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Document 1

Harold Williams, the journalist working for the Daily Chronicle, had originally been sympathetic to the Russian Revolution but became totally disillusioned by the closing down of the Constituent Assembly: "If you lived here you would feel in every bone of your body, in every fiber of your spirit, the bitterness of it... I cannot tell you all the brutalities, the fierce excesses,that are ravaging Russia from end to end and more ruthlessly than any invading army. Horrors pall on us - robbery, plunder and the cruelest forms of murder are grown a part of the very atmosphere we live in. It is worse than Tsarism ... The Bolsheviks do not profess to encourage any illusions as to their real nature. They treat the bourgeoisie of all countries with equal contempt; they glory in all violence directed against the ruling classes, they despise laws and decencies that they consider effete, they trample on the arts and refinements of life. It is nothing to them if in the throes of the great upheaval the world relapses into barbarism."
January 1918, St. Petersburg

Document 2

We stand for organized terror - this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Soviet Government and of the new order of life. We judge quickly. In most cases only a day passes between the apprehension of the criminal and his sentence. When confronted with evidence criminals in almost every case confess; and what argument can have greater weight than a criminal's own confession.
Leader of the Secret Police [Cheka], Dzerzhinsky, 1918

Document 3

Because of Cheka, freedom has ceased to exist in Russia. There is no democracy. It is not wanted. Only American apologists for the Soviets have ever pretended there was democracy in Russia.... Freedom, liberty, justice as we know it, democracy, all the fundamental human rights for which the world has been fighting for civilized centuries, have been abolished in Russia in order that the communist experiment might be made. They have been kept suppressed by the Cheka. The Cheka is the instrument of militant Communism. It is a great success. The terror is in the mind and marrow of the present generation and nothing but generations of freedom and liberty will ever root it out.
George Seldes, an American journalist working in Russia, 1918

Document 4

At the time of the October Revolution in Russia, Lenin and others had hoped that workers throughout Europe would overthrow capitalist governments and achieve socialist revolutions. But when that did not take place, the Soviet Union found itself economically isolated and attacked on all sides by the invading armies of imperialism. Winston Churchill described the purpose of the attacks, involving over half a million soldiers, as "strangling" the revolution "at its birth."
While the Soviet Union fought back and defeated the invading armies by the end of 1920, the damage was done. Industry and machinery, already largely destroyed by the capitalists who fled during the revolution, were in shambles, many of the best workers had been killed or maimed at the front, agriculture, already hurt by war and demoralization of the farmers, was further damaged by crop failure in 1920. The people in the cities were starving.
To feed people in the cities, the Soviet government confiscated grain from the farmers without having money to pay them. As Lenin explained in his pamphlet, The Tax in Kind, "It was the war and the ruin that forced us into War Communism," and "Under this peculiar War Communism we actually took from the peasant all his surpluses - and sometimes even a part of his necessaries - to meet the requirements of the army and sustain the workers."

Document 5

We must not count on going straight to communism. We must build on the basis of peasants’ personal incentive. We are told that the personal incentive of the peasants means restoring private property. But we have never interfered with personally owned articles of consumption and implements of production as far as the peasants are concerned. We have [only] abolished private ownership of land. Peasants farmed land that they did not own—rented land, for instance. That system exists in very many countries. There is nothing impossible about it from the standpoint of economics. The difficulty lies in creating personal incentive…
Have we been able to do that? No, we have not! We thought that production and distribution would go on at communist bidding …. We must change that now, or we shall be unable to make the proletariat understand this process of transition. No such problems have ever arisen in history before. We tried to solve this problem straight out, by a frontal attack, as it were, but we suffered defeat. Such mistakes occur in every war, and they are not even regarded as mistakes. Since the frontal attack failed, we shall make a flanking movement and also use the method of siege and undermining…
Source: Vladimir Lenin, Report to the All-Russia Congress October 1921

Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest the comrades think about a way of removing Staling from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite, and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc. This circumstance may appear to be a negligible detail. But I think that from the standpoint of safeguards against a split, and from the standpoint of what I wrote above about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky, it is not a detail, or it is a detail which can assume decisive importance.

Lenin, 25 December 1922