For the full text, follow these links:
Google Books
A great American journalist, Lincoln Steffens, visited with Lenin at the outset
of the Soviet Revolution. Highly impressed by what he saw, he returned to the
United States and famously declared:” I have seen the future and it works!”
My
father and uncle spent several years in the future and made every effort possible
to get back to the present.
The
Soviet system had as its goal the shaping of the new Soviet man, an altruistic
individual who would give his all for the common good, as attributed to Marx:”
From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs. “
Marxism-Leninism,or Communism, would embody the goals of ancient preachers and
idealists, the Utopia, free of the burdens of religious superstition and the
restrictions of bourgeois society; all would own equally, private property
would be abolished. Ultimately, in this ideal situation, Marx’s partner Engels
predicted, the State itself would be superfluous and wither away. There would
only be a very short “ dictatorship of the proletariat” for the transition.
In this ideal world, as George Orwell’s
Napoleon the Pig declared,” All animals are equal—but some are more equal than
others”.
The
idea of collective ownership produced dismal results. As my father explained,
when all own everything, everyone owns nothing, and no one takes responsibility
for anything and the Soviet economy lagged far behind the economies of America
and Europe.
The “temporary
dictatorship” lasted some 70 years, only to be replaced by a government of
wealthy oligarchs and a flat ( or “regressive”) tax system
In
some sense, both Communism and Nazism shared policies of terror and the
overwhelming force of state and party machinery to create a new society. To the
credit of communism, it must be said that the frenzy of terror was in pursuit
of the noblest goals of human ideals, whereas for Nazism, the goals were the
outright elevation of one race overall others and the annihilation of the Jews
as the greatest obstacle to that victory.
Years
later, when the American Jewish community agitated on behalf of Soviet Jewry,
under the slogan, ”Let my people Go,” there were some voices calling the Soviet
oppression of Jewish religion a second Holocaust. This hurt my father deeply.
For all the flaws of the Soviets, all the rest of European Jewry would have
been dead had the Soviets not crushed the German forces at Stalingrad and then
rolled on to Berlin. He also told me that the Soviets could not possibly let
Jews leave the Iron Curtain—because after the Jews, then the Satellite states
like Poland and Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Republics such as the Ukraine and
Kazakhstan and all the rest would clamor to leave. No system willingly commits
suicide. Indeed, while some Jews were allowed to leave in the 1970’s, by 1980
the exit doors were shut again. Only
with glasnost and perestroika under Mikhail Gorbachov did the
gates open again. As my father said would happen, the whole house of cards came
tumbling down.
