Communist Party supporters with red flags and a flag with a portrait of Vladimir Lenin walk during a demonstration marking the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Moscow’s Red Square on Nov. 5.
100 years later, Bolshevism is back. And we should be worried.
At the beginning of 1917, on the eve of the Russian revolution, most of the men who would become known to the world as the Bolsheviks had very little to show for their lives. They had been in and out of prison, constantly under police surveillance, rarely employed. Vladimir Lenin spent most of the decade preceding the revolution drifting between Krakow, Zurich, and London. Joseph Stalin spent those years in the Caucasus, running protection rackets and robbing banks. Leon Trotsky had escaped from Siberian exile was to be found in Viennese coffee shops; when the revolution broke out, he was showing off his glittering brilliance at socialist meeting halls in New York.
