History depends on rupture. Credit: Sergei FadeichevTASS via Getty Images
“If the term ‘apocalypse’ fits any event in recent world history, it is the Russian Civil War. This is not to suggest that the events of 1917-20 were the end of the world. The revolutionaries saw what was happening as the beginning of a new human order, and if they did not, in fact, establish a New Jerusalem, we can see, seventy years later, that they certainly created in Russia something remarkable and enduring. But their hold on power was bought at the price of great suffering and an unknown but terrible number of deaths — perhaps seven to ten million in all. War and strife, famine and pestilence — the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — devastated the largest country in Europe…”
Appearing at the start of the 1987 edition of the military historian Evan Mawdsley’s The Russian Civil War, this judgement resonates more deeply today. The system the Bolsheviks created has collapsed and vanished. A rebooted version of the Cheka, or All-Russian Extraordinary Commission — the secret police founded by Lenin that established the new society by the use of terror and, through its successors the OGPU, NKVD and KGB, shaped Soviet life until its end — continues to be the core of the Russian state. Yet the country it governs — featuring an oligarchical type of capitalism intertwined with state security structures, a restored Orthodox Church and a Eurasian-flavoured variety of imperialism — is unimaginably different from anything envisioned by the founders of the Soviet state.
An attempt to exterminate completely a section of humankind, the Holocaust was surely the most authentically apocalyptic episode in human history. Yet Russia’s civil war did display several of the features that go with an apocalyptic event. Understanding this neglected period may enable us to understand how far our own time is — and is not — an apocalyptic moment of this kind.
In waves of terror beginning in August 1918, when Lenin was injured in an attempted assassination, the new Soviet regime killed its own citizens on a previously unknown scale. During the two months that followed, around 15,000 people were executed for political crimes — more than twice the total number of prisoners of all kinds executed in the previous century of tsarist rule (6,321). Taken together, the casualties of the Revolution, the 1918 terror, the civil war and the ensuing famine cost the lives of around 25 million people in the territories of the former Tsarist empire — 18 times the number of casualties it incurred in the First World War (1.3 to 1.4 million.)
For the rulers of the new state, the breakdown of the old order was an opportunity to refashion society on a new model. “Former persons” — aristocrats, landlords and priests, together with anyone who employed others — were stripped of civil rights and denied ration cards and housing. Many dying of starvation or from hard labour in the concentration camps Lenin had established, these human remnants of the past watched as their entire way of life was erased. The same was true of the peasantry, whose recurrent rebellions were crushed with savage force. In the large-scale uprising in the Tambov region in 1920-21, Soviet forces used poisonous gas to clear forests into which the peasants had fled.
The famine that ensued killed around 5 million people in 1921-1922. The cause was not just drought and a bad harvest. As a result of the collapse of railways, health and waste disposal services, epidemic diseases such as typhus and cholera were rampant. Cities were depopulated and their wooden buildings demolished and used for firewood. Grain requisitioning and the export of agricultural produce created mass starvation of a peculiarly horrific kind. Russian may be the only language that contains two words for cannibalism. One — trupoyedstvo — denotes the eating of corpses, the other — lyudoyedstvo — killing in order to consume the victim. According to some reports at the time, public markets for human flesh appeared in famine-struck areas in which body parts from cadavers in the latter category commanded higher prices on account of their freshness.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeI agree change is coming and also believe change is long overdue.
The actual uninflated number clearly show Covid 19 to be a complete non event in itself and the reality is that Big Pharma and governments all around the world have worked together to manipulate people.
The truth is the old democratic systems are fraught with corruption and abuse and only served to provide the masses with the illusion that they had some say in their destiny which is entirely untrue. It is time for an overhaul of the democratic system but the world’s politicians, who see the writing on the wall, are desperately striving to maintain their grip on their power by using excuses to exercise constitutionally illegal powers and by wiping out the educated middle classes.
Two things are guaranteed, ultimately change will come and it’s going to get very “messy”, mean and nasty before it does. All of mankind’s ruling systems have evolved throughout history in this manner and unfortunately such change does not come during a tea party discussion or over a beer in the pub!
Good post and I agree with the main thrust. That said, I’m not sure that the politicians see the writing on the wall. They seem to have things pretty well stitched up, from Brussels to Beijing, and there is very little we can do about it.
Isn’t that how the Bolsheviks thought?
Democracy has brought many, many GOOD things, and just because there’s now a megalomaniac criminal in the White House doesn’t mean that nothing works.
Agree with your last point–but don’t you think things could go better if we went about systems change intentionally, heeding the social science that says only 3.5% of the population is required to change regime?
I enjoyed reading this article. I’m looking for one of you smart writers to explain the societal mechanisms that are causing the current disproportionate reaction to the coronavirus problem. As Nicholas Taleb says, COVID-19 is not a black swan, but something that we can expect to happen on a regular basis. Why/how has the world become so fragile?
the world is fragile because it’s increasingly complex. Not advocating some sort fake return to a “simpler world of the horse and buggy era” because infant mortality was high in those days.
But there needs to be a new robustness in life. Less interdependencies.
Correlation is not causation. Do we have enough imagination to envision a possible civilization that is based on biological energy (“horse and buggy,” if you like), that also has a low infant mortality rate? It amazes me that when fantasizing about techno-utopias, people scoff at the notion of anything at all being impossible–but a decent quality of life without high technology? “It can’t be done!”
The last time the entire world was affected was the 1918 flu pandemic.
Is every hundred years your idea of a “regular basis”?
That is just untrue. Only two years ago 2017/18 in the UK there were 55,000 excess winter deaths (as conventionally counted – in excess over the average of the last 5 years). 2014/15 had peak deaths very high. The last week of 1999 had more deaths than any week than any of Covid-19. We are not talking a once-in-a-century event here even when talking dramatic named events such as this one, Covid-19. 1968/69 was the Hong Kong flu and 100,000 died of that USA alone without a Presidential speech on the subject and the USA continued operating as normal no lockdown. Woodstock even happened!
After the non-event of the Spanish flu which fortunately we escaped unscathed due to the absence of epidemiologists, we acquired herd immunity which enabled us to survive the second wave with only five times the non casualties of the first. At this point we really got that immunity which this time really really got us through the non-existant third wave which was at least as not bad as the first one.
The societal consequences were huge.
Thanks to the new learning-at-distance technology called « books » nobody ever went to school again. Newspapers sports stats spelled the end of spectator sports. Color printed magazines meant we never needed to visit national parks and so ended the whole travel industry. Recorded music destroyed the whole insanity of going to concerts and the telephone ended all in-person contact.
This comment is meant as an hommage to the article (which apart the recounting of the well-known Soviet abominations is pure drivel) and half the even worse comments.
Well said, Gray makes a living from the vague cloaked in verbosity.
I’m curious if he is still into communitarianism?
He said the following many years ago about a time when he supported Thatcher,it’s a great quote to keep in mind while reading the above –
“What I liked was Thatcherism’s Bolshevik aspect, which was to shake up the whole of Britain quite fundamentally”.
His weak point has always been his understanding of biochemistry, he seems to poorly grasp neodarwinism which was the dominant view of biology back in his day, he doesn’t seem to bothered to try apprehend the contemporary opposition to the neodarwinist view hence his continued view of no progress but just a little progress at times ,his bizarre and vague continued contradiction.
He now attempts to veer into virology…..
Gray the verbose broken clock.
Well balanced.Thankyou.
I am more fearful of the power we have given to the State, or rather that we have meekly surrendered in the name of the Precautionary principle.
Your example of the Cheka, introduced as a temporary measure for security, but retained permanently is a good example of the freedom we can lose if we do not argue against it.
Touch of the mystic meg here. Did Russians stop drinking, arguing and copulating afte the White Russians were defeated? Did village cricket and the WI die off after 1918 – no. I am very happy to bet the author that aside from increased surveillance and SARS CoV 2 paranoia at airports and within the authorities little will change once the economic adjustment has been made and better business conditions return. The paranoia i mention above is no different to “reds under the bed”, “yellow peril” the “hippy menace” etc etc and will be replaced quickly with new Chimaera. FYI the 9K fees are more for the “Student experience” than the learning. Forget that parents will see the academics on zoom and think OMG i would not pay that person to push a broom, they will not pay 9k pa for what is almost free on MOOCs and TED talks.
‘FYI the 9K fees are more for the “Student experience” than the learning.’
I agree. And many of pointed this out by shouting at the radio when Clegg (or whichever dimwit it was) first announced the entire scheme in all its epic daftness. This does not alter the fact that the taxpayer will left on the hook for the vast majority of these fees.
I agree re tax payers footing the bill, and it will be a politician like Clegg or the US democrats or even bouncing Bojo who, unless their more sensible colleagues restrain them, will campaign on “Student debt cancellation” policy offer.
“Meet the new boss.
Same as the old boss.”
P. Townshend 1971
Wise as ever, and as ever unlikely to be mistaken for a ray of sunshine.
No; you only have to read Pepys’ diary after the plague to realise that people pretty soon go back to their old ways.
The Russian analogy is surely ill-judged; the Russian Revolution had so drastic a transformative effect because the people who came out on top were committed to drastic transformation! Russia after 1917 proceeded along the same kind of radical pathway previously followed by France after 1789 because of the personalities and priorities of those involved. If Kerensky had had the sense to end Russian participation in World War I, the Communist Revolution would never have occurred, and the Russia of the 1920s would have been much more like France after 1870. There would have been shocks and suffering, but bourgeois life and culture would have continued.
By comparison, the Second World War – an equally apocalyptic event – was followed in democratic Western Europe by policies designed to stabilise and to ensure that a reversion to some kind of “normal life” was possible. The major difference between the pre-war and postwar periods was that jobs became more secure and health care and education more readily available – which in turn made it easier for people to marry and raise children (compare European fertility rates in the 1930s with those in the 1950s). Again, the issue was not the nature of the conflict, but the matter of who got to be in charge afterwards: the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats who ran most of Western Europe in the early postwar decades were stabilising rather than disruptive forces.
COVID-19 may change things radically, or it may not. But that will have little to do with the nature of the virus, and much to do with the nature of those who govern and influence us. For instance, John Gray writes that “Higher education operates on a model of student living that social distancing has rendered defunct.” The truth, rather, is that the managerial and technocratic class that determines the direction of higher education actively wants to render that model defunct, because they want to shift teaching online. They have wanted this for a long time, and this is their opportunity; so that’s probably what will happen. But if we had managers who were committed to the old-fashioned ideal that teaching is above all about building relations of trust and care between lecturers and students, then they would be trying to find mechanisms to ensure face-to-face teaching resumed as soon as possible. If COVID-19 does lead to drastic transformations of the way we live, it will be straightforwardly because our political and business leaders believe in creative destruction, are contemptuous of established norms and institutions, and, in the final analysis, are people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Somebody’s been drinking the Imperial College kool-aid. The only real and lasting change will be a beneficial one – the much greater degree of skepticism that greets ‘experts’ and their models.
Impressive stuff from Mr Gray, as always. I have a few of his books on my shelves, and so should everyone else.
I think we should watch what happens in Israel, which encourages out of the box thinking and is now working on new kinds of work patterns.
I suspect the virus will, on the whole peter out in a few months and we will be left with a massive economic headache which will take years to recover from. But by and large life will continue as is.
But if not, I cannot see pubs, restaurants, sporting events, discos (who goes to discos these days anyway!!) disappearing and shrinking. Air travel maybe. More likely, with social distancing in place, pubs, restaurants et al, will have to rise prices due to fewer customers. The rise in prices is unlikely to subdue demand that much. (Come on, who doesn’t want a drink and a meal after all of this!!) Instead, people will prioritise their spending in the direction of the hospitality sector. This will mean an increase in new establishments to meet the demand.
What I expect to happen to air travel is that the model of the budget flight will be unsustainable. We will return to the norm of thirty years ago, where the cost of a flight was a substantial portion of the overall cost of a holiday abroad. Hopefully the outcome will be that most travellers give up on superficial city breaks, and instead gravitate toward two- or three-week holidays allowing them to travel around from city to city, town to village – a type of travel that offers a much more grounded, contextualised sense of a place anyway.
The final few paragraphs of this piece are drivel. Almost nothing will change. Pubs, restaurants, travel, public gatherings will resume. Social distancing will become a memory, because it is to us, as human beings, unnatural. What we will be left with is an enhanced attitude towards personal hygiene, greater respect for lower-paid public sector workers, greater scorn for our media commentators, a shrewder attitude towards the health services, and of course a massive and enduring budget deficit.
I agree. It is a major change, but one that is not that dramatic. The changes will probably be mundane, like people won’t shake hands anymore; a lot of business travel will cease; people will work from home more, there will be more videoconferencing. It is too early to predict the death of the middle classes, or the universities off the back of COVID-19. I’ve read a lot of his books and admire his work, but I don’t really understand how the author can be so certain about this.
…well isn’t your future picture just the sort that JD suggests is likely?
The historical side of the article is very interesting. Thank you. However I disagree with the prognosis of how the future will unfold. It will be worse than imagines
Vive l’avenir! …peut être….
As if I wasn’t depressed enough…
What is the relationship between the first half of this essay and the second?
Social Distancing, innit! 2m, don’t you watch the 6 o’clock views…
Haha, nice try! Yet another “the new normal” diatrebe. Except there is no “new” normal, no “death of your way of life” to speak of. There is no need for SARS2 to affect humanity any more than SARS1 did. Unless you arvocating such change, that is, for reasons that have nothing to do with any virus.
This is not an analysis. it is propaganda.
The COVID crisis reveals the severe vulnerabilities of modern globalized civilization. Democrat or Republican has nothing to do with it. Both parties advocate endless economic growth, business as usual–as climate data and compounding crises announce to all those whose brains are not bobbing in a pool of neo-liberal ideology: “the party is over.”
You want analysis? Look at the food crisis that is unfolding. A small handful of corporations dominate the meat industry: vertical integration, monopoly, profit maximization at the expense of…. well, everything. Very good at making a small group of rich people richer–very poor in terms of system resilience. Viral breakout in a handful of processing plants, and in no time, the industry is brought to its knees.
Of course we see the identical pattern in healthcare, politics, manufacturing, energy.
The insistence on going “back to normal” brings to mind a psychopath beating a dead, rotting horse, trying to get it back up again, ignoring the pleas of disturbed onlookers to… move on.
Please physical distancing NOT social distancing. WHO recommends this. The Russian history is very revealing and barbaric. But the forecast is well like all forecaasts, a bit of guess work. I skip all articles forecasting the future and stick with the here and now and facts of history.
What’s the point of history unless it is used to consider the future?
Many posters here are making the claim that the experts were wrong, that the pandemic was never much of a threat, that the lockdown was excessive, essentially parroting Trump’s talking points.
This poor reasoning is due to a confusion of cause and effect. Years ago, we dealt with the excess SO2 produced by American smokestacks producing acid rain by placing scrubbers in the stacks, eliminating the SO2. People then argued that the expense of scrubbers was unnecessary, because the SO2 had disappeared. The same kind of poor reasoning is evident here.
The reality is that we have managed to hold infections and deaths down only because of the lockdown and social distancing measures. People point to Sweden as if it were some kind of success. The Swedes have one of the highest mortality rates in the world, 361 per million, surpassed only by places such as the UK and Italy, which bungled the process from the beginning. The reality is that those jurisdictions that jumped on the spread quickly, such as S. Korea and Japan, have managed to hold down deaths and infections much better, to only 5 deaths per million.
Nor does it make sense to claim that this is no different from the flu. The flu kills 39 to 62 thousand people per year in the States on an infection rate of 56 million. Covid has already killed 80,000 on an infection rate of one million, making it many times more deadly. Nor do we have a vaccine or herd immunity to covid, unlike the flu. The flu infects one billion people worldwide. The potential is for covid to infect everyone.
Let’s have less of this “The pandemic was a hoax, the lockdown wasn’t necessary, the experts know nothing” nonsense. Instead, keep your eyes on the Republican States in the US, which are now flouting the experts’ advice.
Let’s see how they’re doing a month from now.
Every position has an internal consistency and your does but that’s because of confirmation bias. You refuse to consider alternative points of view. Sunetra Gupta’s interview here on Unherd would be a good starting point.
Every point you make is challenge-able and I am tempted to challenge each. But others do it better than me, you must be or ought be aware of the arguments, but you dismiss them all, seemingly giving them no weight at all!
The Global Village Empire suffered a setback with Brexit and Trump, but it has decided to run the Operation Covert 20 Scenario anyhow. All the wars throughout history could not have pulled this effect on the worlds economies. Amazing how the fear of something invisible could do this. It’s like the threat of ‘god’ has finally been realised – in fact no single religion could have achieved this either.
Instantaneous global comms have secured the fearful compliance of almost everyone – the acting has been spectacular on all stages. Academy awards all around. Who needs Holly, Nolly and Bolly Woods. The Horror movie genre has met it’s match with the real world!
However, Operation Covert 20 has been successful in bringing the potential threat of Plague to every doorstep. Call it a case of mass vaccination – the goal of achieving awareness with merely a tiny casualty list. Well done to those who crafted the Covid 19 virus. It has fulfilled the Empire’s precise requirements correctly. Will the cause ever be found or will the investigating nations not in the circle be fobbed off with a vague explanation and will be only to pleased to just get on with the global convalescence?
Nice essay, it demonstrates the dangers of analogy quite nicely: The Russian Revolution is so, so, SOOO unlike Covid19! I mean, if you wanna write about that, write about that, but please, refrain from tired old comparisons.
Yes, there will be changes, but the author underestimates the yearning factor. There are a lot of people who will yearn for the carefree way of life they had, especially the young ones.
The author doesn’t predict, so allow me: people will stop giving a FQQQ about social distancing, and they will enforce unplanned herd immunity (aka WILD herd immunity). This will be accompanied by millions of deaths. Maybe 4-5 million per year. After we’ve reached herd immunity, normal schedules will be resumed. I am not very optimistic about greening the world. For a greener world, optimum conditions need to be there. This is not as yet, the case.
Sudden disruptive events are simply more visible to us narrow-horizon critters. We evolved to handle things on short timelines. Long-term perspectives are artifacts of our recently evolved intelligence and other big brain capabilities. Because disruptions of existing conditions can be either slow or fast (“slow” = multi-generational), our responses are as much a part of the disruption as the primary cause. Climate change is slow, technological disrupters of labor is medium, Pandemics are fast. AI, and its soon-to-be-upon-us offspring superintelligence, will be all over us soon. It may be faster than we foresee.
One year ago, almost exactly, I responded to other cries (in the stuff I read) for “getting back to normality” with something rude like ‘It’s never gonna happen” in a blog post. Can we plug our blogs here in Unherd? https://seniorjunior.blogsp…
I’ll test it. If I’m violating policy, sorry.
Does John Gray ever replies to these comments?
Only the intelligent ones.
“More than government-enforced policies, public attitudes will prevent any reversion to pre-Covid ways.”
No, this is mistaken.
Nature is far more powerful than any government policy.
The social distancing principle that the lockdown is based upon, is perhaps the most counter-Nature policy every devised by a government in any era, and it is not actually very far from genocide.
As it seriously if followed restricts the ability of ordinary people to date and mate, which apart from survival itself, and sometimes even at risk of it, is the fundamental human biological drive.
Social distancing is in practice unenforcable, as you are never going to stop the population from becoming intimate with each other, in a way that will deliver any virus through most of the population in a very short space of time.
And as soon as that becomes clear to the currently deluded people in authority, who still believe they can control a virus, because of the lies coming out of China that they have successfully done so, which sooner or later will be overturned, they will end the madness.
The only real change will be economic damage, from which we will eventually recover, and a very diminished level of trust in government.
Which has been brewing for a long time anyway, especially after the MP expenses scandal, and the growing belief and awareness that none of the main parties is actually offering a different agenda; which happened briefly under Jeremy Corbyn, but has now been extinguished once again, by the “liberal Blairite assassins” in the Labour party and their media cohorts and co-conspirators.
The 2016 referendum and Brexit vote was probably the most powerful demonstration of democracy exhibited by the British public since the Second World War, when they voted out Churchill and elected socialist Attlee who brought in the NHS, pensions and the welfare state.
That was really the beginning of real democracy in modern times, and when the public figure out that they are no longer getting it, which has been the case since 2016, as the Brexit vote has still not been put properly into reality, they are going to be looking harder at the voting system which only briefly allowed that voice in 2016, and now has silenced them again.
And how they are now apparently living in a dictatorship in which they are not even allowed to protest.
The public may look submissive for now, but not much longer.
A recent poll has said that while 82% will put up with the lockdown until June, that goes down to 69% for July and down to 44% for August.
The public is actually more politically active now than it has ever been, largely fuelled by the online platform of the Internet.
But though that can be destructive at times, ultimately it is the vehicle for a drive for freedom, with political debates like on this website now happening all over the Internet.
What will eventually result will be accountable government.
It will be the dawn of real democracy and accountability that will eventually result from this mess, for the public had to see the danger of that lack of accountability that they are currently seeing worldwide, before they would in large enough numbers finally be motivated to act to change things.
If Boris Johnson is really a democratically elected representative of the public, because he is trying to fundamentally change the nature of our lives and freedom, with a policy of mass imprisonment, for which he has not stated there will ever be any definite end – as he has not said the virus will ever go, and freedom is dependent on this “R number” which can also not ever be certainly predicted – he should give the public either a referendum or an election, to see if they wish to be subjected to this continual house arrest and denial of their fundamental human rights.
The right to meet other citizens at close quarters without any fear; the right to choose whether to cower in fear from a virus that isn’t proven deadly to anybody hardly but the old and already in poor health, or not; and so on.
He’s acting like a dictator, and that’s the part he needs to address, or the mass rebellion which always occurs sooner or later in dictatorships will soon come upon him.
I believe the only way out of this for him is he should resign, as he has dug himself a hole so deep with this lockdown, that there is no way out again, except to hand the job over to somebody else.
Who can then admit a wrong course has been taken, and convince the public that this was only ever taken on the basis of misguided scientific advice.
A plausible excuse can be made, that as Mr Johnson himself was badly affected by the virus, and with a pregnant partner, he made poor decisions while under enormous pressure and seriously compromised physical and mental health, and I for one will certainly forgive him as long as he acknowledges his error even by proxy, by such resignation.