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.
Hatred for the capitalist world enabled the Bolsheviks to throw Russian Czarist patriotism into the discard. They delighted in getting Russian troops to desert at the front; the Germans delighted in this, too. But the Bolsheviks were certain they would have the last laugh because they knew it was only a matter of weeks or months before the revolution--the _inevitable_ revolution, forecast by Karl Marx's peculiar economics--broke out in Germany as well. The Russian devil-may-care attitude toward all established forms of society was perfectly characterized by Trotzky's flip but deadly answer to the German military negotiators at the Brest-Litovsk negotiations. When the Germans balked at some point, "All right," said Trotzky, "no war and--no peace."
The Germans insisted that if the Bolsheviks did not sign the dictated peace terms the German army would make more war.
Fine, said Trotzky in effect, he didn't mind. Go ahead and make war. It wouldn't worry him or his army. They would go somewhere else and would refuse to play games with capitalists.
This stopped the Germans in their tracks. They did not want to send their troops into a starving country that roared with subversive doctrines. They knew that while Trotzky wasted their time quibbling over negotiations, his printing presses worked night and day telling the German troops that the war was over, that capitalism was on its way out, that the workers' revolution was coming, everywhere, for everybody, with food, peace, plenty, atheism and all the other delights of the good Bolshevik life. The Russians finally signed the surrender treaty but in point of fact, the German divisions on the Eastern front were contaminated by Bolshevism, and when they came back across Germany they brought the message of freedom and peace with them. Germany did have an abortive Communist revolution--partly because of Russian operations--though it was stopped by an alliance of the moderate Socialists and the dependable remnants of the army.