peasant insurrection. Most of these uprisings though, were leaderless and highly unorganized. The motives of the rebels were vague and often confused. By the time the government did anything to please the peasants, it was too late. In 1917, due to the breakdown of administration and military order, the peasants moved to carry out their own revolution. They tore down any form of legal and territorial authority and distributed the land in a rough equal fashion. During this time, a man by the name of Georgi V. Plekanhov had smuggled into Russia. Once there, these books influenced young students who saw the revolution dependent on the proletariat, not the peasant class. One of the people influenced by Plekanhov was man going by the name Nikolai Lenin. His revolutionary ardor was strong. Lenin went on to form a group called the Bolsheviks that would go on to create a revolution(Communism, 63-70). It began on March 6, 1917 when bread riots erupted in Petrograd, Russia and didn't end until the U.S.S.R. was organized on December 30, 1922. Then on January 21, 1924, Lenin died. This only complicated matters since two other people were interested in Lenin's position. A power struggle between Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky began (Soviet, xi). Stalin became the Bolshevik party general secretary in 1922. In 1925 Stalin offered a more attractive solution to the Russian people than Trotsky did (Communism, 73-74). Thus in 1927, Stalin scored the first major victory for himself when the Fifteenth All-Union Congress of the Communist party denounced all deviations of the Stalinist line. Trotsky and any ally of his were banished to the Russian provinces. Here Stalin's ruthless nature begins to show. He completely expelled Trotsky from the Soviet Union (Russia, 246). Fear of Trotskiest ideas forced Stalin to have Trotsky assassinated in 1940. However, those fears never completely dissipated. Stalin went on to establish his dictatorship, crushing any opposin...
