V. I. Lenin--Frenzied and Ruthless

Lest We Forget

The Ukraine suffered two terrible famines in the first half of the twentieth century.  Both of them were the product of incompetent tyranny inflicted upon the Ukraine by the Soviet Communist regime.  The first occurred in 1922-3 and was "managed" by Vladimir Lenin.  The second occurred in 1932-3 and was a deliberate tool used to break down the Ukrainian people.  The second famine was "managed" by Stalin.

Lenin overtly and deliberately used the early famine as an opportunity to strike down Ukrainian Christianity.  He argued (and directed) that the famine provided a unique opportunity to seize church property and pass it on to Party members.  The Church was framed as being responsible in large measure for the famine, thereby justifying the extortion.

Lenin wrote to his underling, Molotov who had control of the Ukraine:

Now and only now, when people are being eaten in famine-stricken areas, and hundreds, if not thousands, of corpses lie in the roads, we can (and therefore must) pursue the removal of church property with the most frenzied and ruthless energy and not hesitate to put down the least opposition.  Now and only now, the vast majority of peasants will either be on our side, or at lest will not be in a position to support to any decisive degrees this handful of [reactionary] clergy and reactionary urban petty bourgeoisie, who are willing and able to attempt to oppose this Soviet decree with a policy of force. 

No pastoral concern for the starving.  No attempt to relieve the famine.  No marshalling of as many resources as possible to ease the suffering.  Only the adamant conviction that the suffering provided an opportunity to oppress those who may offer some resistance to the omnipotent power of the Soviet State.

Here lies in full display the "end game" of leftist ideology.   Here lies an actual historical example of the ideology of Sauron the Great.  Tolkien's literary creation of Middle Earth's most terrible scourge has its actual, historical manifestation in tyrants like Lenin and Stalin.  Sauron is not an unhistorical figure; when Tolkien was creating him, he was wittingly or unwittingly drawing upon actual recent history.