Leonard Schapiro and the Russian Revolutions

‘MORALITY’, LENIN TOLD THE 529 APPRENTICE APPARATCHIKI gathered at the Third Congress of the Communist Youth League in October 1920, ‘is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the working people around the proletariat, which is building a new, a communist society… We do not believe in an eternal moralit and we expose the falseness of all fables about morality.’ Lenin's rapt young listeners learned the lesson well: for some it paved the way to high office in Stalin's party, state and police machines, across the corpses of Lenin's own comrades ‘objectively’ become ‘enemies of the people’; many were to perish as they lived by it. The goal was sublime: the ‘true‘ freedom and unity natural to Man, but thwarted till now by class division and exploitation. For such a goal all expedient instruments and methods were fitting. To spurn vile means where these advanced ‘communism’ was the true immorality.