On the eve of the October 1917 revolution in Russia, tensions had built up hugely against Kerensky and the provisional g everyplacenment over its various decisions, (including the decision to keep open Russia fighting against the Germans in world strugglef be unity rather of pulling out). In the forefront of this revolutionary movement was ace, Vladamir Illiyich Lenin, the attractor of the prejudices who had led them this far to victory by appealing to the pot with a simple slogan, land, peace and bread, giving them genuine confide for the future. Having come to power in October 1917 by center of a coup détat, Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks spent the side by side(p) few geezerhood attempt to maintain their rule against widespread habitual encounter. They had overthrown the provisional egalitarian government and were inherently hostile to any form of popular participation in politics. In the name of the revolutionary cause, they employed ruthless methods to suppress real or perceived political enemies. However for every(prenominal) of Lenins good and patriotic qualities, when in power, he displayed a side which the tribe had non, seen in which Lenin was a more(prenominal) than of totalistic dictator than a fair leader of a country that had undergone a proletarian revolution. The small, elite group of Bolshevik revolutionaries which formed the core of the newly established Communist company dictatorship under Lenin ruled by decree, enforced with fright. Lenin was creditworthy for enforcing terror upon his own great deal and controlling almost all(prenominal) aspect of their lives which is proved by numerous power much(prenominal) as the virtual starvation of the red army which he decreed foregoing to demobilization after the accomplished war, or the Cheka requisitioning squads which reigned terror throughout the country side.
Moreover Lenin heritor, Stalin was no unalike as he perpetrated just as much, or more, terror than Lenin by way of the gigantic show trials and purges of the 30s and the persecution of the minorities and intelligentsia. However it has to be said that the terror Stalin unleashed, though exponent nominate resulted in a greater loss of life, provided was not unequaled or the depression magazine it was ever tried Lenin was the depression to set up the closeness camps, (gulags), which Stalin by and by expanded. Lenin was in any case the first to destroy all democratic institutions in the country, replacing them with his totalitarian dictatorship of the communist party. He was also the first to rag the minorities and the intelligentsia and and so the question, were Stalins reprehensible methods a successor to Lenins atrociousness or was the terror he perpetrated unique at the fourth dimension?         Lenin, the great leader of the Bolsheviks, was a very pragmatic man, endlessly sticking to the practical realities in life. He only cared somewhat results and not the way by which these results were obtained, thus for Lenin, the results justified the means of getting there. As can be seen from prove unveil in recent years from declassified documents in the KGB archives, Lenin was thusly a leader who advocated mea genuines that were just as inhumane as Stalin to control the plurality, however maybe not on the blown-up scale that Stalin initiated his purges in the 30s. Lenin was a man who wanted to germinate workers if they didnt come for work during Christmas. He explained once to the food commision of the Petrograd Soviet on 27th january, 1918, [as] long as we do not apply terror to speculators-shooting on the spot-well achieve nothing¦we have to deal with thieves just as decisively-shooting on the spot. In item, during the civil war, Lenin was ecstatic that Trotsky succeeded in turning a world war into a civil war. He of course did not think of the occurrence that it cost the country thirteen million lives and group two Russians abroad. Lenin was also a man who chose to use lies as an effective medium of controlling the mess and keeping the people happy and doing whatever was necessary to maintain his ?grip. He distinctly showed this when he ensured the people in 1920, that the destruction penalty would be abolished. However after the Kronstadt anti-Bolshevik rebellion in 1921, Lenin made sure that anyone found inside a fortress or a ship would be executed. The statistics are staggering in regards to the death directences issued by a special commission on twentieth march, 1921 after the rebellion as ¦167 marines from the battleship Petropavlovsk¦ were reproved to death and the, ¦next day another thirty two were barb, and on 24 march a further twenty s tied(p). In fact under Lenin, no means were spared to maintain control over rebellious ?elements as at one point the commanding bump impinge onicer of the 7th army attacked the battleships, Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol, ¦with use of asphyxiating gas and envenom shells¦6459 were imprisoned or exiled¦ However these few men were later shot in any case by Stalin.
        what is more after the civil war, one would have thought that Lenin might have rewarded his victorious Red army. However, in 1921, just prior(prenominal) to the demobilisation of half a million troops, Lenin was faced with a dilemma in that, if the troops were all send jeopardize home at once, the strain would be too great on the railway network, whereas if the demobilisation was to be taken at a more gradual pace, the troops would have to ho utilise, garment and fed, all of which would require a lot of expenditure and resources which people in the in cities needed. Thinking very coldly and practically, Lenin wrote to Zinoviev on 5th April 1921, and responsibilityd that, in reference to the red army, they should crave the army by giving them nothing at all which meant neither bread, clothes or boots. Lenin was really blackmailing his own army, verbalise them in effect to leave now on infantry or wait for almost a year on very little food and not boots or clothing.
        Lenin was also the first to make political assassinations a common rotating shaft, prior to correct Stalin, for individuals who were a threat to the call strike down and to Lenin and even people who just didnt comply with what Lenin thought/said. In fact, in aboriginal 1920, hearing the news that Admiral Kolchak had been caught by the Red army, he sent a telegram chief in Irkutsk, (where Kolchak was creation kept), and told him, in effect, to condemn Kolchak to be shot and make it calculate like the sentence was carried out due to the threat of ? clean-living plots in Irkutsk. The sentence was quickly executed within a few hours.
        Additionally when Lenin hear that the white general exponent von Ungern-Sternberg was captured, he proposed, we should aim for a solid accusation, and if theres plenty of evidence¦we should pipe organize a humanity trial, carry it out at maximum speed and shoot him. Lenin began the trend of holding public trial of criminals, (i.e. individuals who were a threat to the state and Lenin), and finding them blameful on all sorts of trumped up charges ranging from performance to espionage. His methods were just as brutal as Stalins, resorting always to physically getting justify of an opponent. mickle whos only crime it was to criticise and not agree with Lenin suffered as well, as Nikholai Rozhkov did, (an economist and publicist), when he criticized War socialism and called for a move to more freer trade. Lenin grew suspicious of him and thus coherent for him to be exiled to Siberia in 1922. Ironically, Lenin did push through some convertible free market reforms later in 1921, when NEP was introduced.
        Lenin was the first, between him and Stalin, to make out an atmosphere of paranoia in the masses, making them live in soul fear of the dreaded unfathomable police, the Cheka. In fact the situation got so bad that every person would be facial expression over their fellow mans shoulders to see how much they worked and how much they consumed and playacting as the states ?civilian secret police. Those who did not do as the state told them to do, the threat of serious punishment was imminent, (i.e. the individuals may be sent to the gulag/labour camps, exiled or shot). The people that were most at assay were the intelligentsia, (i.e. the intellectuals), due to the fact that they were the only people in the state who were really capable of thinking for themselves and providing the only solid opposition Lenin, (and later Stalin) would encounter. The creation of slave job camps or ?gulags was one closure that Lenin began and Stalin continued to use on a big scale. Large numbers of people would be thrown into the gulag on a very regular basis which resulted in overcrowding of the gulags. In one situation, ¦403 Cossack men and women¦arrived in Oryol for internment in the concentration camp. The cheka chief, Dzherzinsky reported that the camp couldnt accept them as they were already crowded. Lenins solution: kill them. This resulted in almost a third of the Cossack universe of discourse creation exterminated on Lenins roam. Such brutality was shown, but on a larger scale by Stalin, lede us to the assumption that Stalin was just carrying on Lenins policies on a wider scale and was not an aberration.
        During the War communism era of Lenins reign, Lenin gave the Cheka the part to create requisitioning squads in ordinance to requisition grain in order to feed the people in the cities, from peasants who supposedly were billboard the grain and were speculating, waiting to get ?fantastic prices for their harvest from the black market. These requisitioning squads went off to the country side using force and even sidesplitting peasants in order to confiscate their grain as even Lenin admitted in regard to the requisitioning squads, We did not hesitate to shoot thousands of people and we shall not hesitate¦ This was really the presentation and ?popularisation of a tool Stalin would use just as heavily in his reign, and that is the secret police, (in Lenins clipping it was the Cheka and in Stalins it was the NKVD). In Lenins time, the Politburo began by giving the Cheka ascendancy to conduct ?extra-judicial executions, or in other words, execution without trial.
        Stalin touted himself to be Lenins best pupil, and so he was right for he learnt the poisonous ways of his teacher with great success as he applied them on an even larger scale than even Lenin. He had learnt from Lenin the art of mass terror, (which Stalin would later apply in his purges in the 30s), and political chicanery and cunning which enabled Lenin to kill off his rivals, (such as the Social Revolutionarys), or heinous acts like the murder of the entire Romanov family, and still keep his reputation intact. In fact Stalin established the sentence of hard labor in 1943. He certainly was intent on the destruction of his rivals and people he considered threats as he amended the judicial system, removing the defence and pursuit from trials, limiting the time of the trials to 10 days and stating that the death penalty, if rewarded, should be carried out immediately.
The secret police was a vital organ in the running of the soviet state under Stalin, and thus the NKVD, (the successor to the Cheka), powers were immense.
At any one point in time the NKVDs special boards was ¦handling hundreds of thousands of men and women condemned without any considerate of trial. To relieve this load on the special boards, the rights of the special boards were passed down the NKVD troikas, (who were now empowered to do more than just sentence citizens to correctional or labor camps for a maximum of 5 years), in all the individual regions and republics as to spread the load. People were existence sentenced up to 25 years of hard labor and imprisonment. Over the years, it seemed that the number of people being sent to the Gulags was change magnitude and thus a shortage of space in gulags was experience. On 5th march 1950 Stalin approved a capacity add-on in a labor camp in capital of the Russian Federation from ¦180,000 to 250,000. In fact under Stalin there were more than, ¦ five-spot million camp inmates and exiles at any one time, resulting in space allocated to a prisoner being very small, almost, ¦1.8 lame meters¦about the size of a grave. Only the bare essentials were used for the camps, (i.e. barbed wire and tarpaulin tents).
        The collectivisation that took place during the 5 years plans resulted in major losses in life, amounting up to 9.5 million lives as peasants who refused to give up their land to the bodied farms or grain were either shot, tortured or exiled to Siberia, (more than a 1/3 had been shot or tortured or were exiled to Siberia).
        The purges that took place throughout 30s during Stalin reign created a monumental loss of life, definitely greater than the amount of Jews Hitler exterminated during his Final consequence towards the end of World War two. All in all, in excess of 6 million people were killed during the purges, more than a million of those were shot. The only reason that can be seen for these purges are really the fact that Stalin wants to secure his power and destroy his rivals and capability threats. However as it occurred on many occasions, leaders of the ?deviant republics, (i.e. Georgian, Belorussian, Kazakh, Bashkir, etc.), were arrested and shot because they believed in keeping their separate national cultures and identities. Stalin killed them because they didnt agree with his insurance policy of ?fusion of the nations and like so, if people did not agree with Stalins policy, Stalin sent them to labor camps or had them shot, just as Lenin had earlier coherent the exile of undischarged intelligentsia, (e.g. Rhykov), and other threats.
        The military wasnt a prominent target for purges, however ironically, just before world war two when he needed his army to be strong, in 22nd May 1937, purges reached their zenith when Stalin order the arrest of the Marhsal of the Soviet trades union Mikhail Tukhachevsky and other senior military men. Under intense interrogation, Tukhachevsky admitted to many trumped up charges, (such as spying), which led to him and his comrades being shot on 11th June, 1937. To make matters worse, a week afterwards, ¦twenty one corps commanders, thirty seven divisional commanders, twenty-nine group commanders and dozen of regimental commanders and army commissars were arrested. Statistics reveal that from 1937-1939, almost 45,000 officers would be arrested and 1/3 of them were shot. A military report in October and November of 1941, 6,678 men were arrested, 357 were sentenced by military tribunals and 15 were shot on the spot.
One would have though that during the war, at least, the purges would have stopped. However, the purges continued, as the need for scapegoats for the tremendous losses Russia was apparent. General Dmitri pavlov, one of the many generals to be ?axed, was arrested, having to admit to charges of allying with Germany and opening the front to them, after being beaten up and forcefully persuaded to agree with the charges. Along with 4 other generals, they were shot. The same fate befell Marshall of the Soviet union G. Kulik.
        Blocking division, (units which were place behind the front lines in order to stop troops from retreating or escaping), which were used during the civil war during Lenins time, were used by Stalin during world war two as well. The sheer figures of the army men who put their lives at happen for their nation being sent to special camps or being shot or arrested is shocking. A full 16 divisions were sentence to death which makes Stalin brutality apparent.
        If one were to compare Lenin and Stalin now and take aim the question were Stalins brutal methods a successor to Lenins brutality or was the terror he perpetrated unique at the time? past the answer would be that Lenin and Stalin were equally as brutal as each other which is evident from the brutalities they perpetrated such as Lenins requisitioning squads, his introduction and empowerment of the cheka, (secret police), and Stalins purges in the 30s and collectivisation. However there is a make out difference between both these leaders and thats the span of time they were leaders of Russia. Stalin ruled over Russia for almost 25 years while Lenin only ruled for 6 years which logically resulted in Stalin being statistically being more brutal as he had more time to kill more people. This still however doesnt affect the conclusion that Stalins brutal methods were successor to Lenins brutality as both were just as brutal as each other, its only because Stalin had the advantage of more time and better technology that he ended up cleansing more people.
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