On a snowy day in St. Petersburg 88 years ago, something happened. For me, back under the ancien regime, 7 November meant having to stand through one hour of an absolutely boring ceremony with the whole school (with, on average, a dozen of us fainting and falling); and was a rather glaring sign of foreign occupation*.
For me, back under the ancien regime, 7 November meant having to stand through one hour of an absolutely boring ceremony with the whole school (with, on average, a dozen of us fainting and falling); and was a rather glaring sign of foreign occupation*.
Likewise the suppression of the Russian Orthodox Church was bloody, with priests being thrown down the well in their parish church head first, but seemed to me richly deserved , given the long and vigorous opposition by the Church to any socially progressive changes. I used to put L.M.G. down under the category "Religion" while at Oklahoma State University. The League of the Militant Godless was under Trotsky and I was clearly out from under the influence of Sunday School lessons. If anyone looked at the form they may have thought L.M.G. was a splinter group of Mormons!
I was taught that the New Economic Policy was essentially an act of desperation by Lenin to get the economy running again, one that worked to a considerable extent. But under Stalin things took a really dark turn with the purges and show trials. I never tried to Despite the brutality involved, there was a strain of idealism that ran through Soviet life and history. Gorbachev spoke of it and was, in many ways, a carrier of that idealism.
But there is little doubt that in 1919 Western countries would have been only too glad to carve up Russia into spheres of influence as had been done to China, but and Lenin and Trotsky consolidated power, broke up the large estates and Church lands, won the Civil War, drove out the British, French and US troops and preserved the lands of Imperial Russia reconstituted as the Soviet Union.
Likewise, Hitler provided Stalin with a path to status as a national hero for staving off the Nazi German attack on Russia and doing the bulk of the heavy lifting to defeat Germany in WW II. Else Stalin might have been remembered mostly for making Ivan the Terrible look good. I could never understand those US Communist Party members who had a favorable view of Stalin, even though a friend in LA was the son of one such and got upset when I went off on Stalin. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
