Nikolai Tolstoy on the Russian revolution which his Father, the author, fled and he calls the revolution a 'civil war' – Lenin and Trotsky were funded by Germany - compares Hitler to Stalin and how Stalin killed many more.
https://politicsthisweek.wordpress.com/2022/01/20/not-the-bcfm-politics-show-presented-by-tony-gosling-73/
Stalin’s Vengeance: The Final Truth About the Forced Return of Cossacks After World War II (2022) by Nikolai Tolstoy (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Stalins-Vengeance-Forced-Return-Cossacks/dp/1680538802
In May 1945, as World War II drew to a close in Europe, some 30,000 Russian Cossacks surrendered to British forces in Austria, believing they would be spared repatriation to the Soviet Union. The fate of those among them who were Soviet citizens had been sealed by the Yalta Agreement, signed by the Allied leaders a few months earlier. Ever since, mystery has surrounded Britain’s decision to include among those returned to Stalin a substantial number of White Russians, who had fled their country after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and found refuge in various European countries. They had never been Soviet citizens, and should not have been handed over. Some were prominent tsarist generals, on whose handover the Soviets were particularly insistent. General Charles Keightley, the responsible British officer, concealed the presence of White Russians from his superiors, who had issued repeated orders stipulating that only Soviet nationals should be handed over, and even then only if they did not resist. Through a succession underhanded moves, Keightley secretly delivered up the leading Cossack commanders to the Soviets, while force of unparalleled brutality was employed to hand over thousands of Cossack men, women, and children to a ghastly fate. Particularly sinister was the role of the future British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, whose own machinations are scrutinized here. Following the publication of Count Nikolai Tolstoy’s last book on the subject in 1986, the British government closed ranks, and three years later an English court issued a £1,500,000 judgment against him for allegedly libeling the British chief of staff who issued the fatal orders. Since then, however, Count Tolstoy has gradually acquired a devastating body of heretofore unrevealed evidence filling the remaining gaps in this tragic history. Much of this material derives from long-sealed Soviet archives, to which Tolstoy received access by a special decree from the late Russian President Boris Yeltsin. What really happened during these murky events is now revealed for the first time.
Lenin was able to make extensive use of German money to continue pressing for a much more radical settlement. Writes McMeekin:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/book-review-the-russian-revolution-revisionist-history-sean-mcmeekin/
Lenin, however, had an ace to play: German money. For the first month after its inaugural postrevolutionary issue on March 12, 1917, Pravda had been publishing its editorials in limited runs out of a government-owned printing works on the Moika Canal. After Lenin’s arrival, the Bolsheviks purchased a private printing press on Suvorovsky Prospekt for 250,000 rubles (equal to $125,000 then or some $12.5 million today) after promising the owner that they would retain the experienced staff at full pay (an expense of more than 30,000 rubles monthly, the current equivalent of $1.5 million, or $18 million per year). This last stipulation was critical to overcome the owner’s reluctance, as he was suspicious as to how a shadowy group styling itself the “workers’ printing collective” had that kind of ready cash on hand.
The Bolsheviks could now print propaganda in virtually unlimited quantities. The circulation of Pravda quickly ratcheted up to eighty-five thousand. On April 15, the party launched a new broadsheet, Soldatskaia Pravda, addressed to soldiers in the Petrograd garrison. It had an initial circulation of 50,000, then 75,000.
It was with this German-funded propaganda machine that Lenin could put forward his lines, ones in which Marxist theory allowed him to sidestep what would otherwise look like baldly treasonous talk.
But his most ominous conclusion is this:
Lenin’s genius lay in recognizing the opportunity presented to socialist maximalizers by armies mobilized in wartime. Once modern states had armed huge masses of men to fight their foreign opponents, it was a simple task to propagandize them into unleashing their most atavistic impulses against their social betters at home instead, combining jealousy with bloodlust in mass looting campaigns. In retrospect the shocking thing is not that this happened in wartime Russia in 1917 but that Lenin’s insight about turning “imperialist war” into civil war had never occurred to anyone before.
