On April 16 in the fateful year of 1917, the Russian communist Vladimir Lenin arrived in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) from exile in Switzerland.
The Germans, with whom Russia had been at war since the summer of 1914, secretly arranged his return, granted him safe passage through Germany, and even gave him millions in gold. They hoped he would stir up enough trouble that Russia would withdraw from World War I.
A vaccine is supposed to inoculate a person against a virus. Injecting Russia with Lenin was tantamount to administering the virus itself. British historian Edward Crankshaw noted that Germany saw “in this obscure fanatic one more bacillus to let loose in tottering and exhausted Russia to spread infection.”
So, the Germans got their wish for the near term, but it availed them worse than nothing. They lost the war anyway in November. The monster Lenin created would swallow half of Germany in 1945 and build the infamous Berlin Wall in 1961. The first communist state enslaved millions and bedeviled the world until its collapse in 1991.
Elsewhere, Lenin declared that “The proletariat needs state power, the centralized organization of force, the organization of violence, for the purpose of crushing the resistance … and for the purpose of leading the great mass of the population … in the work of organizing a socialist economy.”
“Comrades! The insurrection of five kulak districts should be pitilessly suppressed. The interests of the whole revolution require this because ’the last decisive battle' with the kulaks is now underway everywhere. An example must be made.Do it in such a fashion, that for hundreds of miles around the people see, tremble, know, shout: ‘The bloodsucking kulaks are being strangled and will be strangled.’
- Hang (absolutely hang, in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, fatcats, bloodsuckers.
- Publish their names.
- Seize all grain from them.
- Designate hostages, in accordance with yesterday’s telegram.
Telegraph receipt and implementation.
Yours, Lenin.