Putin GOES OFF On Marx and Lenin: "Practice Has Shown That Marxism Was Wrong, Family Matters!"

FLASHBACK 2014 Putin Also Trashed Lenin!



As Russia’s military escalation in eastern Ukraine continued last week, Vladimir Putin found time to visit the Seliger National Youth Forum, a summer camp for pro-Kremlin young people some two hundred miles northwest of Moscow. Among the many subjects discussed was history: he spoke about the Bolsheviks, the masterminds of the 1917 October revolution and the founders of the Soviet state. To many in Russia, Putin’s interpretation of the revolution would sound odd. He accused the Bolsheviks of treachery because they undermined the country’s military effort against the Germans in the First World War.


Russia had entered the conflict as an ally of France and Britain. Three years later, the imperial regime fell, exhausted by the war and undermined by broad public unrest**.** The country was in disarray; soldiers defected. Several months after the collapse of the Russian empire, the Bolsheviks seized power. Lenin, their leader, who had called for “turning the imperialistic war into a civil one,” withdrew Russia from the alliance and made peace with Germany. His plan was to pitthe disenfranchised (soldiers, peasants, workers) against the nobility and the propertied class, to radically destroy the _ancien régime _and consolidate Bolshevik power. He launched the Red Terror, a merciless extermination of the Whites, the “hostile classes”; the officers of the imperial Army who had fought against Germany were among the primary targets. After several years of a horrific, fratricidal war, the Reds prevailed, and Lenin became the glorious leader of the world’s first “state of workers and peasants,” as it was known. For more than six decades after his death, in 1924, he was a worshipped founding father, his embalmed body kept on display in the Mausoleum in the Moscow’s Red Square. Cities, streets, industrial plants, collective farms, Naval vessels, universities, and libraries came to bear his name. His slogans, portraits, and statues were everywhere. Generations of Soviet citizens revered his memory, including Vladimir Putin, who was born in 1952.


By the nineteen-seventies, the cult was wearing out, and Lenin became the butt of political jokes. But the Communist Party, which referred to itself as the party of Lenin, still had a firm grip on power and full control over the historical narrative. The Soviet people dutifully celebrated the Bolshevik revolution and the Red victors of the civil war, and worshipped Lenin, who was said to be “forever alive,” “forever with you.”