Vladimir Lenin was the founder of the first government based on Communism, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He was a dictator and a mass murderer who killed three million people. And his government went on to murder forty to sixty million more before its collapse in 1991. Here are some of his quotes:
“Atheism is a natural and inseparable part of Marxism, of the theory and practice of scientific socialism. The workers’ party must… carry on propaganda of atheism.”
“Religion is one of the forms of spiritual oppression.”
“We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing truth. … We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.”
“We say that our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the proletariat’s class struggle. Our morality stems from the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat.”
“The goal of socialism is Communism.”
“The overthrow of the bourgeoisie can be achieved only by the proletariat becoming the ruling class, capable of crushing the inevitable and desperate resistance of the bourgeoisie, and of organising all the working and exploited people for the new economic system.”
“Dictatorship is rule based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws. The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws.”
“Soviet power is a new type of state in which there is no bureaucracy, no police, no standing army.”
“The state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression by one class by another.”
“As long as the state exists, there is no freedom. Where there is freedom, there will be no state.”
“A democracy is a state which recognizes the subjection of the minority to the majority, that is, an organization for the systematic use of violence by one class against the other, by one part of the population against another.”
“People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be, until they have learned to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises.”
“Hang the kulaks (peasant farmers), execute the hostages. Do it in such a way that people for hundreds of miles away will see and tremble.”