Enough about the bad, what was GOOD abot the Soviet Union?

[RZM]

96. I don't know about that

Lenin laid the foundations for what came after. He presided over the implementation of a one-party authoritarian state with a police apparatus empowered to use terror against the population. Stalin built from this foundation.

Also, Lenin never intended the peasant seizure of the land in 1917-18 to be a permanent situation. He envisioned state control of the land eventually, but in his lifetime the state's power did not extend enough into the countryside to do this. Even in his lifetime the Leninist state conducted a war of sorts against the peasants, notably the requisitioning of grain, which caused much starvation in the early 1920s. The utter chaos and discontent this caused was part of the reason for NEP, which was essentially capitalism by another name. There were major peasant revolts in the early days and they were suppressed ruthlessly, including with the use of poison gas.

Would he have been quite as bad as Stalin? Maybe not, but the precedents had all been set in his lifetime. Lenin bears a lot of responsibility for what came after.