And in such instances where one might be sold, the selling nobleman was given the right to retain the individual's family and property.
Though the laws would stop short of allowing the right of the noble to kill a serf, the penalty for doing so was a nominal monetary fine of a negligible sum to a member of the landed gentry. Therefore, prohibition on killing a serf was pointedly low. It is thus that the Russian feudalist system created a scenario in which the seeds of Communist revolution could ultimately be sowed. With literally half of its population living in abject slavery and the stability of the central government constantly threatened by invading Mongols and rebelling Cossacks, the slave population increasingly came to represent a serious threat to the continued survival of the ruling class. First through its constant undermining of the system by flight from ownership and thereafter by increasingly organized slave revolts, the serf population demonstrated the sheer irrationality of enslaving so large a population to the service of so few. Ultimately, the great many would come to recognize their power.
So would this be the recognition of the Tsar Alexander II, who in 1861 responded to a fear that ultimately the imbalance of this system would come to...
We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost constantly under their fire. We have combined, by a freely adopted decision, for the purpose of fighting the enemy, and not of retreating into the neighboring marsh, the inhabitants of which, from the very outset, have reproached us with having chosen the path of struggle instead of the path of conciliation…there can be no talk
.. Bolshevik ideology and political culture... rejected liberal parliamentary forms, a "free market of ideas," and capitalism. That state depended on the dedication, idealism, and sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of Bolshevik cadres and Red Army soldiers, who entered the fray with enormous confidence in history's outcome and a conviction that they had a moral right to use force and terror against their opponents in order to build a socialist
French Revolution and its Enlightenment ideas about nationalism, universal rights and equal citizenship for all was extremely influential at the time it occurred, and was widely studied and imitated afterwards. Liberals and radicals in Europe, and increasingly the rest of the world, always recognized that the French Revolution was somehow uniquely theirs, especially in its attempt to end feudalism, state-supported churches, and the entrenched privileges of monarchs and aristocracies. It
Marxism and National Socialism Lenin's version of socialism, which became the model for the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and other underdeveloped nations that underwent revolutions in the 20th Century, was highly centralized, hierarchical and authoritarian. It emphasized rapid industrialization and economic development under the direction of the Communist Party, although in all these semi-feudal societies this was carried out without the benefits of any type of liberal or democratic traditions. Lenin
Communism & Nationalism Communism Communism is a society without money (For Communism) 1, without a state, without property and without social classes. People come together to carry out a project or to respond to some need of the human community but without the possibility of their collective activity taking the form of an enterprise that involves wages and the exchange of its products. The circulation of goods is not accomplished by means
Lenin to Gorbachev: Three Generations of Soviet Communists The quote by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles which introduces chapter one of this book, has a certain philosophical appeal, and yet it is cloaked in an irony that illustrates the dark side of what Marx and Engles were promoting. "In place of the old bourgeois society...we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the
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