Oakleigh’s Reviews > A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 > Status Update

"The peasant labour teams, like the labour armies, were fantastically inefficient. It took fifty conscripts one whole day, on average, to cut down and chop up a single tree."

In early 1918 Lenin himself had backed a plan to organise a special closed restaurant for the Bolsheviks in Petrograd... Since then the principle had been gradually extended so that, by the end of the civil war, it was also deemed that party members needed higher salaries and special rations, subsidised housing in apartments and hotels, access to exclusive shops and hospitals, private dachas, chauffeured cars... etc.

...the principle urged by Lenin - that it was better to arrest one hundred innocent people than to run the risk of letting one enemy of the regime go free - ensured that wholesale and indiscriminate arrests became a general part of the system.

Quotes that make you say hmmmm:

Trotsky had once said: "We must put an end once and for all to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life."

'Comrades!', a bad-tempered Trotsky warned an army conference in 1919, 'although we have not been brought down by Denikin or Kolchak, we may yet be brought down by overcoats or boots.' In fact, if anything, the Red Army was brought down - quite literally - by illness and disease. More soldiers died from disease than from fighting in the civil war. // Wow. It just gets worse and worse for the people of Russia...

"Although these public employees held diverse political views, virtually all were agreed that the Bolshevik regime was illegal and had to be opposed... The refusal of the State Bank and the Treasury to honour the new governments cash demands was the most serious threat of all... the Bolsheviks finally seized control of the bank and forced the employees, at the point of a gun, to open the vaults."

Brusikov claimed that the Germans had destroyed 'one of the French people's finest properties, the beautiful vineyards that produce champagne'. This of course merely alienated and enraged the soldiers, who began to shout at their Commander-in-Chief: 'Shame on you! You want to spill our blood so you can drink champagne!' // Thoughts: And in this, the provincial government essentially handed Russia to the Bolsheviks...

Lenin arrived a stranger to Russia ... he had spent the previous seventeen years in exile abroad. ... Between July 5 and the October seizure of power Lenin did not make a single public appearance. He barely set foot in the provinces. The man who was set to become the dictator of Russia has almost no direct knowledge of the way it's people lived. Apart from two years as a lawyer, he had never even had a job.