By Lee Cary
“Dmitri Antonovich Volkogonov (22 March 1928 – 6 December 1995) was a Russian historian and colonel-general who was head of the Soviet military’s psychological warfare department. After researching the secret Soviet archives, he published biographies of Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin, among others. Despite being a committed Stalinist and Marxist-Leninist ideologue for most of his career, Volkogonov came to repudiate communism and the Soviet system within the last decade of his life before his death from cancer in 1995.” (Source)
Bolshevism destroyed everything in Russia
Does Bernie Sanders know Dmitri Volkogonov? Has he read any of his books? It seems not.
Volkogonov was once Commanding General of the Soviet’s Army’s Propaganda Department, the Director of the Institute for Military History, and, eventually, Defense Adviser to President Yeltsin from 1991 until Volkogonov died in 1995. After Mikhail Gorbachev was deposed, Volkogonov was given free access to the Soviet military archives, Communist Party documents, and classified presidential files. And he read, he learned, and he wrote.
Should you or a friend admire Bernie’s political philosophy, you might contemplate a sampling of Volkogonov’s conclusions, from his four main books, about the political system to which he dedicated his adult life.
LENIN: “Lenin, A New Biography,” ©1994, The Free Press, Chapter 6: The One-Dimensional Society, p. 326.
“Bolshevism destroyed everything in Russia, starting with the weak and ineffective Provisional government, followed by private property, the peasant commune and the Church. Everything connected with Lenin was anti-capitalist, anti-democratic, anti-liberal, anti-reformist, anti-human and anti-Christian. There can scarcely have been another man in history who managed so profoundly to change so large a society on such a scale.
Perhaps the single most characteristic feature of the new society was its one-dimensionality, its uniformity. The infinite variety of social and intellectual life, culture, historical tradition and the creative potential of millions of people was reduced to the harsh, uniform, uncompromising ideological paradigm of Leninism. Dogmatic thinking, totalitarian bureaucracy, authoritarian and irrational fear became the characteristic features of the new society.”
“Thanks to decades of brainwashing, most people in the Soviet Union are not even aware that Marxism in Russia developed in three stages: Leninism, Trotskyism and Stalinism, all of them deriving from the same root. Despite some major differences, what all three men shared was reliance on social violence, a belief in the absolute certainty of only one ideology, and the conviction that they had the right to dispose of the destinies of nations.” p. xxxv.
Whatever the problem or short coming, the solution was to create a new agency, a new organization
Chapter 57, Absolute Bureaucracy: “Total bureaucracy was independent of economic expediency. It worshipped at the shrine of the omnipotent apparat. Whatever the problem or short coming, the solution was to create a new agency, a new organization, with the result that, despite the flow of instructions to curtail the administrative system, it grew all the faster, for an administrative system cannot be combatted with administrative methods. Only economic, social and political means could have rid society of the bureaucracy, especially as it was so multi-faceted, with its endless titles, degrees, ranks and offices rising to the mysterious heights of the top echelons, where it was—and remains—impossible to find a ‘responsible’ official.” p. 560.
Great triumph of socialism: it succeeds in demolishing the notion of truth, it cannot be accused of lying
“As the Polish thinker Leszek Kolakowski has written, in totalitarian societies, the lie fulfils a special function: ‘Versions are released for the people from above and can be altered the very next day. There is no reliable criterion of truth apart from what is the declared truth at any moment. Thus, the lie in fact becomes the truth, or at any rate the distinction between truth and lies, in the ordinary sense of these words, disappears. This is the great triumph of socialism in the sphere of knowledge: to the extent that it succeeds in demolishing the notion of truth, it cannot be accused of lying’.”
Shortly after completing this, his last book, Dmitri Volkogonov died, having fully faced the realization that his life, largely devoted to propagating the virtues of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, had been the living of one, long, lie.
But in the end, he made up for it, with the truth.
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