"As long as they wanted to stay in power, the Communists had to rule despotically and violently; they could never afford to relax their authority. The principle held true of every Communist regime that followed. Lenin realized this and felt no qualms about imposing a ruthless despotism. He defined “dictatorship” of any kind, including that of the “proletariat,” as “power that is limited by nothing, by no laws, that is restrained by absolutely no rules, that rests directly on coercion.” He was quite prepared to resort to unlimited terror to destroy his opponents and cow the rest of the population. He did so in part because he was indifferent to human lives, but in part because the study of history had persuaded him that all past social revolutions had failed by stopping halfway and allowing their class enemies to survive and regroup. Violence—total and merciless (one of his favorite adjectives)—had to clear the ground for the new order. But he also believed that such violence would have to be of short duration: he once cited Machiavelli to the effect “that if it is necessary to resort to certain brutalities for the sake of realizing a certain political goal, they must be carried out in the most energetic fashion and in the briefest possible time because the masses will not tolerate prolonged application of brutality.” Contrary to his expectations, these brutalities became a permanent feature of his regime. As Thomas Hobbes put it, if there is no agreement on trumps, clubs are trump."