Comment by vidarh
9 years ago
The anarchists in Russia, and a substantial proportion of the communists fought against the Bolshevik coup, and most of them ended up murdered or in exile for it. Or both.
Trying to paint them all with one brush is ignorant.
Well yeah, but they made a deal with the devil.
The anarchists in Russia were murdering thousands of people a year from 1904 forward. They killed one of the few liberalish emperors in 1881. Russia could have been a very different place in 1915 without their action.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narodnaya_Volya
Here's a long list of the infamous actions of the anarchists:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_of_the_deed#Notable...
The sailors on Kronstadt who supported Lenin during the July Days and were one of his strongest bases of support ended up getting put down and executed when they rebelled after the revolution.
Guess it suggests that making friends with violent people is a bad idea, regardless of convenience or agreement.
The idea of treating anarchists of all people as one singular, cohesive unit, when even the elitist, strictly organised Bolsheviks with their high party discipline took many years to manage to fully purge/murder even the opposition within their own party, is beyond ridiculous.
The Russian left was deeply divided to start with, and split further as the Bolsheviks intentions became clearer, leading to a number of uprisings against them from the left as well [1].
Frankly, it is deeply offensive to the memories of the many thousands of them who ended up laying down their lives to try to stop the Bolsheviks that you're lumping them all together and trying to assign them blame for things they fought to the bitter end.
Some of them had at some point made the fault of trusting Lenin, at a time when the Bolsheviks had not yet demonstrated much willingness to oppress, but most had not.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_uprisings_against_th... (with the caveat that the page contains a number of statements about specifics that to me seem overly biased in favour of the Bolsheviks, but the specifics of which groups opposed them looks reasonably correct)