Thoughts on Vladimir Lenin?

I think he would have stayed true to Marxist principles in that he would have seen to it that all distinctions between social classes would disappear after the capitalist society was overthrown -- but he was outnumbered by those who advocated for a socialism that abandoned the notion that socialism could abolish poverty and so decided to make it more general, distributing it "over the whole surface of society". (Marx's words) ---------- Later I discovered --thru Wikipedia -- that "After the revolution Russia dissolved into civil war, and the cities and Red (Bolshevik) army needed feeding. War Communism was a policy of sending Bolsheviks into the countryside to seize grain in order to feed the cities. Also it nationalized all industry and banks. After Lenin was shot and wounded by Fanya Kaplan in August 1918 and to help enforce the War Communism a period known as the Red Terror began where anyone suspected of helping the opposing White armies could face a short trial and execution - some 200,000 may have died - although it must be said that the White forces committed similar number of murders. After the Civil War died down, Lenin realized that War Communism was not working very well and began the New Economic Policy (NEP) . This allowed small businesses and farmers to buy and sell on the open market. Economic growth soon followed." -- so Lenin did not stay true to Marxist revolutionary principles, either! ---------- (Ivar wrote): there was serious debate in the early days about the prerequisites for socialism: orthodoxy held that it could emerge only after the emergence of an industrial/urban proletariat, a condition not met by the feudal society that russia then was (success in russia caught communists by surprise: they expected it in western europe). various initiatives were designed partly to speed up the clock, among them e.g. forced removal from the country to factories and the collectivization/industrialization of russian agriculture. so there was some ideological cover for the introduction of limited free markets after the first round of collectivization failed.