The Thinking Reed

But we cannot wait for that moment. Already now the counter-revolution rules, under the protection of German bayonets, on the Don and in the Crimea, in the Ukraine and in the Baltic provinces. And to every volley of Bolshevik rifles fired here at the political opponents of the Soviet power we hear the answering tenfold echo there of other rifles, shooting down the local revolutionary workers and peasants.46

V.M. Doroshevich also noticed the striking similarity of the Red and White terrors:

Just as, with the Reds, the word ‘bourgeois’ is applied to everyone who does not wear a Russian shirt, so, with the Whites, the word ‘socialist’ is applied to everyone out of military uniform. Mensheviks and SRs [Socialist Revolutionaries] are ‘second-grade Bolsheviks’, and are shot.47

The Whites studied closely the methods of the Red terror, and the Bolsheviks had only to introduce some ‘novelty’ for the Whites to begin applying it, only on a larger scale — ‘simply because the “Reds” do it’.48

Korolenko tried to stop the Red terror, as also did Kropotkin, who returned from abroad specifically for this purpose. The latter even met Lenin. Trying to persuade Lenin, he ‘referred to the French Revolution, which was “killed”, in his view, as a result, inter alia, of the policy of terror adopted as a weapon by the revolutionaries of 1793.’49 Even earlier he had warned Lenin in a letter: ‘The terror practised in the French Revolution held back its influence for fifty years.’50 When he had heard and read all this, Lenin proposed the publication, ‘at once and in the largest number of copies,’51 of Kropotkin’s book on the French Revolution, in which the writer’s attitude to the terror is as indulgent as could be. Korolenko addressed letters to Lunacharsky with equal lack of success, reminding him that the advance to socialism must rely

on the best side of human nature, presupposing courage in direct struggle and humanity shown even to opponents. Let cruelty and blind injustice remain wholly with the outlived past, not finding any place in the future.. 52

Martov, who was no less an intellectual than Korolenko and no less a revolutionary than Lenin, was utterly shaken by what had happened. He wrote of the ‘vicious encroachment by Lenin and Trotsky’ upon the principles of socialism and democracy53 and of the impossibility for him, or for any who had fought in previous years against the autocracy, to accept such a revolution.54 What had happened was for him above all a tragedy for the socialist movement. ‘Shame on the party’, he exclaimed, ‘that tries to sanctify with the name “socialist” the vile work of the hangman.’55

In justifying the Red terror, the Bolsheviks — Trotsky, Lenin, and ex-Menshevik Larin — referred to the French Revolution. Martov reminded them of the sad end of the French revolutionaries to whose shades Larin appealed. After all it was the Jacobin terror, the execution of the deputies to the Convention, the disrespect shown to the people’s will, that eventually led to the failure of the revolution and the establishment of the Thermidorian dictatorship. That same path, Martov foretold, would be trodden by the Bolsheviks who abandoned the principles of Marxism in favour of Jacobinism. They would share the fate of the French revolutionaries, for whoever is unable to learn from the past is fated to repeat it:

Had Danton and Robespierre lived to see that moment when, out of a series of ‘surgical operations’ performed on the Convention and later on the Legislative Assembly, Bonapartism emerged, they might perhaps have bequeathed the advice to Larin not to copy slavishly all the ‘primitives’ of previous revolutions.56