Communism's 'bullet'

pittsburghlive.com ^ | July 17, 2006 | Ralph R. Reiland

[Tailgunner Joe]

Explaining the monumental failure of the Soviet system and empire, Gen. Dmitri Volkogonov, a former official Soviet military historian, stressed that "the roots of the catastrophe lay in the ideology itself, in Leninism."

All told, the "catastrophe" of attempting to impose a Marxist-Leninist utopia in the Soviet Union resulted in the deaths of as many as 25 million people, according to recently released and hitherto inaccessible Soviet archives -- a death toll that was the direct consequence of centrally planned massacres, mass deportations, labor camps, torture and famine. ...

Within months of his rise to power, Lenin provided the definition of "revolutionary justice" to a workers' assembly: "If the masses do not rise up spontaneously, none of this will lead to anything. For as long as we fail to treat speculators the way they deserve --- with a bullet in the head --- we will not get anywhere."

The targets of this "justice" included shopkeepers, landlords, non-Bolshevik newspapers, non-Bolshevik political parties, the clergy, "counter-revolutionary" civil servants, intellectuals, "aristocrats," industrial strikers and malingering "pseudoworkers," entrepreneurs, gun owners, craftsmen, "bourgeois specialists," landowners, and, most especially, "money grubbing" kulaks, i.e., better-off peasants.

Simply stated, Lenin's "bullet in the head" form of "justice" was the officially prescribed punishment for any person "belonging to a hostile social class."

On Aug. 10, 1918, for instance, Lenin telegrammed instructions for dealing with kulaks who were expressing opposition to having their harvests confiscated by the government: "You must make an example of these people: (1) Hang (I mean hang publicly, so that people see it) at least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known bloodsuckers. (2) Publish their names. (3) Seize all their grain. P.S. Find tougher people."

By the time it was over, the Soviet Union's "tougher" enforcers had killed millions...

[AdvisorB]

"Didn't they bring about the mutiny of the troops under Kornilov?"

Bolshevik agitprop decimated Kornilovs troops and coupled with the railway workers opposition to the coup preventing the trains from getting to Petrograd, there was no hope for Kornilov, and more tragically, there was no hope for Russia.
A sad story indeed.

[Ditto]

I frequent a site that has forums for a Swedish computer game about WW II. The unabashed love expressed there for Communism can be quite sickening at times.

Cute. Perhaps you could ask them if they have anything feelings about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact where they mutually decided to gang-bang Poland and the rest of the Baltic states?

Communism is a disease.

[headsonpikes]

Communism was a state religion and it's deity died in 1953.

Dead deities cause less trouble for ambitious apparatchiks than live ones.

Observe the roles of the dead and buried FDR in the US and PET in Canada in advancing the agendas of our native wannabe Glorious Leaders.

Socialism is everywhere and at all times a death-cult.