Vladimir Lenin -- Communist Leader Was Just As Brutal As His Successors

In her July 8 letter, Mary Ann Curtis defends Vladimir Lenin as a noble leader whose lofty ideals were betrayed by Stalin. Nothing could be further from the truth. Lenin was every bit as brutal as those who followed him.

Lenin founded the secret police in 1917 (mere weeks after assuming power) and authorized the infamous Siberian prison camps in 1921.

Lenin was not reluctant to make use of his grisly machinery. In February 1918 he decreed that all "enemy agents, speculators, burglars, hooligans, counterrevolutionaries, and German spies" were to be shot without trial. Later in the year, Lenin noted that "we must encourage energy and wide-scale terror against the counterrevolutionaries, especially in Petrograd as a decisive example." That same fall, when the peasants protested brutal grain extractions, Lenin ordered military units in the countryside to seize hostages and, if the grain was not forthcoming, execute them.

Nor was Lenin at all democratic. In a widely-distributed article written in 1920, he claimed that "whoever does not understand the need for dictatorship of any revolutionary class to secure its victory, understands nothing of the history of revolution." To drive his point home, he added, "the dictatorship means - take note of this once and for all - unrestrained power based on force and not on law."

When Stalin's crimes began to surface after his death, Soviet leaders needed to disavow Stalinism without undermining socialism as a whole. Historians were convinced to rewrite the past, portraying Stalin as the betrayer of Lenin, who was depicted as a gentle democrat. This was untrue during the Cold War, and it is untrue now. Saved from infamy by the quarrels of his successors, Lenin remains one of the most ruthless figures in modern history. Jamie Twiss Seattle