Decrees imposed the "universal labor obligation," which required anyone not currently employed to report to the government to receive their work assignment. And like the Russian governments before it, Lenin's imposed conscription to raise armies - a measure particularly resented by the peasants who thought that Lenin's regime had ended their wartime suffering.

Lenin's successor, Joseph Stalin, took Communist tyranny to new heights. But Stalin was not the corrupter of the noble work of a great lover of human freedom. Communism meant tyranny from its inception, and Lenin and Trotsky were the vanguard of that tyranny. Whenever moral scruples stayed the hand of his followers, Lenin urged them to cast "bourgeois morality" aside. As the great democratic socialist historian Carl Landauer concluded, "This totalitarian form of government took a long time to develop and Lenin did not live to see its completion, but he was its author." (European Socialism: A History of Ideas and Movements)

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