Revolution in Russia Cast Shadow Over Century

To reach his command post, Vladimir Lenin shaved his beard and bandaged his face to make it look like he was going to the dentist to be treated for a toothache. At one point, to avoid arrest by a government patrol in the street, he feigned drunkenness.

At 9 p.m. on Nov. 7, 1917 (or Oct. 25, according to the czarist-era calendar in use in Russia at the time), the cruiser Aurora fired a single salvo to signal the start of the Bolsheviks’ attack on the Winter Palace. Though the Aurora used blanks because it carried no live ammunition, in the vivid metaphor of American left-wing writer and eyewitness John Reed, those days and nights in St. Petersburg “shook the world.”

And in fact, as a distant but direct outcome of the putsch stage-managed by Lenin, American schoolchildren generations later were being given extra doses of math and science. The United States came to fight two wars, in Korea and Vietnam, to contain communism, and to underwrite or choreograph proxy conflicts in countless places from Central America to Mesopotamia.

And as, over the span of this century, the United States expanded into a world power and global player, with men and women in uniform stationed from Korea’s 38th parallel to Berlin, the single most important historical reason surely was what happened on the shores of the Baltic that night in 1917.

For proof of the ripples that continue to spread out from the chaotic Petrograd of that time, consider the event that dominated the news in the final year of the 20th century: the war in Kosovo. In Yugoslavia, remnants of a regime founded on the Leninist model were matched against NATO, a military alliance whose very raison d’etre was the common defense of Western values against the Soviet threat, against the ideals and methods of Lenin and his successors.

The Soviet Union, Lenin’s political offspring, was to be America’s first adversary that literally could destroy it. The force vectors spun out by the Russian Revolution came to touch and shape American life in countless ways, from the drive to put a man on the moon and Teflon-coated frying pans (a space race spinoff) to controversy over the awarding last March of an honorary Oscar to 89-year-old director Elia Kazan, who during the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s named eight people who were party members with him, thereby ruining their careers.

For a time, to many in the United States, “un-American” and “communist” were simply synonyms. Anyone who challenged the established order (example: the Rev. Martin Luther King in his campaign for racial equality) might even be suspected by some of being a Red. Abroad, containment of communism became the No. 1 objective of American foreign and defense policy, starting with Harry S. Truman’s presidency.

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Division of the world into rival ideological camps led to U.S. friendship with some unlikely and unsavory recruits to the side of the “free world,” including South American juntas and African dictators. And what kind of domestic society might have been built if more than $7 trillion in U.S. tax money had not been spent on defense, primarily to counter real and perceived Soviet threats, since World War II?

But the idea of the modern United States also evolved in antithesis to the Soviet challenge, making Americans into who and what they are today. Without the dual risks of disorder from the left and right that seemed very real during the Great Depression, would the United States ever have come to possess a minimum wage, a 40-hour work week or the safety net of Social Security? Without the global competition mounted by the Kremlin, would America, a country that used to want nothing to do with foreign entanglements, have stepped up to assume the role of worldwide power and presence that it fulfills today?

For Russians themselves, the Bolshevik takeover ushered in a near-century of bleak suffering enlivened by great industrial and scientific achievements, but also by utopian hopes that remain unfulfilled. Today, Europe’s largest and most populous nation has become, in the sardonic term of the Russians, “Absurdistan.” Few believe their homeland, a backwater for centuries, will be any time soon what they yearn for: “a normal, civilized country.”

Recently, a group of Paris-based researchers tallied up all the lives lost in various forms of communist class warfare and purges during the 20th century, from the Bolsheviks’ battles against White counterrevolutionaries to the genocide of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, and came up with a total of 100 million.

China may have suffered more dead, and Cambodia a larger percentage, but nowhere did the bloodletting last longer than in Russia and its sister Soviet republics. Nowhere did party leaders have more time to stamp out independence of thought, the spirit of enterprise, unorthodox creativity and dissent.