Remember… Libs get the bullet too.

Remember, Liberals Get the Bullet Too

Between 1900 and 1917, waves of terror struck Russia. Several parties with incompatible ideologies competed (and cooperated) in causing havoc.  Between 1905 and 1907, nearly 4500 government officials were killed, and at least as many private individuals.  Between 1908 and 1910, authorities recorded 19,957 terrorist acts and revolutionary robberies.  Russian historian and terrorism expert Anna Geifman, states, “Robbery, extortion, and murder became more common than traffic accidents.”  Anyone wearing a uniform became a target.  Country estates were burned down (rural illuminations) and businesses were extorted or blown up.  Bombs were tossed at random into railroad cars, restaurants, and theatres.  The terrorists showed no regret, but instead boasted of killing as many as possible, either because the victims were likely bourgeois, or because any murder helped bring down the old order.  

Eventually sadism replaced simple killing.  Geifman goes on to write, “The need to inflict pain was transformed from an abnormal irrational compulsion experienced only by unbalanced personalities into a formally verbalized obligation for all committed revolutionaries.”  One group threw “traitors” into vats of boiling water.  Others were still more inventive.  Women torturers were especially admired.  

And how did the educated, liberal, society respond to these acts?  What was the position of the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadet), and its deputies in the Duma (the parliament set up in 1905)?  Well… even though the Kadets advocated democratic, constitutional procedures, and did not themselves engage in terrorism, they aided the terrorist in any way possible.  Members of the Kadet collected money for the terrorists, turned their personal homes into safe houses, and called for total amnesty for arrested terrorists who pledged to continue the mayhem.  Kadet Party central committee member N. N. Shchepkin declared that the party did not regard terrorists as criminals at all, but as saints and martyrs.  The official Kadet paper, “Herald of the Party of People’s Freedom” never published an article condemning political assassination.  The party leader, Paul Milyukov, declared that “all means are now legitimate, and all means should be tried.”  When asked to condemn terrorism, another liberal leader in the Duma, Ivan Petrunkevich, famously replied, “Condemn terror?  That would be the moral death of the party.”

Lawyers, teachers, doctors, industrialists, and bank directors raised money for the terrorists.  Doing so showed “advanced opinion” and good manners.  This behavior led Vladimir Lenin to say, “When we are ready to kill the capitalists, they will sell us the rope.”  And true to their word, when the Bolsheviks gained control, their organ of terror, the Cheka “liquidated” members of all opposing parties, beginning with the members of the Kadet.

Why didn’t the Liberals see it coming?

Revolutions never succeed without the support of wealthy, liberal, educated society.  Yet revolutionaries seldom conceal that their success entails the seizure of all wealth, the suppression of dissenting opinion, and the murder of class enemies. Lenin, after all, was by no means the only bloodthirsty Russian radical.  In 1907, Ivan Pavlov – not the scientist, but the Maximalist theoretician published his work “The Purification of Mankind”.  In this work he divided humanity into ethical races.  In his analysis, exploiters (which we might call capitalists today), constituted a race, a race that was “morally inferior to our animal predecessors.”  He went on to state that these exploiters must be exterminated, along with their spouses and children, by the morally superior race, whose best members were the terrorists themselves.  The Maximalists later argued for a “red terror” that would kill at least 12 million people.  And yet; liberals refused to use their position in the Duma to make constitutionalism work.  They would not participate in determining the government budget but confined their activities to denouncing the government itself and defending terrorists.  Apparently their professed beliefs were less important than their emotional identification with radicalism.  

In the Russian novel “November 1916”, Nobel Prize winning author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn tells the story of Colonel Vorotyntsev.  The Colonel finds himself at a social gathering of Kadet adherents, where everyone repeats the same progressive pieties and sound-bites.  He soon realizes that “each of them knew in advance what the others would say, but that it was imperative for them to meet and hear, all over again, what they collectively knew.  They were all overwhelmingly certain that they were right, yet they needed these exchanges to reinforce their certainty.”  When Vorotyntsev says something to the contrary the room becomes silent, and he retreats, as if hypnotized, and falls in line. Vorotyntsev gives ground and falls in line, “not because he felt he was wrong, but out of fear of saying something ‘reactionary’.”  Later on Vorotyntsev speaks with a professor Andozerskaya who explains that she, like so many other professors at universities must, “choose every word so carefully.”  A whole school of thought is morally forbidden, not merely in lectures, but in private as well.

In 1909 a book written by former members of the Kadet, titled “Landmarks: A collection of Essays on the Russian Intelligentsia” was published.  This work is a must for anyone trying to learn more about the mentality of the intelligentsia.  The authors had hoped to create reasoned dialogue, foster intellectual tolerance, and sway liberal opinion away from automatic radicalism, but unfortunately that isn’t what happened.  Most Kadets disassociated themselves from the book and its authors, and the book itself was deemed wicked, cruel, and untrue.  

If you’re going to understand the book Landmarks, you must understand the use of the authors words “Intelligentsia” and “intelligent” (a member of the intelligentsia).  “Intelligentsia” is a word that originated in Russia around 1860. It meant something completely different than its English counterpart.  To be “intelligent” it was by no means, or even necessary, to be well-educated.  In the Russian understanding, to be “intelligent” was to be the complete opposite of a curious person who thought for themselves.  In the Russian understanding; an “intelligent” identified primarily as such, rather than by his social class, profession, ethnic group, or any other social category. No one would have considered Tolstoy an “intelligent” because he used his title “Count”.  Unless an “intelligent” was wealthy, or… like Lenin, could become a professional revolutionary living at the party’s expense, he had to work, but as a matter of honor he did not take his profession seriously.  The average, rank-and-file “intelligent” usually did not know his job very well, and did not like it.  He was a poor teacher, a poor engineer, a poor laborer, and he regarded his profession as a sideline that did not deserve respect.  

Landmarksmentions a second characteristic of “intelligent” – their devotion to a special set of manners, including dress, hygiene (deliberately poor), hair styles (think of the famous “short-haired lady nihilists), taboo expressions, and a set of sexual practices (debauchery practiced as a rite) fueled by “nihilistic moralism”.  

However; what was most important was what the “intelligent” thought.  An “intelligent” signed on to a set of beliefs regarded as totally certain, scientifically proven, and absolutely obligatory for any moral person.  He would have to subscribe to a particular ideology that was committed to the total destruction of the existing order and it’s replacement by a utopia that would, with a pen stroke, eliminate every human ill.  And while the mentality of the intelligentsia constituted a twisted parody of religion “preserving the external features of religiosity without its content.”, and “intelligent” could not be a believer (which is another reason no one would have considered Tolstoy or Dostoevsky an ‘intelligent’).  The “intelligent” accepted atheism on faith, they were spiritually devoted to materialism, and a form of determinism.

One assumption shared by all “intelligents” was the assumption that all questions must be judged politically.  Thus, one could discredit a scientific theory not by logic or evidence, but by callings its implications “reactionary”.  The Soviets banned, at one time or another, genetics, the theory of relativity, quantum theory, and others, not on criteria from their respective disciplines, but on the basis of their supposed incompatibility with “dialectical-materialism”.  This thinking led to a disparaging of philanthropy as “a betrayal of all mankind and its eternal salvation for the sake of a few individuals close at hand.”  During the famine of 1891-1892, when Tolstoy and Chekhov engaged in famine relief, Lenin advocated hoarding food to bring revolution closer. Ultimately; the Intelligentsia concluded that if everything is political, then the cruelest means are not only permitted, but obligatory.  Thus; tactics the revolutionaries had previously condemned became acceptable when the revolutionaries themselves used them.

The Party makes it the official (or unofficial, but official none the less) party line, and in essence says “The Party will take all blame upon itself”, so that to the individual, terror is no longer terrorism, murder is no longer murder, looting is no longer robbery, etc… “It’s for the greater good and to affect change.”  It, “removes all moral responsibility from the individual”.  

Thankfully we have works like Landmarks, and the writings of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who critically examined everything the intelligentsia stood for – the simplicity of human psychology, the easy division of people into good and evil, the reduction of ethics to politics, and they showed us how mistaken and dangerous those ideologies were (are).  

For the authors of Landmarksthe liberals attachment to illiberal movements derived from a psychological complex favoring conformism.  Though some liberals recognized their differences from the radicals, most acted like intelligentsia wannabes, who were unwilling to acknowledge, even to themselves, that their values were essentially different. Socialized to regard anything conservative as reprehensible – and still worse, as a social faux pas.  They contrived ways to justify radical intolerance and violence as forced, understandable, and noble.  In-fact; they had to, since the fundamental emotional premise of liberalism – hostility to those ignorant, bigoted, morally depraved people on the right; almost always proved more compelling than professed intellectual commitments.  Motivated by public opinion, they signed petitions they did not agree with, and excused heinous acts, always observing the rule: Better to side with people a mile to one’s left, than be associated with anyone an inch to the right. Educated society knew that one could not just abolish the police as the anarchists demanded, and that socialism would not instantly cure all ills, but they assured themselves that progressive opinion must be right – could it be doubted, when it was accepted by all progressive minds?  

The Landmarksauthors hoped to change Russia so that, like the West, it would have educated people but not an “intelligentsia”. Dostoevsky warned in The Possessedthat to the extent that a society’s educated class comes to resemble an intelligentsia in the Russian sense, it is headed for totalitarianism, unless others muster the strength to speak out, refute it, and resist it. And it must primarily be liberals who speak out – as anyone to the right is expected to speak up and speak against the “intelligentsia”, but liberals who will actually be heard, and will be given credence must speak as well.  The left will always outright dismiss the right, no matter how logical, and well-reasoned their arguments are, but if the left began to actually question themselves, and sound the alarm, it could sway the course of history, and will most certainly save themselves from the bullet.