chapotraphouse

All of the bolshevik cliques were going to murder each other, no matter who won.

have you gentlemen ever seen a revolution?

Remind me to never join a party with you in it. Or, alternatively, to immediately take steps to ensure my own security if I do.

Idk, if I modeled myself after someone (or some clique) who turned all their friends into enemies, I'd be very wary of where my own path was pointing. I haven't spent years digging into the One Truth lying behind thousands of pages of minutiae, my understanding of how people work comes from direct experiences of them and applying a statistical perspective to it. I spent enough time familiarizing myself with prominent agents of the Russian Revolution to realize that barely any of their deaths were of natural causes, and an unusual number of them were in a spike 20 years after taking power.

I'm not "attached to the Bolsheviks" at all. I'm pointing out that the worst enemy of a Bolshevik was another Bolshevik. In no other socialist revolution do you see a party's leadership fragmenting and one fragment killing off all the others more than a decade after the political situation has stabilized. Even if you include the precursor of revolutionary France, the purges happened only early on and amidst wars.

This is the inevitable result of Lenin's revolutionary coalition falling apart after he died.

Would you want to model a party where without its Great Man, it instantly turned into an internal power struggle? Because that looks to me like at best a failure to democratize power, and at worst a replication of the dynamics of monarchy.