The Shameful Legacy of the “October Revolution”
Four prominent members of Congress just formed a new bipartisan congressional interest group, the Victims of Communism Caucus. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), Chris Smith (R-NJ), Dan Lipinski (D-IL) and Dennis Ross, (R-FL) started the caucus on the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Their purpose is to raise awareness of the tyranny of Communist regimes and their legacy of enslaving and killing civilians under their control, among members of Congress and the public.
The Caucus will focus on current victims of communism as well as on historical events. They will call attention to the sufferings of the people of Venezuela, who face starvation and deprivation caused by the communist policies of the kleptocratic leadership. They will explore ways to help them, as well as those who face imprisonment and repression in Cuba, North Korea, and other countries still beset by communist oppression.
On October 25th, 1917 (by the old Russian calendar – November 7th after the calendar was reformed), Marxist revolutionaries overthrew the interim government set up after the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II. They promised to usher in the glorious utopian socialist workers’ paradise, preceded by a brief “dictatorship of the proletariat,” during which the honest working classes would erase the stain of capitalist greed from history.
Instead, they ushered in a century of bloody oppression of anyone deemed an enemy of the state; repression of dissent, freedom of speech and thought and beliefs; and punishment of any independent thinking or adherence to competing belief systems such as religion or political ideology. The temporary dictatorship of the proletariat turned into a permanent dictatorship of Communist Party leaders, who dictated not only behavior but thought, and killed or imprisoned those who refused to swear allegiance.
… they may not wear so many Che Guevara T-shirts, if they ever learn that he was a cold-blooded mass murderer, who enjoyed killing many of his victims himself
As one murderous regime succeeded another, the new leaders purged society of dissenters or of competitors. Millions of kulaks – the well-off landowners among Russian peasant classes – were murdered in Russia and the Ukrainian Holodomor during the forced collectivization of agriculture. More Russians were killed by Stalin’s collectivization policies than by all the military action of the Second World War.
As other countries fell to Communist revolutionaries throughout the 20th Century, more innocent civilians were murdered in great masses. President George W. Bush, in a 2007 speech at the unveiling of the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, D.C., said, “Some of Communism’s victims are well-known. They include a Swedish diplomat named Raoul Wallenberg, who saved 100,000 Jews from the Nazis, … a Polish priest named Father Popieluszko, who made his Warsaw church a sanctuary for the Solidarity underground, and was kidnaped, and beaten, and drowned in the Vistula by the secret police.
“They [also] include innocent Ukrainians starved to death in Stalin’s Great Famine; or Russians killed in Stalin’s purges; Lithuanians and Latvians and Estonians loaded onto cattle cars and deported to Arctic death camps of Soviet Communism. They include Chinese killed in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution; Cambodians slain in Pol Pot’s Killing Fields; East Germans shot attempting to scale the Berlin Wall in order to make it to freedom; Poles massacred in the Katyn Forest; and Ethiopians slaughtered in the “Red Terror”; Miskito Indians murdered by Nicaragua’s Sandinista dictatorship; and Cuban balseros who drowned escaping tyranny. We’ll never know the names of all who perished, but at this sacred place, Communism’s unknown victims will be consecrated to history and remembered forever.”
More than 100 million people were killed by Communist regimes, most of them by their own governments rather than in foreign wars
More than 100 million people were killed by Communist regimes, most of them by their own governments rather than in foreign wars. It is important that the Congress has launched this bipartisan effort, because many people today have forgotten this bloody legacy; younger people may never have heard of it, because they were never taught about it.
An October 2016 study conducted by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that “just over half of Millennials (55 percent) believe communism was and still is a problem, compared with 80 percent of Baby Boomers and 91 percent of elderly Americans. Only 37 percent of Millennials have a “very unfavorable” view of communism, while 57 percent of the rest of Americans do.”
Those Millennials might not like Communism so much if they understood it, and they may not wear so many Che Guevara T-shirts, if they ever learn that he was a cold-blooded mass murderer, who enjoyed killing many of his victims himself. “He was Fidel Castro’s chief executioner, a mass-murderer who in theory could have commanded any number of Latin American death squads.” He is best understood in his own words: “A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. This is a total war to the death.… We must keep our hatred alive and fan it to paroxysm.”
So, three cheers for the new Congressional Caucus. May they truly, in the words of Congressman Chris Smith, “…ensure that Congress and the American people remain aware of and continue to fight against the deadly and ongoing evil of Marxist and Leninist ideology – still promoted by communist dictators.”
