There was no "Russian Revolution." For the Bolsheviks, and revolutionaries everywhere, the seizure of power by the soviets was the Proletarian Revolution and the beginning of the international proletarian revolution. Only Great Russian chauvinists like Stalin (and that is exactly what Lenin called Stalin, along with his henchmen Dzherzhinsky and Ordjonikidze, in 1923) conceived the Soviet republic as a new Russian empire. ...
^^^^^ CB: It was a monumental delusion to think of taking state power in backward Russia as the basis for spreading or "sparking" proletarian revolution in Germany and the countries between Russia and Germany by the very impoverished Soviet/ Russian military invading Poland and Germany. That would definitely have been a suicide mission for the weakling baby Red Army and Russian Revolution.
Since the Bolsheviks gave up a lot of territory from the old Russian empire in the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, that treaty fulfilled the of discontinuation of the Russian Empire by the Soviet Union, not a new Russian empire, the exact opposite of what you say above.
Stalin wasn't taking any positions different than Lenin , and hadn't been for many years as he had been a Bolshevik since the begininng of the Bolsheviks.
> ...Lenin's judgment was in part based on the non-spreadability
> principle...
The whole revolution of the soviets was premised on the spreadability of the proletarian revolution. That was the whole difference between Lenin/Trotsky and Martov/Zinoviev in October 1917
^^^^^^^ CB: Thjs is a false statement. Lenin did not take the position that the Russian Revolution would use military invasion of Poland and Germany to make proletarian revolution there. For one thing, German solidiers and workers had just been in war against Russian soldiers and workers. The antagonisms developed in life and death battle would persist, and Russian soldiers in Germany would definitely have been perceived as attackers of the German motherland, not proletarian brothers come to help with the German bourgeoisie. Lenin was clear on all that and the fact that the German advanced capitalist nation wold have conquered the little baby Soviet Union in inevitable counterattack. Trotsky was in serious error in thinking otherwise. Trotsky tended to romanticism rather than Marxism on this point.. Lenin held that the Russian Revolution might serve as an inspiration to the working class in other countries, not an international enforcer of revolution through force of arms.
> ...when he stopped Trotsky from leading the Red Army into Poland in
> pushing the German's out of Russia/SU in the period of the Russian
> Civil War.
Totally untrue. Trotsky *opposed* the march on Warsaw (it was a war against the French-aided Poles, not against the Germans whose war had ended two years earlier) and it was Lenin, backed by Stalin among others, who imposed the disastrous (in part because Stalin and his cohorts Budenny and Timoshenko disobeyed orders to support Tukhachevsky at the gates of Warsaw and instead drove south for a meaningless capture of Lodz) continuation of the war when a favorable peace had been offered by Pisudski. And Lenin's wrong policy was premised on an inaccurate expectation of a revolutionary uprising by the Polish masses. Three years later, in his preface to *Lessons of October*, Trotsky pointed out that Lenin had made exactly the same error as he himself had made in not immediately accepting the Brest- Litovsk diktat--overestimating the imminence of proletarian revolution (in Germany in 1918, in Poland in 1920). Shane Mage
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CB: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Brest-Litovsk
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/treaty_of_brest-litovsk.htm
This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it
always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,
kindling in measures and going out in measures.
Herakleitos of Ephesos