Excerpt from The Russian Bolshevik Revolution This book is not written to make out a case, but to set forth what appear to be the significant facts. It is offered on the theory that intelligent people are tired of being victims of propaganda about Russia and will welcome a book that is not trying to give their minds a certain twist. I can truthfully aver that when I set pen to paper I had no rigid mental attitudes toward the phases of the Russian revolution, so that such interpretations as I venture on have come out of my study of the facts themselves. The current notion of the second or Bolshevik revolution is that it was the work of a handful of extremists who captivated the Russian masses with their ideas. Under the pitiless pelting of facts I have been driven to the conclusion that this is untrue. As I now see it, most of the developments of the eight months between the March Revolution and the November Revolution were not caused by leaders but were inevitable, given the background of experience of the Russian common people. If the train bearing Lenin and eighteen other Bolsheviks across Germany to Russia had fallen through a bridge on its way and all had perished, events in Russia would have taken much the same course. The peasants would have seized the estates and the soldiers would have quit fighting. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.