At his urging, private enterprise, except for such institutions as banks, was not nationalized. He charted a slow course towards socialism and avoided the opprobrium attached to one-party rule by including the Left-Socialist Revolutionary party in his government. His overriding concern was the preservation of the Revolution and Soviet power against enemies both abroad and at home. In line with these practical considerations Lenin accepted the onerous German terms for the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty. His tenacious struggle to maintain power, however, cost the young Soviet regime dearly in the 1918-1921 civil war. Together with Leon Trotsky, the genius behind the Red Army, he set the course that brought the Soviet Union victoriously through the civil war.

After the war Lenin issued the New Economic Policy, returning the Soviet Union to the market economy and pluralistic society of early Soviet rule. At the same time, however, he called for a ban on factionalism and insisted on the principle of one-party rule.
The first of three strokes incapacitated Lenin in May 1922. He recovered somewhat, but never again assumed an active role in the government or the party. After a partial recovery in late 1922, he suffered a second stroke in March 1923, which robbed him of speech and effectively ended his political career. Lenin died in the village of Gorky, just outside of Moscow, on January 21, 1924.

Evaluation

Although not an extraordinary philosopher, Lenin was a brilliant revolutionary thinker and strategist, whose clear-sighted realism guided the Bolsheviks to seize and maintain power. He did not formulate any one solution to the dilemma of how to build a workers' state in a peasant society. His interpreters and critics differ. Some see a continuity between Lenin's early ideas and those of Stalin, while others stress the pluralistic New Economic Policy that he advocated in the last years of his life. Most observers agree, however, that Lenin was the foremost revolutionary figure of 20th-century Europe.