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Jim, we as Americans tend to downplay the fact that Lenin was a politician
and that he had a political power base among the Russian industrial workers
in the main cities of Russia. Namely St. Petersburg/Petrograd and
Moscow.
<p>Although this power base may have been small in ratio to the total population;
it existed in the nerve centers of Russia among a key element in
the population. There is a real interesting analysis of this by a
woman(whose name I can never remember) who teaches at Oberlin College entitled
Forging Revolution. There are also some memoirs of early Russian
union guys that are also worth reading---the Bolsheviks were the party
of the industrial workers and they made the Bolsheviks---some of this stuff
is obscure and hard to find because it went against later dogma.
Shylapnikov's(sp) memoirs(1923) are good on this point; so are the memoirs
of the first commandant of the Kremlin(1960's).
<p>When you get into the late 1920's what I see is a forced attempt to
increase the size of the industrial working class at the expense of the
small farmers and the then relatively pampered industrial workers.
<b>That might make good Marxist sense, but, poor common sense.</b>
<p>Your email pal,
<p>Tom L.
<br>
<br>
<p>Barbara Laurence wrote:
<blockquote TYPE=CITE>Isn't it true that in Marx and Engels, the proletariat
makes the
<br>revolution, while in Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, the revolution makes the
<br>proletariat?
<br>Jim O'Connor</blockquote>
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