Lenin's Legacy?

I found Leigh's post on Lenin's legacy to be particularly intriguing, but I had a few small quibbles. While I agree that Russia has maintained the element of terror and government-sponsored assassinations throughout the years (consistent with the continued existence of an authoritarian regime), I don't know if enough of a direct connection can be made between intellectuals today and kulaks of the past. Journalists are being gunned down because of their efforts to criticize and reform the Russian state; the kulaks were simply more prosperous peasant farmers, among many peasant farmers who opposed Stalin's policy of collectivization. It became a catch-all term for agricultural enemies of the state, and you need not have committed a terribly treasonable act to be sent to the gulag as one. Though you could argue that the assassinations are an attempt to cow the group of intellectuals as a whole, they seem to me to be more directed at individuals and to be vague warning to all. The kulaks were "liquidated", evicted and deprived of their possessions until they failed to exist as a class or contribute to the agricultural economy. Millions were targeted as part of a larger goal of reconstructing the Communist state; the killing of journalists merely maintains the status quo in Russia today. So while I agree that violence is a traditional tactic of the Russian government, I shall be nit-picky and say that the correlation of kulaks and intellectuals may not be entirely an apt one.