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

livemint.com:

Vladimir Lenin has been gone for a century, but the evil he did lives on. The first leader of the Soviet Union died on Jan. 21, 1924, in Gorki, Russia (now called Nizhny Novgorod), after repeated strokes.

His legacy is a world whose moral equilibrium he helped to destroy. The Soviet Union was based on Marxism, a secular religion, and Lenin was the architect of its system of antimorality. 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. The effect of this theory is felt today in post-Soviet Russia, where the legacy of communism’s blanket rejection of universal morality destroyed the hope for democratic reform.

Lenin’s theory also inspired modern terrorism and contributes to the weakness that leads many in the West to condone ideological crimes. Lenin was born in 1870 in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk), the son of a senior school inspector. In 1893 he moved to St.

Petersburg, where he joined the Marxist party and published a book, “What Is to Be Done?" (1902), in which he described a plan for seizing power by a disciplined “vanguard" party of professional revolutionaries. The unacknowledged model for this party was the Russian People’s Will, which was founded in 1879 and in 1881 carried out the assassination of Alexander II, the “Czar Liberator," who 20 years earlier had freed the Russian serfs. In February 1917, Lenin’s party, the Bolsheviks, had 24,000 members.