Once hundred years ago, on November 6, 1917, the Bolsheviks under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin (né Vladmimir Ilich Ulyanov), took over the government of Russia, creating the world’s first Marxist state. Renamed in 1922 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the revolution unleashed upon the world the deadliest and most bloody of political ideologies, but one, which, frighteningly, is being encouraged in the United States by elements of the far-left. Many of today’s young people, millennials especially, are falling for the lies of these “American Communists” just as the people of Russia and many other countries around the world fell for the lies their revolutionary leaders fed them. What really happened is an eye-opener and should be a wake-up call for all Americans.
The peasants in Russia wanted a change from the heavy-handed rule of the Tsars. In Russia, the gap between the peasants and the nobility was extreme, a remnant of the feudal system of the Middle Ages. Tsar Nicholas agreed to changes after a number of workers and women’s protests, but under the influence of Rasputin, a shadowy “healer” who had convinced the Tsarina that he alone could keep her son alive (the boy suffered from hemophilia), Nicholas rescinded the orders for change once the civil strife had settled down. Rightly feeling betrayed, the workers rose up again, forcing the Tsar to abdicate, and allowing the formation of a provisional government. Losses and privation due to Russian participation in the Great War added to the discontent. Lenin and the Bolsheviks, however, overcame the provisional government’s forces in November, immediately withdrawing Russian troops from WWI, confiscating all land from its owners and distributing it among the peasants, censoring the “bourgeois” press, and rationing bread. By March of 1918, they had changed their name to “the Communist Party.” And then the bloodbath began.
In July, Tsar Nicholas, his wife, and all of their children were awakened from sleep, herded into a room with their faithful servants, and shot to death, servants, children and all. In August, when Lenin received word of uprisings in central Russia, he replied with the order to publicly execute wealthy peasants. By 1920, the country was in chaos. By the beginning of 1921 the ruble had lost 96% of its pre-war value; industrial production had fallen to 10% of its 1913 level. The population of Petrograd had fallen from 2.5 million in 1917 to 600,000.
Following Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin became the Soviet leader. Under him, the killings continued. In order to bring all land under government control, he ordered the execution of all wealthy peasants. In addition, 3.3 million Ukrainians were deliberately allowed to starve after their grain was confiscated for export. 1.3 million nomads in Soviet Kazakhstan also starved to death. In 1937, after the obvious failure of his modernization policies, Stalin ordered the Great Terror. Most of the victims were peasants, the very people the Russian Revolution had promised to help. 386,798 people were shot in the “Kulak Operation” and another 247,157, mostly members of national minorities, were shot by the NKVD, the Soviet Secret Police. The total estimate of civilians deliberately killed under Stalinism ranges from 20 million to, according to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russian dissident, writer, and winner of a Nobel Peace prize, as many as 60 million. Either number is staggering!
Life for the average citizen was not comfortable. Apartments in cities were assigned to families, one family to a bedroom with all of them sharing the kitchen and bathroom. Money was plentiful because everyone was given a job as a worker on a communal farm, in a factory, as a public toilet attendant, but goods were not available. The bedroom allotted to you in an apartment was free, but you had to wait in line for years before getting it. To buy a car, you had to first obtain a buying permit, for which you had to wait in line, then pay for the car in full, and then wait in another line, perhaps as much as ten years before you actually got the car. You stood in lines at stores to buy anything, and if you wanted to take a vacation, you had to buy one from a trade union. If you were a member of the Communist Party, you could go to special stores where the lines were nearly non-existent, and if you were important in the Communist Party, everything was available to you when you wanted it. . . no lines. Books that did not agree with the political views of the government were not available, church attendance was discouraged, Christians ridiculed and harassed for their belief. It became against the law to own a Bible. And all media. . . newspapers, radio, television. . . was controlled by the government.
These conditions were not unique to the Soviet Union. All of the eastern European countries that they gained control of at the end of WWII — Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary — suffered the same deprivations, and attempts at rebellion against the Soviet-run governments were ruthlessly put down with Russian tanks and soldiers.
In China, Mao Zedong, who founded the People’s Republic of China, another Communist country patterned at first after the Russian model, holds the record for even greater murder. In 1958, Mao started the Great Leap Forward to try to catch up with western economies. It was a disaster. The “people” of the People’s Republic were divided into communes where small furnaces were to produce steel while others in the communes raised animals and worked the ground. After some natural disasters and the dissatisfaction of the peasants, the effort was abandoned in the early 1960s, but not until, through starvation, torture, and murder some 45 million Chinese were killed by their “people’s” government.
The failure of his experiment and the criticism of various individuals for the failure no doubt spurred Mao into the infamous Cultural Revolution. Mao closed schools and reorganized young students into the Red Guard and gave them the job of “purging” the society by removing the teachers on college campuses, then party officials and other “class enemies” in the society. In effect, every person of education and skill was persecuted, sent to the country to raise swine, or, more often killed. By some accounts there were as many as eight million dead and tens of millions of people persecuted by the time the Cultural Revolution was brought to an end with the death of Mao Zedung in 1976.
Communism has failed all over the world, leaving only China (which has adopted many aspects of capitalism in order to survive), North Korea, and Cuba. Given its obvious track record, it is hard to understand how anyone could espouse its ideas. The economies of North Korea and Cuba limp along. In North Korea, bribery and corruption are pervasive. The government owns virtually everything including the land, and its economy ranks last of all the countries in the world. North Korea does rank first in the world for two things: persecution of Christians and slavery. Cuba, the country of Black Lives Matter’s favorite Che Guevara and the far left’s idol, Fidel Castro, ranks as having the third worst economy in the world. Modern cars are not available and people still drive vehicles from the 1950s. Arbitrary arrest and detention of dissidents is commonplace with over 6,000 detained in prisons in 2015 alone. Before the visit of any foreign dignitary, the government rounds up and imprisons anyone who might dare complain of the government’s policies.
Every communist regime, every socialistic movement, including the one currently espoused in the U.S. by the far left and by Bernie Sanders, promises a better life for “the people” and every single one provides a life that is far worse. Every one promises to take from the rich and give to the poor, but in the end, they take from the rich and give to themselves, the “new” government. They promise free things — free college, free medical care, jobs for all— but these “free” things all come at a price: the price of long wait periods and inferior products and services. And most of all, the price of lost freedom. There will never be free speech under a socialistic or communistic society. We have seen this already in America. “Free speech,” the left argues, only applies to speech that they agree with. Anything that disagrees with their ideas is labeled “racist” or “hateful” and must be silenced. A society that silences speech, any speech, is no longer free!
Pope Francis summed it up nicely when he said, “Friends: the devil is a con artist. He makes promises after promise, but he never delivers. He’ll never really do anything he says. He doesn’t make good on his promises. He makes you want things which he can’t give, whether you get them or not. He makes you put your hopes in things which will never make you happy.”
Communism and socialism are not the saviors of the world. They are the spawns of Satan, pure evil. Christians and non-Christians alike must wake up to this fact before we Americans fall for the same clever lies that led millions to enslavement and death in the 20th century.