...there has grown up in the United States a curious and inaccurate distinction between Lenin and Stalin. Lenin has been presented as a kind-hearted idealist–almost a democrat in our sense–whereas Stalin has been pictured as a ruthless Asiatic dictator…. But Lenin’s actions and speeches against the opposition of the kulaks, the clergy, the bourgeois, landlords, and generals were just as harsh as anything we know of Stalin. Both men were agreed in showing no mercy to their enemies, but Lenin’s enemies, for the most part, were outsiders, the foes of the Revolution. Against them he showed no mercy. By the time Stalin came to power non-Party opposition in the USSR had been thoroughly defeated. …That, in short, was the difference–a difference of time and a personality. In Lenin’s day the prime struggle was against the anti-Bolshevik elements in Russia and outside Russia, the counterrevolution of Denikin, Kolchak, and Yudenich, supported by the invasion, or intervention, of French, British, Czechs, Japanese, and Americans. In addition, Lenin’s personal authority was so great that he had no real or prolonged difficulty with opponents inside the Communist Party. Stalin’s situation was otherwise. Since, by 1924, when Lenin died, internal and external non-communist enemies had been defeated, Stalin’s conflict was within the Party.

Duranty, Walter. Stalin & Co. New York: W. Sloane Associates, 1949, p. 20