Tense with expectation, the founder of Russian communism returned from exile to St. Petersburg on April 16, 1917, in a sealed railroad car supplied by his country's age-old enemy, Germany. The homeland, to which he returned, was ravaged by war and starvation. Near collapse and anarchy, Russia was primed for Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's impassioned message: "The people need peace, the people need bread, the people need land. We must fight for the social revolution!"
For the next seven years, Lenin gave his countrymen that revolution, one of the most pivotal events of the 20th century. He also gave them chaos, longer bread lines, and a legacy of terror that, while reminiscent of earlier despots in his nation's history, was unique in its vast scale. A master strategist, he combined practicality and idealism to achieve his end, a new kind of utopianism, which sacrificed community to coercion and forbade dissent. Lenin's single-party dictatorship would marry the intellect to the gun like......
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