It's as if good intentions automatically lead to good strategies that automatically lead to good outcomes. Therefore, if you start a revolution with pure heart, a perfect future is guaranteed. And if it does not happen, it is only because someone with bad intentions prevented it -- you need to find the asshole and execute him, before he can cause more harm.
There is no such thing as legitimate criticism. You can't say e.g. "hey guys, I agree with your goal of feeding more people, but your methods are based on pseudoscience and are not going to work; how about trying some actual science instead?". What they hear is "he opposes our attempts to feed the people, he must want them to starve, what an asshole"; and if they have the power, that might mean prison time for you.
It is extremely frustrating to debate with a person who believes that if you don't 100% agree with them about something, the only possible explanation is that you are the bad guy who wants bad things to happen. But it becomes much worse when such person has the power to send you and your entire family to a death camp.
I think it's more plausibly a gradual slippery slope. the kind of slope you don't notice
Lenin and his cronies were revolutionaries well before the calamities of the Great War. The leaders of Russian revolutions were were mostly upper middle class intellectuals and were radicalized in relatively comfortable social circumstances at universities and in various intellectual circles. Lenin often bragged that he actively pushed people against one another so he could harness more revolutionary momentum, which led to even more calamities. And that's not even mentioning that he was implanted as an ideological virus to destroy the Russian Empire by the German agents.
The revolution wasn't some romantic reaction lead by the proletariat against the oppressor. It was led by power hungry fanatics who manipulated the people's grievances to remove those who were in their way and then installed themselves into power.
That wasn't the original point. Widespread discontent do not always lead to bloody revolution or communist regimes with despotic leaders.
My understanding of history is limited, but this I know; History is always messy, and you can never identify just one single reason for the way things turned out.
The system overthrown by the revolution was brutal, but so were the revolutionaries. Where do you think they learned their policing tactics and techniques?
In terms of Lenin being a weapon, one of the greatest quotes on this is Churchill’s. Germany “turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland to Russia”
It’s a quote from a book that’s well worth a read if you haven’t already, ‘Lenin on the Train’ by Catherine Merridale.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/09/books/review/lenin-on-the...
Nicholas II was a weak leader and a ruthless Soviet style crackdown on the Communist insurrectionists could have saved the Czar.
The Lena goldfields massacre is an example of this.
The repeated combination of Nicholas II’s inaction/absense followed by a cack-handed crackdown was the ultimate fuel to the fire.
Look at the news: how trueful they are not. They don't become more trueful as the years pass.
To simplify it a lot, for the last two or three centuries before the communist revolution, the czars couldn't make up their mind about what type of country they wanted to have, so they kept radically changing policies every generation. On one hand, they wanted absolute tyranny, Asia-style. On the other hand, they wanted material progress just like in the West. So, one day they opened many schools, allowed independent press, hoping that this will bring progress and wealth. Then, ten or twenty years later, they panicked, seeing that there was too much independent thought and heresy, so they closed all those schools and put all journalists in prison. Then again, ten or twenty years later, they decided they needed some progress and prosperity, so they opened the schools and allowed the press again... then banned everything again... then allowed everything again... then banned again... and so on, for centuries. If you keep giving people freedoms and then taking them away, they will be pissed off way more than someone who was consistently oppressed for generations. The pre-communist Russia had tons of potential revolutionaries, and strong oppressive secret police to keep control over everything.
The last czar deserves a Darwin award, because he was repeatedly warned about the danger of communists and asked for permission to crush them mercilessly (that is, to apply more than just the usual routine persecution of everyone), but instead he fired the boss of the secret police, accusing him of wasting resources on trivialities and ignoring the real danger -- the Jews. (The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were published in Russia in 1903.)
Then, WW1 happened, and communists got the extremely intelligent and ruthless leader Lenin, who promised everyone whatever they wanted, made alliances, broke all promises, kept stabbing all his former allies in the back as he was making new allies, until he got to the top. Then he established his own version of secret police which, after many rebrandings, still remains one of the pillars of Russia, surviving even the fall of communism. And yes, it is a "coincidence" that many celebrities of the revolution were also upper middle class intellectuals of the previous regime. (Except for Stalin, I think.)
And in some sense this yes-then-no-then-yes-then-no style of government persisted during communism and later, as if it's inextricably a part of Russian politics no matter the regime. Peasants were considered the enemies of progress, then the driving force of progress; capitalism was evil, then good, then evil, then good, then evil again; etc.
As the French saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
This is not what people usually mean when they say “slippery slope”