A Century After Lenin’s Death, His Evil Legacy Lives On

Believing that the class struggle justified any means, he glorified murder as a moral obligation

By David Satter. Mr. Satter is author of “Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union.” Excerpts:

"For Lenin, as he said in his speech to the Komsomol on Oct. 2, 1920, morality was entirely subordinated to the class struggle. An action was right not in light of “extrahuman concepts” but only if it destroyed the old society and helped to build a new communist society."

"Lenin’s theory also inspired modern terrorism and contributes to the weakness that leads many in the West to condone ideological crimes."

"In February 1917, Lenin’s party, the Bolsheviks, had 24,000 members. It was able to triumph in a country of more than 100 million because it was a machine of concentrated power that accepted murder and glorified it as a moral obligation. Isaac Steinberg, the non-Bolshevik justice minister in the first revolutionary government, objected to summary executions. He sarcastically asked Lenin: “Why bother with a Commissariat of Justice? Let’s call it the ‘Commissariat for Social Extermination.’” Lenin’s face lit up, and he said: “That’s exactly what it should be, but we can’t say that.”"

"In a 2008 speech, Vladimir Putin said that maintaining Russia’s place as a “mighty nation” calls for “enormous sacrifices and privations on the part of our people.” In other words, his ambition is the same as Lenin’s: for Russians to suffer indefinitely for the state."

"When the Soviet Union fell, Russia dismantled the socialist economy but didn’t restore the moral framework Lenin destroyed. The result was the rise of a criminal state no less dangerous than its predecessor"

"One of Lenin’s last writings was a set of recommendations for deceiving “deaf-mutes,” his term for Western capitalists who were ready to ignore Soviet crimes in their pursuit of profit. His plan was to promote the fiction of a legitimate government in the Soviet Union separate from the Communist Party and establish relations with as many countries as possible to create a false impression of normality."