Before The Age of the Donald - Dave Jaffe by Dave Jaffe

     Before the Age of the Donald - Part Seven


         "War is the midwife of revolution." the communist leader V.I. Lenin said. In 1904 and 1905 Lenin's statement nearly came true. Japan and Russia went to war. The Japanese inflicted a bloody naval defeat in a great sea battle. Peoples all across the Russian empire rose in revolt. Yet this revolt was crushed.
    Then came the First World War. The German army smashed the Russian armed forces in one great land battle. Once again the Russian people rose in revolt. This time they succeeded. The Russian czar stepped down and handed power to a social democrat named Kerensky in 1917. Yet Kerensky insisted on keeping Russia in the war. Life in Russia just got worse. Soldiers deserted the front, peasants revolted in the countryside, and workers in factories formed themselves into soviets.
     Then in October 1917 Vladimir Lenin overthrew the elected Constituent Assembly. "We need peace, land and bread," Lenin's Communist Party proclaimed. Yet soon White armies formed to crush the Revolution. Russia descended into civil war. Millions of Russians were killed in the fighting. Meanwhile western troops invaded Russia. "We must strangle this baby in its cradle," Winston Churchill said of the revolution.
     The Communists finally defeated their opponents by 1921. Yet Russia, now renamed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics  was a bleeding waste land. The U.S.S.R.  had a problem. It was the only communist country in the world and it was surrounded by hostile nations. How would it survive?
    Lenin allowed for some capitalism to flourish with the communist party in control. Yet Lenin's successor Josef Stalin had a more brutal solution. "Socialism in one country," he said. World revolution that could rescue an impoverished U.S.S.R. was off the table for now.
     In the late 1920's, Stalin purged his rivals and launched a ruthless program of industrialization. Grain was taken at gun point from Ukrainian peasants to feed city workers. The farmers protested and Stalin had many of them killed. Then his army herded the peasants into collectives and millions of them starved and died. Stalin then launched purge after purge of the U.S.S.R. No group escaped his wrath. "Stalin killed everybody," one British journalist said. Robert Conquest claims that Stalin killed 20 million people. This figure may be too high. Yet other estimates put the number of Stalin's victims at somewhere at between 8 and 11 million people.
     Then came another disaster for the U.S.S.R. It was called the Nazi invasion.