Comment on Beyond the Law: What It Means to Weaponize the Government by Munk

It bears consideration that the nascent Soviet Union dismantled decentralized, locally-elected, community soviets (councils) in the midst of the invasion by Russia’s former allies in “the Great War” against Germany. The threat of subversion and invasion would be used as a pretext to centralize governmental control under autocratic rule by the time of Lenin’s death in 1924 and Stalin’s rise to power by 1925, the very year that the “allies” withdrew their armed forces (totalling more than 125,000) from Russian territory. The internal threat posed by the benefactors of the legacy monarchy and foreign intervention certainly placed the soviet government in a state of wartime emergency justifying the “dictatorship of the proletariat”.