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# The dead of the Paris Commune have risen again beneath the red banner of the Soviets!
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/mertvetsy-parizhskoi-kommuny-voskresli-pod-krasnym-znamenem-sovetov/
- Published: 2026-02-25T05:33:53.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:26:52.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archive, Observations, Society, Paris

We understand, of course, that this is an ideological construct fashioned by the Bolsheviks after the fact, for the sake of appearances, so to speak: a justification of their own model of dictatorship and an attempt to legitimise their regime by ascribing to the Commune ideological premises it never came anywhere near.

It should nonetheless be remembered that the Commune retained a high degree of local self-government, elections and rotation of office, and a plurality of currents with ten factions; there was no monopolist party and no politburo, and for all its harshness in conditions of civil war, it never created so centralised an apparatus of repression or such total control over the economy and society. The Commune did not nationalise industry, and its leaders were patriots, not Marxists.

Lenin, in Plekhanov's words, presented a municipal uprising of patriots and petty bourgeois as a class-based proletarian state. But the main point, as Kropotkin wrote, is that the Commune tried to create a state, not to destroy one.

Still, this 1921 poster reads beautifully, and rather fashionably. After all, everyone likes a nod to things foreign, and all the more so to French quality.