, it logically followed that all industrial mistakes must be the result of sabotage by invisible, omnipresent wreckers.
