Reaction

The Russian Revolution also prompted a reaction in the United States, known as the first Red Scare, roughly between 1917 and 1920, which involved some mass hysteria fanned by newspapers stoking the flames of fear and virulent anti-immigrant sentiment. The latter was related the nationality of leftist activists, who were mostly relatively recent arrivals from Germany, Poland and Italy.

Then, in 1919, the government got its excuse for massive repression. Galleanists, or followers of violent insurrectionist and anarchist Luigi Galleani, sent some 36 letter bombs between April and June 1919 to leading government officials and businessmen, but also law enforcement officials. Although only two people were injured (only 8 actually exploded, 16 were sent back for insufficient postage), the Justice Department launched a series of massive raids under the leadership of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer.

The Palmer raids, as the campaign is known, was also an excuse to go after new Mexican immigrants. Ironically, they were mostly the so-called “Cristeros,” who had fled persecution of Christians during the ongoing revolution in Mexico. Palmer deported more than 500 foreign citizens in all; his  popularity and political ambitions to succeed Wilson fizzled when he warned of an attempt to overthrow the U.S. government on May 1, 1920, but nothing happened.

In that period, several states also enacted “criminal syndicalism” laws outlawing advocacy of violence in effecting and securing social change, also otherwise restricting free speech. These laws led to aggressive police action against people accused of being left-wing, with no distinction made between communism, anarchism, socialism or social democracy.

One of the notable cases of that era was against Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian-born American anarchists convicted of murdering a guard and a paymaster during a 1920 armed robbery in Braintree, Mass., and later electrocuted. The case remained controversial because of the prejudice openly invoked against the accused; ballistic tests 40 years later proved that Sacco was indeed the shooter, but not Vanzetti.

Leninism

Lenin’s regime was like an earthquake that set off deep fears within the middle and upper classes of the world, so that for the next 72 years, the Soviet Union remained the bogeyman that every union leader, activist and politician outside Russia could use, for good or ill.

Internationally, Lenin broke almost all the rules. He signed a peace treaty with Germany, effectively bowing out of World War I. More importantly, his government repudiated all foreign debt contract by previous governments or by any Russian entity.

Internally, the new government nationalized all private property — this meant all income-producing property, not personal possessions (clothes, furniture, etc.) and not personal real estate of middle-income people or below. In addition, it nationalized all banks, factories and all business and luxurious property and expropriated all Church property. Wages were raised and the eight-hour working day was introduced. Only agriculture remained initially untouched. Lastly, the Tsar and his family, were executed in July 1918.

The effect of all these measures was electrifying. The Russian revolt inspired a surge by the world Communist movement, which was more or less aligned with the Bolsheviks. In 1918-19 a revolution broke out in Germany, where a short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic popped up. Next door, in Hungary, there were a series of 1918-1920 revolts with heavy Communist involvement. Similarly in Italy, the “biennio rosso” (red biennium) of social conflict between 1919 and 1920 included mass strikes, worker protests and self-management experiments in land and factories seizures by peasants and workers.

For about two years, the western Allies briefly occupied militarily parts of what would soon be called the Soviet Union, until the Reds won the Civil War. In 1922, with the Russian economy near collapse, Lenin reversed course and made a feint to “state capitalism” under his New Economic Policy, which won his government diplomatic recognition in Europe, although the USA would withhold it until 1933.