Left: Bolshevik leaders arrive by train at Brest-Litovsk and are met by German officers, on December 22, 1917. The Treaty that ended Russia’s participation in WWI, was signed on March 3, 1918.
Last month marked the 100th anniversary of the so-called Russian “revolution.” There are few events in history that have been subject to so much misinformation and disinformation. To mention just the most significant:
(1) There was no revolution in Russia in November 1917. There was a coup d’état in St. Petersburg perpetrated by the Bolshevik Party. Its members assaulted the Winter Palace, where the Provisional Government, which succeeded the downfall of the Tsar in March of that year was sitting and proclaimed itself the new government of Russia.
(2) Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks, was unknown in Russia outside the major cities. He was acting on behalf of Germany, at that time at war with Russia. The Germans smuggled him into Russia from exile in Switzerland precisely for the purpose of staging a coup, taking control of St. Petersburg and surrendering his country to Germany. Lenin did that and signed the punitive treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which granted Germany all of Poland and Ukraine and huge territories in Russia itself. This permitted the Germans to transfer a lot of troops and military equipment to the Western front, where the subsequent German offensive in 1918 would in all probability have succeeded in defeating France and driving the English out of the continent had not the American army arrived just in time.
(3) The Bolsheviks were not popular in Russia. They made the mistake of holding an election after taking over and lost it to the Social Revolutionary Party, at which point they canceled the election. In fact, it took the Bolsheviks three years of constant civil warfare to defeat the various armed groups which fought them in the name of anti-communism and nationalism, and which during much of that time controlled Siberia, as well as Crimea, South Caucasus and most of Ukraine.
As it has been said, those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.
The “useful idiots” in the West, including journalists and historians, as well as leftists of all stripes, are guilty of forgetting, or even worse, purposefully altering the popular perception of history.
A band of adventurers, led by a German agent, seized power in the capital of Russia, surrendered to Russia’s enemy, destroyed every vestige of budding pluralism in the country and fought and eventually won a bloody civil war, followed by almost seventy years of oppression, repression, conquest and domination of most of eastern Europe and the nationalities to create The Soviet Union (USSR).
The Soviet leadership was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of its own people, a record surpassed in sheer quantity of human suffering by only a handful of tyrannical regimes in the vast expanse of human history.