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In 1923, after a stroke effectively removed him from power, he seems to have grown horrified by much of what he had wrought. From his sick room he railed against the strangulating Soviet bureaucracy and denounced the "Russian chauvinism" that he saw crushing the rights of national minorities. In his testament, which has never been published in Russia, he wrote that Stalin "concentrated boundless power in his hands, and I am not certain he can always use this power with sufficient caution." In a final postscript to his will, he vainly pleaded that Stalin be removed as general secretary of the party.
Inexorably, the question arises of Lenin's responsibility for the horrors of the Stalin era. Probably the essential difference between the two leaders was that Lenin considered coercion as a temporary weapon in Socialism's struggle against its enemies, while Stalin applied it as a method of everyday rule. Yet the fact remains that Lenin created the instrument of power that allowed Stalin to do as he did, and he formulated the principle that ultimately made all of his successor's crimes possible: "Our morality is completely subordinated to the class struggle." Here is the 20th century extension of Ivan Karamazov's doctrine that "if there is no God, everything is permitted." Indeed, Stalin was to Lenin what Smerdyakov was to Ivan, the murderer who made his half brother's deadly aphorism come true.
As all the factions of the world Communist movement join the Russians in celebrating Lenin's birthday, the Lenin who emerges in centennial rhetoric varies sharply in Peking, Rome, Belgrade and Moscow. In China, they cite the Lenin who denounced Czarist Russian expansionism in the Far East, who stressed the threat to revolutionary purity in the unbridled development of bureaucracy, and who believed in the inevitability of world revolution. In Rome, it is the Lenin who stood for every nation's right to self-determination, who observed that when you scratch a Russian Communist, you will find a Russian chauvinist, and who said that Western Communists would do a better job of building Communism than the Russians. In his own country, he is the Lenin who said, "Communism equals Soviet power plus electrification," who thought Russia's main duty to international Communism was to transform itself into a mighty industrial society, and who was profoundly intolerant of any dissent from party policy.