Let’s go back to the genesis of the somewhat providential rise of the Bolsheviks …
It is 1917, World War I is in its third year. The Russians, allied with Britain and France, are fighting the Central Powers: Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey. The war on the Western front is a stalemate, bogged down in mindless, hopeless trench warfare. On the Eastern front, however, the Germans and their allies are clearly winning and Russian forces are being routed — starving, in retreat, abandoning their posts.
Inside Russia, the peasant class is ready to revolt: millions have been conscripted for a disastrous war; those remaining in the villages are being gouged to feed both the Army in battle and urban factory laborers producing the arms.
Ultimately, four million Russian soldiers and civilians will be killed in World War I — the most of any combatant. For comparison, 116,000 U.S. soldiers will be killed in the same war. Put another way: the Russians will lose about 40 times more people than the United States.
As 1917 proceeds, there’s much more dying ahead. Czar Nicholas II is about to become the last regent of the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty. Nicholas is an anachronism: an overmatched, dogmatic autocrat contemptuous of representative government. When the Czar goes to the front to manage the war, he stupidly leaves a self-proclaimed holy man to help run the country.
Grigory Efimovich Rasputin had won royal favor by claiming he could heal the Czar’s son of hemophilia. But he runs out of magic tricks as Russia’s substitute regent. Under Rasputin’s fickle surrogacy, Russia explodes in food riots and worker strikes.
A group of nobles set out to kill him and find it harder than expected. They poison Rasputin, which does not kill him. Then they shoot him at close range, which does not kill him. Then they shoot Rasputin again, and also beat him, which does not kill him.
Finally, they tie him up and toss him in a freezing river. That proves to be the winner.
On March 17, 1917, the Tsar abdicates. A provisional government takes over. A Russian exile in Switzerland is put in a sealed railway car by the Germans. His given name is Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, but he goes by the alias of Lenin. The name comes from the Lena River, which ran next to the prison camp in Siberia where Lenin had been exiled as punishment for Marxist activities. (Russian radicals used aliases to protect their families and to fool the Czar’s secret police. This ruse almost never worked.)
The Germans know that Lenin is a supreme shit disturber who will further destabilize a teetering Russian empire, and thus help the Germans win the war.
Two years later, addressing the House of Commons, Britain’s 44-year-old War Secretary Winston Churchill will put it this way:
Lenin was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a vial containing a culture of typhoid or cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy.
In returning to Russia, Lenin has revenge on his mind. His brother Alexander had been executed in 1887 for plotting to assassinate Tsar Alexander III.
Lenin’s Bolsheviks are one of three loosely united left-wing parties, along with the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionary Party. In Russian, the word Bolshevik means “one of the majority.” Here’s why:
The group originated in 1903, at a Congress of the Social Democratic Party, after Lenin’s followers insisted that party membership be restricted to professional revolutionaries. These hard liners won a temporary majority on both the party’s central committee and, importantly, the editorial board of its newspaper Iskra (“Spark”)
The Bolsheviks then dubbed their opponents the Mensheviks (“Those of the Minority”). In fact, the evil genius of the Bolsheviks will be how, in small numbers and with only sparse popular support, they seize and maintain power not by the vote, but at the point of a gun.
Following the abdication of the Czar, his police department is dissolved. At the seat of government, in Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg), crime soars and quality of life plummets. Because the police at the time provided a wide range of public services, there was now no one making health inspections or collecting the garbage. As public order collapses, vigilantism and mob violence begin.
Lenin’s slogans are: END THE WAR; ALL LAND TO THE PEASANTS; and ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS. After the Bolsheviks muscle control of a key Petrograd soviet, or worker’s council, they choose not to restore public order, deciding anarchy will act to erase any remaining hope of establishing a Western-style democracy.
The Bolsheviks are soon confronted by challengers from all sides, left and right, all ready to fight for control of a state breaking apart. There will eventually be 18 different groups claiming to speak as Russia’s sole representative.
The first big Bolshevik lie is that Lenin’s Russian Marxists are in tune with a historical dialectic of worker liberation. No people’s uprising ever occurs. Nor do the Bolsheviks ever act, as claimed, like democratic socialists. That’s bullshit, too. They are, rather, born terrorists who will disguise their cruelty and totalitarian views by claiming to be communist utopians.
Lev Davidovich Bronstein – alias Trotsky ⎼ explains the barbaric Bolshevik strategy this way:
We shall not enter into the kingdom of socialism in white gloves on a polished floor.
The Bolsheviks change their name to the Russia Communist Party, announcing that “the object is to create a communistic society … and realize the principle: from each one according to his ability and to each one according to his needs.”
This is more empty rhetoric. What the name change means is that the Bolsheviks are making a full break with the country’s more moderate left wing-parties, which Lenin describes, disingenuously, as “chauvinist, populist and standing in the way of the worker’s revolution.”
Lenin is somewhat shocked by the size of the political opposition facing the Bolsheviks. As a remedy, he doesn’t seek to use the tools of persuasion but instead establishes the All Russian Extraordinary Commission, or Cheka, a secret police organization ostensibly charged with combating counterrevolution and sabotage.
It’s real job is constant terror, perpetual mayhem, and senseless killing.
The Cheka will be renamed several times, becoming the KGB at the start of the Cold War.
Fascinating reading...now what can we expect?