Michael Malice

And I'm skipping ahead a little bit, but Lenin also was someone who was strategic.

So at a certain point when they were trying to advance communism throughout the Soviet Union and the costs were outweighing the benefits, he did a strategic retreat.

He did the new economic policy.

You had a rise of kind of these small capitalists coming back.

You could hire people again.

And for the hardcore,

People in the Soviet Union, hardcore communist, this was a huge betrayal.

It's a step back.

he didn't do it because he was some kind of crypto capitalist.

He did it because he's like, all right, we know where we got to get to, but we have to go at a certain pace and we have to adjust as we go along.

So to have someone who is that much of an ideologue and that much of a visionary, but still to have any element of pragmatism to him is I think a very rare combination.

Pragmatism in this case was good because by taking a step back, he kind of gave himself some breathing room to allow the revolution to continue, to win the civil war.

There was a big moment where Germany... It's just there's lots of funny anecdotes that I learned while researching this book.

So they were...

Germany and Russia, they were negotiating a ceasefire because Germany wanted Russia out of the war.

And basically, Germany was like, all right, we'll let you leave, but you have to sign this treaty and basically hand over all this land that we're currently occupying.

It was just parts of Ukraine, parts of Poland.

And Lenin tells Trotsky to stall.

He's just run the clock because he was of the belief that now that they've taken power in Russia, you're going to have a worldwide workers' revolution.

So he's like, just stall them.