That is IMO one of the most questionable parts of his proposals. Dictatorships have the hardest time keeping moral integrity, as so depressingly well-demonstrated pretty much everywhere.
At the last lights of World War I, Germany smuggled Lenin and a few other Marxist leaders into Russia, hoping to further the internal revolts there enough to relieve the military pressure over their eastern war front.
It worked, after a fashion, but Lenin very soon convinced himself that there could be no socialist change without a lot of violence and murder. The rest is regrettable history. And if in the one hand it led to Stalin and his decisive role in WW II, one has to wonder if some other path could not have helped avoid WW II in the first place. Stalin was not something we had to hope for.
The History of Communism is "mixed" to the point where "right" and "wrong" aren't sufficient to do justice to describing it. It comes down to the question of expiediency. Whatever advances the cause of communism is good or "progressive". whatever hinders or forces back communism is bad or "reactionary". [its "progressive" because communism is supposed to be a predicted future stage in human social evolution which everyone is "progressing" towards.]
On the one hand "liquidating the exploiting class" (*cough* mass murder *cough*) is acceptable and reasonable thing to do as you are eliminating the enemies of socialism. On the other hand, communists had a "heroic" or rather sucicidal ability to pick up unpopular causes to help their own. e.g. Civil rights of African Americans in the South during Jim Crow, resisting Apartied in South Africa, organising the unemployed as a tactic during the Great Depression, and of course being part of the resistence in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe. This included resistence and rebellion in the concerntration camps themselves whilst the nazis were still in control such as at
Buchenwald.
They were also great supporters of Science, and were able to get a head start in the space race (first satillite-Sputnik, first dog in space, first man in space, first woman in space, etc.) They made contributions to science: e.g. the concept of "primordial soup" as an explanation for the origin of life was from Alexander Oparin (1924), Ivan Pavov's work on classical conditioning, etc.). The downside was "Science" was considered a realm of ideology, subordinate to it and as an instrument for building communism, so genetics was banned for being "fascist" due to its association with Eugenics and Soviet agriculture struggled with the disaster of "lysenkoism" effects on biology and agricultural research. Physics had problems as the "Big Bang" and "quantum mechanics" both had potentially "theological" interpretions which had to be avoided. Again, many Scientists-like everyone else- were purged in the 1930's.
Whilst obviously science and politics where not closely connected, Alexander Bogdanov was a member of the bolshevik party during lenin's time and an ameteur scientist. he created a philosophy known as tectology now regarded as a fore-runner of "systems theory". he died after experimenting with blood transfusions on himself and contracting malaria and tuberoclousis from an infected sample (the student who he treated with blood transfusions recovered though).
Another mention is Soviet economists such as Krondatiev who came up with "long-wave" bussiness cycles of about 45-60 years [and was purged by stalin as this contradicted the offical view that the great depression was the final crisis of capitalism or "third period"], and the Kuznets business cycle of 15-25 years (who also won a nobel prize in economic science in 1971).
Depending on how you look at it, the USSR was one of the first countries to legalise homosexuality in 1917 (only to recriminalise it in 1934 under Stalin- the offical justification was that homosexuality was "fascist" because of it's prevelance in the SA in Nazi Germany, as well as a moral panic over pedophillia). During the 1920's there was a period of "sexual revolution" as marxist ideology insisted on the "abolition of the family". this ranged from open discussions of masturbation, freudian psychoanaylisis, "free unions" (legal recognition of rights of non-married parterns), and the right of divorce iniated by one partner. Homosexuality was not widely accepted in the more socially conservative period of Communism under Stalin and after, and was considered "un-mascluine" and therefore not compatable with the idealised version of the political militant. East Germany (sort of an exception) legalised homosexualityin 1968 though it was very grudingly. there is actually a youtube video "do communists have better sex?" which makes the case that east germans were more sexually liberated than their western counter-parts because of communist efforts towards equal rights for women, the states role in regulating sex through education and their anti-religious policy (the west german government is supposed to have been heavily influenced by the church).
On the subject of women's rights, in Afghanistan during the communist period, the "womens council" promited literacy and education for girls and gave women the right to chose their husbands. most of the women of Kabul fought the Mujahadieen because of their opposition to womens rights.
So yeah. there is more to it than a one-dimensional campign of "death and destruction", but it is an inescapable feature. Ultimately, their dedication to their cause was simulanteously their greatest asset and liability. its doesn't fit simple generalisations.
