Lenin's legacy

Lenin was the initiator of the central drama — the tragedy — of our era, the rise of totalitarian states.

Lenin introduced to the 20th century the practice of taking an all-embracing ideology and imposing it on an entire society rapidly and mercilessly; he created a regime that erased politics, erased historical memory, erased opposition. In his short career in power, from 1917 until his death in 1924, Lenin created a model not merely for his successor, Stalin, but for Mao, for Hitler, for Pol Pot.

t is, perhaps, impossible to calculate just how many tens of millions of murders "flowed" from Leninism. Certainly Stalin differed from Lenin in the length of his time as dictator — some 25 years to Lenin's six — and he also had the advantage of greater technology. As a result, Stalin's murderous statistics are superior to Lenin's. And yet Lenin contributed so very much.

In some scholarly circles in the West, Stalin was seen as an "aberration," a tyrant who perverted Lenin's intentions at the end of Lenin's life. But as more and more evidence of Lenin's cruelty emerged from the archives, that notion of the "good Lenin" and the "bad Stalin" became an academic joke. Very few of Stalin's policies were without roots in Leninism: it was Lenin who built the first camps; Lenin who set off artificial famine as a political weapon; Lenin who disbanded the last vestige of democratic government, the Constituent Assembly, and devised the Communist Party as the apex of a totalitarian structure; Lenin who first waged war on the intelligentsia and on religious believers, wiping out any traces of civil liberty and a free press.