Word: lenin
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Confused, disputed, the Russian defeat before Warsaw had one plain effect on Russian intellectual life. Ranked as one of the decisive battles of the world, it changed Comintern policy, stopped plans to employ the Red Army to work with the European proletariat, forced Lenin to give up immediate hopes of world revolution, directed Comintern agitation to China and the Far East. Russians decided that they had underestimated Polish national aspirations, and nationalist ambitions everywhere; when Trotsky fell, the defeat was blamed on him, when Tukachevsky was purged, he was called responsible; latest official history of the Communist Party, the Mein...
...work of a onetime member of the Executive of the Communist International, is practically unique among latter-day Bolshevist or ex-Bolshevist writings in carrying authority for the sane Western mind. With the knowledge of an insider and the detachment of a historian, Souvarine shows how Stalin succeeded to Lenin's power, how Socialism miscarried in his hands, and why the Soviet-German non-aggression pact (TIME, Aug. 28) was no surprise...
...Lenin during the Civil War, but Lenin and Trotsky together were too smart for him. In Author Souvarine's sober account of these years following the revolution, the predicament of Lenin stands out painfully: plunged by his own victory into a chaos which compelled him to backtrack step by step on the Socialist program, sick, knowing his closest henchmen to be politically imprudent, like Trotsky, or unscrupulous, like Stalin. After his death it took Stalin just two years to make himself impregnable...
...constructed under him a bureaucracy of secretaries, "a hierarchy of secretaries, a psychology of secretaries." For that and for the ruthless use of the secret police his talents sufficed, says Souvarine, for the wise reconstruction and administration of Russia they were pitiful in face of the task with which Lenin himself could scarcely cope. The implacability of a good bomb thrower (TIME, Sept. 4) showed itself inappropriate, to say the least, when Stalin collectivized agriculture at the attested cost of 5,000,000 peasant lives. Lenin continually and publicly admitted his mistakes; Stalin gradually would tolerate nothing but adulation...
...befitted a student of Machiavelli, said little and made that little mean much or nothing (see p. 21). Harsh Molotov in Moscow jeered at hopeful democrats and alone of the world's spokesmen said nothing of war's misery-of which Adolf Hitler no less than Lenin showed himself fully conscious (TIME, Sept...