Lester Golden
2 min readSep 22, 2024

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Let's see which of Eco's 14 points would reasonably apply to Bolsheviks:

1. Cult of tradition: nope.

2. Rejection of modernism: nope.

3. Anti-intellectualism and irrationalism: certainly not.

4. Disagreement is treason: Yes in Bolshevik practice. John Reed in Reds told Trotsky "revolution is dissent". Trotsky disagreed.

5. Fear of difference: Certainly not national or racial. Bolshevik pogroms in the Russian Civil War were rare. Pogroms were Polish, Ukrainian and by the White army. Source: my grandma who lived through it in Vinnitsya.

6. Appeal to a frustrated middle class: Bolsheviks were at least nominally a workers' party.

7. Obsession with a plot: Contextual, but not intrinsically ideological yes. So for good reason since the Bolshevik's were an underground party in Tsarist Russia. See #8's explanation below.

8. Casting enemies as both strong and weak: Bolsheviks seeing enemies everywhere was a case of just because your paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. Western invasions of Russia during the civil war gave them good reason to be paranoid. Conditional yes about strong, no about weak.

9. Life is permanent warfare: class warfare, not race warfare. So no.

10. Contempt for the weak: nope. Bolshevism was an opponent of social and racial darwinism.

11. Cult of death and heroism: nope.

12. Machismo: Bolshevism improved women's status. So no.

13. Selective populism: The USSR developed a leader cult around Stalin, but that wasn't intrinsic to Communist ideology. It was a Russian thing. Stalin wrote to his mother in the 1930s that "for the Russian people I'm a kind of Tsar."

14. Newspeak. Certainly yes. Read Orwell.

So 2-4 points of yes is not "many" by any stretch.

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Lester Golden
Lester Golden

Written by Lester Golden

From Latvia & Porto I write to share learning from an academic&business life in 8 languages in 5 countries & seeing fascism die in Portugal&Spain in1974 & 1976.

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