ABSTRACT
The Bolsheviks were installed in power. Their coup de main had cost less blood than the March Revolution. Trotzky, carried away by his own superb eloquence, wanted to proceed immediately from the Bolshevik coup d'etat in Russia to world revolution. The actual Civil War, which was then being waged, gave Stalin an opportunity for further activity. Central Russia was in need of bread, and the treaty with the Germans had deprived it of more than a quarter of its crops. The Commissar for War seemed to feel instinctively that the prolongation of Stalin's sojourn in Tsaritzin and his intervention in military questions would be an intrusion of which one could not foresee the consequences. President of the Revolutionary War Committee, Trotzky was tactfully controlled by Lenin, who saw him as the future 'Commander-in-Chief of the World Red Army', Stalin did not feel equal to continuing an open conflict which might end in his defeat.
