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Today marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Vladimir Vladimir, the first leader of the Soviet Union, the world's first communist state. While Lenin's successor, Joseph Stalin, has few defenders of the modern West (despite the Russian government's efforts to reinstate him), Lenin still enjoys many admirers among the Western left. They tend to ignore or blame Stalin for the great evil he did.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Many of the brutally repressive features of Soviet totalitarianism actually began during Lenin's time. Stalin only perpetuated them on a larger scale.
Let's take a quick history quiz. Which of the following features of the Soviet state was first introduced during Lenin's time and which was introduced by Stalin?
1. Gulag system of slave labor camps
2. Cheka (secret police agency eventually known as KGB)
3. Mass famine caused by collectivization of agriculture
4. Mass executions with little or no due process.
5. One-party state that bans all opposition parties (including socialist parties)
6. Suppression of freedom of speech and religion
7. Confiscation of private companies, including small and medium-sized enterprises
8. Invading other countries to spread communism
9. State control of the media with the aim of promoting regime propaganda and preventing the distribution of opposition speech.
If you answered Lenin, you were correct in all cases! And virtually all of these measures were supported by Trotsky, Bukharin, and other Bolshevik leaders whom some Western leftists liked to trumpet as a potentially superior alternative to Stalin. If Trotsky, and not Stalin, had come to power after Lenin's death, he would have gladly continued all of the above, and in some cases doubled it.
Policies 3 and 7 of this list were partially suspended or canceled under Lenin's New Economic Policy starting in 1921. But Lenin and other Soviet leaders always made it clear that this was only a temporary expedient, intended to be canceled as quickly as possible.
The late Harvard historian Richard Pipes has an excellent overview of Lenin's repressive policies and their consequences in his book. Russia under the Bolshevik regime.
It is also worth noting that Lenin was the person who elevated Stalin to the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party, greatly increasing the possibility that Stalin would succeed him. It is highly unlikely that Lenin would have done so had the two men had major disagreements over ideology and policy.
What new forms of oppression did Stalin engage in? Yes, actually he did this:
1. Expulsion of entire minorities (especially Crimean Tatars). I suspect that if Lenin had thought this would be useful, he would have hesitated about this. But he didn't actually do that. He didn't do that, at least not on a large scale.
2. State-sponsored anti-Semitism. There was no shortage of anti-Semitism in Lenin's Soviet Union. However, Lenin did not actively promote this and was probably not an anti-Semite himself. He sometimes condemned anti-Semitism. In this matter Stalin was much worse.
3. Massive purges of loyal communists. Lenin never did this, and Trotsky probably never would have done it had he been in power. This is the Stalinist policy that most alienated many Western leftists. How dare Stalin kill communist heroes like Trotsky and Bukharin? But it was one of the least of Stalin's crimes. Many of Stalin's victims of communism were actually cruel oppressors, and no doubt got what they deserved (albeit for the wrong reasons and without due process). To be fair, Stalin did not actively participate in the repressions, but he also purged many communists who had joined the party to further their own careers. (The same could be said about the many Germans who joined the Nazi Party after it came to power.)
All told, it was Lenin who led the policies that led to about 90% of the repressions and deaths in the Soviet Union. And this idea was not unusual for Lenin. They had the support of most other communist leaders, which is why subsequent communist regimes tended to adopt policies similar to those of the Soviet Union and achieved similar results. Mao Zedong surpassed the Soviet Union in sheer number of casualties (Mao Zedong had a much larger population to work with). Cambodia's Pol Pot killed more people in a shorter period of time and surpassed the Soviet Union and China in sheer torture and brutality. However, on key issues these mass murderers still largely followed the model first established by Lenin.
With a few notable exceptions listed above, Stalin largely continued and expanded Lenin's evil policies. In the end, the root of evil here was not the personality of any one leader, but the ideology that Lenin, Stalin, and their comrades all tried to embody. But Lenin was nevertheless famous for being the first to lead a regime that pursued this policy and for setting an example for all that followed. How should we remember him?