Ruler / statesman · Contemporary
Vladimir Lenin
1870–1924 · Marxism-Leninism
Baptized Orthodox; a militant atheist who made the eradication of religion state policy.
Lenin led the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 and founded the Soviet state, adding to Marx the vanguard party, the dictatorship of the proletariat as open terror, and a theory of imperialism. His 1918 decree separated Church from state and school from Church, and under him clergy were shot, monasteries closed and “militant atheism” organized; he declared morality “entirely subordinated to the interests of the class struggle.”
Why he matters: The persecution he began produced the martyrs of the twentieth century, including the Eastern Catholic Exarch Bl. Leonid Feodorov; Divini Redemptoris (1937), the “errors of Russia” at Fatima, and the pontificate of John Paul II are all responses to the regime he built.
Where to be careful
Everything the Church condemns in Divini Redemptoris is here in its practical form: atheism as state creed, terror as method (Veritatis Splendor 80), the abolition of property and of religious liberty (Dignitatis Humanae), and the person made an instrument of the collective.
Reading
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The State and RevolutionVladimir Lenin · The theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
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Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 2: The Golden AgeLeszek Kołakowski · Lenin's place in the system, by its greatest critic.
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Divini RedemptorisPope Pius XI, 1937 · The Church's judgment on what Lenin built.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each dispute the test covers.