They represented the smallest of the Russian radical movements....
But theirs was a movement that scoffed at numbers and frankly mistrusted the multitudes. The workers could be educated for their role
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professional revolutionaries," he used to say, "and we will turn Russia upside down."...
Even these contingents were pathetically duped, having not the remotest notion of the real purposes for which they were being used.
They were striking out, they thought, for the multi-party Soviets, for freedom, equality, and other goals which their organizers regarded as emotional garbage....
On the brink of the dictatorship, Lenin dared to promise that the state will fade away, since "all need of force will vanish." Not at some remote future, but at once: "The proletarian state begins to wither immediately after its triumph, for in a classless society a state is unnecessary and impossible.... Soviet power is a new kind of state, in which there is no bureaucracy, no police, no standing army." Also: "So long as the state exists, there is no freedom. When there is freedom, there will be no state."
Within a few months after they attained power, most of the tsarist practices the. Leninists had condemned were revived, usually in more ominous forms: political prisoners, convictions without trial and without the formality of charges, savage persecution of dissenting views, death penalties for more varieties of crime than in any other modern nation. The rest were put into effect in the following years, including the suppression of all other parties, restoration of the internal passport, a state monopoly of the press, along with repressive practices the monarchy had outlived for a century or more.1
All of this, of course, is a departure from the main narrative, but it has been necessary to illustrate a fact that has been obscured by the passage of time and the acceptance of myth by mainstream historians. The fact is that Lenin and Trotsky were not sent to Russia to overthrow the anti-Semitic Tsar. Their assignment from Wall Street was to overthrow the
NOTES FROM LINCOLN STEFFENS' DIARY
That this was the prevailing motive of the New York money powers was clearly brought to light in the diary of Lincoln Steffens, one of America's best-known leftist writers of that time. Steffens was on board the S.S.
1. Eugene Lyons,
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chairman of the Democratic Party's finance committee. He also had organized the Westinghouse Company in Russia and had made no less than twenty-three prior visits. His son, Richard Crane, was confidential assistant to then Secretary of State, Robert Lansing. It is instructive, therefore, to read Steffens' notes regarding the views of these traveling companions. He wrote: "... all agree that the revolution is in its first phase only, that it must grow. Crane and the Russian Radicals on the ship think we shall be in Petrograd for the re-revolution."
Precisely. Re-revolution was the expectation and the goal, not the elimination of anti-Semitism.
With regard to Thompson's claim that he was merely trying to keep Russia in the war against Germany, here again, the logic of actual events speak against it. Kerensky and the provisional government wer