Lenin’s Bolshevism Was Perhaps the Most Irrational and Violence-Prone Doctrine of the Twentieth Century

V. I. Lenin anticipated the “withering away” of the state to be among the first consequences of successful revolution. That would entail the advent of anarchistic government, peace, “workers’ emancipation,” and “voluntary centralism.” The fact is that everything of the subsequent reality of the Soviet Union belied all that. Almost everything about post-revolutionary Russia stood in stark and emphatic contrast to the specific theoretical anticipations that had carried the Bolsheviks to the October Revolution. The differences, in fact, were more emphatic than anything to be found in the comparison of Fascist thought and Fascist practice. If the discrepancies between doctrinal formulations and the reality that emerges out of revolution were a measure of “irrationality” or the potential for violence, then Lenin’s Bolshevism was perhaps the most irrational and violence-prone doctrine of the twentieth century.

--A. James Gregor, Mussolini's Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 9.