Rating: 
Summary: lenin is god
Review: what a funny book. i laughed until i cried, really i did....hilarious
Rating:
Summary: An Amazing Intellectual Journey
Review: 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.
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.
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