ants and workers were being exploited by the upper bourgeois in the way that they were paid and how they were treated. The Bolsheviks felt that the ultimate example of capitalistic evil was the Western imperialists who contended with one another for the accumulation of lands that they had no right to control (Harris). States such as Britain, Germany, France, and Austria-Hungary were proponents for the imperialist way which Lenin felt would lead to an inevitable World War between the imperialist states (Ulam, p. 79). Lenin’s idea was that the competition for lands and resources as well as the expansion of various political ideologies would lead to an inter-imperialist conflict as had happened in prior history (Harris). The outbreak of World War I in 1914 brought the idea of an inter-imperialist war to fruition. Tsar Nicholas II led Russia into W.W.I. in 1914 with the prospects of defending itself from the expansionist Triple Alliance consisting of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy (Harris). Russia entered the war on the side of France and Britain in what became a very costly and unpopular World War. However, after the Bolshevik takeover of Russian government in 1917, Lenin’s main focus was to increase the stability of the new Bolshevik regime and raise the credibility of the new government in the eyes of the Russian people. In the years between 1914 and 1917, Lenin would try to find a way to stabilize the Soviet Union by getting out of World War I (Harris). Lenin contended that the Soviet Union would rather not participate in the war, but would rather “gain strength and maintain the oasis of Soviet power in the middle of the raging imperialist sea” (p. 79). He felt that fighting alongside imperialist countries such as Britain and France in an imperialist war was not something that was in the best interests of Communist ideology (Harris). In the early stages of Communist power, European states such as France and...
