He rejected the rule of law as an instrument of class domination, not a protection against the state.9 He dismissed the self-organization of society to hold the state in check.10 The upshot was a brutal intensification of tsarism’s many debilitating features: emasculation of parliament, metastasizing of parasitic state functionaries, persecution and shakedowns of private citizens and entrepreneurs—in short, unaccountable executive power, which was vastly enhanced in its grim arbitrariness by a radiant ideology of social justice and progress. But then, Lenin fell fatally ill.
