Like his pupils and emulators Mussolini and Hitler, Lenin won power by first breaking the spirit of those who stood in his way, persuading them that they were doomed. The Bolshevik triumph in October was accomplished nine-tenths psychologically: the forces involved were negligible, a few thousand men at most in a nation of one hundred and fifty million, and victory came almost without a shot being fired. The whole operation seemed to confirm Napoleon's dictum that the battle is won or lost in the minds of men before it even begins.
Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution

But these structural problems would probably have not been terminal if Kerensky and the Provisional Government had the common sense to make a separate peace with the Germans. They did not. With bravado, they swore to fight on, earning the enmity of soldiers dying at the front, peasants forced to turn over their grain at below-market prices, and city dwellers wanting for food. Energy and hope which should have been spent laying the groundwork for prosperity and freedom was instead wasted upon continuing the hopeless struggle against the Kaiser. And while the Provisional Government focused on the foreign invader, the Bolsheviks under Lenin's leadership prepared to seize power by dominating the soviets, violent action, or both. As Lenin explained his position:

No support to the Provisional Government; exposure of the utter falsity of its promises... unmasking, instead of admitting, the illusion-breeding "demand" that this government, a government of capitalists, cease being imperialistic. (April Theses)

A skillful political entrepreneur, Lenin coined the simple slogan "Peace, Land, Bread" to signify his determination to make a separate peace with the Germans and recognize the peasants' spontaneous seizures of land.

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