Lenin wasn’t “complicated.” He was evil. Full stop.

We don’t say that enough in the United States because most people never actually learn what he did and others with “intellectual” mentors, parents or grandparents can’t let themselves admit they had a warm heart for the man who ushered in the new age of true totalitarianism quite intentionally. Instead we get at best a cartoon: czar bad, revolution messy, Stalin later goes too far. Lenin is treated like the grim (or for true elitists, heroic) but necessary prologue. That’s backwards.

This is a man who personally ordered people hanged in public “so that the people will see, tremble, and know.” Not generals on a battlefield—peasants labeled “kulaks,” defined as the wrong class of peasant, you know? Like my family. He didn’t reluctantly authorize force in a crisis. He theorized terror as a positive good. He wanted fear as a permanent feature of the system. If deliberately terrorizing civilians as a category isn’t evil, the word doesn’t mean anything.

And what he built was not run-of-the-mill authoritarianism. A normal dictator mostly wants you to shut up and not plot against him. Lenin’s party claimed a monopoly on TRUTH. Every independent center of life, churches, unions, rival socialist parties, the press, civil associations, had to be destroyed or absorbed. Violence wasn’t a last resort; it was a standing method; it was “cleansing”. Whole groups were pre-classified as enemies to be “liquidated” if necessary. He made the jump from dictatorship to totalitarianism.

He also helped kill millions. His Red Terror and campaigns against “class enemies” produced mass executions and death in prisons and camps. His economic and food policies during the civil war helped turn catastrophe into a famine that killed millions more, and he treated it as a problem to manage, not a moral alarm bell. He saw the bodies and stayed the course. You don’t get to hand-wave that away as “history is complicated.”

And Lenin didn’t just drown his own country in blood; he opened up what one scholar called the hemocklysm—the 20th-century blood-cataclysm where states murder their own people in industrial numbers with an ideological permission slip. He built the template: the one-party, (midwit) “scientific” dictatorship with a secret police, total censorship, and entire classes of humans defined as targets. Mussolini literally started as a radical socialist who admired Lenin and then adapted the same basic party-state model to fascism. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot—different flags, same underlying architecture of terror.

So when someone says, “Lenin wasn’t evil,” I just can’t take that seriously. He personally ordered terror against civilians, built a system that crushed every independent source of truth, helped send millions to early graves, and handed later monsters a working blueprint. In American education we mostly skip that, or soften it, and then we’re surprised when people talk about him like he was just a tough reformer in a rough time.

He didn’t just live through the 20th-century slaughter. He opened the hemocklysm. If that’s not evil, nothing is.