The Revolution Of The Communist Party - 1263 Words

When you are in a revolution as large as the Bolsheviks were in Russia, it can be reasonably expected that everyone in their group is in on it. There are a myriad of different opinions possible but if you were a member of the Communist party, you would think you would be expected to commit to and follow communist beliefs. In the article â€Å"Paper Communists† Gayle Lonergan, from the University of Oxford, paints a picture of men who saw the communist party as a way out. She documents how many men saw â€Å"such benefits as preferential food rations and free health care† (p. 139)(1) and wanted to have the opportunity to get out of the farm country. Lonergan also argues the key issue of how much of the communist population was actually committed to†¦show more content†¦It is clear Evaluation The dominant purpose of this article seems to be to say that the Bolsheviks only managed to stay afloat as a movement because after they were victorious in the early part of the civil war, peasants saw them as the attractive option which to ride on. Leading to (for a short period of time) an incredibly large influx of peasants. Lonergan spends the majority of the article walking on a tightrope, saying that it was embarrassing for the Bolsheviks to have their ranks filled with all of these inexperienced men looking to get out of work while at the same time documenting the irony of the truth that the Bolsheviks based in Central Russia did not have the manpower to convince the masses outside of Moscow and Petrograd. They would not have been able to reach the further points of Russia and Siberia because people were not necessarily interested in the Communist beliefs there but they were interested at the opportunity of sitting in an office all day rather than manual labour on a farm. It i s clear that even though the â€Å"Paper Communists† had a strong lacsidaisical attitude towards the movement they were a key part of the advancement of the Bolshevik movement. Lonergan disagrees with both some scholars that she references in the article as well as â€Å"the traditional