Today is the centenary of Vladimir Lenin’s death. His Moscow funeral was marked by official communist solemnity, as if a messiah had come and departed. Trams and buses were halted and boats were tied to mooring posts. Factory whistles were sounded at the moment when his corpse, not yet embalmed for the mausoleum that stands today on Red Square, was lowered into the ice-cold earth. Those who refrained from lamenting his passing joked that people who’d had to applaud him in life were whistling when he died.

Vladimir Putin does not worship at Lenin’s shrine or memory. He holds him culpable for the 1922 constitutional settlement that gave ‘artificial’ recognition to Ukraine and laid the conditions for the current war about frontiers and the Russian zone of influence. Brought up to idolise Lenin, Putin now invariably describes him as a blundering idiot. In doing so, however, he makes no comment on how Lenin installed dictatorship, engineered false elections, suppressed free expression and conducted terror against dissenters. It makes no sense for him to bring this up about Lenin when, as everyone knows, he does the same himself.

Putin and his predecessor Boris Yeltsin must be credited for ending the decades of mawkish idolatry of the founder of the Soviet Union. The result is that most young Russians are barely aware of the degradation of mind to which their parents and grandparents were subjected at school and in the workplace. Slogans like ‘Forward to the World Communist Revolution’ have been forgotten. Instead of images of the goatee-bearded Lenin, consumer good adverts are seen everywhere – nowadays mainly Russian and Chinese goods after the wartime exodus of Apple, Ikea and McDonald’s.

Chinese leaders continue to profess respect for Lenin, even though they show greater reverence for Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. Indeed Lenin remains one of very few foreigners in Beijing’s contemporary pantheon. In ex-colonial countries elsewhere, too, he continues to be fondly remembered by some intellectuals for his calls for an end to imperialism. Their attitude overlooks the fact that Lenin, in the eyes of Georgian and Ukrainian national leaders, was himself one of the worst imperialists of the 20th century. Lenin, who depicted the Russian empire as a ‘prison of the peoples’, never conducted a plebiscite about whether they liked being communised.

In western countries, few communist parties operate any longer except on laptop chatrooms. Back in the 1970s you could rarely walk round an Italian city without spotting a graffito such as Viva Lenin! The same was true of Paris. The culture on the political left embraced a jumble of heroes, not only Lenin but Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and Hi Chi Minh. None were known for an aversion to arresting dissenters. All received the benefit of the doubt because, it was said, they bravely confronted an unfair geopolitical encirclement.

In Lenin’s case, the argument has often prevailed that he was simply unlucky to die in middle age before he could prevent Joseph Stalin’s ascent to the supreme leadership. Mikhail Gorbachev and other Soviet reformers before him took this approach, and several prominent historians in the West have swallowed the same nonsense. Lenin was no softie. If in the communist Valhalla he were to read some of things written about him, he would bark out his favourite put-down: sentimentality!

And it is pernicious sentimentality at that. Lenin didn’t have civil war thrust upon him: he predicted and wanted one. Yes, he had underestimated how vicious it could become, but he immediately became a vengeful, ruthless warrior. By seizing power on behalf of a party that never had a majority at free elections, he declared that the future lay with dictatorship and terror. He extolled the demonstrative effectiveness of public hangings. He rebuked fellow communists who believed that arbitrary arrests should cease at the end of the civil war in the early 1920s.

Lenin founded modern communism both as an ideology and as a state system. He established a state order that would later be called totalitarian. He invented the one-party state and enforced terror, a single ideology, atheism and the compulsory mobilisation of society to sustain it.

On his deathbed he did not resile from any of this. He endorsed the execution of priests (which happened) and rival socialist leaders (which, for the most part, didn’t occur till Stalin’s time). He endorsed a civil code that enabled the maintenance of terror. He deported outstanding artists, poets and philosophers, designating them as dangerous scum. His example, alas, has not been forgotten a century later. Putin is no longer a communist and loves his luxury watches, palaces and yachts. But he has inherited Leninist genes, treating anti-war emigrants as scum and using polonium to terrorize political critics.

The communist poet Vladimir Mayakovski wrote a line that every schoolchild had to learn: ‘Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live!’ Back in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed and Marxism-Leninism was abandoned, it seemed that Mayakovski’s piffle had been consigned to oblivion. But history nurture its own developmental mysteries, and we – like the Russians and Chinese – live and will continue to live with its mutations.