History shows that it is not sufficient for the ruling class to defeat a revolution; it is necessary to cover it with slanders, blacken the name of its leaders, and surround it with a cloud of malice and suspicion, so that not even the memory remains to inspire new generations. There is nothing new in this. In the 19th century when the historian Thomas Carlyle was writing a book about Oliver Cromwell he said that before he could begin he had to rescue Cromwell’s body from under a mountain of dead dogs.
After the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, all the memories of Cromwell and the English bourgeois revolution had to be erased from the collective memory. The restored monarchy of Charles II officially dated its reign from 30 January 1649, the date of the execution of Charles I, and all references to the republic and its revolutionary deeds were to be obliterated. The upstart Charles II was so carried away by the spirit of spite, hatred and revenge that he went so far as to dig up Oliver Cromwell’s corpse, which was then subjected to a public hanging at Tyburn.
The same malice and spite born of fear is what motivates the present efforts to deny the gains and revolutionary significance of the Russian Revolution, and blacken the memory of its leaders. The systematic falsification of history now being undertaken by the bourgeoisie, although somewhat more subtle than the posthumous lynchings of the English monarchists, is in no way morally superior to them. Ultimately it will prove no more effective. The locomotive of human progress is truth, not lies. And the truth will not remain buried for all time.
For the best part of three generations, the apologists of capitalism vented their spleen against the Soviet Union. No effort or expense has been spared in the attempt to blacken the image of the October Revolution and the nationalised planned economy that issued from it. In this campaign, the crimes of Stalinism came in very handy. The trick was to identify socialism and communism with the bureaucratic totalitarian regime which arose from the isolation of the Revolution in a backward country.
The hatred of the Soviet Union shared by all those whose careers, salaries and profits derived from the existing order based on rent, interest and profit, is not hard to understand. It had nothing to do with the totalitarian regime of Stalin. The same ‘friends of democracy’ had no scruples about praising dictatorial regimes when it suited their interests to do so. The ‘democratic’ British ruling class was quite happy to see Hitler coming to power, as long as he put down the German workers and directed his attentions to the East.
Winston Churchill and other representatives of the British ruling class expressed their fervent admiration for Mussolini and Franco, right up until 1939. In the period after 1945, the Western ‘democracies’, in the first instance the USA, actively backed every monstrous dictatorship. From Somoza to Pinochet, from the Argentine junta to the Indonesian butcher Suharto, who climbed to power over the corpses of a million people with the active support of the CIA. The leaders of the Western democracies grovel before the blood-soaked regime of Saudi Arabia that tortures, murders, flogs and crucifies its own citizens. The list of these barbarities is endless.
From the standpoint of imperialism such regimes are perfectly acceptable provided they base themselves on private ownership of the land, banks and big monopolies. Their implacable hostility to the Soviet Union was not based on any love of freedom, but on naked class interest. They hated the USSR, not for what was bad in it, but precisely for what was positive and progressive. They objected, not to Stalin’s dictatorship (on the contrary, the crimes of Stalinism suited them very well as a convenient means of blackening the name of socialism in the West), but to the nationalised property forms which were all that remained of the gains of October.
This re-writing of history reminds one forcibly of the old methods of the Stalinist bureaucracy which placed history on its head, turned leading figures into non-persons, or demonised them – as in the case of Leon Trotsky – and generally maintained that black was white. The present writings of the enemies of socialism are no different, except that they slander Lenin with the same blind hatred and spitefulness that the Stalinists reserved for Trotsky.
Some of the worst cases of this kind are to be found in Russia. This is not surprising, for two different reasons: firstly, these people have been raised in the Stalinist school of falsification, which based itself on the principle that truth was only an instrument in the service of the ruling elite. The professors, economists and historians were, with a few honourable exceptions, accustomed to adapt their writings to the current ‘line’. The same intellectuals who sang the praises of Trotsky, the founder of the Red Army and leader of the October Revolution, a few years later had no qualms about denouncing him as an agent of Hitler. The same writers who fawned on Joseph Stalin the great Leader and Teacher soon jumped the other way when Nikita Khrushchev discovered the ‘personality cult’. Habits die hard. The methods of intellectual prostitution are the same. Only the master has changed.
There is also another quite separate reason. Many of the capitalists in Russia not long ago carried a Communist Party card in their pocket and spoke in the name of ‘socialism’. In fact, they had nothing to do with socialism, communism or the working class. They were part of a parasitic ruling caste which lived a life of luxury on the backs of the Soviet workers. Now, with the same cynicism that has always characterised these elements, they have openly gone over to capitalism. But this miraculous transformation cannot be consummated so easily. These people feel a compelling need to justify their apostasy by heaping curses on what they professed to believe in only yesterday. By these means they try to throw dust in the eyes of the masses, while salving their own consciences – always supposing that they possess such a thing. Even the worst scoundrel likes to find some justification for his actions.