The following is a guest post by the Rev Dr Peter Mullen, Hon. Chaplain of The Freedom Association. 

The BBC is in festive mode as it celebrates the centenary of Bolshevik Revolution. Laurie Taylor was at it again yesterday on Thinking Aloud. How can all the pundits fly in the face of all the evidence and suggest that the Communist Revolution was anything but a catastrophe? The reign of terror began immediately under Lenin and, by the time of Stalin’s death in 1953, anything between 40-60 million of their countrymen had been slaughtered in the purges and genocides. Apologists for Communism claim that it was a beautiful idea corrupted by the lust for power of the dictators. Eric Hobsbawn, an historian garlanded with the Order of Merit, said that all the millions of deaths under Stalin would have been a price worth paying if the great Communist experiment had delivered the goods. How could it? The only results of Soviet Communism – or Chinese Communism for that matter – were famine, terror and death. But let us go further back and look at the founders of Communism, Marx and Engels, and see if we can find anything in these two to admire.