was Lenin as bad as Stalin?

Answer 1

Your Question calls for an examination of Lenin against the benchmark of “bad” established by Stalin. That is fine by me: I consider Stalin on a par with Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot (and maybe a few others) in the pantheon of horrible 20th Century dictators. My personal opinion is that Lenin deserves to be on the same list of horror-dictators.

But, to be fair, I acknowledge that some Marxist-leaning historians still cherish his memory.

Let’s summarize their pro-Lenin arguments first (see source link 1 for more detail): -

“GOOD LENIN” arguments:

Lenin was a highly principled idealist, whose attempts to establish a socialist Utopia were thwarted by right-wing reactionaries; and then ultimately perverted by Stalin.
• Lenin took land from 30,000 widely-hated landowners and gave it to 100 million oppressed peasants.
• Lenin ended huge suffering in Russia when he sought and obtained peace from Germany.
• Lenin wanted political self-determination for all races.
• Lenin abolished the death penalty in the Russian army; legalized abortion and divorce; and insisted on freedom of speech for the press and for ordinary citizens.
• The reason why the Bolsheviks retained power in Russia was because most of the Russian people firmly supported Lenin.

Now for a summary of the anti-Lenin arguments (see source link 2 for more detail): -

“BAD LENIN” arguments:

Lenin was indeed an idealist, but one with utterly perverted ideals that showed no respect for human rights and liberties. A master of “doubletalk”, Lenin’s public pronouncements were generally for PR purposes only. His actions put the lie to his words. If Lenin had lived longer, his tyranny would have proved just as severe and brutal as that of Stalin.
• As early as 1918, Lenin introduced forced/slave labor as a standard economic instrument; by 1919, the first slave-labor concentration camps were in place --- the start of the Gulag.
• Lenin’s secret police, the Cheka, began murdering fellow-Socialists (Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks) from 1918 onwards.
• “Red Terror” reprisals against political opponents very quickly included the mass-execution of hostages.
• The so-called “Alliance of Workers and Peasants” was a mere slogan. Lenin despised Russia’s peasants, because they stood in the way of his notions for collectivization. With the injunction “Merciless war against the kulaks!”, Lenin unleashed the Cheka and Red Army against farmers, slaughtering hundreds of thousands.
• Lenin’s anti-peasant campaigns were directly responsible for the famine of 1920-21, in which between 3 million and 10 million died of starvation.
• His words notwithstanding, Lenin instituted merciless persecution of religion: not just the Russian Orthodox Church, but also Jews, Catholics and Muslims.


Actions speak louder than words. As far as I’m concerned, Lenin was no better than Stalin. And, of course, without Lenin’s actions, we’d probably never have heard of Stalin ... or Mao ... or Pol Pot. We might not even have heard of Hitler: Nazism might have had much less appeal in Germany, but for the dread of Red Revolution as an alternative.

Answer 2

No Lenin was an idealist and true Communist. Where Stalin was a brutal Military dictator under the disguise of Communism.

Answer 3

It is hard to say...because Lenin died before his real project, rebuilding Russia, so we cannot hardly imagine what he was planning to do!

But I am quite sure Lenin was much more respectable than Stalin...Stalin was just a pig who could do anything for his hunger of power and self-ambition...