"The Greatest Failure in All History": A Critical Examination of the Actual Workings of Bolshevism in RussiaSpargo, John
History
"The Greatest Failure in All History": A Critical Examination of the Actual Workings of Bolshevism in Russia
Spargo, John
Communism -- Russia
Let us hear from another leading Bolshevist luminary, Bucharin, who
shares with Lenin the heaviest tasks of expounding Bolshevist theories
and who is in some respects a rival theologian. In July, 1918, Bucharin
published his pamphlet, _The Program of the Communists_, authorized
by the Communist Party, of whose organ, _Pravda_, he is the editor. A
revolutionary organization in this country published the greater part
of this pamphlet, and it is significant that it omitted Chapter VII,
in which Bucharin reveals precisely the same attitude as Lenin. He
goes farther in that he admits the same insincerity of attitude toward
equal suffrage and the Constituent Assembly based on the will of the
majority. He says:
If we have a dictatorship of the proletariat, the object of
which is to stifle the bourgeoisie, to compel it to give up
its attempts for the restoration of the bourgeois authority,
then it is obvious that there can be no talk of allowing
the bourgeoisie electoral rights or of a change from soviet
authority to a bourgeois-republican parliament.
The Communist (Bolshevik) party receives from all sides
accusations and even threats like the following: “You close
newspapers, you arrest people, you forbid meetings, you trample
underfoot freedom of speech and of the press, you reconstruct
autocracy, you are oppressors and murderers.”
It is necessary to discuss in detail this question of
“liberties” in a Soviet republic.
At present the following is clear for the working-men and the
peasants. The Communist party not only does not demand any
liberty of the press, speech, meetings, unions, etc., for the
bourgeois enemies of the people, but, on the contrary, it
demands that the government should be always in readiness to
close the bourgeois press; to disperse the meetings of the
enemies of the people; to forbid them to lie, slander, and
spread panic; to crush ruthlessly all attempts at a restoration
of the bourgeois régime. This is precisely the meaning of the
dictatorship of the proletariat.
Another question may be put to us: “Why did the Bolsheviki
not speak formerly of the abrogation of full liberty for the
bourgeoisie? Why did they formerly support the idea of a
_bourgeois-democratic republic? Why did they support the idea
of the Constituent Assembly and did not speak of depriving the
bourgeoisie of the right of suffrage?_ Why have they changed
their program so far as these questions are concerned?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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