Arguably, the Bolshevik Revolution, as we all know, acted like Chronos and devoured many of its children. It is a useful figure of speech. But it is misleading. It gets both Chronos and the Revolution wrong.
For the Ancient Greeks, Chronos was the "god of time" (as in chronometer). It was time the one that devoured its creations, that is, everything was subject to it. The myth of Chronos was the Ancient Greek version of the later Latin dictum of "sic transit gloriae mundi." Of course, when we see visual representations of it (as Goya's famous painting) we think of the devouring act as happening all at once.
But, Greek mythology aside, this also gets important aspects of the Revolution wrong. Or, to be more precise, it gets them right but organizes them in a peculiar way. One fact that we now tend to forget very easily is how determined the Western powers were in the late 10s and early 20s in rolling back the Russian Revolution. By 1920 there are already British, French and even American expeditionary forces there. From the start, they allied with the White Russians in the Civil War that ensued. This set off a well-known pattern: a revolutionary regime, facing external aggression, becomes radicalized, suspicious of internal dissent, repressive and, in due course, murderous.
There are plenty of examples of this. In the build-up to the Terror during the French Revolution the Jacobines played on the all too real fears of foreign intervention. Louis XVI was decapitated not for being king, the revolution had already accepted his role, but for trying to escape and form an alliance with the Austrians and the Prussians. The Iranian revolution began with a large coalition but the islamicist among them became bolder and ended up eliminating all other elements (including, you guessed it, the Communists) as Saddam Hussein (with American backing) began to bomb Iran viciously (mmmm, was Saddam a neocon?). Even the American Revolution could have turned into a dictatorship during the crisis of the Alien and Sedition Act, itself the reaction of the Federalists to what they perceived (with reason) as the attempts of the French and the British to kill the Revolution in its cradle. The (justified) fear of American intervention played a crucial role in radicalizing the Cuban Revolution. You get the picture. In fact, one revolution that did not have to contend with attempts at suppressing it from outside and that "normalized" over time was the Mexican Revolution.
So, yes, it is easy to conclude that revolutions always turn on themselves in a self-destructive rampage and, of course, the bloodletting of Stalin's Great Purge fits this to a t. But we should not forget that the strain of siege mentality that Stalin represented, his vision of events, always finding "imperialist conspirators" under any bed, were reactions that received an air of reasonableness because of the real attempts from the West at strangling the Bolshevik snake in its nest.
In every polity you will always find sectors with the most radical and deranged views only that, normally, they remain marginalized. But the circumstances in the then-nascent Soviet Union were not normal, quite the opposite, those circumstances led to a situation where Stalin was, so to speak, vindicated by the facts.
What made Stalin a world-historical criminal, as opposed to just another cadre in the Bolshevik party, is precisely that, on key issues, his threat assessment was correct. He was obsessed with a German attack and considered the forced industrialization of the Great Leap Forward as a necessity to stop it, and, sure enough, the German attack came.
Between this and my previous post I want to bring out one fact: liberal democracy did not simply emerge pure and clean from the cesspool of the 20th Century. It was part of that cesspool. Western politicians were involved in the making of the "twin evils." Many of them egged on Hitler because they saw him as the world's greatest anti-Communist. Many of them had their fingers in the Russian pie from the very beginning.
In fact, one politician that managed to avoid one of these, was Winston Churchill. A dyed-in-the-wool anti-Bolshevik if there ever was one, instrumental in the early attempts at suppressing the Russian Revolution, later decided that, in his words, if Hitler invaded hell he would ally with the devil. That's precisely what makes him a 20th Century great, the fact that, unlike many others of the time, he escaped the traditional mold and did not allow his Toryism to blind him to Hitler's danger.
(For what it's worth, I believe that the real giant is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but that's for some other post. I think that Americans don't commemorate him enough.)
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