Lenín

"The Germans used him as a typhoid bacillus," Churchill wrote, referring to the strategy of the German High Command during World War I that allowed Lenín to return to Russia from Zurich in 1917 to contaminate the enemy. The son of a middle-class official, he had seen his brother killed by hanging for plotting against the Tsar and preparing bomb attacks. Since then, Lenin disagreed with the Marxists for their theories, with the Socialists for their weakness and with the Anarchists for their fragile organisation. He developed an anti-bourgeois, murderous revolutionary theory to seize power and transform the world through agitation and terror. There is no reference to his humanity. No historical detail that does not highlight his conviction to use any violent means to achieve his goal: to create a radical revolutionary minority to impose by force the destruction of bourgeois power, of the middle classes and property, and to build a party that will undo society and the past with blood and propaganda. And a single leader for the Bolsheviks and the Communist Party: himself, Lenín. 

His accented name provoked terror. His memory, contempt. But free societies survived throughout the 20th century in spite of this historical murderer and other cruelties of totalitarianisms. Not even the project of a new Progressive International, led today by the failed Greek ex-minister Varoufakis and the leftist guru scientist Chomsky among other radical populists, to reactivate the common front against liberal democracy by taking advantage of the crisis of the coronavirus, has included his name on the banners. Aware that calling for social activism, taking the dictator's mummy as a banner, has no place in the rubble and memories of Europe and the world, which wandered in the shadows of communist tyranny as long as free societies have walked the streets of progress. 

Some prophets, morally debased and isolated, can equate the Bolshevik Agitprop with the rampages of today's radical movements. But they are not the same thing. The Leninist strategy led to death, while the current one still has no definite destination. Poverty, failure and repression, if anything, in experiences like the Venezuelan one. Lenín took power by maneuvering decisively in a Russia battered by war and hunger. He demanded greater freedom of the press in order to nationalise the media and bring them under the control of the Bolshevik Pravda pamphlet. In a few days between November and December 1917, he monopolised the banking business; he nationalised companies; he created a new code of laws applicable to the revolutionary courts; he suspended dividend payments; he abolished military ranks and finally created the political police, the Cheka, to shoot anyone who could be considered bourgeois, 50,000 Russians before 1920. His economic management around collective farms, which never divided the land among the peasants, was calamitous. The purges, which were constant, were from then on the instrument of his successor Stalin to repress any hint of freedom or criticism. In Russia, in the Soviet Union and in any related group or satellite state incorporated into the new paradise under construction.  

To remember the Bolshevik revolution means to reencounter immorality. Thousands and millions of people that communism was going to rescue from hunger, lost their lives and freedom in the century where totalitarianisms succumbed. Lenín was the first and one of the greatest modern tyrants. An exponent of the popular lie with which the propagandists of that time subjugated defenceless societies that were ill-prepared to resist the pressure of falsehood and crime. His accentuated name still provokes contempt.