=The Bolshevik and Chinese Revolutions.= The dynamic propaganda development of this period came about in Russia. The Russian revolution began as reaction to an adverse military situation, disesteemed leadership, economic hardship, and long overdue reforms. In its first, or constitutional phase, it had an inevitableness about it; there was little resistance to the revolution, and the popular mood was one of relief, joy, easement. However, the majority group of the Russian Socialists interpreted the Marxist philosophy to mean (putting it bluntly) that the end is justified by the means. They believed that they had developed a system of politico-economic forecasting which, while not always certain, was close to certain. And they further believed that no one else, lacking this system of forecasting, could lead the workers and peasants to their historically inevitable freedom. This philosophy may sound beside the point, but it is not. Such abstruse doctrines of Hegelianism and Marxism were used by the majority-Socialists (known by their Russian name, _Bolshevik_) to give themselves a sense of unconditional rightness. From the first phase of the revolution on, the Bolsheviks pitilessly sabotaged all other democratic groups. There was no point in helping other groups, when Bolsheviks alone had the inner secrets of history at their command. In the geniuses Lenin and Trotzky, the Bolshevik movement found its leadership. Lenin had no use for democracy as it was known in America. To him it was a sham, a front for the great capitalist trusts, which--even though the capitalists themselves might not know it--were doomed to get bigger on a shrinking market, until international capitalist war, bankruptcy, and working-class revolution was the result. Lenin was as sure that this would happen as he was that the sun would rise the next morning. The only dispute was the matter of timing; a few Bolshevik pessimists thought that the capitalist world might last into the 1920's. Such a frame of mind led to a very deadly kind of psychological warfare. The Bolsheviks despised their opponents, desiring to "liquidate" them (this meant breaking down a group and preventing its reforming as a group, but came above all to mean mass murder). They were so antagonistic to the "capitalist" world that they hated God, patriotism, national history, churches, money, private property, chastity, marriage, and verse that rhymed, all with equal intensity. Moscow became the Mecca for the eccentrics and malcontents of the world and for some years Russia was in fact looser in morals than any other civilized country.