Lenin may have preached Marx, but his methods were decidedly Machiavellian: “It is precisely now and only now,” he wrote, in a top secret memorandum to the Politburo during a severe famine in 1922, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the utmost savagery and merciless energy … so as to secure for ourselves a fund of several hundred million gold rubles.… We must teach these [clergy] a lesson right now, so that they will not
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