[aaron-lebo]

Weren't the Bolsheviks just a minor faction that ended up winning the civil war? Bolshevism became the party in the USSR.

I understand your complaint were it about communism, but it's hard to defend a group (Bolshevism) that was loaded with cowardly and narcissistic mass murderers. There's no one to defend them because they're all dead, in many instances killed off by each other. Their form of government collapsed. What's there to defend? Does anyone really want to associate themselves with the actions and mistakes of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Beria, etc. at this time?

Is this incorrect? Were there Bolshevik communities elsewhere that you may have been part of? I thought most of the Bolsheviks were dead by the 1950s.

[pandaman]

>Weren't the Bolsheviks just a minor faction that ended up winning the civil war? Bolshevism became the party in the USSR.

Nope. It was a majority faction ("bolshevik" literally means "member of majority" as opposite to "menshevik", "member of minority") in the Russian Social-Democratic Worker Party (РСДРП). They took power during the October Revolution. Soon after the revolution the party was renamed into Russian Communist Party (of Bolsheviks). A year later the Communist International (Commintern) was created by Lenin's order and its first congress in 1919 was attended by delegates from 21 different countries.

So, it seems to me, it was not a minor faction in a single country but a member of the international Communist movement.

[aaron-lebo]

Minor is the wrong word. I was trying to get across that the Bolsheviks were but one political entity that existed as of about 1915 and ended up winning, and even as of 1904 they didn't exist separately within their own party (as you say). It was a relatively small group of men that ended up dominating Russia, partially due to how ruthless they were willing to be.

I'm still not sure how the OP knew any Bolsheviks, was anyone calling themselves that in 1970?

[pandaman]

My point is that it was the mainstream Left in 20th century. The fact that people insist on calling them "Bolsheviks" instead of "Communists" is, IMHO, an indication that Left still hope to salvage their ideology by implying that "it was not the true Communism!". There were plenty of them in 1970 (6M or so party members) and, even though, the CPSU was officially disbanded in 1991, a new CPSU has been established in 1993 as its successor and still has enough support to win seats in Duma.

[kmonsen]

I don't think Leninism, Bolsheviks or Communism are anything to do with what I understand leftism (or socialism) to be.

The former were all about a minority controlling the majority, while the latter is about the majority being in control (although that does not work out all that well always either).

Note that the it is almost impossible to discuss this due to overloaded terms like liberalism which means the opposite depending on who you ask. I define leftism like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_politics

[aaron-lebo]

I'm getting into semantics, but though I get that the Bolsheviks of 1920 transformed (officially) and eventually into the CPSU in 1952, with that "rebranding", did anyone in the USSR still call themselves Bolsheviks or were they communists or was there a more popular term?

It's just that I've never seen it in (historical) contexts outside of describing the pre 1920s revolutionaries.

[pandaman]

>anyone in the USSR still call themselves Bolsheviks or were they communists or was there a more popular term

They used "bolshevik" as a term of endearment especially in reference to the old party members.

[LoSboccacc]

> that Left still hope to salvage their ideology by implying that "it was not the true Communism!"

don't worry most of the left repackaged the old communism into moral relativism and is no longer trying to win that unwinnable battle to keep communism as an ideology detached from all communist implementations.

it's mostly the older guards that still try that line.

[anigbrowl]

OK, but so what? Most political parties in history started out as factions of other parties that then split off and coalesced around a new ideological tendency. The Republican party in the US was formed by members of the Whig and Free Soil parties, while the Democratic party (incidentally, the world's oldest political party) grew from the Anti-Federalist party in the late 18th century.

It was a relatively small group of men that ended up dominating Russia, partially due to how ruthless they were willing to be.

You mean like every other successful revolutionary party? Revolutionaries that aren't willing to be ruthless end up in prison or on the scaffold. To quote Ben Franklin as he was preparing to sign the Declaration of Independence, 'We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.'

[aaron-lebo]

Requisitioning disincentivised peasants from producing more grain than they could personally consume, and thus production slumped.[247] A booming black market supplemented the official state-sanctioned economy,[248] and Lenin called on speculators, black marketeers and looters to be shot.[249] Both the Socialist Revolutionaries and Left Socialist Revolutionaries condemned the armed appropriations of grain at the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets in July 1918.[250] Realising that the Committees of the Poor Peasants were also persecuting peasants who were not kulaks and thus contributing to anti-government feeling among the peasantry, in December 1918 Lenin abolished them.[251]

Lenin repeatedly emphasised the need for terror and violence in overthrowing the old order and ensuring the success of the revolution.[252] Speaking to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets in November 1917, he declared that "the state is an institution built up for the sake of exercising violence. Previously, this violence was exercised by a handful of moneybags over the entire people; now we want ... to organise violence in the interests of the people."[253] He strongly opposed suggestions to abolish capital punishment.[254] Fearing anti-Bolshevik forces would overthrow his administration, in December 1917 Lenin ordered the establishment of the Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, or Cheka, a political police force led by Felix Dzerzhinsky.[255]

In September 1918, Sovnarkom passed a decree that inaugurated the Red Terror, a system of repression orchestrated by the Cheka.[256] Although sometimes described as an attempt to eliminate the entire bourgeoisie,[257] Lenin did not want to exterminate all members of this class, merely those who sought to reinstate their rule.[258] The majority of the Terror's victims were well-to-do citizens or former members of the Tsarist administration;[259] others were non-bourgeois anti-Bolsheviks and perceived social undesirables such as prostitutes.[260] The Cheka claimed the right to both sentence and execute anyone whom it deemed to be an enemy of the government, without recourse to the Revolutionary Tribunals.[261] Accordingly, throughout Soviet Russia the Cheka carried out killings, often in large numbers.[262] For example, the Petrograd Cheka executed 512 people in a few days.[263] There are no surviving records to provide an accurate figure of how many perished in the Red Terror;[264] later estimates of historians have ranged between 10,000 and 15,000,[265] and 50,000 to 140,000.[266]

What did Ben Franklin do that was comparable to that?

[anigbrowl]

Wow - whataboutism, a Gish gallop, and cherry-picking all at once. Quite the rhetorical cocktail, but I'd have preferred a responsive answer in your own words.

[icebraining]

Marxism-Leninism is certainly not dead, although the fall of the USSR was a harsh blow. In my Western European country, the Communist Party still gets almost 10% of the votes, and while they no longer openly defend Stalin's legacy, Leninism is still very much at the core of their identity.

[geofft]

> Does anyone really want to associate themselves with the actions and mistakes of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Beria, etc. at this time?

For Lenin at least, yes, absolutely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_Democratic_Front_(Kerala)

[lostlogin]

Alarmingly, Putin has praised Stalin’s management of the USSR and has spoken out about how Stalin is perceived. He seems disturbingly fond of the guy.

Interesting connection - Putins father was a cook for both Lenin and Stalin.

[testestx]

There are many people today that want to associate themselves with Trotsky. They are called trotskyists.

[anigbrowl]

Weren't the Bolsheviks just a minor faction that ended up winning the civil war? Bolshevism became the party in the USSR.

No. They were the largest left faction, and the word bolshevik translates to 'majority', while menshevik means 'minority' - so named because the Bolsheviks pursued a majority-rule policy while the Mensheviks wanted a more parliamentarian system that preserved the rights of minority parties. There were two communist revolutions in 1917; the first, in February, toppled the Tsar but the provisional government led by Kerensky didn't deliver on its promise of pulling Russia out of the war and made so many compromises with the conservative and militarist interests that eventually it lost the confidence of the working class, and the Bolsheviks were able to take power in an almost bloodless second revolution in October.

Lenin was in hiding at the time, having been accused of sedition (I think, I forget the exact charge) against the provisional government, and Trotsky's execution of the takeover went so smoothly that when Lenin turned up at the Bolsheviks' HQ a couple of days alter he demanded of Trotsky to know why they weren't fighting and was astonished to learn that they had already won. Having seized power, the Bolshevik's first task was to get Russia out of the war, and they sent Trotsky off to negotiate the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. This didn't go as well as they hoped, and to get Russia out of the war they had to make huge compromises, but they succeeded in signing a peace treaty thereby fulfilling their primary objective.

The Russian civil war began after the exit from WW1, but the Bolsheviks were legitimately in power before it began and remained in power the whole time. Civil wars in any country are bitter and destructive, partly because many of the issues are personal and partly because both sides know the territory well and are able to wage war more intimately and effectively than a foreign invader, who is more constrained by logistical and infrastructural considerations.

I think the Bolsheviks and the left revolutionaries in general were quite justified in seizing power; Tsarism was dreadful and World War 1 was a horrific waste of life and treasure which the Bolsheviks were quite right to oppose (and which many socialist parties around europe cynically sold out the working class to promote). Having achieved victory and pulled russia out of the war, I don't know why you'd expect them not to defend the government they'd just established against its White Army challengers.

[aaron-lebo]

They may have been right to seize power, but the Bolsheviks have never struck me as anything but murdering gangsters with ideology attached. There's just very little good that came out of the Soviet Union from 1920 to 1940. Repeated missteps in government policy, mass starvations, purges, secret police led by a rapist, etc. It was a completely immoral system that above all else was about a small group obtaining power.

The Tsarists weren't much better, sure. Much of that history is covered here:

https://www.amazon.com/Russian-Revolution-New-History/dp/046...

Unfortunately, Putin is back to praising Stalinism. A free, democratic Russia would be really interesting.

[anigbrowl]

I'm certainly not endorsing the longer-term development of the USSR following the civil war and am no fan of Stalin. I think it's unfair to characterize them as gangsters in their earlier period since their seizure of power has to be weighed against the casualties of World War 1, which was horrific.

People seem to forget that ~18 million people died and >20 million people were wounded in that conflict - understandably since we have far more footage of WW2 and subsequent conflicts compared to a rather hazy conception of trench warfare and primitive tanks for WW1. Compared to this the Russian revolutions of 1917 were near-bloodless affairs. High estimates for the Red Terror in the lead up to the Russian Civil War are about 200,000 (100k is more common), a small number in that historical context, but worse because of the number and nature of the atrocities committed.

On the other hand, the White Terror to which it was a response claimed some 300,000 lives but nobody seems to care about that, which is a pretty weird double standard if you ask me. Perhaps this is because people conflate the Red Terror with the later events of the Stalinist period rather than looking at it in its contemporary context.

Unfortunately, Putin is back to praising Stalinism. A free, democratic Russia would be really interesting.

On this I completely agree, but I have to note that the West's response to the emergence of a somewhat free and democratic Russia after the collapse of the USSR was to set it up with a rudimentary market economy and milk it for profit, while keeping defense budgets in the West at about the same levels (until the early 2000s, when they almost doubled). I think Putin's rise is a direct result of our failure to invest in helping Russia to build democratic institutions.

[thriftwy]

I think you are downplaying number of Red Terror victims by an order of magnitude.

Tambov uprising alone had 11 thousands people directly dead, many more indirectly due to hunger, etc. And that's just a tiny episode.

[anigbrowl]

I took the large estimate from this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror

My point is not to downplay it but to say it should be considered in the context of everything else that was going on at that time. By all means question the historical estimates if you disagree with them, but I think you should be equally concerned by the death attributable to the anti-communist forces, no?

[thriftwy]

They lost, what's the big point of discussing them? But I'm pretty sure the numbers are off. During the war you will see similar numbers, but the bulk of Red victims were when the war in fact ended.

[SiempreViernes]

It’s pretty clear Russia will never accept subjugation to the US, so I doubth it’ll ever be labeled free and democratic again.

[yks]

yeah, cause Kremlin presents being "free and democratic" as being "subjugated to the US" to its general population.

unfortunately, Russians who could see past that little trick were either exterminated or emigrated long ago.

[pandaman]

Not really because of Kremlin "presenting" but, rather, because Russians see an example of "young, progressive and free democracy" right next to them. The one, where the current government came to power through a revolt, displacing another "democratic" government, which also came to power through a revolt 10 years earlier. The one, which is waging a civil war right now. One, where corruption eclipses Russia's own in 1990s. It's hard not to notice since millions of their citizens flee war and poverty in Russia as well as other countries in Europe.

Nobody has a problem with it though since the government is eager to listen to the West so it's a proper "democracy" and things are fine.

[yks]

if you want to recite Kremlin propaganda on this website, please respect the readers and use more sophisticated tropes.

Reasons your text is a poor attempt:

Kremlin propaganda about "democracy = subjugation" predates Ukrainian situation by at least a few decades if not a century; and then Ukraine is not the only "young democracy" Russians could check out as an example, so why do you even bring it out here? especially since attacking Ukraine themselves definitely taints "the analysis of the benefits of democracy".

Even if we take a bait with "Ukraine is a reason why Russians don't want democracy":

Ukrainian history in your post is (on purpose?) not told exactly right and some important elephants in the room (like Crimea and Russian military involvement) are conveniently ignored; subjective statement about corruption levels is thrown, what's your measurement methodology?

again, other "young democracies" might have a better situation with everything, why Russians don't look at those?

I indeed believe that you are sincere and find that because Ukraine is failing and still labeled a democracy then Russia is never going to be democratic, but it's tragic that such a shaky views are just blindly adopted by Russians.

[aaron-lebo]

That's needlessly binary way of viewing history.

Russia can and will be labeled free and democratic by outside organizations when it's not ruled by a dictator. The US did not chose Putin, though Putin might like to choose who leads the US.