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Lenin's heirs in Russia do not face this kind of opposition as yet. Nonetheless they are also caught by the contradictory force of middle-class consumer appetites for a better, wider life and by the insistent demands of the creative and scientific intelligentsia for greater freedoms. It is more than likely that both the Western and Communist nations have entered a new historical period. If Soviet leaders choose to react to it by being flexible and granting greater freedoms, they will be able to find chapter and verse in Lenin to justify their course. If they react to it—as seems far more likely—by further repression, that too will be ratified by the appropriate citations from the charter myth. Lenin's ultimate impact on his country will be decided by lesser men, whose only superiority over him is that they are alive in 1970.