Vladimir Lenin Research Paper

Ben English

English II

Mrs. Ray

27 February 2017

Vladimir Lenin

For seventy years, the world knew Vladimir Lenin to be a compassionate, humble, humanist.

For seventy years, the Soviet archives regarding Lenin were privatized and stored in a highly secret location in order to keep this profile. However, in 1999 seventy years after his death, these records were made available to the public. As they read these documents they began to see him for what he really was -- a cynical, cruel, policeman who would stop at nothing to take absolute power. Lenin recognized communism as an opportunity to help him achieve this mighty goal. During the Russian

Revolution, Vladimir Ilich Lenin negatively utilized his violent, supercilious, and rebellious qualities

Many thought Lenin to be a very humble and peaceful person. However, after seventy years, in 1999, an immense amount of secret documents were publicized from the Soviet political archives.

Seventy years after his death, the world got to see Lenin as he really was. And man, was he violent.

A very popular Soviet dictator, Vyacheslav Molotov, who knew Lenin and Stalin both very closely, said that “ ‘Lenin was easily more cruel.’ ”(Lovell 2). During the beginning of a famine in 1918, farmers in Penza, a large Russian town, refused to give up their crops to the government. Lenin, in his own words, wrote careful instructions on how to deal with these farmers: “ ‘The rebellion of these five districts must be mercilessly suppressed. Hang no less than 100 farmers, publish their names,

English 2 take all their crops, nominate hostages. Make sure that 400 kilometers worth of people will see, tremble, know, shout: they are hanging and will hang to death the bloodsucker famers.’ ” (Lovell 3).

By doing this, Lenin permanently crippled Russian agriculture. Russia still struggles from mass famines because of this. Lenin also deeply hated the churches because he believed they were a threat to his communist movement. While an enormous, devastating famine was occurring in Ukraine,

There is no other way than shooting a very large number of the most influential and dangerous reactionaries in Shuya.’ ”(Lovell 3-4). Lenin later ordered that no copies of his previous statements be made for any reason.

Vladimir Lenin utilized his supercilious qualities to help Russia become a communist nation. It was no secret that Lenin loved, even obsessed over, power. When the Russian government fell in

1917, Lenin saw an opportunity to seize power. His party, the Bolsheviks, won control of Moscow, and Lenin just appointed himself as ruler. He “justified his violent seizure of power as merely a transfer of authority to the Soviets… Lenin declared the formation of a Soviet government, withdrew

Russia from World War I, and put the peasants in charge of the land that formerly belonged to the nobles, state, and church.” (Brown 2). Lenin appointing himself dictator shows his negative supercilious quality. At the end of the first World War, Lenin sensed that Europe was on the verge of a Bolshevik revolution and that “eventually the whole world would be Sovietized.”(Lovell 3). Lenin’s supercilious quality was clearly shown here because he just assumed that his party would take power. English