Compromise With No One    
We return to our excerpts from Smithsonian magazine.
How Lenin gained power; what power wrought, and
what legacy may be with us still.

   By 1917, both Trotsky and Lenin had won fame. Lenin's Bolshevik Party kept its membership to a small group of followers. Lenin believed that the party must compromise with nobody. (Keep that thought.)  

   Since 1900, he had lived all over Europe, and emphasized the international aspect of proletariat revolution. Lenin wrote articles and published books.

   Trotsky also wrote, but he was flashier and kept a higher public profile. Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein in the Ukraine, he had starred in the 1905 Revolution. 

   Lenin saw the world as divided between allies and enemies. (Keep that thought.) For him, the latter had to be suppressed or killed.

   Under Lenin's direction, Bolsheviks advanced through the confusion (after abdication of the czar) by stealth, lies, coercion, subterfuge and finally violence. (Keep that thought.) All they had was a hard-fixed conviction and a leader who had never been elected or appointed to any public office. None of his promises would be fulfilled, but the party knew what the people wanted to hear. (Keep that thought.)

   When civil war broke out (with pro-czar forces rising up), Lenin decided that ex-czar Nicholas and his family, now under house arrest, must be killed. In July 1918, an execution squad slaughtered them all.  

   The pattern was set. Secret police would kill whom they chose. Bolshevik power would be absolute, and violence would be used to terrify. The murder (of the czar's family) upped the anti for the new government; there could be no return. 

   The ghastly way forward led through the bloody suppression of the sailors' rebellion of 1921, and the war on peasants, and the forced mass starvation, and the rise of Joseph Stalin's terror in the 30's, and the one million who died in labor camps in 1937-38 alone. 

       - Ian Frazier