GenZedong

Quoting Jeffrey Veidlinger’s In the Midst of Civilized Europe, pages 53–54:

Following the economic and military failures of the summer, popular support for the provisional government collapsed. The Bolsheviks gained a majority in the Petrograd Soviet, and on the morning of November 7, Lenin issued a manifesto announcing the overthrow of the provisional government and the transfer of power to the Petrograd Soviet.

[…]

With victory in his hands, Lenin promised a “democratic peace to all nations and an immediate armistice on all fronts” and proclaimed “the right of self-determination” for “all nationalities inhabiting Russia.” Elections to the Constituent Assembly, he continued, would proceed as planned in January.

The Bolsheviks had succeeded in securing power in the Russian capital and immediately set about exporting their revolution to the rest of the former Russian Empire. This meant, first, encouraging workers, peasants, and soldiers to establish soviets and assume power in their own regions; and second, raising a Red Army to conquer by force those territories that resisted.

In Kyiv, the Central Rada refused to recognize the undemocratic Bolshevik coup

(Emphasis added.)

How does an otherwise competent writer manage to contradict hisself within the span of only two pages? Either he deliberately lied to appease a publisher, his hamsterlike brain decided that it was time to say something anticommunist, this was a clumsy attempt to represent somebody else’s point of view, or his definition of democracy is utterly fucked.