Whitaker Chambers says of his education at Columbia:
"Nothing that I can remember was said about the Russian Revolution. No one in Contemporary Civilization parted the curtain of falling snow to show me Petrograd with a cold rain blowing in from the Gulf of Finland on a day in November 1917. The tottering republican government of Russia had ordered the drawbridges over the Neva River to be raised."
Of course, Chambers had this advantage over our generation: at least he knew there had been a Republican government of Russia. Nowadays, everyone is taught that the Bolsheviks overthrew the czars, and no one remembers Alexander Kerensky and the Social Democrats who, for a few months, gave Russia the only republican rule it has ever had.
Chambers continues his story.
"The great spans tilted slowly through the air. The Red Guards and the Communist Party resolutes had begun to execute that careful plan, the brainchild of Comrades Trotsky, Podvoisky, and Antonov-Avseenko, which proved to be a master technique for the revolutionary seizure of a modern city. The Communists were occupying the public buildings, the ministries, the police stations, the post office, newspaper and telegraph offices, the telephone exchange, banks, powerhouses, the railroad stations. To cut off the working-class Viborg quarter from the other bank of the Neva, and to prevent its masses from re-enforcing the insurgent Communists, the falling republican government had raised the bridges.
"In from the Gulf of Finland steamed the armored cruisers of the Baltic fleet, whose crews had already gone over to the Bolsheviks. The cruisers nosed into the Neva within point-blank range of the bridges. Their slender guns rose with mechanical deliberateness, and, as they rose, the spans of the bridges slowly dropped again. The masses streamed across into the central city. This was the crisis of the uprising and one of the decisive moments of history.
"The upraised guns of the cruisers—one hopefully renamed The Dawn of Freedom—did not lower. They swung and lobbed their shells into the Winter Palace, which stood next to the Admiralty on the river bank. Inside, the rump of the government was in its final, dying session. Outside, fierce fighting was going on. Directing it was one of history's most grotesque figures, Antonov-Avseenko—the Communist mathematician and tactician, the co-contriver of the coup d'etat, the man with the scarecrow face and shoulder-long hair under the shapeless felt. Antonov rushed toward the guns at the head of the steps. His armed rabble followed him. They stormed the doors. The Winter Palace fell. With it, in that vast, snow-afflicted sixth of the earth's surface, fell the absolute control of the destinies of 160 million people."
—Whitaker Chambers, Cold Friday
The odd part is that after the Bolsheviks took over, it became fashionable in the West to act as if they were the true republicans. Lincoln Stefans, "America's Philosopher," visited the Soviet Union and returned to say, "I have been over into the future, and it works." American labor union leaders visited terrible places in the Gulag and came home praising the Soviet's "rehabilitation programs." And everywhere, Western intellectuals proclaimed "there is no enemy to the left."
Republics were in danger only from the right; this despite the news from the Soviet Union.
Make no mistake: as Robert Conquest shows in Harvest of Sorrow, the truth about the artificial famine in the Ukraine was widely available in the west. The Manchester Guardian and Daily Telegraph, Le Figaro, Neue Zuricher Zeitung, and the Christian Science Monitor and New York Herald Tribune gave broad coverage. Most of this was ignored by Western intellectuals. Some didn't believe it. Others said you can't make omelets without breaking eggs, as if that trite phrase excused turning the breadbasket of Europe into a death camp of starving people.
George Bernard Shaw said, "I did not see a single undernourished person in Russia, young or old. Were they padded? Were their hollow cheeks distended by pieces of foam rubber inside?" Of course, Shaw went where he was told, accompanied by official guides, unlike Malcolm Muggeridge, who went to the Ukraine in secret, and found the people starving.
Then there were Beatrice and Sydney Webb, champions of English Socialism, who said, "The cost of collectivization was driving out the universally hated kulaks and the recalcitrant Don Cossacks by tens or even hundreds of thousands of families," and conclude that dekulakization was planned from the start to summarily eject from their homes "something like a million families. Strong must have been the faith and resolute the will of the men who, in the interest of what seemed to them the public good, could make so momentous a decision."
Robert Conquest observes that these words might equally be applied to Hitler and the Final Solution.
Steven Vincent Benet was one of our better poets, and a man who believed in freedom and the Republic, but even he did not see that between Red Fascism and Black Fascism there was only this difference: the Red variety was much more efficient and racked up a much higher score of victims.
Benet's "Litany" was dedicated to the victims of Black Fascism, but it can serve for all, including, of our charity, Trotsky and Antonov, who were themselves murdered by the regime they created.