This book explores the development of Lenin's thinking on violence throughout his career, and provides an important assessment of the significance of ideological factors for understanding Soviet state violence as directed by the Bolshevik leadership during its first years in power. "Ryan's important book offers an excellent account of Leninism as a revolutionary doctrince that sanctifies political violence and condemns entire social categories to state-engineered extinction. Masquerading as an ideology of the oppressed, it was a secular teleology of exclusion rooted in the visceral contempt for the rule of law, liberty, property and the universality of human rights." - Vladimir Tismaneanu, University of Maryland "Lenin's Terror off ers a chronological narrative of Lenin's relationship with violence from the 1890s to the 1920s, and this makes it a real contribution to the historiography-both in terms of enabling further evaluations of the infl uence of Leninism on Stalinism as well as in its own right. For scholars of political violence, to wit, it is decidedly benefi cial to fi nd contained in one volume a comprehensive overview of Lenin's take on terror, revolution, war, and dictatorship, especially because for Lenin, depending on the circumstances, violence understood as terrorism, for example, could be properly rethought-and legitimized-as partisan or civil war." - Claudia Verhoeven, Cornell University, Slavic Review