Yuri Afonin: Comparison of Prigozhin with the Bolsheviks is absolutely illiterate historically
Communist Party of the Russian Federation
June 26, 2023
[robotic translation] First Deputy Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party Yu.V. Afonin commented on statements that the leader of the armed rebellion, Yevgeny Prigozhin, allegedly did the same thing that the Bolsheviks did in 1917.
Afonin Yury Vyacheslavovich First Deputy Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Deputy of the State Duma
For the past three days, the whole country has been discussing Prigozhin's armed rebellion. In particular, there are many historical parallels. President Putin in his address compared the current situation with the events of 1917. Characteristically, however, he did not mention the Bolsheviks in any negative context. However, immediately there were commentators who tried to settle scores with the Bolsheviks again. Most of them can be ignored. But among these commentators was a former very high-ranking official - Sergei Stepashin. He literally stated the following: "Vladimir Vladimirovich compared the situation with the events of 1917. I understand what we are talking about - then the Bolsheviks betrayed and, in fact, destroyed the army, and we lost the First World War, or rather, we did not lose, but did not become winners.
Of course, as the ideological heirs of the Bolsheviks, we consider it necessary to answer.
In fact, anyone who knows history decently understands that in 1917 the Russian army and the Russian state were destroyed not by the Bolsheviks at all, but by completely different forces. And this happened long before Lenin and his associates came to power. And the Bolsheviks just became that powerful historical force that revived the Armed Forces of the country in the form of the Red Army and gathered back the already virtually collapsed state. It was the Leninists who saved Russia, did not allow it to be torn to pieces by the then collective West.
The fact that it was not the Bolsheviks who destroyed the Russian army in 1917 was recognized even by the leaders of the white movement. If you read the diaries of General Alekseev or the memoirs of General Denikin, you can see that they unequivocally link the collapse of the army with Order No. 1 of the Petrograd Soviet, issued on March 1 (14), 1917. This order gave rise to such phenomena as the election of commanders, the discussion of orders for the command of soldiers, and so on. In fact, this gave impetus to the complete disintegration of army discipline. But who was the author of the text of this order? History has preserved their names. Attorney at Law Nikolai Sokolov is a non-factional Social Democrat, Nikolai Chkheidze is a Menshevik, and Semyon Klivansky is a Menshevik. There were no Bolsheviks around. Then, in fact, the same line in the army was pursued by the Socialist-Revolutionary Kerensky, first as Minister of War of the Provisional Government, then as its head. Most of these figures, by the way, then fiercely fought the Bolsheviks.
Why did the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries turn to a policy that actually destroyed the army during a huge war? By and large, the reason is that they did not want to give the people what they wanted, but at the same time they tried to secure popularity in the army. After February, the revolutionary spirit of most of the leaders of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries evaporated. They were frightened that the revolutionary mood of the masses was going much further than the overthrow of tsarism and stood up in defense of the property of the landowners and capitalists. They refused to hand over the landowners' land to the peasants, dragged on with the resolution of this key issue, telling tales that supposedly it could not be resolved without the Constituent Assembly. They dreamed of leaving plants and factories in the hands of the capitalists. And this is not surprising: in the Provisional Government, along with the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, were the oligarchs of that time - Alexander Guchkov, Mikhail Tereshchenko, Alexander Konovalov. The ministers of the Provisional Government wanted to continue the war in the interests of the Entente, that is, in fact, shed Russian blood for the sake of the profits of the bankers of London, Paris and New York. But at the same time, without giving anything to the people, they tried to somehow win over the soldiers to their side and did this at the cost of destroying discipline, in fact, at the cost of the collapse of the army.
It was because of this collapse of the army that the Bolsheviks later had to conclude the Brest Peace. Now the darkness of critics of the Bolsheviks has divorced, but none of them can formulate: how would they continue the war with the mighty Kaiser Germany and its allies in conditions when the army had already collapsed? It's just that they can't say anything about it.
To all those who really want to understand what happened then, I strongly advise you to watch the film "The Great Statesman". It is easy to find it on the Internet. This is a film about Lenin. We filmed it in 2020, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ilyich, and filmed it in collaboration with leading historians. There, on a large amount of factual material, we show that Lenin then acted precisely as a great statesman, under whose leadership the army was revived and the country was preserved.
The Red Army, relying on the broadest support of the people, was able to beat both the interventionists of the then collective West, and the whites, who acted as mercenaries of the West, and various nationalists, including Ukrainian nationalists - Petliurists, the ideological predecessors of the current Kiev politicians. It was thanks to the Bolsheviks that Russia then survived as a state.
The same position is taken by the Russian communists today. For us now the most important task is to preserve our state, which is subjected to the most powerful pressure from Western imperialism.
