Opinion of Vladimir Lenin?

[GeneralMacArthur]

History's most successful terrorist.  The Bolsheviks were basically ISIS, except they claimed to be fighting for the working proletariat rather than fighting for Islam.

Lenin exclusively used violence, mostly directed against innocent people, to undermine his own nation in the middle of a war.  He and Trotsky lied that they could get Russia out of the war with dignity, taking advantage of anti-war sentiment, and then after they violently seized power, it turned out they were lying, and Russia was utterly humiliated and had to surrender enormous amounts of resources and sovereignty to Germany just to be allowed to crawl away from the war.

After getting out of the war, Lenin was able to focus on his own country, where he had two problems.  The first was that he had to share power, the second was that there were a lot of people upset about his violent coup.  He solved the first problem by murdering and imprisoning all his political opponents and using the entire state apparatus to spread lies about them and murder anyone who expressed support for them in any way shape or form.  He solved the second problem by mass-murdering everyone who opposed him (including the famous Crimean incident where he promised amnesty to any White soldiers who surrendered, and then slaughtered every last one of them) and spreading hatred and division.  His government created quotas of people who had to be killed and encouraged the people to hate each other and find reasons to kill each other.  People hating and killing each other at Lenin's direction was basically the defining characteristic of his rule.

Meanwhile his actual governance of the country was an utter disaster.  His government immediately suffered from one of the worst famines in history, which was entirely man-made and directly caused by his disastrous agricultural policies.  The Soviet Union had to crawl on its knees and beg for food aid from its enemies.  This arrangement persisted throughout the entire lifespan of the Soviet Union, and they endured the famines of 1932 and 1946 even in spite of all the aid.  Workers hated his labor policies, but found that whenever they tried to strike or protest, they were violently crushed by the state military.  What a great hero for the working man!

Stalin was a monster, but he was only able to get away with his monstrous crimes against humanity because of the mass-murder infrastructure gifted to him by Lenin and the Bolsheviks.  Lenin slaughtered millions of people and destroyed a world power so he could instead joyride as the pseudointellectual tinpot dictator of a failed state where people lived as slaves and had to eat their own children to survive.

Comrades! The kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without pity ... You must make example of these people.

(1) Hang (I mean hang publicly, so that people see it) at least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known bloodsuckers.
(2) Publish their names.
(3) Seize all their grain.
(4) Single out the hostages per my instructions in yesterday's telegram.
Do all this so that for miles around people see it all, understand it, tremble, and tell themselves that we are killing the bloodthirsty kulaks and that we will continue to do so ...

Yours, Lenin.

P.S. Find tougher people.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Outside of virtue signaling about lost lives and downplaying the achievements of the Soviet Union, this post ignores the context of several actions done by the Bolsheviks and does not state the crimes done by others

How anyone could defend the pogrom-inducing, imperial warrior caste of Tsarist Russia is beyond me. The Cossacks were the main force of suppression of internal dissent and terror against bordering nations, peasants, and Jews in Russia. Their violence and fiefdoms needed to have been removed else the revolution fail. The Tambov rebellion, falsely painted as a rebellion of peasants against the Bolsheviks, were mainly former White officers taking advantage of the collapsing situation to hold onto territory. Indeed, outside of reactionary peasant leaders and the difficulty in maintaining the Soviet early on in the war through War Communism, the relations between the Bolsheviks and peasants were better if not the same then the remaining Left. Menshevik controlled Georgia and the nationalist republics in Poland, Azerbaijan, and the Baltics also heavily suppressed peasant uprisings and took harsh taxation and tribute. This, along with total war against the seceding republics, made it easy to conquer them.

Wow, this is a real mask off moment.  All those millions of people who died totally deserved it, and it was worth it because the USSR got to conquer their countries after murdering them.  Pretending to care about the mass murder of millions of innocent people is just virtue signaling.

Just to clarify, "Their violence and fiefdoms needed to have been removed else the revolution fail" means Lenin needed to murder every single kossack, along with all their friends and families, down to the last child, because otherwise the great worker's paradise PSOL longs to recreate was doomed to fail.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Lenin's policy was to mass-murder anyone who had even a 5% chance of opposing him.  The man was extremely fragile and paranoid and knew he had to be as brutal and ruthless as possible to maintain the minority rule he had acquired by violent force and terrorism.  Stalin was the same way but lowered the threshold from 5% to 1%, or even 0% if he'd had a nightmare about your ethnic group after drinking too much diluted red wine.

So if you were a member of the ethnic group whose popular public figures didn't like Lenin or his Revolution very much, you had to die.  If your dad said something nasty about Lenin at the local gathering house, sorry but you and your brother and sister all had to die.  That was just how it was.  Lenin didn't really care how many innocents got killed.  He just cared about making sure his minority faction wouldn't lose power.  Because if the people's revolution is going to succeed, the first thing we have to do is make sure the people can't do anything to stop us from building paradise in their name.

Lenin would make up arbitrary numbers and tell his subordinates, this many people need to be killed in this area.  If you didn't kill that many people, it probably meant that you were protecting counter-revolutionary subversives, and deserved to be executed yourself.  None of his subordinates wanted to be executed for not satisfying their kill quotas, so they'd just find excuses to kill people, even people who'd done nothing wrong, just to make quota.  Plenty of Russian peasants took advantage of this to settle old scores.  My neighbor is a dick, and I know the local official is short on his kill quota, so I'll just say I heard my neighbor doesn't like giving up his grain to the state, and he'll be killed and I can take his cow.  This is the glorious society PSOL dreams about.

Lenin's true motive was to use mass-murder to eliminate any glimmers of opposition, and the threat of mass murder to keep the populace terrorized and submissive.  Everyone was wondering why he had to kill so many people, but of course he couldn't give the real reason in public, so he offered up these lazy excuses and tried to gin up enough hatred among the Russian people to get them to support his murder campaigns.  He'd accuse anyone he wanted to kill of being kulaks, or fat cats, or enemies of the state, or anti-revolutionary tsarists, or spies, or whatever he could dream up.  And so, having slapped a token villainization on his victims, he could pretend he had the moral high ground in his mass-murder campaigns.

Of course, even back then most people weren't fooled, which was why there were so many labor strikes and peasant uprisings, which Lenin violently and brutally suppressed so they wouldn't interrupt his quest to build a paradise for those stinky, ungrateful peasants (whom he openly despised).  And absolutely nobody today still buys Lenin's bulls--t.  Except PSOL and his tankie friends.

[GeneralMacArthur]

The collective system was more democratic,

Oh my god

more stable,

Oh my god!

and gave peasants the largest say in governing the land than in any other period and by the late 1930s the damage was getting quickly overdone.

OH MY GOD!

Haha you should make the Vince McMahon meme but with Lenin faces for this

[GeneralMacArthur]

Trotsky would have just been another decade or so of Lenin-style oppression, mass-murder and attacks on workers and unions in the name of those same workers and unions, except once he felt he had secured the country he would have started invading their neighbors in the name of spreading communism.

That's why I always find it funny when I talk to Sawant people and they try to defend any association with Stalin, Mao or the horrors of communism by saying "we're a Trotskyite socialist party, numbnuts, don't you know Stalin had Trotsky killed?"  As if Trotsky is some heroic martyr who would have brought about a humane, just and kind Soviet Union if only he hadn't been assassinated.