Lenin’s Sex Worker Massacre

Today I learned that among Lenin’s many crimes, he specifically ordered that hundreds of sex workers be shot. Worker’s revolution? Sure, but only for the correct sort of workers:

“It is obvious that a whiteguard insurrection is being prepared in Nizhni. You must strain every effort, appoint three men with dictatorial powers (yourself, Markin and one other), organise immediately mass terror, shoot and deport the hundreds of prostitutes who are making drunkards of the soldiers, former officers and the like.”

Due to an ambiguity about whether a specific Russian word means “making drunk” or “being drunk”, this more sensible-sounding translation is also offered:

You must … organise immediately mass terror, shoot and deport the hundreds of prostitutes, drunk soldiers, former officers and the like.

There’s some historical ambiguity about how many of the sex workers were actually shot (as opposed to being terrorized or deported) but any public discussion of the question so rapidly fills up with tankies dreaming up creative justifications to excuse/absolve Lenin of his crimes, that it’s not an easily-researchable question for non-historians.

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