[vidarh]

A key thing to remind people of is that the October "revolution" did not depose the Czar, but the socialist-dominated provisional government.

So many people seems to believe the Bolsheviks overthrew the Czar, but he and his family had been in house arrest for months by then.

And of course the Bolshevik purges didn't stop at the other groups, but also other factions within their own party.

[tehjoker]

True, but that socialist dominated government was filled with a lot of people that believed in an extremely orthodox theory of history that said that the capitalists should get a chance to develop society after the feudal era ended. There was also tension between "defensivists" and "defeatists" on the subject of whether WW1 was worth fighting. Notably, it was the bolsheviks that called for an immediate end to the fighting. That said, the final days of revolution were the bolsheviks trying to create facts on the ground to present to the national congress of deputies, packed with bolsheviks, as a fiat accompli as they thought it was possible to skip the capitalist phase of historical development (they were obviously right in retrospect though later mistakes doomed the experiment).

My understanding of the purges is less comprehensive (though I am taken to understand that while the program went overboard, they weren't paranoid, there were people infiltrating the party to interfere or assassinate members that later bragged about it in books) and my soviet history on what happened post 1917 is not very good. One book at a time...

[vidarh]

> that believed in an extremely orthodox theory of history that said that the capitalists should get a chance to develop society after the feudal era ended

Well, yes, they believed that trying to force socialism without a developed economy was doomed to result in the same class stratification all over again. The Bolsheviks didn't exactly prove them wrong on that count when they effectively established the party as a new upper class, and when they were forced to enact a deeply authoritarian government to retain control.

> That said, the final days of revolution were the bolsheviks trying to create facts on the ground to present to the national congress of deputies

I'm not quite sure what you're referring to here. The Bolsheviks allowed elections to the Constituent Assembly intended to form the new government to go ahead, only to shut the assembly down when they didn't like the outcome (SR and the Mensheviks won a solid majority). It was a coup. To get their opponents to call it a revolution was the greatest PR accomplishment of the Bolsheviks.

If you're talking about the Soviet's, they only got real power because of the Bolshevik coup d'etat. They were not representative of the population, and they simply declared themselves the rightful government because it was convenient for the Bolsheviks to use them to attempt to legitimise their coup in the face of their failure to win the Constituent Assembly elections.

> My understanding of the purges is less comprehensive (though I am taken to understand that while the program went overboard, they weren't paranoid, there were people infiltrating the party to interfere or assassinate members that later bragged about it in books) and my soviet history on what happened post 1917 is not very good. One book at a time...

They arrested and/or murdered a whole host of their on previous allies over disagreements and power struggles. They may have gotten some infiltrators too, but for the most part the purges were about getting rid of rivals within the party structure with a long time history of fighting alongside them.

It's one of the most dangerous features of Lenins vanguard approach that the Bolsheviks basically trained its own organisation to see dissent as a sign of betrayal.