Question by Mr. Fox: How was Vladimir Lenin able to create the Bolshevik army?
How was he able to turn an entire army against the Czar? What exactly did he do to find team mates and people that he could trust? How was he able to convince an entire host of common people to raise their arms and fight? If the October 1917 revolution were to occur in modern day United States what would Lenin have to have done?
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Answer by J&C H
Good thing stupid remarks and threats are not reported. Oh my there goes mine, Oh that will hurt so much
The Russians had no solid leadership. There was no such thing as the Bolshevik Army. THere was no host of common people. Where do you get these phrases and ideas? The Bolsheviks won out with propaganda and longevity.
The people stopped fighting and came home.
No he could not do it now. We are educated. The common Russian at the time was not and would believe anything from anyone who could read.
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Spellbound says
The Red Guard – the Bolsheviks' private army was drawn from the regular army and navy based in Petrograd and from workers and ordinary citizens.
In 1917 Russia was falling apart, the authority of the Tsar was diminishing on a daily basis – by February it had dissolved all together and he abdicated. Soldiers and sailors no longer felt any loyalty to their officers – as they had led them into a disastrous war and they were ripe for a concerted propaganda mission conducted by the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks seemed to offer a way out of Russia's malaise. To the soldier they offered an end to the war, and, importantly as the soldiers were mostly peasants in uniform, they offered the land to the peasantry. For workers and ordinary Russians the Bolsheviks offered a solution to the exploitation of the workers, to the building of a fairer and more equitable society and to a political system where they were represented. To ordinary Russians they offered political representation (not in the ways understood in the West, but in a uniquely Russian way), they offered free education, free health care, women's rights and the modernising of the country.
A Lenin in 21st Century USA would not fair very well. His type of politics speaks mostly to people who are disenfranchised, poor and desperate. Americans are suspicious of anything that remotely smells of socialism, so a political figure offering free health care and the nationalising of all industry would not have sufficient support to run for office.