The forerunner of the KGB was the Cheka whose chief was the Polish aristocrat Felix Dzerzhinsky, a fanatical Leninist. From the moment the Cheka was set up in December 1917 it was authorised by Lenin to unleash a reign of terror on the population, the extent and savagery of which was unprecedented. Even so, Lenin continually urged it on to even more murderous activities, at one point admonishing it for not executing enough counter-revolutionaries. Within a matter of weeks of being established the Cheka was operating the labour camps that set the pattern for the Gulag. One of Lenin’s early instructions was that one out of ten of those found guilty of idling were to be immediately shot. Another of his written instructions ordered a Soviet to “...instantly apply mass terror immediately, to execute and exterminate hundreds of prostitutes, drunken soldiers, former officers, etc”. (Robert Conquest Lenin, Fontana-Collins p. 100). Lenin also savaged what he sneeringly called

a narrow-minded intelligentsia in the Party who sob and fuss over mistakes made by the Cheka… when we are reproached with cruelty, we wonder how people can forget the most elementary Marxism. (Ibid. p. 101)

From December 1917 to the end of 1920 the Cheka shot at least 50,000 people. And this on Lenin’s authority. Compare this with the Tsar’s record. From the 1890s to 1916 executions averaged 17 a year, usually for murder. (Ibid. p. 127). This fact did not stop Adams from including the period 1900 to 1917 with the murderous communist era. Thus making the Tsar Nicholas look as bad as any Chekist mass murderer.

In his last address to a Party Congress Lenin passionately exhorted the Party to “punish strictly, severely, unsparingly the slightest breach of discipline”. “Our revolutionary courts must shoot”. (Johnson, p. 85). In 1918 he told the Petrograd Soviet in no uncertain terms that “the energy and nature of mass terror must be encouraged”. This is the man who gave Trotsky permission to massacre the Kronstadt strikers.

Lenin always struck me as a man intoxicated with violence, wallowing in its degradation as his appetite for terror became insatiable. His love of violence was not created by a revolutionary situation. As early 1901 he stated: “In principle we have never renounced terror and cannot renounce it”. “If [any man is against the revolution] we’ll stand him up against a wall”. Stalin learnt the philosophy of terror from Lenin who bequeathed to him its bloody instruments so that he could continue with the socialist revolution’s legacy. It was Lenin who instigated the red terror. He was the one who created the bloodbath, Stalin just kept the taps running. The late General Volkogonov’s biography of Lenin blew the whistle on the myth that Lenin was not the father of Stalinist terror. Volkogonov, who had been a Leninist, said that for years

[e]ven when he was seriously ill, Lenin never lost sight of his obsession with ‘cleansing Russia for all time’, and he continued to give Stalin instructions to carry out his punitive orders through the Cheka. Stalin was still following Lenin’s advice in the 1930s… (Dimitri Volkogonov Lenin: A New Biography, Free Press 1994 p. 269)

For twenty-five years after the Twentieth Congress the Russian people ask themselves where Stalin had acquired the cruelty which he inflicted on his fellow countrymen. None of us ...could begin to imagine that the father of domestic Russian terrorism, merciless and totalitarian, was Lenin. (Ibid. p. 363)

Volkogonov again:

The idea of the concentration camp system — the State Camp Administration, or GULAG — and the appalling purges of the 1930s are commonly associated with Stalin, but the true father of the Bolshevik concentration camps, the executions, the mass terror and the ‘organs’ which stood above the state, was Lenin. Against the background of Lenin’s terror, it becomes easier to understand the methods of Stalin’s inquisition, which was capable of executing someone solely on the grounds of suspicion. (Ibid. p. 235)

The socialist likes of Adams cannot bring themselves to admit any of this, even in their most private moments. No matter what, Stalin will always be the villain, as if he came from nowhere. Adams said: “I thought I knew a lot of modern Russian history until I saw” War — Blood Upon the Snow. On which planet had Adams been living? The crimes and atrocities of the Soviet regime have been well documented in the West since Lenin’s coup. (For example, there is Boris Souvarine’s Stalin, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1940). Those who tried to bring them to the public’s attention were always denigrated by leftists as Cold War warriors, right-wing reactionaries, etc.

Sure Russia suffered after the disintegration of the Soviet empire. But her economic conditions were not brought on by free markets but socialism. Decades of socialist planning had created masses of malinvestments, declining output, deteriorating health and living standards. All of which Professor Ludwig von Mises predicted in his brilliant book Socialism which was first published in 1922. In the section The Productivity of Labour, he wrote:

Without troubling about the fact that they had not succeeded in disproving the assertion of the liberal school that productivity under Socialism would sink so low that want and poverty would be general, socialist writers began to promulgate fantastic assertions about the increase in productivity to be expected under Socialism. (Ludwig von Mises Socialism, New Haven Yale University Press 1962 p. 182).

In 1980 Professor Pipes of Harvard told a Senate subcommittee that

The Soviet citizen today is poor not only in comparison with his counterpart in other European countries, but also in comparison with his own grandfather. In terms of essentials — food clothing, and housing — the Soviet population as a whole is worse off than it was before the revolution and in the 1920s . . . the Soviet citizenry is positively destitute.

All it took to finally bring down this rotting totalitarian structure was the determination of the much maligned President Reagan. We should also remember is that because Lenin and his disciples successfully destroyed those institutions within which markets operate successfully much of what still passes for markets in Russia is nothing but glorified cronyism and gangsterism. But how many Russian would willingly swap even these for Lenin’s firing squads and death camps? I know Adams and his fellow leftists wouldn’t.

Adams at his most bizarre asked “who suffered the most. . . . The Cambodians as victims of themselves”. Does he think they committed mass suicide? More than 2 million Cambodian were murdered by communist fanatics. One of the worst crimes committed in the twentieth century and one that only a totalitarian ideology could inspire. Yet Adams still cannot bring himself to accept that communism was the real criminal. When Adams interviewed (I think it was 1989) Dr Haing Ngor, author of Surviving The Killing Fields, on his radio show, Adams couldn’t seem bring himself to accept Ngor’s correct observation that communist ideology was responsible for the mass slaughter in Cambodia and Mao’s China. Like all true believers in the Church of Socialism Adams lives in a state of permanent denial.

In another of his many left-wing diatribes (The Australian, 25 September 1999) Adams once again made his pro-communist sympathies abundantly clear when he expressed the opinion that resistance to communist aggression, even in the form of the Western alliance, had been wrong. To Adams’ leftwing mindset such resistance was immoral.

By keeping Adams shocking record on communist aggression and tyranny in mind when reading his current diatribes against Bush and Howard and his sneering references to the Iraq War one can see where he is coming from. Not only that, one can also see why he never referred to Saddam’s crimes, the mass torture, the mass graves, even ones filled with children. To do so would be to draw attention to the overwhelming moral dimensions of the war.

By refusing to speak out against Saddam’s sadistic regime, just as he refused to condemn communism, he has made himself a party to its crimes and in doing so revealed his own nauseating hypocrisy. But this is par for the course for the diseased left as the de facto alliance between the left and Islamofascism shows.

Note: The reason why our leftists get away with so much is that our so-called rightwing columnists prefer to play ‘gotcha’ rather than do the work that is necessary if Adams and his fellow lefties are to be exposed as callous political bigots who despise their country.

Why are so many journalists like Phillip Adams out and out bigoted liars?

Why the left support the BBC’s neo-Stalinist agitprop that defends treason

Gerard Jackson is also Brookes’ economics editor