Eric Margolis

DEATH OF THE SOVIET EMPIRE

In the 1920’s, Lenin predicted communism would last only so long as communists were prepared to shed large quantities of blood to defend the system. For the next six decades, the Soviet Empire followed Lenin’s dictum, killing at least 45 million of its citizens and subject peoples who were deemed ‘enemies of the state.’

Ten years ago this week, the empire of terror created by Lenin and perfected by Stalin began collapsing from internal dry rot. In one of the century’s most dramatic events, East Germans rose en masse in Berlin and stormed the hated wall that divided their nation.

The German national uprising in 1812 began the ultimate defeat of Napoleon. East Germany’s national revolt in 1989 delivered the coup de grace to the Soviet Empire, which had been fatally wounded by President Ronald Reagan’s relentless opposition, the Polish insurrection, Pope John Paul II’s spiritual offensive against Moscow, and the most decisive blow of all, the humiliating defeat of the Red Army in Afghanistan by Islamic mujihadin, and their ally, Pakistan’s leader, Zia ul Haq.

The Soviet Empire collapsed because its soldiers and secret police refused to kill large numbers of civilians. Border guards in Berlin would not fire on crowds of East Germans. Two years later, elite Soviet troops refused to massacre Russian civilians defending the besieged White House. Soviet generals and senior communist aparatchiks, paralyzed by backstabbing, hypocrisy and distrust, and scrambling to protect themselves, could not agree on action to halt the spreading anti-communist insurrection. No one would give the order to shoot.

The unsung hero of the 1991 Russian coup, Air Marshall Y. Shaposhnikov, thwarted attempts by military hardliners to mass their troops in Moscow. Even the KGB’s elite Alfa commandos refused to assassinate Boris Yeltsin, who ended up winning the coup against Gorbachev. Gen. Samsanov, commander of the Leningrad Military District, threatened to shoot himself rather than be forced to disobey orders by refusing to crush pro-democracy demonstrations.

Mikhail Gorbachev unwittingly lit the fuse that exploded the Soviet Empire. A decent, honorable man of great intellect and compassion, Gorbachev tried to reform and modernize the USSR and its satrapies while still retaining the marxist-leninist system. Glasnost was to bring openness and political renewal; perestroika economic decentralization and modernization. The KGB was put on a tight leash. Gorbachev purged the military and communist bureaucracy in huge numbers not seen since the 1930’s - though this time bloodlessly- and slashed the size of the military.

But the moment their handcuffs were removed, the captive peoples of the Soviet Empire rose in rebellion from the Baltic to the Caucasus, across Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Gorbachev, and his close allies Eduard Schevardnadze and Aleksander Yakovlev, did not understand their own people and could not harness the whirlwind they had inadvertently unleashed. As the Soviet Union disintegrated, Gorbachev was unwilling to shed blood to save it.

Marxist tyrants, like Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, Mao, or Castro would not have hesitated to unleash their army and secret police against the people. Gorbachev, thankfully, did not. As a result, the Soviet Empire collapsed. Gorbachev lost his power - but he retained his honor and humanity. History will regard him as one of this dark century’s most influential, heroic, and, ultimately, tragic leaders.

The Soviet Union is gone - at least for now - along with its empire, 6 million man armed forces and plans, it has recently been revealed, to fight a tactical nuclear war against NATO. Yet the bloodthirsty, totalitarian impulses that long drove and maintained communism still remain like toxic waste, both in Russia, its ex-republics, and Eastern Europe.

In the Caucasus, Russia is acting with a ferocity and cruelty that Stalin would have admired. In an attempted final solution to Chechen independence, Russian forces have driven 220,000 civilians into the frozen countryside, where they have no shelter and will soon begin to die from the disease and cold, a time-honored Russian method of mass murder. Meanwhile, Russian big guns and bombers relentlessly reduce Chechen cities and villages to smoking rubble while the west finances these crimes against humanity.

Serbia’s communist regime, a close ally of Russia, employed precisely the same strategy against Croats of Vukovar, Muslims of Bosnia, and Albanians of Kosova, razing their homes, slaughtering livestock, burning crops and driving terrified people into the open to die from exposure, sickness, and shock. Only NATO intervention prevented the death of hundreds of thousands of Kosovar refugees. And yet Serb apologists still spread the big, Orwellian lie that none of this actually happened.

Sixty years ago, a decade before Hitler’s crimes, the Soviet Red Army and NKVD herded millions of civilians in Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, and Muslim regions of the Caucasus to concentration camps in Siberia where average life expectancy was six months. Mass murder is not only a hallmark of communism, but a sine qua non. This century, communist regimes killed at least 80 million of their own citizens, more deaths than all wars combined.

Communism, the 20th century’s greatest evil, was defeated in 1989-1991, but not destroyed. It awaits the darkness, ready to rise again from its temporary grave.