Re:Bolsheviks and their friends

[Ulrich Oswald <uoswald@access.ch>]

Gary Kern schrieb:

>
> A few things need clarification.  The Bolshevik Party took power in
> Russia by means of a planned strike, a coup d'etat.  Once in power,
they
> allowed national elections to proceed, since they had clamored for
them
> when the Provisional Government was in power.  When they lost the
> election overwhelmingly to the Socialist Revolutionaries, they closed
up
> the Constituent Assembly and the planned parliamentary government by
> force of arms.  The dispossessed winners naturally would form a
> coalition and civil war would ensue.  The Bolsheviks, lacking a
popular
> mandate, created a secret police to protect them--the Cheka.  They
> initiated a reign of Red Terror against enemies real and imagined.
They
> confiscated property and ran industry under the rubric of "war
> communism."  Lenin was nearly killed by an SR assassin's bullet.  The
> anti-Bolshevik forces began attacking from various quarters, with
> various foreign backing.  Foreign countries sent military forces to
> protect their investments and stockpiles of weapons in Odessa.  There
> were some skirmishes beyond, but not enough to speak of a foreign
> intervention--that was a Bolshevik myth.  Only the Czech expeditionary

> force, moving west from Vladivostok, engaged in real and decisive
> combat.  After the Bolsheviks emerged from the civil war, still in
> power, Lenin saw the need to lighten up in order to motivate the
economy
> and provide goods--there was nothing left for the central government
to
> steal from the peasants and manufacturers.  So he created NEP, but not

> after giving the order to crush the Kronstadt sailors, petitioning for

> observance of Communist principles and for bread.  From that point on,

> it was the step by step establishment of totalitarian control--secret
> police, concentration camps, closed borders, censorship, persecution
of
> religion, and so on.  Lenin started fading from the effects of his
> wound, and Stalin started taking over.  He brought Marxism-Leninism to

> full fruition.

This is one of the finest compilations of the "Russian revolution" that
I have
read for a long time, and I fully agree. Remains only to add, that the
German
Kaiserreich financed the coup d'etat with hundreds of thousands, if not
millions of gold marks in order to make a separate peace agreement
(which they finally got from Trotzki at Brest-Litowsk in march 1918).
There is
certainly
a kind of an eery underground mycel among the Njemezkis and the Russkis
in the
first half of this century which can make you feel uneasy until today.


Ulrich, from Zürich

(Oh, and I forgot to mention: It was an adventurous Swiss banker who
managed the
transfer of the funds). "Thistikh" shvizarskikh ruk toshe na vsegda.