US Strikes on Iran (Operation Epic Fury)

[Ivan Denisovich]

Fair enough. Lenin wasn’t nearly as bad as history paints him, but he wasn’t nearly as committed to the Marxist ideal as Trotsky was - Lenin was a pragmatist, Trotsky was an idealist.

Lenin lived and breathed for revolution. It was him who convinced doubters that bolsheviks should seize the power:

History can be dramatic and full of exciting, rousing action on battlefields and barricades – and sometimes it can be made in committee meetings. There were twenty-one Bolshevik Central Committee members, but only twelve sat at the round table beneath a single lamp in Sukhanov’s living room where the decision was made to trigger the Russian Revolution. It was a minority of an already small minority.
Lenin spoke for an hour and repeated his demands that a coup should be mounted immediately. He was impatient and constantly on the verge of anger, but as Trotsky said later, ‘he was obviously restraining himself’.
Occasionally he banged his fist on the table to emphasise a point. ‘Since the beginning of September there has been a certain indifference to the idea of insurrection,’ he began. Then he outlined clearly and in detail why ‘we must seize power now and not wait for the Soviets, or any Congresses…The time is right now and the moment of decision has arrived. The masses are tired of words and resolutions. The majority are now with us. The success of the Russian and the world revolution depends on two or three days’ struggle.’
The argument ran on for seven and a half hours. Occasionally there was a short break when Flaxerman made tea or served spicy sausages, and to give the taker of the minutes, a young office clerk named Varvara Yakovleva, a break. At midnight the lights went out, as was usual in Petrograd at that time; the current was on for just a few hours a day. They continued by the light of an oil lamp and candles.
Lenin had convinced most of the doubters. Originally Trotsky had wanted to wait until after the Congress of Soviets – which he chaired – had met. But Lenin persuaded him that would be too late. ‘By that time the Congress will be up and running and it is difficult for a large, organised body of people to take swift, decisive action. We must act on the 25th, the day the Congress meets, so that we may say to it “Here is the power! What are you going to do with it?” ’
Only Lenin’s oldest comrades, Kamenev and Zinoviev, held out. They were against a coup on principle and for practical reasons. ‘There is no demand by the people for an uprising,’ said Kamenev. There was everything to be gained by ‘waiting a few weeks for the Constituent Assembly where we have an excellent chance of winning a big legal
majority. Comrade Lenin’s plan means to stake on one card the fate not only of our Party, but the fate of the Russian and world revolution.’ Zinoviev agreed and said simply that if they failed, ‘we will all be shot’.
Almost at dawn a vote was taken. It went Lenin’s way ten to two, with only Zinoviev and Kamenev voting against. Lenin reached across the table and picked up a pencil. There was no paper so – famously – he scrawled on a child’s exercise book the biggest decision the Bolsheviks took: ‘Recognising that an armed uprising is inevitable and the time perfectly ripe, the Central Committee proposes to all the organisations of the Party to act accordingly and to discuss and decide from this point of view all the practical questions [Victor Sebestyen, Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror, p.339-340].

 
Those aren't actions of someone who isn't committed to Marxist ideal. As a side note I do recommend above quoted work as it is perhaps best biography of Lenin I had read.

In the end all bolshevik leaders were pragmatists as no idealist would accept Brest Litovsk or NEP. They were idealists only in the sense that they wanted to create world in which:

[...]Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.

It is difficult to predict the extent of self‑government which the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction and psycho‑physical self‑education will become two aspects of one and the same process. All the arts — literature, drama, painting, music and architecture - will lend this process beautiful form. More correctly, the shell in which the cultural construction and self‑education of communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise”.*

Lastly Trotsky certainly had his share of pragmatist decisions:

Lenin and his closest comrades believed that one of the characteristic features of modern "bourgeois" states, a standing army, was undesirable and inappropriate for the Workers' and Peasants' Republic over which they presided. Thus, even as negotiations with the Central Powers were underway at Brest Litovsk, the old Imperial Russian Army was being dismantled. At the same time, however, it became apparent that the rag-tag Red Guard units and elements of the imperial army who had gone over the side of the Bolsheviks were quite inadequate to the task of defending the new government against external foes. Thus, on January 15, 1918 Sovnarkom decreed the formation of the Worker-Peasant Red Army, to consist of volunteers from among "the most class-conscious and organized elements of the toiling masses."

The architect of the Red Army's formation was Trotsky who was appointed People's Commissar for the Army and Navy in March 1918 and remained in that position until 1925. Assisted by General M.D. Bonch-Bruevich, a former Imperial Guard officer who served as head of the new Soviet Supreme Military Council, Trotsky assiduously recruited and defended the use of former tsarist officers, euphemistically known as "military specialists." [...]

Still, he recognized Stalin for the thug that he was and recommended he be removed, so points for that.

If you refer to Lenin testament then Lenin simply wanted to remove Stalin from seat of General Secretary and mustachioed Georgian was far from only one who got criticized. Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Trotsky were criticized too.


*https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/200210/9651/trotsky-and-culture-communism