Who was Lenin was talking about when he used the term “useful idiots”?
There’s a variety of answers, but the most common one seems to be “liberal socialists”, an awful lot of whom went to the Soviet Union to fawn all over Lenin (and later Joseph Stalin at the height of his power (and terror)). “I have been over into the future and it works” was the gushy nonsense given by one such useful idiot upon his return to Depression America, after visiting the Soviet Union’s Potemkin Villages they had assembled to convince the visiting useful idiots that Lenin and Stalin were really terribly nice fellows …cute, cuddly teddy bears, to a man. Those Potemkin Villages have a rather odd parallel in Feminism, where the Feminists trot out this or that “fact” about how wonderful Feminism has been all the while the Gulag Archipelago grows more and more crowded. Lenin and Stalin both talked a good line on “equality” just like the Feminists, but the reality was an elitism more thorough and more complete and more tyrannous and despotic than anything Russia had ever endured.
