Word: leninization
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...Lenin could hardly lead a revolution from exile in Geneva, of course, but when he asked Berlin for permission to travel home through Germany, the Germans happily agreed to provide him with a sealed railway carriage (rather like a container for a deadly bacillus) and even allocated secret funds to aid his plans to stop the war. And so, after ten more years of exile, Lenin finally arrived by train at the Finland Station in Petrograd on April 16, 1917. He climbed onto an armored car and began making a speech. "The people need peace. The people need bread...
When rioting broke out in July, Prince Lvov banned the Bolsheviks (who grew fourfold, to hundreds of thousands, in 1917), sent Lenin into hiding and % arrested Trotsky (newly arrived from New York City and newly allied with Lenin). Lvov then resigned in favor of his War Minister, Alexander Kerensky, who called in troops to maintain order in the capital and shut down Bolshevik newspapers. Trotsky, out of jail again, mobilized Red Guards to defend the Petrograd soviet, which he now headed. The government troops would not fight. Lenin called for an armed uprising. Almost without opposition, the Bolsheviks seized government...
...next day, Nov. 8, Lenin appeared before the Congress of Soviets, rejected all talk of a socialist coalition government and insisted on an all- Bolshevik Cabinet. He became Premier, with Trotsky as Foreign Minister. This was not because the Bolsheviks were the biggest or most popular party. In elections for a constituent assembly, they won only 25% of the votes, in contrast to about 62% for various moderate socialist groups, notably the peasant-backed Socialist Revolutionaries, and 13% for various bourgeois parties. Dismissing that as a "formal, juridical" matter, Lenin simply disbanded the constituent assembly after one meeting...
...taking such high-handed actions, Lenin now had the weapon of a new police force known as the Cheka, which authorized local soviets to "arrest and shoot immediately" all members of "counterrevolutiona ry organizations." When a Socialist Revolutionary named Fanny Kaplan shot Lenin in the neck, the Cheka rounded up and executed 500 of her party comrades in one night. Lenin's view: "We have never renounced and cannot renounce terror." As for the future role of the Communists, the Eighth Party Congress decreed in 1919 that "the Russian Communist Party should master for itself undivided political supremacy...
Confronted with this disaster, Lenin zigzagged. According to the New Economic Policy inaugurated in 1921, private enterprise was once again permitted, farmers could keep or sell more of their crops, overtime pay was restored, a new state bank reformed the currency (sound familiar?). Predictably enough, improvements soon followed -- production up, trade up. But in this ambiguous moment of success, Lenin suffered a stroke. He struggled to stay at his post, to finish his work, but two more strokes increasingly paralyzed him, and after 22 months of decline, he died in 1924, at only...