Erin ’s Reviews > Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921 > Status Update

"Neither war nor peace."

Lenin had long been conscious of the fact that the Bolsheviks only chance of seizing power across Russian land mass and retaining it would be to achieve tabula rasa through violence, so there could be no return to the past.

"War to the death against the rich and their hangers-on, the bourgeois intellectuals." His dehumanization of them as lice, fleas, vermin, and parasites was tantamount to a call for class genocide.

The advantage of wearing leather was that unlike wool, it resisted the infestation of typhus- bearing lice.

During the 1812 Patriotic War against Napoleon, the Don Cossacks alone provided 26 regiments of calvary amounting to nearly 50,000 sabres.

The Bolsheviks were numerically miniscule beside the Socialist Revolutionaries.

Any suggestion that Lenin living the life of an impoverished exile in a squalid room in Spiegelstrasse in Zurich might soon become the absolute ruler of Russia would have seemed a fantasy.

"Our generation is doomed. All that is left to us is exile or death."

You should not interrupt your opponent when he is making a mistake.

Lenin scorned half measures as much as he abhorred compromise.