Similarities And Differences Between Lenin And Stalin

Isaac Murrin
Mr. J. Pharion
Freshman English
20 February 2013
The Similarities and Differences between Lenin and Stalin
Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin were similar in what they claimed to be, but in actuality they were very different people. Although Stalin claimed that he followed Leninism, the philosophy that Lenin developed from Marxism, he often distorted it to follow what he wanted to do. While Lenin wanted to make a unified society without classes, with production in the hands of the people, while Stalin wanted to make Russia into a modern industrial powerhouse by using the government to control production. Lenin accomplished his goals through violence, because he thought achieving Communist revolution was worth using violence, with a ‘The ends justify the means’ mentality. Stalin also used violence to accomplish his goals, however Stalin used much more violence than was often necessary to accomplish his goals. Stalin continued even once he was successful in accomplishing those goals, as he did not stop hurting people, but if anything it gave him more power to hurt people even more. But, at the end of the day, although Lenin ruled for only a very short time, he did raise the standard of living, though there maintained a large amount of hardship. Stalin, however, transformed the USSR from a peasantry to an industrialized nation in less than a decade, he did it on the backs of his millions of victims, who died because of his harsh policies and many purges.
Lenin made a series of policies throughout the beginning of the Revolution and through his short time in public office that came to be collectively known as ‘Leninism’. There were many things that influenced Leninism, such as Karl Marx. Lenin had read Karl Marx and his...

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...ding his goals, but the results do in no way justify the horrible number of deaths and suffering that came from Stalin’s rule.
In conclusion, both Lenin and Stalin stood for nearly the same thing, but ended up being quite different in their approaches as to hot to implement the theoretical ideas into the real world. However, while neither man was particularly moral, Stalin especially was evil. But both of them caused famines and wars that caused the deaths of millions of people, not to mention the horrible life of those who survived. I do not believe that Lenin and especially not Stalin realized the goal of the Revolution as they had promised it, and I think that the people of Russia would have been better off if neither Lenin nor Stalin had come to power, and they continued to live under the Tsar.
“One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic”
-Joseph Stalin