Soviet Revolutionary Quotes

During the years of Stalin's reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women's rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the Stalinist era is discussed. To say that "socialism doesn't work" is to overlook the fact that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.

Except for the small revolutionary groups which exist in all countries, the whole world was determined upon preventing revolution in Spain. In particular the Communist Party, with Soviet Russia behind it, had thrown its whole weight against the revolution. It was the Communist thesis that revolution at this stage would be fatal and that what was to be aimed at in Spain was not workers' control, but bourgeois democracy. It hardly needs pointing out why 'liberal' capitalist opinion took the same line.

Rarely has a diplomatic document so missed its objective as the Treaty of Versailles. Too punitive for conciliation, too lenient to keep Germany from recovering, the Treaty of Versailles condemned the exhausted democracies to constant vigilance against an irreconcilable and revanchist Germany as well as a revolutionary Soviet Union.

Art was the first casualty of the Socialist and Communist revolutions of the 20th Century. Socialists killed the independent thinkers first.

So much of the inexplicable about the Soviet experience—the hatred of the peasantry for example, the secrecy and paranoia, the murderous witch hunt of the Great Terror, the placing of the Party above family and life itself, the suspicion of the USSR’s own espionage that led to the success of Hitler’s 1941 surprise attack—was the result of the underground life, the konspiratsia of the Okhrana and the revolutionaries, and also the Caucasian values and style of Stalin. And not just of Stalin.

This was the sickness of the age, the revolutionary madness of the epoch. In thought everyone was different from his words and outward show. No one had a clear conscience. Each with good reason could feel himself guilty, a secret criminal, an unexposed deceiver.

What with the political monopoly, the Cheka and the Red Army, all that now existed of the 'Commune-State' of our dreams was a theoretical myth. The war, the internal measures against counterrevolution, and the famine (which had created a bureaucratic rationing apparatus) had killed off Soviet democracy. How could it revive, and when? The Party lived in the certain knowledge that the slightest relaxation of its authority would give day to reaction.

Revolutionary Marxism sees in fascism a militant self-defense movement for the structure and interests of the capitalist system, directing the movements of the petit-bourgeois masses with pseudo-ideologies formed for the purpose of its own preservation.

A critical analysis of the present global constellation-one which offers no clear solution, no “practical” advice on what to do, and provides no light at the end of the tunnel, since one is well aware that this light might belong to a train crashing towards us-usually meets with reproach: “Do you mean we should do nothing? Just sit and wait?” One should gather the courage to answer: “YES, precisely that!” There are situations when the only true “practical” thing to do is to resist the temptation to engage immediately and to “wait and see” by means of a patient, critical analysis. Engagement seems to exert its pressure on us from all directions. In a well-known passage from his ‘Existentialism and Humanism’, Sartre deployed the dilemma of a young man in France in 1942, torn between the duty to help his lone, ill mother and the duty to enter the war and fight the Germans; Sartre’s point is, of course, that there is no a priori answer to this dilemma. The young man needs to make a decision grounded only in his own abyssal freedom and assume full responsibility for it. An obscene third way out of this dilemma would have been to advise the young man to tell his mother that he will join the Resistance, and to tell his Resistance friends that he will take care of his mother, while, in reality, withdrawing to a secluded place and studying. There is more than cheap cynicism in this advice. It brings to mind a well-known Soviet joke about Lenin. Under socialism; Lenin’s advice to young people, his answer to what they should do, was “Learn, learn, and learn.” This was evoked all the time and displayed on the school walls. The joke goes: Marx, Engels, and Lenin are asked whether they would prefer to have a wife or a mistress. As expected, Marx, rather conservative in private matters, answers, “A wife!” while Engels, more of a bon vivant, opts for a mistress. To everyone’s surprise, Lenin says, “I’d like to have both!” Why? Is there a hidden stripe of decadent jouisseur behind his austere revolutionary image? No-he explains: “So that I can tell my wife that I am going to my mistress and my mistress that I am going to my wife. . .” “And then, what do you do?” “I go to a solitary place to learn, learn, and learn!” Is this not exactly what Lenin did after the catastrophe in 1914? He withdrew to a lonely place in Switzerland, where he “learned, learned, and learned,” reading Hegel’s logic. And this is what we should do today when we find ourselves bombarded with mediatic images of violence. We need to “learn, learn, and learn” what causes this violence.

The Communists’ sense of mission and intellectual superiority was far too great to allow them to be swayed by mere majority opinion. In this, they were like all other revolutionaries, for what revolutionary worth his salt has ever conceded that “the people’s will” is something different from the mission he has undertaken to carry out on the people’s behalf?

The word ‘soviet’ means ‘council’ in Russian (there was nothing particularly Communist about it until after 1917).

...the [pure socialist] critics [of communist countries] seem unable to apply their own leadership genius to producing a successful revolutionary movement in their own country.

pre-revolutionary folkloric figures represented the opposing faces of pre-Soviet womanhood.

During the years of Stalin’s reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women’s rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the Stalinist era is discussed. To say that “socialism doesn’t work” is to overlook the fact that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists.

The celebrating of revolutionary anniversaries and milestones pillory honor as murderers, hypocrites, and sexually diseased youth become heroes of socialism, proclaiming Soviet salvation to the world.

Just as starry-eyed Western intellectuals in the twentieth century would transfer to the Soviet Union all their own fantasies of the ideal state, so the idealists of late eighteenth-century Europe doted on the American Eden.

So before and during the war, the Bush administration had to build up an image in people's minds of Iraq as a monstrous military superpower, in order to mobilize enough popular hysteria so that people here would go along with their policies. And again, the media did their job 100 percent. So I don't know how well you remember what was going on around the country back then, but people were literally quaking in their boots about the extraordinary might of Iraq―it was a superpower with artillery we'd never dreamt of, all this kind of stuff.93 I mean, this was a defenseless Third World country that was so weak it had been unable to defeat post-revolutionary Iran in eight years of warfare [from 1980 to '88]―and that was with the support of the United States, the Soviet Union, all of Europe, the Arab oil countries: not an inconsiderable segment of world power. Yet with all those allies, Iraq had been unable to defeat post-revolutionary Iran, which had killed off its own officers' corps and barely had an army left: all of a sudden this was the superpower that was going to conquer the world? You really had to be a deeply brainwashed Western intellectual even to look at this image―a defenseless Third World country threatening the two most advanced military forces in the world, the United States and Britain―and not completely collapse in ridicule. But as you recall, that's what all of them were saying―and people here really believed it.

LENIN = "Revolutionary Social Democracy" American Socialists = "Democratic Socialism". What is the difference? The USSR held democratic referendums too; all of which increased the power of the central planners and reduced the individual to nothingness.

Conspiracy theories have long been used to maintain power: the Soviet leadership saw capitalist and counter-revolutionary conspiracies everywhere; the Nazis, Jewish ones. But those conspiracies were ultimately there to buttress an ideology, whether class warfare for Communists or race for Nazis. With today’s regimes, which struggle to formulate a single ideology – indeed, which can’t if they want to maintain power by sending different messages to different people – the idea that one lives in a world full of conspiracies becomes the world view itself. Conspiracy does not support the ideology; it replaces it. In Russia this is captured in the catchphrase of the country’s most important current affairs presenter: ‘A coincidence? I don’t think so!’ says Dmitry Kiselev as he twirls between tall tales that dip into history, literature, oil prices and colour revolutions, which all return to the theme of how the world has it in for Russia. And as a world view it grants those who subscribe to it certain pleasures: if all the world is a conspiracy, then your own failures are no longer all your fault. The fact that you achieved less than you hoped for, that your life is a mess – it’s all the fault of the conspiracy. More importantly, conspiracy is a way to maintain control. In a world where even the most authoritarian regimes struggle to impose censorship, one has to surround audiences with so much cynicism about anybody’s motives, persuade them that behind every seemingly benign motivation is a nefarious, if impossible-to-prove, plot, that they lose faith in the possibility of an alternative, a tactic a renowned Russian media analyst called Vasily Gatov calls ‘white jamming’. And the end effect of this endless pile-up of conspiracies is that you, the little guy, can never change anything. For if you are living in a world where shadowy forces control everything, then what possible chance do you have of turning it around? In this murk it becomes best to rely on a strong hand to guide you. ‘Trump is our last chance to save America,’ is the message of his media hounds. Only Putin can ‘raise Russia from its knees’. ‘The problem we are facing today is less oppression, more lack of identity, apathy, division, no trust,’ sighs Srdja. ‘There are more tools to change things than before, but there’s less will to do so.

Thus the Russian working class had contradictory characteristics for a Marxist diagnosing its revolutionary potential. Yet the empirical evidence of the period from the 1890s to 1914 suggests that in fact Russia's working class, despite its close links with the peasantry, was exceptionally militant and revolutionary. Large-scale strikes were frequent, the workers showed considerable solidarity against management and state authority, and their demands were usually political as well as economic. In the 1905 Revolution, the workers of St Petersburg and Moscow organized their own revolutionary institutions, the soviets, and continued the struggle after the Tsar's constitutional concessions in October and the collapse of the middle-class liberals' drive against the autocracy

Everybody in the Soviet Union knew the expression “this is not a phone conversation,” which expressed a wish to discuss something in person because they were afraid somebody else might be listening. The “somebody else” was the state and its vast networks of informers. The

Countries that quash free inquiry, distrust reason, and practice pseudoscience, such as Revolutionary France, Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, and, more recently, fundamentalist Islamist states, stagnate, regress, and often collapse. Theists and postmodernist critics of science and reason often label the disastrous Soviet and Nazi utopias as “scientific,” but their science was a thin patina covering a deep layer of counter-Enlightenment, pastoral, paradisiacal fantasies of racial ideology grounded in ethnicity and geography, as documented in Claudia Koonz’s book The Nazi Conscience79 and in Ben Kiernan’s book Blood and Soil.80

Since they believed that this revolutionary transformation was in the long-term interests of the people, they were willing to force it through, even when, as with collectivization, a majority of the relevant population clearly opposed it. They explained popular resistance as a result of the backwardness, prejudices, and fears of the unenlightened masses.

In this chapter, I want to focus on the really big crimes that have been committed by atheist groups and governments. In the past hundred years or so, the most powerful atheist regimes—Communist Russia, Communist China, and Nazi Germany—have wiped out people in astronomical numbers. Stalin was responsible for around twenty million deaths, produced through mass slayings, forced labor camps, show trials followed by firing squads, population relocation and starvation, and so on. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s authoritative recent study Mao: The Unknown Story attributes to Mao Zedong’s regime a staggering seventy million deaths.4 Some China scholars think Chang and Halliday’s numbers are a bit high, but the authors present convincing evidence that Mao’s atheist regime was the most murderous in world history. Stalin’s and Mao’s killings—unlike those of, say, the Crusades or the Thirty Years’ War—were done in peacetime and were performed on their fellow countrymen. Hitler comes in a distant third with around ten million murders, six million of them Jews. So far, I haven’t even counted the assassinations and slayings ordered by other Soviet dictators like Lenin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and so on. Nor have I included a host of “lesser” atheist tyrants: Pol Pot, Enver Hoxha, Nicolae Ceaus̹escu, Fidel Castro, Kim Jong-il. Even these “minor league” despots killed a lot of people. Consider Pol Pot, who was the leader of the Khmer Rouge, the Communist Party faction that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Within this four-year period Pol Pot and his revolutionary ideologues engaged in systematic mass relocations and killings that eliminated approximately one-fifth of the Cambodian population, an estimated 1.5 million to 2 million people. In fact, Pol Pot killed a larger percentage of his countrymen than Stalin and Mao killed of theirs.5 Even so, focusing only on the big three—Stalin, Hitler, and Mao—we have to recognize that atheist regimes have in a single century murdered more than one hundred million people.

If the parliamentary regime, even in the period of "peaceful", stable development, was a rather crude method of discovering the opinion of the country, and in the epoch of revolutionary storm completely lost its capacity to follow the course of the struggle and the development of revolutionary consciousness, the Soviet regime, which is more closely, straightly, honestly bound up with the toiling majority of the people, does achieve meaning, not in statically reflecting a majority, but in dynamically creating it.

My take on the various components of Maoist politics varies, depending on the philosophical, theoretical, strategic, or methodological element in question. In general, I consider Maoism to be an internal critique of Stalinism that fails to break with Stalinism. Over many years, Mao developed a critical understanding of Soviet society, and of the negative symptoms it displayed. But at the same time, he failed to locate the cause of these symptoms in the capitalist social relations of the USSR and so retained many shared assumptions with the Stalinist model in his own thinking.

Such is Fascist planning-the planning of those who reject the ideal postulates of Christian civilization and of the older Asiatic civilization which preceded ti and from which it derived-the planning of men whose intentions are avowedly bad. Let us now consider examples of planning by political leaders who accept the ideal postulates, whose intentions are good. The first thing to notice is that none of these men accepts the ideal postulates whole-heartedly. All believe that desirable ends can be achieved by undesirable means. Aiming to reach goals diametrically opposed to those of Fascism, they yet persist in taking the same roads as are taken by the Duces and Fuehrers. They are pacifists, but pacifists who act on the theory that peace can be achieved by means of war; they are reformers and revolutionaries, but reformers who imagine that unfair and arbitrary acts can produce social justice, revolutionaries who persuade themselves that the centralization of power and the enslavement of the masses can result in liberty for all. Revolutionary Russia has the largest army in the world; a secret police, that for ruthless efficiency rivals the German or the Italian; a rigid press censorship; a system of education that, since Stalin "reformed" it, is as authoritarian as Hitler's; an all-embracing system of military training that is applied to women and children as well as men; a dictator as slavishly adored as the man-gods of Rome and Berlin; a bureaucracy, solidly entrenched as the new ruling class and employing the powers of the state to preserve its privileges and protect its vested interests; an oligarchical party which dominates the entire country and within which there is no freedom even for faithful members. (Most ruling castes are democracies so far as their own members are concerned. Not so the Russian Communist Party, in which the Central Executive Committee acting through the Political Department, can override or altogether liquidate any district organization whatsoever.) No opposition is permitted in Russia. But where opposition is made illegal, it automatically goes underground and becomes conspiracy. Hence the treason trials and purges of 1936 and 1937. Large-scale manipulations of the social structure are pushed through against the wishes of the people concerned and with the utmost ruthlessness. (Several million peasants were deliberately starved to death in 1933 by the Soviet planners.) Ruthlessness begets resentment; resentment must be kept down by force. As usual the chief result of violence is the necessity to use more violence. Such then is Soviet planning-well-intentioned, but making use of evil means that are producing results utterly unlike those which the original makers of the revolution intended to produce.

And the time was also coming when the great purges, long in blueprint, could no longer be postponed. The whole subject of the slaughter by a revolution of its children is mysterious. But it is clear that the group warfare, by the ‘logic of things,’ had opened into the next stage: the fanatical idealists of the 1880's and 1890's needed to be destroyed by the realists now in control of the Party, their younger fanatics of the apparatus, and their Calibans (a new breed). Some of the original revolutionaries had become disillusioned, and there is nothing worse than an ex-believer. Some were haunted by old romantic notions of ‘freedom,’ and therefore opposed the rough measures needed to forge a modern totalitarian state. Some probably still dreamed they could change the balance, and leadership, of the Party.

A few weeks later, in the middle of a cold December night, the pair, along with 247 other radicals, were herded onto a freighter and shipped off to Soviet Russia, a government the United States didn’t even recognize. Greeted as heroes upon their arrival, Goldman and Berkman believed they had landed in a country where their politics would find a home. But once again, a promised land disappointed. Instead, they found workers in conditions of servitude, corruption among their managers, and no tolerance of free speech. In a remarkable moment, Goldman and Berkman complained to the leader of the revolution himself, Vladimir Lenin. Unlike muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens and other American fellow travelers, Berkman and Goldman courageously criticized the Russian Revolution. Lenin dismissed the complaints and said that there was no room for free speech in the revolutionary period.

My mother is finally rolling out her kulebiaka dough, maneuvering intently on a dime size oasis of kitchen counter. I inhale the sweetish tang of fermented yeast once again and try to plumb my unconscious for some collective historical taste memory. No dice. There's no yeast in my DNA. No heirloom pie recipes passed down by generations of women in the yellowing pages of family notebooks, scribbled in pre-revolutionary Russian orthography. My two grandmothers were emaciated New Soviet women, meaning they barely baked, wouldn't be caught dead cooking 'czarist.' Curious and passionate about food all her life, Mom herself only became serious about baking after we emigrated. In the USSR she relied on a dough called na skoruyu ruku ('flick of a hand'), a version involving little kneading and no rising. It was a recipe she'd had to teach her mother. My paternal babushka, Alla, simply wasn't interested.

Starting in the early 1970s, members of the PLO responded to these pressures, in particular to the urging of the Soviet Union, by floating the idea of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, in effect a two-state solution. This approach was notably promoted by the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (which had split off from the PFLP in 1969), together with Syrian-backed groups, discreetly encouraged by the leadership of Fatah. Although there had been early resistance to the two-state solution by the PFLP and some Fatah cadres, in time it became clear that ‘Arafat, among other leaders, supported it. This marked the beginning of a long, slow process of shifting away from the maximalist objective of the democratic state, with its revolutionary implications, to an ostensibly more pragmatic aim of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, to be achieved via negotiations on the basis of SC 242.

Government use of agitation propaganda Governments also employ this propaganda of agitation when after having been installed in power, they want to pursue a revolutionary course of action. Thus Lenin, having installed the Soviets, organized the agitprops and developed the long campaign of agitation in Russia to conquer resistance and crush the kulaks. In such a case, subversion aims at the resistance of a segment of a class, and an internal enemy is chosen for attack. Similarly, most of Hitler's propaganda was propaganda of agitation. Hitler could work his sweeping social and economic transformations only by constant agitation, by overexcitement, by straining energies to the utmost. Nazism grew by successive waves of feverish enthusiasm and thus attained its revolutionary objectives. Finally, the great campaigns in Communist China were precisely propaganda of agitation. Only such propaganda could produce those "great leaps forward.

Historically, nationalism was a liberal-left phenomenon. The French Revolution was a nationalist revolution, but it was also seen as a left-liberal one for breaking with the Catholic Church and empowering the people. German Romanticism as championed by Gottfried Herder and others was seen as both nationalistic and liberal. The National Socialist movement was part of this revolutionary tradition. But even if Nazi nationalism was in some ill-defined but fundamental way right-wing, this only meant that Nazism was right-wing socialism. And right-wing socialists are still socialists. Most of the Bolshevik revolutionaries Stalin executed were accused of being not conservatives or monarchists but rightists--that is, right-wing socialists. Any deviation from the Soviet line was automatic proof of rightism. Ever since, we in the West have apishly mimicked the Soviet usage of such terms without questioning the propagandistic baggage attached.

The Germans were eventually beaten only when the liberal countries allied themselves with the Soviet Union, which bore the brunt of the conflict and paid a much higher price: 25 million Soviet citizens died in the war, compared to half a million Britons and half a million Americans. Much of the credit for defeating Nazism should be given to communism. And at least in the short term, communism was also the great beneficiary of the war. The Soviet Union entered the war as an isolated communist pariah. It emerged as one of the two global superpowers, and the leader of an expanding international bloc. By 1949 eastern Europe became a Soviet satellite, the Chinese Communist Party won the Chinese Civil War, and the United States was gripped by anti-communist hysteria. Revolutionary and anti-colonial movements throughout the world looked longingly towards Moscow and Beijing, while liberalism became identified with the racist European empires. As these empires collapsed, they were usually replaced by either military dictatorships or socialist regimes, not liberal democracies. In 1956 the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, confidently told the liberal West that ‘Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!

Towards the end of the last century the pursuit of Utopia entered the political mainstream. In future only one kind of regime would be legitimate: American-style democratic capitalism – the final form of human government, as it was termed in the fleeting and now forgotten mood of hubris that followed the Soviet collapse. Led by the United States, western governments committed themselves to installing democracy throughout the world – an impossible dream that in many countries could only produce chaos. At the same time they launched a ‘war against terror’ that failed to distinguish between new threats and the normal conflicts of history. The Right was possessed by fantasies, and like the utopian visions of the last century – but far more quickly – its grandiose projects have crumbled into dust. In the twentieth century it seemed utopian movements could come to power only in dictatorial regimes. Yet after 9/ 11 utopian thinking came to shape foreign policy in the world’s pre-eminent democracy. In many ways the Bush administration behaved like a revolutionary regime. It was prepared to engage in pre-emptive attacks on sovereign states in order to achieve its goals, while at the same time it has been ready to erode long-established American freedoms. It established a concentration camp in Guantánamo whose inmates are beyond the reach of normal legal protection, denied the protection of habeas corpus to terrorist suspects, set up an apparatus of surveillance to monitor the population and authorized American officials to practise what in any other country would be defined as torture. Under the leadership of Tony Blair, Britain suffered, in a more limited way, a similar transformation.

In actual fact our Russian experience—when I use the word "Russian" I always differentiate it from the word "Soviet"—I have in mind even pre-Soviet, pre-revolutinoary experience—in actual fact it is vitally important for the West, because by some chance of history we have trodden the same path seventy or eighty years before the West. And now it is with a strange sensation that we look at what is happening to you; many social phenomena that happened in Russia before its collapse are being repeated. Our experience of life is of vital importance to the West, but I am not convinced that you are capable of assimilating it without having gone through it to the end yourselves. You know, one could quote here many examples: for one, a certain retreat by the older generation, yielding their intellectual leadership to the younger generation. It is against the natural order of things for those who are youngest, with the least experience of life, to have the greatest influence in directing the life of society. One can say then that this is what forms the spirit of the age, the current of public opinion, when people in authority, well known professors and scientists, are reluctant to enter into an argument even when they hold a different opinion. It is considered embarrassing to put forward one's counterarguments, lest one become involved. And so there is a certain abdication of responsibility, which is typical here where there is complete freedom....There is now a universal adulation of revolutionaries, the more so the more extreme they are! Similarly, before the revolution, we had in Russia, if not a cult of terror, then a fierce defense of terrorists. People in good positions—intellectuals, professors, liberals—spent a great deal of effort, anger, and indignation in defending terrorists.

This extreme situation in which all data is processed and all decisions are made by a single central processor is called communism. In a communist economy, people allegedly work according to their abilities, and receive according to their needs. In other words, the government takes 100 per cent of your profits, decides what you need and then supplies these needs. Though no country ever realised this scheme in its extreme form, the Soviet Union and its satellites came as close as they could. They abandoned the principle of distributed data processing, and switched to a model of centralised data processing. All information from throughout the Soviet Union flowed to a single location in Moscow, where all the important decisions were made. Producers and consumers could not communicate directly, and had to obey government orders. For instance, the Soviet economics ministry might decide that the price of bread in all shops should be exactly two roubles and four kopeks, that a particular kolkhoz in the Odessa oblast should switch from growing wheat to raising chickens, and that the Red October bakery in Moscow should produce 3.5 million loaves of bread per day, and not a single loaf more. Meanwhile the Soviet science ministry forced all Soviet biotech laboratories to adopt the theories of Trofim Lysenko – the infamous head of the Lenin Academy for Agricultural Sciences. Lysenko rejected the dominant genetic theories of his day. He insisted that if an organism acquired some new trait during its lifetime, this quality could pass directly to its descendants. This idea flew in the face of Darwinian orthodoxy, but it dovetailed nicely with communist educational principles. It implied that if you could train wheat plants to withstand cold weather, their progenies will also be cold-resistant. Lysenko accordingly sent billions of counter-revolutionary wheat plants to be re-educated in Siberia – and the Soviet Union was soon forced to import more and more flour from the United States.

The German and Russian state apparatuses grew out of despotism. For this reason the subservient nature of the human character of masses of people in Germany and in Russia was exceptionally pronounced. Thus, in both cases, the revolution led to a new despotism with the certainty of irrational logic. In contrast to the German and Russia state apparatuses, the American state apparatus was formed by groups of people who had evaded European and Asian despotism by fleeing to a virgin territory free of immediate and effective traditions. Only in this way can it be understood that, until the time of this writing, a totalitarian state apparatus was not able to develop in America, whereas in Europe every overthrow of the government carried out under the slogan of freedom inevitably led to despotism. This holds true for Robespierre, as well as for Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. If we want to appraise the facts impartially, then we have to point out, whether we want to or not, and whether we like it or not, that Europe's dictators, who based their power on vast millions of people, always stemmed from the suppressed classes. I do not hesitate to assert that this fact, as tragic as it is, harbors more material for social research than the facts related to the despotism of a czar or of a Kaiser Wilhelm. By comparison, the latter facts are easily understood. The founders of the American Revolution had to build their democracy from scratch on foreign soil. The men who accomplished this task had all been rebels against English despotism. The Russian Revolutionaries, on the other had, were forced to take over an already existing and very rigid government apparatus. Whereas the Americans were able to start from scratch, the Russians, as much as they fought against it, had to drag along the old. This may also account for the fact that the Americans, the memory of their own flight from despotism still fresh in their minds, assumed an entirely different—more open and more accessible—attitude toward the new refugees of 1940, than Soviet Russia, which closed its doors to them. This may explain why the attempt to preserve the old democratic ideal and the effort to develop genuine self-administration was much more forceful in the United States than anywhere else. We do not overlook the many failures and retardations caused by tradition, but in any event a revival of genuine democratic efforts took place in America and not in Russia. It can only be hoped that American democracy will thoroughly realize, and this before it is too late, that fascism is not confined to any one nation or any one party; and it is to be hoped that it will succeed in overcoming the tendency toward dictatorial forms in the people themselves. Only time will tell whether the Americans will be able to resist the compulsion of irrationality or whether they will succumb to it.

Well, let me just end with one last point to do with your question. One of the issues which has devastated a substantial portion of the left in recent years, and caused enormous triumphalism elsewhere, is the alleged fact that there's been this great battle between socialism and capitalism in the twentieth century, and in the end capitalism won and socialism lost―and the reason we know that socialism lost is because the Soviet Union disintegrated. So you have big cover stories in The Nation about "The End of Socialism," and you have socialists who all their lives considered themselves anti-Stalinist saying, "Yes, it's true, socialism has lost because Russia failed." I mean, even to raise questions about this is something you're not supposed to do in our culture, but let's try it. Suppose you ask a simple question: namely, why do people like the editors at The Nation say that "socialism" failed, why don't they say that "democracy" failed?―and the proof that "democracy" failed is, look what happened to Eastern Europe. After all, those countries also called themselves "democratic"―in fact, they called themselves "People's Democracies," real advanced forms of democracy. So why don't we conclude that "democracy" failed, not just that "socialism" failed? Well, I haven't seen any articles anywhere saying, "Look, democracy failed, let's forget about democracy." And it's obvious why: the fact that they called themselves democratic doesn't mean that they were democratic. Pretty obvious, right? Okay, then in what sense did socialism fail? I mean, it's true that the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe called themselves "socialist" ―but they also called themselves "democratic." Were they socialist? Well, you can argue about what socialism is, but there are some ideas that are sort of at the core of it, like workers' control over production, elimination of wage labor, things like that. Did those countries have any of those things? They weren't even a thought there. Again, in the pre-Bolshevik part of the Russian Revolution, there were socialist initiatives―but they were crushed instantly after the Bolsheviks took power, like within months. In fact, just as the moves towards democracy in Russia were instantly destroyed, the moves towards socialism were equally instantly destroyed. The Bolshevik takeover was a coup―and that was perfectly well understood at the time, in fact. So if you look in the mainstream of the Marxist movement, Lenin's takeover was regarded as counter-revolutionary; if you look at independent leftists like Bertrand Russell, it was instantly obvious to them; to the libertarian left, it was a truism. But that truism has been driven out of people's heads over the years, as part of a whole prolonged effort to discredit the very idea of socialism by associating it with Soviet totalitarianism. And obviously that effort has been extremely successful―that's why people can tell themselves that socialism failed when they look at what happened to the Soviet Union, and not even see the slightest thing odd about it. And that's been a very valuable propaganda triumph for elites in the West―because it's made it very easy to undercut moves towards real changes in the social system here by saying, "Well, that's socialism―and look what it leads to." Okay, hopefully with the fall of the Soviet Union we can at least begin to get past that barrier, and start recovering an understanding of what socialism could really stand for.

socialism preceded Marxism, and socialism has survived Marxism, in part because Marxism was subjected to a real-world test for nearly a century and failed on an epic scale. Soviet revolutionaries did not engage in Fabian incrementalism; they got their country and their empire and their worldwide movement, and they worked their will without opposition.

The modern-day ultra-Left ideology of “Cultural Marxism” takes yesterday’s Soviet Marxist-Leninist model and stands it on its head. Revolution on this alternative path no longer envisions a cataclysmic clash between workers and capitalists as the final act. Rather, contemporary revolutionary doctrine is far more dangerous: it is based on a nonviolent, persistent, and “quiet” transformation of American traditions, families, education, media, and support institutions day-by-day. The seizure of political and economic power remains a key objective, but this “final act” is really a first step in transforming the existing cultural order.

What is more, in what follows we look at the capacity of the other schools to deal with some of the same problems that Marxism-Leninism considers its private preserve. The fact that the non-Marxist-Leninists deal with these problems in a non-class-bound way is in itself a response to Marxism-Leninism with its dogmatic positions on partijnost' and revolutionary spirit in philosophy. In other words, as we watch each philosophic approach proceed from normative perspectives to speculative issues and then to epistemologicallogical considerations, we see a need for communication which no one of them can avoid and which transcends the explicit or public interchange which is often the work of well-meaning but marginal representatives of these philosophic approaches. For example, there is a sense in which some "progressive" neo-Thomist advocates of dialogue with Marxism are as "Marxist" as their Marxist-Leninist interlocutors. Philosophic debate is not political rhetoric. To the extent that what follows succeeds, it establishes the contours of a theoretical landscape, over which all of our protagonists can travel. It is our contention that these travellers—despite their varied historical situations—cannot avoid meeting, at least relative to the basic questions we evoke below. Only the reader will be able to say whether we have provided merely further evidence as to the incompatibility of various philosophic views or a useful map of the paths across the contemporary theoretical landscape. — Tom Rockmore et al. Marxism and Alternatives: Towarsd the Conceptual Interaction Among Soviet Philosophy, Neo-Thomism, Pragmatism, and Phenomenology (1981), pp. xiii-xiv.

In times of strife, taliban have usually mobilized in defense of tradition. British documents from as early as 1901 decry taliban opposition to colonialism in present-day Pakistan. However, as with so much else, it was the Soviet invasion and the US response that sent the transformative shock. In the 1980s, as guns and money coursed through the ranks of the Kandahar mujahedeen, squabbling over resources grew so frequent that many increasingly turned to religious law to settle their disputes. Small, informal bands of taliban, who were also battling against the Russians, established religious courts that heard cases from feuding fighters from across the south. Seemingly impervious to the lure of foreign riches, the taliban courts were in many eyes the last refuge of tradition in a world in upheaval. ... Thousands of talibs rallied to the cause, and an informal, centuries-old phenomenon of the Pashtun countryside morphed into a formal political and military movement, the Taliban. As a group of judges and legal-minded students, the Taliban applied themselves to the problem of anarchy with an unforgiving platform of law and order. The mujahedeen had lost their way, abandoned their religious principles, and dragged society into a lawless pit. So unlike most revolutionary movements, Islamic or otherwise, the Taliban did not seek to overthrow an existing state and substitute it with one to their liking. Rather, they sought to build a new state where none existed. This called for “eliminating the arbitrary rule of the gun and replacing it with the rule of law—and for countryside judges who had arisen as an alternative to a broken tribal system, this could only mean religious law. Jurisprudence is thus part of the Taliban’s DNA, but its single-minded pursuit was carried out to the exclusion of all other aspects of basic governance. It was an approach that flirted dangerously with the wrong kind of innovation: in the countryside, the choice was traditionally yours whether to seek justice in religious or in tribal courts, yet now the Taliban mandated religious law as the compulsory law of the land. It is true that, given the nature of the civil war, any law was better than none at all—but as soon as things settled down, fresh problems arose. The Taliban’s jurisprudence was syncretic, mixing elements from disparate schools of Islam along with heavy doses of traditional countryside Pashtun practice that had little to do with religion. As a result, once the Taliban marched beyond the rural Pashtun belt and into cities like Kabul or the ethnic minority regions of northern Afghanistan, they encountered a resentment that rapidly bred opposition.

Openly political socialist writings, not legally publishable under then-prevailing censorship practices, would either be published abroad and smuggled back into Russia or, as in this instance, duplicated and circulated clandestinely (a forerunner of the present-day samizdat, or “self-publishing,” as the circulation of uncensored writings in typescript is called in Soviet Russia).

classical Marxism proclaimed the imminence of world proletarian revolution, Leninism (or “Marxism-Leninism,” as it became known in the Soviet Union after Lenin’s death) originated in the proposition that there is no proletarian revolution except through the party.

The party conflict of 1920–21 reflected the grave problems of the time of transition through which the country was passing. By the close of 1919 the Reds were clearly on their way to victory in the Civil War, but the prize—Soviet Russia—was a war-ravaged land with a hungry and dispirited people, an industry in shambles, an inflation-debased currency, a railway system in a state of virtual collapse, and a peasantry with no incentive to supply food for the towns. It took the revolt of the Kronstadt sailors in March 1921 and other ominous signs of popular unrest to galvanize the regime into its decision—made at the Tenth Party Congress that very month—to abandon War Communism for the NEP. Meanwhile, however, Trotsky had offered a plan prescribing the militarization of the labor force as a way out of the crisis, and this precipitated the party conflict.[365]

All this, combined with adept maneuvering in the intra-party politics of the time, explains the otherwise paradoxical fact that Stalin’s political fortunes rose at the very congress which listened in hostile silence when he tried to justify his conduct in the Soviet-Polish war.

The first large-scale party purge of the Soviet period took place during the ensuing months, under the direction of the secretarial trio, and Molotov reported to the Eleventh Party Congress in March 1922 that the party’s membership had been reduced from 660,000 to about 500,000 through the expulsions and forced resignations that resulted. “Now,” he said, “those numerous currents and semi-formed factions do not exist.”[369]

Moscow sought to camouflage its Georgian operation from the international public—and the Soviet public as well—by presenting it as an intervention in an Armenian-Georgian conflict during which internal revolutionary changes happened to occur.

Lenin was worried over Georgian response to sovietization and also over reaction in the international socialist movement to the spectacle of Soviet overthrow of a Social Democratic government.

Lenin had no monopoly upon heroic leadership of the Bolshevik cause during the revolutionary period. Many others rendered exceptional service in saving the Revolution and constructing the new Soviet order. It is particularly noteworthy that Trotsky rose to great heights as the organizer of the Red Army and chief manager of its operations on the far-flung fronts of the Civil War.

In deviation from the historic pattern of Russian autocracy, the Soviet Russian state arose as a novel form of party rule.

it was the higher party organs, notably the Central Committee and its subcommittee, the Politburo, that decided Soviet policy in both internal and external affairs, and the government evolved as the party’s main executive agency.

Since the party was the ruling political authority in the Soviet state, it was not as chief of government but as head of the party that Lenin acted as supreme leader.

Basic Soviet strategy in foreign affairs, under which the Comintern and the Foreign Commissariat operated as two arms of a dual policy, one working to overthrow capitalist governments while the other tried to conduct business with them, was essentially Lenin’s creation, as was the notion of a Soviet diplomacy designed to reduce the insecurity of the revolutionary state by aggravating the discords between its enemies.

the idea of Soviet culture as “national in form and socialist in content.

Under a reorganization carried out in 1920 the national commissariats became regular departments of the central organization, and affiliated sections were created in the executive committees of regional soviets. In that same year a Council of Nationalities was formed as a Narkomnats collegium in which each nationality in the RSFSR had representation.

The only acceptable type of autonomy was one exercised through the Soviet organization of a region in which one or more distinct national groups predominated.

White (i.e., anti-Soviet) Russian armies took the field under such former tsarist officers as Generals Denikin, Yudenich, and Wrangel. Anti-Bolshevik regional governments arose, among them the regime headed by Admiral Kolchak and based at Omsk, in Siberia. Military intervention by outside powers—chiefly France, Great Britain, Japan, and the United States—brought the Whites not only munitions and supplies but also some support, however indecisive, in fighting men. Meanwhile, the Reds found their talented war leader in Trotsky, who relinquished the Foreign Commissariat to become war commissar and chairman of the Revolutionary War Council of the Republic. Through mobilization—initially of workers in Petrograd and Moscow—the Red Army grew into a force of 800,000 by the end of 1918 and nearly four times that number a year later.

The crisis was made all the more desperate by hunger. With industry in a state of partial collapse and inflation rife, normal exchange between town and country was disrupted. The peasants had little incentive to supply the towns with grain and other produce. In these circumstances, the regime’s struggle for survival became in large part a battle for bread. Armed requisitioning detachments were sent into the countryside to take grain by force. To mobilize peasant assistance in the confiscation policy, the government organized “committees of the poor” in many villages. These consisted of poorer peasants who were often hungry themselves and who were given the task—in return for a share of the confiscated food—of helping Soviet organizations to extract grain from the “kulaks” (as the more well-to-do peasants were called) and any others suspected of harboring a surplus. So the countryside itself became the scene of class war, very often of a bloody kind.

Such were the circumstances under which the system of War Communism came into being and which prompted the government to proclaim the Soviet Republic a “military camp” in a decree of September 2, 1918. War Communism has been described as a compound of war emergency and socialist dogma. Its main features, in addition to the forcible food requisitions, were extreme centralization of economic life, the state’s effort to take both production and distribution into its own hands as far as possible, the compulsory mobilization of labor, and the attempt to abolish money in favor of direct exchange in kind.[317] It remained in force until 1921, when the regime proclaimed the New Economic Policy in order to revive the shattered economy. Under the NEP, forcible grain requisitions were replaced with a graduated tax in kind upon the peasant farmsteads, a money economy was restored, and private enterprise was legalized in agriculture, the service trades, and parts of light industry.

Not only was he appealing to the urge prevalent in the party to concentrate attention and effort on the tasks of Soviet development, he was hinting that a fully socialist economy could be created in a comparatively short time.

Stalin’s Lenin was the one who defined the task of building socialism in the doctrine of kto kogo?—who would beat whom in the internal class contest between the proletarian dictatorship and the Soviet bourgeoisie?

But what does building socialism mean if we translate this formula into concrete class language? Building socialism in the USSR means overcoming our Soviet bourgeoisie by our own forces in the course of a struggle.”[

At the end of 1927 and in the early months of 1928 the Soviet regime was confronted with a critical shortage of grain procurements. Among the reasons for peasant withholding of grain from the market was an intensified goods famine brought on in part by fiscal policies espoused earlier under the influence of Bukharinist low-price philosophy.[614] In an effort to galvanize the lagging grain procurements campaign, the party leaders fanned out to the main grain-growing regions.

He spent the next three weeks in the Siberian centers of Novosibirsk, Barnaul, Rubtsovsk, and Omsk conferring with local party and government officials and dictating the line they were to follow. Here at last he found an opportunity to practice the “Leninist hardness” that he had foreseen would be necessary in the revolutionary process of building Soviet socialism.

When they objected that this would be an “emergency measure” for which the judges and prosecutors were not prepared, Stalin said: “Let’s allow that it will be an emergency measure. So what?” Emergency measures would give splendid results, he went on, and any court workers unprepared to apply them should be purged. As for the danger that the kulaks would react by sabotaging next year’s grain deliveries, sabotage was an ever-present danger, and the solution lay in still further measures. Specifically, the organizing of collective and state farms (kolkhozy and sovkhozy). Soviet industry must be made independent of kulak caprice by setting up enough collective and state farms in the next three or four years to provide the state with at least a third of its grain requirement.

This metaphorical depiction of the Soviet situation as a great wrestling match of opposing classes was at once a manifesto of Stalin’s Leninism and a clear revelation of his lifelong need to “beat” in the twofold sense of “strike” and “be victorious.

Pinochet epitomized the “moderate autocrat friendly to American interests,” as the new U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick characterized “authoritarian” military rulers in her famous Commentary article, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” which attacked Jimmy Carter’s policy on human rights.34 The Chileans could be counted on as an ideological ally in the battle against Soviet influence in the hemisphere and a supporter of a hard-line, militarist U.S. approach to revolutionary upheaval in Central America in the 1980s.

But his expressed willingness to put his troops under American command was pure public relations. “We shall never agree to that,” Mao cabled Zhou in Chungking on January 25, 1945, and his reason harked back to Lenin’s theory of imperialism. It would put the party’s troops “under foreign command, turning them into a colonial army,” Mao said. America was the imperialist power, the Soviet Union the revolutionary one. And that is what mattered when it came to distinguishing between permanent friends and permanent enemies.

The final victory over the Soviet Union did not really lead to the domination of "the market." More than anything, it simply cemented the dominance of fundamentally conservative managerial elites—corporate bureaucrats who use the pretext of short-term, competitive, bottom-line thinking to squelch anything likely to have revolutionary implications of any kind.

A notable feature of Stalin’s machine was the power structure that he constructed at its apex. Each Central Committee secretary employed the services of a number of assistants. As general secretary Stalin built up in the course of the twenties a corps of personal political aides who were chosen for their talent and acumen as well as for their loyalty. They kept him informed on every sphere of Soviet affairs, including foreign relations, and assisted him in preparing his policy positions. They also were his representatives vis-à-vis the bureaucracy.[481] No such personal chancery was created by Lenin, who dealt with the top party and government functionaries as directly as possible, employing a minimum of intermediaries.

But institutionally authoritarian as it was, the Soviet party-state of the NEP years was a far cry from the dread bureaucratic leviathan conjured up by our image of a “totalitarian system.”[490]

In the NEP era Soviet society was not yet the tightly controlled organism that it would become during the Stalinist thirties as a result of the revolution from above that Stalin initiated in late 1929, when the power to do so was finally in his hands.

He had given Bolshevism strong personal leadership without being a dictator who ruled by arbitrary command. The movement had arisen as his political following in Russian Marxism and developed for twenty years under his guidance and inspiration. Although not institutionalized in an office, his role of supreme leader had entered into the unwritten constitution of Bolshevism, its habitual modus operandi. Lenin had been the movement’s organizer, its chief strategist and tactician, the author of its distinctive version of Marxist ideology, and the authoritative interpreter of party doctrine. He had been the commander-in-chief of the party in the political struggles that led up to the revolutionary conquest of power, and in those that ensued after power was won. He had been the dominant policy-making personality of the ruling party and of the new Third International that came into being under its auspices. His unique authority enabled him to unify an extremely disputatious ruling group whose inner conflicts continually threatened to tear it apart into warring factions. As head of the Soviet government, moreover, Lenin was Bolshevism’s chief executive and director of its foreign relations.

When he wrote the testament in December 1922, his anxious concern on this score was visible in every line of the document. It showed up in his proposal that the Central Committee’s membership be enlarged to fifty or one hundred as a means of containing its inner conflicts and thus of preventing a “schism” that could jeopardize the continued stability of the party and the Soviet system. It was reflected in his comment on the antagonistic relations between Stalin and Trotsky as the prime source of the danger of a split in the Central Committee, and in his consideration of the qualifications of various possible candidates for succession to the supreme leadership.

The American sociologist Barrington Moore proposed a longer-term explanation for the emergence of military dictatorship in Japan. Seeking the ultimate roots of dictatorship and democracy in different routes toward the capitalist transformation of agriculture, Moore noted that Britain allowed an independent rural gentry to enclose its estates and expel from the countryside “surplus” labor who were then “free” to work in its precocious industries. British democracy could rest upon a stable, conservative countryside and a large urban middle class fed by upwardly mobile labor. Germany and Japan, by contrast, industrialized rapidly and late while maintaining unchanged a traditional landlord-peasant agriculture. Thereafter they were obliged to hold in check all at once fractious workers, squeezed petty bourgeois, and peasants, either by force or by manipulation. This conflict-ridden social system, moreover, provided only limited markets for its own products. Both Germany and Japan dealt with these challenges by combining internal repression with external expansion, aided by the slogans and rituals of a right-wing ideology that sounded radical without really challenging the social order. To Barrington Moore’s long-term analysis of lopsided modernization, one could add further short-term twentieth-century similarities between the German and Japanese situations: the vividness of the perception of a threat from the Soviet Union (Russia had made territorial claims against Japan since the Japanese victory of 1905), and the necessity to adapt traditional political and social hierarchies rapidly to mass politics. Imperial Japan was even more successful than Nazi Germany in using modern methods of mobilization and propaganda to integrate its population under traditional authority. Moore’s perceived similarities between German and Japanese development patterns and social structures have not been fully convincing to Japan specialists. Agrarian landlords cannot be shown to have played a major role in giving imperial Japan its peculiar mix of expansionism and social control. And if imperial Japanese techniques of integration were very successful, it was mostly because Japanese society was so coherent and its family structure so powerful. Imperial Japan, finally, despite undoubted influence from European fascism and despite some structural analogies to Germany and Italy, faced less critical problems than those two countries. The Japanese faced no imminent revolutionary threat, and needed to overcome neither external defeat nor internal disintegration (though they feared it, and resented Western obstacles to their expansion in Asia). Though the imperial regime used techniques of mass mobilization, no official party or autonomous grassroots movement competed with the leaders. The Japanese empire of the period 1932–45 is better understood as an expansionist military dictatorship with a high degree of state-sponsored mobilization than as a fascist regime.

To Lenin, Russia on the morrow of the taking of power was Soviet but not yet socialist. It had undergone a political revolution that placed the state in the hands of the working class led by a party of Marxist socialists, but the country’s way of life had not yet become socialist, or had done so only in part. Nationalization of the land, resources, and main means of production did not make Russia socialist, notwithstanding the use of the phrase “War Communism” as a label for the initial period of Bolshevik rule. For “socialism” meant more than collective ownership of the means of production.

But he did play a commanding part in the larger party controversy of the time by taking up “socialism in one country” as a political and ideological platform. This he did at the end of 1924, when he spoke out for the first time on building socialism in an isolated Soviet Russia.

Citing Lenin’s animadversions on the glorification of personality, post-Stalin Soviet pronouncements have condemned the cult of Stalin which flourished in the nineteen-thirties and forties as an un-Communist phenomenon. Personality cults in general, they have argued, violate the essential nature of Communism as a movement and system.[470] Our study casts doubt on that contention. It shows at least that there was nothing anomalous in the appearance of the original Communist personality cult; it was a natural and spontaneous outgrowth of Russian Communism as a movement which had, in Lenin, a charismatic central figure. His own intense dislike of adulation in no way alters this conclusion. It merely proves that the first and most enduring of

What “complete victory” really meant in Leninist thinking, it now transpired, was not the complete building of socialism in the USSR; it was the safety of Soviet socialism from external danger, from military intervention by the hostile capitalist encirclement.

For that, the proletariat must be victorious “at least in several other countries.”[587] Only in the further progress of world revolution lay final security—and in that sense final victory—for the Soviet Revolution.

Cuban Aircraft are Seized During the early 1960’s, Erwin Harris sought to collect $429,000 in unpaid bills from the Cuban government, for an advertising campaign promoting Cuban tourism. Holding a court order from a judge in Florida and accompanied by local sheriff’s deputies, he searched the East Coast of the United States for Cuban property. In September 1960, while Fidel was at the United Nations on an official visit, Harris found the Britannia that Castro had flown in to New York. That same day the front page of The Daily News headlined, “Cuban Airliner Seized Here.” Erwin Harris continued by seizing a C-46, which was originally owned by Cuba Aeropostal and was now owned by Cubana, as well as other cargo airplanes. He seized a Cuban Naval vessel, plus 1.2 million Cuban cigars that were brought into Tampa, Florida, by ship. In Key West, Harris also confiscated railroad cars carrying 3.5 million pounds of cooking lard destined for Havana. All of these things, excepting the Britannia, were sold at auction. Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, replaced the airplane that had been confiscated. On September 28th, Castro boarded the Soviet aircraft at Idlewild Airport smiling, most likely because he knew that his Britannia airplane would be returned to Cuba due to diplomatic immunity.

Gustavo Arcos, a loyal revolutionary who was with Castro in the second car when they attacked the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba, was shot in his back. The shot severely wounded him and disabled his right leg, thereby causing him a lifetime of pain. A few years later, Arcos went to Mexico with the intention of gathering support as well as money and munitions for the movement. After the revolution, for his loyalty, Gustavo Arcos was appointed the Cuban Ambassador to Belgium. However, as ambassador he became disillusioned with the Soviet form of communism and began to see Castro more as a dictator than a revolutionary leader. When he returned from his duties in Belgium, instead of being able to freely leave Cuba, Arcos was convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison on charges of being a counter-revolutionary. In 1981, after his release from his years of confinement, he attempted to escape from Cuba, for which he was sent back to prison. After his second release, Arcos decided that he could better serve the people of Cuba by staying and accepting the position of the Executive Secretary of the Cuban Committee for Human Rights. His committee rapidly grew from occupying a small office in Havana, to being a nationwide organization recognized by the United Nations. Gustavo Arcos died of natural causes on August 8, 2006, at 79 years of age.

Since its origins, socialism has meant the liberation of working people from exploitation. As the Marxist theoretician Anton Pannekoek observed, “this goal is not reached and cannot be reached by a new directing and governing class substituting itself for the bourgeoisie,” but can only be “realized by the workers themselves being master over production.” Mastery over production by the producers is the essence of socialism, and means to achieve this end have regularly been devised in periods of revolutionary struggle, against the bitter opposition of the traditional ruling classes and the ‘revolutionary intellectuals’ guided by the common principles of Leninism and Western managerialism, as adapted to changing circumstances. But the essential element of the socialist ideal remains: to convert the means of production into the property of freely associated producers and thus the social property of people who have liberated themselves from exploitation by their master, as a fundamental step towards a broader realm of human freedom.

It may well be that the Bolsheviks' greatest strength in 1917 was not strict party organization and discipline (which scarcely existed at this time) but rather the party's stance of intransigent radicalism on the extreme left of the political spectrum. While other socialist and liberal groups jostled for position in the Provisional Government and Petrograd Soviet, the Bolsheviks refused to be co-opted and denounced the politics of coalition and compromise. While other formerly radical politicians called for restraint and responsible, statesmanlike leadership, the Bolsheviks stayed out on the streets with the irresponsible and belligerent revolutionary crowd. As the 'dual power' structure disintegrated, discrediting the coalition parties represented in the Provisional Government and Petrograd Soviet leadership, only the Bolsheviks were in a position to benefit. Among the socialist parties, only the Bolsheviks had overcome Marxist scruples, caught the mood of the crowd, and declared their willingness to seize power in the name of the proletarian revolution.

The old revolutionary chant "Power to the People," usually accompanied by a raised clenched fist, has gone out of fashion. The failure of the socialist model has become too evident. The phrase probably came from the battle cry of the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution when the slogan was "Power to the Soviets." In America in the 1960s the Soviet slogan was corrupted into what some called "participatory democracy," and people like "Tom Hayden of Students for a Democratic Society were calling for a transfer of power to the 'people,' whom they were able to identify as themselves." Later on, the "Power to the People" slogan was adopted by Bobby Seale as the chant of the Black Panthers. Needless to say, the last thing many of these people had in mind was actually giving all of the people a real voice in their government. But that is what is happening now.

The eldest son of Fidel Castro, Fidel Ángel Castro Díaz-Balart, a nuclear scientist better known as "Fidelito," who closely resembled his father was found dead in Havana on Thursday morning, February 1, 2018, after having taken his own life. Castro Díaz-Balart was born in 1949, when Fidel was married to Mirta Diaz-Balart. Being with his father when he triumphantly entered Havana during the Cuban Revolution, he was very popular among the people but resisted becoming involved in politics. The 68-year-old son of Cuba’s revolutionary leader, had been suffering from depression for months according to State television in Cuba. It was reported that he had been receiving outpatient medical treatment following a hospital stay. A nuclear physicist trained by the former Soviet Union, he had run Cuba's nuclear power program until a dispute with his father. At the time of his death, Castro Díaz-Balart was a scientific adviser for the Cuban Council of State and was vice president of Cuba’s Academy of Sciences. During the time his father was the President of Cuba "Fidelito" helped in the development of a nuclear power program in the Communist country. He had three children, Mirta-María, Fidel Antonio and José Raúl with Natasha Smirnova his first wife whom he met in Russia. After divorcing Smirnova, he married María Victoria Barreiro from Cuba. He has three first cousins in the United States including U.S. Congressman Mario Díaz-Balart.

The Cuban Military includes the army, air and air defense forces, navy and various youth groups and reserve components. As a United Military Force it is called the “Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias – FAR” or “The Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces.” “FAR” extends into the civilian sector controlling 60% of the economy. Because of the overlapping interests, it is difficult to separate the various military branches which have been and are still controlled by Raúl Castro. In his speeches he frequently has stressed the military as the people's partner in the operation of the country. The General Officer’s, have duties that extend beyond their responsibilities to the military. Prior to the 1980’s, the Cuban military depended on the Soviet Union to support them and in return, Cuba supported the Soviet Union militarily in Africa, South America and the Middle East. Throughout the 1980’s, the amount of military equipment they received gave Cuba the most formidable military in Latin America. Because of corruption and drug trafficking by the Cuban army in 1989, a move was instituted by Raúl Castro to rout out the offenders, executing some and reassigning others to the Ministry of Interior, which became part of a much smaller army. Presently Cuba has deepened its military training program with China. The Cuban military has been reduced to 39,000 troops however the Territorial Militia Troops, the Youth Labor Army, and the Naval Militia, now more defensive in nature, still retains the potential to make any enemy invasion costly.

In fact this was outrageous to many of his early admirers, that he would become a revolutionary Marxist, because in the United States that always had been associated with Soviet style bureaucratic Marxism and of course then you began to think about the Cold War and all the little films you saw in grade school of Russian kids with their hands hanging on barbed wire, and all that stuff... which actually wasn’t a mode of thought, but was just our mode of propaganda. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t better than their propaganda; events have proven it was… better.

In popular lore, the Iranian arms dealings have been portrayed as rogue policy pursued by the national security staff due to an inattentive president. In truth, the arms-to-Iran initiative continued a five-year-long strategy, one deeply rooted in Cold War fears of revolutionary Iran falling under the Soviet sphere.

The supreme goal of the CIA during the cold war was to steal Soviet secrets by recruiting spies, but the CIA never possessed a single one who had deep insight into the workings of the Kremlin. The number of Soviet spies with important information to reveal—all of them volunteers, not recruits—could be counted on the fingers of two hands. And all of them died, captured and executed by Moscow. Almost all had been betrayed by officers of the CIA’s Soviet division who were spying for the other side, under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Under Reagan, the CIA set off on misconceived third-world missions, selling arms to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to finance a war in Central America, breaking the law and squandering what trust remained reposed in it. More grievously, it missed the fatal weakness of its main enemy.

This familiarity of revolutionary violence in the French imaginaire, together with sepia-tinted memories of the old Franco-Russian alliance, pre-disposed intellectuals in France to greet Communist apologetics for Soviet brutality with a distinctly sympathetic ear.

One had a feeling, in revolutionary and intellectual circles, that they spoke from a script, playing characters from an Islamized version of a Soviet novel.

The most memorable lesson of the unexpected end of the Soviet Union for most Russians may be that history is a series of covert operations. Not the revolutionary masses, apparently, but the cloak-and-dagger intelligence agencies, in both East and West, are the real locomotives of history.

In the course of his informant career Morris Childs would come to be on a first-name basis with Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Mikhail Suslov (head of the Ideological Department of the Soviet Central Committee), and Boris Ponomarev (head of the International Department of the Soviet Central Committee), as well as meeting with MAO Zedong and Chou En Lai.19

The intermediate objectives for achieving U.S. defeat may be enumerated as follows: Make the Americans stupid – Disorient the people of the United States and other Western countries. Establish a set of myths useful from the standpoint of the long-range strategy. Examples of such myths: Josef Stalin is our “Uncle Joe,” a man we can trust; the Cold War was triggered by paranoid anti-Communists; Senator McCarthy blacklisted innocent people; President Kennedy was killed by Big Business and the CIA; the Vietnam War was fought on account of corporate greed; Russia and China are irreconcilable enemies who will not be able to combine their forces against the United States; the Soviet Union collapsed for economic reasons; Russia is America’s ally in the War on Terror. Infiltrate the U.S. financial system – Financial control through organized crime and drug trafficking. To this end the Eastern Bloc began infiltrating organized crime in the 1950s and, in 1960, began a narcotics offensive against the West which would generate billions of dollars in illicit money which banks could not resist laundering. In this way, a portal was opened into the heart of the capitalist financial structures in order to facilitate future economic and financial sabotage. Promote bankruptcy and economic breakdown – The promotion of a cradle-to-grave welfare state as a means to bankrupt the United States Treasury (i.e., the Cloward-Piven Strategy). Welfare simultaneously demoralizes the workforce as it bankrupts the government. Elect a stealth Communist president – As an organizer for the Communist Party explained during a meeting I attended more than thirty years ago, the stealth Communist president will one day exploit a future financial collapse to effect a transition from “the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” to the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Exploit the counter-revolution – Some strategists believe that a counter-revolutionary or right wing reaction is unavoidable. It is therefore necessary, from the standpoint of sound strategy, to send infiltrators into the right wing. Having a finger in every pie and an agent network in every organization, the Communists are not afraid of encouraging counter-revolution, secession, or civil war in the wake of financial collapse. After all, the reactionaries and right wing elements must be drawn out so that they can be purged or, if necessary, turned into puppet allies. Already Putin is posturing as a Christian who opposes feminism and homosexuality. This has fooled many “conservatives” in the West, and is an intentional ploy which further serves to disorient the West. Take away the nuclear button – The strategists in Moscow do not forget that the neutralization of the U.S. nuclear deterrent is the most important of all intermediate objectives. This can be achieved in one of four ways: (1) cutting off nuclear forces funding by Congress; (2) administratively unplugging the weapons through executive orders issued by Obama, (3) it may be accomplished through a general financial collapse, or (4) a first strike.

Isaac Babel’s controversial collection of stories, Red Cavalry, was put on trial in a Moscow club in 1926. Although the speeches against the book were passionate, Babel himself made an appearance to argue in his defense. The assembled crowd not only acquitted Babel, but also judged his work to be a real service to the revolution.61

Only Tarzan managed to escape judgment, since he escaped from the courtroom during a brawl.

We may be tortured by fire, Banished, in mines we may slave, We may be killed without mercy, Always remember, Be brave! Russian rebels had sung this song during the Revolution of 1905. It had been sung by all Russians in 1917 when the Tsar was overthrown, and it had been sung in the early days of Soviet rule; but now it was heard no more—it was too revolutionary! But all Russians knew the melody, and its words were being circulated by the anti-Stalinists among the Soviet troops in Germany.