Socialism to Oligarchy: Examples Section 2
Socialism to Oligarchy:
Examples Appropriate for Review
Fortunately, we have very relevant historical information about what occurred during the 20th Century in the name of “socialism” and the consequences of those movements. Given the force of motion within the United States in the current time frame, this information is essential to understand and most appropriate to review since forces of human nature tend to be repetitive!
Russia: From Dynasties to Socialism to Oligarchy
The first notable example initialized under the banner of "socialism" is found in the history of how The Soviet Union was founded when Lenin (that was an alias, his real name was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov) came to power in 1917. History is replete with nations being controlled by kings, dukes and emperors as dynasties for millennia wherein citizens were controlled to only serve the dynasty. The last reigning emperor (Tsar) of Russia was Nikolai II, Alexandrovich Romanov. The Romanov dynasty ruled Russia from 1613, though their dynastic thread goes back to 1328. The rule of Nikolai II, Alexandrovich Romanov, spanned from November of 1894 until his abdication in March 1917.
Nikolai II (aka Nicholas) actually supported economic and political reforms that his prime ministers wanted. He even pushed for modernization based on acquiring foreign loans with France. As emperor, he resisted yielding major roles to the (then new) parliament, known as The Duma. Nicholas, unfortunately, undermined himself because he insisted on autocratic rule, as many of royalty tend to do. Essentially his autocracy caused his public support to collapse because of pressure from other autocratic elites. Nicholas commanded a violent suppression of an attempted Russian Revolution in 1905, and this violence emboldened his opponents. The violent suppression also degraded his situation when the Russian Military suffered defeats both in WW-I and in The Russian-Japanese War. The collapse of support ended the Romanov’s (a dynasty) rule of three centuries in Russia when Nicholas was forced to abdicate in 1917. Lenin was a Bolshevik, and after the Bolsheviks took power in the “October Revolution” the Romanov family was first held in Yekaterinburg, and then executed in July of 1918.
After the Tsar was overthrown, there were two groups: The Bolsheviks; and, the Mensheviks. The Mensheviks argued for a democratic process. After all, Russians had lived under the dictatorship of the Imperial family with the Tsar's secret police state for a long time, so shifting to a more open society would have become a vast movement toward freedom. The Bolsheviks, however, wanted a dictatorial (they claimed "socialist") model under Lenin. Vladimir Lenin, as he was known by his alias, was the first and founding head of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924, and the development of the Soviet Union starting in 1922: both one-party “socialist” states governed by the Communist Party (an ideological variant of Marxism). The variant of Marxism that he and the communist party developed became labeled as “Leninism.”
In 1918 Lenin’s government repudiated repaying all foreign loans that had been set up the Tsar. Then Lenin nationalized all foreign properties located in Russia, confiscated these, with no compensation provided to the owners. From about 1918 to 1920, Russia suffered greatly by a Civil War. Millions of lives were lost as vast destruction unfolded. The anti-Lenin forces (known as anti-Soviet) were called “Whites” led by former highly placed military officers from the Tsar’s regime and their goal was to overthrow “The Reds” of Lenin’s government. Lenin set up the formation of the “Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army” that was commanded by Leon Trotsky and supported by industrial workers. Paradoxically enough, Lenin worked to persuade the non-Russians in the country that his policies would lead to the freedom of “self-determination” – something that “The Whites” from the times of the Tsar would not accept. Industrial workers temporarily became the new class of privilege for food rations, housing, and power. The peasants demanded that land be confiscated from the church, the crown, and those of high social position (without compensation, of course) and that won support that Lenin’s government needed to survive. Problem was that the economy had broken down. Lenin’s government did not have enough funds to support the Red Army or the towns. Here we get an idea of his grim determination to remain in power: he requisitioned grain from the farms without providing compensation, and even peasants resisted. “Whites” controlling certain areas managed to restore land to previous owners that had been confiscated, and then savagely ravaged the peasants. Peasants given the choice between “Whites” and “Reds” reacted to this initially by choosing “The Reds.” That backfired after the “Whites” were defeated because the peasants threatened a massive rebellion and refused to have their grain confiscated. In 1921 this forced Lenin to set up a “new economic policy” ending grain confiscation and permitting peasants to sell their grain on the open market: a very small suggestion that capitalism might work if controlled on a limited basis, after all.
Despite the complications indicated by the above, the way Lenin and the Bolsheviks prevailed was simple. By about 1921, Lenin’s government had crushed all opposition crying out that the opposition had not supported the Soviet cause in the Civil War.
To Lenin’s mind, any opposition against his “belief system” was increasingly dangerous to his power. Part of this became real fear because of the dire condition of the economy, managed by incompetents. With that economic decline, the peasants and many of the so-called “working class,” were not pleased with the Soviet regime. Historical reports show that Lenin himself was aware of the degradation within the Soviet system. By 1922 the party itself was profoundly tangled in incompetence. Joseph Stalin (also an alias) was appointed as General Secretary of the communist party, and in that role he gathered and concentrated immense power for himself. An early hint of Stalin’s character was how, before he came to power, he raised money for the Bolshevik cause: by kidnappings; robberies; and, protection-extortion schemes starting as early as 1918. Any opponents to the Bolsheviks were given despicable treatment. Lenin set up “show trials” for his opponents that often resulted in the death penalty. Any dissent within the Bolsheviks that now held power as a dictatorship was the base for merciless destruction. On the plateau of high overview, given all of the torture, deaths and destruction, the simplicity is that after they slaughtered the Imperial Romanov family (Nicholas II, wife Alexandra, and their five children - all shot and bayoneted): Lenin then slaughtered the Mensheviks; no opposition; victory controlled by death to any opposition. (The secret police state – that had a history under the Tsars - first became known as the NKVD that later changed to the KGB, and now the FSB).
The reality of what the Soviet State had become was incredibly different than the vision of “socialism” that Lenin first had when he wrote “The State and Revolution” circa 1917 while he was hiding in Finland and writing to support the Bolshevik cause. Lenin recognized the discrepancies where some were against his philosophy, and he even attempted to replace Stalin (that Lenin recognized had accumulated too much power) but Lenin became critically ill in 1922. He was pushing his concepts to develop what he viewed as the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” that was a federalist system in contrast to the domineering unitary role Stalin had devised. Lenin was able to express great fear for the efficacy of his communist party under Stalin’s force that included Trotsky. Over the months, once he realized Stalin required a different direction while Lenin was engaged with this effort to curtail Stalin, he suffered several strokes, eventually becoming paralyzed and unable to speak.
By 1924 shortly after Lenin’s death, Russia as the Soviet State had captured recognition from all the major world powers, except for that of the United States. Obviously, Lenin’s hope to establish a world-wide coalition of Soviet States (the ideology of a world-wide Soviet Republic) did not develop. Essentially Soviet Russia as a communist state became isolated, even with hostility from the rest of the world since that was not communist but operated with a free market capitalist ideology.
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (who was born as “loseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili” in Soviet Georgia) ruled the communist party and the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. After Lenin died he quickly consolidated his power to become a dictator circa the 1930s. The mantras of “Leninism” and “Marxism” became quickly replaced with “Stalinism” as a chant started by Lazar Kaganovich, a politician affiliated with Stalin, who was seeking to make Stalin a personality cult. Stalin dictated that all agriculture be collectivized, and established under his dictatorship what is known as a centralized “command” economy with rapid industrialization. Distortions were quickly obvious, and there were severe shortages in food production resulting in a great famine between 1932 and 1933. Stalin in his quest for absolute control over the communist party and all the government, decided that “enemies of the state” were causing the problems so he dictated a “great purge” to annihilate those enemies (real or imagined). Estimates are that over a million people were imprisoned, and a minimum of 700,000 were executed from 1934 to 1939.
By promoting “the cause” internationally as he saw it, he worked to expand his influence by communist movements in different countries during the 1930s and became involved in a Civil War in Spain. Circa 1939 with the socialist (NAZI) movement well established in Germany, he signed a non-aggression pact with the NAZI’s and his reward for was that Germany allowed the Soviet invasion of Poland. Ironically, Germany itself voided that pact by invading the Soviet Union in 1941. Eventually the Red Army (with horrendous losses) repelled the Germans and the Soviets took control of (East) Berlin in 1945. The Soviets then annexed the Baltic States and set up Soviet-controlled governments throughout Central Europe, Eastern Europe, China and North Korea. After the end of World War-II with the defeat of the Germans, there were two blocks of superpower influence: The Soviet Union in the Eastern European Bloc; and, The United States as the Western Bloc. Stalin reigned over the post-war reconstruction of the Soviet Union and developed their own Atomic Bomb by 1949, setting up the cold war and the policy of “mutually assured (nuclear bombs) destruction” (MAD) against the United States, maintaining peace through the concept of MAD peril, and that continued until about 1989. The concept of the central control and collectivism of agriculture failed again with the result of another great famine circa 1949. Similar to that of NAZI Germany, an anti-Semitic campaign was launched, and in Russia also initiated against medical doctors who were seen as threats. All told, during Stalin’s dictatorial totalitarian regime there were massive actions of “ethnic cleansing” massive repressions, religious persecutions, concentration labor camps (known as gulags), hundreds of thousands of executions, and famines that resulted in multi-millions of deaths.
After Stalin’s death there was a power struggle among the Soviet Communist Party elite oligarchs.
Georgy Malenkov was nominally supposed to be the next leader after Stalin, but he only held power for about 6 months. The Troika (triumvirate) of Malenkov, Beria and Molotov ruled for the next six months. Nikita Khrushchev plotted with elite communist leaders to have Beria executed, and eventually took power. Khrushchev built his own power base largely by getting rid of what he considered to be “hardliners" by exposing Stalin's crimes against other communists and the Russian population more broadly. The approach was that "Stalinist" style rivals for power were removed from any positions that threatened Khrushchev's leadership role that he created for himself.
Follow-up
Nikita Khrushchev held power for about 11 years (1953 – 1964) to be followed by Leonid Brezhnev (1964 – 1982), then Yuri Andropov (1982 – 1984), Konstantin Chernenko (1984 – 1985) and then Mikhail Gorbachev from 1985. Gorbachev Served as General Secretary of the party from 1985, then Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet in1988 until the office was renamed to the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet (1989) then President of the Soviet Union from 15 March 1990 to 25 December 1991 when he resigned.
The day following Mikhail Gorbachev's resignation as president, the Soviet Union was formally dissolved, leaving Russia itself as an independent nation. Boris Yeltsin was President from 1991 to 1999, followed by Vladimir Putin’s first term from 1999 to 2008, then next to Dmitry Medvedev, 2008 to 2012, with Vladimir Putin re-elected in 2012 (term expires 2024).Interestingly enough, the 45 year period of the intense “cold war” between the United States and the Soviet Union (starting circa 1946 to the dissolution of the Soviet Union 1991) was the first period in history where NO European Nation was at war with any other European Nation for a contiguous 45 years.
The peaceful period among European nations ended once again with adirection for socialism as it had in the past. This occurred through the personage of Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic was a communist since the age of 18 and he led the Socialist Party of Serbia becoming president of Serbia in 1989. Yugoslavia was a client state held by the Soviet Union with many others (e.g. Warsaw Pact and Comecon states: Albania; Bulgaria; Cuba; Czechoslovakia; East Germany; Hungary; Mongolia; Poland; Romania; Yugoslavia as well as others). On June 25, 1991, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence from Yugoslavia. Milosevic sent powerful military forces, tanks, to the Slovenian border that started a war that ended in Slovenia’s secession. The end of this horrific war, after massacres at Sregrenica and Markale, involved intervention by NATO, and a General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosina and Herzegovina was formed in Paris, December 1996, after preliminary negotiations were successful as held in Dayton Ohio a month before.
Milosevic himself was accused of being behind the killing of thousands of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats, including the infamous massacre of civilians at Srebrenica in 1995. Slobodan Milosevic was subject to war crimes trial at The Hague, Netherlands. Formally the charges were genocide and war crimes in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. The most serious indictment against him related to genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995. Milosevic served as his own attorney for much of the prolonged trial. The trial (calculated to run for four years) ended without a verdict when Milosevic, then known as “Butcher of the Balkans”, was found dead at age 64 from an apparent heart attack in his prison cell on March 11, 2006. Serbian troops were described in court as committing acts of "almost medieval savagery and a calculated cruelty that went far beyond the bounds of legitimate warfare". It was not in dispute that Serbian troops were involved in ethnic cleansing and killing civilians indiscriminately. In point of fact, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia convicted 45 Serbs, 12 Croats and four Bosniaks of war crimes in connection with the war in Bosnia. The most recent estimates suggest that around 100,000 people were killed during the war. Over 2.2 million people were displaced, making it the most devastating conflict in Europe since the end of World War II. In addition according to testimony, an estimated 12,000 to 50,000 women were raped, mainly by Serb forces, with most of the victims being Bosnian Muslims.
Germany: From Dynasty to Socialism; Oligarchy to Democracy
The second example with horrific consequences was once again initialized under the banner of "socialism". The second example occurred soon after the formation of the Soviet Union, this time in Germany. In a process similar to that of Russia, a dynasty was overturned. The last German Emperor was Kaiser Wilhelm II who was also King of Prussia. He reigned from 1888 until his abdication in 1918 about the same time as the profound events were occurring in Russia. To recognize the comparisons in fact, all one needs to do is review and study the processes and evolution of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (NSDAP), the prevailing political party in Germany that became active circa 1920. The activism, promoted after dynastic rule, caused National Socialism to become a “blind belief” system. The party created their own version of socialism as founded by the far-right and anti-Semitic individual named Anton Drexler that brought Adolf Hitler to power. Hitler himself was mentored by Anton Drexler. Together they and their party rejected even liberal democracy or a parliamentary system. Contracting their stated term, Nationalsozialismus, simplified and signified by the initials NAZI, and in a brief time the world encountered the terror of tyrannical control associated with those initials with history clearly teaching the result. That system, as most are when developed by indoctrination absent any freedom of thought, was a "blind belief system" that took over Germany and through war attempted to take over the planet as a single-point of control, known as the Third Reich.
Hitler and the Third Reich did not confine their ambitions of absolute control only to Germany. NAZI Germany, through powerful military action, invaded and militarily occupied eleven countries: Czechoslovakia; Austria; Poland; Denmark; Norway; Belgium; The Netherlands; France; The Channel Islands of Britain (adjacent to France); and Italy. The Germans also invaded The Soviet Union (to advance to the outskirts of Moscow) but failed to occupy as the Soviets launched a counteroffensive. The Red Army pushed German troops back about 50 miles from Moscow. This counteraction caused the first major defeat of the German Wehrmacht in World War II and it lasted for 1,418 days.
The United States, horribly bruised as it was by the divisive events that were also initiated by the German Wehrmacht as World War I (Phases 4, 5 and 6 of Cycle #3 circa 1918) was not inclined to engage in another war that was once again initiated by Germany only about 21 years later in 1939 with the invasion of Poland. We can surmise that this reluctance was at least partially based on President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s (FDR) campaign promises, circa 1932, “never again to send our troops to fight in a foreign war”. As the war in Europe raged The United States was not involved even though “The Blitz” bombing of London ( and adjacent cities) of England started as early as September 7, 1940 and was continuous for 57 nights until May of 1941 with an estimated 28,500 killed, and another 25,000 wounded. United States involvement would have to wait until The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. (Refer to section above, Cycle #3: Completion; Breakdown & Trough war (entering Cycle #4) and separately, historically delineated descriptions regarding this phase are described in Appendix One of this article.
After December 7th 1941 with the United States fully involved in what was originally a European war, the time of the Third Reich NAZI party, and the reign of the Emperor of Japan to make war, rapidly became shorter.
On August 15th 1944 The United States led the successful Allied invasion of western France. This success forced Germany to assemble reserve forces and with those reserves Germany launched a massive counter-offensive in the Ardennes (primarily in Belgium and Luxembourg, also stretching out to Germany and France). The German counter-offensive collapsed by January 1945. Simultaneously, Soviet forces were closing against the German Wehrmacht from the east by invading Poland and East Prussia. By March 1945, Western Allied forces were crossing the Rhine River, capturing hundreds of thousands of troops that formed The German Army, Group B. The Soviet Red Army had also entered Austria. The front lines of the both forces, Western Allies and the United States and the Soviets, quickly approached the German Capitol of Berlin. Strategic bombing campaigns by Allied aircraft relentlessly attacked German territory, to the extent of destroying entire cities in a single night. Although in the first months of 1945 Germany devised an intense defense, the effort against the overwhelming forces was futile. Germany rapidly lost territory, ran out of supplies, and exhausted its military options. In April, Allied forces advanced through the German defensive line in Italy. East met West on the River Elbe on April 25, 1945. At that point in time Soviet and American troops met together near Torgau, Germany. That was the end of The Third Reich! The Soviets occupied Berlin and Adolf Hitler committed suicide 5 days later on April 30, 1945. Germany surrendered unconditionally on all fronts on May 8 (May 7 on the Western Front). Hitler's planned "Thousand-Year Reich" that started out as a movement for socialism, existed for only 12 profoundly destructive years.
Embodied by the German movement that started out in a “blind belief system” as a cry for socialism, slaughtered an estimated 70 to 85 million people, 3% of the population of the planet. Of these, about 21 to 25 million were military, and 50 to 55 million were civilian.
Follow-up: Reconstruction
The reconstruction of Germany required an extended period of time because of the horrific losses in lives (approximately 7 million Germans were killed domestically) and of industrial production. Some cities were nearly obliterated, and others severely damaged because of heavy bombing near the end of the war. Heavy bombing is a strategic action to break the will of a population that started the war. Agricultural production in Germany was only 35% of what it was before the war. During conferences at Potsdam, the largest city in the German State of Brandenburg that borders Berlin, the Allies transferred approximately 25% of Germany's pre-Anschluss territory to Poland and the Soviet Union. The German population in this area was expelled. Germans of the Sudetenland and the German populations scattered throughout the rest of Eastern Europe were also redistributed. Various sources estimate that between 1.5 and 2 million Germans died in the redistribution of the population. Germany, after the surrender, was essentially dismembered and as a result, the population density increased in the "new" Germany.
Part of the dismemberment established during the Potsdam conferences was intended to convert Germany into an agricultural country with only light industry permitted. After all, Germany was responsible for initializing two World Wars only a few decades apart! Many factories were dismantled or destroyed. These actions were considered to be reparations for the wars. In addition, millions of Germans were still held as prisoners of war for years after the war ended and they were used as forced labor by The Soviet Union and also by The Western Allies. Immediately after the German surrender and for a couple of years that followed, the United States launched an effort to capture all German technological and scientific knowledge as well as all invention patents. Much focus was given to dissolving all NAZI influence immediately after the surrender. This effort was seen as successful by 1947, so successful in fact that the victorious allies began to consider that Germany could be a Western Ally because of a developing “cold war” situation against the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was developing what amounted to client-states in the eastern zone that existed only under complete Soviet control.
Because of the foresight and generosity of “The Marshall Plan” (1947) German industry was gradually rebuilt and the country developed through a gradual and continuous improvement to prosperity, increasing the standard of living, reducing unemployment, increasing food production, and redeveloping a market to export goods. The psychological damage was so great internationally that it was not until 1950 that the “reparations” idea of dismantling German heavy industry was halted. This was motivated by the new formation of The German Democratic (federal parliamentary) Republic. With this formation, German Federal legislative power is vested in The Bundestag (the parliament of Germany) and the Bundesrat (the body representing Germany’s regional states). The judiciary of Germany is independent of the executive and the legislative branches, although it is common for leading members of the executive to be members of the legislature as well. The political system was designed in the 1949 constitution, the Grundgesetz (Basic Law). This all remained in effect with minor amendments after German reunification in 1990 that was set up because of the dissolution of the Soviet Union that had controlled East Germany as a separate state.