Lecture: "Lenin as a Person and Creator of a New Man"

“Lenin was a well-mannered and highly educated person. Polite in communication. At the same time, he easily issued orders to shoot and condemned to death by starvation many people. We underestimate what Lenin did. ‘Bad’ Stalin and ‘good’ Lenin is an outdated scheme. It was Lenin who created the system. And the new person.

The farther we go, the more seriously we reflect on the Soviet person brought up by Lenin… If this is a person who only lived under Soviet power, then it turns out that earlier there was a ‘tsarist person,’ and now there exists some ‘capitalist person.’ But there was no ‘tsarist person’ and there is no ‘capitalist person.’ Yet there is definitely a Soviet person.

Lenin created a system, for the first time in history, that carried out a purposeful influence on an individual. Features of worldview, views on life, habits, traditions were developed and, over many decades, became established. And in a sense, they exist to this day…”

In a new cycle of lectures, Leonid Mlechin tells about our leaders and their closest associates—from Lenin to Putin—through popular biographies of all the heads of our country over the last century.