Ninety-nine years ago, Tsar Nicholas II
abdicated, and, after a few months of weak parliamentary rule, the
Bolsheviks seized power. We call that seizure the Russian (or October)
Revolution, but it might better be designated the Bolshevik coup d’état.
A party of 10,000 people gained control of an empire occupying
one-sixth of the earth’s land area.
From the start, they made up for their small
numbers with outsized violence. If at first their executions of
liberals, socialists, workers who showed independence, and peasants from
whom grain was seized at gunpoint seemed like a short-term necessity,
it soon became evident that the violence would never stop. In fact, it
was to grow, with Stalin proclaiming “the intensification of the class
struggle” when Bolshevik control had long been total.
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