"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
Numerous reports similar to the foregoing could be cited to disprove
the claim of the apologists of the Bolsheviki that the Red Terror was
introduced in consequence of the assassination of Uritzky and the
attempt to assassinate Lenin. The truth is that the tyrannicide, the
so-called White Terror, was the result of the Red Terror, not its
cause. It is true, of course, that the terrorism was not all on the one
side. There were many uprisings of the people, both city workers and
peasants, against the Bolshevist usurpers. Defenders of the Bolsheviki
cite these uprisings and the brutal savagery with which the Soviet
officials were attacked to justify the terroristic policy of the
Bolsheviki. The introduction of such a defense surely knocks the bottom
out of the claim that the Bolsheviki really represented the great mass
of the working-people, and that only the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie,
and the rich peasants were opposed to them. The uprisings were too
numerous, too wide-spread, and too formidable to admit of such an
interpretation.
M. C. Eroshkin, who was chairman of the Perm Committee of the Party of
Socialists-Revolutionists, and represented the Minister of Agriculture
in the Perm district under the Provisional Government, during his visit
to the United States in 1919 told the present writer some harrowing
stories of uprisings against the Soviets which took on a character
of bestial brutality. One of these stories was of an uprising in the
Polevsky Works, in Ekaterinburg County, where a mob of peasants, armed
with axes, scythes, and sticks, fell upon the members of the Soviet
like so many wild animals, tearing fifty of them literally into pieces!
That the government of Russia under the Bolsheviki was to be
tyrannical and despotic in the extreme was made evident from the very
beginning. By the decree of November 24, 1917, all existing courts of
justice were abolished and in their places set up a system of local
courts based upon the elective principle. The first judges were to
be elected by the Soviets, but henceforth “on the basis of direct
democratic vote.” It was provided that the judges were to be “guided
in their rulings and verdicts by the laws of the governments which
had been overthrown only in so far as those laws are not annulled by
the Revolution, and do not contradict the revolutionary conscience
and the revolutionary conception of right.” An interpretative note
was appended to this clause explaining that all laws which were in
contradiction to the decrees of the Central Executive Committee of the
Soviet Government, or the minimum programs of the Social Democratic or
Socialists-Revolutionists parties, must be regarded as canceled.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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