“My name is Fanny Kaplan. I shot Lenin today. I did it voluntarily. I won't say where the gun came from. I had been determined to kill Lenin for a long time. I consider him a traitor to the Revolution. "
BOLShevism, THE SENILE POISON OF COMMUNISM. FROM BREST-LITOVSK TO KRONSTADT: THE TOUGH PATHS OF THE “REVOLUTION BETRAYED” BY LENIN AND TROTSKY
THE LENINIST TERROR WAS 1,700,000 VICTIMS (source TERROR UNDER LENIN BY JEAN JACQUES BAYNAC) Latzis, the leader of the Cheka, himself admits: "our population and even our community of comrades manage to persuade that the Cheka carries with it tens and hundreds of thousands of dead"
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In the tumult of the sounds of chains breaking and the crash of old structures collapsing today, let us spit on the blackened pages of history where betrayal disguised itself as revolution. It is no longer just a whisper in the depths of history, but a resounding cry that we are launching today, in 2024, breaking the unbearable silence around the false prophets of yesteryear, who poisoned revolutionary socialism with the venom of tyranny. The revisionists of reality will be confronted with the raw truth: it is time to unmask the corrupt icons and the vain deifications of revolutionary tombs. Abandoning the vain celebration, sullied by compromise and ignorance, we assert ourselves as stubborn defenders of integral emancipation, the main aspect of anarchism which does not compromise with the shadows of yesterday's despots. Here then is our letter, injected with the venom of revolt, to an uncompromising reflection:
The anniversary of Lenin's death was, for many far-left Leninist-Trotskyist-Maoist-Stalinist organizations and other rejects of decadent reformism, an opportunity to promote his image and his political record. There is no question of denying his role in the Russian revolution, but what role and what interests did he defend in the Russian revolution? He was certainly not the agent of the peasantry, of the working working class. He made himself the agent of a bureaucracy, of a bourgeoisie which rallied to the old one. This involved organizing a brutal repression.
Lenin distorted the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat into a version that could be described as coercive and antithetical to Marxian precepts. In his work “What to do?” ”, published in 1902, Lenin advocated the need for a revolutionary elite, moving away from the dialectical progression envisioned by Marx, where communism was to arise as a natural result of the struggles of the working classes. He draws his inspiration from figures like Sergei Nechaev, whose methods call into question the autonomous emancipation of the proletariat, dear to Marx. Sergei Nechaev, an emblematic figure of the Russian revolutionary movement of the 19th century, was recognized for his nihilistic vision of revolutionary commitment. Born in 1847, in his famous “Revolutionary Catechism” he advocated an absolute commitment to the revolutionary cause to the point of encouraging the total sacrifice of the individual for the collective. His theories highlight the use of violence, espionage, subversion and political assassination as legitimate tools for the overthrow of the established order. Nechayev is best known for his alliance with Bakunin, but also for their break: “[Serge Nechaev] gradually came to convince himself that to found a serious and indestructible society, one must take Machiavelli's policies as a basis and fully adopt the Jesuit system - for the body only violence, for the soul lies. Truth, mutual trust, solidarity only exist between a dozen individuals who form the sanctus sanctorum of society. Everything else must serve as a blind instrument and material for exploitation in the hands of these ten men. It is permitted and even ordered to deceive them, compromise them, steal from them and even, if necessary, lose them. » comment reported by Boris Souvarine, Stalin, historical overview of Bolshevism, 1935. It was the rigor and ruthless nature of Nechaev's tactics that profoundly influenced Lenin. Based on these principles, Lenin and Trotsky ultimately administered a government where the dictatorship of the proletariat, far from being a period of transition to a classless regime, turned into a dictatorship against the same proletariat. Bolshevik repression proved to be a critical divergence from the practical application of Marxian theories, introducing terror not as a tool for liberating workers, but as an instrument for domination over them. Lenin designed an autocracy. Stalin, based on these precepts, quickly directed his action towards repression and consolidation of the totalitarian character of the state, aligning himself with the leadership and teachings of Lenin. Within this ruthless order, the Cheka had no less than 250,000 operators of repression in 1921. During the first four years of its creation, this political police actively executed “140,000 people ”. Latzis, leading figure of the Cheka, delivers a sinister reply by specifying: "our population and even our community of comrades manage to persuade that the Cheka carries with it tens and hundreds of thousands of dead"
This statement corroborates the figures mentioned in several contemporary publications of this period referenced in the book THE TERROR UNDER LENINE by Jean Jacques BEYNAC support this estimate: Professor Saroléa, in the Edinburgh SCOTSMAN of November 7, 1923, presents an assessment of 1 776,737 victims. Or again, LE MORNING of January 9, 1918, which estimates the number of victims from 1917 to 1921 at 1.7 million – and suggests that the number could be identical for the period from 1921 to 1928. Jacques Baynac, in his book even goes so far as to assert on page 46 that
. It is clear that there were nearly one million seven hundred thousand victims of terror, mostly overshadowing the peasant and working class, the real victims (Cf. Jacques Baynac, The Terror under Lenin). Lenin and his criminal accomplice Trostky were the spiritual father of his successor STALIN, but also the Stalinist POL POT and the current leader of North Korea Kim Jong Un as those put in place by Stalin, Pol Pot and current North Korea .
We must obviously mention the Kronstadt uprising in 1921 which was an emblematic event of the Russian revolution, a reflection of the internal tensions of the totalitarian regime of the traitor LENIN and his criminal accomplice Trotsky, and an aspiration for advanced self-determination of workers and soldiers. Leon Trotsky, then People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs, also played a major role in this spectacular plot. He denounced the revolt as a counter-revolutionary uprising and personally led the harsh repression that followed. Under his orders, thousands of sailors and their sympathizers had been killed or arrested; many would be executed or sent to concentration camps, the precursors to the infamous Gulags. The atrocious conditions of repression depict a context of terror where the Bolshevik power did not hesitate to use brutal force against those it considered traitors or counter-revolutionaries. As the most recent work of researchers and historians shows, Kronstadt was not the only example of violent confrontations between the Bolshevik government and the working and peasant classes. The massacre of the Astrakhan workers represents another macabre illustration of the situation, with a merciless crushing that cannot be justified by the egalitarian principles of communism. We provide some historical references to enlighten everyone on the subject of repression against the working class from our readings: there was not only Kronsdadt but also the brutal crushing of the Astrakhan insurrection. This city, located at the meeting point of the Volga and blessed with abundant harvests as well as fishing resources, saw its starving workers prohibited from fishing for their own sustenance. In March 1919, the latter revolted. On March 10, 1919, a demonstration of 10,000 strikers was brutally dispersed by the use of machine guns, grenades, and heavy artillery.
From March 12, unprecedented terror descended on the city, with summary executions taking place in the basements of government buildings, in pens and through forced drownings of tied up workers thrown into the Volga. The next day, the roads of the city of Astrakhan were strewn with corpses, with violence continuing on March 13 and 14. The authorities appeared to target Astrakhan workers in revenge for strikes elsewhere in the country, including in Tula, Bryansk, and Petrograd in March 1919, perpetuating this campaign of terror: a fact reported in the work of Baynac entitled "The Terror under Lenin". The city had by then lost many of its workers, who had fled the violence, necessitating their forcible recovery from surrounding areas using cavalry and bringing them back. On their return, the workers were faced with the scale of the losses they had suffered, with 2,000 of their number falling during the dispersal of their gathering and thousands more in the chaos that followed. They were forced to bury forty-seven of their colleagues in the rubber industry who had been killed during the unrest. On page 149 of the book “Terror under Lenin” we learn “On March 10, 1919, at ten o'clock in the morning, the workers of the Vulcan”, “Etna”, “Caucasus and Mercury” factories, on an alarm signal from the siren, suspended work and began to meet. The representatives of the powers having ordered them to separate, the workers refused and continued to meet. We then firmed up our revolutionary duty and resorted to arms... Signed : K. Mieckhonochine (follow the titles). The meeting of ten thousand workers deliberating peacefully on their difficult material situation was surrounded by machine gunners, sailors, grenadiers. The workers having refused to leave, they fired. Immediately the machine guns crackled aimed at the compact crowd of members of the meeting, the hand grenades began to explode with a deafening noise. A shudder ran through the suddenly silent meeting. In the crackle of the machine guns, one could hear neither the groans of the wounded nor the supreme cries of the dying. Suddenly the crowd is shaken and with a single impulse of its strength, increased tenfold by terror, pushes through the deadly cordon of the troops. And she flees without looking back, in all directions, trying to escape the bullets of the machine guns which start moving again with renewed vigor. We shoot at the fugitives. Latecomers are forced into closed premises and shot at point blank range. Nearly a thousand corpses mark the peaceful spot, here and there we see a few “revolutionary peacemakers crushed by the crowd. Among the convulsed bodies, workers are dying. In the blink of an eye the town knows about the massacre.”
Let's go back chronologically. The time came when Lenin, whose stated aim was, he believed, to preserve the revolution, concluded an agreement he considered necessary with Imperial Germany, motivated by the fear, justified or not, of losing power. So comes the thorny question of the agreement between Lenin and the Prussian reactionary forces in Brest-Litovsk. We inform our readers that Lenin had concluded a peace, arguing that he would not last three weeks in power if the agreement was not signed... This position met with strong opposition within the Bolshevik party itself, according to the historians, anarchists and left-wing worker oppositions... We cannot redo history, but we have the right, as a communist activist, to ask ourselves the question: the choice of Lenin, who was then playing for his resignation, Was it an act of treason? History has proven the opponents of this villainous agreement right, those who wanted to continue the revolutionary war and who would perhaps have been militarily defeated... But then, they would have spared us a century of Stalinism, an immense defeat for the 'humanity. Of course, we cannot rewrite history... But we defend the thesis according to which this constituted a betrayal of all the proletarians who were then fraternizing on the European fronts and expressing an impulse towards what would become the the most intense period of revolutions in history. During the early days of World War I, Lenin rightly urged proletarians to turn their weapons against their own generals. However, he turns around and then advocates, as a new slogan, the desire for a just and equitable peace, a concept which turns out to be a pure chimera in the face of a dominating imperialism. Indeed, the notion of a just peace is illusory when the victorious side crushes and pillages the defeated one. For example, the Treaty of Versailles is the perfect illustration.
In the illustrious pantheon of acts of defiance, it is appropriate to take off our hats to the valiant Fanny Kaplan, who dared to set her sights on the "traitor" according to her principles. Ah, certainly, if we had been there, who knows? We might also have taken our courage in both hands, and perhaps a few damp squibs for good measure. On August 30, 1918, Fanny Kaplan let the powder speak without losing the dust. Fanny Kaplan, a left-wing revolutionary socialist, attempted to assassinate Lenin. Lenin was visiting a Michelson factory in Moscow that day. When he left the building to return to his vehicle, Fanny Kaplan called out to him. When Lenin turned towards her, she fired three shots. One of the bullets passed through Lenin's coat, the other two hit him in the left shoulder and lung. Kaplan is arrested and questioned by the Cheka. She then declared: “ My name is Fanny Kaplan. I shot Lenin today. I did it voluntarily. I won't say where the gun came from. I had been determined to kill Lenin for a long time. I consider him a traitor to the Revolution. I was exiled to Akatoui for having participated in the attempted assassination of the Tsar in kyiv. I spent seven years there working hard. I was released after the Revolution. I was in favor of the constituent assembly and I still am. ". Kaplan was beaten to death, her body doused with gasoline and burned in the Cheka courtyard. She shot Lenin because she considered Lenin a traitor to socialism and because his existence discredits socialism, while 200 workers from the PUTILOV factories on strike saw themselves drowned out by the beloved Chekists of the Leninist Trotskian Stalinoid nebula who continue to sully revolutionary socialism.
Despite the fact that we do not claim to be anarchists, it would be negligent of us to ignore the repression of anarchists. We will rely on the work of Paul Avrich (1931 – 2006), an eminent American historian, specializing in the study of anarchism and the libertarian movement. Born in New York, he was deeply influenced by his family's experiences with political repressions in Tsarist Russia. Under the guise of protecting the revolution, the Bolsheviks seized the means of communication, shamelessly establishing their dictatorship over information. According to Avrich in his work, "The Russian Anarchists", the Bolsheviks orchestrated a devious monopolization of the political narrative, a strategy which was only a facade to justify the censorship and direct oppression of all dissenting voices, especially those anarchists. They have cloaked themselves in the external threats and tensions of the time to silence any media that dares to challenge or question their hegemony. They have not only stifled the press, but they have muzzled freedom of expression itself. The assault on the anarchists in Moscow in 1918 was a low blow most revealing of the Bolshevik dictatorship. Armed to the teeth, the Bolsheviks launched a brutal offensive, determined to dislodge the anarchists from their homes, their collectives, their places of life and organization. Avrich, in his book "Anarchist Portraits", detailed this attack, which was nothing short of a blatant display of betrayal and brute force.
The purpose of this article is not to replace historians and researchers but to express a militant worker point of view. The issue of this memory is current, what society, what is the program of the revolution? One hundred years after his death, we have less right than ever to make concessions to this bourgeois policy which was undertaken in the name of socialism. We must not concede anything; we have a responsibility towards the workers, the exploited which require us not to be opportunistic about the disastrous results of Leninism or Trotskyism, of a bourgeois policy in the revolution. It is not because we militate in the unions with them, in common struggles, that we must make concessions to their prejudices, to their historical revisionism. There is a bibliography of researchers who allow us to understand the Russian Revolution and who give reason to the critical point of view on the general policy of Bolshevism, of the two historical currents: left communism and anarchism. The expanded reissue of the Book “THE TERROR UNDER LENIN” by Jean Jacques BAYNAC perfectly illustrates the real role of Lenin and Trotsky who, according to us, carried out a bourgeois revolution without a bourgeoisie and betrayed communism lastingly and perhaps for centuries. You have to have the courage to write it LENIN and Trotsky have blood in their hands of workers and peasants but also of their offspring Stalin, Pol Pot, and the fanciful billionaire Kim Jong Un of North Korea.
Today in 2024, the fundamental question of the Russian experience poses: Is it a revolution for socialism or a revolution for a new bourgeois dictatorship in the name of the transition or the democratic stage?... Or in the name of a democratic dictatorship? Lenin's conception was the "democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants", and subsequently state capitalism, and for Trotsky it was the tasks of the dictatorship of the proletariat understood as a long transition, which ultimately corresponds to this what Lenin advocated... Fundamentally, that for Lenin or for Trotsky, this transition tolerates social inequalities, the exclusion of workers from the direct management of companies and the maintenance of social inequalities. It reduces the socialist transition to the sole nationalization and planning of production. It is Trotsky's tortuous definition of the deformed workers' state that we violently reject.
To conclude, we must hope for an awareness so that a workers' opposition can be reborn against contemporary neo-Bolshevism, drawing in particular on the anarchist tradition but also that of the German-Dutch communist left, embodied in the past by the militant Otto RUHLE .
As early as 1920, he proclaimed that the revolution is not a party affair and demanded the destruction of all parties in favor of a council movement : “The revolution is not a party affair. The three social-democratic* parties are foolish enough to regard the revolution as their own party affair and to proclaim the victory of the revolution as their party goal. The revolution is the political and economic affair of the entire proletarian class. Only the proletariat as a class can lead the revolution to victory. Everything else is superstition, demagoguery, political charlatanry,” he declared in his brochure. Otto Ruhle THE REVOLUTION IS NOT A PARTY AFFAIR — THE FIGHT AGAINST FASCISM BEGINS WITH THE FIGHT AGAINST BOLShevism.” It is from this perspective that we evaluate the legacy of Lenin and Leninism, not only from a theoretical point of view but also in terms of its practical implication for today's struggles. It is time to redefine the tactics and strategies that promote the emancipation of workers and the exploited without repeating the mistakes of the past. This means questioning bureaucratic centralism and the notion of a "revolution led" by a bureaucracy which had installed itself in power by rallying the old bourgeoisie under Lenin and Trotsky. It is about proposing an alternative that can truly directly transpose social equality and worker control into the reality of the 21st century. Thus, with a century of hindsight, it is fundamental to deepen our historical knowledge, to draw lessons from it and to continue to fight for an egalitarian society which is neither a reflection of old bureaucracies, nor a battlefield for new bourgeois interests disguised as revolutionary speeches. Only this rigor in analysis and clarity in our objectives can help us build the world that workers around the world deserve.
A LITTLE DARK HUMOR
I said to myself, while sipping my local and fair trade tea, that our good old Trotsky had a sense of humor as developed as an organic carrot in a vegetable garden in the middle of winter. 'Imagine, the sailors of Kronstadt rebel because they hoped for a little more than the promises of tomorrow that sing under the Bolshevik gray, and what does our Leon do? He sends them to cool their feet under the ice floe. Finally, what can we say about a LENIN who swore that the State must “fade”, it’s rather funny to see him transform repression into state art. In fact, if we put the atrocities aside, it's almost poetic in a dystopian way, don't you think? In short, we are going to use this story, not to play martyrs, but rather to remind us that for us, communism is not à la carte, it is also measured by our ability not to become what we fight...Let us take a moment of relaxation on the backs of our eternal worshipers of Lenin, the militants of the various Trotsko-Stalinist religious sects, who, with a fervor that could almost be described as mystical, continue to chant his writings as if they were sacred verses. As I observe them, my cup of organic tea in hand, I can't help but think of these fervent disciples tirelessly turning their Bolshevik rosaries, doubtless hoping that the revolution will come as if by the Holy Spirit. It's almost touching to see these activists, like monks in a monastery dedicated to Saint Lenin, recite their litanies with a fervor that would make a church pillar turn pink. They elevate dissent into dogma, without seeing the irony of a prophet advocating the end of the State when he was more inclined to send his fellows to an atrocious death than to organize community suppers. These hard-liners of Bolshevism seem to forget that their venerated altar could well be as empty of substance as the promise of an earthly workers' paradise. And yet they continue, unwavering, perhaps out of a faith that, just as in sacred texts, miracles are a matter of interpretation – even rewriting.
In short, it's good to laugh about it sometimes; not to mock faith – or ideology – but to remember that the fight for a better future often requires examining with a critical eye the icons of the past, and never losing sight that our commitment must remain as transparent and sincere as the glass of water offered to the pilgrim, and not as murky as the waters of dogmatism.
Tell me, between us: are we going to continue to shout in chorus the hagiography of Tovaritch Lenin in a mystical-religious epic style, or are we moving on to something else in 2024?
Finally, in our opinion, communism is a historical movement towards the establishment of social equality according to the principle "to each according to their needs", the abolition of social classes, the abolition of all forms of exploitative relations, but also and above all the abolition of all forms of political domination. It is not yesterday like today, the dictatorship of a party, of a numerical majority and even more electoral or even of a conglomerate of enlightened bureaucrats, the various rejects of Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maoism... Above all not! Because they promise us a bright future, North Korea...
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