Roots of Soviet Terror

Soviet Analyst | Sept Oct 2001 | Soviet Analyst

[Askel5]

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It should be noted that not only did the terror campaign demystify Russian rulers in the eyes of the people but it also caused the Government to overreact.

From 1879 onwards, the Imperial Government introduced a stream of extremely harsh counter measures meant to prevent terror, but which had the effect of alienating moderate groups in Russia.

In the long run this made it impossible for the regime to ever secure the support of moderately conservative and liberal elements in Russian society; so it was left to fall, isolated and alone, in 1917.

--- Richard Pipes

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THE ROOTS OF SOVIET TERROR

According to Professor Richard Pipes, former Director of the Russian Research Center at Harvard University, "the roots of Soviet terrorism, indeed of modern terrorism, date back to 1879"(6), when a Congress of an organization called Narodnaya Volya (The People's Will) met in the small Russian town of Lipetsk. On 1st March 1881, this group succeeded, after a succession of failures, in murdering Tzar Alexander II, even though he was known as the Tzar Liberator, because he had freed the Russian serfs in 1861.

The philosophical underpinnings of the group, and of Soviet-spawned terrorism, may be found in the Catechism of the Revolutionary by Sergei Nechaiev (assisted by his mentor, the former artillery officer, Michael Bakunin). The son of a priest (Stalin studied to be a priest), and one of the most evil men who ever lived, Nechaiev "passionately embraced the cause of revolution.

In 1869, he organized a society in Moscow for the purpose of preparing mass insurrection. He shrank from nothing to attract followers, resorting to deceipt, terrorism and murder.(7) By studying Nechaiev's hideous writings, today's student of continuing World Revolution (and of its enhanced weapon, terrorism) can gain the necessary insight into the mentality we are confronted with. For in the Catechism, Nechaiev wrote:

The Revolutionist is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own … heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order and … the … civilized world.

He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose: to destroy it …

Everything which promotes the success of the Revolution is moral; everything which hinders it is immoral. The nature of the true revolutionist excludes all romanticism, all tenderness, all ecstasy, all love.

[…] … after falling out with Michael Bakunin and the breakup of his organization by the Tzarist police, which led to the arrest of some 300 operatives, Nechaiev had fled to Switzerland. Bakunin left this description of his erstwhile terrorism comrade:

Nechaiev … is as ruthless with himself as he is with others. He is a fanatic, but a very dangerous one, association with whom may be fatal to all concerned. His methods are abhorrent.

He has come to the conclusion that to create a workable organization one must use as a basis the philosophy of Machiavelli and adopt the motto of the Jesuits: "Violence for the Body; lies for the soul."

With the exception of … the chosen leaders, all the members should serve as blind tools in the hands of those leaders …. It is permissible to deceive these members, rob them, and even murder them if necessary. They are merely cannon fodder for conspiracies.

For the good of the cause, he must be allowed to gain full mastery over your person, even against your will."

Professor Pipes explained why "The People's Will" is the model for the modern terrorist organization, just as Nechaiev's Catechism of the Revolutionary established the mindset which infects the barbarous hordes of Muslim and Marxist terrorist who have 'graduated' from terrorism training camps modeled on those originally established under the supervision of KGB Colonel Kotchergine in 1966 [around Havana, Cuba some 10 months after the Jan. '66 Tricontinental Conference of 513 delegates representing 83 groups from the Third World]:

The People's Will was the first to consider the enemy to be the whole system … capitalism, religion, law and everything which kept the body politic intact. (12)

The successor, both in method and also partly in respect of ideology, to the Narodnaya Volya movement, was the party of the Social Revolutionaries (SRs), who launched attacks on the Russian Imperial Government in the early years of the 20th century with the deliberate purpose of destroying the awe in which the Russian population held the regime.

[...]

Professor Pipes observed:

They felt that as long as people feared the Government, and believed it to be omnipotent, there was no possibility of Revolution. So the murder of Government officials or supporters of the Government was an important step in causing the numinous glow surrounding the government to evanesce.

The SR campaign succeeded to a remarkable extent. Almost all contemporary observers note that after 1905, the traditional loyalty and belief of the Russian peasant in the Monarchy were broken. There was [by now] a great deal of contempt on the part of the peasant for the regime. This facilitated the events of 1917.

THE DEFENCE OF TERRORISM BY TROTSKY

It was of course Leon Trotsky (Braunstein) who followed in the footsteps of Nechaiev and Bakunin by adding to the literature of terrorism with his tome entitled The Defense of Terrorism, also called Terrorism and Communism, which appeared in the English language in 1921.(13) On page 23 of this polemical work, Trotsky proclaimed that:

The man who repudiates terrorism in principle – i.e., repudiates measures of suppression and intimidation towards determined armed counter-revolution, must reject all idea of the political supremacy of the working-class and its revolutionary dictatorship. The man who repudiates the dictatorship of the proletariat repudiates the Socialist Revolution, and digs the grave of Socialism.

This piece of subtle "backwards reasoning" was framed so as to imply that the Communists' 'sacred cows' would be violated by anyone who denied the necessity of terrorism to enhance the prospects for Revolution. In other words, those who did not support terrorism were not revolutionaries, and neither were they even socialists: they were scum, to be despised and destroyed.

Trotsky's lust for blood evidently knew no bounds, even though he was by far the most literate and profound of the founding revolutionaries:

That the proletariat will have to pay with blood, that, in the struggle for the conquest of power and for its consolidation, the proletariat will not only have to be killed, but [will also have to] kill – of this, no serious revolutionary can ever have any doubt … One cannot live by phrases about the great truth that under Socialism we shall need no Red Terror.

But Trotsky himself attributed the revolutionary doctrine that Communism cannot be "constructed" without terrorism to Lenin. According to David Shub, an exiled Russian revolutionary, and author of a classic short life of Lenin(14), "Lenin at every opportunity kept hammering into our heads that terror was unavoidable." In order to give physical expression to his demonic desire to embark upon state terror […(15)…] Lenin identified and appointed the son of a rich Polish landowner named Felix Dzerzhinsky, from Poland's Vilno province.

"He was fair, slightly round-shouldered, with a short pointed beard and transparent eyes with dilated pupils," wrote Shrub. "There were moments when his friendly smile gave way to icy sternness. At such times, his eyes and ascetic bloodless lips revealed a demoniac fanaticism. Rigorous self-denial, incorrigible honesty, and a frigid indifference to the opinions of others, completed his make-up. His natural modesty, unassuming air and quiet manners set him apart."

"On 20th December 1917, Lenin instructed Dzherzhinsky to organize an Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-revolution and Speculation. Under the name Cheka, the Soviet secret police soon became the symbol for a system of terror such as the world has never seen.(16)

The Cheka's initial headquarters was the Smolny Institute a former girls' school in Leningrad – the selfsame building in which Anatoliy Sobchak presided as Mayor of St. Petersburg, and to which Vladimir Putin was … posted after … functioning as 'assistant' to the 'dean' of Leningrad University [immediately following] his return from Russia from East Germany [where he had] successfully directed … removal of East European regimes and their replacement by … 'non'-communists in 1989-1990]. (17) […]

Thus the Soviet regime, nurtured in the hellish tradition of Nechaiev's "People's Will" aberration, bathed itself in blood from the outset. Indeed, as Trotsky proclaimed, the revolution makes no sense without terror …

Since we are now truly living in the era of the World Revolution, terror has been exported by the Soviets globally. The only factor preventing the West from understanding and accepting this obvious truth is … the … misguided belief that the Leninist Soviet revolutionaries abandoned, all of a sudden, their global revolutionary intentions and ideology and suddenly became 'like us.'

[ "I felt guilty." V. Putin ]

DEMYSTIFICATION AND OFFICIAL OVERREACTION

The indiscriminate use of terror adopted with relish (even though Lenin's secretary said that Dzerzhinksy's liquidation of over 1,500 inmates in the early stages of the Red Terror was 'a mistake') also had another, more subtle effect, which should (but won't) serve as a warning to President Bush and Tony Blair in the present circumstances.

As Pipes explained:

It should be noted that not only did the terror campaign demystify Russian rulers in the eyes of the people but it also caused the Government to overreact.

From 1879 onwards, the Imperial Government introduced a stream of extremely harsh counter measures meant to prevent terror, but which had the effect of alienating moderate groups in Russia.

In the long run this made it impossible for the regime to ever secure the support of moderately conservative and liberal elements in Russian society; so it was left to fall, isolated and alone, in 1917.

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(6) -- Pipes, Professor Richard, International Terrorism: the Soviet Connection, The Jonathan Institute, proceedings of the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism, 2-5 July 1979, page 11.
(7) -- Lenin, David Shub (who was personally acquainted with many of the Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin, Trotsky and Kukharin, as well as the socialist Kerensky), Mentor Books and Doubleday & Co., Inc. New York 1950-1962.
(8) -- Paris-Match 4th November 1977, cited by Sterling, The Terror Network, op cit [Claire Sterling "The Terror Network: The Secret War of International Terrorism" Holt-Rinehard and Winston, 1981.]
(9) -- Stefan Possony and Francis Bouchey, International Terrorism: The Communist Connection, page 47, Hoover Institute for the Study of War and Peace; and Jean-Pierre Vigier, Le Monde, Paris, 27th October 1967; both cited by Claire Sterling, op cit.
(10) -- Claire Sterling, op cit. p. 14.
(11) -- Lenin, David Shub, op cit., pp. 15-16
(12) -- Pipes, Richards, International Terrorism: The Soviet Connection, op cit., p. 12.
(13) -- Leon Trotsky, The Defense of Terrorism (Terrorism and Communism), 1921, The Labour Publishing Company & George Allen and Unwin
(14) -- Lenin, David Shub, op cit.
(15) -- "We set ourselves the ultimate aim of destroying the state," V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution, International Publishers, New York, 1961 Edition, p. 68.
(16) -- Lenin, David Shub, op cit., pp. 156
(17) -- See, Soviet Analyst, Vol. 27, NO. 4, pp. 6-7.
(18) -- David Shub, op cit., pp. 156

[TapTheSource]

Did I mention that the article was written years after the "end of the Cold War"? Take it easy--TTS

[Askel5]

Communist regimes have never been overthrown without significant violence and bloodshed.

Was pretty amazing, no?, the way communism's epicenter transformed nearly overnight with little more than some shelling of the "White House" (Yelstin posing on a tank like Lenin in the Beautiful Square) and the "coup" against Gorbachev?

Gorbachev – who knew so much about the future that the strategic collective had planned, that the no-for-profit entity established in the State of California under the name "Tamalpais Institute" was put in place ready for its name change to Gorbachev Foundation/USA a year later, on 10th April 1992 – seemed to have special knowledge about the provocation planned for August 1991. For he himself predicted it, in the court of an answer at that Paris press conference:

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The dangers lie in the fact that someone, analysing at some private momont or other, this or that instance or episode, or even event, including a dramatic event should not make hasty conclusions and cast doubt on all that has been acquired and what we have created in putting international relations onto new channels, onto new rails, entering – as all of us have said – a period of peaceful development.

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[This remark telling for (1) its expression of residual Soviet anxiety over the West's ability to rightly perceive the convergence strategy and the "break with the past" as strategic deception; (2) prediction of the dramatic event; and (3) …]

… an affirmation of Moscow's success in altering the Western mentality so that it now openly accepted the Leninist view of the world ("putting international relations on … new rails").

It is axiomatic that a train traveling along a railway line can proceed in one direction only – the direction intended by the Leninist strategists, which is towards the abolition of nation–states and their incorporation into regional blocs en route to World Government [=dictatorship].

Gorbachev could have said "onto a new road" but chose instead to use the word "rails" – from which, of course, a train cannot turn off to the right or the left. In other words, the world had only one option -- to proceed along the "railway line" laid down by the Soviet strategy collective, of convergence between East and West on the Soviets' terms.

Furthermore, this deeply Leninist statement contained a veiled threat, given that the alternative to the "only option" would be for the train to reverse along the railway line back to the Cold War, with the implication that ay such course would have prospectively disastrous consequences for humanity. The West, led by people like the blinkered Mr. Hurd, fell for this blackmail, thereby fulfilling part of Dmitri Manuilski's, notorious prediction in 1938 that …

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The bourgeoisie will have to be put to sleep. So we shall begin by launchig the most spectacular peace movement on record. There will be electrifying overtures and unheard-of concessions.

The West, stupid and decadent, will rejoice to cooperate in their own destruction.

As soon as their guard is down, we will smash them with our clenched fist.

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Paraphrased and quoted from Soviet Analyst, Vo. 27, No. 5

Former Statesman Snubbed

[TapTheSource]

It's funny how the *desire* to believe that Communism has collapsed completely overwhelms the continuous flow of facts that tell us the exact opposite. The Bible diagnosed this flaw in our ability to reason thousands of years ago: "The heart is deceitful beyond measure, who can understand it?"

[Askel5]

The desire to believe is most certainly a handicap where faith is misplaced.

I think the coup de grace for the Calvinists, particularly, as well as the Enlightened generally, was the infecting of otherwise moral minds with Pragmatism.

Once a person can rationalize as "good" evil acts done for "good intents" or judge a person by his motive rather than his actions, it's basically game over where Objective Reality or natural moral law is concerned.

Those are the People who've Eaten from the Tree marked "Knowledge of Good and Evil". They are the ones who think to practice the alchemy of pragmatism and transform good into evil and evil into good, depending primarily on ephemeral Circumstance and wholly subjective Motive.

[TapTheSource]

Askel, like I said, I agree with you on many things...but could you be so kind as to speak in plain english please. Your generalities make you appear like someone who is torn or vacillating between Traditional Catholic, Libertarian, Conservative and Objectivist ideas. If you must go on and on about PRAGMATISM and CALVINISM, please do so directly and succinctly so the rest of us can figure out what you are talking about. Otherwise you're just wasting words.

And read those books!!!...that way you will finally be able to go through life with an objective (and therefore consistent) position on Israel :o)

[Just mythoughts]

Interesting way of describing things.

[nw_arizona_granny]

Bookmark

[TapTheSource]

Just sent you a ping to this thread...turn out you're already here...I think I'm going to rename you FLASH!

[Askel5]

=== you will finally be able to go through life with an objective (and therefore consistent) position on Israel :o)


That, I have already achieved. Remember, it is you who believe Israel is special in that all is fair where "God's will" is concerned.

You are right to sense a reluctance on my part to read the books in the first place. I'll tell you why that is.

My being accused of "hating" the Bush Dynasty dates almost exactly to the posting of a thread I excerpted from the Barbara Bush autobiography which was sitting in our firm breakroom one day. Honestly, the last thing I need is more ammunition for my arguments ... particularly that of a "personal" sort.

I'm fine sticking with public domain facts, the food for thought I've received from Jews (both pro-Israel and not-so-pro-Israel) and perfectly Reasonable (largely Thomist) logic where the recognizing and respecting of acts as essentially evil or essentially good is concerned.

There never was, is not and never will be such a thing as good or "humanitarian" research using artificially manufactured and purposefully-destroyed lives.

There will never be such a thing as committing "pre-emptive" evil acts in God's name so to bring about "God's will."

On occasion, Just War and the sanctity of life (particularly that of the innocent and helpless) obligate a person to commit evil by defending themselves or another to the death and/or seeking to slay an unjust aggressor. The only way in which justice and truth (and mercy) remain a part of this equation is to keep one's perspective on good and evil absolutely intact by recognizing always that infliction of death is an evil to be avoided at all costs. I see nothing wrong, in other words, with placing more emphasis on Father Abraham's haggling with God on behalf of the Good Men of Sodom than I do the instances of "kill them all, let God sort them out" express approvals to lay waste to entire settlements of men, women and children. How anyone with an appreciation of the Covenant made new do otherwise? Are we to read the Old Testament with the same understanding and insights of a man born a thousand years before Christ?

And would you have whipped out your sword to defend Christ in the Garden? I bet I would have. Even if I had somehow managed to think I understood what He was telling me at the Passover meal only hours before, it would have been the perfectly natural thing to do ... to defend with force a man I knew was innocent.

But God's will -- as evidenced by His healing the soldier's ear -- was that man should understand the willing nature of His self-sacrifice, the supreme turning of the other cheek, and learn that there is and should be room for forgiveness of those who, being ignorant, know not what they do.

It's a New Covenant thing. Those of the Old Covenant should have been expecting this all along. To my knowledge, many still are awaiting a Messiah to ride an ass into Jerusalem.

Lastly ... if you'll remember, Christ came to bring that New Covenant to his own -- the only who had an Old Covenant to make new. And He even went so far as to describe the Gentiles as dogs under the table worthy only of the scraps of the Children, perhaps, once the Gentile woman begged for same.

Any so-called Reprobate can beg like a dog and become one of God's Chosen. Remember that. It's the reason mercy---not vengeance or desire to re-form others in our own not-so-godly image, or rationalizations, with all due pragmatism, of the deals cut with the likes of Stalin, the bombing of Nagasaki or Dresden or the tit-for-tat "collateral damage" to innocents--must be the overriding element of any truly Just War.

[TapTheSource]

Like I said, read the books...the Irgun followed your prescription better than almost any other military or paramilitary outfit I know of. You might also remember that Paul tells us the government does not bear the sword in vain. Of course, governments often misuse the sword, but a government that fails to use the sword where appropriate is no government at all. When Israel was founded, there was no legitimate, indigenous government in Palestine. That's one of the reasons a fight needed to take place there, to establish just that. And for the most part, Israel does not bear the sword in vain. Indeed, given their frightful situation, they are far too restrained. The most merciful thing that could happen in that neck of the woods would be one side to win decisively, once and for all (and we both know who that would be at this juncture in history). Instead, we have an artificial UN/US/EU/Soviet/Israeli Left-induced war of attrition (no win war) causing untold misery and suffering.

[Askel5]

=== Instead, we have an artificial UN/US/EU/Soviet/British Left-induced

Zion.


=== When Israel was founded, there was no legitimate, indigenous government in Palestine. That's one of the reasons a fight needed to take place there, to establish just that.


Listen to yourself.

[TapTheSource]

I don't need to listen to myself, I wrote it. You can't have a power vacuum such as existed when the British administered Palestine. Sooner or later you are going to be faced with a war when an outside entity babysits a piece of property hotly contested by two indigenous entities. This dynamic is built right into creation. Are you so romantic that you can't even be objective about that?

[Askel5]

=== You can't have a power vacuum such as existed when the British administered Palestine.

Administered what?

=== Sooner or later you are going to be faced with a war when an outside entity babysits a piece of property hotly contested by two indigenous entities. This dynamic is built right into creation.

So ... where we are reserving for ourselves the "Security Services" and assurances (mostly financial) necessary to "babysit" the nations we're presently liberating (Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq all containing some pretty hostile indigenous entities), are you saying we're doomed to failure because -- as with our "babysitting" Israel -- the dynamic that shall (self)defeat us is "built right into creation"?

[Askel5]

btw ... I gotta crash. Night, TTS

[TapTheSource]

"Administered what?"

Most of Eretz Israel. In other words, they were administering land God promised to the Jews. I have no problem with them administering the land...after all, God kicked the Jews out for a while...but He promised that they would one day return. It was when the British began trying to halt the return of the Jews that they became trespassers, and on the wrong side of God's prophetic plan.

[TapTheSource]

btw, the Soviet and the Arabs were on the wrong side of God's prophetic plan as well.

[Askel5]

=== btw, the Soviet and the Arabs were on the wrong side of God's prophetic plan as well.


How can that be?


I am not one of those who believes in EITHER Faith OR Reason. In fact, I'm quite confident that anyone interested in rightly perceiving and humbly doing God's will must needs rely on BOTH at all times so to keep his chariot from careening to one side or the other.

At this point, utterly fantastic pronouncements on the Evil Ones such as yours above are every bit as intelligible to me as the ramblings of those who cannot fathom the "despicable act" for which Onan was put to death or who manage to rationalize somehow the Purposeful Exclusion of the Creator from the marriage bed as somehow pleasing to God in that they -- not He -- are the best judge of exactly When and How many of "God's blessings" they can afford.

God is not a fiend. Nor -- if his relenting on asking Abraham to sacrifice HIS own son -- does he expect us to be gods ourselves and able to put other men to the tests we devise in order to tell Chosen from UnChosen, Elect from Reprobate.

THE ONLY yardstick we have is whether men follow their consciences or not. The Incarnation is not only an event in Time to which those born before Christ had no access but also an event to which is not given all men to know anything about much less apprehend rightly (in the case of those whose faiths or lack of faith or circumstances preclude such apprehension).

Conscience -- God's law written in the heart of every human being -- rightly educated, formed and FOLLOWED, precludes any man from setting himself up as God (taking the Lord's name in vain) or rationalizing clearly immoral acts (such as murder, envy, theft, failure to honor one's parents or protect one's children from the Moment of Creation, etc.) and cannot possibly lead any just man to believe that Some are More Equal than others simply by virtue of their having been born in the right place at the right time.

I think it's a seriously grave error to believe one can tell those whom God has "chosen" to do evil so that His will might be accomplished. Primarily because we are locked in Time, have no real concept of the mystery of Free Will and the ability of God alone to know a man's heart, it would be rash in the extreme to pick and choose those evil traitors or those evil acts which God DETERMINED somehow would operate to fulfill His plans for human redemption.

Likewise, the same would apply for any Christian tempted to believe that Mary -- however spotless was her soul -- had no Choice in the matter of accepting God's will as proposed to her by Gabriel. Either hers is a triumph as handmaiden and humble servant of the Lord or she was just predestined by God to be a robot.

You cannot have it both ways.

It's at this point, sadly, our conversation ends for now where this line of argument is concerned. I have no wish to be embroiled labyrinthian arguments of selected Scripture that is simply irreconciliable with the Whole of revealed knowledge and -- further -- contrary to human reason. This is where we simply have to agree to disagree for now if we're to salvage for the time being the ability to discourse on incontrovertible facts, events and prognoses for the ongoing march of the revolution at home and abroad by "any means necessary" ... particularly the Triangulation of the People of the Book by atheists whose "some are more equal than others" bent ought to be an indication of how best they manage to play the Faithbased like pianos.

[alrea]

one word: bureaucracy

[DAVEY CROCKETT]

Things just don't change that much do they?

[meema]

Richard Pipes is someone who I love to read.