Lenin was truly Satanic. Unlike Marx, he was a man of total action. Like a Satanist, he loved humanity, he objectified progress by eliminating the notion of ethics from progress. Having arrived as a German agent from Basil, Germany hoped to soften up its rear front against Russia, in the hope of alleviating resources for the western front tied up and paralyzed in France. It worked. All to well.
2018 is the centenary of the Russian Revolution. By far the best account is Yale Universities Laura Engelstein’s Russia in Flames: War, Revolution and Civil War 1914-1921.
Engelstein’s account covers not just world war, but two revolutions, their prelude and the civil war that followed. A civil war that the Bolsheviks wanted to foment. Lenin calculated that a great sorting, a process of clarification would leave the Bolsheviks alone on top. As Lenin often said, the worse, the better. The war turned out to be more terrible than even Lenin envisaged. In the end, it served his and Germany’s purpose.
The Bolshevik’s were storm-chasers, struggling to keep up with events they could not control, only socially-politically harness. The successive iterations of the provisional government, the best known of which was led by Alexander Kerensky, were actually rent from the crisis of revolution.
Kerensky failed to feed the cities, he couldn’t satisfy the demand by both workers and peasants that Lenin’s fomentation aroused. Finally, it was democratic principles and a justified fear of political radicals keep Kerensky from gambling on a more authoritarian mien until it was far too late.
Even by this time, the Bolshevik’s didn’t take the helm. Lenin waited this out. Like a true totalitarian revolutionary, everything was used to strengthen his appeal.
April, June, and July all saw powerful eruptions of popular discontent which were beyond any government to control. Lenin saw those at the political center exhaust themselves and their political credit.
According to Nikolai Sukhanov, Lenin was aiming to create social, political conditions that made it favorable for him to seize power. The Bolshevik’s built their base, patiently gathering support among the population, in factories and throughout the military. Then they mobilized a disciplined mass in a manner designed to invite disorder to topple the reigning, exhausted, ameliorated provisional government. This was performed under the guise of imposing order. In October of 1918, Lenin seized this scheme upon the Russian people.
What Lenin did was create the social base for governance (read Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt). He sought to openly handle, even wrestle the maintenance of the state from Kerensky by running the successor to Russia’s failed autocracy. He simple transformed the excitement of social revolution and liberty into an exercise of raw autocratic power. Something only Tocqueville expected. With Lenin, we witness the return of political tribalism that constituted premodern life. An old gnostic cult of leadership re-emerged (Eric Voegelin).
Its over now, and we’ve got hundreds of millions of dead to prove why the criminalization of political differences is the harbinger for demise.
William Holland
William Holland 