Soviet Union

Press, 31 May 1986, Page 18

Soviet Union

Sir,—ln response to my necessarily brief resume of recorded historical fact, Mark Sadler (May 26) offers a version of the Bolshevik revolution so bizarre it merits not even being graced by the epithet “garbled.” He cites a book obviously a work of luridly imaginative fiction for his authority. Lenin was not “murdered in a power struggle.” He was shot by a Left Socialist revolutionary, Dora Kaplan, in 1922, but survived the assassination attempt, dying in 1924. Mark Sadler has never named the paymasters of the “paid mercenaries” whom he claims “brought about the Bolshevik revolution more than the workers.” The paid mercenaries in the Russian Revolution were the armies of Britain, France, Germany, the United States and Japan, in alliance with the armies of Russia’s deposed landlord-capitalist classes who from 1918-22, over the vast territory of the Soviet Republic, strove to overthrow Soviet power, but were routed by Russia’s revolutionary workerpeasant masses. — Yours, etc., M. CREEL. 4 May 27, 1986.