If you think of the Wall Street Journal staff as the Kulaks and Rupert Murdoch and his team as the Bolsheviks then poor Marcus Brauchli was a Menshevik. He was the guy who thought the revolutionary Bolsheviks might have a point about the Journal's need to change but, at the same time, he had a respect for the Kulaks and sought to find an accommodation between the rulers and the ruled.
But the reformist, as so often, was unloved on both sides. He had prepared the way for Murdoch's entrance to Liberty Street, so the Kulaks despised him. Yet he could not embrace the revolutionary spirit of Murdoch's men, and they found him a nuisance. The useful idiot had done his job by trying to convince the Kulaks that Murdoch's money was the Journal's best hope for a secure future. Now he was just in the way.
Murdoch did not spend $5 billion to placate the Kulaks. He did not switch his Red Army generals, Les Hinton and Robert Thomson, from London to New York to smile at the staff and introduce merely cosmetic changes. They are engaged in a wholesale change of culture and, by extension, a transformation of the paper.
The Menshevik managing editor clearly couldn't grasp what was happening. There is no middle course for Murdoch, the man in a hurry. He and his generals have a clear-eyed view of what was wrong with the Journal and are determined to put it right as swiftly as possible.
They don' t think those trademark WSJ feature articles that take an hour or more to read are as big a draw as the Kulaks believe. They see virtue in shorter, tighter-written stories. They don't believe that sticking to a business niche is good enough and want to broaden the editorial agenda to include politics and even lifestyle.
Why? Because the Bolsheviks (the Murdochoviks?) are fighting a long revolution. They are gearing up for the next big struggle with a new enemy, those White Russians up on 8th Avenue (aka the New York Times). They want their readers and their advertisers. They're seeking Big Apple media domination.
Murdoch already owns the New York Post. Now he's close to buying another New York paper, Newsday, for $580m (£291m). The Bolshevik tanks are rolling across the city and the regulators appear ready to clear the streets for them.
Did I hear someone mention that all is not lost for Brauchli the Menshevik? After all, there is that special five-member committee set up to safeguard the Journal's editorial integrity, which supposedly allayed the fears of the Bancroft family who sold the Journal to Murdoch last year. It has the "right" to approve the hiring and firing of the paper's key editors, such as Brauchli.
I see the Bolsheviks smiling. Does anyone really think they haven't squared this already? Did anyone ever believe that the "independent" committee would do anything other than rubber-stamp Murdoch's decisions?
They may well huff and puff, and even that will probably be behind the scenes, but what power do they have? What rights do they have? What sanctions do they possess to stymie the man who owns the business?
At best, they are Mensheviks. At worst, they are Bolshevik fellow-travellers. Murdoch rules. Kulaks beware.
