> I guess just a reflection of how steely-eyed these radicals were.
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of factors to take into account during that time ofc, most social upheavals will not come with an attached short-term economic benefit. I do not think that they necessarily thought that most would simply die either, but experience a generally hard time rebuilding. Tsarist Russia was a powder keg that were likely to blow up even without the brutal version served by the bolsheviks.
You're right, I didn't really mean to address your initial point about that, I'm just cherry-picking and adding some thoughts. Propaganda will always emphasize the positives and downplay the negatives as you wrote. In fact, and maybe I'm getting a bit side tracked, but Lenin and others of the more cynical revolutionaries of that time, and probably before and today, thought it might be necessary for things to get worse to reach the conditions needed for the revolution to succeed. Of course there's some amount truth to that, but it's nevertheless very much in line with the terror that followed in the means to an end fashion. On the other hand, Bertrand Russell, for example, while agreeing on the need for communism thought the price to pay through these bolshevik methods were just "too terrible" to justify it. So the spectrum of revolutionaries during that time was quite wide.
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of factors to take into account during that time ofc, most social upheavals will not come with an attached short-term economic benefit. I do not think that they necessarily thought that most would simply die either, but experience a generally hard time rebuilding. Tsarist Russia was a powder keg that were likely to blow up even without the brutal version served by the bolsheviks.
You're right, I didn't really mean to address your initial point about that, I'm just cherry-picking and adding some thoughts. Propaganda will always emphasize the positives and downplay the negatives as you wrote. In fact, and maybe I'm getting a bit side tracked, but Lenin and others of the more cynical revolutionaries of that time, and probably before and today, thought it might be necessary for things to get worse to reach the conditions needed for the revolution to succeed. Of course there's some amount truth to that, but it's nevertheless very much in line with the terror that followed in the means to an end fashion. On the other hand, Bertrand Russell, for example, while agreeing on the need for communism thought the price to pay through these bolshevik methods were just "too terrible" to justify it. So the spectrum of revolutionaries during that time was quite wide.