The Bolshevik Revolution, 100 years on: Prototype for Chinese and North Korean communism

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In memory of the hundreds of millions of victims of communism

by WorldTribune Staff, October 25, 2017

The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, led by Vladimir Lenin, took place with an armed insurrection in Petrograd on Oct. 25, 1917. It was also known as Red October. It has inspired leftists and socialist parties and government worldwide, even in the United States, to this day.

The Bolshevik Revolution followed the February Revolution of the same year, which overthrew the Tsar and resulted in a provisional government. The Congress of Soviets, the resulting governing body, elected members of the Bolsheviks and other leftist groups such as the Left Socialist Revolutionaries to ruling positions leading to the establishment of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, the world’s first self-proclaimed socialist state. On July 17, 1918, the Tsar and his family were executed with Lenin’s approval.

As the revolution was not universally recognized, the Russian Civil War (1917–22) followed leading to the creation of the Soviet Union in 1922. The USSR inspired worldwide communist movements rooted in Marxist Leninist atheistic ideology. The Chinese communists under Mao Zedong and the Workers Party of North Korea under Kim Il-Sung separately regarded their systems as ideologically pure and superior to Soviet communism.

From 1929 and the year of Josef Stalin’s death in 1953, 18 million men and women were transported to Soviet slave labour camps in Siberia and elsewhere, many of them never to return. Stalin is pictured inspecting the Moscow Canal, which was built by imprisoned workers, in 1937.

 

The chiefs of gulags, pictured above in 1932, were the overlords of hundreds of thousands of prisoners in slave labor camps across the USSR. Gulag was the acronym for the Main Administration of Corrective Labour camp.

 

Young boys were photographed at a camp in Molotov, USSR, during World War II. The Soviet took thousands from Baltic States and put them into gulags in the Far East. Seventy percent of those imprisoned were women and children under the age of 16.

 

This grim photo shows the bodies of hundreds of Polish people in a mass grave in Katyn, Poland. Millions died in the Soviet gulags. Some were worked to death, some starved, and others like these were simply executed.

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