Should we regret the Bolshevik Revolution?

should we regret the bolshevik revolution…are you kidding me? 10s of millions dead and the emergance of one of the most oppressive states in modern history.

"DURING the whole period I was active in the Trotskyist movement, I accepted the view that the revolution of October 1917 was a great leap forward on the road to socialism, and that the regime it established was a healthy workers’ state until it started degenerating from 1923-24 onwards with the ascendancy of Stalinism and the defeat of the Trotskyist opposition. Since then a closer examination of the actual history of the revolution has led me to question this view. As early as the summer of 1918, the Bolsheviks had lost the support of large sections of the working class and of the peasantry, and were ruling dictatorially……The disillusion of the workers was expressed in a declaration by the striking workers at the Sormovo factory in June 1918: "The Soviet regime, having been established in our name, has become completely alien to us. It promised to bring the workers socialism, but has brought them empty factories and destitution." A workers’ protest movement, the Extraordinary Assemblies of Factory and Plant Representatives, was formed in March 1918 with a membership of several hundred thousand at the height of its influence in June.The response of the Bolsheviks was to nationalise the factories, replace workers’ control by one-man management, and dissolve the oppositional Soviets. By the summer of 1918 with the departure of the Left SRs from the government and the suppression of their uprising, and the Red Terror unleashed by the Cheka, the Bolshevik one-party dictatorship was in place. Any popular control from below of the Soviets or the government had disappeared.In addition, there is ample evidence that the hard core of devoted self-sacrificing Bolshevik party cadres were already being swamped by careerists and corrupt elements in the party and Soviet institutions. In September 1919, a report landed on Lenin’s desk showing that the Smolny was full of corruption.In the light of these facts, one can no longer uphold the Trotskyist thesis that from 1917 to 1923-24 the Soviet Union was a "healthy" workers’ state, and that the degeneration into bureaucratic dictatorship took off only afterwards……All one can say is that the "workers’ state" that was born in October 1917 was premature and infected from infancy. Unfortunately, as it degenerated, it infected the working-class movement internationally, and proved an obstacle on the road to socialism.My old comrade, the late Alex Acheson, who joined the movement in the 1930s and remained a committed Trotskyist till his death last year, once said to me: "It might have been better if the October Revolution had never occurred." What factors or actions by the participants might have resulted in the non-occurrence of October and a different outcome? Assuming that nothing is inevitable until it has happened, and that "men make their own history", there are three possibilities.Firstly, that Lenin’s April Theses that set the Bolshevik party on the road to the October insurrection had been rejected by the party. Let us recall that up till Lenin’s arrival in Petrograd, the Bolshevik leadership was pursuing a policy of critical support for the Provisional government. They felt this was consistent with the view that since the Russian bourgeoisie was incapable of bringing about a bourgeois revolution, this task would have to be carried out by the proletariat supported by the peasantry, but that the revolution could not go immediately beyond the stage of establishing a bourgeois republic. In February, the Petrograd proletariat had carried out this "bourgeois revolution" with the support of the peasant soldiers. Now that the bourgeois republic was in place, the next stage was not the immediate struggle for working-class power, but a relatively prolonged period of bourgeois democracy. Lenin now abandoned this view which he had himself defended under the slogan of "the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry", and argued for no support for the Provisional Government, and for agitation for power to the Soviets. He swung the Bolshevik party to this policy. But it was not inevitable that he should have done. The Bolshevik party might have continued its policy of critical support for and pressure on the February regime.Secondly, even after his steering the party on its new course, Lenin had to fight again in October to commit the party to insurrection against the opposition of Zinoviev, Kamenev, etc. It is not inconceivable that Zinoviev and Kamenev might have carried the day. Then there would have been no October.Thirdly, even after October there was, as I have pointed out, a very real possibility of a coalition Bolshevik-Menshevik-SR government, based either on the Soviets or a combination of the Constituent Assembly and the Soviets as organs of local power and administration. This possibility foundered against the mutual intransigence of the Bolshevik hardliners on one side and the Menshevik and SR right-wing on the other. But in both camps there were conciliatory wings, the Menshevik Internationalists and some Left SRs and the Bolshevik "moderates" – Kamenev, Rykov, Nogin, etc……..A coalition government of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and SRs, having a much broader based support than a purely Bolshevik one, would have been able to confront the White Armies more successfully, and thus shortened the Civil War, and reduced the destruction of the economy……..It can also be argued that the attitudes and actions of the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, SRs, their leaderships and individuals, were themselves determined by the whole of their past histories and ideological roots, and they could not have acted otherwise than they did. That what happened was inevitable. But this is to look at events from a distance and with the hindsight of 1997. What happened happened. But in 1917-18, these parties, leaderships and individuals did have a choice of actions….

You mean 100 millions ( that include China, Vietnan, and Korea ) . You must have read some review about the so called Black Book of Communism which in some way Harvard University has rejected some of the statistic indicated in that book, as well, one of the writer which was an ex-Maoist have backed down on some of the ideas that he wrote on the book. He said now that it is the black book of State Capitalism. The writers of that book do not have a clue of what communism really isProbably, you did not see the public pictures of Stalin and Roosevelt embracing each other when they were allied during world war ii, those pictures were exhibited  public in the US to make peoples  understand that the Soviet Union was the allied of the US ruling class, and then he became the Enemy of the Month Club ( like Gore Vidal said ) Probably, you have not read that the Soviet Union lost 34 millions of peoples during WWII, and they were the one who defeated the German on the Barbarrosa invasion, and they were already to finish dancing Paso Dobles in Spain, and England would have been forced to negotiate with them, even more, Churchill told to the US commanders to launch the invasion toward East Europe, because they knew that the Soviet had a very strong army and were ready to occupy Europe.The allied arrived to Europe in order to drink French coffee, the Nazis were already defeated, at the expenses of the Russian workers, and both powers distributed between each others all the German advanced technology, and both continued the killing around the world, some of the problems that exist in the middle east were originally created by the British empire and by the Butcher Winston CurchillProbably, you do not know that the Bolsheviks  were the ones who stopped WWI because they did not want to fight any more which show that peoples can stop war if they have the desires to do it, and the enemy became friends an allied later and they were known as the white soldiers, they did not want Russia to have self internal capitalist development, and they did it, in a few years they were competing with others powers Before the Nazis took power the Western Power such as France, USA and England already had  killed more than 100 millions of peoples around the world, and they controlled most of the natural resources of the world, and had many colonies. They were the ones who splitted the Ottoman Empire in pieces and nations, and controlled the natural resources, they also killed millions in Africa, and Asia. They can give dead body to the Bolsheviks and they would have many leftOur analysis of the Soviet Union is based on correct analysis, we do not repeat like parrot what the rulers say, we do research,  we do know that the Bolshevik revolution was not a socialist revolution, and we know about the coup, we are more versed than many historian about the Soviet Union and the Bolshevik revolution, we do not phrases we have books and pamphlets. Our problem is that the Bolshevik revolution retarded the real socialist revolution, and socialism we have been in a better stand in our times

The word you're (an abbreviation of you are, not your, which is a second person possessive adjective, used to describe something as belonging to you) struggling for is "condescending".