In the October revolution of 1918, the Bolshevik party in Russia took over the government. Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik party, was inspired by the works of Karl Marx, but his ideas differed some so that his ideas are often called Marxism-Leninism. The main point that they differed on, was that Marx believed that communism was inevitable and that when the working class realized how they were being oppressed that they would rise up in revolution. Lenin, however, believed that the working class would be too stupid to realize that they were being oppressed and that they would always settle for things like labor unions. Therefore the Bolsheviks stirred up and educated the working class on their condition, and when the Bolsheviks took over it was with a “Vanguard of the proletariat.” These were intellectuals supposedly working for the working class and revolting for them because the proletariat was too busy working to be organizing revolutions.
Once Lenin gained power, he began implementing Marx’s ideas in Russia. He took away private ownership of business, factories, and transportation, and forced all men between the ages of sixteen and fifty to work and sometimes women and children. He sent armed detachments to the countryside to take food away from the peasants, as he thought the reason for the food shortages in Russia must be that peasants were hoarding food. He encouraged peasants to tell on their “hoarding” neighbors, which began widespread peasant revolts. Since the peasants knew that any excess food they produced would just be taken away they began to plant fewer crops. Inflation rose by one-hundred-million times as Lenin wanted to get rid of money. This caused a massive famine starting in 1921 that killed up to five million people. Lenin’s response to people who disagreed with Marxism was the firing squad, as Marxism was based on scientific observation, only a lunatic would think that communism was wrong.
Moscow, May Day 1918
The historian Richard Pipes wrote that, “Soviet Russia was the first society in history to outlaw law.” Examples of this lawlessness include the fact that to be a judge in Soviet Russia, all you had to do was to be literate. Judges were also urged to make rulings based on, “Revolutionary consciousness.”. The Russian legal system under communism was meant to legitimize and spread terror. You could be executed or sent to a concentration camp for the vaguest of reasons. Lenin started the Cheka, the secret police that later became the KBG. The tsar had also had secret police but Lenin’s police was sixteen times larger than the tsars. As the Bolsheviks were a very small minority of Russians, Lenin began to rule by terror in order to keep people under his rule. This became known as the Red Terror and targeted Tsarists, the well-to-do, the bourgeoisie, and society’s undesirables.