ABSTRACT
Few great men have so quickly won so secure and uncontested a place in history as Lenin. Even those who most hated Lenin’s work have praised his comparative moderation and statesmanship as a foil to the blacker villainy, first of his colleagues, then of his successors. Death removed him at a moment when the clouds of contemporary calumny had begun to disperse and before he had time to become involved in the embittered controversies which generally attend the consolidation of a revolution. For his own generation he stood out head and shoulders from his contemporaries by the length and devotion of his service to the cause, by the clarity and forcefulness of his ideas, and by his practical leadership in the critical moments of 1917. For the next generation he became the embodiment of the victorious revolution, his writings its sacred text.
