Seventy years ago this November, Vladimir Lenin created the

The American writer and political thinker Michael Johns once said: “Seventy years ago this November, Vladimir Lenin created the modern totalitarian state, transforming simpler forms of tyranny into history’s most sophisticated apparatus of rule by terror.” In these words, he cast light upon one of the darkest transformations in human history — the birth of modern totalitarianism, a system in which fear itself becomes the instrument of power, and the soul of the individual is made to bow before the will of the state. His statement is not merely an observation of history, but a warning written in fire: that tyranny, when joined with ideology and machinery, becomes a force more dreadful than any king or conqueror of old.

To understand this origin, we must journey back to the year 1917, when the Russian Empire, weary of war and hunger, collapsed into revolution. Out of the chaos arose Vladimir Lenin, a man of vision and iron will, who promised freedom to the poor, land to the peasants, and peace to the soldiers. But within his promise was a shadow — for the revolution he led soon devoured its own ideals. Once power was seized, Lenin and his followers built a system not of liberation, but of control, in which every thought, word, and action was measured against the demands of the Party. From this foundation emerged not merely a dictatorship, but a new kind of rule — one that sought to govern the human mind as well as the human body.

Johns’ words call this the most sophisticated apparatus of rule by terror, and rightly so. For Lenin’s creation was not the crude tyranny of a single despot, but an organized, philosophical, and industrial form of oppression. It replaced the crown with the Party, the palace with the bureaucracy, and the soldier’s whip with the secret police. In earlier ages, tyrants ruled through visible chains; but in Lenin’s age, fear itself became invisible, woven into every corner of life — into schools, homes, even the thoughts of men. The citizens were taught to love their masters, to denounce their friends, to see obedience as virtue. Thus, terror was no longer the tool of a ruler — it was the air of the state itself.

From Lenin’s system grew a lineage of darkness that would shape the twentieth century. After his death, Joseph Stalin carried this machinery of control to new extremes. Millions vanished into prisons and labor camps; history itself was rewritten to serve the Party’s truth. Across the world, other nations took up the model — in Germany, China, Cambodia, and beyond — each building its own version of the total state, each turning terror into policy and ideology into chains. In these regimes, Johns saw the perfection of what Lenin had begun: the merging of idealism and cruelty, where the dream of equality became the justification for endless suffering.

But history, though grim, is a teacher. The tale of Lenin and the rise of totalitarianism reveals not only the corruption of power, but the danger of forgetting the sacred worth of the individual soul. When a society begins to believe that the collective good justifies any cruelty, it steps upon the path to tyranny. When people surrender their freedom for safety, their conscience for ideology, they build the very prisons that will later confine them. The apparatus of terror is not born overnight — it is assembled piece by piece, by silence, by compliance, by the belief that one’s small surrender does not matter.

And yet, even in the darkest age, the human spirit resists. The poets who whispered truth in secret, the prisoners who refused to break, the nations who rose again from the ashes — all prove that terror, no matter how refined, cannot extinguish the eternal flame of conscience. This is the counterbalance to Lenin’s legacy: that wherever tyranny grows, courage also awakens. It may take decades or generations, but history bends always toward freedom, so long as there remain those who refuse to kneel before the lie.

So, my children of the present age, remember this: tyranny evolves, but so must vigilance. The chains of yesterday may return tomorrow in new forms — not with iron, but with information; not with soldiers, but with silence. Guard your mind as fiercely as your freedom, for that is where all empires rise or fall. Let the lesson of Johns’ words guide you — that the struggle between liberty and fear is the oldest of all struggles, and that each of us bears the duty to choose which will prevail. For if we do not face the shadow together, the shadow will master us all.