BY PAUL T HORGAN

Twenty twenty-four is election year in the USA, when American voters may realise that the two major parties will present two very poor candidates, one who is obviously combating mentally-debilitating senility, and the other who is combatting criminal prosecutions, only some of which are politically-motivated.

Away from the USA, it is also the centenary year for two major events of socialist history: the death of Lenin on the 21st January 1924, and the UK’s first-ever Labour government, which was formed the following day.

Here I deal with Lenin.

That Bolshevik leader Lenin is held in high, or at the very least neutral, regard is an anomaly of historiography, and demonstrates how, at the professional level, the discipline of history has been captured by the Left worldwide. Lenin was a murderous dictator, responsible for the deaths of millions, and yet this evil is all but ignored in popular historical commentary.

Instead the narrative is of a man who set in motion the modernisation of Russia, liberating the working classes from the oppression of autocratic rule and giving the Russian people an element of self-government denied to them by a corrupt and violent aristocracy. The mass deaths are seen as a coincidence, or just caused by the civil war that generally follows all revolutions, and thus are a historically neutral event.

Lenin’s Red Terror is barely mentioned outside of specialist publications.

In fact Marxism-Leninism was an abject failure. If the Marxism portion was a utopian, and thus peaceful implementation of dialectic materialism, being equitable distribution of wealth between the labouring classes and their managers through common ownership and a benevolent dictatorship of the proletariat, it therefore follows that the Leninist portion has to be the imposition of state terror, mass-murder, and civil war. It is not sufficiently repeated that it is actually always possible for the government of any country to achieve its desired goals, so long as there is no limit on the numbers of the people it can murder, or the amount of money it is allowed to spend. The trick is to do so without going on killing sprees, increasing the national debt, or activating the printing-press. So Lenin took the easy way out, murdering millions and debauching the currency. It is ironic that while Donald Trump is vilified for alleged involvement in the storming of the Capitol in 2021, Lenin is praised for the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917. Both actions were in response to an adverse electoral outcome from the perspective of the interlopers. The attack on the Winter Palace was an illegal coup d’état that succeeded. Lenin’s government was criminal regime. The civil war that Lenin set off was inevitable. Millions died.

For all the deaths, Lenin was responsible.

Leninism included a doctrine called ‘democratic centralism’, which is an oxymoron. The principle of this was that democratic debate and dissent were permissible but that the moment a decision had been made by a central committee no further discussion was permissible. The decisions had to be carried out without question. Thus this was little different to the leadership principle of Germany’s National Socialists, the distinction being that leadership was focused on an ideologically-focused committee rather than a highly-motivated individual. So every act of mass-murder was the consequence of decisions made in one form or another by Lenin and the central committee he held under his thrall, the pyramid of corpses topped by the Russian royal family.

So why does Lenin get such a free pass in the popular discussion of history?

The best part-explanation I can determine is that Bolshevism and its ideological relatives lack the power to seduce Western societies and populations when compared to fascism, which was much more successful, in part because of a fear of Bolshevism entirely caused by Lenin’s conduct as leader. Thus Western media is pointedly anti-fascist to combat this seduction. But Western media is also, however, teeming with committed leftists, which forms another part-explanation. Since the communists appear to be the diametric opposite of fascists, they get a free pass as somehow being the ‘good guys’ in a sort of ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’ way. They are not, and never were ‘the good guys’.

They are in fact the Really Bad Guys.

It also helps that the Soviet Union is depicted as being the main force in the defeat of Nazi Germany which helps sanitise the image of Stalin compared to Hitler, especially when Stalin is seen cosying up with Churchill and Roosevelt. The UK history curriculum teaches pupils about Nazism in an obsessive detail that is far greater than the coverage of communism, despite the USSR lasting six times longer than Nazi Germany, using almost exactly the same techniques of repression, murdering many more people, as well as illegally invading almost as many countries in the east at the start of World War II as Germany did overall up to the end of 1940 (Poland, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Romania vs Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France), and continuing to invade and subvert countries after the end of the war.

It may also be because Lenin (and also Stalin) is still revered in Russia in a way that deceased dictators and their regimes are not in other countries (a major exception has to be Mustafa Kemal ‘Ataturk’ whose Turkish presidential centenary is in October this year). Also, governments fear degrading relations with Russia (well, before the invasion of Ukraine they did) which they would be doing if their medias openly damned Lenin in the same way it is permissible to damn Hitler.

The BBC in its news broadcasts only described Nicolae Ceausescu and Muammar Gaddafi as “the former dictator” of their respective countries only after they had been deposed, killed by their own people, and their regime fell. The Russian regime has not fallen since the storming of the Winter Palace. It has simply evolved from Leninism via Stalinism to Putinism.

All involve mass killings, a characteristic which has to be regarded as central to Russian political culture.

But it also suits left-wingers to depict Lenin as heroic pioneer, an energetic liberator of the working classes.

He was not.

On every metric, Lenin and Leninism was a failure. After triggering a civil war that further devastated a country already badly damaged by the Great War, the state-enforced economics of Bolshevism had to be partially reverted to permit private enterprise to avoid a further economic collapse that was accelerated by hyperinflation. Leninism was actually a symptom of a country continuing to decline after 1917, and this decline persisted after Lenin’s death. Industrialisation was achieved on the back of millions of roubles spent and millions of people murdered. The human cost nullifies any achievement, especially as this took place in a centralised totalitarian regime. The buck stopped at Lenin.

Serious industrial accidents abounded, as experts were supplanted by inexperienced apparatchiks, but these disasters were explained away as the work of a cult of ‘wreckers’, enemies of the regime, especially after Trotsky’s exile, rather than provable incompetence by the under-talented and over-eager. By 1937, the Soviet census showed a shortfall of 20 million people from the predicted population size based on previous statistics. Stalin’s solution was to execute the statisticians and suppress the census. The Bolsheviks had destroyed Russia’s future as well as its present.

The USSR barely survived Hitler’s onslaught in 1941, and then only because of massive economic and material support from the capitalist UK and USA that persisted to the end of the war. Stalin’s grand strategy was to keep shovelling troops westward towards Axis front lines until German soldiers ran out of shells and bullets. The USSR’s much-revered human sacrifice was actually a waste of lives on a scale that had caused criticism of British generals in the Great War, but is somehow priced-in by historians of Russia.

Next month is the 50th anniversary of the toppling of the Marxist Salvador Allende as President of Chile by General Augusto Pinochet in a military-led coup. Just as Lenin’s revolutionaries stormed the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, so did Pinochet’s troops attacked the Palacio de La Moneda in Santiago. And the contrast in their depictions tells us rather too much about how the historical commentary is skewed.

There was a Marxist uprising in Russia. Millions died, The Marxists were victorious. There was also a Marxist uprising in Chile. Thousands died. The Marxists were defeated. It is the defeat of the Chilean Marxists that will be seen as a ‘tragedy’ when the anniversary is marked on September 11 2023, while no such tragedy in Russia will be marked should there be any celebration of the life of Lenin next year.

The conduct of Pinochet’s regime in suppressing Marxism in Chile is not entirely indefensible. All Pinochet would have had to do to convince his followers to undertake their gruesome acts in what should be described as a civil war, rather than a ‘dirty war’ (all civil wars are always the dirtiest kind of war) was to point out what happened to Russia when the Marxists took over, or what happened to China when the Maoists won the civil war they initiated, or what happened to North Korea after 1945, or, closer to home, what happened to Cuba after Castro came down from the hills, and then suggest that something like that could happen in Chile unless it was firmly checked.

But it all started with Lenin and Leninism. Instead of being celebrated, one of the few Old Bolsheviks who managed not to die of a bullet (or ice-pick) in the back of the head should be condemned for the ruin caused by his toxic preaching and deadly policies.

Lenin took a country made sick by war and poor governance, made it even sicker, and then exported the sickness to the detriment of millions around the world. Russia is still sick today. It is questionable if she will ever recover.

Paul T Horgan worked in the IT Sector. He lives in Berkshire.