Plekhanov, the revolutionary mentor who had thrown in his lot with the Mensheviks, mocked the Bolsheviks for being unwilling to abandon their stance, calling them “obdurate rocks.” Lenin happily wore that intended insult as a badge of honor. One young Bolshevik took as his revolutionary alias...
Reilly’s plan to take on the Bolsheviks was to flip Vladmir Lenin and Leon Trotsky’s Latvian mercenary bodyguards. The scheme rested on the theory that the Latvians’ loyalty to the Bolsheviks was paper thin, and that they could be bought off for the right price. Reilly worked on this...
Trotsky in 1918 became the war commissar and he created the red army, and was a major figure in the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War 1918–20. He was a great public speaker and war tactician. However many Bolsheviks were afraid that he would become a military dictator such as ...
After the Bolsheviks seized power during the 1917 October Revolution and created a one-party state under Lenin's newly renamed Communist Party, Stalin joined its governing Politburo. Serving in the Russian Civil War before overseeing the Soviet Union's establishment in 1922, Stalin assumed ...
the bloody years that had so riven the country, was finally in sight. Early that month the Confederate capital had fallen to Union forces; less than a week later, General Robert E. Lee’s surrender ended the war in Virginia and prompted other commanders to lay down their arms. Wa...
The Bolsheviks’ Red Army, led by Vladimir Lenin and his commander Leon Trotsky, laid siege on Kazan to seize the treasure from the tsar’s troops. Whoever got the gold would have enough money to pay for arms and soldiers, and would win the revolution. ...