Great post, I have some disagreements but no time to go into them right now. It does remind me of an excellent Leninist student I had who wrote a paper on the Hungarian Revolution which argued that the problem with the Bela Kun government was that it was nowhere near bloodthirsty enough - no true terror. In particular he mentioned Trotsky's policy towards the peasants which he described as 'promise them everything, give them nothing, massacre all those that resist plus a random proportion of those who don't, pour encourager les autres if you will. He did have a point, the Hungarian revolutionaries did retain a certain degree of what the Bolsheviks would have disparaged as bourgeois moral scruples.