Vladimir Lenin promised peace, land, bread, and power to workers and peasants. After the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd in nineteen seventeen, his government instead moved toward one-party rule, censorship, political policing, hostage-taking, executions, and detention camps. This episode follows Lenin from revolutionary organizer to head of the first Soviet government, separating the February Revolution that overthrew the monarchy from the October Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power. It examines the dissolution of the elected Constituent Assembly, the creation of the Cheka, the Red Terror, War Communism, the Tambov and Kronstadt rebellions, and Lenin’s documented orders calling for exemplary punishment. Lenin was never prosecuted in a criminal court, and the episode does not attribute every Civil War death or later Stalinist crime to him. Instead, it asks a narrower and more difficult question: how much of the machinery later associated with Soviet dictatorship was already deliberately constructed under Lenin’s leadership?

This podcast uses artificial intelligence in its research, writing, production, and narration. Episodes are editorially reviewed before publication.

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