Word: radek
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Lenin, an economist, politician, agitator; Trotsky, an editor, strategist, orator; Radek, a journalist; Chicherin, son of an aristocratic family; Kamanev, a student of law; Rykov, Lenin's secretary; Zinoviev, a master of intrigue, a practical politician, "Lenin's greatest mistake"; Stalin, then 38, an editor; Bukharin, a dry, colorless theoretician; Lunacharsky, a dramatist; Dzerzhinsky, a politician-no group seemed so ill-equipped for the tasks before it as Russia's new leaders. All intellectuals, most of them hardened by years of exile and prison, they were masters of history who misread history, who banked on an international...
Mussolini was only one Socialist who disappointed Angelica in the course of her long revolutionary life, but none of the others-Trotsky, Stalin, Zinoviev. the Russian Revolutionist Georgy Plekhanov, Karl Radek-renounced his beliefs so completely. Nor did Angelica work so closely with the others as with Mussolini in the days when the future dictator was editor of the Italian Socialist Party's central newspaper. Her picture of him- brooding, explosive, egocentric, enigmatic, alternately violent and timid-is the most interesting part of My Life as a Rebel, which is a long (324 pages) record of defeats and betrayals...
Lenin, she says, could control Zinoviev, Radek, Trotsky, but she insists that he disliked Zinoviev, despised cynical Radek, whom she calls a vulgar politician, and distrusted Trotsky's ambition. As for Stalin, she says he was so little known in 1919 that nobody had any attitude toward him. Her version of Bolshevik history is that Lenin employed Zinoviev to split the labor movement of other countries by all manner of intrigue, that such methods became habitual, were employed by Trotsky as much as by Stalin, led to recent Russian trials. Although Angelica Balabanoff has not lost her faith...
...Lenin's big hour, when the Revolution had brought him hurrying back to Russia, the tone of his letters hardly changes. He writes Karl Radek in Stockholm: "The position is arch-complicated and arch-interesting." But with Kerensky out of the way and Lenin and his Bolsheviks in charge at last, his discursive letters shrink to notes and telegrams, their subjects swell to dictatorial size: "Advise you send them six months forced labour in mines. . . . Today at all costs Rostov must be taken. . . . Mobilize all forces. Immediately set afoot everything for catching the culprits. Stop all motor cars...
...frame-up system has been the cornerstone of Soviet 'justice' since the middle of 1918. Trotsky and Radek, Zinoviev and Bukharin helped build...