" . . . millions of lives were shed not just because of the inevitable cost of revolutionary struggle but because Lenin insisted on implementing his own view of how that struggle should develop. Rather than allow the people themselves to establish autonomous and federated revolutionary regimes in the various areas of the tsarist empire — in the Ukraine, in Georgia, in Siberia, and so forth — Lenin insisted that a single regime should rule over all nationalities. This despite the fact he had earlier promised full freedom to all nationalities. The tsarist empire was kept intact with a single party asserting its political dominance — at tremendous cost. The crushing of the revolutionary peasants of the Ukraine is the best-known example. By the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Lenin ceded the Ukraine to Germany as part of his deal to gain peace. The Ukrainian people, though, organised spontaneously to resist German occupation and they were successful. They drove the Germans out of the Ukraine. They also fought off counter-revolutionary forces who tried to take over the Ukraine. Rather than allow the heroic peoples of this region to govern themselves and regulate their own lives, Lenin and Trotsky sent in the Red Army to crush the independent revolutionary movement of the Ukraine. Nestor Makhno is remembered today as one of the more courageous leaders in the fight against the Germans and counter-revolutionaries and, of tragic necessity, against Bolshevik invasion as well. Makhno was but one of many, and the Ukraine is simply the best known of many regions which fell under the rule of Moscow and Lenin. . . " FROM https://buttdarling.insanejournal.com/127165.html?mode=reply Zinoviev in 1919 expressed Lenin’s core idea with inimitable cynicism: We cannot do without Azerbaijan’s oil or Turkestan’s cotton. We take these things which we need, but not in the way the old exploiters took them but as elder brothers who are carrying the torch of civilisation’…