by Revolver News
Thursday marked the 151st birthday of the most successful revolutionary of all time, Vladimir Lenin. With only a tiny cabal of diehard followers, Lenin seized control of the world’s largest country and inaugurated a reign of darkness and terror that lasted seventy years.
The Bolsheviks were indisputably more murderous than today’s left (if only because they lived in a more violent age), but even they had to ramp up how much terror they engaged in.
At the beginning of their rule, in fact, the Bolsheviks were even willing to run a fair election. Just days after the October Revolution, they held the preplanned elections for Russia’s Constituent Assembly, anticipating an easy win. To their surprise, they were easily defeated by the Socialist Revolutionaries. And so, like any good leftists, they simply nullified the election and dissolved the Constituent Assembly. Since it was 100 years ago and the Bolsheviks were well-armed, it was enough to simply announce that the Constituent Assembly was closed. Today, they might concoct a more elaborate narrative, perhaps that the Socialist Revolutionaries engaged in “collusion” with a foreign power.
In their earliest days, the Bolsheviks framed their political abuses as a “war on privilege.” In a tactic eerily reminiscent of 2020’s riots, the Bolsheviks of 1918 encouraged a decentralized campaign by the masses to plunder and crush class enemies.
In January 1918, at a meeting of party agitators on their way to the provinces, Lenin explained that the plunder of bourgeois property was to be encouraged as a form of social justice by revenge. It was a question of ‘looting the looters’. Under this slogan, which the Bolsheviks soon made their own, there was an orgy of robbery and violence in the next few months. Gorky described it as a mass pogrom. Armed gangs robbed the propertied — and then robbed each other. Swindlers, thieves and bandits grew rich, as law and order finally vanished. [Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 525-526]
Since the police and the old criminal courts had virtually disappeared, there was a common feeling that the only way to deal with the problem of crime was by mob trials in the street.
…
As the socioeconomic crisis deepened, and the popular belief developed that the burzhoois were responsible for it, so these mob trials began to assume an overtly class nature. They became a weapon in the war against privilege, focusing less on petty thieves from the urban poor and much more on merchants and shopkeepers, factory owners and employers, army officers, former tsarist officials and other figures of superordinate authority.
The Bolsheviks gave institutional form to the mob trials through the new People’s Courts, where ‘revolutionary justice’ was summarily administered in all criminal cases. The old criminal justice system, with its formal rules of law, was abolished as a relic of the ‘bourgeois order’.
…
The sessions of the People’s Courts were little more than formalized mob trials.
…
[R]obbers — and sometimes even murderers — of the rich were often given only a very light sentence, or even acquitted altogether, if they pleaded poverty as the cause of their crime. The looting of the looters had been legalized and, in the process, law as such abolished: there was only lawlessness.
Lenin had always been insistent that the legal system should be used as a weapon of mass terror against the bourgeoisie. The system of mob law which evolved through the Peoples Courts gave him that weapon of terror. [Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 533-4]
But the facts of the case are nothing compared to the facts of the participants. Pentland is white, and he therefore represents a figure of authority in the minds of the underclass. This makes him a second-class citizen in 2021. His every action is presumptively racist and to be punished with maximum viciousness. Not only is he facing criminal charges, but he’s under investigation by the Army and DoJ, he was condemned by his superiors, and police let a mob surround and vandalize his home. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, a far worse assault on an elderly Asian man ended in no charges at all, because the attacker was from one of the left’s more privileged races.
It’s a strategy Cheka officer Martin Latsis would understand well:
[Do not] look for evidence as proof that the accused has acted or spoken against the Soviets. First you must ask him to what class he belongs, what his social origin is, his education and profession. These are the questions that must determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning of the Red Terror. [Alpha History]
“We must put an end once and for all to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life,” said Trotsky, one of the chief apostles of the so-called “Red Terror.”
As the Terror spread, the torments grew more creative:
Each local Cheka had its own speciality. In Kharkov they went in for the ‘glove trick’ — burning the victim’s hands in boiling water until the blistered skin could be peeled off: this left the victims with raw and bleeding hands and their torturers with ‘human gloves’. The Tsaritsyn Cheka sawed its victims’ bones in half. In Voronezh they rolled their naked victims in nail-studded barrels. In Armavir they crushed their skulls by tightening a leather strap with an iron bolt around their head. In Kiev they affixed a cage with rats to the victim’s torso and heated it so that the enraged rats ate their way through the victim’s guts in an effort to escape. In Odessa they chained their victims to planks and pushed them slowly into a furnace or a tank of boiling water. A favourite winter torture was to pour water on the naked victims until they became living ice statues. Many Chekas preferred psychological forms of torture. One had the victims led off to what they thought was their execution, only to find that a blank was fired at them. Another had the victims buried alive, or kept in a coffin with a corpse. [Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 646]