For all his learning, Lenin began the Bolshevik tradition of waging war on intellectual dissidents — of exiling, imprisoning and executing thinkers and artists who dared oppose the regime. He was a "man of letters" of a particular sort. In the years before and after the October 1917 coup, Lenin was the avatar of a group of radical intellectuals who sought a revolution that did not merely attempt to redress the economic balances under czarism. Instead, Lenin made a perverse reading of the Enlightenment view of man as modeling clay and sought to create a new model of human nature and behavior through social engineering of the most radical kind.

"Bolshevism was the most audacious attempt in history to subject the entire life of a country to a master plan," writes Richard Pipes at the end of his two-volume history of the revolution. "It sought to sweep aside as useless rubbish the wisdom that mankind had accumulated over millennia. In that sense, it was a unique effort to apply science to human affairs: and it was pursued with the zeal characteristic of the breed of intellectuals who regard resistance to their ideas as proof that they are sound."

It 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.

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April 24, 1964	Nov. 10, 1967	Feb. 19, 1990
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