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 dont take this as a personal attack As for the kulaks youre 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 Lenins 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 wasnt a clean historical break between the two  they were part of the same authoritarian and brutal Communist tradition     What Is To be DonePart III   Further remarks are obviously required   ANTISEMITISM  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 antisemite  The pogrom was condemned by the governor of Bessarabia and by the central government  Sergius Witte by far the Tsars best minister made his own feelings on the matter plain    There were pogroms in Tsarist Russia and antisemitism was a longestablished and poisonous tradition  The point is that this cannot always be traced back to the Tsar Russian state and government was far too complex for that  Official antisemitism 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 liberalminded 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  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  p     Now this whole debate arose because I questioned Lenins credentials as a campaigner against antisemitism 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 ageold 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  campaign against religion specifically authorised by Lenin the Jews were singled out as a special target even Maxim Gorky accused the government of using antisemitism 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  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   What price Lenins 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 counterrevolutionaries but peope who had been their allies and comrades in the political underground  By  well after the White threat had gone away oppression and terror had become a fact of life in the workers fatherland  It never went away   Let me make it plain that I am simpy asking that this article reflects the true facts of Lenins career  As it stands at present it is little more than a biased appreciation     I see youve been doing your homework White GuardWe are evidentally getting a more intellectual class of redbaiter these daysI therefore pledge myself  on behalf of the Guardians of the LeninShrine 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