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How Far Was Lenin An Authoritarian?

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Lenin’s rule was authoritarian because he exploited on people’s fear to protect his power and implemented his ideologies forcefully even if it means to take away the people’s liberty.

Firstly, Lenin meted out harsh punishments on his opposition as a hard approach to gain compliance from Russians. He established a secret police force, Cheka to search for “foreign agents, the former Tsar spies, and all those who objected the peaceful construction of communism”, proving that everything that the people did were under the eyes of Lenin and all those suspected of wanting to counter-revolt and restore the a Tsarist Russia would be tortured and executed. The Cheka suspected and imprisoned activists without trials but based on the Cheka’s judgment. This meant that whoever wanted to oppose against his plans and opposes to the idea of a communist state would be punished. It is known that when sailors from the Kronstadt Naval Base started a revolt and accused that …show more content…

As mentioned in the article, Lenin was elected as the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars “by the Russian Congress”, which was then Bolshevik dominated. This means that Russians were not allowed to elect their own leader but the authority was concentrated on the Bolsheviks to decide on Russia’s leader. It is known that when the Bolsheviks did not garner the most votes in the November 1917 elections, they walked out in protest, claiming that the other parties were skewed towards the “bourgeois” and was unrepresentative of the peasants. Then, Lenin dissolved the constituent assembly and banned opposition political parties. This shows that Lenin had immense power such that he could remove his political oppositions easily and could remove a system that has been used for a year so that he could protect his power. At the same time, this authority was only exclusive to Lenin and no one else could make decisions as they

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