how did the Russian revolution influence Communist Russia
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hundred years ago, on November 7 (October 25 according to the Russian calendar), 1917, Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian government and established a communist dictatorship. The world has never been the same since.
Of all the legacies left in the revolution’s wake, the worst is a wrecked Russia. Seventy years of communism devastated the country. The Soviets did modernize things, but at what a price?
Richard Pipes says the Russian Revolution killed 9 million people. Robert Conquest believes that at least 20 million and probably as many as 30 million people perished in the Great Terror. If “unnatural deaths” are included, that number could be as high as 50 million.
This horrible record of mass genocide is exceeded only by another communist dictatorship, Maoist China, which destroyed between 44.5 to 72 million lives (according to Stephane Courtois). And let’s not forget the “killing fields” of Cambodia in the 1970s.
Communists could kill people, but ultimately that is not why they and the Soviets failed. Nicolas Eberstadt estimated that the life expectancy of Russians in the 1980s was six years lower than in Western Europe. Infant mortality was three times higher, and death rates were rising for every age group.
Russians looked westward and were appalled by their own poverty. Whatever the West had — freedom and wealth — that was what the Russians wanted.
The Soviets had failed to deliver on their grand social promises. More than any other reason, it was this fact that brought down the Soviet Union.
Unfortunately, that’s not the end of the story. Russians still live with the historic devastation caused by communism.
Despite their freedom to travel, and the benefits of an economy mostly fueled by energy exports, they are stuck with the old legacies of communism. Every day they face the corruption and poverty caused not only by authoritarian rule, but by the social habits and structural problems created by communism.
Another bitter legacy is totalitarian terror: Starting with the Great Terror of the Bolshevik Revolution, a terrible precedent was set. Now the gates were open for others to mobilize mass violence in the name of revolution.
It matters not whether that revolution was communist, fascist or jihadist, the use of terror to revolutionize society is an historical precedent established by the Bolsheviks (and the French revolutionaries before them).
The Russian Revolution may have died the day the Russian government took down the hammer and sickle flag over the Kremlin. And, yes, the crude Marxism of the Soviet era is dead as well. But we still live to this day with the legacy of the Russian Revolution. Not only in North Korea. Not only in China. Not only with the poverty communism and socialism caused in the developing world.
We live with it as well in the myths of our own politics. Perhaps by the 200th anniversary of the Russian Revolution in 2117, these myths will be retired as well, like the hammer and sickle 130 years before.