On Dec. 26, 1991, the upper house of the Soviet legislature officially voted to end the empire that was the Soviet Union. The day before, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s last ruler, announced his resignation, and Russian leader Boris Yeltsin had the Russian tricolour raised over the Kremlin. Geopolitically, the event’s historical significance rivaled Napoleon’s abdication on June 22, 1815, after the Battle of Waterloo, and the end of the Nazi-led German empire on May 8, 1945. All three events marked the end of a hegemonic challenge to the global balance of power. For the subjects of the Soviet Union, December 26, 1991, meant the end of an evil empire that rose from the ashes of the First World War.
The origins of the evil Soviet empire can be traced to the Jacobins of the French Revolution and the writings of Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, Georgy Plekhanov, Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin, and Pyotr Tkachev, among others, as interpreted and implemented by Vladimir Lenin. Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have bad consequences. Lenin created what the great historian Paul Johnson called the “first despotic utopia.” Lenin personified, Johnson wrote, “the replacement of the religious impulse by the will to power.” Johnson described him as “the first of a new species: the professional organizer of totalitarian politics.” In What is to Be Done?, Lenin wrote that the Bolsheviks would achieve power not by passively awaiting the arrival of the historical forces noted by Marx and Engels, but by seizing power as “vanguard fighters.” The Bolsheviks seized power in the fall of 1917, in a classic coup d’ etat, not a popular revolution, and at once imposed the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” which lasted until 1991.
As Richard Pipes noted, Lenin and the Bolsheviks “took power for the express purpose of beginning widespread armed conflict, first in Russia and then in Europe and the rest of the world.” But first, Lenin consolidated power in Russia. He founded the Cheka as an instrument of domestic terror and opened the first camps of the Gulag. He eliminated all other political parties while assuming control of the Communist Party. He ended the war with Germany and “defended the revolution” by winning a civil war inside Russia. When necessary, ideology was tossed aside in favor of practical power considerations, as with the New Economic Policy. But the goal of a worldwide communist revolution remained a cornerstone of the Bolshevik regime, as manifested in the formation of the Comintern, which was dedicated to promoting world revolution. Imperialism was in the DNA of the communist regime.
Joseph Stalin did not stray from the Leninist program; he fulfilled it. He greatly expanded the Gulag, purged all political rivals within the party, and collectivized agriculture, which reproduced the conditions that had led to famine under Lenin in 1921, but on a much greater scale in Ukraine and elsewhere. The Comintern’s work was continued and expanded. Communist parties sprang up throughout Europe, Asia, and in the Western Hemisphere, including especially in the United States. Stalin readily allied with Hitler to begin the European phase of the Second World War and divide up Eastern and Central Europe. When Hitler double-crossed him, Stalin accepted aide from the U.S. and Britain to defeat Hitler while continuing his war against his own people. At war’s end, Stalin’s armies occupied territories in Europe and Asia that became part of the Soviet empire with Western acquiescence. Stalinism, as James Burnham wrote, was Leninism.
Stalin’s death in 1953 led to a lessening of the terror within the empire, but revolts were crushed in East Germany and Hungary, and later in Czechoslovakia. The empire remained evil and imperialistic. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Soviets engaged in a massive conventional and nuclear weapons build-up and waged proxy wars around the globe. Dissidents within the empire were still killed, imprisoned in the Gulag or psychiatric hospitals, or exiled. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration exploited vulnerabilities within the empire to eventually end Soviet rule, but even in the 80s the Soviets shot down a Korean airliner, dropped bombs disguised as toys to kill Afghan children, attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II, and continued to imprison and exile dissidents. The Soviet empire was evil right up to the time it collapsed. The day it officially ended should be celebrated.
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