Word: bolsheviks
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...listening to Lenin's cold, hard logic, Stalin became a devoted disciple. A cold and careful mind responded to a cold and brilliant mind. The party was flat broke and Koba became the appropriations member of the Caucasian Bolshevik Bureau, i.e., he directed "fighting squads" which robbed banks, public treasuries, steamships. His biggest haul: a quarter of a million rubles in a stickup in the main square of Tiflis. Among those arrested as a result of this raid was Litvinov, future Commissar for Foreign Affairs, who was trying to dispose of the loot in Paris. Koba, although...
World War I broke Czarist power, brought about the 1917 short-lived Kerensky government and the Bolshevik coup d'etat. Stalin got out of Siberia, but took small part in these momentous events. U.S. Journalist John Reed did not even mention him in Ten Days That Shook the World. But Stalin, the Inside Man, emerged as one of the seven members of the party's political bureau and was appointed Commissar of Nationalities. Joked Lenin: "No intelligence is needed, that is why we've put Stalin there...
Sleep Well. One after the other the Old Bolshevik leaders confessed and were led away to be shot. The purge reached its peak in 1937 when the Soviet's leading generals were secretly tried, and together with thousands of Red army officers, including all but twelve members of the general staff, were shot. But the trials were only a fraction of the picture. The GPU reached out into every small town and village, arresting minor party members, doctors, engineers, professional men & women, beating them into confessions of sabotage and treachery. In 1938 Stalin called a halt, ordered a purge...
...over, perhaps 7,000,000 people had disappeared, either into the GPU mass burial pits or into the vast slave camps of Siberia. But Stalin could rest: he had destroyed many innocent people, but with the good grain he had also burned the chaff of the old Bolshevik Party, the chief challenge to his power. He himself slept well. The new generation of party members, which he set about recruiting and educating, were functionaries, meek & mild bureaucrats, with a mortal fear in their bowels...
There was just one Old Bolshevik left: Stalin sent out his new operatives after him. Halfway round the world, a young Spanish Communist named Mercader, alias Monar (with an assist from the New York Communist Party), found Trotsky in Mexico City and killed him with an alpenstock...