"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
... the Labor masses began to draw away from Bolshevism. This
became particularly evident after the Brest-Litovsk Peace,
which exposed the treacherous way in which the Bolsheviks
had handed over the Russian people to the German Junkers.
Everywhere re-elections began to take place for the Soviets
of Workmen’s Delegates and for the trades-unions. On seeing
that the workmen were withdrawing from them, the Bolsheviks
started by forbidding the re-elections to be held, and finally
_declared that the Bolsheviks alone had the right to elect
and be elected. Thus an enormous number of workmen were
disfranchised...._ The year 1918 saw the complete suppression
of the Labor movement and of the Social Democratic Party.
_All over Russia an order was issued from Moscow to exclude
representatives of the Social Democratic Party from the
Soviets, and the party itself was declared illegal._
V. M. Zenzinov, a member of the Central Committee of the Party of
Socialists-Revolutionists, came to this country in February, 1919, and
spent several weeks, during which time the present writer made his
acquaintance. Zenzinov was many times arrested under czarism for his
revolutionary activities, and more than once sent into Siberian exile.
He was a member of the Constituent Assembly, and later, in September,
1918, at the Ufa Conference, was elected member of the Directory. It
will be remembered that the Directory was forcibly overthrown and the
Kolchak Government set up in its place. Zenzinov is an anti-Bolshevik,
but his testimony is not to be set aside on that account. He says: “The
Soviet Government is not even a true Soviet régime, for the Bolsheviki
have expelled the representatives of all the other political parties
from the Soviets, either by force or by other similar means. The Soviet
Government is a government of the Bolshevist Party, pure and simple; it
is a party dictatorship--not even a dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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