zlacker

I think both things can be true simultaneously. Like in the Russian Revolution, there can be a mass of people motivated by a sincere, if naive, optimism in a new way to organize society, but they can get used by people like Lenin and Stalin who were primarily motivated by their thirst for power.

>>jhbadg+(OP)
No idea why you're getting downvoted. That's exactly how it played out. Though the "mass of people" rapidly lost their naivete.

>>jhbadg+(OP)
Although that may be a lack of historical knowledge on my part, Lenin does not strike me as suffering from a thirst of power but as sincere ideologue (in rare combination with a good dose of pragmatism, see his critique and later repression of "leftists" and his adoption of the NEP)

>>cassep+4i2
But that "pragmatism" as you put it is exactly my point. A true ideologue would have realized the revolutionaries in Kronstadt had created a system more in line with the ideals of the revolution than what he had created and woouldn't have set the army out to destroy them. nor would he have introduced the NEP (basically a limited re-introduction of capitalism to save the faltering Soviet economy). In the end, the important thing to Lenin was Lenin -- not any ideology.