The-Guillotine-at-Work-Vol-1-The-Leninist-Counter-Revolution.pdf

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THE GUILLOTINE AT WORK
Vol. 1: The Leninist Counter-Revolution
Gregory Petrovich Maximoff
First edition published Chicago, 1940, by the Alexander Berkman Fund under the title: The Guillotine At Work: Twenty Years of
Terror in Russia (Data and Documents)
Second edition, Volume 1, published
1979 by Cienfuegos Press,
Over the Water, Sanday, Orkney, KW 17 2BL
This, third (revised and corrected) edition, published in 2013 by
ChristieBooks, PO Box 35, Hastings, East Sussex, TN34 1ZS, UK
Introduction by Bill Nowlin
Cover illustration by the late Flavio Costantini. Jacket design by Simon Stern
‘
(Vol. 2 –
Data and Documents
– to follow)
ISBN 978-0-904564-23-5
http://www.christiebooks.com/ChristieBooksWP/
christie@btconnect.com
Contents
INTRODUCTIONby
Bill Nowlin
GREGORY PETROVICH MAXIMOFFby
Sam Dolgoff
PUBLISHER’S PREFACE
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
PART ONETHE
SOURCES OF THE RUSSIAN TERROR
LENIN’S ROAD TO POWER
THE ABSOLUTIST AND TERRORISTIC NATURE
OF THE MARXIST STATE
THE “PREPARATORY” PERIOD OF TERROR
THE BOLSHEVIK COUNTER-REVOLUTION BEGINS
THE BLOODY ORGY OF THE MASS TERROR
THE FIGHT AGAINST LIBERTY
THE “BLOODLESS” FRONT
THE SECOND YEAR OF THE “BLOODLESS" FRONT AND
“PEACEFUL” RECONSTRUCTION
THE TERROR IN THE LAST YEARS OF LENIN’S LIFE
THE TORTURES
LENIN’S TERROR WITHIN THE PARTY
STALIN’S TERROR WITHIN THE COUNTRY
STALIN’S INTRA-PARTY TERROR
1. The Leaders Unmasked
2. The Bloody Hurricane of Death.
3. The Final Phase of the Terroristic Cycle.
4. Formation of the New Classes and Stalin’s
Most Recent Intra-Party Terror.
WHITHER RUSSIA?
INTRODUCTION
by Bill Nowlin
THE GUILLOTINE AT WORK
offers us two very important lessons. First of all, Maximoff
describes the terror under Lenin. His book stands as one of the most comprehensive documentations of
the terror of the early Soviet state, which began under Lenin and was not just a Stalinist development.
The principal lesson Maximoff wished to communicate, though, was that Marxism-Leninism was a
theory, which, despite its revolutionary style, was in essence counter-revolutionary.
This line of argument is a difficult one for many people to accept. While all but the most dogmatic
Stalinists recognise and recoil at the brutality of the Stalin era, it is believed almost equally widely
that this was due to a political deformation characteristic of Stalin the man and not an endemic feature
of Marxism-Leninism itself. Lenin is permitted to retain an aura of sacrosanctity. Whoever might
broadly condemn Marxism-Leninism rather than focus their critique on the Stalin personality cult is
immediately suspect as an unregenerate reactionary. To avoid this charge, Maximoff has confined the
material he presents to that which emanates from socialist, anarchist and official Bolshevik sources.
The idea that the Great Russian Revolution was ultimately perverted and channelled into an
authoritarian and repressive regime is not a new idea. Most feel this occurred after Lenin’s death.
Even as honest and sincere a work as Roy Medvedev’s
Let History Judge,
a masterful and devastating
dissection of Stalinist Russia, lets Lenin off scot free. It is only to “the typical bourgeois historian,”
suggests Medvedev, that “Stalin’s activity is seen as the logical continuation of Lenin’s …”
Medvedev is, legitimately, fearful that a wholesale rejection of proletarian socialism might result
from attributing to Marxism and Leninism itself the origins of the terror and crimes of the Stalin era;
however, there do exist other forms of proletarian socialism than Marxism and Leninism and the
dedicated revolutionary must hold each and every one up to the most penetrating criticism. Clarity of
understanding is essential to the development of authentic revolutionary consciousness. If we are to
learn from the mistakes of the past, we cannot exempt any tendency or any revolutionary figure from
dispassionate consideration of their contributions and their shortcomings.
1
Lenin, according to Maximoff, “followed in the footsteps of the French Jacobins.” He believed in the
necessity and even desirability of terror to implement his programme, in himself and the legitimacy of
his authority. Maximoff presents scores of quotations from Lenin’s published works in which Lenin
urged shootings of political opponents, urged against sentimentality in the waging of political struggle
and urged his fellow Bolsheviks to adopt unashamedly a policy of red terror. Maximoff charges that
Lenin deliberately chose to provoke civil war in the countryside, to terrorise the peasantry and force
their compliance with the forced grain requisitions, to subject them to state regimentation: “That we
brought civil war to the village is something that we hold up as a merit,” wrote Lenin.
2
3
The use of the death penalty was very rare in Tsarist Russia. When the Bolsheviks came to power one
of the first things they did (in Lenin’s absence) was to abolish the death penalty. Lenin reacted
furiously, “beside himself with indignation” in Trotsky’s description. “How,” he demanded to know,
“can a revolution be made without executions'?” Maximoff compiles, from official Bolshevik
sources, statistical summaries of the number of executions in each year of Lenin’s rule. Estimates
based on these figures range from 200,000 to over 1,500,000 shootings during Lenin’s period of
4

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