Once upon a time, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, was the skinny Elvis of Soviet communism. His carefully constructed image symbolized for many the purity of the communist ideal before it was corrupted by the fat Elvis of Stalinism and the dead Elvis of late Soviet bureaucracy. The truth about Lenin, however, is something else. Most of the horrors we associate with Soviet communism—the KGB, the gulag, the show trials, the use of famine to control large populations, the crushing bureaucracy—weren't Stalin's creation, but Lenin's. Stalin was more ruthless, it's true, but excusing Lenin on those terms is...