Sensing inadvisability, the Bolshevik leader had Stalin shave off his sideburns and fled into exile in Finland you can see his cabin today But Kerensky s even more fateful Achilles heel was that he wanted to continue the war on the side of the Entente. He didn t have much of a choice. Had he attempted peace feelers with Germany Austria Hungary, he would probably have been met with coups by Tsarist generals. LENIN S BOUNDLESS CYNICISM Lenin s message was the exact opposite Peace, land and bread. So important was the end of the war to Lenin that he agreed to the humiliating peace with Germany at Brest Litovsk in March He then gave up territories that included most of present day Ukraine.
But these slogans hid Lenin s pure cynicism. Lenin wanted to nationalize the land, not give it to the peasants. When the peasants understood this, he had to establish the Cheka to cow them his slogan about all power to the local councils the soviets was just propaganda. They were whatsapp mobile number list not to become popular advisory and self governing bodies, just ruthless grasping hands for the party s control of the people from above. The only promise Lenin kept was peace. It was Marx s old enemy Mikhail Bakhunin who saw this Bolshevik power grab fifty years earlier If you take the most persistent revolutionary and give him absolute power, within a year he will be worse than the Tsar.
The first to see this Bolshevik degeneration of power were the sailors at the naval base in Kronstadt in the Gulf of Finland. They were the Bolsheviks core troops when the Bolsheviks took the Winter Palace in November In March they protested against the party dictatorship and wanted freedom, especially freedom of speech. Led by Trotsky, the Red Guards came across the ice and massacred them. The local command was held by Mikhail Tuchashevsky, later a marshal who fell to Stalin s bullets in The degeneration of power again. Lenin understood that the future of the revolution lay in getting Russia out of the trenches, where hundreds of thousands of soldiers suffered a life of unimaginable humiliation Russia lost million soldiers in the First World War.