Apologists for the October disaster insist that it was the ‘greatest event in human history’. They say this to suggest not merely that it had a greater impact on the world than anything else, but to indicate moral approval. Aside from the fact that it was a catastrophe, there are so many events in human history which are far more admirable, and have had a far more beneficial and longer-lasting effect on the species, than the barbarous Bolshevik insurrection of October 1917.
Whenever someone makes this idiotic claim, ask them – greater than what? The discovery of penicillin in 1928, which has saved hundreds of millions lives? The Green Revolution in agriculture in the middle of the twentieth century, which saved 100 million lives in the developing world? Note that this was pioneered not by the so-called ‘workers’ states’ of the USSR and its fellow Leninist regimes with their ‘progressive’, nationalised economies, but by ‘bourgeois’ American politicians like Henry Wallace, the do-gooding liberal agronomist Norman Borlaug and large American agribusinesses. Leftists carp and snipe at Borlaug, but the fact is that his methods succeeded in delivering what the so-called planned economy never did for any agricultural sector anywhere in the world.
What about the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions in the United Kingdom, which revolutionised the productive forces and produced far more impressive results than the Soviet economy ever did, relative to other nations? The Information Revolution, which passed the USSR by? We are only scratching the surface when it comes to the future impacts of social media, the Internet, mobile phones etc on human society. The Russian Revolution already looks like a quaint feature of an all-too-distant past, one of those odd and anomalous eruptions that happens every now and again over the course of human history.
What of the founding of the major religions? Christianity, Islam and Judaism have had far greater impact on human history and society than the October coup of 1917, and have arguably done far more good, even with all their crimes and impositions, than Communist tyranny has done for anybody. The unification of Europe around a common Christian culture, and the unifying of the Middle East around an Arab-Islamic one, has, for better or worse, shaped our world. Consider also the impact of the Reformation, which tore Christendom in two, and paved the way for modern liberalism as a direct response to the civic bloodletting between rival Christian sects.
Let us leave the field of economic and social history and look at political events. The American Revolution established the most powerful and influential bourgeois republic the world has ever seen, and the world’s only superpower, a country which, for all its flaws, has influenced human history for the better. (If you disagree, I’d like you to consider what a ‘Chinese’ or ‘Soviet’ century would have looked like.) Christopher Hitchens was right when he noted that it was, ultimately, the only revolution which continues to resonate in the twenty-first century. Bolshevism is dead, killed by its own unreason. The French Revolution is regarded with horror and contempt by most people outside of leftist academics (the armchair revolutionaries of the ivory tower) and Marxists, who romanticise the role played by Robespierre and the Jacobins. Moreover, it culminated in Napoleon, and his subsequent defeat at Waterloo, which left France weaker, poorer and less populous than ever before, and discredited the idea of violent revolution for a century. (The revolutions of 1848 would not have met with the ruthless reprisals they did at the hands of the ruling class if the French Revolution had not existed as an unwelcome example.) Anglo-American liberalism, not French Jacobinism, would provide to the world the model of what a successful, free society, shorn of medieval distortions and feudal despotism, can achieve. (It is worth noting that America never had one-party dictatorship or a Terror, and the brutal civil war over the issue of slavery saw the enhancement, not the diminishment, of its democratic ideals, unlike with the Bolshevik despotism during the Russian civil war. You simply can’t picture John Adams and Thomas Jefferson sending each other to the guillotine for the crime of counter-revolution.)
The Meiji Restoration in Japan, which saw the rise of the modern Japanese state, and helped make it the powerhouse it is today? A greater event than the October Revolution. The Chinese Revolution, which made modern China, may turn out to be even more influential than the October Revolution that inspired it. The Chinese Communist Party enjoys a global reach that Stalin would have envied. Its state-capitalist economy is a far more serious threat to Western pre-eminence than the Soviet planned economy ever was.
Let us not forget the victory over Hitler in WWII, made possible by the determination of the bourgeois American republic to come to the aid of a Europe in mortal peril, the bravery of a plucky British prime minister who was willing to fight Hitler to the end, and rightly saw in him a figure of cosmic evil, and the victory on the Eastern Front, enabled by the generous Lend-Lease program that allowed the Soviets a breathing space to defeat the very Hitlerian tyranny that they had previously been allied with. The successful salvaging of South Korea from communism in the Korean War of the 1950s enabled the development of one of the world’s premier success stories of liberal capitalism. Its impoverished neighbour is still a Stalinist slave state, one of the last bulwarks of Leninist ideology. The successes of the West German state after WWII, clawing back its moral legitimacy after the stain of Nazi barbarism by pushing for European unity, and the impressive economic growth it and other Western nations attained during this period – these are far more admirable than the October larceny in 1917. The return of De Gaulle to power in France in 1958, and his ten glorious years as President, including overseeing record economic growth, European integration, the peaceful secession of Algeria, and his stinging defeat of the leftist revolutionaries in May 1968, indeed, Gaullism as a phenomenon tout court, is an event far greater, and more resonant today, than the stupidities and crimes of Black October. The triumph of Thatcherism in the UK in 1979, and the defeat of the leftist trade union cartel that exerted a stranglehold over the British economy, is a greater event than the October coup in Petrograd in 1917. The British decision to join the European brotherhood and enter the European Economic Community (the future European Union) in 1973, and the subsequent vote to remain within it in 1975, was a greater event than the Bolshevik coup of 1917.
The peaceful restoration of democracy in Spain, Portugal and Greece in the latter part of the 20th century, the founding of NATO and the European Union that has helped bring peace and prosperity to the continent, the reunification of Germany – all are far greater, more inspirational events than the October swindle in Petrograd in 1917, an event that involved a tiny handful of naive peasant soldiers being directed like chess pieces by the malign operators and communist fanatics holed up in the Smolny, as they prepared to deal a death blow to the democratic promises of the February Revolution by claiming that they were saving it. The successful civil rights struggle in America against the moral stain of racist oppression against the black population (the culmination of a struggle that went back to the time of slavery), proves that liberal democracy is superior to any totalitarian, Leninist regime. (A Soviet Martin Luther King would have been sent straight to a gulag, and the entire rebellious ethnic population deported to Siberia before you could say ‘shortnin bread’.)
Women being given the vote in one country after another over the course of the twentieth century, after centuries of exclusion from the public sphere, the acknowledgement after WWII that there was something called ‘Universal Human Rights’ (making it a moral duty for all nations to avoid the repeat of anything like the Holocaust) – all of these things are more worthy of celebration than the Bolshevik holdup operation of 1917. The legalisation of homosexuality and divorce across the Western world marked a death-blow to the tyranny of a homophobic and misogynistic religious tradition which kept LGBT people in hiding, and shackled women to abusive relationships. These, too, deserve celebration over the monstrous coup that made the homophobic, misogynistic Soviet tyranny a possibility.
The revolt of the Kronstadt sailors against Bolshevik tyranny – that was a far greater and more admirable event than the October coup of 1917. The Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, which was quite as ferocious and murderous as the October Revolution in Russia (albeit with the bulk of the carnage spread out over a longer time period), at least resulted in a far less brutal regime, which managed to stay in power for roughly as long as the USSR existed, and bring all the blessings of modernity to the country without imposing a planned economy and trying to spread communism worldwide. The victory of the Mensheviks in the Russian soviet elections of 1918 was a far greater event than the Bolshevik coup in October 1917 – the Bolsheviks had to pull out all the stops to crush soviet democracy and save their dictatorship. The century-long Irish struggle for freedom from British oppression is much more impressive than the opportunistic Bolshevik seizure of power in the midst of a collapse of the Russian state. The restoration of the Polish state after WWI, following over a century of Russian imperial occupation, its defeat of a Bolshevik invasion in 1920 (saving the West from the Soviet horde) and its second restoration after the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe in the 1980s are all far greater events than Lenin’s takeover.
In recent decades, the (largely peaceful) revolutions of 1989 brought down the tyranny of Stalinism, much to the dismay of orthodox Trotskyists, who lamented the death of their beloved planned economy in favour of a successful model of liberal-democratic capitalism. (Contrast this to the mass murder and mayhem following the October coup of 1917.) Here is Leszek Kolakowski in the early 1990s mocking these people:
‘As to the various leftist sects of Trotskyite or Maoist persuasion, they may survive because their virtue, unlike that of the Stalinist parties, has been to remain completely and happily immune from all reality. Though they claimed to be ideologically independent of Sovietism, they lived under the umbrella of Soviet “socialism”; their pathetic sobbing at the sight of crumbling tyrannies can now be heard. But they will possibly survive (perhaps except for strictly terrorist organizations directly or indirectly supported by the KGB) because, not unlike adventist or millenarian sects, they have voluntarily decided to live permanently in the immutable reality of the past. They may survive for centuries, excommunicating each other as agents of imperialism, scientifically predicting each year that the next year will bring the cataclysmic and irreversible world crisis of capitalism, as a result of which “the masses” will grant them the dictatorial power they deserve, given the correctness of their scientific theory. A friend told me that he once met in America, long ago, the basilissa of Byzantium, who kept her dynastic legitimacy intact. Five centuries cannot abrogate the legitimacy, since the pagans had no right to destroy the empire. So, there is no reason that the legitimate heirs of Lenin and Trotsky should not continue to make their claims for the next half millennium.’
Sounds like a brilliant summary of the IMT/RCI types who mourn the overthrow of the failed Leninist slave states of Russia and Eastern Europe in favour of liberal democracy. These events are far more admirable and praise-worthy than the disastrous Bolshevik coup, and, moreover, had genuine popular support from the masses, unlike Lenin and Trotsky’s putsch. Filled with Nietzschean ressentiment as the glaring failure of Leninism, all they can do is slander and wail in the face of the overwhelming rejection of communism by the human race.
The founding of Israel in 1948 as a haven for the Jewish people, and as a refounding of their ancient Biblical state, against all the odds, just years after the Holocaust, was a greater event than the October Revolution. Israel has contributed more to humanity in science, technology and humanitarian endeavour than the Leninist slave state ever did. Indeed, Israel has now (as of 2025) lasted somewhat longer than the USSR did, despite far more perilous ‘objective conditions’. The Islamic Revolution in Iran of 1979, for all its evils, is having more resonance in our day and age than the failed October Revolution – the Khomeinist state is very much a reality and is still exporting revolution, whereas the Soviet state is dead and never coming back. The liberation of Iraq from Saddmist tyranny in 2003, despite the mistakes and stupidities of the Bush administration, was a greater event than the October Revolution. The defeat of the murderous tyrant Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian Civil War last December was a greater event than the October Revolution.
What about the field of art and culture? What of the Renaissance, which saw the revival of a whole world of lost Greco-Roman learning and literature within the bowels of an intellectually-curious Christendom, emerging from under the monopoly of the priesthood on the European mind? Niccolo Machiavelli, Michelangelo, da Vinci, Galileo Galilei, Erasmus – are these not men far more intelligent, talented and admirable in their achievements than the bloody butchers Lenin and Trotsky? Did the USSR ever produce people of such eminence in their fields? With the odd exception, no. Its greatest artists, Shostakovich, Bulgakov, Pasternak etc, were hounded by a brutal regime that could only tolerate geniuses if they agreed to be slaves. If the USSR had never existed, the cultural and technological level of humanity would be little different. To borrow a phrase from Trotsky, it contributed little that was essential to the treasure-store of humanity. Are there any great novels from the Soviet period (novels which are pro-communist, that is) which retain a hold on the imagination of the cultured man or woman in the same way that Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov still does? And he, a great reactionary and apologist for the Tsars!
The debut of the Beatles in the 1960s, the rise of the inimitable balladeer Frank Sinatra in the 1930s and 1940s, Gustav Mahler’s composition of his Third Symphony in 1896 – all are far greater events than the October disaster of 1917. Every year that Dickens published a novel, every time Lord Byron penned a poem, every time Beethoven composed a symphony, every time yet another scientific discovery was made in any Western nation at any time since the Enlightenment, that was a greater event than the stupid and barbaric October insurrection. Every time Nietzsche, standing tall and rapt on the heights of the Engadin, had a profound insight into the human condition, and wrote it down in the pages of the notebooks that would become his famous works, that was a greater event than the October Revolution. I give the floor to one of Dostoevsky’s finest creations, the pitiful, disillusioned ex-radical Stepan Trofimovich from Demons, who repudiates socialism and chooses art and culture over the leftist obsession with material progress:
…”Messieurs, the last word in this matter is all-forgiveness. I, an obsolete old man, I solemnly declare that the spirit of life blows as ever and the life force is not exhausted in the younger generation. The enthusiasm of modern youth is as pure and bright as in our time. Only one thing has happened: the displacing of purposes, the replacing of one beauty by another! The whole perplexity lies in just what is more beautiful: Shakespeare or boots, Raphael or petroleum?”
…”And I proclaim,” Stepan Trofimovich shrieked, in the last extremity of passion, “and I proclaim that Shakespeare and Raphael are higher than the emancipation of the serfs, higher than nationality, higher than socialism, higher than the younger generation, higher than chemistry, higher than almost all mankind, for they are already the fruit, the real fruit of all mankind, and maybe the highest fruit there ever may be! A form of beauty already achieved, without the achievement of which I might not even consent to live…Oh, God!” he clapsed his hands, “ten years ago I cried out in the same way from a platform in Petersburg, exactly the same things and in the same words, and in exactly the same way they understood nothing, they laughed and hissed, as now; short people, do you know that mankind can live without the Englishman, it can live without Germany, it can live only too well without the Russian man, it can live without science, without bread, and it only cannot live without beauty, for then there would be nothing at all to do in the world! The whole secret is here, the whole of history is here! Science itself would not stand for a minute without beauty – are you aware of that, you who are laughing? – it would turn into boorishness, you couldn’t invent the nail!…I will not yield!” he cried absurdly in conclusion, and banged his fist on the table with all his might.
Only people with an impoverished sense of history, brainwashed adherents of Leninist sects, or leftist fanatics who fetishise ‘working-class history’, ‘class struggle’, ‘economic planning’ and other such ridiculous shibboleths, can seriously say that the Russian tragedy in 1917 was somehow a greater event than things which have been objectively far better for the human race, or have had more of an influence on world events, than Soviet communism. One might also add that only people with no serious cultural interests, or meaningful hinterland outside political activism, will fetishise and romanticise a single political event like the October Revolution, to the exclusion of every inspirational non-political event that has ever happened in human history.
With that, I rest my case. The October Revolution was not the greatest event in human history, not even close. The number of events that rank above it in influence or in moral stature are numberless. Marxism is the work of the devil, and the essence of Leninism is lies, murder and crime. There are far worthier aspects of the human story that we should celebrate. Let the gangsters of October, who seized control of a great European civilisation and plunged it into the abyss (holding over 150 million innocent people hostage in the process) lie in their cold graves, whilst we celebrate what is highest in the human spirit.