Un État contre son peuple
Although the subtitle of this book, which translates into English as “From Lenin to Putin” and was most probably the publisher’s decision, is not entirely apposite – with fewer than ten pages devoted to the current regime – this by no means renders the finished product, the work of an honorary research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), who has written some 20 books on the history of the USSR, any less fascinating. In this fully revised and considerably lengthened version of the key chapter on the “Black Book of Communism”, Nicolas Werth unpicked the major dimension of the way the Soviet system functions: by imposing and exercising power through violence.
“Irrespective of the precise number of victims of the Red Terror of autumn 1918 – and the number of executions reported in the press suggests that it can have been no less than 10 - 15,000 – [in barely two months] it definitively represented the Bolshevik practice of responding without mercy to any form of real or potential challenge in the framework of civil war”, the author explains (our translation throughout). These executions “already marked a notable change in pace compared to the czarist period. One need only point out that over the entire period 1825-1917, the number of death sentences handed down by the czarist courts (including courts martial) in all cases brought before them ‘in matters of public order’ was 6321 in 92 years, with a peak of 1376 in 1906, the year in which the revolutionaries of 1905 were dealt with. In the space of just a few weeks, the Cheka alone had executed two to three times more people than the czarist empire had sentenced to death in 92 years, bearing in mind that not all of these people, who were sentenced as an outcome of legal proceedings, were put to death, as many sentences were commuted into forced labour terms”. Werth goes on to stress that “the introduction of new categories such as ‘suspect’, ‘enemy of the people’, ‘hostage’, ‘concentration camp’, ‘Revolutionary Tribunal’, unprecedented practices such as ‘preventative imprisonment’ or the summary execution, without judgment, of hundreds and thousands of people arrested by a political police force of a new kind, set above the law, was a truly Copernican revolution in this area”.
The author also devotes many pages to the relentless attacks carried out by the Bolshevik powers against the serfs, Cossacks and the numerous uprisings against them, mostly in Ukraine, but from which no area was entirely spared. “When the Bolsheviks took back the Crimea, in the final episode of hostility between Whites and Reds, this brought about among the greatest bloodletting of the Civil War: at least 50,000 civilians were massacred by the Bolsheviks in November and December 1920”, he writes. The Cossack regions of the Don, straddling the current internationally recognised border between Russia and Ukraine separating the Donbass from the Russian territories, and from the Kuban (a region of southern Russia adjacent to the Kerch Strait), paid heavily for their opposition to the Bolsheviks: “according to the most reliable estimations, the number of people killed or deported in 1919-1920 is between 300,000 and 500,000 people, out of a total population not exceeding 3 million”. No holds were barred, as the first edition of the Cheka’s newspaper in Kyiv, Red Glaive, makes absolutely clear: “Blood? Let rivers of it flow! Because only blood can colour the black flag of the Pirate bourgeoisie forever into a red standard, the flag of the Revolution. Because only the ultimate death of the old world can protect us from ever having to return to our shackles!”.
“A recurring theme in many articles in Bolshevik newspapers, in Odessa, Kyiv, Kharkov, Ekaterinoslav, but also Perm in the Ural or Nijni Novgorod, the humiliation of the ‘bourgeoisie’ forced to clean the latrines and barracks of the members of the Cheka and the Red Guards seem to have been a common practice. But it was also a watered-down and ‘politically presentable’ version of a more brutal reality: rape, a phenomenon which, according to a very high number corroborating testimonies, took on enormous proportions, particularly the second reconquest of Ukraine, the Cossack regions and the Crimea in 1920”, the author notes.
“Between the summer of 1921 and the end of the following year, famine hit some 30 million people, the vast majority of them serfs. Its effects were made even worse by terrible epidemics – typhus […], Spanish ‘flu, malaria, cholera, dysentery, diphtheria, measles, scarlet fever, smallpox, whooping cough – which affected the majority of the country, far beyond the areas afflicted by famine. These epidemics spread through the displacement of tens of millions of civilians and soldiers as a result of civil war, the worsening of sanitary structures and the general worsening of hygiene conditions in a country in which everything was in short supply, including soap. Between 1918 and 1920, more than 70 million people caught one of the ten epidemic and parasite-borne diseases listed above. Around 10% (between 6 and 7 million) died as a result of these diseases. This proportion was far higher (in the order of 25 to 30%) in the famine-stricken regions. This high death toll makes it very difficult to calculate with any degree of precision the numbers of those who died of hunger or malnutrition, particularly as official records have often gone missing in these regions devastated by civil war. Estimates of famine victims range between 2 million and 5 million”, Werth writes.
Ten years or so later, under Stalin, nearly seven million Soviets, almost all of them serfs, would die of starvation: 4 million in Ukraine, 1.5 million in Kazakhstan, 700,000 in the Russian regions of the Volga and the Central Black Earth Region (Belgorod, Kursk, Lipetsk, Tambov and Voronezh) and 500,000 in the Kuban. “Direct consequence of a policy that devastated rural life, the famine, in Ukraine and the Kuban, a rich agricultural region of the northern Caucasus inhabited mainly by Ukrainians although administratively attached to Russia, was deliberately made worse from autumn 1932 onwards by Stalin’s relentless determination not only to use famine as a weapon to break the particularly virulent resistance of the Ukrainian peasant classes to collectivisation (it is worth noting that almost half of the total of in the region of 14,000 riots, insurrections and rebellions that erupted in 1930 against the imposition of the kolkhoz system based in Ukraine), but also to stamp out Ukrainian ‘nationalism’, which he felt was a severe threat to the integrity and unity of the USSR”, the author writes, referring to what is known as the Holodomor in Ukraine.
Not long after that, the Soviet Union saw the greatest massacre ever perpetrated in Europe in peace time: “in 16 months, from August 1937 to November 1938, around 750,000 Soviet citizens were executed after having been sentenced to death by a special tribunal following a parody of a judgment. That equates to nearly 50,000 executions per month, 1600 a day. During the Great Terror, one in every hundred adults Soviets was put to death by a bullet in the back of the head. At the same time, the 800,000 Soviets were sentenced to 10 years of forced labour and sent to the gulag”.
Werth also devotes many pages to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact on the division of Poland, its occupation after the war, its sovietisation, etc. He then goes on to stress the major role played by the NGO Memorial, which was dissolved by the Russian Supreme Court in 2021: “having collected, over the years, Russia’s largest library on mass repression (more than 40,000 volumes and 500 periodicals in around ten languages) and a collection, the only one of its kind in the world, of private archives (more than 600,000 files) donated to Memorial by the families of the victims, the ONG has become the world’s principal centre for studies, research and documentation on the history and memory of mass repression in the USSR”, the author stresses, adding that “for Putin, controlling the historical memory, the interpretation of the past, is absolutely vital”.
“The new national narrative promulgated by Vladimir Putin proposes a dissonant amalgamation between the czarist past and the Soviet experience, one denuded of its Communist trappings, ‘de-Communised’. The reconciliation between these two antagonist periods around the glorification of an ‘eternal Great Russia’ and of a strong state that is capable of defending the country from ever-threatening foreign powers. The Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945, which is seen as part of Russia’s long struggle with its aggressors, has, in its epic dimension, become the apotheosis of the whole of Russian history, the keystone of the new national narrative. The victory of 1945 (the terrifying cost of which – more than 26 million dead, 16 million of them civilians – was not made public until the early 1990s) justifies and supersedes the violence of the forced collectivisation of agricultural land, the famines of the early 1930s, industrialisation at breakneck speed, mass repression and the labour camps of the gulag”, Werth explains, picking up from the Russian historian Arseni Roginski in his conclusion that without a historical memory worthy of the name, “the birth of a normal system of social values in which life, liberty and human dignity are absolute priority over the interests of the power of the State is simply impossible”. (Olivier Jehin)
Nicolas Werth. Un Etat contre son peuple – De Lénine à Poutine (available in French only). Les Belles Lettres. ISBN: 978-2-2514-5698-0. 509 pages. €21,90
Que faire de l’Union européenne?
The essayist and journalist author of this book shows himself to be first and foremost a (radical) left-wing militant, whose argument is based around denouncing the “supranationalism” and neoliberalism of a contemptible European Union that allocates itself competences by hijacking what he sees as the more legitimate ones of the nation-states.
Anybody reading this book by Aurélien Bernier might almost get the impression that the European Union is the exclusive creation of a fully autonomous Commission and of a court of justice that produces law ex nihilo, a view widely shared in most conservative and sovereignist circles, up to the far right. This is not particularly surprising in that extremes are, sometimes for diametrically opposed reasons, the staunchest opponents of European integration. It is also worth noting that at no point does the author mention European Parliament, the Council of Ministers (other than a fairly vague reference) or the European Council. For the purposes of his demonstration, all decisions would appear to be made exclusively at the Berlaymont!
So, what should be done with the European Union? The author successively explores the ideas of changing it from within, “disobeying” it, and leaving it (our translation throughout). He starts by eliminating the first solution on the grounds that “the electoral, unionist and associative reality within the Twenty-Seven is very unfavourable to progressive forces at the moment”. And it would be difficult to disagree with him on that point. He goes on to acknowledge that “the approach of disobedience is […] impossible to implement in the current legal framework”. Which is entirely to his credit. The only remaining option, therefore, is to leave it. “The European Union is so captured by neoliberalism, it has to such an extent martyred the people of the weakest states and shown such contempt for the working classes of all member states, it so openly rejects democracy when it is inconvenient to it, that belonging to it is, whether you like it or not, a way of validating these policies and methods”, Bernier argues.
The “federal” project, to use an adjective that is anathema to nationalists on the right and the left alike, is, admittedly, still by no means complete and riddled with many failings of democratic legitimacy, such as the method of appointing the European Commission or, within certain member states – France in particular – a lack of almost any parliamentary control over the action of the governments and their leaders – including the President, in the aforementioned case – within the Council and the European Council. Instead of dismantling this institutional system, an aim pursued by Hungary’s Fidesz party, the PiS of Poland and certain pro-Trump circles, it would be far better to complete it as a matter of urgency, to allow the Europeans to re-gain the sovereignty that they lost individually a very long time ago. Leaving it serves no purpose, as shown by the British example, with a new partnership between the United Kingdom and the European Union being negotiated at this time. (OJ)
Aurélien Bernier. Que faire de l’Union européenne? (Available in French only) Editions de l’atelier. ISBN: 978-2-7082-4791-8. 154 pages. €16,00