Customer Reviews

Lenin: A Biography

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This new biography benefits from Service's access to the Central Party archives and thus new information about Lenin. In particular, it seems that Service was able to ferret out previously restricted correspondence relating to Lenin's early life and interpersonal relationships. From these, the author has been able to begin to "humanize" a man who has been reduced nearly to the level of caricature by both his apologists and his critics. Service's major contribution is to illuminate the influence of Lenin's early life on his subsequent character development. At times, however, this psycho-biography becomes breathlessly speculative, as when the author hypothesizes that the execution of the Romanovs represented Lenin's revenge for the hanging of his older brother as a regicide, and the subsequent ostracism suffered by the Ulyanov family. Perhaps, but there were a number of other, more logical (if cynical) grounds for this action. Claiming that Lenin "enjoyed-really enjoyed-letting himself loose against people in general from the ancien regime" seems to be stretching the bounds of evidence a bit far. Also, the running commentary regarding the psychological origins and consequences of the twists and turns of Lenin's relationships with his wife, sisters, and Inessa Armand is worthy of the old-time Kremlin watchers. While interesting, the speculations are often extrapolated from the flimsiest of evidence. In these days of celebrity biography, this may well sell books, but it does not strike me as being particularly well-written history.

These quibbles aside, my major concern about this work is that the author fails to clearly address larger historical questions in writing this popular style of biography. Lenin is portrayed (accurately) as an emigre' factionalist who consistently staked out the most extreme positions, and yet is is never made clear, at least to this reader, how he came to win the series of factional disputes that ultimately lead to his assuming the position of leader of the October Revolution. How did a movement that was directed toward the overthrow of autocracy come to accept the supposition that a regime of dictatorship and terror were necessary to achive this goal? While a work describing the details of Marxist-Leninist ideology would be unbearably turgid, this book would have benefited from at least a coherent distillation of that philosophy, and a clear exposition of the differences between the various factions. The book would also have been stronger if there had been a firmer editorial hand. In many places, previous insights or speculations are repeated nearly verbatim, and temporal linearity is not always well-preserved. In addition, major figures, such as Stalin, Martov and Kerenski, suddenly appear (Stalin) or disappear (Martov, Kerenski)from the narrative, without either introduction or farewell.

In general then, this is an interesting work that sheds more light on the human aspect of that mausoleum-bound icon that the world recognizes as Lenin. But readers seeking a clearer understanding of the process of the Russian Revolution would be better served elsewhere.

Service is a British historian of Soviet Russian history who has written this quite good narrative of the life of Lenin. While not definitive, it is nevertheless the best synthesis of the political and personal life of Lenin

One of the better reasons to read Service is that while he has no qualms about outlining the viciousness and brutality of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, he is also not a hard line ideologue. He is a historian and he takes history as he finds it. There is none of the strident cold-war dogmatism of Conquest or the russophobia of Pipes that often make their writings come uncomfortably close to political diatribes rather than analytical histories.

Service walks the fine line between personal and political biography fairly well. He also has the added bonus of being a good narrative historian which makes this an immensily readable book.

Lenin's early life is covered in good detail. What Service does well is to show how, after brother Alexander's excecution, the Ulyanovs were marginalized by the very class of society they had aspired to, and how this effected both Lenin and his sisters. Service goes on to show the interaction between Lenin and his female relatives and how this carried on throughout his life.

Being a total biography- personal and political- the political side gets a bit of a short shrift at times. Lenin as shown as the "bookish fanatic" and hypocondriact who is all revolution all the time with little time to spare in life for other diversions.

His single-mindedness is such that he dictates executions (never naming individuals just groups) to achieve his ends. What Service show best is how his temperament in childhood carried on to his political life- never brooking disagreement- throwing tantrums and denounciations- and rarely compromising.

And yet Lenin is at heart, a middle class bourgeois in his social manners. His personal relationships with women are not especially notorious save for a life-long relationship with Inessa Armand who may or may not have been his mistress.

Personal without being gossipy and showing Lenin's idiocincracies without being psychoanalytical, Service handles his biography well. All in all this is a highly readable, not perfect, but enjoyable biography of the life of one of the century's most notorious figures.

Robert Service paints the most in-depth portrait of the life of Lenin that I have ever read. He takes readers no only through the trials and tribulations of Lenin's everyday life, but also into an analyzed look into his beliefs and interpretations of Marxism that were the foundations of his life. Service keeps the reader enthralled in his book with an intelligent and imaginative writing style that did not let me put his book down. Being a student in Russian studies, I was thoroughly impressed by Service's account of one of the most influential character's in history. Readers should know that this book not only covers Lenin's life, but also the history of the Russian Revolution in 1917, and the theory of Marxism and Communism. Those who are not familiar with these subjects may find the book difficult to read since it assumes a lot of knowledge from the reader. However, those who know Russia will find the book extremely insightful.

Like Lenin's life, this book goes through slow, quiet times as well as periods of frenetic activity. Especially interesting are sections on Lenin's childhood and family, the October Revolution itself, and Lenin's final political struggle with Stalin as he battled his failing health. The chapters dealing with his nearly 20 years in exile are a bit of a slog, but do necessary justice to this phase of his life and illustrate that Lenin spent most of his adult life in petty but ruthless fights with other Bolsheviks.

Robert Service does not paint a pretty picture, but no honest biographer could with the today's open archives. Lenin was ruthless in pursuit of his socialist vision, destroying political rivals, horrifying many erstwhile allies with his ferocity, and never hesitant to use violence, and deceit. A bookish intellectual, Lenin advocated terror but let others do his dirty work. Lenin demonstrated remarkable tactical flexibility (several amazing flip flops are documented) even when his primary goals and assumptions never changed. As a young man, Lenin refused to engage in famine relief work with his family noting that peasant suffering and starvation will push Russia through necessary stages of economic development towards the inevitable communist utopia. With this, and other similar episodes, Service argues that Lenin was motivated more by hatred and revenge towards the tsarist regime than any sympathy towards the poor.

The book is quite successful as a biography in that it gives you a feel for Lenin's personality, family, likes and dislikes. He has a cosmopolitan love for European culture and a general disdain for all things Russian. Lenin is fastidious, cannot stand noise while working, and is obsessive about keeping his pencils sharp. His outward politeness disguised an inner ruthlessness. He is something of a spoiled "wonder child", adored and idolized by his mother, sisters, and wife. The biography does justice to the complexity of Lenin's character, and Service occasionally allows himself a little affection for his subject without ever condoning or whitewashing the horrors he perpetrated.

Note this is primarily a biography of Lenin, not a history of the Russian Revolution. Lenin's contributions and reactions to key events are given more attention than narration of the events themselves. Depending on your interests, you may want to consult a general history of the Russian Revolution instead of, or in addition to, this book. Sheila Fitzpatrick's "The Russian Revolution" is a concise and solid introduction.

This may be the best all-purpose Lenin biography out there. The treatment of Lenin is balanced, and Service presents alternative viewpoints fairly even when he dismisses them in favor of his own opinions. I preferred it to Volkogonov's biography, which is really directed at a Russian audience.

Service has apparently examined, absorbed, and digested virtually all of the resources available before setting to work on the writing of this book. I rate it so highly for two reasons: it seems to be the definitive biography of one of the most influential political leaders of the 20th century, and, it anchors its reader in an historical context within which Lenin's influence can be seen in a proper perspective. For me, Service answers two separate but related questions: Why Lenin rather than someone else? Also, what was his subsequent impact on what became the U.S.S.R.? While answering these two questions, Service also helps his reader to understand at least some of the forces which still have influence, not only on the former member states of the U.S.S.R. but also on the contemporary world with which they continue to interact.

Mr. Service's biography of Lenin is outstanding. The text is amazingly detailed (it describes his behavior patterns as a child, his arguments with fellow Bolsheviks behind closed doors, and his final year in stunning detail). Service also gives insight into Lenin's personal motivation that drove him to the October Revolution in 1917, as well as the future of the USSR as Lenin had envisaged (let's just say Stalinism was not foreseen). Additionally, the book is well written and easy to read; a must for anyone interested in Lenin, the Soviet Union, or the Bolshevik Revolution.

As a graduate student in sociology who studied the works of Karl Marx, I was always struck by the cruel irony that the only countries advancing his communist theories were exactly those places in which he least expected such revolutionary change; czarist Russia and feudal China. Marx had predicted that the western democracies, including England, France, and Germany, were the most likely locale for such proletariat uprisings. The fact that the two backward and predominantly rural countries of China and Russia were the only ones to succumb to the siren call of a worker's paradise owes much to the unique and extraordinary efforts of exceptional individuals in each of the two countries, each of whom through their own extraordinary insight, political savvy and exquisite timing successfully executed bloody overthrows of ancient regimes.

This wonderfully written and masterfully told biography of the first of these two men on horseback, Russian Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin) does great tribute to both the incredible genius and singularity of the man himself, while at the same time paints a wonderfully descriptive and quite comprehensive picture of the maelstrom of social, economic, and political circumstances surrounding the rise of Lenin's Bolshevik party to power. Lenin's importance in the subsequent developments both within the former Soviet Union and indeed throughout the modern world can hardly be exaggerated. And while we now self-confidently brag that the specter of communism is dead, the fact is that much of what Marx and later Lenin wrote regarding the continuing evolution of society continues to unfold.

In what is commonly referred to as Marx's "Emiseration" theory, the gradual but inexorable drift of the two major political forces, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, toward increasing polarization and the eventual erosion of the large middle class separating them would lead to increasing concentration of wealth and widespread impoverishment as the owners of industry and corporations became more and more powerful and less and less accountable. Many observing the contemporary creation of a permanent "underclass" in modern democratic societies in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany as well as the slide of many in the middle class toward economic uncertainty and insecurity remember Marx's prognostications nervously. Perhaps, they say, we have celebrated the final victory over communism too soon.

In this fashion, Service's wonderful book about Lenin and his ideas provides the reader with a terrific understanding of his biographical roots, his philosophical concerns, and his social, economic, and political agenda. Whether one gives any credence to Marxian thought or to Lenin's revisions to this theory of scientific socialism, one must give credit to the quality of mind that conceived of such a mind-boggling overthrow of the powers that be, with little to work with but a rag-tag bunch of political malcontents and committed party members to work with. The story of how they actually succeeded at overthrowing one of the most callous and brutal regimes in modern history with so little going for them but the indifference of the populace and the blind ignorance of the existing monarchy is truly one for the history books. While that story is brilliantly told in John Reed's spellbinding "Ten Days That Shook The World", this biography shows how Lenin himself came to be the mastermind guiding the Bolsheviks toward victory and then through a bloody civil war to come to rule the country with an iron fist. This is a marvelously entertaining and edifying book, and is one I heartily recommend. Enjoy!

I approached this book with some enthusiasm as an introduction to a major 20th century figure about whom I knew very little. Now having completed the book I can say that I have a grasp of Lenin as a man, as a politician and as a historical figure but it took me a while to get there. Service paints a well rounded picture and clearly reveals Lenin's ruthlessness and intolerance and illuminates many other aspects of the man's character. Ultimately Lenin comes across as a monomaniacal egotist driven to impose his view of Marxism on others and uniterested in anything but politics.

The book though is marred by two failings. The first, which has been pointed out be other reviewers before me, is that Service occasionally overreaches on his conclusions regarding Lenin's psychological motivations. Certainly speculation is a part of historical biography but Service often gives the impression that he knows Lenin's thoughts. Secondly, and this is purely subjective, the book just didn't "grab" me. I have read several major biographical works of historical figures and the best ones draw me in as if I were reading a novel. This one did not, though I cannot explain exactly what it is about the book that fails in this regard. Perhaps Lenin is such an unsympathetic character and such a total politician that ultimately I could not find anything to relate to.

This biography is incredibly thorough, and is entirely fixated on Lenin. In fact, that would be my one complaint. The book was so thoroughly focused on Lenin (and I can appreciate how silly this must sound as the book was a biography of Lenin), that it missed properly characterizing what was going on in Russia. In certain sections the book did discuss what was taking place in Russia, but usually only within the very limited scope of how Lenin was responding to the problem. I felt the narrative on Lenin would have benefited from an expanded discussion of what was going on socially within Russia as Lenin came to power. This weakness of the book is perhaps exacerbated by the fact (something I did not know) that Lenin lived for 18 years outside of Russia as an adult man. As his ideology was developing he was fully outside of Russian culture.

Lenin was an average ideologue, but he was an above-average politician. His works on political philosophy, as Service says, were barely above the standard of a college student. They were not insightful and were not worthy of prominent distinction. Lenin was a consummate politician who did believe in the essential goals of socialism.

I believe he would have been disgusted at what Stalin did with the gulag system; however, Lenin was a pragmatist. He did not allow Stalin to rise to power on accident. Did he see Stalin as a balance against Trotski who Lenin may have feared would be more willing to compromise? The life of Lenin illustrates the core problem of socialism: it has never been embraced by people who did not prove to be brutally totalitarian and completely unwilling to allow individuality.

This book would be great for a research paper about Lenin! I enjoyed reading it immensly. It is well researched and well written. (see below for more on that) Whether you love him or hate him, if you are looking to find out anything about the man behind the name, then this is for you.

The only reason I do not give this 5 stars is because the language can be a bit hard to read for some. I am an avid reader, and am well educated, but even I had to get out the dictionary a few times.