Lenin: A New Biography

Rating:
Summary: Biased, and heavily so
Review: A major disappointment for anyone looking for an objective and analyzing view of Lenins role in history. It seems the author is cunningly familiar with the old saying "if you can't beat them, join them". Full of details, it surely is, and while many are certainly accurate, the facts are a mish-mash mixed into a huge pot and drawn at random, put into the text and spiced up with personal "views". Already on page 2 the tone is readily set, "It is worth noting that both Lenin and his father lost their considerable mental powers much earlier than might be thought normal."; pointing out Lenins unfortunate disease and hinting insanity!

If one can neglect and bias-adjust the book (not an easy task!), it contains several interesting facts! I strongly suggest ANY other book on Lenin though, if a more scientifical analysis is expected! ...

Rating:
Summary: Lenin, The West Still Has A Blind Spot...
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The Most Evil Man Bertrand Russell Ever Met
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Finally, Lenin as a Man
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Lack of chronology and bias makes for a confusing read.
Review: This book jumps around a lot and has only a very loose structure. It does not give a chronological account of Lenin's life. On one page he jumps from 1917 to 1921 back to 1918 and then jumps to 1964 and Breshnev's reign. This in and of itself is not a problem, but Volkogonov does not connect a lot of his arguments and mearly skips around.

Likewise, he often strays too far from his subject. Almost half of the book is devoted to explaining the lives and evnets of leaders other than Lenin. This ranges from Stalin to The Meneshevik, Martov. The leader will learn a great deal about many Soviet personalities, unfortunately Lenin is not necessarilly one of them. Volkogonov seems bent on radically changing the historical view of Lenin. At times, his bias compromises his work, and he tries to blame Lenin for all of the USSR's problems, including collectivization and many items usually associated with Stalin.

In his quest to revolutionize history, the author dismisses many previous arguments. Unfortunately, he often does not give them proper attention. The work is interesting but fails to fairly treat the complex character of Lenin. There are many biographies of Lenin that are better than this one.

Rating:
Summary: Topical History
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Pretty Good Biography...
Review: This is a very detailed, pretty interesting, and mainly fair biography of Lenin. It certainly does an excellent job in destroying the myth of Lenin as a benevolent figure, a myth that was believed by many, both in the former USSR and outside it. Using evidence from formerly secret documents, it demonstrates Lenin's true ruthlessness and eagerness to use terror to accomplish his goals.

If anything, maybe, this book is a little biased AGAINST Lenin. Although Lenin was a terribly ruthless ruler, he was dedicated to the cause, and held power in the interests of advancing it. In order to totally refute the myth, the author sometimes places insufficient emphasis (in my opinion) on this point. Also, to some extent, Lenin's actions could have been a reaction to the circumstances his regime faced.

Nevertheless, Lenin's actions can't really be justified, so the author is right in judging him harshly. Overall, the book is interesting and really illustrates the reality of Lenin and the Soviet system. It provides many facinating (and horrifying) details and first hand documents as well.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent!
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Legend of Lenin
Review: When the former state known as the Soviet Union withered away in January, 1991, many Communist sympathizers around the globe expressed both confusion and wonder: Is this the indication that the final stage of the worker's revolution is only now beginning? Or, is this final proof that the great Bolshevik experiment has failed? Even now, ten years after the demise of the political aspect of the world's largest and most truculent empire, those who languished in its thrall--Eastern Europeans, Southeast Asians, refugees from the Third World--continue to worry about what could be coming next. After all, most with direct experience of the brutal tactics begun by Vladimir Iliych Lenin know first-hand that nearly 100 years of revolutionary activity don't simply vanish in the space of weeks or months.

Hence, it is often necessary for us to review history, careful to examine what Communism, as envisaged by its leading adherents, really meant or still means. Dimitri Volkogonov's "new biography" of the father of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat seeks to shed some light on this, bringing to the table, he is quick to point out, new information long locked away in the archives of the supreme Soviet. Amazingly, however, Volkogonov repeatedly issues sad news: this document or that document, while reputed to have existed at one time or another, simply disappeared; this document, while extant, has been redacted of crucial information; these documents, while supposedly copied faithfully, may have been changed. In other words, Volkogonov, while his heart seems to be in the right place regarding getting to the "essential truth" of Vladimir Lenin's personality and the cult thereof, is also inadvertently falling victim to the narrow lens of any and all interpretations of history.

This much we know: Lenin, though lauded as a gentle man with a certain compassion for the working class, was not a member of the working class and had a tendency to try to separate himself from the concerns of the working class whenever possible. For example, during the long "locked train ride" out of Germany" in 1917, Lenin, coming upon Bolshevik workers who had been wounded in battle, blanched: He didn't offer aid, nor did he go out of his way to insure the future protection of workers who, it seems, were only tools of the revolution, not human beings.

In the long run, Volkogonov's interpretation of events hinges on a crucial distinction many American readers may miss: The distinction between liberty and power. This is something American commentators have lost over the years. The pursuit of power for the sake of power is altogether different from the pursuit of power for the sake of liberty. Lenin, sadly, seemed to have a cynical attitude towards liberty. He disdained the liberal tradition, just as, oddly enough, do America's right wing AM radio commentators.