>>3863416
From the start the Bolsheviks worked to subvert the loyalty of the 125.000 soldiers in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) with promises of private land, farms, stopping the war, avoiding the return of landowners etc. with the result that only 25.000 or so remained loyal to the Provisional Government.
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Francis knew Kerensky well and saw him as more of an orator than a statesman, with his most fatal error (among others) being his argument with Korniloff, the Commander in Chief of the Russian forces. They planned to combine to remove the Bolsheviks but on Korniloff's request to be made head of the government, Kerensky foolishly ordered his arrest, and Korniloff replied by declaring his intention of marching on Petrograd. He never did but it didn't stop Kerensky arming the Bolshevik workingmen's and soldiers committee to defend Petrograd from the attack that never came.
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The Bolsheviks of course used the arms against the Provisional Government, and when the elections to the Constituent Assembly eventually came (far too late) at the end of November 1917, the Bolsheviks filled the assembly hall with soldiers armed with rifles, grenades and machine guns and rejected the result of the vote (Social Revolutionaries 20,893,743, Bolsheviks 9,023,963 out of 36.257.960 votes cast). The Bolsheviks declared that Constitutional Democrats were to be arrested and Lenin established his dictatorship.
With the empty statement, "The Soviet Republic represents not only a higher form of Democratic institution, but it is also the sole form which renders possible the least painful transition to Socialism", Lenin set in train the greatest system of organized mass murder that the world had ever seen (at least 15 million lives in the estimate of Robert Conquest), and lest the world forget, this human abattoir was largely directed by Jews ( NKVD heads Genrikh Yagoda and Yakov Agranov, and all the heads of the Gulag death camps, Aron Solts, Yakov Rappoport, Lazar Kogan, Matvei Berman and Naftaly Frenkel + Lazar Kaganovich killing at least 3 million Ukrainian farmers in the winter of 1932-33).
Stalin awarded the Bolshevik Jews a special protected status in Russia (until 1945) as recorded in Slezkine's recent book , "The Jewish Century" and he documents in some detail the way in which the new Jewish "revolutionary" bourgeoisie enjoyed their new country dachas, worship of Pushkin and attendance at elite educational academies (the inspiration behind George Orwell's book, "Animal Farm").
"Progressive" U.S. academics don't like this book and it is fairly obvious why.