While we’re distracted reliving last year’s election, a graver anniversary will be passing by. On Nov. 8, 1917, at 2:10 a.m., Vladimir Lenin’s soldiers stormed the Winter Palace after a two-day siege and found the men who’d fall to their coup. They stopped the clock in the former imperial dining room—to mark the first minute of a “New World Order.”
The revolutionary leader had slithered back from exile to overtake a divided provisional government—weakened thanks to uprisings that boiled over when he fled to Finland—and seize the state for the Soviets. It was less a workers’ revolt than one man’s nose for political opportunity that gave us the first communist government exactly 100 years ago.
The world’s deadliest ideology, we’ve learned since then, devours innocent citizens; first it ensnares the egalitarian, then it rewards the opportunistic autocrat. Or, we ought to have learned this. In 2017, 69 percent of Americans polled by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation underestimate the combined death toll of a century’s communist and socialist reign. A plurality of respondents guessed fewer than 25 million—when the true figure is at least four times that.
And, as VCMF also found, sympathy for Marxist ideology and communist government are highest among those between the ages of 20 and 35. A 53 percent majority of Senator Bernie Sanders’ most loyal age bracket believes the U.S. economy works against them; 51 percent say they’d rather live in a socialist or communist country.
It’s more confusion than corruption working against anti-communist enlightenment, VCMF executive director Marion Smith tells me. According to this year’s poll, 69 percent of respondents failed to choose the correct definition for communism in a multiple-choice question. In last year’s VCMF poll, 64 percent of the socialism-sympathetic generation agreed with the Marxist aphorism, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”—but 68 percent agreed with Milton Friedman that, “A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither.”
Student activists flipped off the Angel of Democracy memorial on the Mall earlier this year, a bizarre disrespect to the dead. The memorial is modeled on the statue torn down at Tiananmen Square, where hundreds of student activists were brutally killed by Communist soldiers little more than a quarter-century ago.
These protesters may be among the 45 percent of Americans who don’t know the name Mao Zedong. (His successor who commanded the 1989 massacre would doubtless score an even lower name recall.) The 16 percent who believe socialism and communism were “20th century problems” surely belong to the 61 percent majority who admitted unfamiliarity with the name Maduro.
Smith sees a silver lining to all this youthful ignorance. “Our poll also found that they overwhelmingly also just don’t understand what communism and socialism are. They can’t define it, and they are grossly ignorant of the scale of human suffering under communist regimes,” but he makes the case that this is good news.
“When presented with the facts, they can’t help but reject communism and Marxist ideals because of the perfect record of destruction they lead to.” Speaking on college campuses over the last few years, he says he’s seen it firsthand: Students disdain western democracy, until face-to-face with the historical, and present, reality of its alternatives.
VCMF, begun by Lee Edwards and Lev Dobriansky in 1990, will commemorate the lives lost under communist tyranny with a rich program this week—honoring hundreds of dissidents and dignitaries. They expect a statement from President Trump to mark the somber centennial, and plan to announce an anti-communist caucus in Congress, chaired by Democrats Marcy Kaptur and Dan Lipinski and Republicans Dennis Ross and Chris Smith. In the Senate, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz—who will speak at their centennial memorial this week—support VCMF’s efforts, along Connecticut’s Chris Murphy.
In the age of populist uprisings in presidential primaries and beyond, “It is vitally important that liberal anti-communists reject the whitewashing of history and stand up for the truth,” Smith says. The New York Times series “Red Century” hasn’t helped, flitting from condemnation of Communist destruction to absurd “for all its flaws” celebrations of women’s sexual freedom in Soviet communes; Lenin’s environmental conservation; and Mao’s rhetorical embrace of gender parity.
But the hope is that a century’s legacy, when confronted honestly, can poison public opinion on socialism—before, as history would have it, yet another opportunistic politician senses an opening for a new world order. That night in 1917, as divided government died, partisan outlier Julius Martov warned the Soviet delegates. “One day,” he’s supposed to have said as he stormed from the Kremlin, “you will understand the crime in which you are taking part.” Today, 100 years later, I’m not sure we do.
