Echoes Of Bolshevik Revolution: Democrat Replacement Of Police With Antifa/BLM Anarchist ‘Authority’

Echoes Of Bolshevik Revolution: Democrat Replacement Of Police With Antifa/BLM Anarchist ‘Authority’

If I were a cop in Portland, I would have quit a long time ago. But Portland’s riot squad resigned only recently and only in protest of the indictment of one of their members for the alleged mistreatment of an Antifa member during a violent Black Lives Matter insurrection in August 2020.

I’m using the word “insurrection” pointedly. While the powers that be repeatedly try to characterize the events of January 6th as such, the threat was always blown out of proportion. The most far-reaching accusation against the unarmed January 6 rioters was that they were going to somehow kidnap the Vice President.

Presuming that it was the plan—and it wasn’t—the premised plot would have been something like the 1825 Decembrist’s revolt in St. Petersburg when the armed conspirators gathered at the Senate Square to affect succession of the tzar. They were dispersed by an overwhelming military force; the leaders hanged or exiled.

A successful revolution, as Russians had learned over the course of the following century, requires not a pointed tactical move against the head of state but control of the streets across the vast empire. The Romanov dynasty lost control in February 1917 during the bourgeois revolution that saw the formation of the Provisional Government. The latter was overthrown by Bolsheviks in October of the same year.

The first revolution started when, in the midst of World War One, a colder than usual February both put a stress on the food supply chain and drove St. Petersburg residents indoors. At the end of the month the weather suddenly turned unseasonably warm, and people poured out of their homes, joining a socialist women’s demonstration for bread and equality.

That should ring a bell: substitute weather with government health decrees, and bread and equality with racial equity, and it sounds a lot like the massive hysteria-laden Black Lives Matter marches of spring 2020.

All of a sudden, there was a whiff of liberation in the Petrograd air. After the Cossack regiment patrolling the Russian capital failed to react to the demonstration with a show of force, more people joined the protests, and within a few days, Nicolas II had himself a full-grown rebellion against which he was hesitant to move.

Russians like to think of the February Revolution as a bloodless uprising, and compared to the Bolshevik one that ushered in a murderous Civil War in which as many as 12 million perished, it was. However, a Velvet Revolution it wasn’t.

As early spring air enveloped Petrograd, the mob of striking workers fraternized with locally stationed soldiers. The regiments were predominantly recent draftees, peasants reluctant to be shipped to the trenches. At the time, the Russian capital hosted 160,000 soldiers, compared to 30,000 law enforcement officers, an overwhelming majority of the latter in auxiliary forces, and most poorly armed. They were required to buy their own weapons, and some were known to carry empty holsters.

Initially, the frenzied mob killed three civilians and then quickly went after gorodovye, or police forces, and gendarmes employed on the city streets. Gendarmes were a political police, so it’s possible to rationalize the outrage directed against them, but gorodovye were scapegoated for nothing other than being a visual representation of the dreaded regime.

Having found themselves to be the target of popular ire, policemen tried to defend themselves when they could. Perhaps they remained loyal to the Empire, or maybe they had no other option. Some of them changed out of uniform, and went into hiding, but “well-wishers” turned gorodovye to the mob.

Rioters proclaimed a section of St. Petersburg “liberated,” and set on fire the district police station. The initially reluctant Tzar Nicolas II established a curfew, sending military units to enforce it. Dispersing an illicit gathering, soldiers opened fire, killing forty people.

The calm enforced by the army was short-lived. By February 27th, the uprising was on again, and soldiers and workers looted weapons from a garrison. Richard Pipes explains in his seminal volume The Russian Revolution:

Anyone who stood in their way risked being lynched. Other soldiers broke into the Peter and Paul Fortress, releasing prisoners. A mob sucked the Ministry of the Interior. The red flag went over the Winter Palace. Policemen caught in uniform were beaten and killed.

In the late afternoon, people stormed Okhrana headquarters [internal political police], scattering and burning files— Okhrana informers were observed to display particular zeal on this occasion. Arsenals were broken into and thousands of guns removed. There was widespread looting of shops, restaurants, and private residences.

By nighttime, Petrograd was in the hands of peasants in uniform”.

The mutineers installed a Provisional Government led by intellectuals.

Russian intellectuals had been readying for that opportunity since 1825. The new leadership promptly moved to dismantle provincial bureaucracy and the police. On March 4, two days after the abdication of the tzar, the Provisional Government formally abolished the Department of Police, Okhrana, and Corps of Gendarmes. In their place they imagined creating citizen militias, but as such forces failed to materialize, vast swaths of the country fell to anarchy.

Sporadic grassroots attempts to keep the thugs at bay did take place. In Petrograd, where criminals were set free along with political prisoners, unnerved apartment residents formed groups to assist doormen and janitors to keep intruders out of the buildings. If thieves were caught, they were simply thrown into the river.

The feeling of insecurity among the ordinary city-dwellers across Russia can not be underestimated. More importantly, the Provisional Government created a power vacuum. When Bolsheviks showed up in full force in the final months of 1917, there were no local regiments to counter them. Provisional Government made a lot of mistakes.  Failure to assert control in cities and towns of the Empire was a major one.

Once they consolidated power, Bolsheviks weren’t particularly interested in protecting ordinary people from the criminal element. Soviet Militia regiments were formed immediately following the revolution. However, as Gary Gindler pointed out, USSR leadership considered the criminal element to be “socially close.” While Joseph Stalin went after political foes, he turned a blind eye to criminality, allowing a Thieves in Law subculture to flourish.

American street theater organizations Antifa and Black Lives Matter are Leninist in their nature; they are the mechanics of revolution rather than its theorists. Because they study the process of government overthrow, they have to know very well how Russian revolutions unfolded. Their thinking, and their relationship with the Democrat Party, remains obscure, but it’s hard to believe that they don’t use the events of 1917 as some kind of blueprint for their actions.

Contrary to their professed mission, nether BLM nor Antifa care about black lives. Defunding of police departments, their most immediate stated goal, led to a spike in murders in inner cities.

In the meantime, armed Antifas roam the streets of the predominantly white Portland, periodically establishing zones where American law no longer applies. If police abolition is not intended to be a step towards the supposed emancipation of black people but is intended as a way to control the American landmass, Antifa demonstrated a narrow success.

Of course, the U.S. in 2021 is not Russian Empire of 1917. We don’t have reluctant draftees, literal sons of slaves accustomed to being ruled by a strong hand, stationed in the capital.

No matter how many hardened criminals George Soros-backed District Attorneys like Chesa Boudin keep releasing from jail, a political prisoner population ready to lead the lefty rioters to the barricades simply doesn’t exist. The jackboots had a hard time holding on to the “liberated” blocks of Portland, let alone using the zone as a springboard to take over the federal government.

Americans owe their well-being to the political and economic system put in place in 1776, and most of us know it even if we are not willing to admit it publicly. Even those of us who can’t articulate this idea are socialized in the culture that values self-reliance and self-control, and we are not prone to descend into anarchy the minute the centralized state eases its grip. Whatever Antifa designs might have been, their gains are limited. The map of the last year’s presidential election only got redder compare to 2016.

Nevertheless, Antifa-BLM threat should be taken seriously. They might be LARPing revolutionaries, but they LARP the right way. Moreover, the safety and security of ordinary Americans who don’t have Secret Service protection is more important for the stability of the regime than the prevention of riots at the center of power.

The thin blue line that cops represent is not merely the safeguard of a law-abiding individual against anarchy, but quite literally function as our bulwark against tyranny.

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