The front page of the online edition of the\u00a0Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung\u00a0on October 3, the 35th anniversary of German unification, carried a frontal attack on Lenin. Under the headline \u201cOne must counter the myth that everything started out well,\u201d the mouthpiece of the Frankfurt stock exchange complained: \u201cLenin still will not disappear even 35 years after reunification.\u201d<\/p>\n
Front page of F.A.Z. online on the Day of German Unity.<\/p>\n
What followed was a long screed of almost 3,000 words in which the leader of the Russian October Revolution was denounced as a \u201ccriminal\u201d whose name, it was claimed, \u201cleads to a trail of violence, blood and terror,\u201d who stood for \u201cdictatorship, violence and murder\u201d and who \u201cbelongs in hell.\u201d The piece asserted that Lenin had established a \u201csystem of terrorist surveillance and repression\u201d whose tradition the SED (Socialist Unity Party) regime in the GDR (German Democratic Republic, East Germany) had continued. This was presented as \u201cthe true face of communism.\u201d<\/p>\n
The article relied on contemporary witnesses who had come into conflict with the Stalinist regime of the GDR and had been persecuted for distributing anti-SED leaflets or trying to flee to the West.<\/p>\n
Finally, the federal commissioner for the victims of the SED dictatorship, Evelyn Zupke, was quoted complaining that isolated Lenin statues still stood in some German towns. She said this sent the wrong signal and could even foster positive impressions. One must \u201ccounter the myth that everything actually began well,\u201d Zupke demanded. \u201cMany people still cling to the delusion that these were basically good ideas.\u201d Too rarely, she said, was addressed \u201cwhat trail of violence this ideology has left in human history, the millions of dead since 1917.\u201d<\/p>\n
At first glance, more than a hundred years after Lenin\u2019s death, it may seem surprising that the\u00a0Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung\u00a0would feel compelled to verbally beat the great revolutionary to death once more. Since the dissolution of the GDR and the Soviet Union 35 years ago it has repeatedly proclaimed that socialism had failed and no longer matters. Yet it is obvious that the paper\u2019s editors themselves do not really believe this tale.<\/p>\n
They have dug deep into the moth-eaten anti-communist propaganda of the Cold War because they fear that the revolutionary, Marxist perspective embodied by Lenin and his comrades\u2014above all Leon Trotsky\u2014could regain mass support. Their hatred of Lenin is an expression of their fear of socialist revolution.<\/p>\n
Lenin\u2019s political genius lay in grasping that the outbreak of the First World War\u2014the greatest catastrophe in history to that point\u2014represented the collapse of international capitalism, just as Marx had predicted.<\/p>\n
The imperialist war was not simply an arbitrary policy that could be replaced by a different, more peaceful one. It followed inevitably from the laws of capitalism\u2014the replacement of free competition by monopolies, the dominance of finance capital over industrial capital, and the complete partitioning of the world among the imperialist powers, which required a violent redivision. \u201cThis war will soon, if there is not a series of successful revolutions, be followed by other wars,\u201d Lenin warned at the beginning of the First World War.<\/p>\n
While the leaders of Germany\u2019s SPD and other social-democratic parties betrayed their pledges against war, called for the defence of the fatherland and postponed socialism to some indefinite future, Lenin called for struggle against the warmongers at home and for the international unity of the working class. In October 1917 the Russian working class, under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, seized power and on the same day ended the war.<\/p>\n
The October Revolution was an act of liberation of unprecedented international significance. Millions of workers around the world joined the Communist parties; liberation movements against barbaric colonial oppression gained immense momentum; in Russia culture flourished despite material shortages, widespread illiteracy was overcome within a few years, and after initial years of wartime deprivation the economy experienced substantial growth despite international isolation.<\/p>\n
The\u00a0Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung\u2019s attempt to present the October Revolution as the origin of \u201cdictatorship, violence and murder\u201d rests on hackneyed lies that have been refuted time and again. \u201cDictatorship, violence and murder\u201d came from the imperialist powers, which imposed a civil war on the young workers\u2019 state and relied on notorious butchers\u2014such as the tsarist generals Kornilov, Denikin, Wrangel and Kolchak\u2014who were infamous for conducting antisemitic pogroms.<\/p>\n
The Bolsheviks also resorted to repressive measures, which, under civil-war conditions, were unavoidable. But equating coercive measures taken in a civil war with the later Stalinist terror is a gross historical falsification.<\/p>\n
Stalin\u2019s terror did not target the enemies of the revolution, but its leaders. The Great Terror of the late 1930s claimed several hundred thousand devoted revolutionaries, including almost the entire Lenin-era leadership of the Bolshevik Party and much of the command of the Red Army. Its climax came in August 1940 with the assassination of Leon Trotsky, who had built the Left Opposition internationally and in 1938 founded the Fourth International to defend Lenin\u2019s legacy against Stalin.<\/p>\n
Equating Leninism with Stalinism is the great historical lie of the 20th century; the more historical research refutes it, the more stubbornly it is repeated. It places the leaders of the revolution on a par with its gravediggers, equating victims with their murderers.<\/p>\n
Stalin represented a privileged bureaucracy that developed within the state and party apparatus under conditions of economic hardship and international isolation, whose interests increasingly clashed with those of the working class. Fixated on securing its own incomes, the bureaucracy grew more hostile to the prospect of an international socialist revolution on which the October Revolution had been based. Internationally, it pursued an increasingly counter-revolutionary policy that led to numerous defeats of the working class.<\/p>\n