Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [80]
Hansen contended that the Russian Revolution was not much of a revolution. The Czar’s house was rotten from within from centuries of feudalism, corruption, class rule, church abuse, failure to industrialize, failure to humanize. The rotten house needed but a hearty shove to collapse. History has been conveniently rewritten by the Communists for the world to believe that the revolution was a Communist-led people’s uprising. That is not true.
The Russian people, Hansen said, both by nature and by historical precedent, have proven that they are neither politically inquisitive nor revolutionary in spirit. They have tolerated a police state in one form or another from the origins of their history, for some twelve solid centuries. They have lived out their entire history in complete adjustment to police-state terror with little or no protest.
Hansen liked to point to Pavlov’s experiments with dogs. The great Russian scientist experimented to show how completely an animal could be conditioned. Such an animal could be trained to perform certain feats to ward off hunger, cold, and privation. Hansen believed that in a sense, Pavlov was experimenting with the Russian people themselves. Human history has given few examples of a people who can be so thoroughly conditioned as the Russians. When the pressures reach a critical stage, another bone is thrown them and they will remain quiet. Indeed, with pitifully few exceptions the Russians are magnificently trained animals who will not permit an alien, creative, free, or contradictory idea to function within their minds. They adjust within that framework of what they are allowed to think by their peers.
In recalling the history of the ending of the first war, Russia was weary, bloody, beaten, and hungry. The moment was ripe for a gathering of divergent political parties to unite and push in the Czar’s rotten house. This was the so-called revolution.
Among those divergent groups was the Communist Party. When the new government was formed the Communists were not a majority. However, they were the most tightly knit, the most ruthlessly led, the most dynamic, and the most deliberate in their ultimate goals.
In the confusion that followed the flight of the Czar, the Communists made a naked seizure of power. This was not a popular movement of the people, which they later claimed, nor was it particularly understood in most reaches of that vast land.
After a time, scattered remnants of the Czarist regime got their second wind, and along with Ukrainian and White Russian Nationalists, who hated “Mother Russia,” staged the counterrevolution against the Communists.
These were the “Whites.” The White Counter-Revolution was doomed from its inception. As the Whites reconquered parts of Russia, they reinstated the nobility and the corrupt system that had led to the collapse of the Czar in the first place. They tried to beat a dead horse to life.
The Reds, therefore, fell heir to the people by the default of the Whites. It was the lesser of the evils at the time. The Communists, moreover, did not sell the war-weary people on any lofty idealisms of Marx. The Red slogan was simple and understandable ... Bread! ... Peace! ... Land!
The Communists made a separate peace with Germany, withdrawing Russia from the war, and deserting their former allies. France, Britain, and the United States had both troops and equipment on Russian soil, including an Allied-trained Czechoslovakian division. Angered at Russia’s separate peace and committed to guard their hordes of supplies, the Allies loosely supported the ill-fated White
Counter-Revolution. For this alleged Allied treachery, the Western world earned the everlasting hatred of the Russians.
Poland, which had been partitioned into oblivion before the First World War re-emerged once more as a nation. Poland made an ill-advised move, leaping on the back of the shaky Russians in 1920, the latest in a series