![a victory march exemplery orchestra of the ussr a victory march exemplery orchestra of the ussr](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ETluXZNocNA/hqdefault.jpg)
Since 1989 and especially since 1991, there has been some highly intensive publishing activity in this regard: first, we have the reprinting of all the books which had appeared in Russian in the West from surviving actors in the civil war - White Army generals (now eulogized by some!) - separatist Cossack leaders, Social Revolutionaries and even, of especial interest to us here, Nestor Makhno’s Memoirs and Arshinov’s History of the Makhnovist Movement, which have so far run to several editions. And it is apparent in the ongoing determination to recover historical memory and fill in the many gaps from the past.
![a victory march exemplery orchestra of the ussr a victory march exemplery orchestra of the ussr](http://p1.music.126.net/EH5ki41ksYcz2gM_5Xo5OQ==/109951165588310730.jpg)
This is the school of thought currently in the ascendant in Russia and Ukraine. If we are to get out of that impasse, we must return to the primary resource and re-examine everything. This mismatch between the sign and the signified has shaped the fates of tens of millions of human beings and led ultimately to an impasse. A circumstance upon which Lenin seized in order to so dub his sectarian grouplet. Let us also de-mystify the expression “soviet” which, properly rendered, simply means “council,” but then we would have to explain to folk why, say, France, a country covered from top to bottom by “councils” - from municipal councils to the council of ministers - is still not wrapped in the “exotic and oh so revolutionary” whiff of “soviet”! We could go on decoding many another term or expression, but for the time being let us dose with “Bolshevik,” which simply means “majority,” when the Russian party of that name never achieved a majority in any election in Russia, except for two obscure internal votes within the Russian Social Democratic and Labor Party at its 1903 congress, which resulted in a split. Let me cite but a few examples: “bourgeois revolution” is used to designate the real Russian revolution of February 1917 which overthrew the tsarist autocracy: “Great October 1917 Socialist Revolution,” or “October Revolution”! for short, refers to what virtually every Russian and indeed French socialist ever since then has described as the “Bolshevik coup d’etat,” and which radical revolutionaries indeed have described as the “Bolshevik counter-revolution”: “dictatorship of the proletariat” means the dictatorship of a tiny caste of intellectuals “actually” exercised over the urban and rural proletariat: “war communism” means the 1921 period and in fact the systematic pillaging of the peasantry and wholesale take-over of day-to-day life by the Party-State, all of it dependent upon the most bloodthirsty terror. Verifying this is the easiest thing in the world: one need only take a semantic key to certain definitions or expressions. However, their writings remain and endure and these carry the stamp of their aberrations. For decades, their slavish pens have peddled a single lane version of historical truth, celebrating the supposed -“triumphant march of actually existing socialism.” They find themselves all at sea now that their phony certainties have evaporated. The spectacular collapse of the so-called communist system of the former USSR has exposed the vacuousness of the regime’s historians’ official theses and highlighted the intellectual complacency of their western counterparts - with only a few rare exceptions.