Slavoj Zizek on the Bolsheviks' Red Terror

so i i want to now ask about uh some of the more controversial aspects of lenin which you alluded to earlier yeah yes um so you know when we had you on slavoy to talk about the french revolution um you offered what i thought was a very interesting and useful corrective to some of the standard liberal narratives around the jacobins and the terror and brothers it's true i mentioned this i think sorry if you are a humanitarian who think robespierre went too far downtown no even admitted yeah the problem with despair was even that he saw where the constant state of terror is leading and he was in the last year of his reign robespierre opposed with the idea how to limit terror and then he made a crucial mistake because with terror moderate by today he alienated of course the right wing but then in a desperate attempt to calm the situation to establish a balance he also did a purpose of those sanski lord the left and then he found himself in an empty space sorry go on yeah i mean but you know when you when you bring this up and that of course leads me to the red terror right uh the bolsheviks after the october revolution uh you know undertake a program to consolidate their power which among other things leads to the creation of the secret police the cheka and then of course during the russian civil war uh this group will carry out what we now call the red terror and the reason why i wanted to ask you about this is because if i'm not mistaken the bolsheviks modeled uh their program of you know um uh stamping out counter-revolutionary activity on what they understood the jacobins to have done so i suppose my question for you is how should we understand this time period or how should we understand the red terror i i agree it's an ambiguous difficult period but again we should clarify some things i forgot the name of a british general you know when there was a civil war all the world's powers joined in it against the new bolshevik regime this from big known fellows like even the writer british kid popular somerset mom he worked as a russian agent was sent with immense amount of money to undermine the bolshevik and uh you know what's important to know first if you do the simple inflation adjusted account of how much money western powers spent we are talking i read in a recent history account of sums approaching one one one uh one trillion of dollars in today's term so it wasn't a small operation second thing uh remember that when uh when at some point coltrack the admiral who was the most dangerous of counter-revolutionary heroes he held more than two-thirds of russia even beyond plural at some point bolshevik held only i think about like one seventh or even one ninth of a russian territory so what i want to say is this there was of course a a kind of uh unofficial embassy a british general worked with there to help call chuck and that some left guy should reprint this he wrote after the defeat of the count revolution his memoirs very honest you see we should learn from honest honest conservative opponents because he worked for us he said that whatever you say about bolsheviks he was shocked by the terror of this white armies you know what was the typical story bolsheviks were maybe a little bit rough blah blah but not really so contract came and did what incredible purges returning land to reach landlords and so on that's not only with trotsky's ingenious military machine that's called the bolshevik and then today when anti-semitism is prohibited a good thing you should especially note that among one of the first books that in contract territory they started to reprint like crazy were of course the protocols of zion you know yeah contract is at the beginning of this idea of uh of bolshevik revolution is part of a jewish plot and so on and so on so again what about the beginning of red terror now it so interesting to read good they don't have even to be biased by our leftist views not uh witness account for example you can download it for free on i don't know where youtube returned russell on the theory and practice of bolshevism he has many complaints but he's he admitted that at that point 1919 when that in spite of the terrible situation military and so on he didn't have any problem of uh of of contacting the opposition persons benefits all others who were still there talking with them you know what's uh the problem you know how that error began lenin till that period till 1920 i think do you know and this gives you a flare an idea of the situation there you know that lenin was simply driving around just with the software in his car you know what once happened to lenin in i think mid 1918 he was stopped out of moscow on his way to deliver a speech to some high school conclusion here he and his driver were stopped by a gank who took the car and didn't recognize them and that they walked away so then lenin and his driver somehow reached the nearest police station there they didn't believe him that he is learning the mad men go and so on and you know how that attention laning happened he was returning to kremlin again in a car and some women gathered at the entrance to kremlin started to shout at him you screwed up blah blah blah learning stopped the car went out begin to talk with them and then there was the no terror was strictly a reaction at the same time you know another figure now i will say something horrible but another figure to be partially rehabilitated is the one who is today painted as the ultimate evil the founder of trekka jarvinski he was an incredibly interesting person read the biography of him he always tried to limit the terror he saw the human costs and it was because of him all the time after the end of civil war after 1920 she all the time put the pressure on police bureau listen these guys are already two years in prison let's release them and then later before his death his big activity was to organize for literally two three million uh homeless children wandering around russian big cities to organize this so again the other thing is that you know it wasn't that we had a nice democratic order and then evil bolsheviks are introducing terror and so on don't underestimate again the absolutely terrorist nature of the of the account of the counter revolution that's why bolsheviks won not only because trotsky was a good organizer jumping up and down on his legendary train or whatever you know no it also don't underestimate it in spite of all distortions and so on the how do they call it uh socially liberating force in sexuality rights of women and so on it's breathtaking what happened then not only instant legalization of homosexuality but even freedom of women and so on this survived even i forgot the title of the movie till late 20s a little bit of it when i even don't know who shouted there is a famous movie about a young husband and wife a friend visits them and the wife falls in love with both men and then they lead a life marriage in three then there are some problems but everything is taken quite normally and so on it was again it was it was an incredible period incredible artistic productivity i mean we underestimate to what extent stalin not so much late 20s early 30s changed not only political situation but also the entire the entire cultural scene and to make one big distinct we can go on if you want later but i like this superficial sign of signs of deeper distinctions like you know with all his but he wasn't very paranoiac paranoia like enemies arrest them two things strike the eye always with lenin first the lack of personal than data when a guy lost lenin you usually even tried to find a way to use him for another lower job or marginal position he never had this vengeance spirit of now we have to kill him and so on for example you know all these are my bourgeois sources my god when i i read the book on that philosophic philosopher's vote or whatever you know in 21 22 they sent over 100 of academics to the west and there was a guy on the list whom lenin didn't like and he asked grinsky what about that guy he said yes he's summaries dying of some illness and so on and claiming instantly forgot about hatred and said oh my god help him get him an additional uh and even it's an incredible story you know who was the main menshevik who was quite a charming person he just did stick to this dogma martov leaning to the end remained warm towards him like when they sent a delegation in 22 i don't know when to the to the west and one of them met martha lenin immediately asked my god how is the guy and so on so and also considering his paranoia one could make such a nice distinction here for lenin there were renegades people who were once ours and then they become traitors okay but in stalinism you don't have renegades when let's say sorry i like this let's say i am stalin and you are some buhari type no logic is always if you give become now my enemy it means you are secretly back all the time already the enemy that's what's done the revolution just to betray it you know there is no renegade from the beginning you must be a traitor another thing lenin it may sound a little bit dogmatic but i think it's the correct category like to use the category of objective responsibility you may be a group humanitarian but you are doing things which objectively in this situation serve the enemy stalin is doing something else he immediately subjectivized this stalin doesn't say you are objectively serving the enemy stalin says no if you objectively serve the enemy it means that you are their spy and so on and so on it's a totally it's a totally different it's a totally different logic now i don't think there was a chance through some miracle some trucks like friends of mine have this dream you know if only lenin were to survive for three years more and whatever and made the pact with trotsky the situation was so difficult that i don't think they had a great chance i think if you ask me the most tragic moment of the october revolution was precisely at the end of the civil war because then it was also the end of let's call it state of emergency and then the real task began how to build a new society and it meant quite concrete things like even at the level of i don't know manners funerals sexual habits and so on precisely these unwritten rules of everyday life and so on this was if you ask me the true defeat but my final point you will like this answer when people don't jump too quickly from lenin czecho and so on to later stallionism you know which theory i love that uh the rise of the soviet state as we usually know it and associate with it you know was precisely the result of nap new economic politics which allowed for more freedom of capital even up to a point and so on and uh in stalin you find already at that point some crucial passages where he says okay we made a compromise in economy but not to lose power we have to strengthen our state power secret police and so on and so on so the paradox is dead the rise of secret police terror is precisely the hard line bolshevik post learning reaction to this economic liberalization fear of if we can sit there my god we have to have other apparatuses to control no i think i'm not here an optimist i don't believe in these magical stories and so on but i think that nonetheless we should treat even stalinism in some sense yes a great betrayal but our own betrayal it happened to our side in this sense it's a true tragedy fascism especially narcissism it's not a tragedy in what sense not it is for the millions to die but it's that uh some people came to power they said we will do bad things and look look they really did all the bad things you know but nonetheless lenin leninist revolution was an authentic attempt at emancipation and we have to analyze without any critical limitations how this happened i am not afraid to go even back to marx who sometimes neglected the problem of social organization of work in the sense that marx sometimes gives this image of communism as a totally self-transparent society where and it's not clear how some organ or society matter will organize and production and distribution and marks even very significantly often passes from plural to singular he says you know in his famous part in capital i think when he talks about different modes of production and he begins with robin john and then he says in communism we return to robinson only robinson is no longer one alone but some collective body and so on so this this is the trick to do it for us the sport is not to the game to play is not to blame max you know this eternal obsession where did it begin did it with stalin with lenin with marks with with jacobeans with oliver cronwell who is another of my good guys because i think if we play this game the definitive answer was provided although i don't quite agree with it by adorama and her kinder the break is at the very beginning you know that's the thesis of their dialectic of enlightenment that with the first primitive cavemen magic you know i sacrificed that animal so that like whatever manipulation is already there so we shouldn't fall into this on the other hand we should learn from conservatives in the sense that again we shouldn't fall into this trap of gradual progress the passage from classical marxism to leninist bolshevism and then to mao it's not a simple expansion from western europe to russia from russia no in some sense what again the great conservative my god eliot says that with every really new work of art in some sense the entire past english also no no after lenin you cannot read marx the same way even if lenin went much further it is the same with mao i'm very critical of some mouse things no and this is what confronts us today to do what lenin dude did in today's situation sorry go on yeah i was just gonna say uh you know leading from that um i want to go back to something that you mentioned the end of the russian civil war and lenin uh because i i uh a few years ago i believe you wrote an article for nlr for new left review uh where you look at some of lenin's writings right after the russian civil war and um you you know in one text in particular he uses the analogy of a mountain climber who's scaling it it's so good yeah so i was just gonna add you know so the the analogy is you know a mountain climber who's scaling a mountain reaches an impasse and has to move backwards in order to find another pass to move forward yeah so i i wanted to ask you why you find that text and that analogy uh so useful because lenny is very clear there his answer is not this evolutionary we we should stop at that level no he says literally we should go all the way back to the bottom and begin again and this is what lenin did already in the october revolution he didn't just say we should change marxist standard view of britain no he in a way by putting uh accent on on on farmers all that stuff and so on lenin was so refreshingly open here you know in one of his stacks from that period after world war sorry after the end of the civil war lenin says we have a paradox now we have a party represented working class on power but practically all the working class is dead that we can lenin was absolutely open but you know what's so great about lenin the usual socially democratic evolutionary guy would have said oh stop so to be an authentic working-class party we should step down and develop working class no lenin in this crazy paradoxical situation radical party on power without working class practically learning just in a principled but pragmatic way ask himself but what can we do what can we do and he found a way in this modernization especially simple civilization not in the western racist way but nonetheless so uh this is also what we have to do today if we were to have more time the pro the guy who is a problem today is you should do something jacobin about it it's incredible paradox maybe he's the most important intellectual today did he do something about vanc he's now one of the seven members of the standing committee of the police bureau the seven who basically run china the strongest and it's incredible what he did thirty years ago he wrote a book called america against america as a young guy he visited united states and in a very intelligent way he saw all the deadlocks already that led to trump populism social disintegration and so on and his big obsession was how to prevent that this will happen to china also and now it is happening to china and so the idea is that he is the brain behind see the chinese president's recent netherlands will they succeed i am my point is this one yes in our media you just hear what they do to uighurs to tibetans intellectual life and so on it's true i don't agree with that it's horrible but it's a wrong repressive answer to a very real problem of today's capitalism week ago even less i had here in ljubljana a round table with janis varuvakis my friend who in some sense is even more crazy than me in this radical sense but he said something which maybe it's a rhetoric exaggeration but it's right he said that didn't we notice that capitalism as we knew it liberal democratic capitalism is in the last years de facto disappearing because there are so many strange phenomena like you remember a year ago on the very day when it was reported that in united kingdom brutal product fell for 20 and in united states similar stock markets went up so it's as if this division between let's call it real capital and speculative exploded open that next thing how we are today witnessing what one cannot but call uh uh kane schematianism at reverse we are printing immense amounts of we sorry i would like to have some of them those who power banks immense amounts of money trillions but they are not invested in a canadian way into let's call it real people's needs production maybe a small part it all remains within this uh speculative circles like a big company like volkswagen had to be safe so they deutsche bank gives half a billion even more to volkswagen who buys their own stocks it all remains up there so this thing then there is i'm not sure the term is correct but it designates a real phenomenon this so-called uh neo-federal corporatism you know big corporations which as i developed in a couple of my books repetitively are privatizing our commons like if you buy books the comments of books lessons on its amazon the comments of private communication is facebook and so on and so on and this is no longer capitalism as we knew it this is a return to rent and so on and chinese are in some sense aware of this that capitalism as we knew it is uh is is disintegrating it's already tremendously changing now into something else so that's how i written my chinese friends confirmed this extraordinary news that now as part of this key presidency initiative you know what they did they opened in beijing a new stock market exchange to deal with small dynamic companies and so on it's as if the chinese are doing an absolutely crazy thing to break this new almost post-capitalist rule of big corporations they are trying to make a pact with small dynamic capitalism as if they saw it that the danger is so great of this new corporate rule and i even understand what they are doing in the wrong way what crazy things are happening there at the level of it's not just this anti-corporate rule used for workers equality as verification reminded me it's easy to just mock him as the new totalitarian but president he said something wonderfully dialectical now a couple of weeks ago he said that to listen at the intelligence insight to raise the ordinary people's standards we have to lower the growth the rise of production it's a very wise argument so as always then i give you back work i will finish with a dirty story which i like you know that now in china they prohibited what they call 996. okay dirty guy as i am from my youth we knew if i didn't do it you know what six nine means mutual oral sex position what is this china that the party is now even prohibiting certain sexual position no no and then i learned what it is it's the practice imposed by big corporation you work for 12 hours nine to nine for six days of the week so again we may disagree they do it in a authoritarian way and so on but they much more than we in the west they are confronting the right problems i'm just afraid that maybe it will not work but i think that their failure will be something horrible for the entire humanity if they fail because again they take problems much more seriously the basic problems and again what i'm saying is that uh this guy van kunin is defining himself as a neo-conservative in his books he quotes positively alan bloom the closing of the american mind huntington and so on all that stuff this is his limit i think that he sees all these topics that even conservatives today see the social disintegration and so on what he doesn't see i think is that uh this uh so what he doesn't see is that this let's call it without this time without any evil connotations soft fascist version because this is the dream of fascism let's keep capitalism but in a more balanced way counteracted by social solidarity values and so on and so on i don't think this solution in the long term works but it's extremely important if you like this video from the jacobin show please hit like and subscribe and share with your friends thanks [Music]

Channel: Jacobin

Views: 42,908

Keywords: slavoj zizek, russian revolution, bolsheviks, lenin, Dzerzhinsky, red terror, russian civil war, red army, white army, jacobin show, jen pan, nando vila

Id: oRVjZSeCmco

Length: 30min 6sec (1806 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 28 2021