This program uses Lenin’s own words to tell the story of the Bolchevik rise to power: the overthrow of the Tsar and of the Kerensky government, the efforts at world Communist revolutions and the readiness to compromise in order to save the revolution in the Soviet Union, the ascendancy of the struggle against socialism over the struggle against capitalism. Thus the program explains the political background of the establishment of the totalitarian Soviet state and of its economic, social, and cultural policies—the precise institutions and policies that would in our time cause the destruction of what Lenin created by the force of his single-minded personality, his political acuity, his powerful oratory...and the weaknesses of the divided democratic opposition. (60 minutes, b&w/color)