Tragedy of Russian revolution

Tomorrow, a hundred years ago – on October 25, 1917 (November 7 in the old calendar) – the Russian revolution occurred. It wasn’t really a revolution. It was a bourgeois coup by a small group of middle-class activists. But it changed the world.

It brought the first modern tyranny with untold misery and oppression.

Its leader was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin. He was the model for the tyrants who followed him, including his Russian disciple, Joseph Stalin, and the German National Socialist leader, Adolf Hitler.

A genuine revolution happened in February 1917, the result of the misery of World War I: the tsar was overthrown. But succeeding governments were weak and confused. In October, the Bolsheviks – few in number, but disciplined and brutal – took charge in an almost bloodless coup.

On the 25th, Leon Trotsky was everywhere to be seen and Lenin nowhere. But Lenin was the mastermind, in total control.

Lenin knew Marx was talking nonsense when he said communism was inevitable. It could only happen if a group of revolutionaries imposed it by terror.

On taking power, he immediately set up the Cheka (which became the KGB) to seize, torture and murder everyone who opposed him. He crushed all democracy and freedom, wrecked the economy and slaughtered ordinary people on a massive scale.

Lenin is the fourth-worst mass-murderer of the 20th century. Mao (1), Stalin (2) and Hitler (3) killed more. But he was the first.

He came to power 1917, was stricken by a mysterious illness in 1921 and was dead in 1924.

Lenin never worked in a factory in his life and thought workers too stupid to rule themselves.

But he made two good decisions. In 1918, in the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, he took Russia out of WW1 despite huge losses of territory to Germany.

In 1921, when communism of agriculture caused the inevitable famine, he ordered the New Economic Policy, which restored some market forces to farming.

Under capitalism people eat, under communism they starve. But Stalin, following him, reverted to communism and starvation.

Lenin’s communist state lasted 72 years, ending in 1989. This was a remarkable achievement – and a tragic one.