The correct answer is "limiting the population’s ability to oppose him".
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as "Lenin", was a political theorist and Russian revolutionary who served as head of government of Soviet Russia, which would be later called the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1924. He fused his ideas with those of Marxism. An ideological mix that he would call "Marxism-Leninism".
Just as Hitler in his last years in power, he exercised "democratic centralism", which promotes that political decisions are reached by voting processes which are held exclusively among the party's members, excluding the rest of the population.
