Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

by David Remnick

Then Yakovlev made a connection between Lenin and Stalin that was still considered radical even for non-Party intellectuals. To hear it from the main ideologist of glasnost, perestroika, and the “new thinking” in foreign policy was absolutely stunning: “Today, when we are asking ourselves the excruciating question of how it was possible for this country and Lenin’s Party to accept the dictatorship of mediocrity and put up with Stalin’s abuses and the shedding of rivers of innocent blood, it is obvious that one of the factors that nurtured the soil for authoritarian rule and despotism was the morbid faith in the possibility of forcing through social and historical development, and the idealization of revolutionary violence that traces back to the very sources of the European revolutionary tradition.”