Lenin was an intriguing fellow, if perhaps having completely departed from Marx - Marx's central theme is the way in which history is shaped by great forces, and Lenin's goal was to take a small group of revolutionary leaders and forcibly change the government to make it more liberal and democratic.
Throughout history, we have seen that this simply does not work. Whenever revolutions have fallen under the control of small groups, those small groups have ended up becoming authoritarian. The Reign of Terror in France, the Napoleons, and, ultimately, the 1905 Russian Revolution, which ended up giving power to the Tsar again, ending the revolution.
Lenin's belief that small groups of people can be trusted to defy history and start things off before they are ready is inaccurate even had Marx been right.
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