Customer Reviews

Lenin: A New Biography

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

For some reason westerners continue to have something of a blind spot for V.I. Lenin. The conception that Stalin perverted Lenin's idealist vision, that Lenin's communism might have been a more viable utopian ideal had he survived, remains strong. This is one of several books that should help to shatter that illusion once and for all as it comprehensively documents the extent to which Stalinism was firmly rooted in Lenin's murderous totalitarian revolution.

Volkogonov's book is far from perfect in this English translation. The opening chapters are somewhat non-linear and unfocused (it only really picks up once it starts discussing Germany's role in Lenin's return to Russia in 1917, about a third of the way in), for all his supposed access to secret archive documentation the author is occasionally prone to speculation (though he usually admits as much, for example in discussing Lenin and Sverdlov's roles in the murder of the Tsar's family), and the English translator freely admits that he's cut out large sections of deeply Russian philosophical discussions.

But for all that, the book remains a powerful testament to Lenin's flaws. Few details in the book were that new to me. I knew the Germans had helped the Bolsheviks for their own ends in 1917; I knew about Lenin's almost mindless obsession with violence as the sole true path to revolution; I knew about Lenin's cynical willingness to discard almost any principles in the pursuit of power for the Bolsheviks. But seeing all of this documented - and far more of it is documented than some reviewers are suggesting - by the Bolsheviks' own hands makes it all the more powerful.

Nor do I think that the book is that biased. Certainly Lenin still comes off better than Stalin; Lenin doesn't so much come across as personally evil as he does blindly obsessed with the idea that his great misguided experiment justified the implementation of any means, however cruel, deadly or violent. But unlike Stalin, he wasn't interested in personal power for its own sake or personal self-aggrandisement. It's a small distinction, but an important one - though I would argue that a genuine belief in your visionary ideal makes it no more forgiveable when that ideal requires killing millions.

This isn't a book that's going to appeal to all tastes; some will find the first third (which, as others have noted, isn't really a traditional Western biography) hard going, and it probably isn't the only biography of Lenin that those interested in the subject should read. But readers who stick with it will nonetheless be richly rewarded.

For years after Nikita Khruschev's famous "secret speech" in 1956 denouncing Stalin and some of his crimes, apologists for the USSR and its Communist system continued to claim that if only Lenin had lived longer, Soviet-style Communism would have evolved in a much more benign direction than it ultimately did under the bloodthirsty Stalin. This book, written by a formerly high-ranking member of the Soviet military establishment who himself believed this, tears this myth to shreds. By getting unprecendented access to secret Soviet archives, Volkogonov clearly shows that the criminal nature of the regime was instituted by Lenin and his associates from the first day they came to power. There never was an "idealistic", clean phase to the Bolshevik Revolution. The corruption and tyranny began at once. Although the author points out that Bolsehvism appeals to universal ideas of social justice, when Lenin called to turn the "imperialist war" (i.e. the First World War) into a "civil war", the writing was on the wall for anyone who wanted to see it that it was the Bolshevik's intention to tear Russian society apart, and not just provide the people "peace, land and bread" as Lenin also claimed in order to get the naive to support his agenda for revolution.
Lenin never had any intention to improve the lives of the Russian people because at a time of mass famine during the "War Communism" repression at the time of the Civil War after the October Revolution, the Bolshevik regime was sending millions of dollars out of the country in order to stir up revolutions in other countries while letting their own people starve. Lenin was only interested in political power leading to what he hoped would be "world revolution" and class struggle. All morality was subordinated to the goal of attaining and keeping power, and any deceit and violence was justifiable for these purposes.
I think it can be stated that Communism was the greatest fraud in history because millions of otherwise well-meaning people were conned by Lenin and his successors into supporting this gigantic criminal enterprise.
It should be pointed out that this book is not really a comprehensive biography of Lenin, but is rather the story of "Leninism" and the creation and consequences of the Leninist system that ran the USSR for over 70 years. Important events in Lenin's life before the October Revolution are skimmed over. For example Lenin's seminal work "What Is To Be Done" is simply mentioned in passing. However, in spite of this, the book is very worth reading, especially by someone who is not well-informed about Soviet history. Volkogonov, who died in 1995, warned that the perversion of morality that Lenin and Leninism brought to Russia did immense damage to the country and its people and this will make the rooting of truly democratic institutions in that country very difficult, in spite of the collapse of the Leninism system. This has proven prophetic as we now see Putin slowly restoring an authoritarian system in that country which has suffered so much in the 20th century.

Simply put, the others below who write of Volkogonov as some mere right wing pedant are far from any truth in the matter. Volkogonov was brought up and schooled in the marxian tradition and lost it honestly, through discovery.

Having been intersted historically in Lenin for over fifteen years, I find any conclusion other than Volkogonov's conclusions about Lenin to be simple exercises in propoganda. Let there be no doubt- the two others who wrote about Volkogonov are either amateurs on the subject and bluntly do not know what they are speaking about, or they are hacks in some form or another and are seeking to conceal truth by means of the process that Orwell made so plain in his "Politics and the English Language".

The only people who would disagree with as reasonable a conclusion as Volkogonov's fascinating bio of Lenin are either fools or liers.

This book is excellent. Add it to your collection.

This volume appears to be an abridged version of a much longer work in Russian and though it is labelled as a biography is much less linear in format and chronology than one normally expects from this designation. This is however no drawback and around the main developments in Lenin's life the writer frequently jumps forward in time, and occasionally backwards, to explore the consequences, or antecedents, of specific decisions, policies and actions of Lenin and his circle. A degree of familiarity with the revolutionary period is assumed - not unreasonably in the case of a Russian readership - and a Western reader coming fresh to the subject might more profitably start elsewhere - "A People's Tragedy" by Orlando Figges being a safe bet. The author writes from the position of a disillusioned disciple and, as a Kremlin insider in both the Late-Soviet and Post-Soviet periods, he gives valuable insights into the difficulties of breaking away from orthodoxies of thought built up over decades - even a character as courageous as Gorbachev is seen from minutes of a 1983 Central Committee meeting to be unable to cope with the challenge of a mildly dissident stage-play. The book draws heavily on Soviet archives that were secret to the early 1990s and, though one must have some uncertainty as to how selectively the author has utilised them, the overall argument that there is a considerably greater degree of continuity between Leninist and Stalinist attitudes policies than has hitherto been recognised is developed very powerfully. The writer anchors Lenin's personality, and the development of his thought, in his family background, in the Russia of the late nineteenth century, and in the artificial world of political exile in the years preceding the revolution. The latter period comes across as Conrad's "Under Western Eyes" made flesh and one becomes uncomfortably aware that the endless theorising, sectarian infighting and pamphleteering of those years, conducted in conditions of comfort bordering on luxury, and divorced from any practical appreciation of actual conditions in Russia, made a later resort to extremist measures, not only easy, but perhaps inevitable. Brutality of thought and callousness in decision making comes easiest to those who have seen neither privation not bloodshed at first hand - and indeed one is struck by the extent to which Lenin managed to insulate himself personally from such realities to the very end of his life. The mechanics of establishing power and winning the Civil War are well described, with insights into personalities little known in the West providing many fascinating digressions on the way. Despite the horror, waste and tragedy involved in the Bolshevik victory however one is left with the disturbing reflection: "What was the Alternative?" - not just in the moral but in the pragmatic sense. The period between the February and October Revolutions had thrown up neither vision nor leadership of any lasting power and the various White factions that emerged from 1918 onwards were equally bankrupt in both competence and ideology. Against this background the triumph of Leninism - bleak, clear-sighted and single-minded - seems to have been all but inevitable.

This book would be best for someone who already knowledgeable about the history of the Russian revolution. The book is organized topically, rather than chronologically, so it moved around in time. It is peopled with a host of characters, which were hard for me to keep straight. It did paint a vivid picture of Lenin. Someone already knowledgeable of the history would get must more from the book. For those who are not, reading a history first would be helpful.

Now I have read a lot of accounts of Lenin's adventures, because I was born and raised in the Soviet Union. But in those accounts he had no character, or rather his character and the characters of everyone described by official sources, was a series of slogans: modest man, friend of the workers, trusted by the people, dedicated to the revolution. In this book fact come out, and the real Lenin does, too. Like many powerful political leaders, Lenin was born in a small provincial town, belonged to a minority or mixed ethnic group, and had a personal vendetta against the system he wanted to overthrow.

Lenin's genealogy is complex and tangled. But this book finally reveals his multiplicitous ethnic origins: Russian, German, Sweedish, Jewish, and Kalmyk. Of this, as you might imagine, not a word was breathed in the Soviet Union, a country where ethnicity has supposedly become irrelevant (what a sad ideological joke!). To amount to anything in life Lenin needed to overcome his provincial roots, prejudice against minorities, and the stigma of being a brother of a criminal, who unsuccessfully tried to assassinated the Russian tsar.

Lenin was a single-minded, driven individual. His life's goal was to overthrow the Russian government, ostensibly for the benefit of the workers and the downtrodden. He spared no effort, no political trick, and no cruelty to achieve this goal. Before he died in 1924, the civil war in Russia was won and the new Soviet state established. Lenin sowed the seeds of totalitarian dictatorship, using Karl Marx as ideological God, and himself as his chosen son who came to Russia to save the world from the evil of capitalism and to build paradise on Earth. When Lenin died, a special tomb was constructed to preserve his body and put it on public display, where it still lies, never mind Lenin's request to be burried next to his mother in a cemetery. In life Lenin was a dictator, and the only person who effectively stood up to him was his mother-in-law. His own wife was less successful and had to put up with Lenin's long love affair with Inessa Armand.

The book is very factual and tends to bog down in details. But it is also full of valuable information and dispells any myth of Lenin as god-like, flawless human being that communists made him out to be.

Lenin, no matter what is thought of his philosophy, is one of the major figures of 20th century history. The author of this book had access to newly released documents (at the time, ca. 1994) from the archives of the USSR, and has used them in a telling biography of the man.



Some have called the author less than objective, and that probably is true. The times in which the book was written need to be taken into account. But if the author was less than objective, this book still reveals much about Lenin and the inner workings of the regime he helped create.



Lenin had but one thing that he used as a criterion for deciding what must be done: Does it help the revolution? That he was capable of ordering the execution of 'undesirables', letting people starve, all because he thought it was good for the revolution tells the truth about the man. He was ruthless, he was cruel, and evidently had no problem with his conscience over anything he ordered done.



What I got from this book is that Lenin was the architect for what came after him. Stalin took full advantage of this, and evolved the brutality to new heights. But Lenin was the beginning. Stalin was but the continuation.



A book that does get bogged down at times in detail, and has to be 'waded' through. Hence only 4 stars. But there is plenty to read and learn, and the 'wade' was worth it. Despite that caveat, still recommended.

As a history teacher, I find it appalling that anyone would write that this book is "biased" or that the fact that he was "dedicated to his cause" as a mitigating factor to his campaign of mass murder, erecting the conspiratorial police state, total destruction of the family, church, and freedom, and of course foisting the bankrupt theories of Marxism on an entire nation...the fact that this almost always requires mass murder should be revealing. The fact that anyone would in anyway mitigate anything done by Lenin is probably autobiographical...an enchantment with socialism...The story always seems to end the same way. The West, espeically the left, still has a blind side when it comes to utopianism. How many millions must be murdered before we get it. Read the book and learn....Read the Venona Secrets and about the GRU by Dr. Raymond Leonard. Good places to start.

The biography will be condemned by remaining True Believers. For this reason alone it should be read by all Americans. Because the author was a dedicated Leninist for most of his life, we can see how wrenching is his education to the truth of the ruthless dictatorship Lenin created and perpetuated. More people murdered in the name of an unattainable goal than by any other regime in the history of the world. And we think Hitler is evil! A must read to get a clear perspective on most of the 20th Century.

What makes Dmitri Volkogonov's work so important, is not the fact that he is the first to publicize these formerly secret documents, but that as a former Leninist he made the remarkable intellectual journey to form the conclusion that the Bolshevik state was a sham from the start. This is a powerful statement coming from a man who once served the Soviet state as an Army General, a man who as a young officer willingly drove a tank through ground zero of a nuclear blast. His informed view deserves more weight in my opinion than the smug attitudes of comfortable armchair communists in the West or unrepentant apparaciki in Russia. Leninists will of course hate Volkoganov for this in that he has shown their bogus saint for what he was - a cynical opportunist, a close-minded dilitant, operating with but the fig leaf of a political plan. What interested Lenin most of all, as shown by the author, was not the establishment of communism, but rather the raw use of power. Thus he could write of the withering away of the state in "State and Revolution" while at the same time planning the creation a bureaucraticized police state based on mass terror. Volkognov sheds amazing light on various aspects of Lenin which until now were little known, such as his family background, his connections with the German General Staff, his responsibility for the murder of the Czar and his family, his actions in the Kaplan affair, and his unrealistic hopes in spreading the world revolution. What was for me perhaps the most frightening aspect of Lenin is how much his style has been copied since 1917 by cynical political manipulators, especially in the West. The quest for unrestrained power is for them, as it was for Lenin, the sole reason for their political existance.