The October Revolution(s)
The road to hell is paved with good
intentions and it behooves us on certain anniversaries to reflect how that
innocuous path taken in the beginning led right to the sulfurous pits of fire.
And no I am not referring to the recent history of demonetization and its
appalling aftermath. I am jogging your memory back to a similar economic
terrorism let loose on an unsuspecting population based on the noble ideals of
social equity and punishing corruption.
A hundred years ago, back in 1917,
there was a large country, riven with rifts between the devastatingly poverty
ridden majority populace who lived hand to mouth existence as serfs and the fat
cats who ruled over them by colluding with those in power, all of which was
centered around a single family rule. Sounds bizarrely similar to current India
and a certain congress party? No, I am talking about imperial Russia and the
ruling tsar family. There was even a secret advisor who had the ear of the
empress like a certain pc of the UPA government who was widely blamed for all
the illogic laws affecting the poor populace and whose ill-intentioned advice
was responsible for the majority of the anti-people edicts which so poisoned
the serfs and peasants against the then ruling government of the tsar.
History, shows again and again that
rulers who listen to the backroom boys with no ear to the ground among the
people are the ones who end up with all the opprobrium and hate of the people
while the backroom manipulators escape with their reputation’s untarnished to
serve another set of rulers again. Meanwhile the long suffering poor and
downtrodden looked out for a messiah, even if he appears to be a snake-oil
specialist to all un-blinkered realists and a charismatic demagogue appeared on
the horizon – someone who promised to end the single family rule and put the
fat cat capitalists in jail. The October revolution happened and blood flowed
all over Russia. The imperial family was decimated, those close to the tsar
were hounded out of Russia and all looked rosy.
But. As a corollary to the main show
of political freedom, the new rulers of Russia, Lenin and his thug, Stalin, a
backroom manipulator of the party, who together ruled over the government and
the party decided they needed a grand economic narrative, something to change
the course of history and etch their names in gold for posterity. So despite
the best advices from a host of economic experts, the two not-so-wise men of
Russia decided to implement socialism in one stroke, overnight. Eliminate
private property by converting it all into public property and hence destroying
the ill-gotten gains of the corrupt with one surgical strike. Anyone who
protested the illogicity of such drastic action and its obvious effect on the
economy were labelled anti-nationals and either shot or sent into re-education
camps in Siberia, something which has thankfully not happened over here.
The move to destroy all property
ownership was received with acclaim by the poor and downtrodden as they were
happy (vicariously) to see the rich suffer the same fate as themselves, much
similar to a hundred years later when everyone was happy about their neighbors
and dog queuing up outside the atm’s to receive two, two thousand rupee notes a
day from the ration shop turned ATM’s. But such vicarious pleasure at the
sufferings of others only offers temporary gratification and does not feed the
belly. The economy took a nose dive and crash landed so badly that the starving
masses instead of getting their bellies filled just had new competition for
scarce resources in the form of the newly poor and desperate. These were mostly
the middle class and the intellectuals who were treated with contempt and
anathema by the illiterate thugs now in power and who had always harbored a
secret envy of the educated middle class who had till then somehow managed to
just about stay above the poverty line.
And as a corollary, the uber-rich
managed to flee the country with their ill-gotten gains, courtesy the corrupt
amongst the new ruling dispensation to safe havens in Great Britain aka how Vijay
Mallaya and Lalit Modi fled a 100 years later. The thugs of the ruling party, local
commissars who let their petty power go their heads, stifled dissent in the
name of patriotism, destroyed all individual initiative in the name of progress
and instituted a widespread surveillance system to root out those desperate
enough to speak the truth and all this in the name of doing good to the country.
And Russia instead of getting the
change they hoped for, went into the dark ages for a hundred years with
countless millions dying of food shortages and official apathy while the rulers
celebrated each anniversary with pomp and pageantry and self-pats on the backs
for achieving equality and egalitarianism. The economic experts re-wrote fudged
data numbers showing bountiful harvests even as millions were slowly starving.
The newspapers , the paid media of those times, reported the obviously false
data as verified news and sang paeans to the rulers and everything looked
hunky-dory till it all came crashing down almost overnight and all the lies
were exposed for what they were, mere self-delusion.
The October Revolution of 1917 has
now been universally condemned by history as a colossal failure led by
megalomaniacal rulers who brooked no dissent in their belief in their own
infallibility. History has a way of surprising us when it repeats itself, first
as a tragedy and subsequently as a farce. To conclude, I can only repeat the
cliché that those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it.
Unfortunately we didn’t and we did. I rest.
