I sometimes wonder if I am really the kind of person who would have resisted communism at the very onset.

At present, there is no doubt that I would resist it. I know it's history and it's body count. I know how it strips societies down to bareness and then flogs them till the blood runs in the gutters. I know communism well. She is a cold reptile who leaves a trail of death wherever she emerges from the sewers.

The question I ask myself is this: If I were a young man circa 1906 in Russia, would I have had the astuteness to recognize the evil that was coming to nest on the country when the Bolsheviks were stirring?

To be sure, the Tsars were harsh and remote. They were unconcerned with the lives of the serfs and countenanced brutality against them.

If, during this era, I was introduced to group of eager men and women proclaiming a better life for all Russians, would I (without the benefit of history lessons and conversations with people who had escaped the talons of communism) have foreseen the insanity of it all?

I'm really not sure.

At meetings, some of the tenets of the new political movement would have sounded like this:
In the new political order,...

[1] there would be no class system but rather a brotherhood/sisterhood of equal men and women

[2] the state would require people to perform as they were able and the state would provide what they needed

[3] all property and capital for production would belong to the state

Are there enough red flags (excuse the pun) in the brief manifesto to have made me leave the meeting in a panic to warn my fellow citizens of the horrors to come?

[1] The notion of a classless system is appealing to me. I love societies that are set up in such a way that the rich and the poor are very hard to distinguish. I like societies where the president of a prestigious university carries his own boxes of stuff from his car to his office and cuts his own lawn on weekends and sits next to an office clerk in a plane as part of a seamless continuum of people. This is not to say that I want an office clerk and a president to earn the same but rather to say that the office clerk should not feel less or be considered less than a president. By the same token, the president should not have been conditioned to feel greater than an office clerk.

In the dimly lit bar where we met with the Bolsheviks, I might have drawn my stool closer upon hearing this first precept of communism.

[2] The second idea would then be tabled. "All people would be called upon by the state to offer their skills for the betterment of the state and in return, the state would give them what they needed".

I think I would have mulled over that for some time. The proposal implies that the state would have directoral powers over what I produced and what I consumed.

That's a hard one. As a young man, I may have reasoned that I was jobless anyway so what would be the harm in accepting employment from the state. I may also have reasoned that my needs were very basic. All I needed was food, shelter and a means to get to work. If the state would promise to provide these things, I perhaps would have felt that such a social contract would be an improvement over living with the risks of unemployment and economic uncertainty.

So far, I have failed. I have rationalized all the proposals so far. This is depressing.

The boozy crowd is roused in the little Republik bar but there is one last item on the agenda.

[3] All property would belong to the state and any profit accrued from that property shared among all comrades.

"What?...you mean the state would own everything?" I would have asked myself. "You mean my father's farm would belong to the government?"

How could one NOT ask this question?

This is a proposal that would strike fear into my soul. I would have reasoned that without the ability to own anything, I would be vulnerable to extreme lack without the option of using my own determination to get what I needed. If I needed an extra bowl of soup to because I was feeling under the weather, I would need to rely of the benevolence of my food-distribution officer to see to it that I got it? How on earth would that work?

Without ownership, my life would be anchorless. I could be ordered anywhere and instructed to do anything because the failure to comply would result in starvation effectively making me a slave. I would be unable to store for the future and unable to select optimal paths to procure my hopes and dreams.

I would be reduced to a unit of production for the state. If my usefulness to the state ended, so would my life.

Sitting in the Republik bar on the frosty Russian steppes, I would have felt uneasy about the breathlessly told plans for the future of Russia. I would have looked at the faces of the agitators and wondered if I could trust any one of them with my life and the lives of my children?

As they theorized and masterminded their revolution, I would have slipped out and warned those I could and left the accursed land.

At least I hope I would have.

As it turns out, classlessness and all the other tenets of communism were promises that were all broken by the communist regimes and the ideology itself nothing but a colossal failure.

The giddy talk of revolution in the seedy Republik bar circa 1906 turned out to be a vodka-fuelled fantasy that caused the world a heap of pain.

Like they say...... hindsight is 20/20.