"Trotsky IS a fox!" - Elizabeth

"Despite its complexities, the Russian Revolution is one of the best revolutions to learn about - which is why it is by far the most popular in the VCE course (more than 40 percent of all students study it). Unlike the American and French revolutions, as a 20th-century event its ideas and events still resonate today (echoing in the Chinese Revolution). It had a doomed old-regime emperor, blinded by religion and tradition, a figure of pathos and misfortune. He was led by a domineering wife, who herself succumbed to the charms of a dubious holy-man with a liking for prostitutes and cheap wine. The lead revolutionary was obsessive, determined to the extreme, a figure who would stop at nothing to secure power and then to hold onto it. One-hundred million Russians would be led through a generation of isolation, starvation, war, civil war and politically-motivated brutality in which countless millions would die. Little wonder that one contemporary historian would call his Russian Revolution book "A People's Tragedy".
Though most of the causes of revolution are reasonably easy to understand and appreciate, what complicates study of Russia between 1905 and 1924 is that there were actually three separate revolutions. Each revolution and the phase which followed can be viewed as a new opportunity for change; each subsequent revolution would topple a government that could not or would not bring about change. Three men stand like pillars through this period, almost as manifestations of the political regimes they led: Tsar Nicholas II, Alexander Kerensky and Vladimir Lenin - and each would fail, for various reasons. Only when a usurper called Stalin took control would there be someone determined enough, resilient enough and brutal enough to impose change, though this would come at enormous human cost.*
The Russian Revolution can be a multiplicity of things, depending on what you read or who you listen or talk to. To those who led it, it was the long-awaited but inevitable rise to power of the long-exploited working classes. To most who lived through it, it was a year of great hope followed by a generation of darkness, misery and tyranny. To people of today, shaped and informed by Cold War values and rhetoric, it implemented an unworkable political and economic system that descended into evil. To socialists and communists, it represented a brief moment where the promise of equality was snuffed out by deceit, thievery and opposition, both inside and outside Russia. There are few historical events that have divided opinion like this one has done for the past 90 years, which is why the historiography of the Russian Revolution is so rich and so diverse."

I rest my case. Thanks to Thompson for his eloquent wording of my exact feelings.

- Isabella

P.S
It has come to my attention that Abbe Sieyes (author of revolutionary pamphlet "Qu est- ce que le tiers etat?") is a Silver Fox. Consider:

Delicious, non? Mr. Darcy-esque I thought. Ill leave y'all with sweety Abbe to ponder.

A plus tard,

Bisous.