The October Revolution and It's Heritage.

It's not that often that good surprises come our way, but meeting some comrades from around Sweden it became obvious that the heritage that is carried down from the Communist and Leninist traditions are not gone. That the revolutionary promise still exists. And it also exists throughout Europe, and throughout the world. Lenin's Tomb, for example, delivers an illuminating portrayal of the Bolshevik Party, Lenin and the October revolution with the ensuing counter-revolution and some of the tasks and solutions created by the party of workers and peasants.

The fact that the Bolsheviks won the civil war by the skin of their teeth - against an ememy that would undoubtedly have not only crushed the democratic achievements of the revolution, but also set a record for Hitler to break in terms of Jew-killing - at least suggests that to dispense with the tactic would have invited defeat and a potential humanitarian catastrophe. To adopt a more pacific posture when one is under sustained and vicious attack not only domestically from the most horrendous reactionary thugs, but also internationally from the club of rich men who have recently sunk Europe into one of its most depraved episodes in history, is arguably a form of fanaticism and utopianism that defies logic. Lenin is frequently upbraided for utopianism, yet if anything defines the Bolsheviks in opposition and in power, it is their pragmatism, their awareness of the necessary compromises to achive their goals. And those goals themselves were very precise and Lenin was one of the most creative in formulating direct, material means of achieving them (see this lively little warning shot, for example). The Bolshevik role in the revolution wasn't a coup, as it is usually interpreted, but it was at the minimum a form of humanitarian intervention. Having fought alongside Russian workers to win their humane goals in the real world, not in Utopia, the Bolsheviks then sought to defend them in the real world. Aware of the threat that the bureaucracy itself posed and the parlous condition of soviet power after the civil war, Lenin opposed the abolition of trade unions as a power separate from the soviets. Having gauged the threat of Stalin's obsessive bureaucratism, his petty tyrannical tendencies, and his Greater Russian chauvanism, Lenin tried to stop the slow-moving coup.

A few points need to be made for the subject of clarification. Calling Lenin a political moderate and humanist is entirely pointless (except perhaps as an argumentative or pedagougical device). Again, what is moderation and extremism is simply a quality of the particular hegemony of society. The Bolsheviks were the Left of the Second International, together with the Swedish Young Social Democrat's League, the Spartacists around Luxemburg and a few other groups. In themselves they had Left and Right currents that intertwined, changed sides and members. As for humanism, it's merely a ideological term that means little but promises many pretty things (much like the liberalism that created it).

Lastly, what must strike us as odd is the quaint resistance of the Bolshevik Party to engage in any of the measures imposed on enemy factions and rival groups before they betrayed and murdered agents of the revolution. Only after the murder of some Communist leaders and an attempt on Lenin's life are rival groups (the Social Revolutionaries, for example) forbidden or otherwise surpressed. Enemies of the October Revolution took every chance they had to murder, imprisonment and terror. It took many years for the Communist Party to enact the laws and decrees that forbade other parties or groups - years that were drenched in blood and horror.