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All throughout 1917, the toils of war and cascading revolutionary activity overturned the Russian Czarist government and established the left-leaning but democratically principled Provisional Government. The new authorities made preparations to hold elections. For the many political philosophies and groups then existing in Russian intelligentsia, it was an exciting prospect.

In March 1917, Czar Nicholas II was deposed and forced to abdicate following major bloodshed in St. Petersburg, then the capital of the Russian Empire. But the vast nation, containing many different cultures and races across about 20 percent of the worlds land area, had never been a democracy and was unprepared to implement a universal, secret electoral system.

By May, the Provisional Government had not been able to carry out an election, and dissent was mounting from all sides. The date was delayed multiple times and public opinion sank further.

After several violent anti-government actions throughout the summer, the radical Bolshevik Party under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin armed itself and mobilized. In their infamous October Revolution, 100 communist militiamen took the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, killing two people, and seized the Russian capital.

As a communist, Lenin despised democracy, calling it a capitalist tool of oppression. Yet to mollify the still-powerful opposition, the Bolsheviks agreed to go forward with elections.

The Bolsheviks would convene the Assembly, but were ultimately unwilling to accept its results. As claimed in one initial report, the proposed Russian parliament must right the historical wrongs and protect the working class from exploitation.

In a speech at the time, Lenins right-hand man Leon Trotsky proclaimed: Long live an immediate, honest, democratic peace. All power to the Soviets. All land to the people. Long live the Constituent Assembly.

There are conflicting reports on whether Lenin believed he would win the elections, or if he and his Bolsheviks were merely feigning support. In any case, their language provided an excuse for the Bolsheviks to later dissolve the Constituent Assembly.

Bolsheviks held power through underground Soviets, or councils of urban workers and soldiers. Lenins dictatorship of the proletariat was incompatible with the proposed democracy.

Lenin (center, with dark fur hat and coat) and other communist leaders with Red Army soldiers who participated in crushing the anti-Bolshevik Kronshtadt uprising. (Leon Leonidov)

In November, elections for the Constituent Assembly were held and confirmed the Bolsheviks fears that theythe self-appointed leader of the Russian Revolutionwould not win a popular vote. Bolsheviks won less than a quarter of the total vote of 40 million Russians, losing badly to the Socialist Revolutionaries who had broad support from the peasant masses.

As described by Tony Cliff, a British communist writer, Lenin derided the election results, saying that obsolete laws had given the Socialist Revolutionaries (labelled as right-wing by the Bolsheviks) undue weight.

In the article The Constituent Assembly Elections and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Lenin expressed his anger with the peasant population: The country cannot be equal to the town under the historical conditions of this epoch. The town inevitably leads the country. The country inevitably follows the town.

When democracy worked against the Bolsheviks, Lenin turned to violence. According to Cliff, revolution and the struggle between capitalist and proletarian forces boiled down to counting the machine guns, the bayonets, the grenades at their disposal.

The Bolsheviks were rejected by the rural peasants, but they gathered a large following among urban workers and soldiers who had deserted from the ongoing fight against Germany in World War I. Lenin and his political party had the military force to take power.

The Russian Civil War is readily understood as a fight between socialist Red and conservative White Russian forces, but this mischaracterizes the nature of the conflict and its participants. Tens of millions of Russian peasants, opposed to Lenins dictatorship, were the most numerous among victims in a war that by some estimates killed over 12 million people, or more than all combat deaths in World War I.

Bolshevik economic policies, or war communism, starved millions of people in the Russian countryside when their grain was seized. And after the civil war, millions more were fated to perish in the brutal projects of Lenins successor, Joseph Stalin.

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How Lenin's Bolsheviks Brought Communism to Russia - Epoch Times - The Epoch Times

At Miami college founded by Cubans exiled under communism, officials shut down pro-capitalism club

After granting the pro-capitalism club Turning Point USA tabling rights on campus last fall, administrators at St. Thomas University founded in 1961 by Augustinians expelled from Cuba by the communist Castro dictatorship have revoked that permission.

In an email obtained by The College Fix, Carmen Brown, an administrator at the Miami-based Catholic university, recently wrote to the clubs field director Driena Sixto that the organizations foul language does not align with the schools Catholic principles, thus they are prohibited from promoting their cause on campus.

In reviewing your organization, including its website, we found that your organizations use of foul language is offensive to the very principle of what we stand for in our Catholic core values as an institution. Therefore, we regret to inform you that we are not approving your organizations presence on our campus, Brown wrote in the March 16 email.

Brown did not respond when Sixto asked for clarification about the allegation, though Sixto told The Fix she believes the administration might have taken issue with TPUSAs slogans Big Government Sucks and Socialism Sucks. But when Sixto asked Brown specifically if this was the language to which she referred, she said Brown directed her to the schools lawyer, who also did not reply. Brown also did not respond to The College Fixs requests for comment.

Matt Lamb, director of campus integrity for Turning Point USA, called the administrations decision troubling.

The school invokes a broad opposition to foul language to keep a free-market, conservative group off of campus, Lamb told The Fix via email. The higher-ups in the school administration frequently dodged requests to speak with us, and then failed to keep their facts straight.

Sixto, who is not a student at the school but rather a field director that helps college students in the Miami area launch and maintain Turning Point USA chapters, shared a strongly worded email with The College Fix that she sent to St. Thomas students who had signed up to be a part of the group.

In an ironic turn of events, the school that was founded in 1961 by Augustinians that were expelled from Cuba by the communist Castro dictatorship is now a school where conservative values and freedom of expression are undesired, thanks to complaints of left-wing, and self-declared communist/socialist faculty members, Sixto wrote.

She also pointed out that Turning Point USA in fact stands for the same principles of limited government that the Catholic Archdiocese of Miami has invoked in their lawsuit against a government mandate, which forces employers to subsidize abortion-inducing contraceptives.

Whats more, TPUSA is the largest student group at Barry University, a Catholic University similar to St. Thomas and both schools receive funding from the Archdiocese of Miami, Sixto noted.

In a separate email she sent in mid-March to St. Thomas students, Sixto said she believes at the crux of the issue is professors who do not like the groups free-market message.

A couple of self-declared socialist professors on campus complained about having me on campus promoting capitalism and free markets, and apparently it triggered them enough to go complain and have me shut down. This is what socialists, communists and the left customarily do anywhere in the world, Sixto wrote. Since their ideas are so bad and go against the very concept of individual liberty and freedom they have a hard time selling it to others. Therefore the next step is to silence those who dont agree with them through censorship.

Nearly six universities over the last two years have refused club status to TPUSA, though the chapters have eventually overcome most of these fights with the help of free-speech supporting organizations such as the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

Lamb said he is hopeful that a similar outcome will be possible at St. Thomas. Sixto has implored the administration, university president, and the archdiocese of Miami to reconsider their decision.

We look forward to the university reconsidering their decision, Lamb said.

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About the Author

Kate Hardiman is a student at the University of Notre Dame majoring in the Program of Liberal Studies and minoring in the Philosophy, Political Science, and Economics (PPE) Program. She serves as campus editor of the Irish Roverand is a fellow of both the Constitutional Studies Department and Center for Ethics and Culture. She interned at The Hillin Washington D.C. for the summer of 2015 and has had articles published there, as well as onMinding the Campus.

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At Miami college founded by Cubans exiled under communism, officials shut down pro-capitalism club - The College Fix

Forbes

A Century Ago Woodrow Wilson Took America Into WWI: Blame Him For Communism, Fascism And Nazism Forbes A century ago Congress declared war on Imperial Germany. It was a bizarre decision: the secure New World voluntarily joined the Old World slaughterhouse, consigning more than 117,000 Americans to death for no intelligible reason. The chief outcome of ... and more »

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A Century Ago Woodrow Wilson Took America Into WWI: Blame Him For Communism, Fascism And Nazism - Forbes

ROME (CNS) -- In an Italian nature reserve surrounded by a forest inhabited by wild boar and foxes, a group of families is seeking to embrace the lifestyle of New Testament-era Christians.

"In the Acts of the Apostles, it is written that they lived with one soul and heart and held all things in common," said Susanna Scifoni, a member of the Nomadelfia community on the outskirts of Rome.

Following that principle, community members live together and share the responsibilities involved in their work of welcoming visitors and with cooking, cleaning and gardening for the community. They grow bok choy, fennel, lettuce, spinach and chicory, raise chickens and assist their local parish in its Caritas operation.

Nomadelfians, as they are sometimes called, receive no pay for their work, but they also do not need money for anything within the group's 25-acre property.

"If work is an act of love, an act of love can't be paid for because it has a price that would be infinite," Scifoni, 24, told Catholic News Service.

"There should be neither servants nor masters, for we are all brothers and sisters," she said.

An Italian priest, Father Zeno Saltini, founded Nomadelfia in 1948, naming the community after the Greek expression meaning "the law of fraternity."

Paolo Matterazzo, 29, said that if the group's ideas sound revolutionary, they should.

"In the DOCAT," the Catholic Church's youth-oriented compendium of social teaching, it says, "if you want to be a Christian, in spirit you have to be revolutionary; if you aren't revolutionary, you aren't Christian," Matterazzo said.

Though there may be a temptation to compare some of Nomadelfia's ideas to communism, members said there are important differences between their economic philosophy and Marxist ideology.

Even Pope Francis has been accused of espousing communism when he promotes an economy based on solidarity and sharing. But, Matterazzo said, the pope has responded, "I am not communist; I am Christian."

"In communism there is no forgiveness," Matterazzo said. "Our purpose is to lead people to God."

And, he said, "communism wants everyone to be communist. We don't ask everyone to become a Nomadelfian."

Nomadelfia members have been encouraged by the pontificate of Pope Francis, who often critiques modern economic values and the "idolatry of money."

The pope "insists a lot on the fact that money should not govern but serve," Scifoni said.

While relationships within the community are money-free, Nomadelfia does accept donations for the community's upkeep and uses money in its relationship with the world, paying for tools, cars and supplies that make its religious life possible.

The challenges of living in common and sharing property are such that Nomadelfia members describe their lifestyle as impossible to sustain without a vocation to live it.

To avoid members becoming overly attached to possessions, or even to the family groups they live in, they rotate homes within the community every three years.

The life is clearly not for everyone. Nomadelfia members report that 70-80 percent of children raised in the community leave at 18 to seek work and a life in the world.

Some, though, leave for university or work only to discover later that God is calling them back to Nomadelfia.

Maria Paolucci, 28, moved into Nomadelfia with her family when she was 9. After leaving the community for university and spending time traveling internationally, she decided to return to Nomadelfia last September.

Having an experience of the outside world "reinforced the idea that Nomadelfia could be a response to many of today's problems, starting with those of the family, problems of loneliness," Paolucci said. For such social ills, living in "a community context is undoubtedly a winning proposal."

Nomadelfia's main campus is located near Grosseto in the region of Tuscany, where the group of 60 families owns 990 acres of rural land and runs its own school for the children raised within the community. The smaller branch located in Rome occupies buildings once part of a Benedictine convent, and it has a special mission of evangelization.

"We want to show that even today, despite everything, even in cities like Rome where we are now, it is possible to live out the principles proposed by the Gospel," Scifoni said.

Nomadelfia's Rome site, called the John Paul II Center for Spirituality, welcomes 2,000 visitors each year. Carlo Sbaraglia, the 67-year-old in charge, said there is a cultural reason more people are inquiring about their way of life.

The growing interest in Nomadelfia Sbaraglia reports coincides with a broader international interest in alternative Christian communities.

For example, Rod Dreher's new book, "The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation," details the approach of many such communities and landed on the New York Times' best-seller list last month in the United States.

"Many people are looking for a new world to live in," he said, pointing out that despite modern means of communications, "there is a lot of loneliness."

There is a need to rediscover human relationships that are "not fiction, not online, but real, authentic, concrete," Sbaraglia said.

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Christian, not communist: Catholics in Rome embrace counterculture - Catholic News Service

Foreign Policy (blog)

It's Not Communism Holding China's Youth Back. It's Their Parents ... Foreign Policy (blog) I am the son of a Chinese democracy activist. My father went into exile in 1988; I was born in China and raised in England. But today, my father and I find ... and more »

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It's Not Communism Holding China's Youth Back. It's Their Parents ... - Foreign Policy (blog)