Russian Revolution Centenary: Part One

I got a call from Tanya, an employee of the Russian consulate in Bombay, this morning.

“We’re happy to invite you next Saturday, the 4^th of November, for lunch and a concert.”

“Thank you.” I said. “I was wondering when the centenary celebrations would be announced.”

“Centenary?” Tanya sounded puzzled. “We are celebrating the Day of People’s Unity.”

“The Day of People’s Unity?” Despite my thirty-five years’ association with Russia, I could not recall any such day. Which Russian people were in need of uniting and why? When I lived in Moscow, every year we celebrated the 7^th of November, the day of the Great October Socialist Revolution. The atmosphere was festive, Russian government used special planes to forcefully send clouds away. As a result, on 7^th November, it never rained or snowed on the red square. Brezhnev and later Gorbachev stood on the balcony of Lenin’s tomb with uniformed commanders and watched the red square parade displaying the Soviet military might. Hundreds of thousands of Russians who pretended to work every day got a welcome one-day relief. 

“You don’t know the Day of People’s Unity?” Tanya asked. “President Putin has established that holiday a few years ago.”

“And the October revolution day? The 7^th November?”

This year is the 100^th anniversary of the October revolution. Since Russia is synonymous with grandness, I expected celebrations the kind of which mankind has never seen.

“No, the October revolution day is gone. We don’t celebrate it at all. For many years now. In fact, the Day of People’s Unity replaced it.”

Since Tanya was on the consulate’s phone line, I decided not to probe any further. Who would have thought the 100^th anniversary of the great Russian revolution would be ignored and forgotten? Like the clouds on top of the red square, the centenary has been swept away into oblivion. 

*****

The 1917 revolution appeared to be jinxed from the start. In 1918, Russia adopted the Gregorian instead of Julian calendar. Consequently, it turned out that the October revolution had, in fact, happened in November. (Equally confusing for the foreigners is the “Old New Year” celebrated by Russians on 14 January.) 

I can write the story of the last Tsar, Nicholas II, and the execution of his entire family. Or about the Bloody Sunday in January 1905 when the imperial guards ruthlessly killed unarmed, peaceful protesters. Bloody Sunday could have been the starting point of the revolution that took place twelve years later. It would be interesting to write the life story of the mad monk, Grigori Rasputin, a peasant whose influence on the Tsar’s wife made him a threat to the empire. His murder still remains a mystery after 100 years. I could probably write an essay explaining the difference between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, the Red army and the White army. But I don’t plan to write any of it now. In the coming weeks, I prefer to analyze why the impact of the revolution didn’t last even for 100 years, why communism failed, why the Soviet Union collapsed, and what lessons we can learn from that failure.

In doing so, I will offer my personal perspective, based on my years of stay in Russia. The USA and Europe have many outstanding experts on Russia and communism. However, most of them have never lived in Russia. Their analysis is usually tainted with their own agendas. The versatile historian and activist Noam Chomsky calls the Russian revolution a “coup”, and considers that Lenin and Stalin had killed socialism in the initial years itself. I am a Chomsky fan, but I think he is wrong (a) because his diehard left-wing thinking blinds him at times and (b) he has never lived in the Soviet Union.   

The surviving communists in the world still maintain communism to be the only political system capable of saving the mankind. They argue that in the USSR, communism died because it wasn’t rightly implemented. That is also untrue. Soviet Union tried to enforce the Marxist philosophy in many ways.

*****

The world, as a matter of fact, should be grateful to the October revolution. That revolution gave birth to the world’s first Communist State. The massive experiment used the Soviet people as guinea pigs. Soviet Union bore the burden, it became the biggest lab to test communism, and millions of its citizens suffered as a result for over seventy years. Russia and the other fourteen sovereign off-shoots of the former USSR are still paying the price for their communist past. By running that experiment, and failing miserably in it, the USSR saved many other nations from failing in the future.

Before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the world had 32 communist countries. Today, only five: China, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam and North Korea. (Would you like to settle in any of them?)

The USSR-USA cold war was projected as the war between communism and capitalism, authoritarian system and democracy, planned economy and markets. But USSR and USA were not equivalent samples. Their history, geography, economies and people were not comparable. In a scientific experiment, you take two similar rats (scientific term: probabilistically equivalent), one becomes the experimental sample and the other a control sample. Since USSR and USA were vastly different, the failure of communism is not proven by the collapse of Soviet Union.

The failure was, curiously enough, proven in two other nations where historical accidents had created two pairs of identical rats.

After the Second World War, Germany and Korea were both split into two nations each, one rat given the dose of communism and the other rat vaccinated with capitalism. East Germany collapsed, its currency and political system vanished, and it had to be absorbed by West Germany. This was one scientific proof of the failure of communism.

The experiment, unfortunately, still continues in North Korea. South Korea is an Asian Tiger, its economy putting it among the world’s elite, its brands Samsung, LG or Hyundai part of our households. North Korea, a military regime, subservient to a whimsical dynasty, is poor beyond imagination. Availability of electricity and water is sporadic. Torture, public executions, slave labour, forced abortions and infanticides in prison are common. A comparable child in North Korea weighs 20 pounds less and is 8 inches shorter than its Southern counterpart. If this is not the proof of failure of communism, I don’t know what is.

Private vs public ownership

I don’t know if you have ever felt what I feel when I look at infants. They look so terribly helpless that I wonder how all of us survived our infancy and childhood. The answer lies in private ownership. The procreating parents take enormous care of their child; feeding, cleaning, teaching and caring and worrying about it till the time the child becomes independent.

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, children are supposed to be given at birth to the State for the State to raise them. I am glad that book remains a fiction. It is impossible that the State, the faceless State, can raise children with the same degree of care and love as the parents. The same is true of private property versus government property.

In the Soviet Union, all means of production had to be owned by the government. Every working Soviet citizen was a government employee. Even writers and painters were expected to be employed by the Writers’ guild and Painters’ guild which were government organisations. A music composer was an employee of the Union of Composers.

At the time of the revolution, the Russian empire was primarily agricultural. Kulaks privately owned large agricultural farms. Stalin decided to get rid of them – a process termed dekulakisation. Many were arrested, deported and executed. This was followed by the process of “Collectivisation”. Collective farms (Kolkhoz) and state-owned farms (Sovkhoz) were both wonderfully fantasy concepts. Farmers began killing their own cattle. Ukraine, known as the bread basket of the world became an importer of wheat. In the man-made famine of 1932-33, some 10 million people died of starvation (holodomor).  This is now considered as genocide by Ukraine and some other nations.

The farmers had no incentive to put in their best efforts when their farms, their cattle, their property was taken over by the government. That killed Soviet agriculture.

Making a large pool

What is a government? It is the summation of the people who are part of the geography which that government controls. Since government is a legal fiction (in the sense we can’t see or touch it), what is owned by the government is actually controlled by people who run the government. Governments can own property (open spaces, parks, lands, bridges), cash (taxes collected from the citizens), natural resources (oil, diamonds), banks, airlines, hospitals and much else. All that is owned by the government is liable to be looted by those who run the government. That is the reason politicians of all kinds, parties and countries are usually rich far beyond their capabilities.

In the USSR, buying a private car was not easy. Those who could afford to book one, needed to wait for 6-8 years for delivery. Leonid Brezhnev, though, owned a large fleet that included everything from Chevrolet Bel Air, Opel, Chrysler 300 up to Maserati Quattroporte, two Rolls-Royce Silver Shadows and a Lincoln Continental. 

Public versus private

This public versus private debate is not restricted to the governments.

I see many Indian men spitting on the roads. They do it passionately and shamelessly. I don’t think they spit on the floor inside their house (I hope not).

We, the civilised non-spitting people, may change our order in the restaurants depending on who is paying for it. If a large corporation, your employer, is paying for it; you may be tempted to eat more or at least order the most expensive dishes. When you do that, whose money are you spending? The shareholders’. They would get less dividend as a result of your eating expensive dishes.

Looting can happen in private corporations just like it happens in the governments. Government collects taxes from a large number of people. A giant multinational can raise huge amounts of money by issuing shares to the public. The trick is to collect money from a large number. Whoever controls that money can then begin to loot part of it for personal profit. This is how some bankers in the USA manage to earn 100 million dollars a year as their pay package. Then why don’t those banks collapse the way the Soviet Union did? Because of the checks and balances in the system. Private companies and democratic nations have regulations and checks and balances. If not enforced, the banks paying hundreds of millions of dollars to their top directors will go bust as well.

That was the difference between a private company and the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union, everything belonged to the government, and due to the dictatorship of the communist party, almost no checks and balances existed. At the lower level, ordinary workers had little incentive to work. No farmer is really interested in cultivating land that doesn’t belong to him. At the highest levels, the politburo and the top communist party members were busy plundering the country’s natural resources. Since all power was concentrated in their hands, they were not answerable to anybody.

Soviet Communism experiment: Lesson no. 1: The private owners can take better care of their property whether it is children, farms or businesses. Government, a faceless entity, forcefully owns the country’s resources and collects money from its citizens. That opens the doors for govt representatives to raid the country’s treasury. In the absence of regulations, checks and balances, the same can happen in large public companies.

(Next lesson next week)

Ravi