BOLSHEVISM Inquiry Reveals Lenin Unleashed Systematic Murder of 200,000 Clergy Crucifixions, scalping and “bestial” torture: Russia confronts Bolshevik terror Philippa Fletcher, Reuters, Hobart Mercury, Australia, November 29, 1995 A Russian presidential commission confirmed yesterday that 200,000 clergy were systematically murdered under Soviet rule in a horrific cycle of crucifixions, scalping and other “bestial tortures.” Commission chairman Alexander Yakovlev, presenting the report at a news conference, seemed unconcerned the disclosure might deter electors from voting communist or nationalist in parliamentary elections on December 17, and he added: “If it has an influence, I will be very satisfied.” The report by the Commission for the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Repression also found another 500,000 religious figures had suffered persecution in the decades after Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power. “Documents relate how clergymen, monks, nuns were crucified on royal gates and shot in the basements of the Cheka [secret police], scalped, strangled, drowned and submitted to other bestial tortures,” he said. Yakovlev said some of the material, from archives of the former ruling politburo and security services, had not been previously published and that uncovering it had been traumatic. “I was especially shocked by accounts of priests turned into columns of ice in winter. But that’s not all, there were crucifixions... it was total cruelty.” Yakovlev said hundreds of people were shot for not giving up church property, and only a fraction of the proceeds were spent on the poor, as had been promised. “The rest went on the world revolution and to open foreign bank accounts for our leaders,” Yakovlev said. Yakovlev, known as the “Father of Glasnost” for his role in promoting liberal reforms in the late ’80s, admitted the timing of the report was not entirely coincidental. The 71-year-old former politburo member, who leads a Social Democratic party, said he knew he would be accused of electioneering but that reforms were doomed unless Russia rid itself of all traces of Bolshevism. Yakovlev said “Bolsheviks” – including communists, ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s party and the Agrarian Party – had not renounced the politics of force and their current fondness for the church was “deeply immoral.” “Building on the maxim ‘religion is the opium of the people’ ... Lenin gave the order to carry out ‘a campaign of merciless terror,’” he said. Of 48,000 churches in Russia before 1917, only 7000 remained by 1969, and Islamic and Jewish religious buildings had suffered in similar proportion. “It’s a tragic story which has not provoked repentance and which has not been properly heard,” said Yakovlev. Bolshevik coup d’état Bolshevik coup d’état is an old news, as had been admitted by Lenin too.* Yet some people are still trying to teach us conceptions that we rejected more than 100 years ago because those were considered as anti-socialist positions, and they are citing political conception promoted by the right wingers. No problem, we would like to see more serious political sources, if any. Marxism-Leninism was a creation of Joseph Stalin and his gangs of criminals, and it was not a revolutionary trend, it never proposed the elimination of capitalism, and with them socialism did not advance for one day. The Bolsheviks provoked a coup d’état to the government of Kerensky, and they were the one who promoted the so called revolutionary violence which was never advocated by Marx, different to the point of view of Marx who considered that parliament was one method for workers to transform the means of production into common possession. The real reactionaries in Russia were the Leninists. The Bolsheviks considered that the use of Parliament was a social democrat method because they did not have the majority support of the working class, they were only between 1-10% of the population, and the only possible way to take power was through Lenin’s conspiracy theory, through violence, or a coup d’état, and it has been proven that socialism cannot be established by a minority in one single country, a theory that was not created by Marx, but by one of the enemies of Jose Stalin named as Nikolai Bukharin At this time and point in history to proclaim that Marxism-Leninism is a revolutionary current is being out of new information when it has been proven that for Lenin socialism was state capitalism. The Socialist Party of Great Britain and her sister parties in the World Socialist Movement has demonstrated thousands of times that Leninism is a dangerous trend within the working class movement. Millions of words have been written showing that Leninism is anti-Marxism [*Bolshevik coup d’état”: “e. Yedinstvo. A very small and dwindling group, composed almost entirely of the personal following of Plekhanov, one of the pioneers of the Russian Social Democratic movement in the 80’s, and its greatest theoretician. Now an old man, Plekhanov was extremely patriotic, too conservative even for the Mensheviki. After the Bolshevik coup d’état, Yedisntvo disappeared.” – John Reed, TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD, Notes and Explanations, 1919, Progress Publishers, Moscow, p.18. Lenin wrote its INTRODUCTION as follows: “With the greatest interest and with never slackening attention I read John Reed’s book, Ten Days that Shook the World. Unreservedly do I recommend it to the workers of the world. Here is a book which I should like to see published in millions of copies and translated into all languages. It gives a truthful and most vivid exposition of the events so significant to the comprehension of what really is the Proletarian Revolution and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. These problems are widely discussed, but before one can accept or reject these ideas, he must understand the full significance of his decision. John Reed’s book will undoubtedly help to clear this question, which is the fundamental problem of the international labor movement.”N. LENIN. End of 1919. marxists.org/archive/reed/1919/10days/10days/lenin.htm These quotes show that what had actually happened in October 1917 in Russia was actually a coup d’état and in no way a working class revolution.] Kronstadt Revolt The Kronstadt Revolt began on 28 February 1921. (Sec A. Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, pp. 78, 83, 84). The naval squadron stationed at Kronstadt outside Petrograd – “the pride and glory” – of “the Russian Revolution” since March 1917, which supplied contingents to every fighting front during the civil war – was eventually gagged and dragged to a “rebellion” against: “the new Communist slavery” … “the bureaucratic trade unions” and the oppression of peasants, and for election of Soviets. (Cited by M. Dobb, Soviet Economic Development Since 1917, pp. 119-120). [Also, see E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 2, p. 271-2 and the footnote thereat.] The disorganized state of the Russian economy brewed unrest and dissatisfaction: epidemic of peasant uprisings and workers’ protest meetings. Petrograd Workers’ protest meetings were dispersed by the Government – which forced them to resort to strike action in order to get their demand heard. On 27 February, they proclaimed: “A complete change is necessary in the politics of the Government. First of all, the workers and peasants need freedom. They don’t want to live by decrees of the Bolsheviki: they want to control their own destinies. Comrades, preserve revolutionary order! Determinedly and in an organised manner, demand: Liberation of all arrested socialists and non-partisan working-men; Abolition of martial law; freedom of speech, press and assembly for all those who labour; Free election of shop and factory committees (Zahvkcomi), of labour unions and soviet representatives; Call meetings, pass resolutions, send your delegates to the authorities and work for the realization of your demands! (Quoted by Alexander Berkman: “The Kronstadt Rebellion,” 1922). Arrests and suppression were Lenin’s only answers to these demands. The Government Committee of Defence of Petrograd issued an order: “In case crowds congregate in the streets, the troops are ordered to fire; those that resist are to be shot on the spot.” (See Introduction by Editors, The Kronstadt Revolt by Anton Ciliga, Freedom Press, London Reprint, July 1942, pp. 3-4). Disturbed by the events in Petrograd the crews of the warships Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol, which in 1917 had been in the forefront of Bolshevik seizure of power, began a sympathy movement that spread throughout the fleet and then to the Red Army and workers in Kronstadt. They sent delegates to Petrograd to report. Then the Petropavlovsk resolution was presented to a mass meeting of 16,000 sailors, Red Army and workers, and was passed unanimously except three votes of: Kuzmin – the Commissar of the Baltic Fleet, Vassilov – the Chairman of the Kronstadt Soviet, and Kalinin – would be President of the USSR. The Kronstadt resolution infuriated Lenin who sent Trotsky who gave the infamous order to the Red Army to “shoot them like partridges”. This forced the Kronstadters prepare to resist by force of arms, and this turned the peaceful resolution into a “rebellion against the Soviet Power”. “Throughout, however, they abstained from taking the offensive, as they could easily have done.” “But in addition to the brutal suppression by the Red Army, and subsequently by the Cheka, during which 18,000 workers were killed. Lenin also instituted a campaign of calumny against the Kronstadt workers. The delegates of the 10th Party Congress, which was going on at the same time, were assured that “the White Generals played a big role,” that “it was the work of the Social Revolutionaries and the While Guardists from abroad.” The Kronstadt workers had asked that delegates of the workers and soldiers be sent to inquire into these charges. The Petrograd Soviet, under the chairmanship of the Bolshevik leader Zinovieff, refused.” (ibid, pp. 4-5). As stated above, the Kronstadt workers stood against the growing political repression and miserable conditions of living imposed by a regime that had alienated itself from the proletariat and thereby transformed itself from becoming the voluntary ‘vanguard of the proletariat’ into the coming into being of an involuntary capitalist class and unintentional bourgeois party. Proletarian though the uprising was, it was not to be “the Third Revolution of the toilers” as the Kronstadters claimed, since the uprising had no socialist economic objective to achieve, nor was it at all a ‘white guard plot’ supported by the entente as the Bolshevik propaganda put out just to justify the merciless massacre of this eventual proletarian rebellion against the Bolshevik misrule. Thus, the alienation of the producers from the state power and their decisive defeat at Kronstadt were accomplished not without blood and life. This brutal and bloody suppression shows that the hands of the predecessors of both the Stalinists, and the Trotskyites were stained with the blood of the proletarians long ago in 1921. The Stalinist and the Trotskyite factions did not emerge out of a primordial hell that had existed from eternity elsewhere beyond Bolshevism. Neither were they the products of an ‘accident by chance’. They were the logical culmination of the same historical process of degeneration of Bolshevism itself. Ideologues as they had always remained and exploiter and oppressor of workers as they had to become, no matter what their predecessors and they had thought about and spoken of themselves, they had to find themselves among the warring factions of a fully-fledged bourgeois class evidently since March 1921. Thus, the fact remains that the revolt was neither a White Guardist plot aided by the entente as the Leninist calumny put through to justify the massacre, nor was it to be “the Third Revolution of the toilers” as the Kronstadt workers wished. Bolshevism/Fascism The journal Living Marxism, edited by Paul Mattick, expounded the slogan, “the struggle against fascism begins with the struggle against Bolshevism”. Fascism – n. 1 the totalitarian principles and organization of an extreme right-wing nationalist movement, originally as prevailing in Italy (1922-1943) where it was founded by Mussolini. It spread to other European countries (Hitler developed a more racialist brand of authoritarianism in Germany) and to South America. It has remained a latent, if minimal, force in most countries of the western world. 2 (also fascism) a any similar nationalist and authoritarian movement. b disp. any system of extreme right-wing or authoritarian views. – OXFORD ENCYCLOPEDICENGLISH DICTIONARY
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