CHUEV: Who was more severe, Lenin or Stalin?

MOLOTOV: Lenin, of course. He was severe. In some cases he was harsher than Stalin. Read his messages to Dzerzhinsky. He often resorted to extreme measures when necessary. He ordered the suppression of the Tambov uprising, that everything be burned to the ground. I was present at the discussion. He would not have tolerated any opposition, even had it appeared. I recall how he reproached Stalin for his softness and liberalism. “What kind of a dictatorship do we have? We have a milk-and-honey power, and not a dictatorship!”

CHUEV: Where is it written that he reproached Stalin?

MOLOTOV: It was in a small circle among us. Here is a telegram from Lenin to a provincial food commissar in his native Simbirsk in 1919: “The starving workers of Petrograd and Moscow are complaining about your inefficient management…. I demand from you maximum energy, a no-holds-barred attitude to the job, and thorough assistance to the starving workers. If you fail, I will be forced to arrest the entire staff of your institutions and to bring them to trial…. You must immediately load and send off two trains of 30 cars each. Send a telegram when this is complete. If it is confirmed that, by four clock, you did not send the grain and made the peasants wait until morning, you will be shot. Sovnarkom Chairman, Lenin.”

I remember another case. Lenin had received a letter from a poor peasant of Rostov province saying that things were bad with them, that no one paid any attention to them, the poor peasants, that there was no help for them and that, on the contrary, they were oppressed.

Lenin proposed the formation of a group of “Sverdlovers [adults from Sverdlov University]….” Lenin directed this group to go to the place in question and, if the report was confirmed, to shoot guilty parties right then and there and to rectify the situation.

What could be more concrete? Shoot on the spot and that’s that! Such things happened. It was outside the law, but we had to do it…. Lenin was a strong character. If necessary, he seized people by the scruff of their necks.

CHUEV: They say that Lenin had nothing to do with the execution of the tsar’s family in 1918, that it was a decision of the local authorities following Kolchak’s attack…. But some people say it was revenge for Lenin’s brother.

MOLOTOV: They make Lenin out to be a crank. They are small-fry philistines who think this.

Don’t be naive.

I think that, without Lenin, no one would have dared to make such a decision. Lenin was implacable when the Revolution, Soviet power, and communism were at stake. Indeed, had we implemented democratic solutions to all problems, this would surely have damaged the state and the party. Issues would have dragged on for too long and nothing good would have come of this sort of formal democracy. Lenin often resolved critical problems by himself, on his own authority.

Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 107-109