How Stalin Would Have Dealt with John Bolton

 

It isn’t easy to turn John Bolton into a sympathetic character. But when Kash Patel and his FBI thugs gleefully raided Bolton’s house last Friday, he became an instant symbol of the Trump junta’s ravenous taste for retribution.

Before Trump came along, Bolton was easily one of the more loathsome figures to emerge from the Bush-era neocons. An unapologetic warmonger, he wasn’t an obvious choice for National Security Advisor in Trump’s first term, because for all his faults, he actually believed in objective reality and rational thought. This made him an awkward fit among the hacks, charlatans, and morons surrounding Trump — not to mention Trump himself.

As an unrepentant cold warrior, Bolton has never had any use for Russia or Putin, which was yet another thing the Dear Leader would not find endearing. And since Trump’s re-emergence, Bolton has made a point of poking the bear, taunting Trump at every opportunity. He has called Trump things like “incompetent and unfit for office” and a “useful idiot” for Russia. Last week he called Trump’s absurd Alaska summit a victory for Putin, which might have been the final straw.

The actions and reactions of Trump’s DOJ under Bondi — and his FBI under Patel — are so far fairly toothless. They’re long on intimidation and photo-ops, but short on legal grounding, at least for now.

But you can see the ambition, which comes as no surprise to those familiar with the life cycle of fascist dictatorships. Students of the Soviet Union under Stalin will recognize that we are now in the “consolidation” stage of fascism, in which the dictator must, as quickly as possible, bring all the levers of power under his personal control.

It took Stalin roughly ten years — from the death of Lenin in 1924 to the “show trials” of the early thirties — to fully consolidate his power. But once he did, that power was absolute. At which point, Russia disappeared down a deep dark hole from which it has still not emerged.

But first, let me dispel the notion that “communism,” as it was practiced in the Soviet Union, was any different from the “fascism” being practiced at roughly the same time by Hitler in Germany or Mussolini in Italy. True, there were vast differences economically — Russia’s grotesquely inefficient “planned” economy was, even then, a basket case. But in terms of the systematic oppression of their populations — the defining trait, after all, of a fascist state — the differences were minimal. They all followed a well-worn playbook, the same one Bondi and Patel are following now. Whatever you want to call it, it’s fascism.

Lenin never trusted Stalin. It was Leon Trotsky who was Lenin’s likely successor. Trotsky had all the intellectual heft and charisma that Stalin lacked. Trotsky was also closely aligned with the “Old Bolsheviks,” those veteran Communist Party members who had plotted insurrection for decades. They’d done time in Tsarist prisons, they’d planned and carried out the October Revolution of 1917, and they continued to have outsized influence in the Party. Most of them wanted nothing to do with Stalin.

But Stalin controlled the Party apparatus — over a million well-indoctrinated functionaries — which answered to him alone. By that point, the Party was actively overseeing most of the government bureaucracy, most notably the police and the entire judicial system, and Stalin set out to use both to neutralize the Old Bolsheviks, to turn the Party against them.

They started by making an example of Trotsky, publicly turning him into an enemy of the people, a bogeyman who would scare little children. They sent him into exile, and when he wouldn’t shut up, they had him murdered in Mexico.

But it’s the fate of the Old Bolsheviks that bears on our current situation. Because it wasn’t enough to merely slander, neutralize, and disgrace them. Stalin wanted them gone.

This is where the NKVD, predecessor of the KGB, came into its own. The dreaded secret police would pull up in black vans in the dead of night — think ICE, but before videophones. They’d arrest, interrogate, and torture their “suspects,” getting them to confess to anything — espionage, sabotage, “Trotskyism,” even “rootless cosmopolitanism,” which translates roughly as “Jew.” Today, they’d be confessing to wokeness.

In 1936, Stalin took sixteen of those well-publicized “confessions,” and held the first of his show trials. Sixteen men — all of them heroes of a revolution that was not yet twenty years old — were subjected to a humiliating public trial in which the evidence was fabricated, the defense non-existent, and the outcome preordained. All sixteen were found guilty, all sixteen were executed.

It’s worth noting that some of these guys — notably Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev — were long-time party leaders and, in their own way, household names. Seeing them railroaded and murdered so transparently was a shock to the world, and an early glimpse at how that world might evolve over the next eight or nine decades.

The show trials continued through 1938, taking scores of high-ranking Party figures off the board. These included Nikolai Bukharin, once the editor of Pravda and the guy Lenin had once called “the darling of the Party.” Alexei Rykov had been Premier of the Soviet Union. Genrikh Yagoda had been head of the NKVD itself. All were executed. The Party was eating its own.

Most revolutionary movements eventually eat their own. It’s a Shakespearean sort of drama that pre-dates Shakespeare by several millenia. Most dictators come to suspect — not without reason — that many, even most, of the people around them want them dead. Suspicion tends to fall most heavily on those closest to the throne.

The analogies here beg to be examined. It took Trump ten years to fully gain control of the Republican Party, and to do so, he needed to outflank the “Old Republicans” — McConnell, Romney, the Bushes, the Cheneys, etc. — and replace them with “his” people.

In that time, there have been plenty of apostates — Republicans who ran afoul of the Dear Leader and whose careers were subsequently cancelled. Liz Cheney leads the list, to be sure. But remember Jeff Flake? Bob Corker? Today, Thom Tillis is only the latest senator to vote against Trump then announce his retirement.

For sheer symbolism and propaganda value, none of these Old Republicans rise to the level of a Trotsky. Nor is John Bolton in that league. But there are plenty of Republicans that would make Trump’s top sixteen in any show trial. Bolton would most likely be high on that list.

I’m guessing the Republicans scare Trump more than Democrats. Democrats are the enemy he knows, and he sees them as powerless. Republicans, on the other hand, might turn against him at any moment. This is the sort of paranoia that can only get worse. Trump is never more ruthless, or more demented, than when he’s punching down at a Republican who steps out of line. Look for Bolton to be a leading indicator of punchings to come.

I hasten to add that Trump has nowhere near the power Stalin had, so we’re still a long way from seeing show trials of such “traitors” as Bolton, or Liz Cheney, or Adam Kinzinger, or Cassidy Hutchinson.

But that said, retribution is emerging as a persistent theme of this regime, and the Old Republicans, like the Old Bolsheviks before them, are in the crosshairs. So it’s fair to ask what Stalin would do with a guy like Bolton. Of course, the answer is obvious.

No, we’re not there yet. But there’s no doubt we’re being herded in that direction.