No romanticising Bolshevik coup

November 2017 marks the centenary of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia: an event which changed the world and whose aftershocks endure. The chaos in Russia wreaked by the First World War was a major cause – the collapse of a weakened Russian state under the outdated and inept leadership of the Tsar.

But the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks under Lenin and Trotsky, aided and abetted by cynical German opportunism, was the event that set the tone for the rest of the 20th Century.

Central and Eastern Europe, traumatised and weakened by the brutality of the First World War, lurched into totalitarianism which began with Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, and led directly to Hitler and the Holocaust. Communism and Nazism were and remain the twin pillars of evil that brought 20th Century Europe to its knees. Ideologies which to their fanatical supporters purported to be peddling the promised land in reality produced hell on earth.

It was Bolshevik communism which first removed all constraints on the power of the state, or rather the party, to control the lives of citizens.

Communist ideology demands unbridled loyalty to the party, taking fundamental freedoms away from the individual – movement, conscience, wealth, property, education and debate. Stalin’s communism was the most extreme – at least prior to Mao and Pol Pot – and used education, the arts, the media and propaganda in grotesquely new ways to reinforce that control, in concert with developments in technology to extend the brutalisation of the people through genocide and enforced ethnic cleansing.

Stalinism turned the armed forces into party-controlled militia and the courts became instruments of state violence against the people rather than the defenders of the rule of law.

In all this Stalinism was an inspiration to Hitler and the National Socialists, who set out to replicate and push to new limits in Germany what Stalin had already put in place in the 1920s and 30s.

They were ideological cousins. Purity of class and its vanguard, the party, was matched by purity of race.

Militarised societies and the almost total absence of rule of law led to personality cults, concentration camps, political executions, anti-semitism and mass murder in both Communism and Nazism. The slogans of socialism in one country and a thousand-year Reich in national socialism are in practise virtually identical.

And if you think Lenin and Trotsky were better – forget it. Stalin survived Lenin and outmanoeuvred Trotsky, that’s all. The Bolshevik coup d’etat in November 1917 was an unmitigated disaster for Russia and Europe. It inspired dictators from Mussolini to Franco to Hitler in their deluded madness and continues to do so today.

And yet, in 1945, with the whole of Europe devastated by these criminals, somehow, in the part under the control of the Western allies, the forces of American and British liberal democracy managed to greenhouse a plan for the future and encourage the growth of the extraordinary democratic consensus, whether in the EU or elsewhere, backed up by Nato, to ensure parliamentary democracy and the rule of law could begin to thrive once again.

Now at a time when we as a society seem to growing unduly cynical about the values of our precious liberal social democracy and the post-war European consensus, and people flirt with illiberal, even dictatorial, ideologies and rhetoric, it is crucial that we remember the Bolshevik coup of 1917, not to glorify or romanticise it, nor even to relativise it, but to condemn it for what it was: the first ghastly step in the totalitarian terrorisation, first of Europe, then large parts of the globe.

Our democracy is imperfect and full of inconsistencies. But it is an extraordinary achievement and we need to work hard to preserve and develop it.

Picture: Getty. People carry a portrait of Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin as they take part in a rally held by the Russian Communist Party to mark the centenary of the 1917 October Revolution in Lenin Street, Omsk.