"He probably never wore a top hat or a frock coat; he had no pomp or manner."

The full article is worth more than a glance.

Naturally, we interpret a 91-year-old essay by reading into it all we know about the events unfolding since. It is a useful exercise to try to suspend those judgments and look fresh at items like Bertrand Russell's depiction of Lenin as a high priest of the "Marxian gospel," or that "compromise was another of his strange virtues."

The USSR came into being an unprecedented experiment in "economic revolution," against the express wishes (and active intervention) of world capitalism. From the vantage point of 2015, we know how it worked out there, but it's hard not to feel a tremor of recognition now, in the age of the Kochs and their 1% plutocracy, when reading this:

"Political democracy without economic liberation is a farce."

January 21, 1924: Vladimir Lenin Dies (The Nation)

... Lenin is dead. His country has had to make many painful compromises since his ragged crew took power, but it is running the railroads and marketing the wealth of Russia today. The Communist Government preaching and, to the best of its ability, practicing the gospel of economic revolution, still fills the breast of [Secretary of State Charles Evans] Hughes with alarm. Whatever may come of it in Russia that doctrine—that political democracy without economic liberation is a farce—has swept the Western world, and the Western world will never again be quite the same. The French Revolution was crushed, but it molded the history of nineteenth-century Europe. The Russian Revolution is compromising; Lenin is dead and Trotzky is ill, but they will long continue to make history.