Equality: The Impossible Quest by Martin van Creveld

Author:Martin van Creveld
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Castalia House
Published: 2015-03-16T23:00:00+00:00

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The first, and, until 1945, practically the only Communist country was the Soviet Union or, to call it by its official name, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. As Marx had predicted, it was brought about through revolution and a bloody civil war. In the process countless aristocrats, wealthy people, and senior civil servants who had served the previous regime were killed and had their property confiscated. The same fate overtook anybody identified as “an enemy of the people” or, to quote Lenin, whose existence was considered “inexpedient.” If there were any trials at all, they were of the kind where the accused is not permitted to defend him- or herself. As Marx had also predicted, these events led to the creation of the dictatorship of the proletariat or, to be precise, of a small clique of determined leaders who claimed to represent it. Representation itself, incidentally, was not based on open competition among several parties with equal rights before the law, as in bourgeois and socialist democracies. Instead it was based on inequality as the communist party prohibited all others.

Once they felt themselves firmly in the saddle Lenin and his comrades in arms lost no time establishing the kind of socio-economic equality they had been planning for perhaps two decades past. At the top of the pyramid stood Lenin himself and, after his death, Stalin. The latter liked to say that “nobody was indispensable.” Coming from that mouth, under that moustache, that was equality with a vengeance. No sooner had the new communist government been established than it launched some of the most comprehensive reforms in the whole of history. All mines, factories and buildings of any size were nationalized, i.e. confiscated without compensation. So were banks, insurance companies, every kind of financial institution, transportation, communications, and telecommunications. Initially much of the land, its owners having been killed or driven abroad, was left alone. Later, though, it too was formally confiscated. The mujiks, or peasants, who worked it were either incorporated into cooperatives or simply turned into state employees. The process was nothing if not barbaric. As it unfolded several million “kulaks,” i.e. relatively well-to-do farmers, lost their lives.[24]

Compared with advanced countries Russia had always been quite poor. In 1914 per capita income only stood at about eleven percent of that of the United States.[25] Following the destruction caused first by World War I, then by the Civil War, and finally by the Communists’ forcible reforms it was turned into a land of beggars. Millions died of malnutrition and disease. During the 1930s much of the damage was repaired and the economic situation improved somewhat. However, the 1941 German invasion, which was only finally thrown back in 1944, once again left in its wake a country so devastated as to almost defy the imagination.[26] After 1945 it was the Eastern European countries' turn. They, too, had suffered badly from the war. They, too, were captured by the communists, either local ones such as had survived the German occupation or such as had earlier escaped to Moscow and were put in place by the victorious Red Army.

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