Word: lenin
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...Dutch, already in the long shadows of a dying empire, promptly exiled him to Flores in the Outer Islands, where with thousands of other political detainees he continued his revolutionary education, reading insatiably in Dutch, English, French and Indonesian and drawing new conclusions from an odd compost of Lenin, Thomas Jefferson, John Dewey, Otto Bauer, Abraham Lincoln. He took time out-to divorce his wealthy widow and marry a young and beautiful Javanese girl named Fatmawati. He had no doubts about the future. "I entered prison a leader and I shall emerge a leader," he said...
Moscow, a stiffly honorable diplomat who was not on speaking terms with the key Bolsheviks and believed them to be nothing but German agents. Raymond Robins was the supercharged head of the American Red Cross mission and had become chummy with Lenin and Trotsky. Robins seems to have believed that the exercise of power was a form of occupational therapy for the Soviet leaders and "that they could be made, over a short time, into reliable and effective allies...
Idealistic Swivet. As early as May 2. Ambassador Francis made a forthright plea for intervention, asking rhetorically "whether [the] Allies can longer afford to overlook principles [of worldwide social revolution] which Lenin is aggressively-championing...
...cherished an "image of the Russians as a simple people, clothed in a peculiar virtue compiled of poverty, helplessness, and remoteness from worldly success-a mass of mute, suppressed idealists languishing beneath the boot of the German captor." The real boot, of course, was the Soviet reign of terror; Lenin and Trotsky, between hasty Kremlin lunches "of salt pork, buckwheat grits, and red caviar," were stamping out all political opposition. Wilson might never have heeded Anglo-French pleas for intervention had it not been for "sentimental" considerations involving the Czechs, to whose postwar birth as a nation Wilson was passionately...
...Little, Too Late. Despite Kennan's strenuous objectivity, one inescapable conclusion leaps from the pages of his book-taken rapidly and resolutely, the decision to intervene would have snapped Bolshevik power like a twig. More than a score of separate Russian governments were contesting Lenin's right to rule on Russian soil. The Russian people were famine-ridden and war-weary. Lenin himself relied on endless improvisation. If this was one of history's great lost opportunities, the chief culprit was Wood-row Wilson. Democrat Kennan admits: "[Wilson] drew onto himself, ultimately, the blame for the failure...