Creature From Jekyll Island by G. Edward

Bolsheviks, on the other hand, could count on several regiments to carry out their orders. Units of the Baltic Fleet also supported them....

In the event, the Bolshevik take-over was almost bloodless: in contrast with what had happened in February, nothing could have been less like a city in the throes of revolution than Petrograd on 25

October. Crowds of well-dressed people thronged the streets in the evening. Theaters and restaurants were open, and at the opera, Shaliapin sang in Boris Godunov. The principal stations and services THE BEST ENEMY MONEY CAN BUY

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had all been taken over by the morning of 25 October without a shot being fired....

A battleship and several cruisers, including the Aurora, had reached Petrograd from Kronstadt and were anchored with their guns trained on targets in the city....

The Provisional Government inside the Winter Palace...received an ultimatum calling for surrender of its members, under threat of bombardment of the palace by Aurora and by the guns of the Peter and Paul Fortress.... It was only at 9:40 P.M. that the Aurora was ordered to fire —and discharged one blank shell. The main effect of this was to accelerate the thinning out of the cadet defenders of the palace, who had already begun to dwindle. The women soldiers, who had formed part of its defense force, also left before the palace was invaded. At 11 P.M. some live shells were fired, and the palace was slightly damaged....

The story of the dramatic storming of the Winter Palace, popular with Soviet historians and in the cinema, is a myth. At around 2 A.M. on 26 October, a small detachment of troops, followed by an unruly crowd and led by two members of the MRC [Military Revolutionary Committee], entered the palace. The remaining officer cadets were, apparently, prepared to resist, but were ordered to surrender by the ministers. In the end, the total casualties were three officer cadets wounded.1

POPULAR SUPPORT WAS NOT NECESSARY

Eugene Lyons had been a correspondent for United Press in revolutionary Russia. He began his career as highly sympathetic to the Bolsheviks and their new regime, but six years of actual living inside the new socialist utopia shattered his illusions. In his acclaimed book, Workers' Paradise Lost, he summarizes the true meaning of the October Revolution:

Lenin, Trotsky, and their cohorts did not overthrow the

monarchy. They overthrew the first democratic society in Russian history, set up through a truly popular revolution in March, 1917....

They represented the smallest of the Russian radical movements....

But theirs was a movement that scoffed at numbers and frankly mistrusted the multitudes. The workers could be educated for their role after the revolution; they would not be led but driven to their terrestrial heaven. Lenin always sneered at the obsession of competing socialist groups with their 'mass base.' 'Give us an organization of h Leonard Shapiro, The Russian Revolutions of 1917 (New York: Basic Books, 1984), pp. 135-36.

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professional revolutionaries,' he used to say, 'and we will turn Russia upside down.'...

Even these contingents were pathetically duped, having not the remotest notion of the real purposes for which they were being used.

They were striking out, they thought, for the multi-party Soviets, for freedom, equality, and other goals which their organizers regarded as emotional garbage....

On the brink of the dictatorship, Lenin dared to promise that the state will fade away, since 'all need of force will vanish.' Not at some remote future, but at once: 'The proletarian state begins to wither immediately after its triumph, for in a classless society a state is unnecessary and impossible.... Soviet power is a new kind of state, in which there is no bureaucracy, no police, no standing army.' Also: 'So long as the state exists, there is no freedom. When there is freedom, there will be no state.'

Within a few months after they attained power, most of the tsarist practices the. Leninists had condemned were revived, usually in more ominous forms: political prisoners, convictions without trial and without the formality of charges, savage persecution of dissenting views, death penalties for more varieties of crime than in any other modern nation. The rest were put into effect in the following years, including the suppression of all other parties, restoration of the internal passport, a state monopoly of the press, along with repressive practices the monarchy had outlived for a century or more.1

All of this, of course, is a departure from the main narrative, but it has been necessary to illustrate a fact that has been obscured by the passage of time and the acceptance of myth by mainstream historians. The fact is that Lenin and Trotsky were not sent to Russia to overthrow the anti-Semitic Tsar. Their assignment from Wall Street was to overthrow the revolution.

NOTES FROM LINCOLN STEFFENS' DIARY

That this was the prevailing motive of the New York money powers was clearly brought to light in the diary of Lincoln Steffens, one of America's best-known leftist writers of that time. Steffens was on board the S.S. Kristianiafjord when Trotsky was taken off and arrested in Halifax. He carefully wrote down the conversations he had with other passengers who also were headed to strife-torn Russia. One of these was Charles Crane, vice president of the Crane Company. Crane was a backer of Woodrow Wilson and former

1. Eugene Lyons, Workers' Paradise Lost (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1967) p p . 1 3 - 2 9 .

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chairman of the Democratic Party's finance committee. He also had organized the Westinghouse Company in Russia and had made no less than twenty-three prior visits. His son, Richard Crane, was confidential assistant to then Secretary of State, Robert Lansing. It is instructive, therefore, to read Steffens' notes regarding the views of these traveling companions. He wrote: '... all agree that the revolution is in its first phase only, that it must grow. Crane and the Russian Radicals on the ship think we shall be in Petrograd for the re-