Bolshevik Revolution : The Heroes

Figure 1.-- In the United States, the men who made the American Revolution, the Founding Fathers, are remembered as great heroes and honored throughout our history. A very different fate awaited the Old Bolsheviks who created the Soviet Union.

In the United States, the men who made the American Revolution, the Founding Fathers, are remembered as great heroes and honored throughout our history. A very different fate awaited the Old Bolsheviks who created the Soviet Union. Lenin was assassinated and later died (1924). Stalin who dominated the Communist Party machinery had already began to dominate the country and in a few years was in complete control (1928). He immediately began attacking his fellow Bolshevik leaders who had made the Revolution. Some were arrested and shot with no accounting. Others met unexplained accidents. Then once Stalin was the absolute master of the country, the Great Terror and Purges began. The most illustrious of the Old Bolsheviks were arrested by the NKVD and beaten until they confessed to unimaginable crimes such as conspiring with foreign agents, both British and German. After the Great Purges of the 1930s, virtually none of the men who made the Revolution, many playing much more important roles than Stalin, were left alive and their names were erased from history. 【 Khrushchev 】 The NKVD cut them out of newspapers in library archives. Hidotic pkotogrphs were reworked to exclude them nd f course they disappeared from Soviet history books. Think about it. Other than Lenin and Trotsky, how many imprtant figures in the Russian Revolution an you name. Only historians and diligent students of the Revolution can name any. To seize power they had to move against the rule of law and had no compunction with eliminated those they disagreed with. Lenin and his colleagues from the very beginner would show very little regard for the rule of law or basic civil rights--commonly seen as bourgeois pretensions. Ten of millions of Soviet citizens would pay the consequences, but the Old Bolsheviks themselves would pay the consequences. After Lenin's death (1924), Stalin would gain control of the Party and State. He then began a methodical, merciless campaign of arresting and executing the Old Bolsheviks who has created the Soviet Union, most of whom had supported him. As they has destroyed the rule of law and basic civil rights, they had no protection from the totalitarian state and fearsome secret police force that they had created. Stalin's priority target was Leon Trotsky who created the Red Army, second in importance to the success of the Revolution only to Lenin. It took some time for Stalin to get Trotsky as he wisely fled the Soviet Union. Trotsky was finally dispatched with an ice pick to the head in Mexico City (1940). By this time the other Old Bolsheviks had long since been eliminated.

Sources

Khrushchev, Nikita. Edward Crankshaw, intro, commentary, and notes. Strobe Talbott, trans. and ed. Khrushchev Remembers (Little Brown: Boston, 1970), 639p.

Created: 11:46 PM 3/1/2025
Last updated: 11:47 PM 3/1/2025