Vladimir Lenin born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (22 April 1870 – 21 January 1924) was a Russian lawyer, politician, political theorist and revolutionary. Lenin was the founder of Bolshevism and the leader of the Russian October Revolution of 1917. His faction’s victory started the first communist country, Soviet Russian, with him as dictator. He continued this role with the beginning of the Soviet Union in 1922.

The Ulyanov family is Russian nobility and Lenin’s older brother was Aleksandr Ulyanov. Aleksandr was a leader in the attempt to assassinate Czar of Russia Alexander III. The attempt was to be made on 1 March 1887, the sixth anniversary of the assassination of Alexander II. Alexander II “the Liberator” was best known for his abolishment of Russian serfdom in 1861.

The plot was foiled and Aleksandr Ulyanov was hung with four co-conspirators in May of 1887, the others having been pardoned. This is what motivated Vladimir Lenin’s entrance into politics. He was expelled from the Karzan University where he went to study law for his involvement in protests.

In 1890 his mother, influential because of her deceased noble husband, was able to convince authorities to allow Vladimir to take his exams externally. He was granted a degree from the University of St Petersburg and began to work as a legal assistant.

By late 1894, he was leading a Marxist workers’ circle, and meticulously covered his tracks to evade police spies. He began a romantic relationship with Nadezhda “Nadya” Krupskaya, a Marxist school teacher. He also authored a political tract criticizing the Narodnik agrarian-socialists, What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats; around 200 copies were illegally printed in 1894. Wikipedia

He traveled to Switzerland and Berlin where he met other Marxist thinkers. When he returned he began distributing communist writings to strikers and was arrested. Not considered a serious threat he was exiled to Siberia where he spent the next three years under police surveillance. He married Nadezhda and was visited by other revolutionaries.

After his exile ended he often traveled to Munich and moved to Switzerland in 1904. He continued to write and influence his Bolshevik movement. The 1905 Russian Revolution was not successful but Lenin felt comfortable enough to move back to Russia as Czar Nicholas II granted liberal reforms in the aftermath.

Recognising that membership fees and donations from a few wealthy sympathisers were insufficient to finance the Bolsheviks’ activities, Lenin endorsed the idea of robbing post offices, railway stations, trains, and banks. Under the lead of Leonid Krasin, a group of Bolsheviks began carrying out such criminal actions, the best-known taking place in June 1907, when a group of Bolsheviks acting under the leadership of Joseph Stalin committed an armed robbery of the State Bank in Tiflis, Georgia. Wikipedia

When World War I broke out Lenin was living with his wife in Galicia region of Poland and Ukraine. He moved to Bern and then Zurich Germany. When the February Revolution (1917) began he decided to travel back to Russia and take charge of the Bolshevik faction. Alexander Parvus < with help from the German government arranged his and other Russian dissidents’ travel by train.

He organized meetings and publicly condemned both the Mensheviks (a Marxist faction opposed to the Bolsheviks) and the Social Revolutionaries, who dominated the influential Petrograd Soviet, for supporting the Provisional Government, denouncing them as traitors to socialism. He encouraged armed demonstrations and encouraged an armed insurrection by Bolsheviks to take over the new government. He then fled to Finland.

General Lavr Kornilov, the commander-in-chief of the Russian Army, sent troops to Petrograd in an attempted coup. The city was defended by the Red Guard made up of revolutionaries including the Bolsheviks. The soldiers did not succeed and the Bolsheviks were back on the political map. Lenin returned and organized the October Revolution when the Bolsheviks forcibly took over the government.

The Bolsheviks held an election which left the soviet dominated by agrarian focused Socialist Revolutionaries. The Bolsheviks won a quarter of the seats. Lenin declared the soviet assembly counter revolutionary and disbanded it. Lenin redistributed land from the aristocracy and Orthodox Church to peasants and abolished all media outlets he didn’t approve of. Lenin formed People’s Courts and Revolutionary Tribunals that made legal rulings without being “tethered by laws.”

The Russian Civil War began when the White Army made up of right leaning Russian military leaders, socialists and Ukrainian anarchists attempted to overthrow the Bolshevik government of Lenin. The war included other groups and forces from other nations vying for power. The war lasted from 1917 until 1922 with a Bolshevik victory.

After 5 years of the Russian Civil War, in May of 1922, Lenin suffered a stroke that paralyzed half of his body. In December he suffered another. In March 1923 Lenin suffered his third stroke and lost his ability to speak. On 21 January of 1924 he fell into a coma and died. Josef Stalin had been consolidating power in the Bolshevik faction and became the new leader of the Soviet Union.

Roy Marcus Cohn (February 20, 1927 – August 2, 1986) was an American lawyer and prosecutor who has been called “a Jewish anti-Semite and a homosexual homophobe.” (The Advocate). Cohn gained fame for his part in the Red Scare prosecutions as an ally and friend of Joseph McCarthy. It was Cohn that prosecuted the case against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Cohn was vehemently opposed to communism; maybe he remembered?

One often ignored part of the Red Scare were the political attacks by McCarthy and Cohn against opponents who were homosexual or falsely accused of homosexuality by the pair. Later it became common knowledge that Cohn was a homosexual and at the time it was rumored McCarthy was as well.

Former U.S. Senator Alan K. Simpson wrote: “The so-called ‘Red Scare’ has been the main focus of most historians of that period of time. A lesser-known element…and one that harmed far more people was the witch-hunt McCarthy and others conducted against homosexuals.” Wikipedia

McCarthy and Cohn started accusing military leaders in their Red Scare indictments. In 1954 the Army–McCarthy hearings brought McCarthyism to a halt and Cohn resigned. He then became a New York City lawyer, a career that lasted 30 years. During this time he was indicted three times for blackmail, conspiracy and other charges. He was acquitted each time. One of his clients was Donald Trump.

Several people have asserted that Cohn had considerable influence on the presidency of Donald Trump. Ivy Meeropol, director of Bully, Coward, Victim: The Story of Roy Cohn, said “Cohn really paved the way for Trump and set him up with the right people, introduced him to Paul Manafort and Roger Stone—the people who helped him get to the White House. Wikipedia

In 1971 Trump was accused of violating the Fair Housing Act by keeping black renters out of his various apartment complexes. This was allegedly done by telling black applicants there were no units available. Cohn represented Trump and filed an unsuccessful countersuit against the government. Trump settled out of court.

Cohn allegedly introduced Trump to mob boss Anthony Salerno who provided Trump with concrete at reduced prices to build Trump Towers.

In his 1987 book The Art of the Deal Trump wrote about “all the hundreds of ‘respectable’ guys who made careers out of boasting about their uncompromising integrity but have absolutely no loyalty …. What I liked most about Roy Cohn was that he would do just the opposite.” Wikipedia

In 1986, a five-judge panel of the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court disbarred Cohn for unethical and unprofessional conduct, including misappropriation of clients’ funds, lying on a bar application, and falsifying a change to a will.

Cohn opposed same sex marriage. In his autobiography, he expressed harsher views towards homosexuals both publicly and privately. When opposing the aforementioned bill, he told Andrew Stein, “you’ve gotta get off this fag stuff,” and called gay activists “fucking fags.”

The young Cohn also attached himself to several older powerful men who, in return, provided Cohn with assistance. One of them may have been New York’s Cardinal Francis Spellman, whose own alleged homosexuality has been a subject of controversy in the Catholic Church. Although Cohn always denied his homosexuality in public, he had a few known boyfriends over the course of his life, including his assistant Russell Eldridge, who died from AIDS in 1984, and Peter Fraser, Cohn’s partner for the last two years of his life, who was 30 years his junior. Speculation about Cohn’s sexuality intensified following his death from AIDS in 1986. In a 2008 article published in The New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin quotes Cohn associate Roger Stone: “Roy was not gay. He was a man who liked having sex with men. Gays were weak, effeminate. He always seemed to have these young blond boys around. It just wasn’t discussed. He was interested in power and access. Wikipedia

Roy Cohn died on 2 Aug 1986 of complications due to advanced AIDS. Cohn referred to Donald Trump as his best friend. Cohn told journalists that Trump phoned him 15 to 20 times a day and according to Christine Seymour, his long-time switchboard operator, Trump was the last person to speak to Cohn on the phone before he died in 1986

• Trump’s Role Model: The Most Evil Gay Man in America YouTube
• Who was Roy Cohn? All about the closeted gay lawyer who mentored Donald Trump The Advocate
• The Final Lesson Donald Trump Never Learned From Roy Cohn Politico
• Roy Cohn: The mysterious US lawyer who helped Donald Trump rise to power BBC
• How Donald Trump and Roy Cohn’s Ruthless Symbiosis Changed America Vanity Fair