by David Satter

David Satter commented that 100 hundred years ago this week armed Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace in Petrograd, arrested ministers of Russia’s provisional government and set in motion events that will kill millions and inflict a near-fatal wound on Western civilization.

The revolutionaries not only captured train stations, post offices, but literally changed Russia’s society. The goal of the Bolsheviks was to translate Marxist-Leninist ideology into reality. For the first time a state was created that explicitly believed in atheism and claimed infallibility. This was incompatible with Western Civilization, which presumes the existence of a higher power over and above society and the state.

Bolshevism hollowed out society’s moral core, degrading the individual and turning him into a cog in the machinery of the state. Communists committed murder on such a scale as to eliminate the value of life and destroy the individual conscience in survivors. Communism has inverted society’s understanding of the source of its values.

In 1920 Lenin said that communists subordinate morality to the class struggle. Good was anything that destroyed “the old exploiting society” and helped build a “new communist society. “We are not waging a war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. The first question should be to what class does he belong… that should determine his fate.” The Soviet Union when they forcibly annexed Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia in 1939 executed or in prisoned schoolteachers, firemen, and other low level functionaries in those countries. My memory was that 25% of the population of these countries was either killed, put in prison, or forcibly repatriated throughout the Soviet Union.

Communism was responsible for the death of 100 million people

  • 20 million put to death by regime or died as a direct result of its repressive policies.
  • 11 million dead from famine and dekulakization
  • 1.6 million dead from forced population transfers
  • 1.1 killed during Red Terror (1918-1922) and (1937-38)
  • 2.7 million killed in Gulag labor colonies
  • Deaths caused by communist regimes in Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, North Korea and Cambodia

During the Battle of Stalingrad, Soviet forces shot civilians who sought shelter on the German side and/or filled water bottles in the Volga for German soldiers. General Chuikov, the army commander in Stalingrad justified these tactics in his memoirs by saying “a Soviet citizen cannot conceive of his life apart from his Soviet country.”

In 2008 the Russian Parliament justified the deaths of millions who died under brutal Stalin repression “ the Magnitogorsk steel mill and the Dnieper dame, would be “eternal monuments” to the victims.

If there is one lesson the communist century have taught, it is that independent authority of universal moral principles cannot be an afterthought, since it is a conviction on which all of civilization depends.

I have visited the Soviet Union twice (1968-69) while I was a student at Oxford University and (2006). In both cases I learned first hand the deadening impact of a totalitarian state. Once you get past the museums and the state stores, you witness the downside of a repressive regime.