The Hunt for Red October

Earlier this month, when he launched the SACP's ‘Red October' campaign, Blade Nzimande, the SACP's Secretary-General, called for a celebration of Lenin's Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and the wonderful era that it had inaugurated for the Russian people. According to him, it was "one of the best periods in the development of the Soviet Union" (see here).

Nzimande added that the Bolshevik revolution had proved "that another world is possible. We celebrate Red October to remind all and sundry that a world that is characterised by hunger, poverty, deprivation and want is not given - it is imposed on humanity by the system of capitalism, a system where the creativity of man is being used to enrich a few, which we must overcome."

Nzimande's glowing interpretation of communist history warrants further consideration.

Lenin's illegal coup against the centrist Karensky government in 1917 immediately unleashed a devastating civil war which lasted seven years and laid waste many of the countries surrounding Russia that would later form part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

According Evan Mawdsley in ‘The Russian Civil War', "there were seven to ten million victims, four times those the country lost in the [First] World War, and they were mostly civilians. The Civil War unleashed by Lenin's revolution was the greatest national catastrophe Europe had yet seen." He cites Lev Kritsman, historian of the Civil War economy, who estimated that national income in 1920 was only 40% of what it was in 1913: "Such a fall of the productive forces... of a huge society of a hundred million people... is unexampled in the history of mankind."

It's hard to imagine Minister Nzimande was referring to this enormous destruction as "one of the best periods in the development of the Soviet Union." Perhaps he meant that there was a great period of development after the civil war ended in December 1922, when Lenin was in undisputed control of the USSR?

According to The New World History "Lenin pulled Russia back from the abyss" in 1921, by abandoning the communism of the Civil War in favour of his New Economic Plan (NEP) which was "a modified version of the old capitalist system." Sale of agricultural products was legalized, "[r]etail stores and small industries that employed fewer than twenty employees could now operate under private ownership, although heavy industry, banking, utilities and mines remained in the hands of government." "Overall the NEP had saved the nation from complete economic disaster even though Lenin and other leading Communists intended it to be only a temporary, tactical retreat from the goals of communism." The NEP would remain the guiding policy even after Lenin's death in 1924, until 1928 when Joseph Stalin gained an absolute grip on power.

It also seems unlikely that Nzimande had this brief period of reduced misery in mind when he lauded Bolshevik ‘development', since the NEP was, in fact, a temporary retreat from Bolshevism. It worked precisely because Lenin had allowed the Russian people some free market mechanisms that Nzimande so disdains. Even then, the progress achieved was simply a limited reversal of the massive setbacks caused by the purer form of communism that Lenin had originally imposed on the country.

So maybe Minister Nzimande was thinking of some golden age of socialism after the NEP and the Civil War - in which case he could only be referring to the period of Stalin's rule from 1928 to 1953?.

In 1928 Stalin replaced Lenin's NEP with the first of his regular Five Year Economic Plans - which involved massive state-directed industrialisation aimed at producing a lot of what people didn't want and very little of what they did. Under his land reform policy of the collectivisation of farms - and exacerbated by bad weather - as many as 5 million Ukrainians - and probably more than 11 million people throughout the USSR - starved to death. Some 14 million people passed through Stalin's penal labour camp system, known as the Gulag, leading to estimated deaths in excess of 1.5 million people. Enforced internal migration - usually involving the deportation of entire ethnic groups - affected some six million people - of whom an estimated one million died.

Evidently, some people still failed to understand the virtues of communism, so Stalin initiated the Great Purge. Between 1936 and 1938 an average of one thousand people a day - 700 000 in total - were executed. Amongst them counted artists, academics, party members and even majorities of certain categories of military and government office holders. If one includes war crimes perpetrated during World War II - such as the massacre of the Polish officer corps in the Katyn forest - one quickly reaches Robert Conquest's lower limit of the 15 million deaths caused by Soviet communism.

The period after Stalin saw some improvements in the lives of Soviet citizens - but no freedom and no prosperity. Finally, at the end of the 1980s the whole edifice of communism collapsed under the weight of its aggregated failure to meet the needs of the populations that it claimed to serve. In reality, there was no golden age during the history of the Soviet Union - only varying degrees of misery, drabness, deprivation and terror.

Nzimande is right: "another world is possible" under central planning, but is inevitably a world "hunger, poverty, deprivation and want." It is not free markets that are imposed upon people as he claims but rigid and totalitarian systems like communism. The proof is that as soon as people have the freedom to choose they will invariably opt for freedom - as they did all over eastern Europe when communism collapsed twenty years ago. If he has so much faith in the people's longing for ‘Red October' why does the SACP not stand as an independent party in our next national election?

Until then, it is unfitting for a Minister who has sworn an oath of allegiance to our truly democratic constitution to propagate views that represent the antithesis of everything that our Constitution represents.

Piet le Roux is an analyst for the F W de Klerk Foundation

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