Word: leninization
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...real sympathies lie? Probably with Azef. He managed to get out of the country and lived out his days in Germany, peacefully playing the stockmarket and horsing around at bourgeois seaside resorts (see cut). Azef was the living transition between the Czar's police state and Lenin...
Something Borrowed. If Russia lacked "a form of social order" before the revolution, what was the case after Lenin completed his handiwork? He destroyed Russia's institutions and tried to impose a form of society of which 99 Russians out of 100 had never heard, which had not been tried anywhere, and for which Russia was called unfit by the very men who had invented this idea of society. If Czarism needed an Okhrana, clearly the Bolshevist state would need a super-Okhrana to fill the larger social vacuum...
...Lenin picked as first policeman of the proletarian revolution was borrowed from the Polish aristocracy. When Felix Dzerzhinsky was made head of the Bolshevists' CHEKA, he wrote to his wife: "I am now in the front line and I want to be merciless, to tear the enemy to pieces as a watchdog would...
Once, at a meeting of political commissars, Lenin passed a note to Dzerzhinsky "How many vicious counter-revolutionaries are there in our prisons?" Dzeizhinsky's scribbled reply was: "Abou: fifteen hundred." Lenin nodded, made a cross on the note, and returned it to Dzerzhinsky. That night, on Dzerzhinsky's order, all 1,500 were shot. It turned out to be a mistake. As Lenin's secretary explained later: "Vladimir Ilyich usually puts a cross on a memorandum to indicate he has noted the contents...
Something Blue. Dzerzhinsky was succeeded by another aristocrat, Vyacheslav Rudolfovich Menzhinsky. Before the revolution Menzhinsky wrote a prophecy: "If Lenin ever reaches power in fact, and not in imagination, he will make a mess of it, the like of one made by Czar Paul I. ... Leninists are a clan of political gypsies, with a strong voice and a love for wielding the knout, imagining that it is their inherent right to serve as coachmen for the laboring masses...