Leadership Quote by Michael Johns

“Modern totalitarian state” is doing a lot of political work here: it’s not just a historical claim, it’s a branding exercise. Michael Johns reaches for the language of technological progress - “modern,” “sophisticated apparatus” - to frame Leninism as an innovation in cruelty, a kind of bleak upgrade from old-school despotism. The word choice converts ideology into machinery, terror into system, and governance into engineering. That’s the intent: to make the Soviet experiment feel less like a messy revolution and more like a blueprint that later regimes could import.

The subtext is Cold War moral clarity, delivered as commemoration. “Seventy years ago this November” sounds like a calendar note, but it’s really a rhetorical trigger: an anniversary harnessed to produce vigilance in the present. In the late-20th-century American political register Johns writes from, Lenin becomes the origin point for a whole genealogy of enemies - not merely Stalin’s USSR, but any state that claims a utopian mandate while building secret police infrastructure. “Simpler forms of tyranny” quietly flatters the West’s self-image too: we used to know what tyranny looked like; now it’s sleek, bureaucratic, and therefore more dangerous.

The line also sidesteps complications. It collapses differences between Lenin’s revolutionary government, the civil war emergency state, and the later Stalinist terror into a single invention story. That compression isn’t an accident; it’s how polemic achieves speed. By insisting on Lenin as creator, Johns assigns culpability to the founding moment, not just the dictator who followed, turning historical debate into a warning label.