Today, November 7, is the actual 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. They call it the October Revolution, but actually occurred in November because the Russians use a different calendar than we do.
I do not have a 100% negative view of the October Revolution. I think there were some good things about it. However, it was a military coup and it certainly was not democratic, but the Leninists never intended to be democrats anyway. The excesses of the Cheka, in particular the executions of 12,000 officials of the Russian Orthodox Church (12,000 priests and 500 bishops) must be condemned. Lenin started executing his political opponents pretty quickly. I don’t necessarily object to putting those folks in prison, but once in prison, they should have been afforded basic rights.
A high ranking member of the Bolsheviks, a Jewish man, was in charge of Legal Affairs. He interviewed an opposition member in prison and then went to talk to Lenin to ask what was to be done with this man. He was expecting Lenin to grant him the typical rights of the accused, but the man was shocked when Lenin was outraged at the suggestion that this man deserved any basic rights at all. To Lenin, he was a counterrevolutionary, and as such he was going to be shot. Lenin failed to understand what was so controversial about that.
I will never support the use of the Cheka, the organization of the firing squad, in killing opponents of the Revolution. Of course I will never support the Whites, but the excesses of the Cheka should not be supported by any fair-minded person.
With that said, I think the Alt Left should not see the October Revolution as 100% negative, and we should not support the Whites. And only 15% of Russians today say they are better off now than they were in the USSR. Anti-Communist propaganda in the US and the West leaves much to be desired. In particular, it is at odds with the testimonies of most people who actually lived under Communism. At the very least, most people think that they had it better under Communism than they do today based on polls taken in Eastern Europe and the former USSR. Communism wasn’t paradise, but whatever replaced it doesn’t seem to have been any better and most people think it is worse.
