The sheer existence of the dreams, plans, projects and experiments enumerated above, flourishing in the years of revolution, Civil War and N.E.P - before and after the death of Lenin - sets this period off in a stunning way from the years of Stalinism. The utopias were like so many experimental teams in Lenin's gigantic laboratory of revolution, using materials and expending time and exuberant energy on projects that were marginal to the Party leader's own 'research design' for building socialism by means of tutelary state power and organization - from the top down. Lenin frowned on some of the experiments, barked at the experimenters, and sometimes even deprived them of their equipment and funds. But, unlike his successor Stalin, he did not destroy this vast laboratory, did not close it all down, did not arrest and exterminate its principle investigators.
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