Date: Fri, 02 Aug 1996 17:57:05 -0700 (MST)
Subject: people's militias and other final thoughts




I almost forgot some final comments I had about the character of Lenin's
U.S.S.R., which also shed some light on what can happen when people get
carried away by rhetoric and forget that reality is notoriously 
uncooperative.  The fact that some leftists dismiss all documentation
of Stalinist methods in the pre-Stalinist period does not surprise me.
After all, despite decades of ample documentation, many American 
communists refused to believe what was said about life in the U.S.S.R.
under Stalin, until Krushchev's speech of '56.  The fact that Stalin 
was able to further consolidate power through the pre-existing
Bolshevik institutions does not seem to make some people think twice 
about the design of such institutions.  Those who are ignorant of 
history are doomed to repeat it.

A generally well documented source of information about the Cheka is 
George Leggett's book "The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police" (Oxford
University Press, 1981).  There are some newer works incorporating
documents recently gathered from the Russian archives.  

A more popular (and much condensed) treatment can be found in Chapter 2
(The Cheka, Counterrevolution, and the "Lockhart Conspiracy" (1917-21))
of Andrew and Gordievsky's book "KGB: The Inside Story" (Harper
Perennial, 1991).  The book is marred by some unsupported speculations
by Gordievsky about Harry Hopkins, an aid to F.D.R., and its position
on CIA involvement in the Chilean coup is laughably naive.  Nevertheless,
it's tone is generally temperate, much (not all) of it is well 
researched, and people who isolate themselves in a cult-like fashion
>from information sources which don't tow their ideological line would
do well to read it.

Here are some excerpts which bear directly on recent discussions here:

***************
  "Lenin's prerevolutionary vision of life in Bolshevik Russia was
similarly utopian.  In State and Revolution, written in the summer of
1917, he claimed that there would be no place even for a police force,
still less for a secret police.  He acknowledged that in the transition
>from capitalism to communism it would be necessary to arrange for
"the suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of
wage slaves of yesterday."  But such suppression would be "comparatively
easy":
          
       Naturally, the exploiters are unable to suppress the
       people without a highly complex machine for performing 
       this task, but the people can suppress the exploiters
       even with a very simple 'machine', almost without a
       'machine', without a special apparatus, by the simple
       organization of the armed people.  [Lenin]

. . . .

  The problem of opposition, both at home and abroad, to the new
Bolshevik government, the Council of People's Commissars
(Sovnarkom), proved vastly greater than Lenin had anticipated.
He quickly concluded that a "special apparatus" to deal with it
was necessary after all.  Convinced of their monopoly of Marxist
wisdom, the Bolshevik leaders tended from the outset to classify
all opposition, whatever its social origin, as counterrevolutionary."

(End of excerpt)
************************
 
The founder of the Cheka, Feliks Dzerzhinski, himself came from
a well to do family of Polish land owners and intelligentsia.
Originally he had intended to become a Catholic priest, and his
conversion to Marxism is therefore not all that surprising.
Marxism has sometimes been referred to as religion for atheists,
and whatever one thinks about this characterization, it does seem
to share, at least among its more radical adherents (e.g., Comrade 
Locker), similar qualities: dogmatism, ideological puritanism,
the quasi-Satanic characterization of its enemies, a penchant for 
simple, black and white analyses and solutions, a savior complex, and
a ruthless, punitive role for themselves as the sword of Correct 
Thought and Behavior.

Here is an illuminating excerpt from the Cheka periodical Krasny
Terror (Red Terror); a passage written by Martyn Ianovich Latsis,
one of Dzerzhinski's chief lieutenants:

      We are not waging war against individuals.  We are 
      exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class.  During
      investigations, do not look for evidence that the accused
      acted in word or deed against Soviet power.  The first
      questions that you ought to put are: To what class does
      he belong?  What is his origin?  What is his education or
      profession?  And it is these questions that ought to
      determine the fate of the accused.  In this lies the
      significance and essence of the Red Terror.

The gross hypocrisy of Dzerzhinski and others like him, given
their own class origins, is again not surprising, since power
is its own justification.  The fact that Hitler was a dumpy
little brunette and that Himmler was a chinless little weasel
who needed coke-bottle glasses to see did not stop either of
them from persecuting jews, gypsies, slavs, and the mentally
and physically handicapped for failure (real or attributed) to
meet Nazi standards of Aryan physical beauty and health.

--
Mark Adkins (emerald-AT-aztec.asu.edu)


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