An authentic mood of revolt had been swelling up in Russia for some time before 1917, with a previous attempted revolution in 1905-06 violently repressed by the tsarist regime. A great inspiration behind this mood was the back-to-the-land Christian anarchism of the revered Russian novelist and thinker Leo Tolstoy, [11] author of
If it's any consolation, Trotsky famously met the business end of an ice-pick.
Whenever I think of the brutality of early-days Bolsheviks, recalling accounts of the Checka's activities is enough to remind me of the pure psychopathy at the heart of the beast.
The details surrounding the Bolsheviks' disposal of the Romanovs (Nicholas, Alexandra, their four daughters and their anemic son) are also as instructive as they are harrowing.
Voline: “Their system depends on deception and violence, as in any authoritarian and state system, which necessarily dominates, exploits and oppresses. … The statist ‘communist’ regime is just another kind of fascist regime” — Which is hardly surprising, given their connection to Wall Street.
‘Liberty or death.’ Indeed. Brilliant stuff - thank you Paul. I am currently planning to live an anarchist Christian/Buddhist life in central Portugal - insh-Allah - if anyone would like to join me?
Fascinating look at the history. And it helps give some backdrop to the next assault on Ukraine, in the early 30s, directed once more at the kulaks or small independent farmers, again condemned as counter-revolutionary. Which both give resonance to the Ukraine-Russia enmity, ongoing.
"Socialism only makes sense if it is the people who govern, not the machines, the capital, or a class of aristocrats who call themselves communists". Exactly.
Actually, I believe the Bolsheviks lasted for just a few years before Stalin purged all the original revolutionaries. He was the only one "left" standing. No pun intended, as he was more totalitarian than a democratic socialist.
In fact, "around 5,000 American soldiers were part of an allied expedition to intervene in the ongoing Russian civil war against the "Red" Bolshevik forces. For a little over a year, the American Expeditionary Force in North Russia fought to give the anti-Bolshevik "White" Russians the upper hand."
The Western ruling class was so terrified by this revolution that the British monarchy would not give refuge to the Czar and his family in fear that it would trigger a prole revolt in England.
At the beginning of the 20th Century workers were uniting throughout the West and unions were becoming powerful and not yet co-opted. The newspaper reporters were muckrakers from the working-class and regularly wrote about worker exploitation.
What's interesting to note, is that many believe the 1917 Russian Revolution was funded by Wall Street banksters who wanted to get rid of the Czar, but once that was done quickly ensured Stalinism followed.
but you don't understand that a revolution was taking place that overthrew the ancient feudal system at its foundation, and the anarchists did not have the strength to repel the forces of the counter-revolution, only the Bolsheviks could do so.
The bankers perhaps financed the revolution in the early days, given that at the beginning it had different souls, Mensheviks, bourgeois, anarchists, socialists, Bolsheviks, etc. One of the leaders of the revolution was Kerensky, who was certainly not a Bolshevik. But I don't think that when the Bolsheviks took power they continued to do so, in fact the Russian and international banks, still in the hands of the capitalists, suspended all accounts and it was one of the big problems that the Bolsheviks had to face.
As for the soviets, they were real bottom-up assemblies of workers, peasants and soldiers, I'm talking about the times of the revolution. Think of the heroic sailors' soviet of Kronstad, then massacred by the Bolshevik guards themselves, for fear that it was infiltrated by the Korlinovists and counter-revolutionaries.
the Mensheviks were in favor of a bourgeois parliament and thought that the revolution had lasted too long, they wanted to eliminate the Bolsheviks from the new government and open up to the bourgeoisie and also to the old tsarist ruling class. Not even the anarchists had the strength to oppose the terrible class war from above that the opponents of the revolution were unleashing.
This would lead to the massacre of the Bolsheviks.
Only Marxists could do this. That's why everyone wanted to take them out. It was a clash not only of power, but political, radical, the word ideological, when talking about Marxist revolution, makes less sense...
I would add that the entire bourgeois and aristocratic world, even the moderate socialists, hated the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks were considered the devil, and to survive they sometimes became one, but less and less than their capitalist antagonists, who as far as the devil was concerned, had Mammon and enriched themselves with the genocides of entire populations, with slavery practiced as a means of economic accumulation , continuous wars and intensive exploitation of the working class. As they do even now.
Remember also that even the anarchist Kropotkin voted in favor of the First World War, a bloodbath that also caused the Russian Revolution.
at a certain point the Bolsheviks had against them the very powerful internal reaction, the Mensheviks, the Cossacks, and all the European and not only European nations. This is reality. Lenin knew from Marx, in his writing on the Paris Commune, that if the Communards occupied the Central Bank, they would have a real chance of succeeding. But in the early days no Russian bank was willing to collaborate with the Bolsheviks. It's a fact. The Russian revolution was a complex and controversial affair, just think of Kronstadt, in which the Bolsheviks acted like butchers against other Marxist comrades (by the way, Kronstadt was a sailors' soviet, of worker and peasant origin), and the treatment they reserved for Nestor Makhno and his troops, without whom, in the endless Russian campaigns, the revolution would have been lost;
and to the massacres of anarchists and early communists themselves. But the Bolsheviks were also massacred en masse by the Kornilovists, the Black Guards, the Cadets and the Imperial Army, and by the imperialist armies outside Russia. Their ranks were full of spies and agents provocateurs. They were subjected to a continuous siege both inside the country and outside. It's not every day to overthrow a thousand-year-old empire and an entire ruling class and proclaim Soviet communism. The Bolsheviks were certainly not saints, far from it, but Lenin knew from Saint-Juste that ''Ceux qui font des révolutions à moitié n' ont fait que se creuser un tombeau.''
[Those who make revolutions halfway are only digging a grave for themselves.]
At that point they could only move forward and continue fighting, it was a civil war, as well as an external war.
We know who took power in 1917 in Russia. They were the Soviets of workers, peasants and soldiers, i.e. bottom-up assemblies that decided the actions of the new government. Hence the name of the Soviet Union. Factories for workers and lands for farmers, and the end of the world imperialist war which was causing millions of deaths and suffering. In fact, the backbone of the Revolution of '17 was the army, it was the soldiers, who mutinied en masse so as not to die like flies in the name of the arbitrariness of the czars, capitalists and master classes, including the Church, which sent its military chaplains blessing the dead. The millions who died in the First World War were mainly farmers and workers, sent into disarray by their very religious sovereigns in a crazy fratricidal world war.
One of the first initiatives implemented by the new Soviet government was the abolition of large landholdings (read large estates).
Lenin read the decree on land: ''All large agrarian estates, all lands belonging to the crown, monasteries, church, ... are placed at the disposal of the Agrarian Land Committees and the District Peasants' Soviets... ''.
A great Reset yes, but the opposite of what they are preparing for us in Davos, a Reset from below.
The October Revolution was an experiment that upset the natural order of things which has always established the right of the strongest to decide and legislate, and absolute power by divine right, at least in Russia, over endless masses, deprived of rights , voiceless, reduced to subhumans, oppressed by ecclesiastical dogmas, kept in total ignorance. It is known that Siberia already functioned very well under the Holy Imperial Crown, the idea had in fact been that of the tsars....
The Bolsheviks took that power which in Russia had always been denied by divine right to the masses, thanks to the participation of a part of the Russian people, of the army, of representatives of the working class and, in part, but only in part , of the peasants, the question is controversial, (that the anarchist Nestor Makhno who knew them well took them). They obtained it with an act of force, with the soldiers who mutinied from their superiors to join the revolution, overthrowing the previous feudal power that had lasted for centuries, and was based, yes, on force, arbitrariness and assassination.
This is how it goes in revolutions...
Or at least they tried to do it, it's another thing to decide if they really succeeded...
The so-called Soviet "dictatorship" in fact it crumbled under the shock wave of a much more powerful and pervasive totalitarianism: neoliberalism, the tremendous force of global financial power and multinationals. We are all in this together, even ex-communist China.
As in Plato's Cave we are inside and we talk about 'Soviet dictatorship', without realizing that we have fallen into the era of the infinite multiplication of goods, the ruthless dictatorship of profit as an end in itself, of perhaps 50 multinationals, even less, which it is driving the earth as we know it to its extinction. Where war, even nuclear, has now become the fastest method to govern and rob entire continents. They are wars of robbery, those are happening now, not revolutions, unfortunately.
I think it makes sense to see the Covid scam as global (ongoing) war against the working class (as well as the much of the middle class too). As a political philosophy, anarchism failed as pathetically (as any other "-ism" out there) not only to fight against this ruling class attack, failed to recognize it as an attack but has joined the war on the side of the ruling class as storm troopers against those few fighting against it. So, I gather from your article that we should see anarchism as a way forward? When it has failed and continues to fail so miserably? This is not to say that anarchism doesn't have positive things to say, but then so does socialism, communism and Marxism (as well as liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism who have all failed too (as demonstrated post Oct 7th 2023)).
Nicholas II and the Romanov had direct connection to Wallstreet. This is where the whole alternative explanation of what happened breaks down. We are given an unbelievable official history that some workers' leaders from the goodness of their hearts with support of the masses destroyed the monarchy when everybody was against them. And the alternative explanation spread by the whites and Churchil, and conspiracy literature is that it was "the jews", Wallstreet and jewish bankers. And the problem with this is that the Romanovs were part of the club. Directly connected to the Round table and the American Eastern Establishment. Kiril Vladimirovich financed them through the SOSJ while spreading rumors of the jewish conspiracy. Why the head of the Romanovs finances the financers of the Bolsheviks?
Good one!
Random thoughts:
If it's any consolation, Trotsky famously met the business end of an ice-pick.
Whenever I think of the brutality of early-days Bolsheviks, recalling accounts of the Checka's activities is enough to remind me of the pure psychopathy at the heart of the beast.
The details surrounding the Bolsheviks' disposal of the Romanovs (Nicholas, Alexandra, their four daughters and their anemic son) are also as instructive as they are harrowing.
Voline: “Their system depends on deception and violence, as in any authoritarian and state system, which necessarily dominates, exploits and oppresses. … The statist ‘communist’ regime is just another kind of fascist regime” — Which is hardly surprising, given their connection to Wall Street.
It's always a power grab, under the pretense of fighting it. I'm reminded of these lines (from https://redpillpoems.substack.com/p/wokeworld-take-2):
“…pretending
— in the spirit of their virulent hoax —
that their goals were entirely noble
and their methods beyond reproach
as they feigned a burning concern
for their fellow sisters and brothers
when the aim of their long-plotted plague
of weaponized infantile outrage
had always been nothing
but the wielding of power over others.”
‘Liberty or death.’ Indeed. Brilliant stuff - thank you Paul. I am currently planning to live an anarchist Christian/Buddhist life in central Portugal - insh-Allah - if anyone would like to join me?
Fascinating look at the history. And it helps give some backdrop to the next assault on Ukraine, in the early 30s, directed once more at the kulaks or small independent farmers, again condemned as counter-revolutionary. Which both give resonance to the Ukraine-Russia enmity, ongoing.
I don't know anything. It feels like this is happening right now.
"Socialism only makes sense if it is the people who govern, not the machines, the capital, or a class of aristocrats who call themselves communists". Exactly.
Actually, I believe the Bolsheviks lasted for just a few years before Stalin purged all the original revolutionaries. He was the only one "left" standing. No pun intended, as he was more totalitarian than a democratic socialist.
In fact, "around 5,000 American soldiers were part of an allied expedition to intervene in the ongoing Russian civil war against the "Red" Bolshevik forces. For a little over a year, the American Expeditionary Force in North Russia fought to give the anti-Bolshevik "White" Russians the upper hand."
The Western ruling class was so terrified by this revolution that the British monarchy would not give refuge to the Czar and his family in fear that it would trigger a prole revolt in England.
At the beginning of the 20th Century workers were uniting throughout the West and unions were becoming powerful and not yet co-opted. The newspaper reporters were muckrakers from the working-class and regularly wrote about worker exploitation.
What's interesting to note, is that many believe the 1917 Russian Revolution was funded by Wall Street banksters who wanted to get rid of the Czar, but once that was done quickly ensured Stalinism followed.
but you don't understand that a revolution was taking place that overthrew the ancient feudal system at its foundation, and the anarchists did not have the strength to repel the forces of the counter-revolution, only the Bolsheviks could do so.
The bankers perhaps financed the revolution in the early days, given that at the beginning it had different souls, Mensheviks, bourgeois, anarchists, socialists, Bolsheviks, etc. One of the leaders of the revolution was Kerensky, who was certainly not a Bolshevik. But I don't think that when the Bolsheviks took power they continued to do so, in fact the Russian and international banks, still in the hands of the capitalists, suspended all accounts and it was one of the big problems that the Bolsheviks had to face.
As for the soviets, they were real bottom-up assemblies of workers, peasants and soldiers, I'm talking about the times of the revolution. Think of the heroic sailors' soviet of Kronstad, then massacred by the Bolshevik guards themselves, for fear that it was infiltrated by the Korlinovists and counter-revolutionaries.
the Mensheviks were in favor of a bourgeois parliament and thought that the revolution had lasted too long, they wanted to eliminate the Bolsheviks from the new government and open up to the bourgeoisie and also to the old tsarist ruling class. Not even the anarchists had the strength to oppose the terrible class war from above that the opponents of the revolution were unleashing.
This would lead to the massacre of the Bolsheviks.
Only Marxists could do this. That's why everyone wanted to take them out. It was a clash not only of power, but political, radical, the word ideological, when talking about Marxist revolution, makes less sense...
I would add that the entire bourgeois and aristocratic world, even the moderate socialists, hated the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks were considered the devil, and to survive they sometimes became one, but less and less than their capitalist antagonists, who as far as the devil was concerned, had Mammon and enriched themselves with the genocides of entire populations, with slavery practiced as a means of economic accumulation , continuous wars and intensive exploitation of the working class. As they do even now.
Remember also that even the anarchist Kropotkin voted in favor of the First World War, a bloodbath that also caused the Russian Revolution.
at a certain point the Bolsheviks had against them the very powerful internal reaction, the Mensheviks, the Cossacks, and all the European and not only European nations. This is reality. Lenin knew from Marx, in his writing on the Paris Commune, that if the Communards occupied the Central Bank, they would have a real chance of succeeding. But in the early days no Russian bank was willing to collaborate with the Bolsheviks. It's a fact. The Russian revolution was a complex and controversial affair, just think of Kronstadt, in which the Bolsheviks acted like butchers against other Marxist comrades (by the way, Kronstadt was a sailors' soviet, of worker and peasant origin), and the treatment they reserved for Nestor Makhno and his troops, without whom, in the endless Russian campaigns, the revolution would have been lost;
and to the massacres of anarchists and early communists themselves. But the Bolsheviks were also massacred en masse by the Kornilovists, the Black Guards, the Cadets and the Imperial Army, and by the imperialist armies outside Russia. Their ranks were full of spies and agents provocateurs. They were subjected to a continuous siege both inside the country and outside. It's not every day to overthrow a thousand-year-old empire and an entire ruling class and proclaim Soviet communism. The Bolsheviks were certainly not saints, far from it, but Lenin knew from Saint-Juste that ''Ceux qui font des révolutions à moitié n' ont fait que se creuser un tombeau.''
[Those who make revolutions halfway are only digging a grave for themselves.]
At that point they could only move forward and continue fighting, it was a civil war, as well as an external war.
We know who took power in 1917 in Russia. They were the Soviets of workers, peasants and soldiers, i.e. bottom-up assemblies that decided the actions of the new government. Hence the name of the Soviet Union. Factories for workers and lands for farmers, and the end of the world imperialist war which was causing millions of deaths and suffering. In fact, the backbone of the Revolution of '17 was the army, it was the soldiers, who mutinied en masse so as not to die like flies in the name of the arbitrariness of the czars, capitalists and master classes, including the Church, which sent its military chaplains blessing the dead. The millions who died in the First World War were mainly farmers and workers, sent into disarray by their very religious sovereigns in a crazy fratricidal world war.
One of the first initiatives implemented by the new Soviet government was the abolition of large landholdings (read large estates).
Lenin read the decree on land: ''All large agrarian estates, all lands belonging to the crown, monasteries, church, ... are placed at the disposal of the Agrarian Land Committees and the District Peasants' Soviets... ''.
A great Reset yes, but the opposite of what they are preparing for us in Davos, a Reset from below.
The October Revolution was an experiment that upset the natural order of things which has always established the right of the strongest to decide and legislate, and absolute power by divine right, at least in Russia, over endless masses, deprived of rights , voiceless, reduced to subhumans, oppressed by ecclesiastical dogmas, kept in total ignorance. It is known that Siberia already functioned very well under the Holy Imperial Crown, the idea had in fact been that of the tsars....
The Bolsheviks took that power which in Russia had always been denied by divine right to the masses, thanks to the participation of a part of the Russian people, of the army, of representatives of the working class and, in part, but only in part , of the peasants, the question is controversial, (that the anarchist Nestor Makhno who knew them well took them). They obtained it with an act of force, with the soldiers who mutinied from their superiors to join the revolution, overthrowing the previous feudal power that had lasted for centuries, and was based, yes, on force, arbitrariness and assassination.
This is how it goes in revolutions...
Or at least they tried to do it, it's another thing to decide if they really succeeded...
The so-called Soviet "dictatorship" in fact it crumbled under the shock wave of a much more powerful and pervasive totalitarianism: neoliberalism, the tremendous force of global financial power and multinationals. We are all in this together, even ex-communist China.
As in Plato's Cave we are inside and we talk about 'Soviet dictatorship', without realizing that we have fallen into the era of the infinite multiplication of goods, the ruthless dictatorship of profit as an end in itself, of perhaps 50 multinationals, even less, which it is driving the earth as we know it to its extinction. Where war, even nuclear, has now become the fastest method to govern and rob entire continents. They are wars of robbery, those are happening now, not revolutions, unfortunately.
https://www.marxists.org/ebooks/reed/ten-days-that-shook-the-world-reed.pdf
Perhaps one day we shall refuse any who desire to win on such terms.
I think it makes sense to see the Covid scam as global (ongoing) war against the working class (as well as the much of the middle class too). As a political philosophy, anarchism failed as pathetically (as any other "-ism" out there) not only to fight against this ruling class attack, failed to recognize it as an attack but has joined the war on the side of the ruling class as storm troopers against those few fighting against it. So, I gather from your article that we should see anarchism as a way forward? When it has failed and continues to fail so miserably? This is not to say that anarchism doesn't have positive things to say, but then so does socialism, communism and Marxism (as well as liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism who have all failed too (as demonstrated post Oct 7th 2023)).
Why resurrect these tired old arguments?
Nicholas II and the Romanov had direct connection to Wallstreet. This is where the whole alternative explanation of what happened breaks down. We are given an unbelievable official history that some workers' leaders from the goodness of their hearts with support of the masses destroyed the monarchy when everybody was against them. And the alternative explanation spread by the whites and Churchil, and conspiracy literature is that it was "the jews", Wallstreet and jewish bankers. And the problem with this is that the Romanovs were part of the club. Directly connected to the Round table and the American Eastern Establishment. Kiril Vladimirovich financed them through the SOSJ while spreading rumors of the jewish conspiracy. Why the head of the Romanovs finances the financers of the Bolsheviks?