One take about the October Revolution I remember reading from conservatives is that it was not organic and was a scheme by the German Empire to get Russia out of WWI and place Lenin in charge. Now of course, this, apart from sounding extremely dumb, ignores the October Revolution being the culmination of the failures and suppression of Communists by the Provisional Government of the February Revolution, but I want to ask, has anyone come across this take before?
I’ve seen this dumb take so many times
Literally what is the point they’re trying to get across? That communism was actually invented by the German Empire? That the people of Russia actually wanted to starve to death in an unpopular war?
The point is to shit on USSR and Lenin.
And it ignores that the Communists solved the problems of the Russian empire. They left the war, rebuilt, collectivized, industrialized, improved living conditions, ended mass starvation and illiteracy etc
Yeah but! Imagine how far would Russia get if it wasn’t for that German spy! /s, but some people unironically said that to me
And it’s not surprising given even my school history books (Belarus) have been a lot of perestroikaesque “Stalin was routinely fucking shit up and we won thanks to individual heroism of people”. Lots of contemporary Russian movies about WW2 follow that theme too.
Kingsman. KINGSMAN
The Germans did send Lenin into Russia with the hopes that something like that would happen, but they didnt engineer the revolution or push it in any way other than allowing Lenin to go there, that take is giving far too much credit to the Germans, whose only part was recognising the importance of Lenin to what was going on in Russia. Conservatives just cant accept giving anything to Communists, even the revolutions have to somehow be conservative caused.
AFAIK they didn’t even recognize the Lenin’s importance. They just were like “oh there are all those various leftist Russians in Switzerland and there was an amnesty after February revolution, we’ll let them pass and maybe they’ll do something to stop the war”.
It was Lenin who requested it, they put him on a special sealed train and then he took a ferry and futher transport through Sweden and Finland, with 31 other revolutionaries, there’s a movie in it somewhere.
Rumours of Lenin and other highly-placed Bolsheviks being German spies was a counter-revolutionary conspiracy theory in 1917 haha
same as it ever was
