Talk:Vladimir Lenin/Archive 3

message: What languages did Lenin speak?
*Russian, of course.
*German 
*French
*Latin & Greek
*English (I'm pretty sure of)
...more?...
Bronks 17:02, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I am not sure he spoke English.--Nixer 08:08, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

text: He spoke English alright, he translated a whole book from English to Russian. However, he only learnt to SPEAK the language properly when he visited London in 1902 with Krupskaya. This site contains a personal account by Krupskaya that proves this: . Black-Velvet 13:04, 23 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Languages

message: I think the pronounciation of Lenin's name should be in something more popular than Ogg.
:I don't think we CAN use anything more popular. .mp3s (and the like) require a license, or some such, and .oggs are free...Wikipedia being the free encyclopedia (free as in gratis). I should say I don't know this for a fact, so correct me if I be wrong.--Yossarian 30px| 02:13, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Name Pronounciation

message: I think TeaDrinker is wrong about http://www.vilenin.info/. 
http://www.vilenin.info/ have voting about carrying out of a body of Lenin from the Mausoleum, except for that a site contains more than 586 comments of high quality with various estimations about Lenin's activity and the Mausoleum.
Please, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:TeaDrinker#Lenin.27s_Mausoleum
With respect, Aleksandr 82.208.121.130 22:05, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links 

message: The article states that after Lenin died, it was intended that he should be cryogenically frozen for future revival but that this was not done for a 'variety of reasons'. Shouldn't the article state what those reasons were instead of being vague? I don't know what they were but hopefully someone will. ::..SMI..:: 09:41, 9 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Lenin's Embalment

message: Oh dear, oh dear; this whole article demonstrates a quite appalling political bias.  
Here are some of the worst examples;
CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY.  We are told that the Bolsheviks closed down the Constituent Assembly "with the backing of the overwhelming majority of the workers in both of Russia's major cities", though this simply glosses over the fact that this was another coup, comparable to that of October 1917, designed to ensure that a political minority retained control of absolute power. The 'dictatorship of the proletariat' was, in practice, never more than the dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party.  Quotations are used here to support a distinctly political-and undemocratic act-as an intellectual and historical necessity.  This is the worst example of manipulation and bias that I have ever come across in Wikipedia.
SOVIET DEMOCRACY.  We are told that Lenin 'advocated and helped to form' a 'Soviet democracy', though the whole drift of Leninism since 1903 had been towards political professionalism and centralised control.  Lenin's concept of 'democratic centralism' militated against effective democracy by silencing debate after decisions had been taken; and the political organisation of the Bolsheviks ensure that the Soviets quickly ceased to represent any dissenting views.
OPPRESSION.  The Soviet state is defended against the use of secret police and labour camps on the entirely disingenuous grounds that these had been used by the Tsars!  The Russo-Japanese War, Bloody Sunday and World War I are then alluded to for some bizarre and unexplained reason to excuse forms of oppression used by the Bolsheviks.  "They also mention that the scale of the circumstances which surrounded the Bolsheviks was different as well: a country ravaged by an unprecedentaly destructive world war, a mass of people kept historically illiterate by Tsarist autocracy, an oppositional force that fought to oust the Bolsheviks from power etc."  Make what you will of that semi-literate and intellectually incoherent nonsense.  Trotsky and a 'river of blood'?  If there was such a river he began the flow.
WORKERS STATE.  Consider this: "The Leninist vision of revolution demanded a professional revolutionary cadre that would lead the working class in their conquest of power and centralize economic and administrative power in the hands of a workers state."  This could be straight out of official Soviet publications from the Brezhnev era.  As a statement of historical and political fact it is utter tosh.
THE TSAR'S CRIMES.  So the Bolsheviks intended to put the Tsar on trail for his 'crimes against the Russian people'?  What crimes might these have been? Incidentally, Lenin was not an 'auxiliary' in Sverdlov's decision to murder the Tsar and his family; he was instrumental in the whole process.  
*The tsar was a dictator who oppressed the russian people. He was overthrown by the russian people and (like Saddam Hussein today) should have been put to trail for his crimes against the russian people! Bronks 10:55, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Here are some words by Trotsky on the revolution and red terror during the civil war: 
In Petrograd we conquered power in November, 1917, almost without bloodshed, and even without arrests. The ministers of Kerensky’s Government were set free very soon after the revolution. More, the Cossack General, Krasnov, who had advanced on Petrograd together with Kerensky after the power had passed to the Soviet, and who had been made prisoner by us at Gatchina, was set free on his word of honor the next day. This was “generosity” quite in the spirit of the first measures of the [1871 Paris] Commune. But it was a mistake. Afterwards, General Krasnov, after fighting against us for about a year in the South, and destroying many thousands of Communists, again advanced on Petrograd, this time in the ranks of Yudenich’s army. The proletarian revolution assumed a more severe character only after the rising of the junkers in Petrograd, and particularly after the rising of the Czechoslovaks on the Volga organized by the Cadets, the S.R.s, and the Mensheviks, after their mass executions of Communists, the attempt on Lenin’s life, the murder of Uritsky, etc., etc. Communism and Terror
-Bronks 19:43, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  What Is To Be Done? 

message: Further remarks are obviously required.
ANTI-SEMITISM.  Could I please have a reference for Nicholas' authorisation of the Kishinev massacre?  As far as I am aware this episode was the handiwork of Vyacheslav Plehve, minister of the interior and a notorious anti-semite.  The pogrom was condemned by the governor of Bessarabia and by the central government.  Sergius Witte, by far the Tsar's best minister, made his own feelings on the matter plain.  
There were pogroms in Tsarist Russia, and anti-semitism was a long-established and poisonous tradition.  The point is that this cannot always be traced back to the Tsar: Russian state and government was far too complex for that.  Official anti-semitism was, moreover, of a confessional rather than a biological nature.  Under Alexander III the drive for assimiliation became ever greater, after the murder of his liberal-minded father, but it also affected Catholics, Lutherans and Muslims, as well as Jews.  Civil disabilities could always be lifted for converts to Orthodoxy, for those who were minded to take this path.  
Nicholas was a conventional and unimaginitive man, but even he could detect the patently false.
Although he was initially taken in by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (as was the London Times in 1919) he soon recognised them, according to Vladimir Burtsev, no friend of the Tsar, as dangerous political nonsense.  You may care to consult Solomon Grayzel, again no admirer of Tsarist Russia, who in his A History of the Jews says "Even the Tsar had considered the forgery utterly improbable and unworthy of consideration." (Philadelphia, 1968, p. 613).  
Now, this whole debate arose because I questioned Lenin's credentials as a campaigner against anti-semitism on the basis of a single speech with no examples provided.  If we look at the actual record of Soviet Russia under Lenin a quite different picture emerges.  The age-old antisemitism of the Tsars showed little sign of going away; if anything, it got worse.  Red army units were amongst those responsible for pogroms in the Ukraine, to the obvious disquiet of Trotsky.  During the 1921 campaign against religion, specifically authorised by Lenin, the Jews were singled out as a special target; even Maxim Gorky accused the government of using anti-semitism for political purposes.  There were pogroms in Smolensk and other places.  When Jewish people tried to defend their synagogues, threatened with confiscation, troops broke in, shouting 'Death to the Yids' in the process.  The campaign of 1921 peaked in the mock trial of 'Judaism', carried out, for additionl emphasis, if any such was needed, in the very same courtroom as the Beiliss trial of 1913.  What price Lenin's support for the Jews?
TERROR.  Yes, there was terror, extensive and brutal; but that of the Whites was more than matched by that of the Reds, and not just against counter-revolutionaries but peope who had been their allies and comrades in the political underground.  By 1921, well after the White threat had gone away, oppression and terror had become a fact of life in the 'worker's fatherland'.  It never went away. 
Let me make it plain that I am simpy asking that this article reflects the true facts of Lenin's career.  As it stands at present it is little more than a biased 'appreciation.'
White Guard 00:25, 23 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I see you've been doing your homework 'White Guard'...We are evidentally getting a more intellectual class of red-baiter these days...I therefore pledge myself - on behalf of the 'Guardians of the Lenin-Shrine', at whatever expense in time and money, - to read the chapter 'The Pogroms and White Ideology in the Russian Civil War' by P. Kenez in  Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russia (2004) edited by J.D. Klier and S. Lambroza (CUP), and will be back with a series of devastating counter-attacks to your above points...which will send you reeling right back up the trans-Siberian railway of intellectual discourse.... Colin4C 05:12, 23 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  What Is To be Done?-Part III 

message: He is a red koala and want to dictatate the whole world
he should be killed.
:If this comment refers to Lenin, I wholeheartedly agree. But this encyclopedia isn't the place for political posturing. Walton monarchist89 07:55, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Red Koala