On the one hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, October 25, I watched the 1965 movie “Dr. Zhivago”, a story based on a manuscript smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in 1957. The setting is the Russian Empire and the events leading up to and following the revolution in 1917. It is a good reminder that those are dangerous times, and not just for those in power. The events led to the establishment of the Communist Party, which, over the eighty years of its iron rule, killed many times more of its own people than the Nazis did and brutally repressed any kind of dissent, a tragic irony for a movement proposed to free the workers from oppression.

The United States also rose out of revolution, but the results have been quite different. It is certainly true that the American government doesn’t have a spotless record, but the contrast is stark. Generalized prosperity, freedom of movement and association, and plentiful food is compared with incessant shortages of government-provided goods, long waiting lines, careers and jobs imposed by authorities, restricted movement, and very limited rights.

The vast differences are more understandable if you consider surrounding events. The Russian czars had a long history of oppression, with a growing popular discontent that boiled over to several revolutionary attempts. The battle failures, scarcity, and extreme difficulties from World War I were the wedges that the revolutionary leadership used to gain power, but instead of giving peace, land, and bread like they had promised, they used the opportunity to experiment in the socialist dream of collectivism.

Under Soviet rule, the individual was sacrificed for the collective good. People had no rights and were used in whatever way the rulers determined was best for society, since, under socialism, society takes precedence over individuals. Entire towns were exterminated because they did not submit to the dogma, and farms and other property were collectivized to produce what the bureaucrats determined they would. Millions of people were starved to death in regions that resisted.

In the time before the American revolution, in contrast, the West was undergoing an expansion of rights, with rule of law becoming an important part of civil society, restricting arbitrary rule by a king or officer. The American colonists inherited and nurtured that tradition, and were relatively free from significant intervention from Great Britain for several decades, providing their own colonial government for most things. It was only when British rulers started to impose more tax and interfered more in trade and political activities that revolution was considered.

The rights of the individual over the government were immortalized in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It goes on further, saying that people have the right to alter or abolish a government that is destructive of those rights. The priority of the individual is the most significant difference with the Soviet experience.

The rights and freedoms that Americans had as a whole gave the incentives to productivity and prosperity, whereas an old dictum of the Soviet worker, whose wages came from the state, was “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” The reason the Soviet system lasted as long as it did was because black markets functioned effectively to give people what they needed. In America, the revolution ended well because incentives aligned with economic reality. The Soviet experiment didn’t work out so well for the vast bulk of the population, because it ignored those incentives and the personhood of the individual.