Wednesday in the Age of Reason-Munchausen (1988)

Lenin had never abandoned his uncompromising democracy. In 1904 he wrote: “We are prepared to support even a bourgeois democrat in the degree that he conforms to democracy; we are prepared to expose any democrat, even a Social-Revolutionary, who abandons democracy.” One reads in his pamphlet, Two Tactics, which was dated 1905: “Anyone who attempts to achieve socialism by any other route than that of political democracy, will inevitably arrive at the most absurd and reactionary deductions, both political and economic.” In the same year he defined his conception thus: “Everyone is free to say and to write what he believes without the slightest restriction…. Liberty of speech and of the press should be complete.” Even the Mensheviks could not have gone further; but the divergence over ways and means was stronger than the agreement on principles.

 

https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/souvar/works/stalin/ch03.htm