For English speakers: roots of communist feelings
Sam Tanenhaus wrote in his book "Whittaker Chambers: A Biography":
"Chambers’s career at Columbia ended quietly. The long-running protest petered out. By December he had stopped going to class altogether. He had found a new intellectual passion, bolshevism. At one of the many secondhand bookshops on Fourth Avenue, in lower Manhattan, he had come upon a fifty-cent edition of a speech Vladimir Lenin made to his Soviet colleagues in April 1918, five months after their coup. Titled The Soviets at Work, the speech was one of the first inside reports on the most successful political uprising since the French Revolution.
Lenin’s remarks set forth no facet of socialist theory Chambers could not have found elsewhere. What made The Soviets at Work exciting was that it went far beyond mere theory. Lenin was not a dreamer. He was a world leader at the zenith of his power. He had toppled a government, installed another in its place, and promised still-greater things to come, an international revolution. “This was not theory or statistics,” Chambers later wrote of Lenin’s pamphlet. “This was the thing itself.”
The ex-radical Max Eastman, writing in 1955, remembered being “enraptured” by his first reading of The Soviets at Work: “The monumental practicality, the resolute factualness, of Lenin’s mind, combined as almost never before with a glowing regard for poor and oppressed people, anxiety over their freedom, devotion to the idea of their entrance into power, swept me off my feet. I still think it one of the noblest-and now saddest-of political documents.”
What Chambers does not say (nor does Max Eastman) is that The Soviets at Work is written in a prose of almost unrelieved brutality, a combination of insults (“Let the poodles of bourgeois society scream and bark”) and threats (“everyone who violates the labor discipline in any enterprise and in any business … should be discovered, tried and punished without mercy”). Lenin’s analogies are drawn almost exclusively from the battlefield. He is thrilled by the spectacle of violence. His favorite adjective is “merciless.” Nor does Lenin conceal the authoritarian character of the government he is assembling. Democracy in the new world can be achieved, he explains, only “by subjecting the will of thousands to the will of one.” Lenin admits “no contradiction in principle between the Soviet (Socialist) democracy and the use of dictatorial power [by] individuals.”
Humane revolutionists, such as Prince Kropotkin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Emma Goldman, had warned against the incipient tyranny of the emerging Bolshevist state. But Lenin’s authoritarianism is precisely what attracts Chambers".
Istn't that why there wasn't a decent person among kommunist leaders ever? That's all what matters: authoritarianism