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From Lenin and Stalin to today’s radical left, the history of communism reveals a recurring pattern of false promises, political repression, and revolutionary violence.
Marxists have long used verbal and historical misrepresentations to convince non-communists to support them and their positions. As Vladimir Lenin reportedly said, “there are no morals in politics; there is only expedience.”
An early master of disinformation was a young German, Willi Münzenberg, who led the Communist International’s (Comintern’s) propaganda effort in the West in the 1920s and early 1930s. Münzenberg called the deceptive organizations he created to advance Soviet interests “Innocents’ Clubs”—for the gullibility of their members. Such people became known as useful idiots or naïve dupes.
Exploiting such people, the Soviets for decades deceptively promoted themselves as advocates of “peace” while maintaining a huge military, building armed so-called progressive forces abroad that would fight the revolutionary uprisings they planned, and demanding that Western states unilaterally disarm.
Bolsheviks like Lenin made no effort to hide the fact that they sought to foment violent foreign revolutions and that the “democracy” they espoused was a dictatorship of a vanguard communist party—themselves. But they built Potemkin villages that regularly fooled political pilgrims who traveled to the USSR to witness its purported socialist wonders. Many Americans also bought the Soviets’ deceptive “peace” line.
These deception campaigns remain relevant today, given the surge in support for the Marxist, self-styled “Democratic Socialists of America” (DSA), many of whom claim to be progressives seeking only social justice. They, too, seek to deceive (and recruit) naïve dupes.
But confidence breeds candor, and, reflecting their growing strength, in mid-2026, the DSA overtly proposed to radically reform American government without explaining how they intended to do so. Given that they may be on the cusp of significant power within the Democratic Party, Marxists’ record of violence in power also merits consideration. No Marxist regime has ever taken power without using extralegal violence against its citizens, claims of Marxism’s “peaceful” nature notwithstanding.
Lenin wanted Russia to lose World War I, expecting it to trigger a civil war he planned to win. His first intelligence service, known as the Cheka, killed tens of thousands of people, possibly more, extrajudicially during the civil war before even Lenin recognized its excesses and reorganized it in 1922.
Lenin’s successor, Stalin, after consolidating his power, by the late 1920s built what was called “the Gulag,” a massive complex of forced labor camps that housed tens of millions of people over decades. Millions died from murder, exposure, exhaustion under horrible working conditions, and poor medical care.
In 1936–1938, reflecting paranoia and simple viciousness, Stalin launched what has been called the Great Purge or Great Terror, which killed as many as one million people, including many loyal communist party members, senior military officers, intelligence officials, and diplomats.