own for this action. He believed that the strain of the war would make it possible to set off a series of Communist revolutions in every major capitalist nation. Therefore, he wanted to disentangle Russia from the conflict in order to get her prepared for her role as the “Motherland of Communism.” This would give him a chance to consolidate his power in Russia and then to supervise the revolutions in the war-weary capitalist nations so as to bring the whole world under the dictatorship of the proletariat within a very short time.
However, getting Russia out of the war did not prove to be an easy task. For months the Russian armies had been retreating in the face of superior military forces. Consequently, when Lenin finally obtained an armistice with the Central Powers and offered to negotiate a peaceful settlement, they treated him as the defeated leader of a conquered nation. The demands which Germany made upon Russia were outrageous. Lenin hesitated. To further persuade him, the Germans marched even deeper into Russian territory, and were soon threatening the very precincts of Petrograd. Lenin hurriedly moved his government to Moscow and then did something which was deeply humiliating to a Communist revolutionary; he appealed to Russia’s old capitalist allies—France, England and the United States—for help.
He was further humiliated when these countries completely ignored him. Lenin had destroyed the balance of the Allied defense when he pulled the Russian armies out of the conflict. Now these nations were so busy preparing to defend themselves against the all-out German offensive being planned for the spring that they had neither the desire nor the means to help Lenin out of his self-inflicted predicament.
Like the shrewd political gambler that he was, Lenin now weighed his chances for survival in the balance and decided to force his own party to support him in accepting the indecent demands of the Central Powers. Even the iron-disciplined members of the ruling committee of the Bolshevik Party balked at Lenin’s proposal, but, nevertheless, he finally forced it through with a vote of seven to four.
As a result, a settlement was signed between Russia and the Central Powers on March 3, 1918, which has become known as the notorious treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
In it, Lenin accepted terms which took from the Russian Empire 62,000,000 people, 1,267,000 square miles of her arable lands, 26 percent of her railroads, 33 percent of her factories, 75 percent of her coal mines and 75 percent of her iron mines. In addition to this, Lenin promised that Russia would pay the Central Powers 1 ? billion dollars in indemnities!
Such was to be the end of a war that had cost the Russian people 8 ? million casualties.
The First Attempt to Communize Russia
With Russia out of the war, Lenin now felt sufficient confidence to subordinate the whole Russian economy to the theories of Communism. He confiscated all industry from private owners and set it up under government operation. He seized all land which belonged to the aristocracy, the Tsar and the church. He also seized all the livestock and implements which ordinarily served this land. He then abolished wages and replaced them with direct payment “in kind.” This saddled Russia with a sluggish and primitive barter system. He ordered all domestic goods to be rationed among the people according to their class. For example, a worker or soldier was allocated thirty- five pounds of bread, while a nonworker, such as a manager, received only twelve. Lenin also made all labor subject to mobilization. People with technical skills could be compelled to accept any work assigned to them. The selling of retail goods was taken over by the government.
As for the peasants, Lenin distributed the confiscated land to them, but required them to work the land without hiring any help and without selling any of the produce. It was all to go to the government. Furthermore, the land could not be sold, leased nor mortgaged.
In March, 1918, the Bolsheviks changed their name to the “Russian Communist Party.”
But from the very beginning the Russian people did not take well to the new order. Without any personal incentive among the workers, production on the farm and in the factory dwindled to a trickle. The factories were soon down to 13 percent of what they had been producing before the war started, and the farmers cut their production in half. Black markets began to flourish. Workers often stole goods from the factories to exchange for food which the peasants secretly withheld from the government. Before long, the peasants were holding back more than one-third of their crops.
As might have been expected, this decomposition of the Russian economy brought down upon the heads of the people all the wrath and frustration of the Bolshevik leaders. Every terror method known was used to force the people to produce. This led to retaliation.
During the summer of 1918, violent civil war broke out as the “White Guard” vowed they would overthrow the Reds and free the Russian people. The western Allied Nations, though hard-pressed themselves, were sympathetic to this movement and sent supplies, equipment and even what troops they could spare to help release the Russian people from the Bolshevik grip.
Lenin knew this was a crisis of the highest order. He therefore decided to strike back in three different directions simultaneously. To resist organized military groups, he authorized Trotsky to forcibly mobilize a Red Army which ultimately totaled five million. To resist the people’s anti-Bolshevik sentiment and refusal to work, he organized the secret police or Cheka. This body could investigate arrest, adjudicate and execute suspected persons. Authorities state that during the civil war, literally tens of thousands went down before its firing squads. Finally, Lenin struck out at the Tsar. To prevent any possibility of a new monarchial party being developed, he had the Tsar, the Empress, their children and all their retainers shot to death at Yekaterinburg and their bodies completely destroyed. This mass assassination occurred July 16, 1918.
Six weeks later the scalding vengeance of the White Russians nearly cost Lenin his life. The Bolshevik aristocracy was caught under vulnerable circumstances and a volley of rifle fire assassinated the Cheka chief and seriously wounded Lenin. To avenge itself, the Cheka summarily executed 500 persons.
When the end of World War I came on November 11, 1918, it had little effect on the situation in Russia. The civil war continued with even greater violence, and the Bolsheviks redoubled their efforts to communize Russia. Lenin continued to set up Soviets or workers’ councils, in every part of the empire, and these Soviets in turn sent delegates to the supreme Soviet at the capital. Through the channels of this Bolshevik-dominated labor- union empire, Lenin carried out his policies. Behind the Soviets stood the enforcing power of the Red Army, and the terror of the Cheka secret police.
In spite of all these coercive methods, however, Lenin eventually discovered he was fighting a losing battle. For a while he took courage from the fact that United States, England, France and Japan began withdrawing their troops and supplies under the League of Nations policy of “self-determination for all peoples,” but the ferocious fighting of the White Russians continued.
The breaking point for Lenin came in 1921–22 when the economic inefficiency of the Bolshevik regime was compounded by a disastrous famine. There was a complete crop failure along the Volga—the bread basket of Russia. Nikolaus Basaeches wrote: “No one who was ever in that famine area, no one who saw those starving and brutalized people, will ever forget the spectacle. Cannibalism was common. The despairing people crept about, emaciated, like brown mummies…. When those hordes fell upon an unprepared village, they were apt to massacre every living person.”
Packs of wild, orphaned children roamed like hungry wolves through cities and country sides. It is estimated
