He may on occasions in the past have written in praise of elections. But he didn’t believe in ‘bourgeois democracy’ on principle and certainly not in practice for a revolutionary state. The dictatorship of the proletariat and the authority of the Soviet were ‘not only a higher form of democracy…[but] the only form of democracy’.

Victor Sebestyen, Lenin: The man, the dictator, and the master of terror, New York, 2017, p. 391