EVALUATION  
Although not an extraordinary philosopher, Lenin was a brilliant revolutionary thinker and strategist, whose clear-sighted realism guided the Bolsheviks to seize and maintain power. He did not formulate any one solution to the dilemma of how to build a workers' state in a peasant society. His interpreters and critics differ. Some see a continuity between Lenin's early ideas and those of Stalin, while others stress the pluralistic New Economic Policy that he advocated in the last years of his life. Most observers agree, however, that Lenin was the foremost revolutionary figure of 20th-century Europe.