Vladimir LAVROV,
Doctor of Historical Sciences,
main Researcher
Institute of Russian History RAS

The cornerstone of Leninism (Marxism-Leninism) is the incitement of social discord and propaganda of the inferiority of people based on their social affiliation. Leninism is the ideology of the permissibility of using extreme measures to obtain the desired effect (immoral principle: the end justifies the means).

Moreover, in Lenin’s works, social racism and social genocide were imposed on our country - the destruction, including physical, of the bourgeoisie and nobility, the clergy and the old Russian intelligentsia, strong working peasants (“kulaks”) and Cossacks. If Hitler's National Socialist Workers' Party preached national racism and genocide, then Lenin preached social racism and genocide; but in both cases - racism and genocide, in both cases millions died as a result of the political activities of these leaders, in both cases crimes against humanity that have no statute of limitations.

Lenin constantly called for a violent change in the foundations of the legal system, led the October coup d'etat of 1917 and dispersed the legitimate Russian parliament - the Constituent Assembly. Lenin was the last to prevent legal activities government agencies, the exercise by citizens of their voting rights in conjunction with violence (violent dispersal of the Assembly, accompanied by the shooting of a peaceful demonstration in its support). The October armed seizure of power and the dispersal of parliament led to the Civil War - the most immoral of all wars, in which Russian went against Russian, brother against brother, son against father, etc. Lenin openly called for the outbreak of a Civil War (see document No. 4).

Lenin not only publicly justified terrorism, but also directed specific terrorist activities and developed methods guerrilla warfare, for example, in October 1905 (see document No. 1).

Lenin created terrible concentration camps and pursued the policy of Red Terror, i.e. state terrorism.

Lenin violated the rights, freedoms and legitimate interests of man and citizen, depending on his attitude to religion, aroused religious discord with his insults to the feelings of believers, their discrimination in the socio-political and other spheres of life of the atheistic regime he created. And Lenin’s orders to kill as many clergy as possible are misanthropic, criminal and extremist (see documents No. 2, 3, 10, 17, 20, 22).

All this was reflected and embodied in many of Lenin’s works, in fifty volumes of his Complete Works, which in fact is not complete, since Lenin’s followers were afraid to publish a number of openly terrorist documents. And what is in italics above are the legal definitions of what constitutes extremist activity, according to the Law “On Combating Extremist Activities.”

Lenin's works are raising new generations of leftists, extremists ready and eager to provoke bloodshed. And God forbid they seize power again: what then? And what appears and is justified in Lenin’s works: reprisals against all dissenters, rivers of blood.

On February 1, 1918, the holy Patriarch Tikhon addressed the Bolsheviks led by Lenin: “Come to your senses, madmen, stop your bloody reprisals. After all, what you are doing is not only a cruel deed: it is truly a satanic deed, for which you are subject to the fire of Gehenna in the future life - the afterlife and the terrible curse of posterity in the present - earthly life. By the authority given to Us by God, we forbid you to approach the Mysteries of Christ, we anathematize you...”

The madmen did not come to their senses.

As examples of Leninist extremism, falling under several criminal articles, we give the following.

Pour acid on your heads and rob banks!

(Document No. 1)

“I am horrified, by God I am horrified, I see that they have been talking about bombs for more than six months and not a single one has been made!.. Let them immediately organize detachments from 3 to 10, up to 30, etc. Human. Let them immediately arm themselves, some as best they can, some with a revolver, some with a knife, some with a rag with kerosene for arson...

Some will immediately undertake the murder of a spy, the bombing of a police station, others - an attack on a bank to confiscate funds... Let each detachment itself learn at least from beating up policemen: dozens of victims will more than pay off in what hundreds of experienced fighters will give...

Even without weapons, detachments can play a very serious role... climbing to the top of houses, into the upper floors, etc., and showering the army with stones, pouring boiling water...

Killing spies, policemen, gendarmes, bombing police stations, releasing those arrested, taking away government funds... such operations are already underway everywhere..."

Lenin
October (16th and later) 1905

(Lenin V.I. Complete collected works. T.11. P. 336-337, 338, 340, 343.)

Religion - opium and fusel

(Document No. 2)

“Religion is one of the types of spiritual oppression... Religion is the opium of the people. Religion is a kind of spiritual booze in which the slaves of capital drown their human image...”

(Lenin V.I. Complete collected works. T. 12. P. 142, 143.)

God is a corpse

(Document No. 3)

“...every godly thing is corpse deposition... every religious idea, every idea about every godly thing, every flirtation with a godly thing is the most unspeakable abomination... the most dangerous abomination, the most vile “infection.”

(Lenin V.I. Complete collection of works. T. 48. P. 226, 227, 228. - From Lenin’s letter to M. Gorky. Having reprimanded the outstanding writer for seeking God, Lenin ends the letter: “Why are you doing this? It’s a shame, diabolical ".)

Let Germany defeat Russia! Bring on the Civil War!

(Document No. 4)

“...the Great Russians cannot “defend the fatherland” other than by desiring defeat in any war for tsarism”; “the slogan of “peace” is wrong, the slogan should be transformation national war into the civil war"; “The least evil would be the defeat of the tsarist monarchy and its troops.”

Lenin
September—December 1914

(Lenin V.I. Complete collection of works. T. 26. P. 108-109, 6; Lenin collection. T. 2. P. 195. There is treason to the Motherland: what Lenin wrote is directed against the interests of the Russian state. Note that to the First world war about 1 million of our compatriots died, during the Civil War - from 12 million to 14 million people, and the famine provoked by the Civil War claimed 3-5 million (according to other data published under Stalin - 15 million); generally political activity Lenin resulted in the death of 15-19 million Russian citizens.)

Cut off the head of the crazy Nicholas II!

(Document No. 5)

“... the heads of at least a hundred Romanovs must be cut off” (December 8, 1911); “in other countries... there are no such crazy people as Nikolai” (May 14, 1917); “weak-minded Nikolai Romanov” (May 22, 1917); “idiot Romanov” (March 12, April 13 and 29, 1918); “the monster-idiot Romanov” (May 22, 1918), etc. and so on.

Lenin

(Lenin V.I. Complete collected works. T. 21. P. 17; T. 32. P. 97, 186; T. 36. P. 85, 215, 269, 362. Members of Lenin’s party on the night of On June 12, 1918, the first Romanov was shot; on the night of July 17, 1918, seven Romanovs were shot and stabbed to death; on the night of July 18 of the same year, six Romanovs were thrown to die in a mine and shot; on the night of January 24, 1919, five Romanovs were shot. )

Shoot the intellectuals!

(Document No. 6)

“It’s a war of life and death for the rich and hangers-on, bourgeois intellectuals... they must be dealt with at the slightest violation... In one place they will be sent to prison... In another they will be put to clean toilets. In the third, they will be provided with yellow tickets after leaving the punishment cell... In the fourth, they will be shot on the spot... The more varied, the better, the richer the overall experience will be...”

(Lenin V.I. Complete collection of works. T. 35. P. 200, 201, 204. - From the work “How to organize a competition?”)

The corpse smell of parliamentarism

(Document No. 7)

"It's horrible! To go from among living people to a society of corpses, to breathe in the smell of corpses...

A hard, boring and tedious day in the elegant premises of the Tauride Palace, which differs in appearance from Smolny approximately in the same way as elegant but dead bourgeois parliamentarism differs from the proletarian, simple, in many ways still disordered and unfinished, but living and vital Soviet apparatus.”

(Lenin V.I. Complete collected works. T. 35. P. 229, 230-231. Lenin’s article “People from the Other World” about the All-Russian Constituent Assembly - the first Russian parliament, the immediate predecessor Federal Assembly RF. Lenin dispersed parliament on January 5, 1918, which was accompanied by the shooting of peaceful demonstrations in his support in Petrograd and other cities.)

Let's burn Baku completely!

(Document No. 8)

“...Can you also tell Theroux to prepare everything for the complete burning of Baku in the event of an invasion, and to announce this in print in Baku?”

(Volkogonov D.A. Lenin. Political portrait. Book I. M., 1994. P. 357; RGASPI. F. 2. Op. 2. D. 109. Lenin’s handwritten order to the Chairman of the Baku Cheka S. Ter-Gabrielyan; through whom it was transmitted is unknown.)

Death to the fists!

(Document No. 9)

“...These vampires have picked up and are picking up the landowners' lands into their hands; they enslave the poor peasants again and again. A merciless war against these fists! Death to them!

Lenin
First half of August (later 6th) 1918

(Lenin V.I. Complete collection of works. T. 37. P. 41.)

Merciless terror against priests

(Document No. 10)

Gubernia Executive Committee

...to carry out merciless mass terror against the kulaks, priests and White Guards; those who are dubious will be locked up in a concentration camp outside the city.”

(Lenin V.I. Complete collection of works. T. 50. P. 143-144.)

Exemplary hang and take away all the bread

(Document No. 11)

“To Penza. 11/VIII-1918

Comrades Kuraev, Bosch, Minkin and other Penza communists.

Comrades! The uprising of the five kulak volosts must lead to merciless suppression. This is required by the interest of the entire revolution, for now the “last decisive battle” with the kulaks has been taken. You need to give a sample.

Hang (be sure to hang, so that the people can see) at least 100 notorious kulaks, rich people, bloodsuckers.

Take away all their bread.

Assign hostages according to yesterday's telegram.

Make it so that hundreds of miles around people see, tremble, know, shout: they are strangling and will strangle the bloodsucking kulaks.

Wire receipt and execution.

Your Lenin."

(Latyshev A.G. Declassified Lenin. M., 1996. P. 57. The hanging telegram was first published in November 1991, RGASPI. F. 2. Op. 1. D. 6898.)

Shoot without asking anyone!

(Document No. 12)

“Saratov, [Narkomfood Commissioner] Pikes

...I advise you to appoint your bosses and shoot conspirators and hesitant ones, without asking anyone and without allowing idiotic red tape.”

(Lenin V.I. Complete collection of works. T. 50. P. 165. Please note: The Red Terror was declared on September 2, 1918, but in reality it was unleashed before the announcement, before the assassination attempt on Lenin on August 30, 1918. and was not a response to the assassination attempt.)

Merciless extermination and do not spare Kazan!

(Document No. 13)

"Sviyazhsk, Trotsky

I am surprised and alarmed by the slowdown in the operation against Kazan, especially if what I was told is true that you have every opportunity to destroy the enemy with artillery. In my opinion, we cannot spare the city and postpone it longer, because merciless extermination is necessary ... "

(Lenin V.I. Complete collected works. T.50. P. 178. Lenin understood the criminal nature of what he insisted on, and covered his tracks by adding to the telegram: “Secret Code (return the original to me .) (Send me a copy of the cipher.)".)

Finish off the Cossacks!

(Document No. 14)

Rakovsky, Antonov, Podvoisky, Kamenev

By all means, with all our might and as quickly as possible, help us finish off the Cossacks..."

(Lenin V.I. Complete collection of works. T. 50. P. 290.)

Foreigners - to a concentration camp!

(Document No. 15)

“As for the page, I advise you not to rush into deportation. Wouldn't it be better to go to a concentration camp..."

(Lenin V.I. Complete collection of works. T. 50. P. 335. Lenin’s telegram was addressed to Stalin in Petrograd. At the same time, Lenin signed a decree of the government he headed, in which: “All foreign citizens living on the territory of the RSFSR from the ranks the bourgeoisie of those states that are conducting hostile and military actions against us, at the age of 17 to 55 years, should be imprisoned in concentration camps...” See: Latyshev A.G. Op. cit. p. 56.)

Peasants are state criminals

(Document No. 16)

“...not all peasants understand that free trade in grain is a state crime. “I produced bread, this is my product, and I have the right to trade it” - this is how the peasant argues, out of habit, in the old days. And we say that this is a state crime.”

(Lenin V.I. Complete collection of works. T. 39. P. 315.)

Shoot those who venerate St. Nicholas

(Document No. 17)

“...to put up with “Nikola” is stupid, we need to put everyone in the Cheka on their feet in order to shoot those who don’t show up for work because of “Nikola.”

Lenin
December (not earlier than the 23rd) 1919

(Latyshev A.G. Decree. Op. P. 156; RGASPI. F. 2. Op. 1. D. 12176. - Lenin’s written order was made to the special representative of the Defense Council A.V. Eiduk in connection with the failure of believers to show up for work in Orthodox holiday- Memorial Day of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, December 19, 1919)

Punish Latvia and Estonia!

(Document No. 18)

“...Take military measures, i.e. try to punish Latvia and Estonia militarily (for example, “on the shoulders” of Balakhovich, cross the border somewhere 1 mile and hang 100-1000 of their officials and rich people there).”

Lenin
August 1920

(Latyshev A.G. Decree. cit. P. 31; RGASPI. F. 2. Op. 2. D. 447; Volkogonov D.A. Decree. cit. Book. II. P. 457. Lenin’s handwritten order.)

We deny universal morality

(Document No. 19)

“In what sense do we deny morality, deny morality? In the sense in which it was preached by the bourgeoisie, which derived this morality from the commands of God...

We deny any such morality, taken from a non-human, non-class concept. We say that this is a deception, that this is a deception and brainwashing...

(Lenin V.I. Complete collected works. T. 41. P. 309, 311, 313. - “Tasks of youth unions” (Lenin’s speech at the III Komsomol Congress). From Hitler: “I free you from the chimera of conscience” .)

Prizes 100,000 rub. for the hanged man

(Document No. 20)

“...Excellent plan. Finish it together with Dzerzhinsky. Under the guise of the “greens” (we will then blame them on them) we will march 10-20 miles and outweigh the kulaks, priests, and landowners. Prizes 100,000 rub. for the hanged man."

Lenin
Late October - November 1920

(Latyshev A.G. Decree. Op. P. 31; RGASPI. F. 2. Op. 2. D. 380. Lenin’s handwritten order.)

Theaters are in the grave!

(Document No. 21)

"T. Lunacharsky

... I advise you to put all theaters in a coffin.

The People's Commissar of Education should not engage in theater, but in teaching literacy."

(Lenin V.I. Complete collection of works. T. 53. P. 142.)

The more clergy and bourgeoisie we manage to shoot, the better!

(Document No. 22)

“Strictly confidential.

We ask you not to make copies under any circumstances, but for each member of the Politburo (Comrade Kalinin too) to make their notes on the document itself.

...if it is necessary to carry out a series of cruelties in order to achieve a certain political goal, then they must be carried out in the most energetic manner and in the shortest possible time, because the masses will not tolerate prolonged use of cruelty.<…>In addition, the main part of our foreign opponents is among Russian emigrants abroad, i.e. Socialist-Revolutionaries and Milyukovites, the fight against us will be difficult if we, precisely in this moment, precisely in connection with the famine, we will carry out the suppression of the reactionary clergy with maximum speed and mercilessness.

Therefore, I come to the absolute conclusion that we must now give the most decisive and merciless battle to the Black Hundred clergy and suppress their resistance with such cruelty that they will not forget this for several decades...

The more representatives of the reactionary clergy and the reactionary bourgeoisie we manage to shoot on this occasion, the better.”

(Izvestia of the Central Committee of the CPSU. 1990. No. 4. P. 190-193. The text of Lenin’s letter, indicating that he was pursuing a policy of state terrorism, was hidden from the Soviet people until the advent of Gorbachev’s glasnost. However, about the very fact of writing a letter to members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) dated March 19, 1922 was mentioned in the 45th volume of the 5th edition of Lenin’s Complete Works, and truly by God’s Providence - it was mentioned on page 666!)

Terrorist court!

(Document No. 23)

“...The court must not eliminate terror; to promise this would be self-deception or deception, but to justify and legitimize it in principle, clearly, without falsehood and without embellishment.”

(Lenin V.I. Complete collection of works. T. 45. P. 190.)

On the eve of April 22 - the birthday of Vladimir Ilyich - he spoke about the myths and truth around the figure of LeninMikhail FYODOROV, historian, associate professor of the department modern history Russia St. Petersburg State University.

Myth 1.

In fact, “the most humane person”, “the main friend of children” was one of the most cruel politicians in the entire history of the country.

- The demonization of the figure of Lenin is as little true as the varnished image of the “Great Leader” created by Soviet propaganda. Yes, they were given enough cruel orders. It is a known fact that Lenin proposed shooting prostitutes as an antisocial element and called for hanging kulaks, White Guards and disloyal priests. Although this did not always involve practical implementation.

But when assessing Lenin's actions, one must take into account that he was the leader of a political party during a period of fierce struggle for power and civil war, accompanied by foreign military intervention. And the facts indicate that Ilyich’s “atrocities” are at least not superior to the acts of his political opponents - A. Kolchak, A. Denikin, L. Kornilov, names that are now trying to idealize Russian cinema and journalism. Let us remember that the leader of the revolution was not a “pioneer” in the practice of confiscating church values ​​in favor of the state. Russian tsars laid hands on church property, starting with Peter.

It is worth noting that Lenin, earlier than other Bolsheviks, was able to abandon ideological blinders and move to new forms of economic management. He did not hesitate to use the ideas of other parties if he considered them useful. It was not for nothing that the Mensheviks reproached the leader of the proletariat for “stole” their economic program, and the Socialist Revolutionaries - their agrarian one.

Myth 2.

Lenin was involved in the execution royal family.

More than once a version has been put forward that the death of his elder brother Alexander could be one of the reasons for Lenin’s hatred of the Romanovs. However, there is no documentary evidence of his involvement in the execution of the royal family on the night of July 16-17, 1918 in Yekaterinburg. Most likely, in principle, he was not against the murder of Nicholas II, but did not give a direct order. It is no secret that in those days the security officers did not stand on ceremony with the “class enemy.” Lenin himself more than once revoked the Cheka's authority to impose the death penalty. There is a version that the local authorities of Yekaterinburg themselves made the decision to kill, without instructions from the center, in connection with the advance of the Whites.

According to the memoirs of the Yekaterinburg security officer M. Medvedev, Lenin spoke out for “an open trial of Nicholas II.” But all this is just speculation. Neither historians nor modern investigators have been able to find the truth. In 2011, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation announced the absence of documents confirming that the order to execute was given by Lenin or another person from the Kremlin.

By the way, according to the memoirs of Commandant P. Malkov, Lenin asked for pardon for Fanny Kaplan, who official version shot him in 1918. But, by order of the chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee Ya. Sverdlov, Kaplan was shot, her body was doused with gasoline and burned near the walls of the Kremlin.

Myth 3.

Lenin is a German agent.

- Similar accusations arose on the basis of calls by the Bolsheviks to stop the imperialist war and the passage of a group of emigrants led by Lenin through German territory, since the Allies did not allow them to enter Russia.

Rumors also spread that the Pravda newspaper was financed with German money, but during the search and seizure of documents it turned out that it was a self-supporting newspaper, which also contributed money to support the Bolsheviks. But there is no evidence that Lenin acted in the interests of Germany.

It is interesting that many of those who then reproached Lenin for espionage themselves found themselves in the pay of foreign intelligence services. In particular, the terrorist B. Savinkov (at that time assistant to Minister Kerensky) became a Polish agent. Accusations of using “dark money” were then brought against the “grandmother of the Russian revolution” Breshko-Breshkovskaya, who raised funds for the party in the USA.

Myth 4.

Lenin was one of the most unpretentious politicians.

This is true. Lenin was very unpretentious in food and clothing - he wore a shabby coat, cap and old boots. The apartment in which he lived first in Smolny and then in the Kremlin was a real closet, compared to the apartments of his followers.

In exile, he lived on money sent from home. There is a letter from Ilyich to his mother, where he complains that he is forced to quit smoking, because there is not enough money for tobacco, and beer in Germany is tasty, but too expensive.

Myth 5.

Lenin was killed on Stalin's orders.

- Let’s not forget that in 1918 Lenin was wounded by a poisoned bullet, that he worked day and night and was wildly overworked, that during his life he was in prison and exile, suffered a stroke and was partially paralyzed. There is no doubt that by 1924 Lenin was seriously and hopelessly ill. special reasons Stalin had no intention of hastening his death. Stalin told members of the Politburo that Lenin had approached him with a request to give him a capsule of poison just in case, since he was experiencing excruciating pain. But he refused.

Photos are often published where Lenin, paralyzed and looking crazy, sits in a chair. It is widely believed that his last works were written in a deranged state.

It is not true. After an exacerbation of the disease, he partially recovered. In fact, until the end of his days, Lenin was of a strong mind and dictated his notes.

Myth 6.

If it were not for Lenin, we would not have “lost” 70 years in the communist system.

- To say that suddenly, out of the blue, the “damned Bolsheviks” staged a revolution is stupid. Revolutionary uprisings and attempts to overthrow the autocracy began as early as late XIX century. And in 1881, Tsar Alexander II, as we remember, was killed not by the Bolsheviks, but by the Narodnaya Volya. The imperfection of the social system in Russia was obvious, especially against the backdrop of Western Europe. And the events of 1917 in Petrograd became a spontaneous uprising of the people.

Of all the political figures of that time, Lenin was the most effective organizer. He was going to carry out a socialist revolution - he carried it out. Another thing is that Russia was not ready for such a degree of socialization, and forcing reforms led us to the creation of barracks socialism and the dictatorship of the party. By the end of his life, Lenin realized the main mistakes, proposed ways to correct them, and, perhaps, if he had lived longer, the history of the country would have taken a different direction.

As for Lenin’s accusations of all sins, he repeated the fates of all the country’s leading politicians. In our country, as soon as a person’s period in power ends, it turns out that the country was ruled by a scoundrel. And the children of Stalin and Khrushchev were completely forced to go abroad because of the “glory” of their fathers. It's time to abandon the general denigration. For example, in England, even King Henry VIII, famous for his cruelty, is calmly accepted, and no attempt is made to destroy his traces in the history of the country.

The cornerstone of Leninism (Marxism-Leninism) is the incitement of social discord and propaganda of the inferiority of people based on their social affiliation. Leninism is the ideology of the permissibility of using extreme measures to obtain the desired effect (immoral principle: the end justifies the means).

Moreover, in Lenin’s works, social racism and social genocide were imposed on our country - the destruction, including physical, of the bourgeoisie and nobility, the clergy and the old Russian intelligentsia, strong working peasants (“kulaks”) and Cossacks. If Hitler's National Socialist Workers' Party preached national racism and genocide, then Lenin preached social racism and genocide; but in both cases - racism and genocide, in both cases millions died as a result of the political activities of these leaders, in both cases crimes against humanity that have no statute of limitations.

Lenin constantly called for a violent change in the foundations of the legal system, led the October coup d'etat of 1917 and dispersed the legitimate Russian parliament - the Constituent Assembly. The latter Lenin prevented the legitimate activities of state bodies, the exercise by citizens of their voting rights, combined with violence (the violent dispersal of the Assembly, accompanied by the shooting of a peaceful demonstration in its support). The October armed seizure of power and the dispersal of parliament led to the Civil War - the most immoral of all wars, in which Russian went against Russian, brother against brother, son against father, etc. Lenin openly called for the outbreak of a Civil War (see document No. 4).

Lenin not only publicly justified terrorism, but directed specific terrorist activities and developed methods of guerrilla warfare, for example, in October 1905 (see document No. 1).

Lenin created terrible concentration camps and pursued the policy of Red Terror, i.e. state terrorism.

Lenin violated the rights, freedoms and legitimate interests of man and citizen, depending on his attitude to religion, aroused religious discord with his insults to the feelings of believers, their discrimination in the socio-political and other spheres of life of the atheistic regime he created. And Lenin’s orders to kill as many clergy as possible are misanthropic, criminal and extremist (see documents No. 2, 3, 10, 17, 20, 22).

All this was reflected and embodied in many of Lenin’s works, in fifty volumes of his Complete Works, which in fact is not complete, since Lenin’s followers were afraid to publish a number of openly terrorist documents. And what is in italics above are the legal definitions of what constitutes extremist activity, according to the Law “On Combating Extremist Activities.”

Lenin's works are raising new generations of leftists, extremists ready and eager to provoke bloodshed. And God forbid they seize power again: what then? And what appears and is justified in Lenin’s works: reprisals against all dissenters, rivers of blood.

On February 1, 1918, the holy Patriarch Tikhon addressed the Bolsheviks led by Lenin: “Come to your senses, madmen, stop your bloody reprisals. After all, what you are doing is not only a cruel deed: it is truly a satanic deed, for which you are subject to the fire of Gehenna in the future life - the afterlife and the terrible curse of posterity in the present - earthly life. By the authority given to Us by God, we forbid you to approach the Mysteries of Christ, we anathematize you...”

The madmen did not come to their senses.

As examples of Leninist extremism, falling under several criminal articles, we give the following.

Pour acid on your heads and rob banks!

(Document No. 1)

“I am horrified, by God I am horrified, I see that they have been talking about bombs for more than six months and not a single one has been made!.. Let them immediately organize detachments from 3 to 10, up to 30, etc. Human. Let them immediately arm themselves, some as best they can, some with a revolver, some with a knife, some with a rag with kerosene for arson...

Some will immediately undertake the murder of a spy, the bombing of a police station, others - an attack on a bank to confiscate funds... Let each detachment itself learn at least from beating up policemen: dozens of victims will more than pay off in what hundreds of experienced fighters will give...

Even without weapons, detachments can play a very serious role... climbing to the top of houses, into the upper floors, etc., and showering the army with stones, pouring boiling water...

Killing spies, policemen, gendarmes, bombing police stations, releasing those arrested, taking away government funds... such operations are already underway everywhere..."

Lenin
October (16th and later) 1905

(Lenin V.I. Complete collected works. T.11. P. 336-337, 338, 340, 343.)

Religion - opium and fusel

(Document No. 2)

“Religion is one of the types of spiritual oppression... Religion is the opium of the people. Religion is a kind of spiritual booze in which the slaves of capital drown their human image...”

(Lenin V.I. Complete collected works. T. 12. P. 142, 143.)

God is a corpse

(Document No. 3)

“...every godly thing is corpse deposition... every religious idea, every idea about every godly thing, every flirtation with a godly thing is the most unspeakable abomination... the most dangerous abomination, the most vile “infection.”

(Lenin V.I. Complete collection of works. T. 48. P. 226, 227, 228. - From Lenin’s letter to M. Gorky. Having reprimanded the outstanding writer for seeking God, Lenin ends the letter: “Why are you doing this? It’s a shame, diabolical ".)

Let Germany defeat Russia! Bring on the Civil War!

(Document No. 4)

“...the Great Russians cannot “defend the fatherland” other than by desiring defeat in any war for tsarism”; “the slogan of “peace” is incorrect, the slogan should be the transformation of a national war into a civil war”; “The least evil would be the defeat of the tsarist monarchy and its troops.”

Lenin
September—December 1914

(Lenin V.I. Complete collection of works. T. 26. P. 108-109, 6; Lenin collection. T. 2. P. 195. There is treason to the Motherland: what Lenin wrote is directed against the interests of the Russian state. Note that In the First World War, about 1 million of our compatriots died, in the Civil War - from 12 million to 14 million people, and the famine provoked by the Civil War claimed 3-5 million (according to other data published under Stalin - 15 million); in general Lenin's political activities led to the death of 15-19 million Russian citizens.)

Cut off the head of the crazy Nicholas II!

(Document No. 5)

“... the heads of at least a hundred Romanovs must be cut off” (December 8, 1911); “in other countries... there are no such crazy people as Nikolai” (May 14, 1917); “weak-minded Nikolai Romanov” (May 22, 1917); “idiot Romanov” (March 12, April 13 and 29, 1918); “the monster-idiot Romanov” (May 22, 1918), etc. and so on.

Lenin

(Lenin V.I. Complete collected works. T. 21. P. 17; T. 32. P. 97, 186; T. 36. P. 85, 215, 269, 362. Members of Lenin’s party on the night of On June 12, 1918, the first Romanov was shot; on the night of July 17, 1918, seven Romanovs were shot and stabbed to death; on the night of July 18 of the same year, six Romanovs were thrown to die in a mine and shot; on the night of January 24, 1919, five Romanovs were shot. )

Shoot the intellectuals!

(Document No. 6)

“It’s a war of life and death for the rich and hangers-on, bourgeois intellectuals... they must be dealt with at the slightest violation... In one place they will be sent to prison... In another they will be put to clean toilets. In the third, they will be provided with yellow tickets after leaving the punishment cell... In the fourth, they will be shot on the spot... The more varied, the better, the richer the overall experience will be...”

(Lenin V.I. Complete collection of works. T. 35. P. 200, 201, 204. - From the work “How to organize a competition?”)

The corpse smell of parliamentarism

(Document No. 7)

"It's horrible! To go from among living people to a society of corpses, to breathe in the smell of corpses...

A hard, boring and tedious day in the elegant premises of the Tauride Palace, which differs in appearance from Smolny approximately in the same way as elegant but dead bourgeois parliamentarism differs from the proletarian, simple, in many ways still disordered and unfinished, but living and vital Soviet apparatus.”

(Lenin V.I. Complete collected works. T. 35. P. 229, 230-231. Lenin’s article “People from the Other World” about the All-Russian Constituent Assembly - the first Russian parliament, the immediate predecessor of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation. Lenin dispersed the parliament January 5, 1918, which was accompanied by the shooting of peaceful demonstrations in his support in Petrograd and other cities.)

Let's burn Baku completely!

(Document No. 8)

“...Can you also tell Theroux to prepare everything for the complete burning of Baku in the event of an invasion, and to announce this in print in Baku?”

(Volkogonov D.A. Lenin. Political portrait. Book I. M., 1994. P. 357; RGASPI. F. 2. Op. 2. D. 109. Lenin’s handwritten order to the Chairman of the Baku Cheka S. Ter-Gabrielyan; through whom it was transmitted is unknown.)

Death to the fists!

(Document No. 9)

“...These vampires have picked up and are picking up the landowners' lands into their hands; they enslave the poor peasants again and again. A merciless war against these fists! Death to them!

Lenin
First half of August (later 6th) 1918

(Lenin V.I. Complete collection of works. T. 37. P. 41.)

Merciless terror against priests

(Document No. 10)

Gubernia Executive Committee

...to carry out merciless mass terror against the kulaks, priests and White Guards; those who are dubious will be locked up in a concentration camp outside the city.”

(Lenin V.I. Complete collection of works. T. 50. P. 143-144.)

Exemplary hang and take away all the bread

(Document No. 11)

“To Penza. 11/VIII-1918

Comrades Kuraev, Bosch, Minkin and other Penza communists.

Comrades! The uprising of the five kulak volosts must lead to merciless suppression. This is required by the interest of the entire revolution, for now the “last decisive battle” with the kulaks has been taken. You need to give a sample.

Hang (be sure to hang, so that the people can see) at least 100 notorious kulaks, rich people, bloodsuckers.

Take away all their bread.

Assign hostages according to yesterday's telegram.

Make it so that hundreds of miles around people see, tremble, know, shout: they are strangling and will strangle the bloodsucking kulaks.

Wire receipt and execution.

Your Lenin."

(Latyshev A.G. Declassified Lenin. M., 1996. P. 57. The hanging telegram was first published in November 1991, RGASPI. F. 2. Op. 1. D. 6898.)

Shoot without asking anyone!

(Document No. 12)

“Saratov, [Narkomfood Commissioner] Pikes

...I advise you to appoint your bosses and shoot conspirators and hesitant ones, without asking anyone and without allowing idiotic red tape.”

(Lenin V.I. Complete collection of works. T. 50. P. 165. Please note: The Red Terror was declared on September 2, 1918, but in reality it was unleashed before the announcement, before the assassination attempt on Lenin on August 30, 1918. and was not a response to the assassination attempt.)

Merciless extermination and do not spare Kazan!

(Document No. 13)

"Sviyazhsk, Trotsky

I am surprised and alarmed by the slowdown in the operation against Kazan, especially if what I was told is true that you have every opportunity to destroy the enemy with artillery. In my opinion, we cannot spare the city and postpone it longer, because merciless extermination is necessary ... "

(Lenin V.I. Complete collected works. T.50. P. 178. Lenin understood the criminal nature of what he insisted on, and covered his tracks by adding to the telegram: “Secret Code (return the original to me .) (Send me a copy of the cipher.)".)

Finish off the Cossacks!

(Document No. 14)

Rakovsky, Antonov, Podvoisky, Kamenev

By all means, with all our might and as quickly as possible, help us finish off the Cossacks..."

(Lenin V.I. Complete collection of works. T. 50. P. 290.)

Foreigners - to a concentration camp!

(Document No. 15)

“As for the page, I advise you not to rush into deportation. Wouldn't it be better to go to a concentration camp..."

(Lenin V.I. Complete collection of works. T. 50. P. 335. Lenin’s telegram was addressed to Stalin in Petrograd. At the same time, Lenin signed a decree of the government he headed, in which: “All foreign citizens living on the territory of the RSFSR from the ranks the bourgeoisie of those states that are conducting hostile and military actions against us, at the age of 17 to 55 years, should be imprisoned in concentration camps...” See: Latyshev A.G. Op. cit. p. 56.)

Peasants are state criminals

(Document No. 16)

“...not all peasants understand that free trade in grain is a state crime. “I produced bread, this is my product, and I have the right to trade it” - this is how the peasant argues, out of habit, in the old days. And we say that this is a state crime.”

(Lenin V.I. Complete collection of works. T. 39. P. 315.)

Shoot those who venerate St. Nicholas

(Document No. 17)

“...to put up with “Nikola” is stupid, we need to put everyone in the Cheka on their feet in order to shoot those who don’t show up for work because of “Nikola.”

Lenin
December (not earlier than the 23rd) 1919

(Latyshev A.G. Decree. Op. P. 156; RGASPI. F. 2. Op. 1. D. 12176. - Lenin’s written order was made to the special authorized representative of the Defense Council A.V. Eiduk in connection with the failure of believers to show up for work in the Orthodox holiday - Memorial Day of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, December 19, 1919)

Punish Latvia and Estonia!

(Document No. 18)

“...Take military measures, i.e. try to punish Latvia and Estonia militarily (for example, “on the shoulders” of Balakhovich, cross the border somewhere 1 mile and hang 100-1000 of their officials and rich people there).”

Lenin
August 1920

(Latyshev A.G. Decree. cit. P. 31; RGASPI. F. 2. Op. 2. D. 447; Volkogonov D.A. Decree. cit. Book. II. P. 457. Lenin’s handwritten order.)

We deny universal morality

(Document No. 19)

“In what sense do we deny morality, deny morality? In the sense in which it was preached by the bourgeoisie, which derived this morality from the commands of God...

We deny any such morality, taken from a non-human, non-class concept. We say that this is a deception, that this is a deception and brainwashing...

(Lenin V.I. Complete collected works. T. 41. P. 309, 311, 313. - “Tasks of youth unions” (Lenin’s speech at the III Komsomol Congress). From Hitler: “I free you from the chimera of conscience” .)

Prizes 100,000 rub. for the hanged man

(Document No. 20)

“...Excellent plan. Finish it together with Dzerzhinsky. Under the guise of the “greens” (we will then blame them on them) we will march 10-20 miles and outweigh the kulaks, priests, and landowners. Prizes 100,000 rub. for the hanged man."

Lenin
Late October - November 1920

(Latyshev A.G. Decree. Op. P. 31; RGASPI. F. 2. Op. 2. D. 380. Lenin’s handwritten order.)

Theaters are in the grave!

(Document No. 21)

"T. Lunacharsky

... I advise you to put all theaters in a coffin.

The People's Commissar of Education should not engage in theater, but in teaching literacy."

(Lenin V.I. Complete collection of works. T. 53. P. 142.)

The more clergy and bourgeoisie we manage to shoot, the better!

(Document No. 22)

“Strictly confidential.

We ask you not to make copies under any circumstances, but for each member of the Politburo (Comrade Kalinin too) to make their notes on the document itself.

...if it is necessary to carry out a series of cruelties in order to achieve a certain political goal, then they must be carried out in the most energetic manner and in the shortest possible time, because the masses will not tolerate prolonged use of cruelty.<…>In addition, the main part of our foreign opponents is among Russian emigrants abroad, i.e. Socialist Revolutionaries and Milyukovites, the fight against us will be difficult if we, precisely at this moment, precisely in connection with the famine, carry out the suppression of the reactionary clergy with maximum speed and mercilessness.

Therefore, I come to the absolute conclusion that we must now give the most decisive and merciless battle to the Black Hundred clergy and suppress their resistance with such cruelty that they will not forget this for several decades...

The more representatives of the reactionary clergy and the reactionary bourgeoisie we manage to shoot on this occasion, the better.”

(Izvestia of the Central Committee of the CPSU. 1990. No. 4. P. 190-193. The text of Lenin’s letter, indicating that he was pursuing a policy of state terrorism, was hidden from the Soviet people until the advent of Gorbachev’s glasnost. However, about the very fact of writing a letter to members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) dated March 19, 1922 was mentioned in the 45th volume of the 5th edition of Lenin’s Complete Works, and truly by God’s Providence - it was mentioned on page 666!)

Terrorist court!

(Document No. 23)

“...The court must not eliminate terror; to promise this would be self-deception or deception, but to justify and legitimize it in principle, clearly, without falsehood and without embellishment.”

(Lenin V.I. Complete collection of works. T. 45. P. 190.)

Vladimir LAVROV,

Doctor of Historical Sciences,
Chief Researcher
Institute of Russian History RAS

Before the outbreak of the First World War, V. Lenin remained only the leader and ideologist of the most radical party of the Second International. His name was already known in the international labor movement, and some of his ideas found supporters within the left wing of Social Democracy. However, this wing itself was not formalized, and the figure of V. Lenin did not represent any alternative to the right and moderate figures of the International. The outbreak of war radically changed the situation. The war once dispelled naive romantic illusions, inspired by the works of K. Marx and F. Engels, about the primacy of the international over the national in the labor movement and socialist parties. The thesis that “workers do not have a Fatherland” did not stand the test of practice - it was refuted already in the first days and weeks of the World War. And it was not at all a matter of the “betrayal of the leaders” or the “labor aristocracy”, not the machinations of the “imperialist bourgeoisie”, but the real sentiments of the participants in the social democratic movement.

The war disrupted the calm course of the evolution of capitalism and the accompanying evolution of the social democratic movement. As military difficulties and disasters intensified, radical left elements in many social democratic parties became more active. V. Lenin became the informal leader of the left revolutionary-internationalist wing of international social democracy. In his works of this period one can detect a growing intolerance towards anyone different from himself. own position views. He deliberately worked to consolidate and deepen the revealed split in the labor movement.

Even before the final formation of a special communist ideology different from the social-democratic tradition, such a feature as totalitarianism appeared. The main thing that V. Lenin took from the Marxist heritage during this period was the absolutization of the class struggle, the idea of ​​revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. At the same time, the evolution of the political views of the founders of Marxism themselves is ignored. The dogmatic interpretation of Marxism is complemented by its “development” in a number of theses put forward during the First World War. Among them was the thesis about the possibility of a transition to socialism initially only in certain countries.

“The unevenness of economic and political development is an unconditional law of capitalism,” wrote V. Lenin in his work “On the Slogan of the United States of Europe.” “It follows from this that the victory of socialism is possible initially in a few or even in one individual capitalist country.”

Returning to this conclusion in the article “ Military program proletarian revolution,” V. Lenin makes it even more specific:

“Socialism cannot win at the same time in all countries. He will win initially in one or several countries, and the rest will remain bourgeois and pre-bourgeois for some time."

When V. Lenin made these conclusions, he did not have any specific country in mind, especially Russia. But later, it was for Russia that these conclusions turned out to have negative consequences. The methodological basis of Lenin’s conclusions was the “theory of imperialism” he formulated, which was an interpretation in a radical revolutionary spirit of the results of studies of the capitalist economy carried out by Hilferding, Böhm-Bawerk and other Marxists. Along with utopian judgments, refuted by subsequent world developments, Lenin's theory of imperialism contained rational judgments and sound forecasts. So,

V. Lenin was one of the first to draw attention to the potential significance of colonial and semi-colonial countries for world politics and economics. He also correctly foresaw some political consequences world war. This demonstrated his gift as a politician of a practical rather than a theoretical kind.

Bolshevik slogans, which expressed the wishes of defeat in the imperialist war for their own government and its transformation into a civil war, remained abstract in the first war years. But as military difficulties and economic and political destabilization grew, they acquired a real basis. By 1917, a revolutionary crisis had matured in many states that participated in the First World War, and primarily in Russia.

“Naturally,” V. Lenin noted in this regard, “that in tsarist Russia, where the disorganization was the most monstrous and where the proletariat was the most revolutionary (not thanks to its special qualities, but thanks to the living traditions of the “fifth year”), a revolutionary crisis broke out before anything else. This crisis was accelerated by a series of severe defeats that were inflicted on Russia and its allies. Defeats shook the entire old government mechanism and the entire old order, embittered them against it. All classes of the population, hardened the army, exterminated on a huge scale its old commanding staff, of a calloused noble and especially rotten bureaucratic character, and replaced it with young, fresh, predominantly bourgeois, raznochinsky, petty-bourgeois. People who were outright servile to the bourgeoisie or simply spineless people who shouted and screamed against “defeatism” are now confronted with the fact of a historical connection between the defeat of the most backward and barbaric tsarist monarchy and started revolutionary fire".

The February Revolution of 1917 was, from the point of view of Marxism and V. Lenin, bourgeois-democratic in its objective content. But it occurred and developed under unique conditions associated with the ongoing war, the displacement of traditional socio-political divides, the uneven resolution of pressing economic and political issues. The official levers of power passed into the hands of the Provisional Government. In parallel with it, a system of Soviets spontaneously emerged, which initially had greater opportunities for effective control over events, especially on the ground. Politically, immediately after the victory of the revolution, Russia advanced further along the path of democratization than the majority developed countries. However, the socio-economic problems of the revolution remained unresolved. The Provisional Government was in no hurry to satisfy the peasants' demands for a solution to the land issue, or to resolve the pressing issue of peace. On the contrary, it sought, due to its understanding of the allied obligations, to continue military operations.

The Soviets, where initially the leading positions belonged to the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, step by step actually ceded real power to the Provisional Government. Before the arrival of V. Lenin and his “Letters from Afar,” the prevailing opinion among the Bolsheviks was that the bourgeois-democratic revolution was over. Not least of all, this was facilitated by the fact that they perceived the Provisional Government as the natural political crown of the revolution, because in the works of 1905-1907. Lenin himself spoke of such a government as an organ of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. Among those who held similar views was I. Stalin.

The return of V. Lenin from emigration radically changed the situation. In one of his first speeches to the Bolsheviks, he clearly outlined the features of the then political development:

“The uniqueness of the current moment in Russia lies in transition from the first stage of the revolution, which gave power to the bourgeoisie due to the insufficient consciousness and organization of the proletariat, - to the second its stage, which should give power into the hands of the proletariat and the poorest strata of the peasantry."

In fact, this meant a rejection of Lenin’s previous concept, since agreement with others was rejected socialist parties, if they occupied positions different from the Bolsheviks. It is no coincidence that during this period there was a rapprochement between V. Lenin and L. Trotsky, which ended with the latter’s entry into the Bolshevik Party.

About the motives that prompted L. Trotsky to ultimately overcome his pride and join the Bolshevik Party on the terms of recognizing the leadership of V. Lenin, author of a comparative political-psychological study of the personal characteristics of leaders October revolution D. Navigator says this:

“For a long time Trotsky felt that he was not identical with Lenin and his circle. He is in no hurry to formalize his joining the Bolsheviks organizationally. Apparently, it took him some time to feel that recitation alone, without Lenin’s everyday ability to organize necessary actions and predetermine their consequences, would not go far. But under Lenin it was impossible to remain first. Without any cultivation of external signs of his leadership, Lenin, until the second half of 1922, managed to prevent open attacks on the first place in the party by his comrades. For Trotsky, apparently, it was not easy to accept this rule of the Bolshevik game. And while we were talking about things less than complete political victory, Trotsky did not condescend to unification, which obviously presupposed Lenin’s supremacy. In the summer of 1917 the question of power arose. And Trotsky begins to come to terms with the idea that he will not be able to “wrest power” without unifying with the Bolsheviks, that is, without recognizing Lenin’s primacy, without relying on Lenin’s tactical and organizational talent” (7, pp. 73-74).

Just like L. Trotsky, V. Lenin now relies on no less than the “world proletarian revolution.” A break is declared with all trends in Russian and international social democracy that do not recognize the radical program of the Bolshevik Party and the need to create a new Communist International. The international aspect comes to the fore in V. Lenin, as well as in L. Trotsky.

However, the basically adventurist line towards a socialist revolution with an orientation towards the help of the international proletariat was based in the summer and autumn of 1917 on some real phenomena. Then it seemed that the future foreshadowed inevitable revolutionary upheavals in most of the warring countries of Europe. This is partly what happened later, although the results of political changes on the European continent turned out to be different than those that V. Lenin counted on.

The successes of the Bolsheviks in winning over the broad masses in the summer and autumn of 1917 were largely due to their social demagoguery, perhaps unconsciously. For example, by promising a way out of the war, the Bolsheviks played on the most painful chord of the people and army, exhausted by disasters, but their plans for a “democratic peace” in those conditions were obviously impossible to implement. It was only possible to achieve a separate peace through significant concessions to the enemy (which in fact happened later). Acting on the principle “the worse, the better,” the Bolsheviks practically identified themselves with the nationalist separatist movements on the outskirts Russian Empire. Using the slogan “self-determination up to separation,” V. Lenin sought to achieve the main goal - to gain power. But slogans about self-determination did not mean that they were really ready to destroy the multinational Russian state. As further developments of events showed, the Bolsheviks did a lot to preserve it, but they themselves had to face the consequences of their pre-revolutionary unbridled “Self-determination demagoguery.”

Although the disintegration of the army occurred thanks to the activities of the tsarist and later the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks skillfully used this process and even deepened it themselves, since it suited their interests. At the same time, neither V. Lenin, nor L. Trotsky, nor other leaders of the revolution thought about the consequences of such a course. But it was political immorality and demagoguery that contributed to the success of the Bolsheviks, once again confirming the truth that in politics it is not the one who is scrupulous in the choice of means who wins. This is also the reason for the defeat of the Provisional Government, whose leaders put principles above real political interests.

N. Berdyaev, characterizing the Provisional Government, noted that it“proclaimed abstract humane principles, abstract principles of law, in which there was no organizing force, no energy infecting the masses. The Provisional Government pinned its hopes on the constituent assembly, the idea of ​​which it was doctrinairely devoted to; in an atmosphere of decay, chaos and anarchy, it wanted, out of a noble feeling, to continue the war to a victorious end, while the soldiers were ready to flee from the front and turn a national war into a social war . The position of the Provisional Government was so difficult and hopeless that it is hardly possible to judge and blame it strictly. Kerensky was only a man of the revolution in its first stage. Never in the elements of revolution, and especially a revolution created by war, can people of moderate, liberal, humanitarian principles triumph. The principles of democracy are suitable for peaceful life, and even then not always, and not for a revolutionary era. In a revolutionary era, people of extreme principles, people inclined and capable of dictatorship, win. Only a dictatorship could stop the process of final decomposition and the triumph of chaos and anarchy."

The Bolsheviks made their first attempt to seize power in early July 1917. In July, unlike October 1917, the Bolsheviks did not yet direct the course of events, but rather followed them. The performance of the Baltic sailors, soldiers of the Petrograd garrison and workers of Petrograd factories and factories was largely spontaneous. The revolutionary masses, among whom the Bolsheviks carried out active propaganda, demanded the overthrow of the “bourgeois” Provisional Government, an immediate end to the war and a solution to the land issue through the complete elimination of landownership. The leadership of the Bolshevik Party decided to join the protesters and lead the demonstrations. In fact, it was an attempt at a political coup, only poorly prepared and poorly organized. And yet, the Bolsheviks had a chance to seize power in July 1917, but they did not take advantage of it, since the party leaders did not have a common opinion about the emerging situation, and V. Lenin, who was on vacation outside Petrograd at the beginning of these events , I didn’t have enough determination to go to the end. The government, with the help of military units loyal to it, managed to restore public order in Petrograd.

In the July days, a political scandal erupted related to accusations of spying for Germany brought against V. Lenin and other Bolsheviks. Even before the July events, Russian military counterintelligence received information about the channels of financing Bolshevik activities from abroad. When the demonstrations of soldiers, sailors and Petrograd workers began, this information was made public. Opponents of Lenin and the Bolsheviks began to brand them as “traitors to the motherland” and agents of the Kaiser’s Germany. Of course, neither V. Lenin nor other Bolshevik leaders were any “German spies” in the literal sense of the word. But their activities were indeed financed from abroad. The Bolshevik Party from a small underground organization in a few months of 1917 turned into a mass one and needed significant funds. They went to maintain the growing party apparatus, to publish numerous newspapers and leaflets that were published in huge circulations. These funds came to the Bolsheviks from Stockholm through Lenin's confidant Ya. Ganetsky. Ganetsky was an employee of the company of A. Parvus, well-known in social democratic circles in Russia and Germany.

During the years of the first Russian revolution, A. Parvus adhered to views similar to those of L. Trotsky, to which he remained faithful in the future. Left-radical views did not prevent him from doing business, and by the beginning of the First World War he had become quite wealthy man. During the war, A. Parvus took the initiative to finance those anti-government parties and movements in Russia whose activities could contribute to its defeat. With this defeat, Parvus pinned his hopes on the beginning of a permanent world revolution and himself prepared to play one of the leading roles in it. The German authorities found in the proposals of A. Parvus unconditional benefit. All warring states sought to take advantage of the internal political problems of their opponents, and the Kaiser's Germany was no exception. The Bolsheviks were also not the only political group that the Germans tried to use to internally destabilize the Russian state and society. Among such groups were Ukrainian, Finnish, Estonian, Polish and other nationalists who saw the destruction of the Russian Empire as a way to achieve their political goals. But it was the Bolsheviks who were destined to play decisive role in the events of 1917

Money to the Bolsheviks came from A. Parvus through a number of foreign and Russian banks, but he, in turn, received it from the German authorities, not forgetting about his own commercial interests. V. Lenin could not help but guess about the true sources of financing, since the amounts coming from A. Parvus were very impressive and exceeded the financial capabilities of their sender. Previously, the leader of the Bolsheviks himself condemned those Russian revolutionaries who took money from the Japanese during Russo-Japanese War 1904-1905 Now, revolutionary expediency - the prospect of seizing power - has become sufficient grounds for V. Lenin to neglect moral and ethical prohibitions.

The military counterintelligence remaining after February Revolution the only one law enforcement agency who defended the interests national security Russia, there was no impeccable evidence of the guilt of Lenin and Zinoviev. In the July days, the only witness in the “espionage case,” a certain E. Sumenson (a relative of Ganetsky), disappeared without a trace. Despite this, both Zinoviev and Lenin chose to avoid open trial and went underground. Trotsky himself voluntarily surrendered to the authorities and was imprisoned in the famous Petrograd prison “Kresty” along with other active participants in the July uprising from among the Bolsheviks and anarchists.

One way or another, the July events turned into a serious political defeat for the Bolsheviks, and their influence in the country began to quickly decline. They again received a chance to gain power in the fall of 1917 after the so-called Kornilov rebellion.

The speech of General L. Kornilov at the end of August 1917 is one of the most dramatic episodes in the political history of Russia in the 20th century. General L. Kornilov, who became the Supreme Commander-in-Chief in the summer of 1917, was a professional military man with little understanding of politics. Kornilov’s goals were determined exclusively by military tasks, which, in his opinion, urgently needed to be solved To the Russian state. These tasks required restoring discipline in the army and establishing order in the rear. Some members of the Provisional Government, including its chairman A. Kerensky, agreed with this. Close contacts began between Kornilov and Kerensky, through the mediation of the former terrorist B. Savinkov. At the end of August 1917, the parties agreed to implement measures aimed at preventing a hypothetical Bolshevik coup. Kornilov, inexperienced in politics, did not realize that Kerensky, like other representatives of “revolutionary democracy,” saw the real danger not so much in the Bolsheviks, whose influence was then significantly weakened, but in the “tsarist” generals and himself. The specter of a “monarchical counter-revolution” frightened both the Bolsheviks and their opponents among the Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries and left liberals equally.

When Kornilov, in accordance with previously reached agreements, moved troops to Petrograd, a chain of misunderstandings occurred, caused both by the already mentioned distrust of left-wing politicians and Kerensky himself towards the military, and by the inappropriate behavior of Prince V. Lvov, who volunteered to be a mediator between the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief and the Provisional Government. As a result, Kerensky declared Kornilov a rebel and announced his removal from the post of commander in chief. Kornilov refused to carry out Kerensky's orders and was arrested.

After General Kornilov was declared a “rebel” in Russia, a situation arose that took place in the political history of other countries of the world, when the failure of the supporters of some political goals is followed by the strengthening of the positions of supporters of other, directly opposite goals. The end result turns out to be the opposite of what the initiators of such a speech were counting on. This, for example, happened in 1965 in Indonesia. The coup attempt carried out on September 30 by a group of left-wing officers with the support of the local Communist Party and directed against the threat of a “conspiracy of the generals” failed. As a result, the regime of President Sukarno, closely linked to China and the Soviet Union, was replaced by the military anti-communist dictatorship of General Suharto, and millions of Communist Party members and supporters were killed. We can also recall how events developed in our country seventy-four years after the Kornilov rebellion. Following the failure of the August 1991 GKChP putsch, whose goal was to preserve the Soviet Union, there was a rapid and irreversible collapse union state and the collapse of the power of the CPSU.

In August 1917, fearing a “monarchist military conspiracy,” the Provisional Government began to cooperate with its recent (and future) enemies - the Bolsheviks. And the Bolshevik Party again had the opportunity to intensify its activities. Its positions strengthened in the fall of 1917, although V. Lenin preferred to remain underground until the October Revolution. But he assessed the opportunities that opened up for the party after the failure of General Kornilov’s speech, and made the following conclusion: “There is no way out, objectively there is no, there cannot be, except for the dictatorship of the Kornilovites or the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Throughout 1917, V. Lenin constantly spoke about the dictatorship of the proletariat. This idea became for him central to Marxism and the main divide between the revolutionary and “opportunist” trends in the international labor movement. The concept of “dictatorship of the proletariat” is described in most detail in V. Lenin’s work “State and Revolution”. The same work presents political program Bolsheviks.

The work “State and Revolution” includes large excerpts from the works of K. Marx and F. Engels and comments to them by V. Lenin. First of all, the weakest part of K. Marx’s concept, which Marxism inherited from utopian socialism, is commented on. V. Lenin rejected the traditional understanding of democracy and dictatorship. For him, the dictatorship of the proletariat is the highest degree of democracy:

“The dictatorship of the proletariat provides a number of exemptions from freedom in relation to the oppressors, exploiters and capitalists. We must suppress them in order to free humanity from wage slavery, their resistance must be broken by force - it is clear that where there is suppression, there is violence, there is no freedom, there is no democracy.”

At the same time, the principle of separation of powers is rejected as unnecessary.

In 1917, V. Lenin actively promoted the idea of ​​​​creating a republic of Soviets, unprecedented anywhere, as a new “semi-state” without a standing army, police and bureaucratic apparatus. His approach to complex problems is superficial and utopian:

“We will organize large-scale production based on what has already been created by capitalism, themselves we, the workers, relying on our working experience, creating the strictest, iron discipline, supported state power armed workers, we will reduce government officials to the role of simple executors of our instructions, responsible, replaceable, modestly paid “overseers and accountants” - that’s our, proletarian task, that’s why it can and should begin during the proletarian revolution. Such a beginning, on the basis of large-scale production, naturally leads to the gradual “withering away” of all officialdom, to the gradual creation of such an order... when the increasingly simplified functions of supervision and reporting will be performed by everyone in turn, will then become a habit and, finally, disappear , as special functions of a special layer of people" [10, p. 49-50].

Next, V. Lenin puts forward a plan for specific political and economic transformations of the “socialist revolution”. The first task of such a revolution, he believes, should be the task of “breaking, breaking into smithereens, wiping off the face of the earth the bourgeois state machine, the standing army, the police, the bureaucracy, replacing them more a democratic, but still state machine in the form of armed working masses, moving to the complete participation of the people in the police" [10, p. 100].

In fact, this is a call for ochlocracy, since no organizational forms and frameworks for such “universal participation of the people in the police” are envisaged. V. Lenin believes that

“It is quite possible to move immediately, from today to tomorrow, to overthrow the capitalists and officials and replace them - in action control for production and distribution, in business accounting labor and products - by armed workers, armed people without exception (there is no need to confuse the question of control and accounting with the question of scientifically educated personnel of engineers, agronomists, etc.: these gentlemen work today, subordinate to the capitalists, will work even better tomorrow, subordinate to the armed workers )".

This is how V. Lenin paints a picture of the “first phase of communist society,” which should be the result of the transformations he proposes:

All Citizens are transformed here into employees of the state, which are armed workers. All citizens become employees and workers one national, state "syndicate". The whole point is that they work equally, correctly observing the measure of work, and receive equally. Accounting for this, controlling this simplified capitalism to the extreme, to the unusually simple, accessible to every literate person, observation and recording operations, knowledge of the four operations of arithmetic and the issuance of corresponding receipts.

When majority of the people will begin to independently and everywhere carry out such accounting, such control over the capitalists (now turned into employees) and over the gentlemen intellectuals who have retained capitalist habits, then this control will become truly universal, universal, nationwide, then it will be impossible to evade it in any way, “there will be nowhere get away." The whole society will be one office and one factory with equality of labor and equality of pay" [10, p. 101].

The picture proposed by V. Lenin is very primitive, it simplifies reality, and it is not surprising that, once in power, V. Lenin and the Bolsheviks abandoned in practice most of the ideas on economic organization new society, set out in the work “State and Revolution”. But the political ideas expressed in this work played a role in the establishment of a totalitarian dictatorship in Russia.

The course towards a “socialist revolution” seemed to follow from a previously substantiated thesis about the possibility of the victory of such a revolution in one particular country. However, Lenin still did not believe in the first days after October that economically underdeveloped Russia alone was capable of solving the problem of socialist transformation. Great hopes were placed on the victory of revolutions in more developed countries. Returning to the October events of 1917, he repeatedly repeated that the Bolsheviks pursued the course towards the victory of the “socialist” revolution in Russia with great hope of developing a “world revolution”.

“When we started, in our time, the international revolution,” said V. Lenin at the Third Congress of the Comintern, “we did not do it out of the conviction that we could anticipate its development, not because a number of circumstances prompted us to start this revolution. We thought: either the international revolution will come to our aid, and then our victories will be fully assured, or we will do our modest revolutionary work in the consciousness that, in case of defeat, we will also serve the cause of the revolution and that our experience will do for the benefit of other revolutions. It was clear to us that without the support of the international world revolution, the victory of the proletarian revolution is impossible” [11, p. 36].

V. Lenin remained faithful to his concepts of “growing the bourgeois-democratic revolution into a socialist one,” “the union of the working class and the peasantry.” True, now he viewed the relationship between the political and socio-economic aspects of the revolutionary process differently. Believing that Soviet power, established as a result of the victory of the Bolsheviks, corresponds to Marxist ideas about the dictatorship of the proletariat, Lenin at the same time noted the need to complete, “finish” the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and saw in this the main content of the revolutionary process until the summer-autumn 1918

“The victorious Bolshevik revolution,” he wrote, “meant the end of vacillation, meant the complete destruction of the monarchy and landownership (before the October Revolution it did not have destroyed). Bourgeois the revolution was brought about by us to end. The peasantry followed us generally. His antagonism towards the socialist proletariat could not be revealed at one moment. The Soviets united the peasantry at all. The class division within the peasantry has not yet matured, has not yet spilled out."

The “regrouping of class forces,” with which Lenin had previously associated the transition from the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the working class and peasantry to the dictatorship of the proletariat, occurred in real Russian reality when the dictatorship of the proletariat officially already existed. Lenin associated this moment with the aggravation of the political struggle and the Civil War in the summer of 1918, the revolts of the Czechoslovak corps, the left Socialist Revolutionaries and the transition to what was then considered socialist transformations, but in fact was the onset of the period of “war communism.”

“A year after the proletarian revolution in the capitals,” Lenin noted in 1918, “the proletarian revolution came, under its influence and with its help, in the rural outbacks, which finally strengthened Soviet power and Bolshevism, and finally proved that within the country has no strength against him. Having completed the bourgeois-democratic revolution together with the peasantry in general, the Russian proletariat finally moved to the socialist revolution, when it managed to split the villages, with - " to unite its proletarians and semi-proletarians, to unite them against the kulaks and the bourgeoisie, including the peasant bourgeoisie” [12, p. 315].

In reality, Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders, as well as the entire Russian revolutionary intelligentsia, did not understand the laws of the functioning of the agrarian economy at all and were poorly acquainted with the realities of the Russian countryside. The Bolshevik Decree on Land transferred the landowner's land to the communal peasantry and thereby completely eliminated the basis of the most protracted and acute social conflict pre-revolutionary Russia. At the same time, the agrarian revolution destroyed the results of the Stolypin reforms. Along with the liquidation of landownership, large farm (“kulak” in Marxist terminology) farms, the main source of Russia’s food supply, were also liquidated. The central figure of the Russian village has become the so-called “middle peasant,” i.e., the owner of a small, essentially subsistence farm, capable of providing food only for himself, but not capable of producing agricultural products in large commercial volumes. In conditions of growing economic chaos and increasing inflation, peasants refused to sell grain, storing it until better times. Therefore, in order to provide food for the urban population and the army, the Bolsheviks had no choice but to continue the policy begun by the Provisional Government of confiscating “surplus grain” in the countryside by administrative, violent means. But if the Provisional Government implemented its own Law of March 25, 1917 on the monopoly of the grain trade sluggishly and inconsistently, then the Bolsheviks set to work with all their destructive energy.

In addition to the current tasks of establishing administrative channels for supplying the urban population, the agrarian policy of the Bolsheviks also had far-reaching goals. From the point of view of Marxist theory (although Marx had little understanding of the specifics of agriculture), the future of the agricultural sector should be the same as that of industrial production. That is, just as small craft workshops were replaced by large factories, so peasant farms should be replaced by industrial-type agricultural enterprises. However, if in the long term such a forecast made some sense (although it did not fully take into account the entire technological complexity of the agricultural production process), then it had nothing to do with the Russian realities of the spring-summer of 1918. Nevertheless, already in February 1918 the Decree on the socialization of the land was adopted. Soon after him, what later became worldwide was born famous word“kolkhoz” (collective farm). However, it was difficult for the Bolsheviks to begin “communist” transformations in agriculture, since they did not have sufficient support in the countryside. Elections to the Constituent Assembly in the fall of 1917 showed that the Bolshevik Party was voted predominantly in major cities, in military units in which Bolshevik agitators carried out active propaganda, as well as in some national outskirts (the Bolsheviks managed to achieve the highest figure - 72% - in the part of Latvia that was not occupied by German troops at the time of the elections). In the predominantly peasant Great Russian provinces, the Bolsheviks' successes were minimal. The Socialist Revolutionary Party remained the most influential in the countryside.

While the main goal of the Bolsheviks - the transition to “socialist transformations” of agriculture was not achieved, “from Lenin’s point of view,” states R. Pipes, “it was necessary:

1) establish state control over food supplies through strict enforcement of the monopoly on grain trade and

2) create communist cells in the villages. To fulfill these two conditions, it was necessary to unleash a civil war in the village. Such a war was secretly declared by the Bolsheviks in the summer of 1918.”

Civil war, from a Marxist point of view, is a war between classes. The Civil War, which was already going on throughout the country, was perceived by the Bolsheviks as part of a worldwide conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Exactly the same “classes” were to become the main opponents of a local civil war in the Russian countryside. In real social structure the villages became even more homogeneous than they had been before the October Revolution, since they consisted almost entirely of communal peasants, in economic terms

On September 5, 1918, the Council of People's Commissars issued a decree on the beginning of the Red Terror. Tough measures to retain power, mass executions and arrests, hostage-taking - this bloody page of history still causes controversy.

Red/white terror

End justifies the means. This phrase, attributed to Machiavelli, was an unspoken justification for the actions of the Bolsheviks during the Red Terror. The Soviet government propagated the myth that the Red Terror was a response to the so-called “White Terror.” On September 2, 1918, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee adopted a resolution in which the term “red terror” appeared: “The workers and peasants will respond to the white terror of the enemies of the workers’ and peasants’ power with massive red terror against the bourgeoisie and its agents.” The decree that marked the beginning of the mass executions was a response to the murder of Volodarsky and Uritsky, a response to the assassination attempt on Lenin.

“White Terror” and “Red Terror” are phenomena of a different order. The Red Terror had a powerful ideological basis; it was an officially legalized crime. S.P. Melgunov wrote in his book “Red Terror”: “It is impossible to shed more human blood than the Bolsheviks did; It is impossible to imagine a more cynical form than that in which the Bolshevik terror was clothed. This is a system that has found its ideologists; This is a system of systematic implementation of violence, this is such an open apotheosis of murder as a weapon of power, which no power in the world has ever reached. These are not excesses for which one explanation or another can be found in the psychology of the civil war.”

Immediately after the assassination attempt on Lenin, 512 people were shot in Petrograd, there were not enough prisons for everyone, and a system of concentration camps appeared. The legitimate mass character of the Red Terror could not be compared with the atrocities of the “whites,” which also took place, but were not a legitimate means of confrontation, but rather a manifestation of the so-called “atamanism.”

Time of Terror

Despite its very official dating: September 5, 1918 - November 6, 1918, the Red Terror has rather blurred chronological boundaries. The Red Terror was defined by Trotsky as “a weapon used against a class doomed to destruction that does not want to die.” Thus, the year 1901 can be considered as the beginning of the “red” revolutionary terror. From 1901 to 1911, about 17 thousand people became victims of revolutionary terror. On February 21, 1918, the Council of People's Commissars issued a decree “The Socialist Fatherland is in Danger!”, which decreed that “enemy agents, speculators, thugs, hooligans, counter-revolutionary agitators, German spies are shot at the scene of the crime.” On August 9, 1918, Lenin wrote: “It is necessary to carry out merciless mass terror against the kulaks, priests and White Guards; doubtful ones are locked up in a concentration camp outside the city. Decree and implement the complete disarmament of the population, shoot on the spot mercilessly for any hidden rifle.” It must be understood that such instructions were given even before the official start of the “Red Terror”, anyone could be considered a fist and a dubious element, the decision about whether a particular person belonged to the counter-revolutionary elements was made “on the ground”. By the end of the Civil War in concentration camps 50 thousand people stayed. The end of the “Red Terror” is also a very arbitrary date. Mass repressions of the 30s - can they also be attributed to the “Red Terror”? Historians continue to debate this issue to this day.

Myths of the Red Terror

The Red Terror gave rise to a lot of myths. Thus, one of the myths was the myth that “the Reds drowned people in barges.” The source of this myth was eyewitnesses of how rebel officers in Petrograd were forcibly driven onto a barge. Popular rumor turned this barge into a "last refuge", while one of those who was on that historical barge (it was one barge) later wrote that they, prisoners on this barge, were taken to Kronstadt, where they could apply for German patronage. Such myth-making existed everywhere and even played into the hands of the Bolsheviks, whose cruelty of measures eventually stopped any “counter-revolutionary reaction.”

Class struggle

The perception of the Red Terror as a class struggle was far from ambiguous.

M. Latsis wrote: “We are exterminating unnecessary classes of people. During the investigation, do not look for materials and evidence that the accused acted in word or deed against the Soviets. The first question is to what class does he belong, what is his origin, upbringing, education or profession. These questions should determine the fate of the accused. This is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.”

Latsis's words were critically assessed by Lenin. “Political distrust of representatives of the bourgeois apparatus is legitimate and necessary. Refusal to use them for management and construction is the greatest stupidity, causing the greatest harm to communism. Whoever wanted to recommend a Menshevik as a socialist or as a political leader, or even as a political adviser, would have made a huge mistake, for the history of the revolution in Russia has proven conclusively that the Mensheviks (and socialist-revolutionaries) are not socialists, but petty-bourgeois democrats capable of In the event of a serious aggravation of the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, take the side of the bourgeoisie.”

Latsis later recalled this episode as follows: “Vladimir Ilyich reminded me that our task is not the physical destruction of the bourgeoisie, but the elimination of those causes that give rise to the bourgeoisie.”

Number of victims of terror

Data on the number of victims of the Red Terror is another controversial issue. The discrepancies in the numbers are very, very significant: from 135 thousand to 400-500 thousand people. It is significant that such discrepancies are often caused not even by ideological approaches to the phenomenon of the Red Terror itself, but by the fact that mass grave sites are still being found during archaeological excavations and construction work.

"Sun of the Dead" and "Drunken Sun"

One of the most poignant memories of the Red Terror in Crimea belongs to Ivan Shmelev. In his book “Sun of the Dead” the writer wrote:

“And now I’m walking along the hillock, at the bailiff’s dacha, the horse died in winter... I look - boys... What are they doing with the bones? I look... they are lying on their belly, gnawing a hoof! They're gnawing and purring! It’s creepy... pure dogs.”
“Andrei Krivoy from the lower vineyards died,” “Odaryuk also died...” Uncle Andrei froze after a “bath” (a type of torture), exhausted by hunger. And just recently some “brave” sailor shouted at a rally: “Now, comrade workers, we have finished off all the bourgeoisie... who, having run away, were drowned in the sea! And now our Soviet government is called communism! So we made it! And everyone will even have cars, and we will all live... So... we will all sit on the fifth floor and smell the roses..."!

In Soviet literature, the response to Ivan Shmelev’s “The Sun of the Dead” was Fyodor Gladkov’s story “The Drunken Sun.” Quote: “We, Komsomol members, should not reason. We deviate from criticism. The party gives a ready-made formula. The party thinks for us. The opposition is deviation. Deviations undermine the party. In order not to fall into deviation, you must remember every letter of the resolutions even in your sleep."

National question

There can be no unambiguous interpretation of the Red Terror. There is no doubt that this was a bloody page in Russian history. The most heated debates are based on national question. The participation of Jews, Latvians, and Poles in the revolutionary process is caused by nationalist interpretations, leading to debates about some kind of Jewish conspiracy against the Russian people. Gorky wrote: “I explain the cruelty of the forms of the revolution by the exceptional cruelty of the Russian people.” The tragedy of the Russian revolution is played out among “semi-savage people.” “When the leaders of the revolution - the group of the most active intelligentsia - are accused of “atrocity” - I consider this accusation as a lie and slander, inevitable in the struggle of political parties, or - among honest people - as a conscientious delusion “The “recent slave,” Gorky noted elsewhere, became “the most unbridled despot.”

The assessment of the “proletarian writer”, of course, is far from objective, but are those who claim that the Red Terror is the product of a “Jewish conspiracy” right and is it possible to conclude about the Red Terror in a nationalist vein?