Yes, but did he oppose Stalin for his ruthless inclination to state terror, or just for his plotting, scheming and paranoia, and his preference for bureaucratic power over grand ideas?

I mean, those latter ones would have all already been perfectly good reasons to be wary of Stalin, obviously. ;-) But sometimes people make too much of how communism was only "perverted" under Stalin. It was Lenin who had the freely elected parliament surrounded and many newly elected MPs arrested; it was under Lenin that the first massive prisoner camps in the icy north were built; it was Lenin who oversaw the persecution of all rival socialist movements; it was Lenin who helped formulate concepts such as the dictatorship of the proletariat and an elite party as the avant-garde of the people, which were used, in his time already, as rationales for ruthlessly clamping down on any protest and dissent and claiming the right to govern, by force, even in absence of majority popular support.

I mean, don't get me wrong: Stalin really was much worse still. Just saying that it's not like Lenin was the good guy who would have prevented all the terror if he could have. You only need to read some of the letters and orders he wrote in his first few years in power - yes, it was a civil war, but even so he seemed to push his underlings, if anything, to only greater brutality.

As an 18-year old socialist, I started my MA in Russia and Eastern Europe Studies partly because I wanted to know when it all went wrong with the Soviet Union. Admittedly that's a couple of decades ago, but the more that I read about the October "Revolution" and the years after, the more I felt that the answer was that it had simply been wrong from the start. Beginning with the revolution itself (the October one, not the February one), which had really been more of a coup d'etat.

I'm still a socialist, for lack of better definitions, but I've come to see Soviet communism as itself a perversion of socialist ideas, right from the start, beginning with Lenin and Trotsky -- a malign outgrowth of the ideology really, which over the 20th century ended up doing a grievous amount of harm to the name and prospects of socialism worldwide. And still new 18-year olds, just like I was, realizing the brutalities of capitalism, look to Lenin or Trotsky or at least Che Guevara for answers, instead of to non-totalitarian socialists; the harm continues.

/soapbox /rant