Opinion of Vladimir Lenin?

[KaiserDave]

Despicable mass murderer. Gets a softer treatment in history than he deserves because his successor was more evil and more murderous and his predecessors were incompetent. The overwhelming majority of the Russian left was preferable to him (as well as all the liberals and many on the right), and did not support his brutal tactics and aims. He let his ideological dogmatism and pursuit for utopia blind him to the consequences of his actions among the poor suffering Russian people, especially the peasantry. Such terrible crimes as Decossackization, the suppression of the Tambov Rebellion, many of the policies of War Communism, the Red Terror, and more come to mind.

The humanitarian and scientific improvements of the USSR from the Tsarist backwater did not necessitate the historic amount of blood shed, lives ruined, families destroyed, and communities annihilated "in defense of the revolution."

I cannot emphasize enough how revolting I find how Lenin's dogmatism, coldness, and drive towards imagined utopia lead him to justify the murder of so many innocents. Such attitudes are extraordinarily dangerous, and history proves this. Whether it is to "win the war" or to "defend the revolution", please my God, we must keep our humanity. There is such a thing of making sacrifices or doing nasty things for a necessary and noble cause, and then there is needless slaughter of innocents.

HP.

[KaiserDave]

Despicable mass murderer. Gets a softer treatment in history than he deserves because his successor was more evil and more murderous and his predecessors were incompetent. The overwhelming majority of the Russian left was preferable to him (as well as all the liberals and many on the right), and did not support his brutal tactics and aims. He let his ideological dogmatism and pursuit for utopia blind him to the consequences of his actions among the poor suffering Russian people, especially the peasantry. Such terrible crimes as Decossackization, the suppression of the Tambov Rebellion, many of the policies of War Communism, the Red Terror, and more come to mind.

The humanitarian and scientific improvements of the USSR from the Tsarist backwater did not necessitate the historic amount of blood shed, lives ruined, families destroyed, and communities annihilated "in defense of the revolution."

Outside of virtue signaling about lost lives and downplaying the achievements of the Soviet Union, this post ignores the context of several actions done by the Bolsheviks and does not state the crimes done by others

How anyone could defend the pogrom-inducing, imperial warrior caste of Tsarist Russia is beyond me. The Cossacks were the main force of suppression of internal dissent and terror against bordering nations, peasants, and Jews in Russia. Their violence and fiefdoms needed to have been removed else the revolution fail. The Tambov rebellion, falsely painted as a rebellion of peasants against the Bolsheviks, were mainly former White officers taking advantage of the collapsing situation to hold onto territory. Indeed, outside of reactionary peasant leaders and the difficulty in maintaining the Soviet early on in the war through War Communism, the relations between the Bolsheviks and peasants were better if not the same then the remaining Left. Menshevik controlled Georgia and the nationalist republics in Poland, Azerbaijan, and the Baltics also heavily suppressed peasant uprisings and took harsh taxation and tribute. This, along with total war against the seceding republics, made it easy to conquer them.

I’m finishing this off with the usual stump speech. Education spending was rapidly increased for all in this new state under Lenin, Women could get an education and were strived to be equals under the law under Lenin, Lenin greatly aided anti-colonial and justice movements across the world, and finally sexual and artistic freedom were greatly expanded under Lenin. The revisionists and Landlords by all evidence deserved it, while the Leftcoms and Anarchists who had beliefs you all would still hope fail did not as much and in the way it happened.

Virtue signalling? This is the kind of callous and ideological delusional dismissal that comes along with Leninism I suppose.

Firstly, the Cossacks are not a class, they are an ethnic group. Many Cossacks participated in horrific crimes under the Tsarist regime, and were undeniably mostly quite reactionary. If you think that justifies the practices of the Bolsheviks that verged on ethnic cleansing, and engaged in wholesale collective punishment. I suppose we disagree. I disagree on the Tambov Rebellion as well, but that's more of a matter of facts. Alexander Antonov, the leader of the rebellion, was a longtime S-R and target of the Okhrana. But if you want to chalk him up to some kind of reactionary White, that's more propaganda. The reality of Tambov was that the Russian peasantry wanted more their own land and self-government, which had been denied for centuries. They were not however, interested in submitting themselves to the draconian demands of War Communism, or the grand utopian goals of the party to achieve their perfect society. The ruthless enforcement of party policy produced a justifiable backlash. As for broader peasant relations, Lenin had a very public derisive view of the peasants, and his policies contributed to the calamitous famines of the Civil War. Peasant rebellions were common, and they were entirely organic. Hard to say relations with the peasants were very good. As for the conquest of the outlying seceding Republicans, I can only say they were tragic.

As for the accomplishments of the USSR. I acknowledge the tremendous strides made by the USSR in social policy compared to the reactionary Tsarist regime. But these gains could all have been made in a Republic run by a liberal-socialist coalition. As for the very last sentence, I can only say justifications for political terror with lines such as "deserved it" (even for other socialists) are very disturbing, and it is the kind of thinking I warned against in my initial post. You can either deny the horrific collective punishment and mass violence that occurred by Lenin's order, or you can say it was justified. Either is deeply wrong.

[KaiserDave]

I haven't even mentioned the horribly elitist nature of vanguardism. Lenin had nothing but contempt for the people he desired to build utopia for, especially the peasantry.

[KaiserDave]

Today I learned many on Atlas will simp for genocidal tools of the Tsarist empire just to own the reds. Many are more wack than the 1986 movie condemning the Cat-Sacks. This is like calling the Ottoman Jannisaries a progressive force for freedom.

Nobody is “simping for the Cossacks.” We are objecting to the practices carried out by the Bolsheviks were were arguably ethnic cleansing. The Cossacks were not just a class. They were an ethnic group. You cannot ignore this crucial distinction. We are all cognizant of the crimes of the Cossacks under the Tsarist regime, but that doesn’t justify the collective punishment and terror carried out by the reds. As a Jew I am especially aware of the crimes of Cossacks in pogroms and their reactionary and anti semitic beliefs. This doesn't justify the deportation, expropriation, and mass violence against the Don-Kuban peoples. Special commissions, hostage-taking, mass graves, women and children in camps. I will let "Iron Felix" speak for himself in his report to Lenin.

the republic has to organize the internment in camps of about 100,000 prisoners from the Southern front and vast masses of people expelled from the rebellious [Cossack] settlements of the Terek, the Kuban, and the Don. Today 403 Cossack men and women aged between 14 and 17 arrived in Oryol for internment in the internment camp. They cannot be accepted as Oryol is already overloaded.

The Cheka set up execution lists from town to town. This was deeply evil. Again, you can either deny it or you can say it was necessary to "defend the revolution." That is up to you. There is such thing as necessary sacrifices, or doing nasty, brutish things to achieve a vital end. And then there is mass murder in a merciless drive to a utopia that never transpired. We cannot allow utopian visions to distract us from basic decency and humanity.

[KaiserDave]

Today I learned many on Atlas will simp for genocidal tools of the Tsarist empire just to own the reds. Many are more wack than the 1986 movie condemning the Cat-Sacks. This is like calling the Ottoman Jannisaries a progressive force for freedom.

Nobody is “simping for the Cossacks.” We are objecting to the practices carried out by the Bolsheviks were were arguably ethnic cleansing. The Cossacks were not just a class. They were an ethnic group. You cannot ignore this crucial distinction. We are all cognizant of the crimes of the Cossacks under the Tsarist regime, but that doesn’t justify the collective punishment and terror carried out by the reds.

It is arguable that the Cossacks were a warrior caste in Tsarist Russia, but that still does not defend that they were the jackboot keeping it all together and a terror in the countryside. Eliminating that category by taking away their special privileges made sense.

And not all Cossacks were subject to collective punishment, many in ukraine and Russia. Those that went with the Soviets and had no history with the Whites were treated much better.

The Cossack hosts as a whole were states within a state and ultimately arch-conservative in nature, not supporting their dissolution and special privileges are just madness.

The Tsarist empire did a lot of bad things but it's absolutely hilarious to call it genocidal (it wasn't under Nicolas II) when you consider what came afterward.

This is not true; somehow the multiple Jewish pogroms, Circassian genocide, and other attemptive genocidal pushes into the Far East and Caucasus—largely done by Cossacks who were over-represented in Russian colonial policy and settlement—don’t count.

I have elaborated upon my earlier posts, but I'll say it again.

This is not just a matter of breaking up reactionary cossack power structures and scattering them into the wind. This is ethnic cleansing, and deeply evil regardless.

Women and children in camps, in the small city of Pyatigorsk the Cheka killed 300 people in a single day. This is state terrorism. Since Decossackization the "Cossacks" have ceased to exist as a distinct ethnic group. Lenin did his job well. You can either defend his work as admirable or deny the crimes ever took place.

[KaiserDave]

In any case, Decossackization is but one crime on the lengthy list of terror and murder acts ordered by Lenin. But it is indicative of Lenin's use of mass murder as state policy. And it is profoundly evil. I remained perturbed by the fact that a whole third of this blog either condones his actions as necessary or doesn't believe they happened. I hope it is mostly just ignorance.

[KaiserDave]

In any case, Decossackization is but one crime on the lengthy list of terror and murder acts ordered by Lenin. But it is indicative of Lenin's use of mass murder as state policy. And it is profoundly evil. I remained perturbed by the fact that a whole third of this blog either condones his actions as necessary or doesn't believe they happened. I hope it is mostly just ignorance.

All factions have blood on their hands, but saying they were all bad or saying that the Bolsheviks and Lenin were evil murders and maniacs is flat out wrong.

Also the Cossacks, being a caste, were mainly not all killed but removed of powers and became Russian or Ukrainian. Mainly the officers and Cossack leadership was liquidated, while those who defected from their ranks and joined the Bolsheviks were unharmed until Stalin’s undeniable terrible leadership.

Of course all factions have some amount of blood on their hands. Denikin and Kolchak and company were bloody reactionaries and proto-fascists. The Tsarist regime was responsible for countless deaths. Even the liberals in the provisional government could be argued to be responsible for many lost lives, with their fruitless policy of continuing the war.

But nobody was comparable to the crimes of Lenin. On the Russian left, almost nobody was in favor of the terror tactics that Lenin carried out. The mass executions, execution quotas, the camps, the deportations, the brutal suppression of justified revolts of the people at Tambov, Kronstadt, in the Ukraine and so on. Lenin wanted to radically revolutionize Russia, as you well know, and in the process more people were dead than under years of pre-war Tsarist status quo.

Lenin was a hard-headed, uniquely driven, cold, hard man. He was unique in this regard, and his single-minded vision served him well in his revolutionary journey. But it also made him willing to carry out great evils. And foror what? The USSR did indeed make remarkable strides from the Tsarist backwater. As you have explained, many of these are objective facts. But for many Russians, the Bolshevik program left them starving, deprived of liberty and what little property they may have had, subject to an opaque, undemocratic bureaucratic regime, a sickeningly evil secret police, and ethnic chauvinism. Certainly for the Don-Kuban Cossacks, the people on the Volga river valley, or for the millions of Russians subject to state terrorism, or those thousands laying face down in a ditch, the USSR achieved nothing but pain and suffering.

We are really going around in circles. You can either acknowledge these events and say they were necessary for the protection of the revolution, or deny they occurred. Or some combination of them both. Alternatively, we can acknowledge the crimes and evils of Lenin, and acknowledge the danger of letting utopian visions cloud our humanity.

[KaiserDave]

I do not deny that mistakes were made and they were needlessly harsh, but that depends on a contextual and in many cases a case-by-case basis.

Also, it is wrong to say that the Mensheviks or anarchists were any more or less bloody given that they were limited to areas where they had complete control over and in the former case mainly unmolested and tucked in the mountains. Still they engaged in forced extractions in terms of tax and tribute of the peasantry there and also sidelined and silenced dissent.

I mean. You say "mistakes" and "needlessly harsh." And I see crimes against humanity. But I guess we can settle there.

As for the Mensheviks and SRs, I am not all that educated on conditions in their Republics. I am willing to believe they engaged in repression, but the mass purges, the conduct of the Cheka, and the mass deportations and ethnic cleansing is really just on another scale with Lenin.

[KaiserDave]

It would have been better had he lived a little longer to secure Trotsky as his successor. While Lenin and Trotsky weren't democratic socialists like Martov, they were far better than Stalin.

"Trotsky would have salvaged the USSR" is one of the funniest pieces of liberal gospel. Despite being one of Stalin's harshest critics, Trotsky never took issue with Stalin's tyranny over the Soviet populace.

Stalin was a massive HP and one of the worst statesmen of the past century, but for all you could say about him, he wasn't a warhawk and never had any serious intention of invading western Europe. Trotsky, on the other hand, was a warhawk and wanted to invade a lot of places. Stalin's isolationism was one of Trotsky's biggest criticisms of him.

With Trotsky, the Cold War would have been a hot war.

Bukharin is right there. By all historical indications, Lenin liked him the most as a potential successor, he was the favorite of the CCCP, and he primarily wanted to continue Lenin's market policies. You'd think Bukharin would be a slam dunk for communist-sympathetic-on-paper liberals to clamor about, but no, they choose Trotsky.

Yes, Trotsky was a madman, and arguably worse than Stalin. Reflects very badly on Lenin they he wanted Trotsky to succeed him.