RUSSIA IN THE EUROPEAN CIVIL WAR

 

From 1917 ,up to 1945, a Standing War

Oт 1917 до 1945, непрерывная война

Dal 1917 al 1945, una guerra ininterrotta.

A partir de 1917 et  jusqu'à 1945, une guerre sans cesse

Seit 1917 bis 1945, ein ununterbrochener Krieg

 1.The controversial role of Anticommunism

Another reason why Russia remains so strongly associated with communism is that, for a broadly shared (but, according to us, not so much sustainable) view, all main historical events which took place over the XX Century were originated by the very presence of communism. So,the fact  having Russia been the center of the communist movement for 70 years, would imply, according to many observers and citizens, a central role of communism for Russian identity still today.

Summarizing the above theory, the fear of Communism at the end of World War I would have been the origin of the trend toward the radical right, and in particular, of the birth of Fascisms, which, from one side, were fighting against communism openly, and, from the other side, imitated its paradigms with the aim to entice the “traditional” audience of the latter (workers and intellectuals). This interpretation of XX Century’s history has been defined, by Nolte, as “Europäischer Buergerkrieg” (“European Civil War”). In its broader reading, the “European Civil War” encompasses also World war I and World War II, as well as the civil wars and the revolutions occurred between the two wars and up to the Georgia war of 2010 (such as the Russian Civil War, the Fiume Republic, the March on Rome, the Spanish Civil War, the Anschluss, the Greek Civil War, the Berlin, Budapest, Poznan’, the Danzig Revolts, the Greek Coup, Solidarność, the “Velvet Revolutions”, the Post-Sovietic and Post-Yugoslav wars).

According to that theory, communism had been the real protagonist of all those events, so that nationalism and capitalistic democracy would have been mere co-starring antagonists.

We do not object to Nolte’s use of the idiom “Civil War”, which stands on the basis that Europe is indeed “one Fatherland”. We just observe that capitalistic democracy and nationalism were the driving factors of World War I, and communism arrived during the war as a consequence of it.

The strongest evidence that Nolte gives for this theory in the book having precisely this title is the complete parallelism among all aspects of Communism and Nazism(Chiliasm; Party Dictatorship; Führerprinzip; “general mobilization”; exaltation of the “people”; ritualism; persecution of opposants; lager/GuLag; expansionism; “satellites”). 

2.Priority of Fascism

According to our point of view, the precedence of communism as compared with Nazism is misleading, because Fascism was born in Italy with Mussolini, and followed the exact timing of the evolution of Lenin’s Bolshevism:

-      pre-war socialist maximalism (1905-1914);

-      democratic interventionism (1915-1917);

-      militant  revolutionarism of Trockij and D’Annunzio (1918-1922);

-      party coup-d’état (1917-1922);

-   first phase of “national consensum” (NEP, first Mussolini Government) (1922-1926);

-      later development of an own “dirigistic” policy (1927-1933);

-      militarization of the State (1934-1938);

-      intervention in World War II beside Germany (1939-1940);

-      change of alliance (1941-1943)

As a consequence, we do not believe that the deep cultural  motives which brought to fascism were very different from the ones of Bolshevism:

-      activism of the cultural vanguards;

-      hatred for bourgeois “Biedermeier”;

-      militarism and/or militantism;

-      wish, by intellectuals, workers and beuaureaucrats, to conquer new social positions;

-      quest for State interventionism;

-      new ways for rehabilitating  nationalism.

The first mass applications of science and technique, such as industrial organization of production, gas and electrical lighting, and railways transportation, the creation of the first “national” conglomerates, the first traces of democratization, such as enlarging voting rights, tolerating strikes, encouraging mobility, the diffusion, through elementary schools and military service, of a “national” ideology, where at the origins of centralized States, colonial adventures, economic competition and mass parties, a set of forces striving to quick change and self-affirmation.

World War I allowed these forces to acquire a stronger role at the expenses of the peasant civilization, of the Churches, of aristocracies.

Both Lenin and Mussolini understood this, and were therefore favorable to the war, which gave them the means to emerge as political leaders.

After the war, the capitalistic and democratic American army started its presence in European soil, whilst large and ancient conservative empires were substituted by smaller and weaker “bourgeois” republics, plagued by civil wars carried out by demobilized soldiers trained to years of fighting. Bourgeoisie had gained a place besides aristocracy, thanks to the huge war profits, and socialist parties were admitted in parliament for the first time.

Communism started just as a consequence of the above. Lenin arrived in Russia thanks to the German Army, and was allowed to operate because the weak socialist government of Kerenskij could not prevent the birth and the operation of party militias. The Red Army was made up of demobilized imperial soldiers and officers, and could win the Civil Was thanks to the disintegration of the Imperial Army itself. Also Fascism and Nazism were strengthened by industrialization, mass democracy, war and demobilization. Also they started their political careers as party militias.

2.General Mobilisation

According to Ernst Junger, the key concept for understanding World War I is “General Mobilization” (“Allgemeine Mobilmachung”), which is the quintessence of any kind of modernity. The latter, in its sake for unlimited progress of science and technique, cannot tolerate that the forces of mankind remain, as it happened to a large extent in pre-modernity and up to World War I, dispersed and not operational. It demands that everybody and everything is put at work at the best of its potential, at the service of the development of science and technique. As Manuel De Landa has observed, war is the most effective instrument for innovation. Thanks to World War I, we have now economic planning, female work. Thanks to World War II, we have present days space industry, radars, computers, Internet, television, international organisations.

After its creation, Communism and Fascism became driving forces of European Civil War, because they were powerful elements of “General Mobilization”. The idea itself of an organized force taking the lead of the progress of Mankind stays at the center of “General Mobilization”. The same concept is true for the organization of a militarized and industrialized powerful empire, as well as of a massive propaganda in favor of progress, work ethics and technique improvement. 
So,  Russian Bolshevism became a protagonist of the European Civil War.First of all, it prompted other revolutionary parties, both communist and non communist, to follow the revolutionary path, so rendering possible events like the Sovietic Republics in Budapest and Munich, but also the Fiume "Republic of Quarnaro", the March on Rome, the Putsch Kapp and the Hitler Government. 

3.The Communist Bloc

Then, it created a worldwide communist movement, in competition with other international movements. Such movement, starting from the works of Lenin, of Trotzkij and of Stalin, developed its own ideology (and/or, even, political theology), which, gradually, evolved away from “traditional” Marxist thinking, so that, already after World War II, most Marxist thinkers in the West considered themselves as supporter of a different ideology as the one of Eastern Block’s “DiaMat” (Dialektičeskij Materijalizm).

Later on, following to the Budapest Revolution and to the ’68 movement, also most of marxist and communist parties in the West started criticizing the Soviet Union. In the meantime, in China, Yugoslavia, Albania, Romania, Cuba, other Communist Regimes expressed their own orthodoxies, conflicting with the Soviet one.

Finally, the development of Communism in the other parts of the Soviet Block, and even, to a certain extent, in some Sovietic Republics, revealed themselves different from the “Soviet” Mainstream. For instance, in Eastern Germany there has always been an apparent multipartitism, whereby all the political parties of Western Germany were present also in the Eastern Parliament (including the extreme right National Democratic Party). In Poland, the leading party was not a “party”, but a “Front”, whereby two or three catholic political movements, like Znak and Pax, were allowed. Moreover, the Church enjoyed a privileged role. From another point of view, it has to be remarked that some of the Republics, especially the ones at the borders of the Union, were allowed to enjoy a larger independence from the center, also because this would have been helped for a better image of the country abroad. For instance, a certain amount of economic independence was granted to Estonia and to Georgia, which allowed these small republics to become a center of local private trade, and to raise a sort of local “bourgeoisies”.

Finally, after World War II, it gave rise to one, and, later, to more than one, “socialist blocks”, in competition with the “Western World”, but also among themselves.

4.World War II

Similarly to what happens as concerns the interpretation of Bolshevism, so also the one of the origins of World War II has given rise to an infinity of discussions. Surely, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression agreement between Communist Russia and Nazi Germany, was one of the main causes, since the first effect of that pact was a “fourth partition” of Poland, between the Soviet Union and the Third Reich, alongside the first three ones during XVIII Centuries.

This Pact is still now criticized by all sides, as a demonstration of the aggressive character of Russia, Germany, or both, and of the need, for Poland, to go on protecting itself with the help of the United States.

Surely, there is something true in this. However, a recent study has shown that, even now, there is clearcut cultural divide (expressed, e.g., in terms of election results), between the Polish Regions staying west, and the ones staying east of the former border of Russia. So, at the end of the day, it is not something unthinkable to imagine that many people were in good faith at that time thinking of a new form of partition, which corresponded to a real difference between the two part of Poland.

By the way, in Poland, between World War I and World War II, there was not even a sole legislation. In fact, in certain regions, German, Austrian, pre-war Russian, and, even, French/Napoleonic Law were applicable.

At the end of the day, thanks to World War II, Russia was able to recover that status of world power, that it had lost with World War I. Even after losing the Republics, present-days Russia has still maintained some element of that role.

In any case, the Pact has surely prejudiced very seriously the possibilities of good relationships among peoples in that part of Europe. This even more because, at the moment of restoring an independent Poland, the victorious powers maintained the “Curzon Line”, i.e. the partition line decided between Molotov and Ribbentrop, so setting free just the Western part of Poland, and just compensating the latter by the right of occupation of three formerly German regions, whilst the inhabitants of the Eastern Regions were transferred to these Regions (“Kresy” or “Lity”), and were given to Belarus and Ukraine (hence, to USSR and populations of these countries).

The trauma’s of World War II are not forgotten at all. Russia itself, albeit reneging completely the Soviet Heritage, considers the “Great Patriotic War” as one of the founding elements of its statehood In fact, it is thanks to the victory of Soviet Russia that the Soviet Union was accepted to be a part of the leading powers of the world, and, in particular, of the members of the Security Council of the United Nations. It is thanks to that victory that it has been able to develop an outstanding military technology which allows it to stand at pair with the US.

Recently, the myth of the “Great Patriotic War” has been revived, and President Medvedev has reaffirmed it at several occasions, albeit specifying that the victory has not to be considered as a victory of Stalin, but, on the contrary, as a victory of the Russian people.. Also in this theory, there is a part of truth. Apart from the fact that Stalin, albeit a tough dictator and a non-Russian Communist, was a theorist of “National Communism”, and, even involuntarily, succeeded to a liberation war which seemed lost, when Nazi tanks were at the doors of Leningrad and Moscow. So, the victory can be considered more a victory of the Russian people than of Communism.

6.Restless Eastern Nationalities

By the way, the questions of the Eastern regions of Poland had never been settled also before, because Poland, before the Partitions, was a multinational State, called “Rzeczpospolita”, and, especially in the Eastern part of it, lived, mixed the one with the other, Ukrainians, Belarussians, Poles, Russians, minor Slavonic peoples, Cossacks, Lithuanians, Jews and Tatars. The conflicts among those populations had been strong since the Cossack and peasant revolts, up to the fighting among Poles and Ukrainians, among the two World Wars, the exchange of populations after World War II and the persecutions of Jews starting from the late Tsarist Empire, up to the last “pogroms” in Communist Poland.

This also taking into account that many of the Republics (like, e.g., the Balts, Ukraine and Moldova), on the contrary, fought the war on the side of Germans. This last fact constitutes a further source of substantially unending disputes between Russia and the Republics. These are the only states in Europe where politicians and military, which had fought side by side together with the armies of the Axis, such as Bandera in Ukraine, are now considered national heroes.

This, of World War II, is a source of big contradiction in historical “orthodoxies”, not just for Russia and its neighbors, but for all countries of the World. It is clear that, because of its scope and its toughness, World War II could not have left the world unchanged. In fact, the main features of today’s world (American Hegemony, Europe’s division, resurgence of China, force of Russia), still depend on the outcomes of that war. Thus, no one of those who share the power in the world now has an interest to challenge the results of that war. Otherwise, America should give up hegemony, China its status, Russia its arms, and even the European elites their role as purported champions of western style freedom (whilst many, if not most of them, were, at the beginning, involved either in pro-communist, or in pro-fascist movements).

And, since symbolic power is stronger that military force, no one of the winners may give up to its own myths: not the war for democracy (when, in reality, the American war started with Pearl Harbour), not the cult of President Mao, not the one of the Great Patriotic War, not to the one of Résistance, a.s.o.. However, the interest of the Great Powers of today are often conflicting among them; so, some gaps open from time to time in the so-called “shared memory”: Bandera may become a national hero of Ukraine, and Stalin is a hero when he is seeming winning the war, but, therefore, the title may be withdraw, a tyrant when it is considered governing Russia.

We hope, now, that,65 years after the taking of the Reichstag,  20 years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, and after the useful tentative to invade militarily Southern Ossetia, the “European Civil War” is really to an end.

7.A Useless Slaughtering 

Since, as we have seen, such “European Civil War” was started, not by communism, but by nationalisms and democracies, the end of communism would not mean, by itself, the end of such war. And, in fact, after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, we have still had post-Yugoslav and post-Sovietic wars, which have not been fought by communists.

From another point of view, Americans pretend that they have won the “European Civil War” with her victory on Communism.This historical interpretation constitutes in itself a further source of new conflicts. In fact, considering only the clash among ideologies, it negates the role and existence of the European nations, including Russia and Europe as a whole, and pretends to assert an overall “moral” authority which, in reality, is challenged by many.

According to us, in reality, plays are still open today, precisely as they were open at the beginning of the “European Civil War”. This is a very risky situation, but it is also what renders it worthwhile working for the future of Europe.

Still one general consideration. It is not always true that “History may not be made with ‘Ifs’”. If, starting from 1815, Europeans, instead of going through the path of wars and revolutions, would have followed the one set by the “Russian” version of the Holy Alliance (the “Christian Nation”, as well as the “Europe of the Peoples”), they would probably have reached in a much easier way, through treaties and reforms, the same point where they have arrived now after so many conflicts.