Fascinating! I have always understood the desire to spread the revolution to the West was straight from Marx, where the struggle against capitalism, a global system, must of course be a global one.
Coldly understanding that "millions of men will be deprived of sustenance" while the new Socialist system takes place, and yet doing it anyway, is I guess just a reflection of how steely-eyed these radicals were. Still, my point stands that this was not how it was sold to the masses. Going out with a message of "Out with the bosses, we'll take all the riches ourselves!" is a much easier sell than "Listen, I know you are all desperately poor and suffering, but that will have to get even worse, and a lot of you are probably going to starve, before it gets better if we're going to build socialism."
> 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.
Coldly understanding that "millions of men will be deprived of sustenance" while the new Socialist system takes place, and yet doing it anyway, is I guess just a reflection of how steely-eyed these radicals were. Still, my point stands that this was not how it was sold to the masses. Going out with a message of "Out with the bosses, we'll take all the riches ourselves!" is a much easier sell than "Listen, I know you are all desperately poor and suffering, but that will have to get even worse, and a lot of you are probably going to starve, before it gets better if we're going to build socialism."