The former died too soon to have the GULag camps made, but seeing differences in humanity between him and Stalin fades away as pure pettiness. POWER POLITICAL VACUUM So why did neither Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky, head of the provisional government after the fall of the Tsar in February nor the White generals succeed in crushing the numerically inferior Bolsheviks Lenin s party received only a quarter of the votes in the Constituent Assembly in November The explanation lies largely in the political power vacuum that arose after the February Revolution in when Czar Nikolai II fell.
Such pockets of power represent a parallel to the final phase of the Weimar Republic from to This last Romanov was a deeply reactionary and weak willed nobody, without intelligence or character Beevor The mechanisms were as follows the administration of the Tsardom was widely whatsapp mobile number list hated and rapidly disintegrated. Especially in the rural areas, the police, the judiciary and all officials feared for their lives and went headlong. Returned soldiers, often totally demoralized and traumatized, systematically raided all alcohol outlets and were deadly when drunk. Beevor notes with some surprise that the Tsarist army did not raise a rifle in defense of the monarchy. So despised was Nikolai s regime.
Here we must not forget that Lenin s thinking was constantly dominated by the idea of world revolution. Without a revolution in Western Europe, his own in Russia was doomed to defeat, he believed. This may shed light on his bold policy No sacrifice was great enough, only that could save his revolution. Here, Lenin was both an ideologue and a pragmatist. But Stalin saw that a European, especially German, revolution would make the Soviet Union a secondary power and reduce his own role. That is why he leaked to the German police that the German Communists were planning an uprising in At least that s what my history teacher Wolfgang Leonhard told me us. He had good sources he was high up in the GDR s Politburo until he fled to the West in as one of the first defectors.