Roger Scruton

As the left surges back, Marxism’s bloody legacy is covered up

  • From Spectator Life
Demonstration during the Russian Revolution (image: Getty)

As we approach the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, it is fitting to ask whether we have learned what it tells us about its ideological root. Do we now appreciate that the Marxist ideology destroys legal order, political opposition and human rights? Do we have some idea of the death toll that has in every case followed the triumph of the ‘vanguard party’? Do we have an inkling of the human cost of collectivisation, or of what the gulag meant in terms of the humiliation and destruction of its victims?

Of course the answer in each case is no. Our school curriculum dwells incessantly on the Holocaust. Several states have made denial of it into a crime, and museums and monuments to the victims of Nazism and fascism exist all across the continent. But communism’s millions of victims are remembered hardly at all. One standard history of modern times, widely used in our schools, praises the Russian Revolution as aiming at ‘the complete destruction of the Russian and European bourgeoisie’, necessary for ‘the victory of socialism’. This history (Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes) does not mention the abolition of the law courts, or the establishment of the Cheka (the secret police), or the vicious expropriations that destroyed the Russian economy, or the mass starvation inflicted on the Ukrainian peasants. It is inadmissible for a historian to write in any but disgusted terms of the Nazi destruction of the Jews; but the equally cruel ‘destruction of the bourgeoisie’ can be described in terms of unqualified approval.

We who own property, deal in markets, collect salaries, have spouses and children, and live by the ordinary day-to-day morality of neighbourliness, are the people whom Lenin set out to destroy. We are the targets of resentment, and Marxism is the theory of that resentment.

The term ‘bourgeoisie’ is a technicality of the Marxist theory.

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