Lenin, Stalin, and Mao: Revolution Followed by a Reign of Terror
What precedes the revolution are promises of utopia. What follows the revolution is a living Communist hell.
This Substack article is an excerpt from my book The Truth About Neo-Marxism, Cultural Maoism, and Anarchy: Exposing Woke Insanity in an Age of Disinformation.
Like Lenin and Stalin, Mao never apologized for the catastrophic misery he caused among the people he ruled. Mao’s failures governing China concerned him when Khrushchev decided, in 1956, to reveal the true horror to the Russian people of Stalin’s rule. But, as we noted earlier, in the wake of Khrushchev’s secret speech, Mao refused to admit he too failed to make Communism work. Instead, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution to discipline the Chinese people even more severely into respectful silence. In the United States, Khrushchev’s 1956 speech also disturbed William Z. Foster. While Foster came around to admit that Stalin’s many mistakes and errors were “appalling,” he continued to support Stalin and his brand of Communist rule in Russia. Ultimately, Foster reduced himself to a very predictable rationalization, arguing that Stalin “consistently followed a correct general political line…and he has performed great services in the rapidly advancing Russian and World Revolution.”1
In the late 1990s, a book first published in France, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression,2 swept Europe on its way to becoming an international sensation. The 858-page book documented that wherever Communism gained power, the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist governments committed horrific crimes, including terror, torture, censorship, suppression of dissent, famine, deportations, and massacres—all resulting in millions of deaths. The authors also credited Khrushchev’s 1956 secret speech as a turning point. “For the first time, a high-ranking Communist leader had officially acknowledged, albeit only as a tactical concession, that the regime that assumed power in 1917 had undergone a criminal ‘deviation.’”3 The authors acknowledged that Khrushchev’s complex motivations for delivering the secret speech included advancing his career after Stalin’s deaths. Those listening to Khrushchev’s speech were stunned by what they were hearing. The Black Book of Communism authors stressed that the delegates listened in absolute silence. The first secretary of the Russian Communist Party, Khrushchev, “systematically dismantled the image of the ‘little father of the peoples,’ of the ‘genius Stalin,’ who for thirty years had been the hero of world Communism.”4
In his 2007 book Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe, historian Robert Gellately presented a perceptive analysis of Lenin. He described Lenin as “the most intransigent practitioner of Russian Marxism in the prerevolutionary period.”5 Gellately defined Lenin’s power politics in historical terms. “It was precisely his will [Lenin’s] to power that drove on the doubters among fellow Bolsheviks in 1917. Without a hint of moral scruple or sense of national loyalty, Lenin desperately hoped for Russia’s defeat in the First World War and ridiculed fellow Bolsheviks who thought they should defend their country.”6 When the 1917 revolution came, Lenin was in Switzerland. Emboldened that the tsars had been toppled, Lenin returned to his homeland. “He was determined to destroy what remained of the old social and political order in Russia and intent on killing any chance that the new Russia would become a liberal democracy,” Gellately explained.7
Gellately noted that Lenin, as “the foundation of Soviet Communism,” was “the key advocate of establishing the one-party state, the concentration camps, and the terror.” He stressed that within days of the October Revolution of 1917, Lenin insisted that civil rights had to be curtailed. Weeks later, Lenin pushed for creating a new secret police force (the Cheka).8 Lenin had little sympathy for the common people, including peasant farmers and the industrial working class. He felt that if left to their own devices, workers would merely want better wages—trade union demands that would preclude the need for a real revolution. Here is how Gellately summed up his analysis of Lenin and Leninism:
Leninism was based on the idea that professional revolutionaries would form an avant-garde or vanguard party and rule in the name of the proletariat. They would not waste time on the “sham” of liberal democracy, which they regarded as nothing more than the government of the hated bourgeoisie. Getting rid of the absolute monarchy and replacing it with a constitutional system was merely a prelude to a more authentic revolution. None of this was going to happen without bloodshed and Lenin took it as self-evident that the class struggle meant civil war. He was convinced that Communism had to be forced through violently. His followers were elitist to the core and assured of their own superiority. They took it upon themselves to create a new world from top to bottom.9
Gellately argued that Stalin was Lenin’s logical heir: “Stalin justified every zigzag in policy, every twist of the screws, every dose of terror, by tracing it to some statement or other that Lenin had made.”10 He took exception with Khrushchev’s 1956 secret speech only because Khrushchev “trotted out the myth of Lenin the noble and good to save the ‘inner truths’ of Communism from association with what were belatedly recognized as ‘Stalinist evils.’”11 The truth, he insisted, as made clear by then-newly opened Soviet archives, revealed Lenin “to be the most extreme of the radicals, and the leader who pressed for terror as much as, and probably more than, anyone.”12
Gellately’s well-documented analysis forces us to come to terms with the reality that Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideologies share the characteristic of being psychologically powerful perversions of language that have proven to be highly successful in toppling the existing order. What precedes the revolution are promises of utopia. What follows the revolution is a living Communist hell. Lenin, Stalin, and Mao used terror, imprisonment, and murder to exert authoritarian control over their populations. In the reality of the Communist state, millions more under Stalin and Mao starved to death in failed schemes to eliminate private property.
As Jisheng pointed out about Mao’s China, there is no possibility of resistance under totalitarianism. He emphasized the following:
For the most part, people submitted; the exceptional people who opposed the system were usually crushed by it. In the face of a rigid political system, individual power was all but nonexistent. The system was like a casting mold; no matter how hard the metal, once it was melted and poured into that mold, it came out the same shape as everything else. Regardless of what kind of person went into the totalitarian system, all came out as conjoined twins facing in opposite directions: either despot or slave, depending on their position respective to those above or below them.13
Jisheng stressed that the CCP established “an ironclad system of social control that included an impermeable organizational structure, a household registration system, food rationing, and controls on population movement.”14 A disarmed population had no chance to succeed in a rebellion against the CCP and Mao’s rule. “From 1958 to 1962, the government maintained a military strength of more than four million,” Jisheng wrote. “These armed forces were well equipped and prepared to deal with both foreign aggression and domestic strife. It was impossible for citizens to contend with the might of government armed forces.”15
1 Quoted in Edward P. Johanningsmeier, Forging American Communism: The Life of William Z. Foster (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 338.
2 Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartošek, and Jean-Louis Margolin, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, ed. Mark Kramer, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Originally published in France as Le livre noir du Communisme: Crimes, terreur, repression (Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, S.A., 1997).
3 Ibid., 23.
4 Ibid.
5 Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 7.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., 8.
10 Ibid., 10.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Jisheng, Tombstone, 21.
14 Ibid., 478.
15 Ibid., 482.