Lenin's Childhood

by Isaac Deutscher

When he died suddenly in 1967, Isaac Deutscher had completed only the compelling first chapter of a long-anticipated biography of Lenin, published here. It covers Lenin’s family background, birth and early years in the backwater town of Simbirsk up to the execution of his brother, a traumatic formative event. Drawing on a lifetime of background research, including access to the closed section of Trotsky’s archives, Lenin’s Childhood gives a novel interpretation of the earliest influences on Lenin’s personality and thinking. Most of all, it is a glimpse into an unfinished work which would have striven to save Lenin from fanatical anti-revolutionary condemnation and, perhaps more important, from uncritical communist beatification.

This anniversary edition includes an introduction by Deutscher's biographer, Gonzalo Pozo, which situates the Lenin project within Deutscher’s oeuvre and discusses the sources, influences and evolution of his never completed life of Lenin.

Genres: History, Lenin, Biography

112 pages, Paperback

First published October 22, 1970

About the author

Isaac Deutscher was a Polish-born Jewish Marxist writer, journalist and political activist who moved to the United Kingdom at the outbreak of World War II. He is best known as a biographer of Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin and as a commentator on Soviet affairs. His three-volume biography of Trotsky, in particular, was highly influential among the British New Left.

Reviews

[William West · Rating 4 out of 5]

Isaac Deutscher completed only one chapter of his projected biography of Lenin before he died. In less than seventy pages, this stand-alone publication of the fragment does an outstanding job of evoking mid-to-late nineteenth century Russia.

One of the biggest surprises for me was the extremely modest means of the Ulyanovs. I had always envisioned Lenin's upbringing as being, while not aristocratic, extremely privileged. According to Deutscher, Lenin's paternal grandfather was an illiterate former surf who died when his youngest child, Ilya, Lenin's father, was too young to remember him. Lenin's uncle sacrificed everything to get Ilya an education.

Reading about the adult lives of the educated but working-class Ulyanovs, I was struck by the universalism of such experience. Moving from town to town in hope of better paying teaching jobs, Ilya and his wife Maria often compared "happy places" with "unhappy ones." Always worried about money, they took refuge in the quiet solitude of apartments filled with books and the kind of "debates" that rarely arise except in educated family circles. The Ulyanovs reminded me, in some ways, of my own parents.

The last pages, focusing on the political activity of Lenin's brother Alexander, reveal to what degree the Tsarist security apparatus was a forerunner of modern surveillance states. No wonder, I thought while reading it, that Russian society, in the height of what is generally referred to as the "Stalinist era," regressed to such defensive excess. Beset on all sides, exhausted by war and revolution, the culture was simply retreating to the "comforts" of its upbringing.

[Julio The Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

A curious irony here. Isaac Deutscher was working on a full biography of Lenin when he succumbed to illness at the too young age of sixty, just as Trotsky, the subject of his masterful THE PROPHET trilogy, died at the hands of a Stalinist assassin, having only put a few strokes on his own life of Stalin. Judging by this one chapter Deutscher completed his biographical and political gifts never diminished. Deutscher paints the Russia of 1870, just seven years after the emancipation of the serfs, and Lenin's privileged childhood; son of a significant official in the Czarist education system and younger brother to Alexander Ulyanov, a dedicated enemy of that system, and destined at a young age for the gallows. What a trilogy of the Russian Revolution (Trotsky, Stalin, Lenin) we missed out on due to Deutscher's untimely demise.

[Diaz Mathis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A shame Deutscher was unable to finish his biography of Lenin before his death, of which this would have been the first chapter. RIP.

[David Hayter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Learned more from these 60 pages than in dozens of other books about Lenin. Were the full 2 volumes to be completed they would be definitive and magisterial, as with the author's trilogy on Trotsky.

[Bala · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well-meaning; but repetitive, inelegant, and blatantly psychoanalytical.

[RYD · Rating 3 out of 5]

Isaac Deutscher's plans to write a two-volume biography of Lenin were cut short by a heart attack that took the author's life in 1967 at 60. This book, published posthumously, represents 67 pages that he had written about Lenin's boyhood up the point in which his brother is executed for plotting to kill Tsar Alexander III. It is too bad the work wasn't more complete, because Deutscher offers some interesting emphasis on Lenin and his family.