Thursday 21 August 2014

Aug 21 1940 - Russian Revolution Takes Another Twist

A post taking real life incidents from this day in history and my view of them as if they were happening today and what my honest view would have been then on that day and ignoring hindsight or knowledge of how it ended.

Revolutions are hardly ever neat and clean and the Russian one a little over 20 years ago continues to serve up twists as turns as another of the key figures, Leon Trotsky, has been found dead, the victim of an ice pick to the head.
Second only to Vladimir Lenin in the early stages of Soviet communist rule, the former head of the Red Army's star waned dramatically on the death of Lenin when he lost the power struggle with Stalin over who was to become Lenin's successor and was exiled and sentenced to death for treason.
He found himself in Mexico where he continued to criticise Stalin and the direction that he was taking Communism in the Soviet Union.
Stalin, never one to take criticism lightly, ordered his death and the inevitable conclusion happened in Trotsky's Office after he had survived a previous gun attack on his family home.
Now that the two intellectuals of the Revolution, Lenin and Trotsky, have left the scene, the death bell has been sounded for the Lenin/Trotsky idea of 'Permanent Revolution' that would see Communism expanded to include other countries, the Stalinist 'Socialism in one country' idea now holds sway under the totalitarian stewardship of Uncle Jo and the revolution takes another lurch away from the very ideals that it was based upon.

2 comments:

Chris said...

Thats the problems with an ideology, it gets bent out of shape and what starts off as a sound idea ends up twisted. The same will happen with capitalism.

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...
This comment has been removed by the author.