WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE FRANCE - news journal UPDATE - (en) France, Monde Libertaire - Ideas and Struggles: A State Against Its People (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr) [machine translation]

 "A Political Project Based on Terror" ---- The waves of repression

suffered by the Russian people from 1917 to the present day are a grim
observation. Of course, the Tsarist regime practiced arrests by its
political police, the Okhrana, imprisonment, and deportation, and many
revolutionaries were victims. ---- But with the regime that emerged
after the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, state violence against the
people increased in scale, and few opponents survived in a police
society of unprecedented brutality. Nicolas Werth, in an updated edition
of his book A State Against Its People: From Lenin to Putin, highlights
"the centrality of mass repression in the exercise of power and the
functioning of the Soviet state during a large part of the seven decades
of its existence and the impasse to which these repressions led." Thanks
to the opening of the archives during the period of relative democracy
under Yeltsin, he strengthens his analysis of the use of violence from
the very beginning of the regime. The Bolsheviks introduced a specific
political culture of civil war, marked by a refusal of any compromise or
negotiation. Behind the real pretext of military circumstances,
Bolshevik leaders, and Lenin in particular, developed "a strong
political project based on terror as a primitive but effective
instrument of state building." The creation of the Cheka, on December 7,
1917, constitutes the basis of this policy. This police, political,
extrajudicial, and economic tool organizes the arrest, deportation, and
elimination of "enemies of the people," members of a "socially alien
class," "enemies of the Soviet regime." Its victims included tsarists,
Mensheviks, anarchists, revolutionary socialists, Bolsheviks who had
broken away from the party, kulaks... in short, anyone who had a
different vision from those in power. This "dirty war," to use Nicolas
Werth's expression, the matrix of Stalinism, continued into the 1950s,
even though the confrontation between the Whites and the Reds had long
since ended.

The Fragility of the System

Why did this policy continue? It is clear that the leaders were aware of
the fragility of the system in the face of a social structure that was
difficult to control and unreliable leadership. Let us not forget that
the Bolsheviks were a small minority in 1917. To assert itself, the Red
Terror constantly used and perfected new techniques of repression. The
hunt for Makhno's troops in Ukraine, the Kronstadt massacre, two actions
led by Trotsky, demonstrate the violence against the people and the
opposition. In this column, we have often cited testimonies, notably
from the books "Vivre ma vie" (Living My Life) by Emma Goldman and "La
Terreur sous Lénine" (The Terror under Lenin) by Jacques Baynac. The
facts were well known, but Western democracies looked the other way. The
reader will be appalled by the millions of deaths during the great
famines and the repression of striking workers. The absurd so-called
Moscow trials highlight the endless spiral, with their delirious
vocabulary, of the application of criminal law eliminating real or
perceived opponents, relying on the famous Article 58 of the Criminal
Code, which defines counter-revolutionary crimes in fourteen paragraphs.

Fear of Conspiracy

The fear of conspiracy constantly drives the regime. It is important to
recall the mistakes and crimes, particularly at the beginning of the
Second World War. For each failure or shortcoming, it is enough to find
culprits, right up to the doctors' plot on the eve of Stalin's death on
March 5, 1953. Yet, the regime is slowly moving toward de-Stalinization.
Many of its leaders had been "heroes" of the waves of repression,
including Khrushchev, so caution was advised.

The repression became more subtle and perverse. The KGB relied on its
network of psychiatric hospitals, accused intellectuals of hooliganism,
and banned dissident journals. The regime clearly lacked the capacity to
become a democracy. We are more familiar with more recent events, even
though worker strikes were hidden and repressed. Perestroika allowed for
the rehabilitation of victims. However, Russia fell back into
institutional violence in Chechnya, media control, and the elimination
of journalists like Anna Politkovskaya. Opposition figures died in
Siberian prisons. The revision of history justified the invasion of
Ukraine, exacerbated nationalism, and permanent censorship. Criminal law
justified attacks on freedoms. The Memorial Association was dissolved
with arguments and terms reminiscent of the Cheka era. And "as always,
the war played a major role in the expansion and hardening of political
repression." It takes courage to be an opponent in Russia, from Lenin to
Putin.

* Nicolas Werth
A State Against Its People
 From Lenin to Putin
Published by Les Belles Lettres, Le Gout de l'Histoire collection, 2025

https://monde-libertaire.fr/?articlen=8364
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