As awful as he was, Lenin was like all humans…complicated. A couple things I will say in his defense: compared to Stalin, he was an amateur dictator and although many morons put him incorrectly in the company of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, the Kims, etc., he didn’t die a rich guy, lying around in comfort. Aside, from having thousands-to-millions killed (it’s hard to tell exactly), he spent most of his leadership constantly thinking, not much doing. To give you an idea, when revolutions or revolts were happening before Russia, Vlad was more about going to the library to read up and adjust his interpretation of Marx and other intellectuals. He was not a man of action when push came to shove, preferring to let others do the dying while he often ran away. John Cleese’s leader of the People’s Front of Judea would be the most accurate portrayal of him.
If you really want to know more truthful facts about Lenin quickly, I recommend the podcasts Real Dictators and if Robert Evans covered him in Behind the Bastards. The sad truth regarding Lenin was that in the beginning, he was originally a bookish, middle-class kid who had no interest in politics. The czar executing his older brother, a real communist, was the catalyst transforming him into the rabid revolutionary the world would know.