Word: bolshevik
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...Russian penchant for excesses aside, the existence of such a mystique should hardly surprise the West. Every nation requires what sociologists term a charter myth, meaning a founding father and a founding ideology. In the Soviet Union, the need for a charter myth has been particularly insistent. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 attempted to destroy every traditional institution-political, religious and economic-that had held Russia together since the 15th century. From its inception, moreover, the Soviet system has demanded terrible sacrifices of its people that had to be justified in the name of Lenin's ideals. While Stalin...
Only Lenin offers a thread of continuity and legitimacy of rule for Russia's present, apparently divided leadership. Virtually all of Lenin's closest Bolshevik comrades-Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev-were dishonored and murdered by Stalin. For 40 years, from Lenin's death in 1924 through Khrushchev's ouster in 1964, every Russian leader was irreversibly disgraced by his successors. Such an interruption in legitimate succession demands a fresh reinforcement of the link between the present leaders and the founding father...
...Lenin put it, the Bolshevik seizure of power during the ten world-shaking days of October 1917 was "as easy as lifting a feather." Lenin and his ideas did not arouse the masses to overthrow an exploiting regime, as his early scenario had called for. Instead, he simply but effectively thrust himself into the vacuum of power that had been created by the disintegration of the Russian state and society. In the name of building socialism, he overthrew the "bourgeois" liberties that Russia had barely begun to enjoy, convinced that he knew what was best for the people. "The will...
...created-the brutal, terrorizing model for all later Soviet secret-police systems. Many former capitalists were sent to forced labor camps or summarily shot. It was Lenin who started the campaign of harassment against well-to-do peasants, which escalated into open warfare when thousands of detachments of Bolsheviks forcibly requisitioned grain and other products. It was Lenin who, after the 1920 Bolshevik victory in the civil war, turned his full attention to building the gigantic machinery of rule that served as the instrument of Russia's new autocracy and, ultimately, of Stalin's tyranny...
...within the context of a decimated, impoverished, and continually besieged Soviet nation that one must consider the atrocities of Stalinist rule. As one who was faced with resurrecting and maintaining the initial gains of the Bolshevik victory, Stalin faced a set of alternatives any of which would have resulted in widespread suffering and death, by famine if not by police terror and violence. His forced collectivization and his persecution of the kulaks must have been prompted at least in part by the fact that the wholesale refusal of the peasants to sell their already scant grain reserves to the state...