Mined from the notebooks, Thursday, August 13, 2020. Posted Thursday morning, September 10, 2020.
Leon Trotsky at his desk, 1918. Via Wikimedia Commons.
From “Red Famine” by Anne Applebaum:
For everyone in the Communist Party, the Civil War era was a true watershed, personally as well as politically. At the beginning of 1917 few of them had much to show for their lives. They were obscure ideologues, unsuccessful by any standard. If they earned any money, it was by writing for illegal newspapers; they had been in and out of prison, they had complicated personal lives, they had no experience of government or management.
Unexpectedly, the Russian Revolution put them at the center of international events. It also brought them fame and power for the very first time. It rescued them from obscurity, and validated their ideology.
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