Abstract
On 22 January 1917 Lenin addressed a gathering of working youth in Zurich. Europe, he told them, was ‘pregnant with revolution’. Popular risings, led by the proletariat and ending with the ultimate victory of socialism, would come about in the ‘next few years’. But ‘we older men may not live to see the decisive battles of this imminent revolution’. However, within eight months the Bolsheviks, headed by Lenin, had swept their political opponents from the field and were in sole if precarious possession of power in Russia. It was to take them several years to eliminate rival parties, and to lay the foundations of unity within their own. But the story of their struggle, which is the subject of this book, cannot be understood without a glance at the origins and faiths of the political parties mainly concerned.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Professor G. J. Renier in his analysis of the division of the seventeenth-century Dutch Calvinists into remonstrants and counter-remonstrants comes to a conclusion which offers a striking historical parallel to the Bolshevik-Menshevik split. The difference of doctrine between the groups was slight, yet ‘it marked the difference between two temperaments, and temperament is the mother of conviction’. This difference of temperament produced, as in Russia, ‘the parting of the ways for the two political parties that were, henceforth, going to fight for mastery in the Dutch Republic’. See The Dutch Nation, an Historical Study (London, 1944), pp. 41–50 at p. 49.
Copyright information
© 1977 Leonard Schapiro
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Schapiro, L. (1977). The Political Background. In: The Origin of the Communist Autocracy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09509-4_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09509-4_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-44140-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-09509-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political & Intern. Studies CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)