I

FRIGHTENED VICTORS 

The people are shivering in their boots over Bolshevism, and they are far more scared of Lenin than they ever were of the Kaiser [German emperor]. We seem to be the most frightened victors that the world ever saw.

—Walter Lippmann, journalist (1919)

RED OCTOBER 

Lenin bided his time. After arriving in Petrograd, he planned and plotted, aided by German money equal to $1 billion in today’s dollars. Secret German funding was critical, enabling the Bolsheviks to buy a printing plant, publish newspapers, turn out protest signs reading “The Germans Are Our Brothers,” and pay agitators to undermine morale in the army. “Lenin’s entry into Russia successful,” noted a German army intelligence report. “He is working exactly as we would wish.”1

In October 1917—“Red October”—Lenin gave the word. Bands of armed Bolsheviks called Red Guards, joined by radicalized soldiers, sailors, and workers from the soviets, swung into action. In a series of swift moves, they stormed government buildings, taking control of the capital. But instead of allowing free elections, as millions had hoped, the Bolsheviks began to reshape Russian society. Ruthlessly tearing the economy from private hands, they ordered businesses and factories, buildings and land, seized and declared public property. Depositors could only withdraw a small amount from their bank accounts each month; safe-deposit boxes were broken open and valuables confiscated for “the people’s use.” An edict forbade hiring anyone for wages, because employing others in order to profit from their labor was deemed “class exploitation.” Private trade, even for small-shop keepers, was abolished.

To feed the newly created Red Army, “food brigades,” teams of activists sent from the cities, forced peasants to turn over much, and in many cases all, of their crops. Infuriated peasants reacted by cutting open food thieves’ bellies and filling them with grain as a sign of contempt. The Red Army retaliated, smothering rebels hiding in forests, including women and children, with poison gas.

For Lenin, there was no such thing as an honest difference of opinion. He was an aggressively intolerant man, whose nature didn’t allow for suffering “idiots.” The Bolshevik leader, an aide noted, “didn’t give a damn for the opinions of others.” He saw no reason to, for Marxism was his absolute truth, beyond question or criticism; anyone who disagreed was by definition not only wrong, but evil. Lenin saw such people as scarcely human. To him, they were “slime and filth,” “blockheads,” “bastards,” “prostitutes,” “dirty scum,” “shits,” “cretins,” “Russian fools,” “windbags,” “stupid hens,” and “silly old maids.” They deserved a bullet in the head, not the give-and-take of reasoned debate. Bullets were very useful things, in Lenin’s view. He’d ask, in all sincerity, “How can you make a revolution without firing squads?” By its very nature, Bolshevik-style revolution meant unbridled violence.2

Lenin and his followers rejected traditional values and moral norms. For the vast majority of Europeans and Americans, these derived from the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule, which tell us to act toward others as we would have them act toward us. Bolsheviks denounced these principles as “putrid” and silly. “Is there such a thing as communist morality?” Lenin asked a...