The bullshit of Red October

It’s been 100 years since the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in October 1917, storming the Winter Palace to throw off the Czar’s yoke and deliver freedom to the Russian masses.

October 25! The day of Red October!

Trouble is, everything about that fairy tale is wrong, including the outcome. It’s fake history. Even the date is bullshit.

The Bolsheviks were lying pissweak murdering parasites, and the ‘glorious October Revolution' was their first grand re-invention.

And 100 years later, and after 100 million deaths due to the communism they helped unleash, you’d think folk would know better than to still peddle all their lies. Even to repent and apologise, as many need to, for cuddling up to the murderous brutality the Bolsheviks released around the world. (This centenary year it’s been the New York Times who’s been best playing Pravda, posting a series of ‘commemorative pieces’ alleging that everything from productivity to family life to women’s sex lives was better under Bolshevism. Fake news about fake history.)

So what actually did happen on October 25, 100 years ago? Answer: nothing very much. The putsch, which is all the takeover amounted to — a bitter little stab in the back — actually happened on November 7, 1917; the October date that's now remembered coming from the Julian Calendar then being used in Russia, rather than the Gregorian Calendar used in the rest of the world. This misunderstanding about dates is a fair metaphor for all the other misunderstandings bundled up in the fairy tale.

Fact is, It wasn't they who swept away the Czar in a heroic seizure of power; they came to power instead in a squalid little coup that squashed like a bug Russia's first stumbling chance at real freedom. The Bolsheviks didn't sweep away oppression; they brought it back.

Remember all those stories and images of people rampaging across Palace Square and storming the Winter Palace? That wasn't the Bolshevik hordes storming the citadel of Czarist oppression — that was a lie. You got it from films and paintings, not from what actually happened.

There were no hordes; there was no storming of the Palace -- not by the Bolsheviks anyway; and the oppressive Czarist regime had already been swept away some months before in the 'Good Revolution' of February, 1917, a largely bloodless revolution that deposed the authoritarian ancien regime, gave power to a democratic Parliament (Duma) and to an interim government under one Alexander Kerensky that swept a breath of free Spring air through Russia's stale and oppressive ordure.

It was nearly everything a freedom-lover could have hoped for to have emerged (in wartime) after centuries of darkness.

By contrast, the Bolshevik’s backroom seizure of power (which is all it was) was a sordid stab in the back that took place nine months later hard on Winter’s traces; the seasonal metaphor could not be more precise: where the February Revolution was a brief taste of Spring’s freedom, the October Revolution brought on an oppressive, marrow-chilling Winter that lasted nearly three-quarters-of-a-century.

So the Bolsheviks were liars. And they were pissweak.

They were pissweak liars who relied on others to do their work for them. If ever there was a time when one muck-stained tail wagged several dogs, this was it.

In a tactic that would become familiar in many a leftist perversion of democracy later, the Bolsheviks used democracy against itself: A small Bolshevik-dominated Petrograd Soviet (ie., Workers Council) wagged the larger Union of Soviets (essentially a national Council of Trades Union); by a series of calculated moves designed to increase the leverage of their small body, the smaller Bolsheviks made themselves the mouth of the larger Union of Soviets. Meanwhile, as the Workers Councils disrupted the country, a Bolshevik minority coalesced with a larger rump to disrupt the democratic Duma, in an attempt to make the Soviet the greater seat of power. Come the October Putsch, the Bolsheviks simply dissolved the Duma, evicted the interim government, and in the name of “democracy” and the “proletariat” called the Petrograd Soviet the centre of power, and let democracy go hang. Along with hundreds of thousands of their enemies.

The Bolsheviks were parasites.

The Bolsheviks were parasites on the February Revolutionists. They didn't just borrow the success of February to produce their phoney myths; without the Good Revolution of the February before, the October Coup could never even have happened. The February Revolutionists took the risks and did the donkey work of ending the Czarist oppression; when the time was ripe for them he Bolsheviks then happily stabbed the February Revolutionists in the back. (And that is not a metaphor.)

The Bolsheviks were parasites on the Kaiser’s regime, who Russia was fighting at the time in a blood-drenched war of survival. A war going very badly for everyone. 1917 was the third year of World War I, and conditions on the Russian Front were as bad as legend remembers them. Seeking some advantage from the Czar's overthrow, in April the Germans sent Swiss-based cafe-dweller Vladimir Lenin back to Russia through Germany in a sealed carriage—“transported in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus" as one astute writer put it, to avoid his virus spreading further. Staggered at first to learn there had even been a revolution in his home country, Lenin saw his chance to pervert from behind the revolution already successfully completed. Germany simply saw “in this obscure fanatic one more bacillus to let loose in tottering and exhausted Russia to spread infection.” The Germans got their military advantage, which is all they were after — once Lenin had others sieze power for him, he gave the Germans all they had wanted: Complete surrender. The capitulation sold out the Baltic States, sold out those Russians who had died defending their country against German invasion, and left the Germans free to throw their resources being used on the Eastern Front into the meat-grinder of the Western Front, extending the carnage there for nearly another year.

The Bolsheviks were parasites on the workers, the workers' councils (known as Workers’ Soviets) formed after the failed 1905 Revolution having become the platform for their grab for power. Once power was achieved however under the banner of “the dictatorship of the proletariat” (which would have been bad enough), all the non-Bolshevik dominated councils were simply dissolved and the real dictatorship was then revealed in all its gory squalor — it by then being abundantly clear that the workers and their organisations were of no more interest to the Bolsheviks than their political opposition, executed without trial in the Red Terror, or the Ukranian Kulaks — left to starve in Stalin's famine.

The 1921 Kronstadt Rebellion and its accompanying general strike was the last major attempts by workers to gain back some of their own freedom lost in the November Coup. Like all the other later attempts, it ended in bloodshed. The Bolsheviks had never wanted to free the workers; they only wanted to enslave them.

As the world was soon to learn, the Bolsheviks were murderers.

The killing started with the Cheka, set up by Lenin immediately on assuming power. It later became the GPU, then the NKVD, and eventually the KGB — all names that still summon up their chief tactic: terror. When the killing ended nearly three-quarters-of-a-century later, 62 million Russians had been murdered, and several million more around the world had their lives cut short or made into a living hell by the bloodstained influence of the Soviet regime. And that's just the murders — epidemics, famine, fighting and the general breakdown after the November Coup meant that in just a few short years after the Bolsheviks siezed power some twenty million souls were slaughtered. The Soviet Union began just the way it was to continue: in cowardice, in destruction, and in death.

The Bolsheviks were lying pissweak murdering parasities. About the 'October Revolution,' there is nothing to celebrate. Nothing at all.

Shame on those who do.
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