> He still says nice things about Lenin. His right-hand
> man during perestroika, Yakovlev, died the other day BTW.
http://www.greenwood.com/catalog/C7794.aspx Return to the NEP:The False Promise of Leninism and the Failure of Perestroika by Oscar J. Bandelin. Endorsement From David Curp Assistant Professor of History, Ohio University: Bandelin has written an important book on the Leninist origins of Gorbachev's reforms and the Soviet Union's collapse. It is important to be reminded by timely works like [his] that from the beginning Communism was a heady and toxic mixture of utopian idealism, repressive epistemology, and deeply flawed pseudo-science. Its implementation in the former Russian Empire and Eastern Europe brought about disasters from which these societies are only in the first stages of recovery.
Read this? A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia by Alexander N. Yakovlev Yale University Press, 2002
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300087608/104-9370653-0204753?v=glance&n=283155&v=glance
>...So while I found it interesting I would hesitate to recommend this
treatise to you unless you have read a number of books already on some
aspects of Soviet history. It's just hard to absorb the enormity of
the numbers involved herein. Some examples: "In the Russian Federation
alone, according to incomplete data," Mr Yakovlev states, "the number
of people sentenced between 1923 and 1953 total more than 41 million."
41 MILLION! "More than 994,000 Soviet servicemen were sentenced during
the war by military tribunals alone, and of this number more than
157,000 were sentenced to be shot." During the month of august 1922,
135,000 of 300,000 domestic letters were opened and examined, and "all
285,000 letters sent abroad had also been censored." 5.5 million died
of famine during the civil war and more than 5 million in the 1930s.
And such staggering numbers appear every few pages in this book.
Soviet history---It's crazier than fiction. Cheers!
http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/6529-7.cfm
>...Stalin has been an easy target, and even the Soviet Communist
Party conceded many of his psychopathic excesses. Lenin is a different
matter altogether. Many Soviet reformers, including Gorbachev, have
contended that Lenin was correct in the overthrow of the Provisional
Government in 1917, but that his ideas had been distorted. Therefore,
the Soviet system could be saved by going back to its Leninist roots
and creating a kind of "socialism with a human face."
Yakovlev, however, launches a devastatingly effective attack, showing that both the institutions and the ideology of repression were established by Lenin himself. He characterizes Lenin as "organizer of the fratricidal Russian civil war and the concentration camps, including camps for children . . . personally responsible for the deaths of millions of Russian citizens." Yakovlev reluctantly but firmly comes to the conclusion that the problem was the very nature of the Bolshevik system, that it could not be reformed and instead had to be eradicated.
In his examination of the fate of the intelligentsia and the nature of anti-Semitism, Yakovlev further demonstrates the fatal and tragic faults of the system. The destruction of much of the intelligentsia was not an accident, and anti-Semitism was a symptom of the constant need to find enemies to explain the failures of a salvationist doctrine. At the book's end, Yakovlev puts together a bill of indictment of Bolshevism which leaves little doubt about its criminality. Yet he also recognizes that, in addition to de-Bolshevization, Russia must change from a 1,000-year-old tradition of a land "ruled by men" to one ruled by laws. This is a book that deserves to be widely read. -- Michael Pugliese