Why do you want to pretend that history never happened, except when it suits you? Why do even the academics, especially them, always take the easy way out: Lenin was a liar, a hypocrite, ate babies at breakfast, etc, his program was unconscionable irresponsibility or else deceit, and anyway life teaches that these utopian experiments always end badly et cetera... Lenin's utopic vision, like that of certain premarket societies, was based on a different relationship to the land -- coexistence and respect, not plunder and use. Read the _April Theses_ (it's quite short) and _State and Revolution_. From them came what? Not the 'toilers' kingdom of heaven on earth' he spoke of. Not the utopic dream of a garden-socialism. Came instead, the behemothic scale of Soviet industrialisation, where mountains like Magnitka were turned into holes in the round, and this was hailed under the sign of the conquest of nature, and the Five Year Plans legitimised the specifically Soviet despoliation of nature, with its mindlessness, its rapacity, its mind-boggling scale. But why? As Lenin might have said, _Encirclement, Encirclement and again, Encirclement_. The Soviet Commune had to defend itself and built heavy industry for that purpose -- and pretended and soon believed this out-of-control monster of heavy industry was a stepping stone to socialism. The Commune was forced into the absurdity of building Socialism in One Country, because and only because of _Encirclement_. Or do we think that Trotsky, or Keresnky, or Emma Goldman, had some magic cure-all alternative? Before forgetting what happened in Soviet times, as you are all in danger of doing, let us think for a moment why it happened. Mayakovsky said, _look at my Soviet passport and envy me_. But Socialism in One Country had to begin by confiscating the passports. Because it cannot exist without a tremendous mobilisation of every social resource, including crucially the intelligentsia. And naturally, middle class intellectual wankers do not like this. So they leave the country to work in the US. You don't think so? Well, come on! Once the passports were gone, the madhouse began. Read Platonov! Every relationship, even between motherhood, was perverted to one of potential criminality and denunciation. The proletarian project became overnight a prison camp. Criminality thereupon flourished with literally no limit, since there were no longer even the conventional borders which exist in the west between crime and lawfulness. It was enough to have your motives suspected, in Socialism in One Country, to end up in a labour camp. But, tell me please, how could it be otherwise, given the baleful, omnipresent reality of Encirclement? Well, I grant you, it could have been otherwise. There was an alternative. Not, however, the optimistic variants of history-falsification of Norman Stone et al, or the spooky fantasies of some of your correspondents. They always forget that the Bolsheviks could not precede themselves and were the product of a colossal breakdown in the world capitalist system, that it was the system which produced the mutations including both Lenin and Hitler. No, the alternative to Bolshevism was _Africa*. That was what they dreamt of, not just Hitler, but the Harmsworths, the Hearsts -- the Rupert Murdochs of their day - - and many many others. Victory by Hitler. No more Russians alive anywhere. You think that wasn't the alternative to Socialism in One Country? But I assure you, it definitely was. And before we shed any more crocodile tears on behalf of the split homes, the broken lives, the KGB victims. etc., let us dwell on this. Or do we prefer to believe that Africa is like it is _because of the Africans_? Is that our unspoken and racist collective understanding of the matter? Well, I continue. My point is this: Socialism in One Country required the sacrifice of the one to the many, and the sacrifice was made not with justice but expediency, and survival in mind. And all the time that Encirclement cast its shadow, the Comrades perversely made a glorious success out of the desperate straits Encirclement forced on them, out of the Alice- in-Wonderland it made of socialism. This was the petard they hoist themselves, by foolishly making a virtue out of a dire necessity. Thus, when crises erupted and difficulties flowed -- famines from collectivisation, the effects of the purges -- it was explained or justified not as contradictions and deformations resulting from the defence of socialism, as the price to be paid for preserving the fundamental gains of the revolution (And they could have, could easily demonstrate that it was no argument that human rights were paramount, for example the right to work or not to work, or the right to travel and to leave the country. Such individual rights were secondary to the rights enjoyed by the mass -- were self-evidently injurious to the socialism which brought them all so many material benefits, gave them security and most of all gave them hope. You simply couldn't, in a nutshell, allow engineers, let alone doctors, physicists, composers, metallurgists etc., leave for the States). Because to allow such things would collapse the system, which depended upon a total politicising of society, total conscription of the workforce, total mobilisation of all resources, especially human ones _in conditions of encirclement, ie siege_. The right to emigrate would cause a mass exodus under conditions of forced mass mobilisation required to build the country in the early years. But the alternative was to return to markets and a restoration of capitalism in Russia, which I repeat would inevitably doom the country to become another Africa, one on the very doorstep of Europe, one to which merchant adventurers would not need to travel by uncertain ocean voyages, and then to live in disease- ridden, unfamiliar surroundings; Russia was only a drive down an autobahn after all, as Hitler's Wehrmacht knew. People in the West cannot imagine what backwardness means until they see it and touch it. It is not a matter for the imagination, because all that faculty can do is to rework the contents of real experience. Russia is still today a backward country and that backwardness is seen in the psychology of the average Russian, especially one who lives in the provinces: suspicion, distrust of novelty, shiftiness, tactical opportunism, laziness, thieving, irresponsibility are all characteristics of people whose level of understanding of what it means to live in a civil society is primitive, for whom civilisation is still in fact something threatening, foreign, burdensome. Imagine the situation sixty or seventy years ago, then, when the Bolsheviks announced the dream of constructing a vast modern industrial society to these people's grandparents, who knew only the village, who had never seen perpendicular lines, who wore bast shoes made of straw and lynched the first teams of agricultural engineers sent to demonstrate to them the workings and potentialities of the few dozen - pitifully small number - of Fordson tractors which Lenin had imported for the purpose - because they convinced themselves that this was the devil's work, believing satanic imps lived inside the noisy, fuming engines. In 1916 the British sent an armoured-car brigade, Dunsterforce, to bolster up the sagging moral of the Tsar's troops. These English heroes found themselves thrown into the whirlpool of revolution and, forgotten by their masters in Whitehall, left to fend for themselves, struggling across European Russia, ending up in the Carpathians, from where they intended to attack the Turkish army. By that time, the war was over as far as Russia was concerned. It was 1917; the peasants had climbed out of the trenches and gone home to argue things out with their Tsar, and when they finished arguing there was no more Tsar. And the gallant soldiers of Dunsterforce, seeing all this, for the most part joined the Bolsheviks in their struggle against the Whites, because the justice of their cause - the people's cause - simply seemed self-evident to them. If Bolshevism made sense even to English soldiers - ones who'd had time to live amongst the Russians and see something of their problems - you may be sure it made sense to many others. Forget Lenin's utopian promise of building heaven on earth; Bolshevism offered land to the peasants, bread to the hungry cities, peace to all. If any kind of viable capitalist alternative had existed, Lenin never would have succeeded. He'd have failed just as surely as Leibknecht and Rosa Luxemburg failed in Germany, when the Kaiser too was swept away, but in Germany February was not followed by October; there was no second revolution. There, it was Woodrow Wilson who gave the bread and the peace to the German people; the land they already had, for the most part. In small packets. Capitalism already existed in Germany. Capitalism existed in Russia too, even in Tsarist times. But Russia was not capitalist. Russia was the village. Even Moscow was just a sprawling, wooden-walled village. Only St Petersburg looked like a real European town. So Lenin won, because the alternative was not a native, home- grown Russian capitalism; it was colonial plunder, the dismembering and death of a nation. The Civil War was death made visible; the Intervention, when eleven states from Japan to the USA, showed them what to expect if they could not defend themselves. Seven million died, and many of those by the catastrophic mistakes Bolsheviks themselves made, mistakes which Bolshevik indifference made into crimes, as famine came to be seen as one more weapon in the war to defend the Commune, even against its own recalcitrant peasantry. In the Soviet Union it was always clear that capitalist encirclement posed its own direct threat to the continuation of the regime, but that fact was a source of hope for the regime's enemies as well as of fear for its defenders. It was always a conditioning factor on the modalities of repression in the Soviet Union. It made the creation of the Gulag Archipelago an intrinsic outcome, absolutely entailed and required by everything which had gone before, by the whole situation in the country, which required vast masses of easily-mobilised cheap labour and also required the coercive effect on society as a whole which just knowing about the camps imparted. The camps were a brilliant solution to the problem of creating and defending Socialism in One Country. The Commune failed. But it was not Socialism which failed. It was not Lenin's great dream which failed. They were never even tried and as Lenin knew and said, there can only be socialism in the world as a whole. There cannot be socialism in one country. Those who think or pretend that the iniquities and crimes committed in the Soviet era were the inevitable result of what is seen as an arbitrary abandonment of the laws of the market and of the civilised values and human rights and freedoms which arise from them, are wrong. Encircled, damaged by the folly of its rulers, savaged by the armies of Hitler, Soviet socialism, which was not true socialism but only a pale shadow of it, still managed to guarantee its citizens higher living standards, more creature comforts, better medical care, a higher life expectancy, more personal security, than they will experience again in this century. The Soviet Union is by no means evidence of the failure of socialism, on the contrary. Thew other book I read and heartily recommend is Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain. I have spent time in Magnitogorsk so I particualrly appreciated this account of the first Five-Year Plan. Before Blank rubbishes Soviet history he should address some of Kotkin's concerns. Magnitka was the microcosm of the new world they were intent on creating, with its emphasis on work and welfare, on planned cities, with urban environments not like industrial cities in the west or the shanty-towns of developing countries, but with all the facilities necessary for raising cultural levels and opportunities for self-improvement; with housing guaranteed for all as a social right, and every form of communal provision encouraged - in Magnitka there was everything, from public lending libraries which even by 1936 had gramophone record depts, to cinemas, schools, clubs, institutes, nurseries, trade union palaces of culture, communal laundries, communal eating facilities - and in the first super-blocks of workers housing, the workers each were given a cell; everything was done communally and the family itself was set to wither away, until it was rehabilitated in 1936. But all these grandiose visions and social goals conflicted not only with the privations caused by want of everything, so that many workers lived in tents and mud huts for years at a time, while the socialist utopia was built around them (and the bosses lived in 'Amerikanka' - the settlement of big dachas originally meant for American engineers, where the plant director Iakov Gugel lived in splendour, with chauffeur-driven cars, horses, a sleigh, a carriage, servants, a music room, billiards room etc. - until his arrest by the NKVD as an Enemy of the People - he was executed in 1937). They also conflicted with the reality of encirclement, (Japan, Germany) which fuelled the paranoia at the centre and created the atmosphere of intense suspicion which existed at the base, where communality was mainly an opportunity for surveillance, for spies and informers, for neighbours sending anonymous letters about each other to the authorities. The question of political loyalty mattered first, last and foremost - but it need not have been this way. Encirclement was the main thing which dripped the acid into socialism, burning its way into everyone's soul. The NKVD, mass repression, the purges, the police state, the dragooning of thought, the monopoly of ideology, the culture of monolithism, the politicising of everyday life and the whole of society, the extending of the public domain throughout private life so that no-one had any privacy, to live, to cook, to make families, to write - all were activities within the purview of the state, to some degree - all followed the logic of encirclement like night follows day. It could not be otherwise; to lift up society, to raise people and production from their backwardness, meant a total mobilisation, from which no-one was exempt. The whole population was conscripted and had no right to refuse. The whole population was required to parade on official holidays carrying portraits of the leaders and shouting hurrah, and no-one had the right to refuse that either, because under conditions of encirclement, the whole project would unravel within weeks or months once such rights were allowed - once allegiance became wholly voluntary and not a a strange product of real belief and blind terror. In fact, that is what happened - the Soviet Union collapsed when the myth of Stalin was finally destroyed in 1988, and until that moment the whole world was so blinded by the myth and its hold on the minds of its subjects that few expected the place to fall apart the way it did. In the 1930s the Terror and the Plan were two sides of the same coin; it was impossible to have the one without the other. There was no strong state at this time; there was enormous social chaos, and the heart of chaos was the Party itself. The whole of society ceased to exist, in fact, except for these two things: the chaos of the Purges, and the chaos of the Plan; and the only thing which came to matter was the fulfilment of the plan. In 1931 Stalin said 'We have ten years or they will bury us'. In 1941, Hitler attached, but by then the country had an army, an airforce, a big heavy industry and everything necessary to defend itself. That was the paradoxical consequence of the Terror. In every respect, Stalinism was part of our world. Woodrow Wilson answered Lenin's call for World Revolution, which so electrified people in the collapsing empires of Germany and Austro-Hungary and which resonated throughout the working classes of the western world, with a call for the self- determination of nations and the creation of a League of Nations. Ireland won its (partial) freedom thereby. Read the history! In subsequent decades the great social experiment in Russia stimulated or forced its capitalist competitors to emulate it: Roosevelt's New Deal; the creation of welfare states in post-war Europe - all took as their model the kinds of social provision first elaborated in the great social experiments in Russia. But the Bolsheviks themselves based their conception of socialism on an idea of industrial organisation which was not their own, but was copied directly from the most advanced developments within capitalism: the factories of Henry Ford and the great American steelworks were the models they followed. So what is the enemy Blank fears, and you fear? Soviet socialism was a part of the twentieth century's accommodation with the vast upheavals of the nineteenth century, when masses of peasants were decanted from the land and sent to work in satanic industrial cities. In fact, Soviet socialism exhausted its historical potential by 1945. From that time onwards it became a deeply conservative force, a roadblock in the way of history. Once it was swept away, a fortress of old resistance to the curses of capitalism, nothing was left to prevent the final emergence of a truly global capitalism and its social counterpart, a truly global working class. Perhaps the liquidation of the Soviet Commune has now created, not the capitalist utopia Blank craves, but the preconditions for the World Revolution which Lenin dreamt of.
Regards, Mark jones