Status Updates From 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and th...

Of the 15 original members of the Commissars' Committee, 12 would later be executed or murdered on Stalin's orders.

On December 9, 1917 a British army marched into Jerusalem, ending Muslim control of the city for the first time since the Crusades.

Wilson embraced the Russian revolution as America's revolution as well.

Large numbers of descendants of Irish immigrants opposed becoming allies of Britain, especially in the wake of the bloody suppression of the 1916 Easter Rebellion.

Since 1914 Jewish Zionist Nationalist had been urging both the United States and Britain to act as their protectors.

As it became an active military player the United States would find its role to be not that of partner but increasingly that of master.

WW1 would be at the time the bloodiest war in history. American troops would be entering a slaughterhouse that had already claimed more than 2 million lives.

Woodrow Wilson was more and more impressed with the idea that "white civilization" and its domination in the rested largely on our ability to keep America intact.

By the mid 1890s Marxism would be the dominant ideology among the Russian intelligentsia.

After nearly 300 years the Romanov dynasty of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great was at an end and Russia was poised to become a parliamentary democracy for the first time in history.

The sense that the Civil War and Reconstruction were undiluted tragedies for the South and the nation. Perhaps even the wrong side won had a profound effect on Wilson's views of domestic polices.

In many ways Russia was more isolated from Europe than at anytime since Peter the Great.

The Russian calendar was 13 days behind the calendar used in the United States and the rest of the West.

Throughout the war 10% of British soldiers and 17% of German soldiers wound up being killed in action. By contrast the death rate for U boat crews was 30%.

The theme of Lenin's book was that the concentration of wealth in capitalist countries must inevitably lead to war.

"The tactics of revolution may be summed up in two words To Dare."

By time World War I started The U.S was already the most powerful economy in the world and had the 3rd largest naval fleet.

Lenin spent his life believing that the existing order, capitalism was doomed by its own internal contradictions.

Lenin hated anything connected with the "bourgeoisie". In the 19th century that word had become the symbol of everything Karl Marx's followers were now dedicating their lives to discrediting and destroying in order to liberate Europe's working class.

Woodrow Wilson ran for reelection with the slogan "He Kept Us Out of War"