I concur with White Guard that Lenin and his government committed many atrocities against the Russian people and your attempt to whitewash their reputation is somewhat historically inaccurate please don t take this as a personal attack As for the kulaks you re perfectly correct that they never really existed as a class and were invented by the Communists as an attempt to encourage class warfare in the countryside yet you choose to ignore the fact that it was Lenin not Stalin who began the campaign against the kulaks It was admittedly Stalin who was responsible for the wholesale purging of kulaks as part of his collectivisation programme Overall I would say Stalin took Lenin s ideology to new heights of paranoia and mass murder but the foundations of this ideology were all in the system that Lenin established Stalin was worse than Lenin but there wasn t a clean historical break between the two they were part of the same authoritarian and brutal Communist tradition What Is To be Done Part III Further remarks are obviously required ANTI SEMITISM Could I please have a reference for Nicholas authorisation of the Kishinev massacre As far as I am aware this episode was the handiwork of Vyacheslav Plehve minister of the interior and a notorious anti semite The pogrom was condemned by the governor of Bessarabia and by the central government Sergius Witte by far the Tsar s best minister made his own feelings on the matter plain There were pogroms in Tsarist Russia and anti semitism was a long established and poisonous tradition The point is that this can not always be traced back to the Tsar Russian state and government was far too complex for that Official anti semitism was moreover of a confessional rather than a biological nature Under Alexander III the drive for assimiliation became ever greater after the murder of his liberal minded father but it also affected Catholics Lutherans and Muslims as well as Jews Civil disabilities could always be lifted for converts to Orthodoxy for those who were minded to take this path Nicholas was a conventional and unimaginitive man but even he could detect the patently false Although he was initially taken in by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as was the London Times in 1919 he soon recognised them according to Vladimir Burtsev no friend of the Tsar as dangerous political nonsense You may care to consult Solomon Grayzel again no admirer of Tsarist Russia who in his A History of the Jews says Even the Tsar had considered the forgery utterly improbable and unworthy of consideration Philadelphia 1968 p 613 Now this whole debate arose because I questioned Lenin s credentials as a campaigner against anti semitism on the basis of a single speech with no examples provided If we look at the actual record of Soviet Russia under Lenin a quite different picture emerges The age old antisemitism of the Tsars showed little sign of going away if anything it got worse Red army units were amongst those responsible for pogroms in the Ukraine to the obvious disquiet of Trotsky During the 1921 campaign against religion specifically authorised by Lenin the Jews were singled out as a special target even Maxim Gorky accused the government of using anti semitism for political purposes There were pogroms in Smolensk and other places When Jewish people tried to defend their synagogues threatened with confiscation troops broke in shouting Death to the Yids in the process The campaign of 1921 peaked in the mock trial of Judaism carried out for additionl emphasis if any such was needed in the very same courtroom as the Beiliss trial of 1913 What price Lenin s support for the Jews TERROR Yes there was terror extensive and brutal but that of the Whites was more than matched by that of the Reds and not just against counter revolutionaries but peope who had been their allies and comrades in the political underground By 1921 well after the White threat had gone away oppression and terror had become a fact of life in the worker s fatherland It never went away Let me make it plain that I am simpy asking that this article reflects the true facts of Lenin s career As it stands at present it is little more than a biased appreciation I see you ve been doing your homework White Guard We are evidentally getting a more intellectual class of red baiter these days I therefore pledge myself on behalf of the Guardians of the Lenin Shrine at whatever expense in time and money to read the chapter The Pogroms and White Ideology in the Russian Civil War by P Kenez in