Lenin the Dictator

by Victor Sebestyen

Victor Sebestyen’s riveting biography of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin—the first major biography in English in nearly two decades—is not only a political examination of one of the most important historical figures of the twentieth century but also a fascinating portrait of Lenin the man.

Brought up in comfort and with a passion for hunting and fishing, chess, and the English classics, Lenin was radicalized after the execution of his brother in 1887. Sebestyen traces the story from Lenin’s early years to his long exile in Europe and return to Petrograd in 1917 to lead the first Communist revolution in history. Uniquely, Sebestyen has discovered that throughout Lenin’s life his closest relationships were with his mother, his sisters, his wife, and his mistress. The long-suppressed story told here of the love triangle that Lenin had with his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and his beautiful, married mistress and comrade, Inessa Armand, reveals a more complicated character than that of the coldly one-dimensional leader of the Bolshevik Revolution.

With Lenin’s personal papers and those of other leading political figures now available, Sebestyen gives is new details that bring to life the dramatic and gripping story of how Lenin seized power in a coup and ran his revolutionary state. The product of a violent, tyrannical, and corrupt Russia, he chillingly authorized the deaths of thousands of people and created a system based on the idea that political terror against opponents was justified for a greater ideal. An old comrade what had once admired him said that Lenin “desired the good . . . but created evil.” This included his invention of Stalin, who would take Lenin’s system of the gulag and the secret police to horrifying new heights.

In Lenin, Victor Sebestyen has written a brilliant portrait of this dictator as a complex and ruthless figure, and he also brings to light important new revelations about the Russian Revolution, a pivotal point in modern history.

Genres: History, Biography, Russia, Nonfiction, Politics, Russian History, Biography Memoir

608 pages, Paperback

First published February 9, 2017

About the author

Victor Sebestyen was born in Budapest and was only an infant when his family left Hungary. He has worked for many British newspapers, including the Evening Standard. He lives in England.

Reviews

[Max · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sebestyen delivers a straightforward easy reading biography. We get to know Lenin’s thoughts, emotions, relationships and skills. We find a mind so intense that it would not be denied. Dogmatic and demanding but also politically astute, he knew when to give in, but always to further his power and the interests of the Party. We see why Lenin was essential to the Bolshevik movement and its ultimate success in taking over Russia. My notes follow.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was born in 1870 in a small town on the Volga River to an upper middle class family. A brilliant student a successful career seemed inevitable. But his father’s untimely death in 1886 followed in 1887 by his elder brother’s hanging at the hands of the Tsar changed everything. Lenin admired his brother and quickly adopted the revolutionary cause for which he had been arrested and executed. Vladimir was now a marked man by his relationship to his brother alone. He would be watched closely by the Okhrana, the Tsar’s secret police. He would be denied the best schools and jobs. His personality was transformed. He became disciplined and self-reliant.

After being thrown out of school for being in a protest with student radicals, Vladimir educated himself. He devoured books on history, philosophy and economics, particularly socialist literature and translated into Russian The Communist Manifesto. He regularly engaged with revolutionary groups. He wrote constantly: Letters, articles, leaflets. He also began to lecture and developed the ability to express complex ideas in simple terms becoming popular as speaker to left leaning audiences. Maxim Gorky noted “I had never known anyone who could talk of the most intricate political questions so simply…no striving after eloquent phrases, but every word uttered distinctively and its meaning marvelously clear.”

In debate Sebestyen notes “He battered opponents into submission with the deliberate use of violent language which he acknowledged was ‘calculated to evoke hatred, aversion contempt…not to convince, not to correct the mistakes of the opponent but to destroy him, to wipe him and his organization from the face of the earth’…almost single-handedly he changed the language on the revolutionary Left…Communist parties everywhere, even following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, learned it made sense to play the man, not the ball - and how to do so with ruthless efficiency. It was one of the principal lessons of Leninism.”

In 1895 Vladimir was arrested and spent 14 months in prison followed by 3 years in exile in Siberia, luckily in the southern part. His living conditions in exile were far better than those we are familiar with under Soviet regimes. He was able to write and exchange letters with his socialist friends often using invisible ink. In fact he used invisible ink to propose to Nadya, a fellow revolutionary who was also in prison. She was allowed to join him in exile and they were married in 1898. While their relationship was centered on politics there was a love relationship as well.

In 1900 Vladimir’s time in exile was up and he moved to a town near St. Petersburg where he was soon arrested for violating parole. He was allowed to leave for Germany where Nadya would join him. He began writing, publishing and distributing a paper called Iskra which became the leading underground newspaper in Russia. Nadya was in charge of getting it smuggled into Russia using hundreds of agents. In 1901 Vladimir began using the name Lenin. He now considered himself to be the Party and was often at odds with other revolutionary leaders. Lenin’s best-known writing, “What is to be Done?”, laid out his ideas on how to take power and keep it, in essence how to set up a dictatorship. Nadya was important to Lenin’s writing. He always recited his works to Nadya before putting pen to paper. This short pamphlet was published in 1902, the same year he met and became friends with Trotsky. In 1903 at a meeting of revolutionary leaders in London, those favoring Lenin’s hardline style split from more moderate socialists giving birth to the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Mensheviks literally meant the minority, but in fact the vast majority of revolutionaries sided with the Mensheviks. To Lenin the Mensheviks became the enemy.

1905 was a turning point. The inept Nicholas II started a war with Japan ending in a humiliating defeat. Then workers living in oppressive poverty made a peaceful march to the Royal Palace to petition the Tsar for better conditions. The Tsar’s troops opened fire killing hundreds. For the common people, the Tsar became the enemy. The Tsar also alienated the business magnates who now contributed to revolutionary organizations. In 1905 Lenin first met Stalin who Nadya couldn’t stand and didn’t trust. Lenin would use Stalin and his ilk to conduct “expropriations”, a euphemism for bank robberies. Also that year Lenin finally met the eminent writer Maxim Gorky, a socialist supporter. Gorky then set up the first legal Bolshevik newspaper in Russia for which Lenin wrote many articles.

From 1900 to 1910 Lenin and Nadya moved about Europe living in Munich, London, Geneva and finally Paris. All these cities had vibrant Russian émigré communities escaping oppression and the Okhrana. Many were revolutionaries. These exile groups were heavily infiltrated by the Okhrana. In Paris Lenin met the attractive, vivacious and elegant Inessa Armand, a Russian revolutionary who had married into a successful St. Petersburg family and had four children with her husband. She left her husband and ran off with his brother and had another child. Then she was arrested for revolutionary activity and exiled to the arctic. Eventually she escaped. She and Lenin developed an affair that lasted until she died ten years later. It was discreet although many including Nadya knew. Lenin also relied on Inessa heavily in his Bolshevik organizational work as he continued to do with Nadya. Nadya who now had the bulging eyes and swollen neck of Graves’ disease had let herself go. Despite the disease she gained much weight and also took no care in how she dressed. Fortunately all three got along. Inessa was a difficult woman who always put her five children first. Lenin was happy to continue living with Nadya to whom he was still devoted. Nadya and Lenin still went on their frequent holidays together to the mountains and enjoyed their time together. These vacations helped Lenin deal with his constant insomnia and headaches.

In 1912 Lenin did an about face lauding democracy and putting up Bolshevik candidates for the Duma. Unfortunately the person he chose to lead his Duma delegation was a double agent for the Okhrana who compromised many Bolshevik members. It wasn’t until 1917 that Lenin realized he had been fooled. A change in Russian laws allowed a new Bolshevik paper to open in Russia, although there were limits on what it could print. Thus Pravda was born. To closely administer and write timely articles for Pravda Lenin and Nadya moved near the Russian border to Krakow in Austrian Poland. Inessa followed moving into an apartment on the same street. The three of them worked closely together and took long walks together. Nadya was becoming increasingly ill. At Lenin’s urging she had surgery in Switzerland to remove part of her thyroid which restored much of her health. It was Lenin who sought out the best doctor in Europe for her and raised the money from the Party.

In 1914 WWI broke out and Russia quickly suffered disastrous defeats. The Tsar was further weakened and the country demoralized just as Lenin thought would happen. Lenin and Nadya moved to Berne for safety. Here they could enjoy the mountains to dispel some of Lenin’s constant tensions and agitation. Lenin opposed the war from the beginning which hurt his standing short term but turned in his favor as the war went on. As the initial enthusiasm for the war in Russia gave way to dismay at the massive casualties and recognition of the government’s incompetence, Lenin was seen as right from the beginning. A key to the Bolshevik’s success was Lenin’s promise to end the war.

In February 1917 there was a revolution in Russia. It was not led by the Bolsheviks. Lenin was caught unaware. The high prices, lack of food, deteriorating conditions and general disarray caused the populace of St. Petersburg to rise up in mass joined by many mutinying soldiers. The Tsar abdicated and moderate liberal socialists formed a new government. Lenin made a deal with the Germans to transport him, Nadya and thirty of his cohorts from Switzerland to Russia. Top of Lenin’s list of the thirty was Inessa. The German’s also supplied Lenin with money which he would deny. The German’s saw Lenin as a disruptor and a good investment.

Lenin received an enthusiastic reception by the Bolsheviks upon his return to Russia. He immediately went on the attack against the provisional government demanding an end to the war, the disbandment of the army, the police, and the civil service. What was needed was bread, not war. Lenin wanted to tear down everything and rebuild with a new communist government. He incessantly spoke and wrote pounding his ideas home. He promised workers that under communism they could run their own factories, peasants that they could farm their own land, all the time knowing that was not his plan. Many thought him a crazy belligerent, but as the army fell apart, daily life became chaotic and a power vacuum emerged, his ideas became increasingly accepted. Pravda, financed with German money and well organized by Lenin was hugely influential. Distribution was widespread and there were even special editions for the troops. Many Russians first became familiar with the Bolshevik message through Pravda. Bolshevik membership rose from 23,000 in March 1917 to 200,000 in July.

Lenin’s biggest fear was that the provisional government would end the war undercutting the Bolsheviks’ most appealing argument. But allied governments threatened to cut off economic aid if Russia dropped out of the war and as provisional government leader Kerensky said years later ”We were too naïve.” By September 1917 Bolshevik membership was 350,000 and Kerensky had now alienated his support from the right as well as the left. Lenin believed the time for revolution was at hand. Sebestyen observes “The next few weeks showed Lenin’s great skill as a leader…He dragged his reluctant and frightened comrades with him towards an uprising most of them did not want. He used a mixture of guile, logic, bluster, threats and calm persuasion to impose his will on them.”

The revolution was planned for October 25th, the day the Congress of Soviets met. The Bolshevik forces with the help of naval units loyal to the Bolsheviks easily took over the government. No one was willing to fight for Kerensky or the provisional government. Lenin then presented this fait accompli to the Congress. Many of his opponents walked out. Those remaining cheered as Lenin said he would end the war and distribute land to the peasants. Lenin went quickly about consolidating power. He began shutting down opposition newspapers saying it was a temporary measure. In December Lenin set up the Cheka under Felix Dzerzhinsky who would become the most feared man in Russia. Even more brutal than the Okhrana, the Cheka began taking out opposition. The Cheka established headquarters at 22 Lubyanka because its basement hid noise. Tortures would be carried out here for decades to come. Dzerzhinsky and the Cheka reported solely to Lenin.

In February 1918 Lenin finally reached a peace agreement with Germany. Dithering by his chief negotiator, Trotsky, frustrated the Germans who demanded a far harsher deal than they first offered. But Lenin had no choice. The Russian army was virtually non-existent. In March 1918 Lenin moved the government to Moscow. He was concerned the Germans would break their agreement and take St. Petersburg. Moscow would be difficult for them and the move made St. Petersburg a less attractive target. 1918 saw grave food shortages. Many were near starvation. Lenin identified a new culprit he called the kulaks. These supposedly rich peasants were accused of hording food. Brigades under leaders called commissars like Stalin were sent to the countryside to take the food. After much torture and killing, little food was collected. But blaming and terrorizing the kulaks would become a regular feature of Soviet rule.

In June 1918 a party of left wing socialists disillusioned with Lenin and appalled by the food crisis staged a major revolt. The Bolsheviks crushed this first major threat to their power executing hundreds of those involved. In July 1918 the Tsar and his family were executed on Lenin’s orders. Lenin was concerned that the Tsar might be captured by the opposing forces and embraced by his foreign relatives, particularly Kaiser Wilhelm. So hated was the Tsar, few in Russia cared. In August 1918 Lenin was shot in an assassination attempt. The Cheka was unleashed executing hundreds of “counterrevolutionaries.” After narrowly surviving, Lenin’s frequent rages became more frequent and severe. He lashed out at everyone. Always a workaholic, he now worked steadily seventeen hours a day in his unpadded chair. Lenin always lived simply even when he didn’t have to, while many of his functionaries took advantage of their positions to enjoy luxuries.

The war with the Whites was also raging. The Whites were three fragmented armies that did not communicate with each other. They were led by those who wanted to restore the old Russia. They were even more brutal than the Bolsheviks. They were anti-Semitic and engaged in pogroms killing and raping tens of thousands. Peasants were conscripted and many including families shot for any resistance. The Bolshevik army led by Trotsky was more efficient. Trotsky used experienced Tsarist officers but let them know that any disloyalty would mean their execution and that of their families. Lenin supported Trotsky all the way. Party loyal commissars were responsible for each brigade. They too could be executed if anything went wrong. The Bolsheviks used threats and violence strategically, while the Whites were undisciplined wantonly killing 150,000 civilians as they retreated. The Whites only stayed in the war with massive financing from Britain which got much of the money from the US. Secretary of State for War Winston Churchill even sent 50,000 poison gas canisters to the Whites of which only a few thousand were used as they proved ineffective. Finally Britain and the US became disenchanted and dropped support. The Whites quickly fell apart and by the end of 1919 were no longer a threat. The Whites’ demise precipitated the emigration of two million Russians to the West. Lenin’s dictatorship was now secure.

In September 1920 Inessa died of Cholera. She was loyal to Lenin until the end. Lenin held a state funeral for her. Lenin became active with the Comintern, the Communist International established in 1919. Its purpose was to promote Bolshevik organizations loyal to Moscow around the globe, particularly Germany and England. In 1920 Lenin spent more financing foreign communist parties than on famine relief which was desperately needed. In 1921 the Kronstadt sailors who had been loyal to the Bolsheviks since the revolution demanded reforms. Lenin brought in the army and the sailors were massacred. The famine was worse than ever and a prime cause of the sailor’s demands. Yet the grain Lenin took from peasants was being sold abroad for hard currency. But then Lenin did an about face. He allowed peasants to keep and sell their grain, small businesses to hire labor and sell goods on the open market. This was called the New Economic Policy and it quickly showed results.

In 1921 Lenin became increasingly ill. He had shortness of breath, pains in his chest and legs. In 1922 he suffered the first of many strokes. He died January 21, 1924. Lenin never established any succession plans, leaving the way for Stalin to take over and dividing the Party between Trotsky and Stalin. Stalin���s crude behavior, heartlessness and ruthlessness were extreme even for a Bolshevik. Perhaps Churchill summed it up best, “For Russians, their worst misfortune was Lenin’s birth; their next worst, his death.”

[Mikey B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Page 468(my book) Lenin 1920
“The dictatorship means... unrestrained power and the use of force, not of law.”

Page 120 Yuli Martov
“Lenin has no talent for friendship, he uses people too much.”

Page 138 Alexander Potresov
“for Lenin Marxism was not a conviction, but a religion.”

This is truly a highly impressive and readable portrait of the Russian leader who brought dictatorial communism to his country.

This will disabuse anyone of the notion that Lenin was a communist Marxist humanitarian. He sought power first and foremost. He violently oppressed any opposition. He organized brigades (some under Stalin) to remove food from the peasants in the countryside which led to mass starvation. Lenin hindered any attempt to aid these starving millions as foreign interference.

Page 346 October 1917
Lenin knew that power could slip away at anytime, which explains so much of the seventy-four year history of the Soviet Union... Lenin’s only real concern for the rest of his life [after the October Revolution in 1917] was keeping power – an obsession he passed down to his successors... The regime he created was largely shaped by his personality: secretive, suspicious, intolerant, ascetic, intemperate.

Lenin himself had little in common with the proletariat (even less in common with Russia’s massive peasant population). He led a petit bourgeois life in exile – and did a lot of leisure hiking in the Swiss Alps. When he obtained power in 1917 there was little time for relaxation which led to his heart attacks and death in January, 1924. He was a really wound-up individual and would fly into fits and rages. Interestingly he had a congenial relationship with his family (mother and sisters) – and then with his wife, Nadezhda, and his mistress Inessa Armand (this relationship was hidden from the Russian people). The women in his life exerted a strong influence and supported him in the communist movement. Lenin treated them with respect.

The author points out that it is the failed assassination attempt on Lenin in August, 1918 that signalled the beginning of the “Lenin cult”. The “cult of the personality” then became a common feature of all Communist countries.

Lenin applied some of the features of Marxist Communism like the redistribution of wealth (much of this was done violently), education for all, and to some extent the emancipation of women (there were many women involved in the Russian revolution, it was a woman who attempted to assassinate Lenin in 1918).

However, he kept and expanded on many aspects of Czarist Russia. No autonomy was given to outlying regions. There was a centralization of power, now in Moscow. The role of the secret police was expanded, and like during the era of the Czar, no laws restricted it. No dissension was tolerated. Nadya, Lenin’s widow, continued, even after her husband’s death to remove “dangerous books” (page 508) “ridding Russia’s libraries [of author’s] like Kant and Spengler."

Page 53-54
The Okhrana[under the Czar], had draconian powers to detain people without trial and send them to “administrative exile” in Siberia and the Arctic wastes at any hint of “political crimes”. Its power and scope were unlike anything elsewhere in Europe. It became the model for the Cheka, the NKVD and the KGB in the Russia of the future – or indeed the FSB of the post-Soviet era. It invaded the lives of ordinary people.

This book is a page turner; Russian history is gripping and devastating.

[Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

Concise Lenin

I have to say I really enjoyed Lenin: The Man, the Dictator and the Master of Terror as far as popular history goes. It’s a cradle to the grave account of the fanatical leader’s life from a child with a large and odd shaped head to a man unable to talk or write ruling over the largest country in the world. Victor Sebestyen’s biography is unapologetic and hard hitting. It’s a warts and all story, and yes there are plenty of warts. At the same time Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov has been brought to life alongside his alter ego Lenin.

Lenin was no doubt extremely intelligent and gifted, he was however a fanatic and an extremist. To some he is the hero of the revolution, who has inspired many around the world to equality. To others he was a wicked dictator who had distain for human life, people and caused more suffering than the Tsarist regime. A man who delivered none of his promises to give power and ownership of the means to production to the people and invented a class of people, the Kulaks in order to shift the blame for the failures of his regime.

These are things we already know. So why do we need another Lenin biography? Well different scopes and opinions on a subject always allow for a wider understanding, new material gets released from archives, different aspects and opinions can be focused on in concise arguments. Rather than a ‘catch all’ narrative. The biggest surprise with Lenin: The Man, the Dictator and the Master of Terror however is that Lenin could forge relationships with other humans and the importance of his relationship with Inessa Armand and the support from his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya who accepted Inessa into their lives. It always strikes me of how particular he was, he liked his desk in a certain way, pencils had to be sharpened to pin points, his bike had to be oiled and cleaned every night, the windows had to be open.

For me Lenin: The Man, the Dictator and the Master of Terror is a window into how things never really change, the commentators think they know best and so often they don’t. The book is fast paced and is definitely allows Lenin to be accessible to those who know nothing about him, Russia and the early twentieth century. A great place to start and an excellent revisit for those who are fascinated with this era of history. I was pleasantly surprised with this book.

[Louise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Victor Sebestyen, through the life of Lenin, has supplied the missing pieces for me to understand the Russian Revolution. This may be because Lenin was so central to it, or it may be that Sebestyen writes in clear, organized and engaging prose.

Except for the first few pages the book is a chronology. Each successive event provides context for the future events. The reader is not distracted by great side-stories (they are in the footnotes) or by keeping track of the long Russian names (Principal Characters are sketched at the end). The book is a smooth engaging read from beginning to end.

I’ve always wondered how Lenin took the reins after such a long absence and how what I thought was an endorsement of Trotsky resulted in Stalin. With thorough research inclusive of newly available material Sebestyen provides clarity on these any other issues. For instance:

-The “sealed train” entry into Russia was clearly sponsored by the Germans as its own ploy to get Russia out of the war, or at least sow chaos into an enemy country. The money that went with Lenin on this train must have been a huge sum. The number of printing presses (the only media of its day) active on Lenin’s behalf within weeks of his return was staggering.

-As to Lenin’s “will”, Lenin dictated it to (wife) Nadya. In it, he denigrated almost all the Bolsheviks and Stalin the most. He gave only faint praise to Trotsky for getting things done and so it was in everyone’s interest to keep this buried. Upon Lenin’s death, Stalin, was in a position to hold the reins.

- The reasons for the Kronstadt Rebellion and how the punishment of the sailors was decided (Lenin) and carried out (Trotsky) are made clear in all their sad brutality.

- How the Bolsheviks raised their money (the German “start up” money, robbing banks, marrying unsuspecting heiresses, looting, misrepresenting their cause to wealthy supporters of democracy) through which they were able to buy off constituencies, further weakening the already weak provisional government.

There were a number of surprises and takeaways for me:

The Bolsheviks were always a minority party… even when the Mensheviks (meaning “minority”) were a factor.

Lenin led a very bourgeoisie life in exile. He worked hard and then relaxed. Dressing simply, living in cabins, spare rooms or camping, eating at home (no fine or even 2 star dining) he can seem like any American middle-manager on vacation: swimming, hiking, hunting and keeping tabs on the office.

Lenin’s parents, the Ulynov’s, were unlikely parents of revolutionaries. Could it be that his brother’s (along with 4 others) hanging for an assassination attempt on Alexander III fueled a rage that took on a life of its own? Lenin's aggression does not seem to be tied to the ideologies he wrote extensively on and for which he had others sacrifice. When things did not work out, he spun words to cover actions that were counter to those ideologies.

Lenin’s life with Nadya (wife) and Inessa (mistress) was known to me, but not so fully as described here. Most surprising was Inessa’s very public funeral. Surprising to a lesser extent was a very ill Lenin taking Stalin to task over his harsh words (both these guys are murderers!) to Nadya.

Each chapter is introduced with very apt quotations. The very best, at the end is Winston Churchill: “For the Russians, their worst misfortune was Lenin’s birth; their next worst, his death.”

This is an excellent read. It pulled together (for me) all the threads and clarified the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. Although I’ve read quite a bit on this time in history and knew what happened; through this book, I finally understand how it happened.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror by Victor Sebestyen is a biographical look at Vladimir Illyich Ulyanov, or Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union and a life long communist revolutionary. Lenin was born in provincial Russia to a fairly well off family. His father worked as a school inspector in the region, and his mother was a Lutheran Christian. Both his parents were monarchists and conservatives, and raised their children in the Russian Orthodox Church. They were both quite progressive in their child rearing, however, and encouraged their children to read voraciously. All of their kids turned out to be revolutionaries looking to reform Tsarist Russia into a state, and most supported violent revolutionary groups on the left. Lenin became a convinced revolutionary after his older brother was executed for his role in a plot to murder the Tsar of Russia in St. Petersburg. He began to read Marxist texts at a young age, and became expert in political and economic theory. His family was constantly watched by the Okrhana, the Russian police force, which made getting an education difficult for Lenin. He was kicked out of upper school a few times for joining Marxist readining groups or participating in strikes and protests. He was eventually able to gain a degree in law, and at this time had found his true passion: writing revolutionary newspapers and flyers.

Lenin would over the years become an adept journalist, and most of his revolutionary career consisted of founding, writing, editing and smuggling newspapers in support of Marxist revolution. He began to take greater power in revolutionary circles due to his adept writing skills, and his amatuerish yet effective methods at smuggling print into the Tsarist regime. His participation in these fields led to his arrest and exile, first to Siberia, and then abroad, where he would live in Germnay, Switzerland, England and France. Sebestyen chronicles these journies; his marriage to his wife Nadya, a fellow revolutionary and an adept party organizer - she would be his rock throughout his life, and immensley supported him both personally and in his work.

Lenin had a difficult personality. He could be charming and direct, and was excellent and formulating ideas, and presenting and convincing others. He was also a strong manager of people, and adept at organizing and managing others. He was also opinionated to the extreme, and divisive in how he dealth with rivals. He would split from other fellow leftist revolutionaries, like the more extremist Socialist Revolutionaries, and the more passive communist Menshiviks. He was happy to divide and conquer, and used this tactic to divide the Bolsheviks that he would lead from other communist groups. This made him a rival of many influential communists, like Martov for example, but Lenin had no qualms about this. He would often berate those he disagreed with, and was harsh with others who presented ideological or tactical ideas that he disagreed with. He would often fly into rages at these times, often brought on by stress and overwork.

Lenin was the stereotypical Communist in many ways. Although born well off, he lived most of his life in exile, and in uncomfortable living conditions. He had spartan eating habits, worked almost all day, and did not enjoy frivolous activities like plays, entertainment, or drinking. He hated smoking, and banned it anywhere near him. His one true personal passion was the outdoors. He loved to go hiking, exploring and hunting, and was most at home in nature. When he flew into one of his rages, his wife would worry about his health, and take him on a vacation into the woods, up the mountains, or down to the beach.

Lenin was able to take power in Russia late in his life, and planned and executed his coup d'etat very well. Tsar Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia, was an unpopular autocrat. He believed strongly in his divine right as a ruler, and took little pity on his enserfed population. Although reforms had been coming along, they were moving too slow to stop the tide of Russians from turning against their emperor. Increasing numbers of young Russians in the late 1800's were turning to extremism and revolutionary movements to try and bring themselves bread, income, land, and just sheer survival. An early attempt at insurrection took place in 1905, with Lenin woefully unprepared. Lenin began to plan for the next revolution, as the 1905 upheaval was crushed by the Tsar brutally, with thousands of peasants executed by marauding bands of soldiers, and greater autocracy imposed on the population. The real catalyst to the overthrow of the Russian Empire, however, was WWI. This war destroyed the Russian economy, and the last tatters of support for the Emperor. The Tsar was overthrown by a Provisional government run by Kerensky, a charismatic figure with dictatorial ambitions. Kerensky set up a multi-party chamber, but from the outset despised the Socialists and Communists, and sought to undermine them. Lenin did not support the multi-party experiment (neither did most Russians) and actively sought to undermine it. This time he was prepared. He made sure that the Bolshevik units were organized enough, and when the time was ripe, struck. He overthrew the Kerensky administration with an armed coup, and installed the Soviet system provisionally (this too was removed after a show of trying it). He took power dictatorially, and ruled as an autocrat, much like his two predecessors.

In power he was ruthless. His years as a revolutionary had made him immune to sympathy for his opponents, and he actively encouraged peasant uprisings and lawlessness to ensure the destruction of the middle class and aristocratic class. He was supported in power by a close group of fellow revolutionaries, who soon took on the trappings of a new aristocracy. Lenin was much loved and feared by the general population, as the Tsar had been, but was skilled at building his state. Russia, at this time (1917 onward) was in chaos. Years of war against Germany had destroyed its economy, and demoralized its army. Millions of Russians were dead or captured, and much of the Western portions of the Empire were lost to independence movements. Lenin immediately ended the war with Germany, ceding territories in 1917 (although this cessestion was reversed after Germany's defeat in the West). He focused on the destruction of the landed class, appropriating religious properties, and eliminating rival groups for power, including the White Russian forces, the right wing nationalist Kadet's, and rival leftist parties. Millions of Russians fled the country for exile, and thousands were killed by these competing factions in brutal pogroms and crackdowns. Lenin initiated the Polish-Soviet war of 1919 in order to regain lost territories and progress the global communist movement. This war did not achieve its aim to eliminate Poland, as the Russian army was quite weak at this point. However, it did succeed in taking small amounts of Polish territory, and led to the eventual merger of the Soviet and Ukrainian SSR's in 1922. Lenin also enjoyed playing off his subordinates. The famous example is the emergence of the Trotsky-Stalin rivalry that ended with Stalin taking power following Lenin's death.

Lenin survived numerous assassination attempts in power, including one in 1919 where he was shot through the neck. This coupled with his legendary work ethic led to deteriorating health. He began to suffer strokes in the 1920's, and eventually succumbed to his third stroke in 1924. Against his express wishes, he became an icon of the Soviet Union, and was entombed in an elaborate mausoleum viewable by the public (to this day).

Lenin's legacy in the Soviet Union was massive. His autocratic style of rule, his personality cult, his politics and his ambitions were all passed along to his successors. The Soviet Union was characterized by its brutal drive for efficiency, its autocratic rule, and was plagued by corruption due to its Nomenklatura system of staffing. This style of rule was exported globally, with similar characters emerging in China (Mao) and North Korea (the Kim family). To this day, Lenin is a revered and controversial figure. He was brutal, cold and calculating, but also driven, intelligent, and passionate about removing the landed aristocracy from power in Russia. He was a devoted Marxist, but his realpolitik streak would see the Marxism he espoused become its own form of political theory (Leninism/Stalinism) which was characterized by communist collectivization, totalitarian style rule, and autocratic personal leadership. His system would spark imitations throughout the world, with much of Asia and Europe adopting Communist style governments (not always through Soviet expansion). This rival system would only collapse in the '90's, but remnants remain in North Korea, and increasingly again in China.

Sebestyen has written a very detailed and interesting account of Vladimir Lenin. His life is well documented and sourced, his movements tracked to great detail, and his politics and thought processes recorded. The book examines his life and those of his close confidants while building a picture of the birth of Communism in Russia and the creation of the USSR. This was a great biography, marred only by a few issues regarding tangents and off topic comments in some sections of the book. Other than this small criticism, this is a biography I would recommend to anyone interested in reading more about Lenin.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

"How could this obstinate little man...ever have become so important?"

- Stefan Zweig

The first time I saw a statue of Lenin in person was in early 2012, near the university in Kyiv. The next time was a few months later in Donetsk, in east Ukraine, on a walk with my friend Paul, who lived there at the time; Lenin was facing away from a nearby McDonald's, "as if he can't bear to look", Paul joked. The statue in Donetsk is most likely no longer standing, like many of that city's structures, and I know for sure that the one I saw in Kyiv is no longer standing, because, well, the residents of the city decided that they didn't want it there anymore, around the same time they decided the same thing about their venal and autocratic president. In Russia, however, there are still statues and images of Lenin everywhere, as well as, almost 100 years after his death, his preserved body in Red Square (unless you believe that "it's not even him", as a Russian co-worker told me with conviction at lunch recently), a symbol of...what, exactly?

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, later known as Lenin, was born in 1870 in Simbirsk, about 900 km southeast of Moscow. I'm disturbed to report that I found the young Lenin sympathetic. While he was a teenager, his father, older brother and older sister all died within the span of a few years- although to be specific, his brother Sasha was executed for having conspired in an attempt to assassinate Tsar Alexander III. Lenin committed himself to studying and graduated at the top of his class, becoming the driven and resolute kind of person so easy for irresolute people like me to admire. But he was not allowed to attend Russia's most prestigious universities in either St. Petersburg or Moscow, in the eyes of the law guilty by association with his brother, and ended up enrolling in university in Kazan, from which he was expelled after about a semester for joining a dissident student movement (although he was not, it seems, one of the ringleaders). He went home to Simbirsk, but remained active in nascent revolutionary circles.

"Whenever two Russians come together", Conrad wrote in his 1911 novel Under Western Eyes, "the shadow of autocracy is with them, haunting the secrets of their silences." Conrad's novel is far from a pean to revolution, but it nevertheless left me with a vivid impression of the oppressiveness of Russia under the Romanovs, particularly during the reign of Nicholas II, and of the seeming omniscience of his secret police, the Okhrana (now a name that describes fairly benign security guards who monitor schools and administrative buildings throughout Russia, by the way). And yes, as Sebestyen notes, Russian people under Nicholas II were not "free", even by the standards of the day. You really could get sent...to...Siberia, like, literally, for reading or writing the wrong book or article, or for expressing the wrong opinion to the wrong person. In a country where it can almost seem that the natural environment has been designed for punishment, one's fate in the early twentieth century depended on a variety of factors that are not entirely clear to me. It certainly didn't help to be Jewish. And yet the Bolsheviks would make Russia under Nicholas II look like a Kindergarten picnic. Lenin, after being arrested for writing and distributing subversive literature, seems to have gotten off fairly easily, for whatever reason; he was sent to a town called Shushenskoye, known as the 'Italy of Siberia', where the climate was relatively moderate and he lived with his wife Nadezhda and his mother-in-law. According to Sebestyen, Lenin spent most of his time there hunting, swimming, taking long walks, and translating European socialist writers into Russian. He could send and receive mail, and even played long-distance chess with professional players throughout Russia. Nadezhda later expressed regret at having to leave. Maybe I missed something in my reading, but it didn't even seem to me that Lenin had to do, you know, forced labor or anything like that. Nor was he tortured or starved. In other words, it was not the Gulag.

It's not difficult to understand what made Lenin a compelling and formidable figure. He was intelligent and erudite, and could laugh at himself. He was an ideologue, but he could be pragmatic and extemporaneous when necessary. When he tells Trotsky things like, "in six months' time, we will be in power or swinging from the gallows", one senses that he relishes both possibilities about equally. His intelligence was combined with a level of coarseness- his opponents were "pieces of shit", "treasonous scoundrels" and "cunts"- that made him unpleasant and difficult to debate against. He also combined an unwavering conviction in his rightness with an unwavering conviction that everything he did was for others, the workers and the peasants (even if it eventually turned out that he had to kill them). People like this are compelling. They don't insult your intelligence, and the strength of their conviction seems to offer the resoluteness that you, as a diffident semblance of a real person, have always lacked. Their notion of self-sacrifice allows you to see the trials of your own life in the most charitable possible terms. And their viciousness towards opponents satisfies one's repressed aggressiveness, while binding you closer to them. You don't become friends with people like this; you become enlisted, recruited, because they always have a cause...and then you either become bound to them (as Trotsky expressed clearly in his rationale for the murder of Nicholas II and his family- it needed to be clear to all Bolsheviks that there was no turning back) or you become an apostate. But even relatively early in life, there were indications that Lenin's commitment to the ends made him indifferent to the means, and indifferent to the loss of human life. It apparently never occurred to him that inhumane means could eventually render the aims unachievable. A paradise brought into being by the suffering of even one innocent (not to mention millions) isn't a paradise, to paraphrase Ivan Karamazov...but it seems Lenin hated Dostoevsky. In 1891-1892, when the Volga region was afflicted by a famine that killed hundreds of thousands, writers like Chekhov and Lev Tolstoy organized relief efforts. Lenin's only reaction was that the starvation of peasants was desirable, as a means of mass radicalization against the regime. About 30 years later, he would again see in mass famine an opportunity, using an even greater one (brought about in part by the Bolshevik policy of grain requisitioning) as a pretext to launch his attack on the Orthodox Church.

One of the problems with revolutions is that you never know what you're going to get. As Conrad wrote, in Under Western Eyes,

...in a real revolution the best characters do not come to the front. A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first...such are the chiefs and the leaders. The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures...may begin a movement- but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims...

Throughout this biography, Sebestyen subtly but firmly insists on his subject's historical continuity with both Russia's Tsarist past and its present. In this view, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were anomalous in Russian history only due to the patina of Marxism and atheism- but in the most essential aspects of rule, they were not anomalous at all. Lenin, on his second day in power, began to censor the press, while his wife Nadezhda set about purging libraries of such writers as Descartes, Kant, Schopenhauer and William James (we learn that Lenin hated Dostoevsky for being 'grossly, dangerously reactionary', as well as 'totally vile', but I can't help wondering if he ever read Besy/Demons, whose main character is a Lenin-like conspiratorial leader whom Dostoevsky based on Sergei Nechaev...the nihilist and revolutionary who, in turn, was a great influence on Lenin)- policies that wouldn't have seemed unusual under Nicholas II. Lenin established a secret police apparatus, the Cheka, who, though they were more brutal, based their methods on the Tsar's Okhrana (and later became the NKVD and then the KGB). He used terror and starvation against political opponents. A cult of personality was established around him, which he professed to dislike, but never took pains to prevent. After the attempt on Lenin's life, Zinoviev, Sebestyen writes, "supposedly an atheist...compared Lenin to Jesus Christ and said he was 'leader by the Grace of God'- as Orthodox priests had referred to the Tsars."

Talking recently with someone who grew up in the Soviet Union, I asked what her teachers had said about the February Revolution. She didn't seem to know what I was referring to, which I guess answered my question. Finally, she said, "oh, you mean 1905..." But no, I meant February, 1917 (or March, by the modern calendar). It's sad to think that for a few months in Russia, it must have seemed as though anything was possible- and how quickly and completely the promise of those months was eradicated. As Sebestyen writes,

Overnight the [February] Revolution had brought political freedoms never before known in Russia- and hardly ever since. People could say, write and read what they wanted, something they could not do a year later- nor their great-grandchildren a hundred years later.

In the days leading up to November 7th of last year, the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, I read a few articles that attempted to explain why the current Russian government was not treating the event with more fanfare. It was pointed out that, well, Lenin was a revolutionary after all, he brought down the state, and that's not the kind of thing that any government wants its people taking to heart. But on the other hand, Lenin fits comfortably into the historical narrative of modern Russia's leadership. As Sebestyen puts it,

The clear signal [in preserving Lenin's tomb] is to show historical continuity, the idea that Russia still needs- as it has always needed- a dominant, ruthless, autocratic leader, a boss, in Russian, the Vozhd.

This is what makes Lenin's life a tragedy- that he insured the continuance of the injustice he claimed to have been fighting against all his life, and in fact made things much worse. And this is even before we consider what Sebestyen, and it's hard to argue, calls Lenin's greatest sin- leaving a man like Stalin in position to take charge of the country.

[Chrissie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is thorough and clear. I am glad I read it. Maybe I ought to feel all excited about it, urging others to grab it immediately, but that is just not how I feel. The book is interesting, but it never grabbed my heart. I never felt I had to know what would happen next. Is that because there isn't all that much new information provided? There are tidbits about his wife, his longtime mistress and his mother, but I cannot say I got to know any of the women in his life well. Vladimyr Ilyich Ulyanov (1870 – 1924), better known as Lenin, his traits are made very clear. His deeds speak, even if we do not get into the man’s head.

The book starts with the October 1917 coup, probably to immediately grab readers' interests. Then it backtracks giving information about his family, his roots. We learn about his youth, about his older brother Sasha who was hung. From this point on, it moves forward chronologically through to his death. Both events in his life and the growth of the Bolshevik movement are followed. Bloody Sunday of 1905, the February and October Revolutions of 1917, the civil war, the defeat of the White Army, the conflict between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, the rebellion and slaughter of the peasants, the famine years, dramatic changes in directives, new economic policies, efforts against the Orthodox Church, his rages the growth of his fanaticism and the terror he wrought. An ideolog willing to do anything for the cause, always believing he knew best and for him always the ends justified the means.

This book is just as much about Bolshevism and the birth of Communism as it is about Lenin. It is equal parts history and biography. When appropriate, background information is provided - about Marx, about earlier dissent against the aristocracy (the Decembrists), Tsar Alexander II abolishment of serfdom in 1861, Tsar Nicholas II’s weak reign and overall poor political judgments.

It was very interesting to me to see the extent to which women in Russia were involved in politics, both before and after the October Revolution.

The audiobook is narrated by Jonathan Aris. I had difficulty keeping straight some of the Russian names, but I was helped a lot by the accompanying PDF file. Therein is found a list of principal characters with a few lines about each. There are photos. These too I appreciated. Maps, notes, a bibliography and acknowledgements are provided. Aris’ narration is at a good speed and easy to follow. I have given the narration four stars.

So, do I give the book three or four stars? I think it is worth four. It is to the point, clear and presents what is known today about Lenin, the women most important to him and the birth of Bolshevism. That we cannot get into heads of these figures is not the author’s fault; there is a lack of intimate source material and nobody left to interview.

I can also recommend the author’s book Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire. Four stars for both.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 5 out of 5]

When we think of the Soviet Union, we mostly think of it as a fully realized totalitarian state. We think of Stalin, of World War II and of the Cold War. Lenin is a shadowy figure to most of us, usually lumped in with the chaos that preceded and surrounded the Russian Revolution. As a result, biographies of Stalin and histories of the Cold War are a dime a dozen, but there are few objective biographies of Lenin. Lenin, though, was the true author of Soviet totalitarianism, and, more importantly, he, and he alone, was the indispensable man to the creation of Communism as a realized state, even if he did not live to see it. His life, therefore, is important, in that it illuminates history, and also in that it provides, in some ways, an instruction book for those seeking change today.

You would think I, at least, would know more about Lenin that I do. My father was a professor of Russian history, my mother’s family fled Communist domination in 1945, and I grew up through the ending stages of the Cold War. But really, until I read this book, by Victor Sebestyen, I knew very little, other than that Lenin was the fulcrum around which Communism turned from a mere extremist ideology of babblers and dreamers to an iron hand that nearly crushed the world. (And also that his body was, oddly, still embalmed and on display twenty-five years after Communism itself died.) Sebestyen’s book does an excellent job of covering Lenin’s life, in highly readable prose and without getting too bogged down in details. This book also has the advantage of being written after many archives were opened following the fall of Communism. Although those archives didn’t change the major outlines of Lenin’s life and career, Sebestyen adds quite a bit of personal flavor about Lenin that was missing until those archives became available, especially regarding his irregular relationship with his quasi-mistress, Inessa Armand.

I find myself finding Lenin strangely attractive, in these latter days, when everything old is new again. Not his goals, which are silly and pernicious, or his fanatical devotion to an ideology, which, no matter the ideology, is always a mistake. But his discipline and his methods of acquiring power show a purity and consistency of purpose which is totally lacking among conservatives today, who instead spend their days on the disorganized defensive, and he always demonstrated a grasp of reality which is totally lacking among progressives today. (Lenin also loathed modern art, and always dressed nattily, both to his credit.) I don’t think I’ll be putting up a portrait of Lenin anytime soon, or ever, but after reading this book, I am beginning to think his personality and methods will reward close study (although, as with Milton’s Satan, one must be on his guard not to be seduced).

Pre-Revolutionary Russia seems very far away from us. Poor, corrupt, and intensely authoritarian, wracked by violence on a scale incomprehensible to us (tens of thousands of government officials were assassinated in the last few years of the Romanovs’ rule, and then there was the whole World War I thing), it is difficult at first to see many parallels to our time. Still, there are more than a few, and even where there are no parallels, there may still be lessons. Sebestyen agrees, citing the loss, then as now, of “confidence in much of the West in the democratic process itself,” “Lenin would very probably have regarded the world of 2017 as being on the cusp of a revolutionary moment. . . . The phrases ‘global elite’, and ‘the 1 per cent’ are now used in a decidedly Leninist way. It is unlikely that Lenin’s solutions will be adopted anywhere again. But his questions are constantly being asked today, and may be answered by equally bloody methods.”

Lenin (that is, Vladimir Ulyanov, his real name) was born in 1870 and died in 1924, at only 53. He was born in Simbirsk, a sleepy provincial town, to bourgeois parents—his father was a successful civil servant in the education ministry, a moderate liberal whose attempts at education reform were largely frustrated by the 1881 accession of Alexander III (whose more lenient predecessor was assassinated). Lenin’s father died in in 1886, when Lenin was only 16, and the following year, his brilliant and idolized older brother, Sasha, was hanged for his role in an assassination plot against the new Tsar. This, along with the social isolation that descended as a result on the family, gave Lenin a lifelong hatred of the Tsars and the bourgeois, before he became a Marxist ideologue. I suppose this is yet another example of how personal events often shape great men, from Alexander Hamilton’s illegitimate birth on Nevis to Donald Trump’s poverty-wracked upbringing in Appalachia.

Lenin’s education was somewhat irregular, since he was denied the usual university placements due to his brother’s politics, and due to his own, which quickly became radical, although he was not a leader of any groups at this time. Still, he managed to become highly educated, while being formed by books like Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s "What Is to Be Done?", a strident work of fiction about an iron-willed revolutionary, which Sebestyen says is nearly unreadable today but which greatly affected Lenin, who consciously modelled himself on the book’s hero. Not that he completely ignored pleasures—his greatest was nature, especially walks in nature. (It is strange in these days of constant connectivity to read how Lenin, even at busy and critical times in his life, would take multi-week vacations in the country, doing nothing and being functionally unreachable by other Bolsheviks.) Naturally, he practiced as a lawyer for some time (successfully getting the necessary certificate of loyalty and good character from the Okhrana, the cruel but buffoonish Tsarist secret police, in 1891), but quickly became a full-time Communist agitator, a job he kept for the rest of his life.

Unlike most cult leaders, Lenin lacked interest in vices of the flesh. He was not corruptible by money, women, or, really, power. He didn’t smoke or party. His forte was discipline and focus. No doubt connected to this, from the beginning Lenin betrayed zero human sympathy beyond his immediate family circle. In 1892 he opposed famine relief in the Volga, because the famine was desirable to show that capitalism was incompetent and dying—never mind that thousands of peasants were dying too. This well illustrates ones of Lenin’s guiding principles, that “Our morality is new, our humanity is absolute, for it rests on the ideal of destroying all oppression and coercion.” As Ryszard Legutko has pointed out, there is a very significant overlap of theory and practice among so called “liberal democracy” and Communism, and one reason Communists were never punished is that the “liberal democrats” currently in control of most of the West had much more sympathy for Communism than for traditional currents of thought. More broadly, across the West today, any action, however damaging to real human beings, is justified by the Left by a call to “emancipation,” identical to Lenin’s, with the same disregard for actual people. Certainly, the Left would love to take advantage of a famine or any human disaster even now, if it could be tied to increased emancipation. Their disinterest in the epidemics of opioid addiction, dependency, and despair afflicting the deplorable, Trump-voting white lower classes is evidence enough of that. If they could cause a famine among those people, they would, and laugh.

Much of the book is taken up with narration of Lenin’s combat with other elements of the Left, tied to a never-ending whirl of conspiratorial international meetings, avoidance of arrest by various police forces, struggles for control of newspapers, and hard work to smuggle into Russia and distribute those newspapers. Those newspapers had a great effect within Russia and gave the Bolsheviks much of the power they accumulated. Such media not only sways opinion, but can create opinion from whole cloth, and also provide readers with a sense of comradeship and non-isolation, which is why today’s Left so aggressively and increasingly censors conservatives online. Naturally, Lenin was eventually arrested, and as was usual under the Tsars, merely sentenced to a few years of internal exile, which he used to study hard. As Sebestyen notes, “The Tsarist penal regime was far more benign for political prisoners than it would be in later years under the Soviets, where torture and summary execution were the norm.” (Not that it was all fun and games—plenty of people died as a result under the Tsars, especially those exiled to less salubrious places than Lenin was.)

Eventually Lenin left Russia, moving to Germany, then England, then Switzerland, all the while continuing revolutionary activities. He worked incessantly, primarily on writing, both journalism and books. As always, he stayed focused. Most of all, he consistently offered a simple message of “optimism and hope. He told his followers that they could change the world in the here and now, if they followed a set of essentially easy-to-comprehend steps and believed in a few fairly straightforward propositions.” Along the way Lenin collected various followers and allies (most of whom he later broke with), from Leon Trotsky to Grigory Zinoviev. Sebestyen covers all this with verve, adding bits and pieces of interesting information. For example, I did not know that that suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, lionized today, was a Communist, and a vicious one at that.

And, then, came Lenin’s moment, created by World War I and the incompetence of Nicholas II (whom Sebestyen regards with very strong distaste for his ineptitude). The economic collapse and dissatisfaction of the masses of peasant soldiers created the conditions without which the Bolsheviks would never have had the chance to grasp power (not that the soldiers had any interest whatsoever in Bolshevism—what they wanted was “anarchistic freedom,” and Lenin had that on offer, or so it appeared). But they, in the person of Lenin, did have that chance, and they grasped it. Not to overthrow the Tsar, as many ill-informed people think, but to overthrow the democratic successor government, in a coup vividly covered by Sebestyen, which succeeded even though its imminence was the worst-kept secret in Russia and it was incompetently executed.

It is a commonplace that the Kerensky government was run by fools, and that is very evident in the account given here. They responded, when the British offered to stop Lenin from returning on the “sealed train” provided by the Germans, that since Russia’s new government “rested on a democratic foundation . . . . Lenin’s group should be allowed to enter.” And rather than seizing Lenin when he arrived, killing him and throwing his body into a canal, as had been done with Rasputin and should have been done with him, they dithered. They did not know their enemy. This is not surprising, though. As history repeatedly shows, the vast majority of those who are threatened by bad people in any way, rather than meeting the threat with action, prefer to retreat into half-, or quarter-, measures, or into fantastical hopes that somehow they will be rescued by an external agency. As Benjamin Franklin, and not the Bible, said, “The Lord helps those who help themselves.” But helping themselves is something people usually find hard to do.

My main interests in Lenin are two, although they are closely related. My first interest is that Lenin shows us how the Left always thinks and operates, then and now, since Lenin first established the template for successful Left dominance. Therefore, studying Lenin has tactical value in the wars to come. We can closely examine how and why this is so through a particular ideological obsession of the modern Left, which this week has yet again raised its ugly head—gun control. (It is also an obsession of the past Left—one of the Bolsheviks’ first edicts was to confiscate all privately held guns, under penalty of summary execution for failure to comply, something that the odious Shannon Watts and Michael Bloomberg would, if they were being honest, doubtless completely endorse.) For the Left, gun control is justified not by its demonstrated, or even possible, benefits to society (though laughable claims along those lines are mouthed for propaganda purposes). Rather, it is justified by its purposes, which are to ensure that the ruled know that they are ruled, to ensure they continue to be ruled, and to signal to the rulers, the Left classes, their supposed moral superiority. Gun control is not a policy choice; it is the opium of narcissistic tyrants.

So, to take one example of Left tactics, Lenin continuously used violent language which, in his own words, was “calculated to evoke hatred, aversion, contempt . . . not to convince, not to correct the mistakes of the opponent, but to destroy him, to wipe him and his organization off the face of the earth.” Or, as Sebestyen characterizes it, “Communist Parties everywhere, even following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, learned that it made sense to play the man, not the ball—and how to do it with ruthless efficiency.” But Sebestyen is wrong—it’s not Communist Parties, it’s also the entire progressive Left, and has been since Lenin (whose broad program they have always supported). These tactics of “hatred, aversion, contempt” continue to be on full gruesome display at this very moment in the disgusting, hate-filled propaganda campaign being waged by the Left (who totally control the news-setting media, and thus the narrative, by deciding what constitutes “news���), to demand mass gun confiscation, in response to school shootings that occur largely because of their social policies. The good news, I suppose, is that Lenin was using a new tactic, successful largely because nobody knew how to respond to such tactics—either his Left opponents, whom he steamrolled, or his Right opponents. We do know how, and that’s to hit back twice as hard. We just have trouble executing the right tactics, because the Republicans are run by weak men who are happy to bow and scrape to their betters as long as they are thrown a few crumbs and invited occasionally to the right parties.

To take a second example, during a 1922 famine, “Lenin deliberately used the famine as an excuse to launch an assault on the clergy [to seize liturgical vessels and other metals]. . . . ‘We must seize the valuables now speedily; we will be unable to do so later because no other moment except that of desperate hunger will give us support among the masses.’ ” This use of unrelated, manufactured or fictional crises as the moment of action, whether because the masses are desperately occupied with their own concerns (as Rahm Emanuel famously openly admitted under Obama) or in order to propagandize the masses by manipulating irrational and immature emotions (as with gun control) is also a universal tactic of the Left, also largely invented by Lenin. Its modern counter is less obvious than the counter to violence in language and action, and probably requires structuring and maintaining permanent and binding organizational brakes on rapid legislative or executive action, the opposite of the “more democracy” constantly called for by the Left.

And to take a third, closely related but distinct, example, the Left does love themselves a good Reichstag fire. The Bolsheviks used a 1918 assassination attempt on Lenin by a (non-Bolshevik) leftist as an excuse to eliminate opponents and generally consolidate their power through a wave of mass terror. With gun control, the exact same tactic is used—not by killing opponents, or not yet, but by suspending all normal processes of republican debate and decision-making, demanding that “something must be done”—naturally, something that aligns perfectly with their pre-existing ideological goals and plans, no possible deviation from which can be discussed, much less implemented, and which must be implemented immediately, though no reason for the urgency is given, or can be given, other than the need to impose their desires on the rest of the nation. The classic example of this is the repeated use in state legislatures of “emergency” procedures to pass gun control measures after a shooting, formally eliminating any debate or public input, and demands for similar action at the federal level.

So far, so generic, really. The modern Left is unscrupulous and often evil, no doubt, but this is not news, and I am being repetitive, if you look at other writings of mine. More interesting, I think, is my second interest in Lenin—as a model for how a reactionary movement might acquire power in America. By definition, nearly, a reactionary movement contemplates a formal concentration and reallocation of power, rather than a formal diffusion, as some conservatives would have it. That is, if the Enlightenment project of ever greater autonomy and atomization is defective, and as part of that project the Left has consistently advanced their goal of concentrating power to themselves while pretending to increase democracy (that is, allowing democracy as long as it reaches the correct conclusions), breaking both the Left concentration of power and the forms of sprawling, ever-expanding democracy is necessary to remake the political system. Presumably this would involve some form of restricted franchise and a return to a mixed form of government (e.g., returning to the Senate being elected by state legislatures), but the details do not matter here. We can simply call it the “Program,” for now. The question is, how is the Program to be accomplished? And here Lenin is instructive.

I don’t mean Lenin in the substance of his ideas, essentially 100% of which were pernicious, and the vast majority of which were outright evil. Nor do I mean Lenin in the substance of his implementation, which, flowing from his ideas, necessarily implied and required terror and mass murder. Rather, I mean Lenin in his efforts to gain power so that he could implement his program, which is just about 180 degrees from the Program.

So, how is Lenin instructive? Here, a few thoughts. Lenin thought long term, but with an eye to the main chance, which he took when he got it, unlike most men in his position, who would have dithered. “There are decades when nothing happens—and there are weeks when decades happen.” “Timing is all.” But without his discipline and focus, he would have had no chance at all, willingness to risk everything or not. And, while an ideologue, he was willing to be flexible in his interpretation of theory, rather than getting bogged down in debating ideological purity (as Communist splinter groups, as well as conservatives, have always been prone to do, while the successful Bolsheviks, like today’s Left, paper over differences to achieve power). All these practices allowed Lenin to seize opportunities created by chance the mistakes of his enemies. “We made the Bolsheviks masters of the situation,” said Sukhanov, an opponent of Lenin [on the Left]. “By leaving the [1917] Congress [of Soviets] we gave them a monopoly on the Soviets. Our own irrational decisions ensured Lenin’s victory.” Yes, but only Lenin’s ability to take advantage made the Mensheviks’ mistakes matter.

[Review finishes as first comment.]

[Steven Z. · Rating 4 out of 5]

For many years historians have laid the blame for the oppressive and authoritarian regime that took root in Russia following its revolution on Joseph Stalin. Names like NKVD, GPU or banishment to Siberia, political purges were all associated with the Russian dictator. However, the credit for the darkness that pervaded the former Soviet Union first must rest at the feet of Vladimir I. Lenin. In 1973 Alexsandr S. Solzhenitsyn published the first volume of his GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, and the famous Russian dissident argued that the origin of Soviet terror and the police state belong to Lenin. This argument has been accepted by historians and in the latest biography of Lenin since Robert Service’s excellent monograph, Victor Sebestyen’s LENIN: THE MAN, THE DICTATOR, AND THE MASTER OF TERROR has taken that argument to a new level. According to Sebestyen, in his quest for power, Lenin “promised people anything and everything. He offered simple solutions to complex problems. He lied unashamedly. He identified a scapegoat he could label ‘enemies of the people.’ He justified himself on the basis that winning meant everything…..Lenin was the godfather of what commentators a century after his time call post truth politics.” Anyone who has paid attention to our current political climate can easily recognize practitioners of this authoritarian approach.

Lenin’s greatest crime aside from creating the precursor of the NKVD, the Cheka or the Soviet secret police, is leaving a man like Stalin to assume the leadership of the Soviet Union upon his passing in 1924. Lenin built a system that rested on the concept that political terror against any opposition was justified for the greater good. It was perfected by Stalin, but the ideas were Lenin’s. Sebestyen’s approach to his subject is a very personal one and he explores a number of issues in greater depth than previous books. He delves deep into the relationship between Nadezhda K. Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife who was vital to her husband and the revolution. She was in charge of regulating his explosive temper and at times erratic behavior. Her role was to maintain his health and be a sounding board for his ideas and writing. Next, the author explores Lenin’s relationship with his long time mistress, Inessa Armand. For ten years before Lenin died they had an on-off love affair. She was central to his emotional life, one of his closest aides, and was one of the best-known female socialists of her era. The three, Lenin, Nadya, and Inessa formed a ménage etois that was accepted by the women involved who had their own strong relationship.

Further, what separates Sebestyen’s approach from others is how he constantly reaffirms that the tactics and system developed by Lenin dominated Soviet rule until 1989, and has reasserted itself in the last decade. Lenin’s leadership traits seemed to have been handed down in succession from Stalin, in particular to Vladimir Putin. Lenin set up the Cheka and over the decades be it the GPU, NKVD, KGB or currently the FSB its purpose did not change; “protect the Party and its leadership from any perceived threat of subversion and to dispense revolutionary justice.”

Not long ago Steve Bannon stated that “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too.” The concept of deconstructing government that forms the core of Bannon’s political agenda rings very closely to that of Lenin. The parallels are clear and in Lenin’s case, underneath the superficial sophistication and personal charm he periodically put on display, he was capable of acts of appalling evil. Whether his approval of the use of firing squads to eliminate the opposition soon after coming to power the winter of 1917-1918, or his attitude toward the death of Russian soldiers against the Germans, his refusal to distribute land to peasants as promised and the creation of the Kulak class of land owners who he destroyed, the mass starvation that took place, and Lenin’s response to this terror, were all sacrifices that were acceptable in order to achieve the larger goals of gaining and maintaining power.

Sebestyen effectively reviews the spreading of revolutionary fervor in Russia among the bourgeoisie dating back to the Decembrist uprisings of 1825, the assassination of Alexander II, and the arrival of Marxism. The Marxist ideology did not really apply to Russia because of its peasant economy and majority. Lenin, brilliantly argued that Russia did not need to have an Industrial Revolution based on the working class as Marx argued, but could redefine Russian needs and developed through many books and pamphlets the justification of a revolution based on the peasantry. It is interesting to note that Lenin had no great respect for the working classes who he proposed to make the revolution before turning to the peasants.

Early on Lenin was radicalized by the Tsarist police’s murder of his brother Alexander (Sasha). From that point on he would work to overthrow the Tsarist monarchy. Though he was brought up in a bourgeois family and periodically lived on estates Lenin had nothing but disdain for the Romanov dynasty. Sebestyen’s analysis of Lenin’s personality, the courtship of Nadya, life in exile, be it Siberia, London, Paris, Geneva, the creation of the Bolshevik party, the role of Germany, the revolution itself and the years following may be well known, but the author’s insights, sources, and analysis separate his monograph from others.

Sebestyen’s examination of the role of newspapers in the revolution is important as he explains how the creation of Pravda and other outlets allowed Lenin to write editorials, and articles, and through a wide circulation was able to disseminate his ideas. Lenin had the ability to correct others and have them adopt his views as if they were his own, and the ability to inspire optimism and these traits enabled him to disarm the opposition and rally support among the masses. The use of newspapers, apart from Tsarist incompetence was major factor in creating the conditions for revolution.

The author pays a great deal of attention to fighting within the parties and the development of a between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. The arguments between the factions were intense and brutal as Lenin did not suffer fools gladly when people disagreed with him. Sebestyen also does a good job describing Nicholas II’s personality and reign. The Tsar was a weak individual who was not cut out to sit on the Romanov throne. “It is no exaggeration to say that every major decision Nicholas II took was wrong – from the choice of a wife, Alexandra, who compounded his own misjudgments, to his disastrous decisions on war and peace.” It is fair to say that the Tsar did the most service in the cause of revolution!

Lenin believed from 1900 on that a war between the capitalist countries was inevitable. When it finally came Russia was totally unprepared for a war of attrition. Within two months 1.2 million men were killed, wounded, or missing. This is a small sample of the disaster that would follow and led to the February abdication of the Tsar in favor of the Kerensky government and the final elevation of Lenin to power in October, 1917. Sebestyen drills down deeply in presenting Lenin’s strategy and ability to overcome many obstacles as the revolution approached. Once it did his willingness to work with the Germans to travel to Russia is brilliant as is his ability to overcome the opposition of Party members. The chapters entitled; “The Sealed Train,” and “To Finland Station” are emblematic of Sebestyen’s assiduous research and master of historical detail as he describes the negotiations, reactions to the agreement with the Kaiser’s government, and its reception in Russia. Sebestyen’s ability to integrate analysis into the flow of the narrative is an important aspect of his writing. Another important component of Sebestyen’s style is the use of notes at the bottom of each page which are also a fountain of historical information and analysis.

It is clear that once the revolution took place Lenin laid the groundwork to rule by terror. He was under no allusions when it came to the exercising of power to remain in control of the state. Lenin’s arguments and promises to the masses and his political opposition immediately went by the wayside as he closed down press outlets, purged those who disagreed, set up the Cheka, and justified his actions to prevent counter-revolution. At the Third Congress of the Comintern in 1921, Lenin argued that “We do not promise any freedom, or any democracy,” he did not disappoint and neither did his successor, Joseph Stalin.

The major figures of this period of Russian history are all presented, examined, and placed in their historical context. Whether Sebestyen is writing about Leon Trotsky, Georgy Plekhanov, Yuli Martov, Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, Yakov Sverdlov, Maxim Gorky, Nicholas II, Alexander Helphand (Parvus), a number of foreign diplomats and journalists, Joseph Stalin, and of course his wife and mistress we have a balanced account that lends to a greater understanding of the material presented. Lenin is the key figure as he created the basis for a one man tyranny. The terror that evolved was systematic and was not Stalin’s creation.

A key to authoritarian rule was the creation of a “cult of personality.” Stalin was an expert, Mao took it to even greater heights, but Lenin was the first. After an assassination attempt where he was wounded three times, a “cult of Lenin” would emerge as he had survived. This cult was used to rally support and further the Leninist agenda.

“The scholar Robert Service writes that “the forced labor camps, the one-party state…the prohibition of free and popular elections, the ban on internal party dissent; not one of them was to be invented by Stalin…Not for nothing did Stalin call himself Lenin’s disciple.” But why blame Lenin and Stalin, the foundation and structure of the Russian police state had been established by Nicholas I in the 1820s.”* This is the theme of Sebestyen’s new biography of Lenin which is sure to become one of the standard works of one of the most important figures of the 20th century.

*Joffe, Joseph, "The First Totalitarian,"NEW YORK TIMES, October 19, 2017.

[Pauly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mr Sebestyen has produced the most interesting and readable of biographies of Lenin. His main focus is on his subject's personal life, with surprising detail on his family. This is also the only biography to go in to detail about Lenin's relationship with Inessa Armand. The author, of course, deals with Lenin's political ideas and their evolution over time, especially when a means to grab power was in sight. My favourite book of the year so far.

[Vheissu · Rating 3 out of 5]

I should imagine that a person of Lenin's legacy deserves a multi-volume, exhaustive biography. Robert A. Caro, Irwin F. Gellman, Edmund Morris, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. have all written magisterial biographies about American presidents. Add these to the two volumes by Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler 1929-1941 (next on my reading list; Volume II only takes us to 1941!), and one appreciates definitive stories based on the latest available records. This is not that type of biography.

Sebestyen's goal is to correct the distortions and outright lies about Lenin's life that have been propagated by communists and anti-communists alike. Much of his source material comes from recently opened Soviet archives, and he has done a yeoman's job is piecing together the puzzles. For this he deserves credit. Unlike the other authors mentioned above, however, Sebestyen stays focused on his subject at the expense of contextual materials that might permit a fuller "appreciation" of Lenin. And the problem with that is, at least before the Bolshevik coup in 1917, Lenin was a pretty boring guy who led a mostly boring life, hiding out and living on the lam.

Before the coup, Lenin was a coward, liar, bully, cheat, unscrupulous and hysterical megalomaniac who openly cheated on his wife. After the coup, he didn't change much. He never attempted much less achieved any heroic or dramatic adventures in his pre-coup life. He had nothing to do with the 1905 revolution or the February 1917 revolution for that matter; he was surprised and unprepared for both. His literary accomplishments were rubbish, if prolific; not only have competent social scientists--including other neo-Marxists--debunked his theories, but he abandoned almost all of them once he became Soviet dictator. Thereafter, he controlled a vicious secret police that waged terror against other socialists, workers, and peasants, even butchering the Kronstadt sailors who arguably put him and the Bolsheviks in power in the first place. Evil doesn't begin to capture the fulsomeness of this most repugnant dictator. There are no protagonists in his story.

Sebestyen tries to put to rest some of the lingering historical questions about V.I., as his friends called him. Did he collaborate with the German military? Yes, although their goals were the same: defeat Tsarist Russia. The infamous sealed train trip was not secret and raised howls of angry protests from Socialists across Europe, including his Bolshevik supporters. The Germans bankrolled Pravda in 1917, which made Lenin a household name in Russia, and then bilked Russia out of its best territory at Brest-Litovsk. Almost to a man, the Bolshevik leadership denounced the peace agreement (even Stalin, at first) and questioned Lenin's loyalty to Russia. The treaty was nevertheless accepted at Lenin's insistence. If the guy wasn't a willing German agent, his behavior was indistinguishable from somebody who was.

Did Lenin order the assassination of the Tsar and his family? Almost certainly, although Sebestyen notes that Lenin was too clever to leave his fingerprints on the damning documentation. Did Lenin order the calamitous Soviet invasion of Poland in 1920? Yes. Did Lenin order the use of poison gas against the Whites in 1918 and revolting peasants in 1921? Absolutely. Did Lenin repeatedly order shooting anybody who stood in the way of the Bolshevik Party? Pretty much.

There is nothing whatsoever heroic about the subject of this otherwise well-written biography. If you want to be depressed, this is the book for you.

[Miglė · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vienu metu, jau išaušus, partijos nariai ėmė diskutuoti dėl naujos vyriausybės sudėties. Leninas svarstė, kaip ją reikėtų pavadinti.
- Neturėtume jos vadinti ministrais, - tarė jis. - Tai atstumiantis, nuvalkiotas žodis.
- Gal komisarais? - pasiūlė Trockis. - Nors jau yra daug komisarų. Gal liaudies komisarais?
- Liaudies komisarai. Man tai patinka. O kaip vadinsime vyriausybę?
- Liaudies komisarų taryba.
- Nuostabu, - šūktelėjo Leninas. - Šiuose žodžiuose justi revoliucijos kvapas.

Didelė savo apimtimi knyga, kurią gali įsimesti į tašę tik tada, kai tašė yra kuprinė. Lenino gyvenimas pasakojamas labai smulkiai, pasiremiant gausybe šaltinių ir liudijimų, taigi išvengiama perdėto psichologizavimo ar "sensacingos istorijos". Taigi skaitosi lėčiau, bet lyg ir kruopščiau. Pasakojamas kiekvienas Lenino gyvenimo periodas, ką jis veikė, su kuo susirašinėjo, kokį įspūdį aplinkiniams padarė.

Papasakosiu trumpai, kokį įspūdį man padarė Leninas iš šios knygos:

• Baisiai mėgo slapukauti, persirenginėti, kad išvengtų šnipų, siųsti užkoduotus raštelius. Tik duok Leninui kokį užkoduotą raštelį išsiųsti! Net jau būdamas valdžioje, kai slapukauti jau nebebuvo didelio reikalo, vis tiek mėgo raštelius pasiuntinėti.

• Labai pedantiškas. Kai nuvyko pas Londono socialistus, pasibaisėjo, kokiame jie šiukšlyne gyvena, mėto cigaretes ant grindų ir pan. Visi miestai jam buvo šiukšlynas, Paryžius šiukšlynas, Ciurichas šiukšlynas, o apie Londoną nėra net ką kalbėti.

• Užtat gamtą labai mėgo. Kai suprastėdavo sveikata ar nuo užsitęsusio streso imdavo labai dažnai kartotis įsiūčio priepuoliai (visas išraudonuodavo labai ir šaukdavo), su žmona išvykdavo į kokį kurortą ar šiaip kaimo trobelę ir vaikščiodavo ilgai gamtoje, maudydavosi ežere, Leninas gimnastikos pratimų ant turniko padarydavo.

• Į socialistų diskusijas įnešė plūdimosi madą. Iš pradžių visi būdavo nustebę - ateina Leninas, mandagiai su visais pasisveikina, o kai ateina metas diskutuoti: "Ir jūs klausysite, ką šitas šiknius jums sako? Šita kiaulė buržuazinė?!" - paskui visi priprato ir patys ėmė dailiai plūstis diskutuodami.

• Turėjo žmoną ir meilužę, bet kažkaip net neišeina taip sakyti, nes panašu, kad visi trys buvo artimi, gražiai sugyveno ir nebuvo didelės dramos tame. Good for them!

• Revoliucija jam buvo tikrai svarbu, bet žmonės - meh. Rusijoje visi badauja? Hmm... Ką čia apkaltinus?.. Ūkininkų daug, jie visur išsimėtę, gal... ūkininkus? Jo, tebūnie "turtingi" ūkininkai! Rašė įsakymus anuos visaip bausti ir kankinti, o kas jam.

• Kai visas naujai iškeptas komunistinis elitas ėmė gyventi apartamentuose, rengtis kailiais ir liuobti vyną, Leninas gyveno gana asketiškai, gal dėl to, kad jam nuoširdžiai patiko taip gyventi. Į kitus žiūrėdamas kraipė galvą (ta prasme, Rusija realiai badauja tuo metu), bet nieko nesakė. Užtat jei kas į posėdį vėluodavo dešimt minučių, gaudavo įspėjimą arba net piniginę baudą. Ko jau ko, o vėlavimo čia nebus.

• Gal irgi dėl to asketizmo, bet nemėgo, kad iš jo daro herojų ar beveik šventąjį, ypač po to, kai tokia šustra ponia jį pašovė. Bet ir vėl - nieko pernelyg nedarė, kad sustabdytų savo asmenybės kultą, nebent privačiai pasakydavo, kad negražu, draugai, ne dėl to kovojome.

• Patyręs insultą labai susinervino, kad negali padauginti 7 iš 12, visą dieną sėdėjo užsispyręs ir bandė atlikti šį uždavinį, galiausiai atliko paprastuoju būdu: 12 + 12 = 24, 24 + 12 = 36 ir t.t. Bet vis tiek suprato, kad nebebus iš jo daug naudos partijai, ir paprašė, kad žmona sugirdytų jam nuodų, bet jai nekilo ranka. Pakviesk Staliną, - tada sakė Leninas, - tas tai tikrai sugirdys. Bet ir Stalinas nesugirdė, gal pagailo, gal pamanė, kad naudinga dar kultinę figūrą gyvą palaikyti.

• Paskutinę gyvenimo dieną (po dar kelių insultų), Leniną išvežė į lauką pažiūrėti medžioklės. Jam labai patiko, pamatęs medžioklinį šunį net sugebėjo ištarti: "Tai šuo". O paskui vakare numirė. Greičiausiai Lenino paskutiniai žodžiai buvo "Tai šuo".

Šia gražia mintimi ir pabaigsiu įspūdžius apie šią knygą.

[Steven Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

The removal of statues honouring the Tsarist army, particularly those commemorating the defeat of Napoleon’s Grande Armée, is described as part of the Bolsheviks' broader campaign to erase symbols of the old imperial order. The purpose was to dismantle the cultural and historical legacy of Tsarism and replace it with a new revolutionary narrative that glorified the proletariat and the Bolshevik cause. By toppling these monuments, Lenin and the Bolsheviks aimed to signal a decisive break with the past, undermine the legitimacy of the Tsarist regime, and reshape public memory to align with their ideological vision of a socialist state. This was also intended to weaken any lingering loyalty to the old regime among the population and to assert the dominance of the new revolutionary order.
This should serve as a reminder to future generations..

Historical amnesia

[Alan Tomkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a political genius, and also a heartless, amoral psychopath obsessed with revolution and power over others. This volume is a near perfect biography of him. Excellent. Highest recommendation for fans of twentieth century history.

[Leftbanker · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was excellent. Even the opening chapters of the mundane aspects of the Soviet leader were illuminating as well as entertaining and served to define the man who would go on to lead the Russian Revolution. From the very beginning we are given a portrait of a driven and highly motivated man with a view towards destiny.

No matter how you look at the Russian Revolution and the people and events the led up to this epoch-changing event, it’s impossible not to see it as a thoroughly shameful undertaking and an enormous error on almost every level. About the only positive thing one could say about Lenin was that he wasn’t as horrible as Stalin—not exactly a high bar to surpass.

Lenin never understood that he needed to be a better human being than the Russian feudalist he swept under his tidal wave of oppression and myopia. He was also about a million times less clever than he thought he was concerning economic and political theory. His failures doomed the Russians from 1917 to the present. Putin would have fit in nicely among the brutality of Lenin’s revolutionary guard.

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very reputable biography; Sebestyen's book, as opposed to the book's publicity, is perfectly fair. I was, frankly, surprised by the lack of post-Cold War triumphalism or score settling. Lenin, it turns out, was a person. He was an odd one, and, in sum, a deeply harmful one, but also one who can pretty much be understood like all other human beings. He's marked by his history and the society of his time. His ideas aren't pretty, but they're perfectly comprehensible as reactions to events guided by a reasonable wish to make life better for people. Was he right? No. Was he Satan? No. Of course, if you yourself are full of post-Cold War triumphalist score-settling mania, you'll still get something out of this book, because nothing in it precludes you from drawing your own conclusions.

The book is also enjoyable; it's well written, and just flat-out fun. Also, great cover.

[Prashanth Bhat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lenin - Victor sebestyen

ಸರಿಸುಮಾರು ನೂರು ವರ್ಷಗಳ ‌ಮೊದಲು ಬದುಕಿದ್ದ ಒಬ್ಬ ಸರ್ವಾಧಿಕಾರಿಯ ಸುತ್ತ ಏನೆಲ್ಲ ಕತೆಗಳು ಹುಟ್ಟಬಹುದು? ಅದನ್ನೆಲ್ಲ ಒಡೆದು ನಿಜ ತಿಳಿವ ಬಗೆ ಹೇಗೆ? ಅದರಲ್ಲೂ ಆ ಸರ್ವಾಧಿಕಾರಿಯ ವಿರುದ್ಧ ಮಾತಾಡಿದರೆ ನಿಮ್ಮ ಮೇಲೆ ಹಲ್ಲೆ ಮಾಡುವಷ್ಟು ಆರಾಧಕರಿದ್ದರೆ?
ಗೆದ್ದವರೆಲ್ಲ ದೊಡ್ಡವರು ಎಂಬ ಮಾತಿನಂತೆ ಲೆನಿನ್ ಸರ್ವೋಚ್ಚ ನಾಯಕನಾಗಿ ಸೇರಿ ಹ��ದ ಇತಿಹಾಸದಲ್ಲಿ.
ಅವನು ನೇತೃತ್ವ ವಹಿಸಿದ್ದ ಕ್ರಾಂತಿ ಅದರ ಸುತ್ತಲಿನ ಕತೆಗಳಷ್ಟು ರಂಜನೀಯವಾಗಿರಲಿಲ್ಲ. ಅವನು ಎದುರಾ ಎದುರು ಹೋರಾಡುವಾಗ ಹೇಡಿಯಂತೆ ಓಡಿ ಹೋಗುತ್ತಿದ್ದ. ತಕ್ಕ ಮಟ್ಟಿಗೆ ಸುಖಿಯಾಗಿದ್ದ ಅವನ ಕುಟುಂಬ ಅವನ ಜೊತೆಗೇ ಇತ್ತು. ಅವನ ಅಣ್ಣನ ನೇಣಿಗೆ ಹಾಕಿದ ಮೇಲೆ ಅವನು ಬದಲಾದ. ಅವನ ಹೆಂಡತಿ ,ಪ್ರೇಯಸಿ,ತಾಯಿ ಇವರೆಲ್ಲರ ಜೊತೆ ಅವನಿಗಿತ್ತು.
ಇತರ ಸರ್ವಾಧಿಕಾರಿಗಳಿಗೆ ಹೋಲಿಸಿದರೆ ಅವನಲ್ಲಿ ಪ್ರಕೃತಿ ಪ್ರೇಮವಿತ್ತು. ಪರ್ವತಗಳ ಕಡೆ ಹೋಗುವುದೆಂದರೆ ಆಸಕ್ತಿ ಇತ್ತು.
ಅನೇಕರು ಅವನು ಜರ್ಮನ್ ಗೂಢಚಾರ ಎಂದು ನಂಬಿದ್ದರು. ಇದಕ್ಕೆ ರಷ್ಯಾಗೆ ಜರ್ಮನ್ ಕಡೆಯಿಂದ ಹಣ ಸಂದಾಯ ಆದ ದಾಖಲೆಗಳೂ ಇವೆ.
ಅವನಿಗೂ ಸ್ಟಾಲಿನ್‌ಗೂ ತೀವ್ರ ಭಿನ್ನಾಭಿಪ್ರಾಯ ಇತ್ತು.
ಸಾವು ಹತ್ತಿರವಾದ ಹಾಗೆ ಅವನು ಪಾರ್ಶ್ವವಾಯು ಪೀಡಿತನಾಗಿದ್ದ. ಒಳ್ಳೆಯ ಲೇಖಕ,ಒಳ್ಳೆಯ ಭಾಷಣಗಾರ,ಬುದ್ಧಿವಂತ ಆಗಿದ್ದ.
ಎಲ್ಲಕ್ಕಿಂತ ಮಿಗಿಲಾಗಿ ಅಧಿಕಾರ ಹೌದು ದೊಡ್ಡ ಮಟ್ಟದ ಅಧಿಕಾರ ಎಂಬ ಹುಚ್ಚು ಕುದುರೆಯ ಸವಾರಿ ಮಾಡಬಲ್ಲ ಸಾಮರ್ಥ್ಯ ಇದ್ದವನಾಗಿದ್ದ.
ಆದರೆ ಸ್ವಭಾವತಃ ಅವನು ಅಧಿಕಾರ ಚಲಾಯಿಸುವವ ಆಗಿದ್ದ.
ತನ್ನ ತಪ್ಪು ಇನ್ನೊಬ್ಬರ ಮೇಲೆ ಹಾಕಲು ದಾರಿ ಹುಡುಕುತ್ತಿದ್ದ.
ಭಯದ ಮೇಲೆ ದೇಶ ಕಟ್ಟಿದ.
ಈ ಜೀವನಚರಿತ್ರೆ ಇಷ್ಟೇ ಅಲ್ಲ.
ಒಂದು ಜೀವನಚರಿತ್ರೆ ಮಾಡಬೇಕಾದ ಬ್ಯಾಲೆನ್ಸ್ ಇದು. ಅದು ನಾಯಕರದಾದರೆ ಆ ಕಾಲಘಟ್ಟದ ಚಿತ್ರಣವನ್ನೂ ಕೊಡಬೇಕು.
ಇದು ಮಾಹಿತಿಯ ಜೊತೆ ಲೆನಿನ್‌ನ ಮನಸ್ಥಿತಿಯನ್ನು ಸೆರೆ ಹಿಡಿದ ಅದ್ಭುತ ಕೃತಿ.
ಇದು ನನಗೆ ಬಂದ ಬಗೆಯೂ ಆಸಕ್ತಿದಾಯಕ
ಇದರ ಹಾರ್ಡ್ ಕಾಪಿ ಐನೂರಕ್ಕೆ ಸಿಗುತ್ತದೆ ಅಂತ ಆರ್ಡರ್ ಮಾಡಿ ಅದು ಬರಬೇಕಾದ ಡೆಲ್ಲಿ ಲಾಕ್‌ಡೌನ್ ಆಗಿ ಎರಡು ತಿಂಗಳಾಗಿತ್ತು. ನಡುವೆ ಅಮೆಜಾನ್ ಚೆಕ್ ಮಾಡಿದರೆ ಅದರ ಬೆಲೆ ಎರಡು ಸಾವಿರಕ್ಕೆ ಏರಿತ್ತು.ಬಹುಶಃ ವಿದೇಶದಿಂದ ತರಿಸಬೇಕಾಗಿತ್ತೋ ಏನೋ? ಕೊನೆಗೂ ಬಂತು..ಕಾಯುವಿಕೆಯೂ ಸಾರ್ಥಕವಾಗಿತ್ತು.

[Leah · Rating 4 out of 5]

The man behind the cult...

This new biography of Lenin concentrates on the personal, though with Lenin the personal can't avoid being political. Sebestyen starts with a brief introduction in which he makes some comparisons between the events of 1917 and the rise of populist leaders today. Next up is a prologue in which Sebestyen tells of the night of the October revolution. This gives a flavour of the style of the book to come – it's very readable but it's written in a light kind of way that makes it seem almost farcical. The basic facts are the same as those in Trotsky's and Figes' accounts, but this prologue reads more like an Ealing comedy than a people's tragedy. At this stage I was a little concerned the book may lack depth, but happily, although the book has a much lighter tone overall than those other tomes, as it progresses Sebestyen doesn't shy away from or try to disguise the darker aspects of Lenin's personality.

The book follows the conventional linear structure of biographies, starting with Lenin's background and childhood and ending with the cult of Lenin which followed his death. We see him first as the son of a 'noble' – not quite the kind of aristocrat we would think of as a 'noble' in the UK, but more what would pass as upper middle or professional class. As a child and youth he was intelligent, a voracious reader and rather cold emotionally to people outwith his family. Sebestyen suggests that it was the execution of his brother, for attempting to assassinate the Tsar, that instilled in the young Lenin an interest in revolutionary politics and a deep hatred for the bourgeoisie who turned their backs on the family after this scandal.

Much of the book is taken up with Lenin's long years in exile, his personal relationships with his wife and later his mistress, and with those other budding revolutionaries in exile who would later become political allies or enemies. As Lenin's life progresses, Sebestyen discusses his various writings, giving a good indication of the development of his own ideology and the methods he would employ when the revolution began. Lenin is shown as entirely dedicated to the cause, something of a loner, hardworking, and dismissive of many of the intelligentsia who talked a lot but did little to practically advance the revolutionary cause. However, he is also seen as ensuring he steered clear of personal danger, often writing furiously from his safety in exile to encourage those back in Russia to act in ways that would put them in extreme danger from the state.

In truth, I found the long sections about his period in exile began to drag, but I feel that's because I'm always more interested in the political than the personal. So I was glad to get back to Russia as the Revolution dawned. In this section, there's quite a diversity in the depth of information Sebestyen gives. For instance, the account of the reasons for Russia going to war in 1914 feels incredibly superficial, as do the days between February and October 1917 – in fact, Sebestyen more or less skips right over the October Revolution. On the other hand, he goes quite deeply into the matter of Lenin's return on the “sealed train” and the question of how suspicion of German support played out. Clearly Sebestyen has concentrated most on those events in which Lenin had a direct involvement, which makes sense since this is a personal biography of the man rather than a history of the period; and it's actually quite interesting to see how absent he was during some of the major points of the revolution – that personal safety issue again. Overall there's still enough information to allow the book to stand on its own, but a reader who wants to understand the ins and outs of the revolution will have to look elsewhere for a more detailed account.

The same unevenness is shown in the period following the revolution – some events are given more prominence than others. The murder of the Romanovs, for instance, is given in some detail and with a rather odd level of sympathy (terrible, perhaps, but no more so than the starving millions, the people driven to cannibalism, the widespread torture and the 7 million children left orphaned, surely). On the other hand, the account of the civil war is an unbelievably quick run through – it almost feels as if Sebestyen had rather run out of steam by the time he reached this stage. Sebestyen finishes with a description of the cult of Lenin and how his legacy (and earthly remains) were used by subsequent Soviet leaders to bolster their own regimes.

All-in-all, I found this an approachable and very readable account, lighter in both tone and political content than some of the massively detailed histories of the period, but giving enough background to set Lenin's life in its historical context. And it undoubtedly gives an intriguing picture of the contrasts in his personality – a man who seemed to love and engender love from those near to him, but whose friendship could easily turn to enmity when he felt betrayed, and who could show great cruelty in pursuance of his political aims. So despite my criticisms of the superficiality of the coverage of some of the historical events, I feel it achieves its aim of giving us a good deal of insight into Lenin the man. Recommended.

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Bolshevik seizure of power and how they held onto it was one of the most improbable events in history. How could a relatively small group of professional revolutionaries take over the largest country in the world? With all the chaos Russia In the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution, it seemed the Bolsheviks would go the same way as the provisional government that they had displaced. Victor Sebestyen focuses on the man who led it all, Vladimir Lenin.

The Bolsheviks had dedicated their entire lives to revolution. Yet when the revolution happened, the one that brought down the Tsar, Lenin and the other leading Bolsheviks were miles away. In the end, Lenin taking power was far more of a coup than a revolution.

Lenin spent his days writing revolutionary pamphlets and articles, studying Marxist theory and, of course, arguing with other Marxists. That last one occupies much of the space of this biography before 1917. Lenin had no experience in governing, military affairs, or running an economy. All of which he would be forced to face in 1917. His lack of experience made his eventual success all the more unlikely (the same goes for the other Bolsheviks). All of this was compounded by the fact that Lenin had lived much of his life in exile, away from Russia. Lenin experienced great freedom to do his work in London, rights that he would deny to those who lived under his regime.

Germany funded and arranged Lenin’s return to Russia. Because of this, Lenin was accused of being a German agent. Although he wasn’t, his actions certainly made it look that way, especially with the favourable peace terms of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. Backing the Bolsheviks was in Germany’s interest at the time. But the tactic ended up backfiring on Germany, as the regime Lenin established would go to subjugate half of Germany under Stalin (which was Hitler’s worst nightmare).

Russia was exhausted by the First World War, and much support for the Bolsheviks came from Lenin’s promise to bring peace. But in reality he brought another war. Fighting Germany was over, but Russia descended into civil war. Lenin would have carried his revolution to all of Europe, if not for the Battle of Warsaw. One can make the case that the sufferings of the Russian people during the civil war, starvation and terror from both the Red and White armies, was worse than that of the First World War.

During the civil war, Lenin ensured the Tsar and his family were cruelly executed. While there is no direct documentary evidence to link Lenin to the crime, the decision would not have been made without Lenin’s approval. The Tsar had abdicated the previous year and had no ability to impact what was happening. His children were completely innocent.

Revolutions have a tendency to eat their own children. A prime example of this was the brutal suppression of the rebellion by the Kronstadt sailors, who had previously been the most loyal supporters of the Bolsheviks. The Kronstadt sailors were essential in the October coup that brought the Bolsheviks to power. The massacres ordered by Lenin paved the way for what Stalin would later do. Stalin would purge all the Bolsheviks of 1917. Those who advocate revolution today would do well to remember this history, and this book is an excellent place to start. Violence was characterised the communist regime from the outset.

One drawback of this biography is that author never considers the possibility that Lenin’s testament was forged, as has been argued by Stephen Kotkin. In the testament, Lenin was critical of all the power that Stalin had acquired. That was especially strange, as it was Lenin Stalin was Lenin’s closest confidant in the Politburo during his final illness.

[Marks54 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a strong one volume biography of Lenin that is distinguished by making use of newly opened archives that reveal some of the sensitive documents of the early life of the Soviet government that had been hidden up until the fall of the USSR. These do not produce a more flattering picture of Lenin but rather show that he was very much a primary initiator of the violent autocracy for the revolutionary that Stalin perfected within a decade of Lenin’s death. They show him to be quite flexible in modifying his tactics to fit what he saw as the political needs of the moment.

The picture of Lenin that Sebestyen presents generally fits with that available in a variety of histories of the Russian Revolution and the USSR. While Lenin was flexible, he comes across here as more important because of his inflexibility at key moments, such as after his return to Russia in 1917.

There are several aspects of Lenin’s life that were just interesting enough but could have stood more discussion. One was how Lenin handled administrative issues that arose in building a state apparatus from next to nothing. One can marvel at the longevity of the Soviet State, but it did eventually go out of business and one of the reasons was a bureaucracy that would have made the Byzantine Empire seem downright entrepreneurial. It seems possible here that some poor or thoughtless decisions at the start ended up having large unintended consequences at the bureaucracy grew to encompass so much. The interplay of the personal and organizational turned out to be really important in this stretch of Soviet history, such as in the details of Stalin being named General Secretary by Lenin and what that decision led to after Lenin. Kotkin’s second volume of his Stalin biography is now out, so I will have to work through that to find out more. This also ties to the initial decisions regarding Lenin being immortalized and transformed into a religious presence, which perhaps benefitted Stalin more than it did Lenin.

Related to this is the period of compromise with capitalism in the 1920s - the New Economic Policy. This does not receive that much treatment in Sebestyen’s account but it was long remembered and was very influential in setting the course for economic development in China under Mao and later under Deng. Thoughts of alternative futures rapidly come to mind.

The personal details of Lenin’s life are interesting, as far as they go, but there is not much new here. Merridale’s book of Lenin’s train trip back to Russia from Switzerland is more interesting.

Overall, this is a good book to read for the anniversary of the revolution and worth the effort.

[Laurent Franckx · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have forgotten the name of the ancient Greek who wrote that a new generation of young men had grown up, who had never experienced a war first-hand, and were therefore eager to try another one.
I sometimes feel that the same is happening with extreme political ideologies. While media mostly focus on the rise of a new generation of far right extremists, we should not be blind to the enduring sympathy felt in some circles for Marxism-Leninism. While few people would dispute nowadays that Stalin was a ruthless mass murderer, there is still a tendency to see Stalin as the person who betrayed the legacy of Lenin.
I have always thought this was complete nonsense. Anyone who was willing to look at the facts, knew that Stalin only perfected a system of terror that was put in place by Lenin.
Sebestyen's biography of Lenin should take away any remaining doubt.
Lenin's fanaticism, intolerance and complete indifference to human suffering if it could serve the "good cause" was already widely known when he was in his early twenties, and put off many of his allies. Sebestyen also shows convincingly that Lenin could have been stopped, but the people who could have done so didn't think of him as a serious menace until it was too late. All this sounds probably familiar to anyone who has ever read a biography of Hitler.
Sebestyen's book is at its best in his discussion of Lenin's long rise to power. Lenin's family background was completely new to me, as was the personal trauma that transformed an a-political teenager in an overnight revolutionary radical: the execution of his elder brother for participating in a botched attempt to assassinate the Czar. Actually, this was one of the most remarkable recurring themes in the book: the role of purely personal rancor in the radicalization of people who pretended to believe in a "scientific" theory of the impersonal forces that shape history.
The discussion of what happened after the revolution leaves much more interesting issues unaddressed. It is well know that in the three decades that Lenin prepared his grab for power, he barely thought about the practical organization of the ideal society he would create with his dictatorial powers. Unfortunately, Sebestyen continues to focus on the personal aspects of Lenin's live and how he organized a merciless system of political repression, but barely discusses the economic policies implemented by the revolutionaries. The concepts of "war communism" and the "new economic policy" are addressed in just a few paragraphs, where I would have rather have seen complete chapters devoted to them. Well, maybe we should accept that the book is a biography, not a comparative economic study.
All in all, this book is required reading for everyone. It reminds us that even if you have the best intentions in the world (Sebestyen never questions Lenin's personal integrity), you can still end up a mass murderer. It has been said that you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, but communism has destroyed dozens of millions of human eggs, and only produced a burned omelette.

[Max Nova · Rating 5 out of 5]

Few men had a larger impact on the 20th century than Lenin, yet in all of my formal education he received no more than a passing mention. The accessible and balanced "Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror" started to fill in this egregious blank space in my mental map. Lenin's philosophy can be summed up as "the ends justify the means" and Sebestyen's excellent biography forces us to confront the terrible consequences of this idea. As architect of the Russian Revolution, Lenin is responsible for human suffering on a scale unmatched by almost anyone else in history. Yet for him, it was largely theoretical - he only saw three dead bodies in his whole life. Sebestyen's heavily researched book lends depth to this complex and tragic man who "desired the good... but created evil."

Lenin's personal life surprised me. I would never have guessed that his favorite book growing up was "Uncle Tom's Cabin" or that he loved reenacting the American Civil War (always taking the side of the Union!) with toy soldiers. He was an avid reader and chess player. His domestic life was irregular, to say the least. He was part of a ménage à trois, and his lover (Inessa Armand) exercised a major influence on him.

As he grew up, he became a complete workaholic (17+ hours a day) and prolific writer (over 10 million words in his lifetime). His capacity for intellectual effort and organizational management was astounding - in line with that of Alexander Hamilton, Robert Moses, and John D. Rockefeller. Given the chaos of the time, it's remarkable that he ran as tight of a ship as he did. It probably didn't hurt that his HR strategy was to threaten to "line up and shoot" underperformers.

Sebastyen expertly guided me through the bewilderingly complicated cast of characters in the chaos of the Russian Revolution. I was surprised by how much of a shitshow it was. Half the reason the revolution succeeded was because "most of the people didn’t care which side won." The murder of the Russian royal family was particularly brutal and sloppy. Yet the intrigue and violence surrounding the revolution snared the whole world in its web. The whole German "sealed train" scheme continues to give rise to conspiracy theories and the British gave over 100 million pounds (in 1917 dollars!) of aid to the anti-Bolshevik Whites. And in a wild twist, the leader of the Whites, Alexander Kerensky, ended his life as a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution!

What will stick with me most from this book are Lenin's failures. Tactically, he made the classic dictatorial blunder of muddled succession planning. But more importantly, his strategy of "the ends justify the means" imposed terrible suffering upon the Russian people. In many ways, this core guiding principle is the opposite of Western law in which we consider a man innocent until proven guilty. In Lenin's world, it was "better that 100 innocent people are killed than that one person who is a danger to the Revolution remains free and a potential threat." Sebestyen's biography won't let us look away from the results of this philosophy.

I want to end this review with a Lenin quote that sounds eerily modern - I wouldn't be surprised at all to read this in a Facebook post today. Let us not forget the past.

Our morality is new, our humanity is absolute, for it rests on the ideal of destroying all oppression and coercion. To us, all is permitted, for we are the first in the world to raise the sword not in the name of enslaving or oppressing anyone, but in the name of freeing all from bondage... Blood? Let there be blood, if it alone can turn the grey-white-and-black banner of the old piratical world to a scarlet hue, for only the complete and final death of that old world will save us from the return of the old jackals.’

Full review and highlights at https://books.max-nova.com/lenin

[Shahin Keusch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written and very informative. Personally didn't know much of Lenin and so am glad to have read this book. While a socialist, his way of ruling would seem very familiar to todays world of Trump and alternative facts. I always look at these books on dictators in 2 ways. Their actions and their personality. And Lenin fails in both. He commited many sins, but also did not seem to have any good qualities.

This was a easy and quick read. Highly recommended.

[Sengeset · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was inspired to read this book after encountering praise of him and the communist regime several times on online chat forums. I had always heard that the man Lenin was a horrible tyrant and far from the benign "hero of the people" as he is portrayed in some circles. So, I decided to read this portrait of the legendary Russian revolutionary to really find out what he was all about.

Well, the reality is far worse than I expected. Lenin at one point or the other crossed off every single thing on the "Ruthless Authoritarian 101"-checklist

Make populist promises only to renege on them or do the opposite once in power? Check

He promised the farmers "peace", "bread" and "land" and instead started waging a brutal grain requisition campaign on the farmers when they did not want to sell their grains at unreasonable prices. 98% of farmers at this time were small-holders, not the greedy kulaks they were portrayed as.

Throwing former allies under the bus? Check

The most ruthless example of this is the crushing of the Kronstadt navy protests in 1921. These sailors helped him get into power and were even praised as exemplary revolutionaries. Once they wanted a freer press and a certain degree of democracy their demands were not even considered, they were ruthlessly massacred.

Demanding absolute loyalty on pain of death? Check

For an ideology nominally based on the "rule of the proletariat", communism a la Lenin turned out to be nothing more than a personality cult and a strict dictatorship veiled in the rhetoric of liberty for the working class. There are several instances where minor or major factions are bloodily repressed for so much as daring to criticize Lenin. He did not want any challenges to his power, certainly not from the people he professed to represent. Power was highly centralized from an early stage.

Creating a brutal secret police to keep people in check? Check

Swiftly after the 1917 revolution the predecessor to the KGB - the Cheka - were introduced into the daily lives of Russians. They could largely do as they wanted, since the definition of "class enemy" remained vague. At some point they just killed people at random and excused it with overly zealous revolutionary fervour.






Not only was Lenin a ruthless tyrant, in some instances he even threw former key allies under the bus when they got uppity.

[Liviu · Rating 5 out of 5]

it's very good - a little bit too sympathetic for my taste but without illusions and noting the tens if not hundreds of millions that died both as a consequence of the communists regimes spawned by Lenin's example (and the author makes it clear how the soviet state was built in the image of Lenin and while Stalin was a more "personal" monster as he was sadistic, cruel and a hands on torturer and murderer and Lenin was the "kill them in batches" abstract guy as personally he retained his polite aristocratic upbringing all his life, the main characteristics of the communist state from the secret police, the central planning, the new aristocracy of the party men, the destruction of the peasantry and the church, the legal theft of all property to little things like the development of chess and the neglect of arts outside of socialist realism all came from Lenin, his tastes, his theories and his interpretation of politics) and also of all the dictatorial regimes that rose on the will and charisma of an outsider in the right circumstances again following Lenin's example that a small dedicated group of killers with a single minded leader and an ideology that works in the corresponding historical moment can take power against all odds

definitely recommended

[Paul Crosby · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a general rule, I try to take note of the general ideological persuasion of an author, especially when it conforms a little too neatly with my own biases. Truth be told, i don’t know much about Sebestyen, though the dedication to Robert Conquest at the very end, along with some level of association with the Hoover Institute, should be enough to prepare the reader for a biography that leans negative on the subject matter.

So yes, this is a biography critical of the man, and told from a western and anti-communist perspective. Nonetheless, the book reads like a factual account, and is very engaging. Bottom line: I learned a lot about Lenin, which was the point.

He was a paradox. Some are cliche for his personality type (e.g. inflexible intelligence, cynical idealism, etc)

But there is a reoccurring theme that is especially interesting: he seems to have been driven by assuaging collective suffering, but lacked empathy for people as individuals. Maybe this was an inevitable outcome of his Marxism, but I bet it’s more interesting than that.

I was reminded of a character quirk highlighted by Dostoevsky in either Demons or The Brothers Karamazov. I can’t reproduce it word-for-word, but the gist was this: the more fervently held the zeal of the revolutionary, the more he intolerable he finds individual people. In other words, abstract love for mankind is inversely proportional to love for the individual. Perhaps Stalin hinted at similar deterioration of empathy when he said that the death of one is a tragedy and the death of millions is a statistic (if he even did say that). In the case of Lenin, this trait was borne out by his sister’s shock at his indifference toward charitable giving and other attempts to alleviate suffering. In comparison to the hastening of history toward its inevitable end, basically nothing.

Another horrifying episode was the way in which Lenin dispensed with the Romanov’s, children and all. It just goes to show that those who do make history commit acts which are horrifying to the rest of us proletariats

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exactly what a solid biography, for a "popular" audience, should aspire to. Sebestyen tells the saga in efficient, clear, and thoughtful observations. Each chapter's endnotes comment pithily and at times ironically or wittily on the contradictions, testimonies, cover-ups, and truths, many of course which either came to light or have been obscured since the events, bookending the USSR's 75 years.

Sebestyen opens at the supposed takeover of the Winter Palace, itself staged as hardly any Tsarists remained to oppose the chaotic Reds. Management of the public performance for maximum effect serves as a synecdoche for the mastermind taking on the name of Lenin. He's revealed in a style accessible but never glib, articulated without lapsing into surmise or sarcasm, and aware depiction.

The cynicism sears. The manipulation of the crowd lingers as we see leaders enact his same savvy strategy. The justification of saying whatever it takes not to lose control, to cow rivals, to silence opponents. It is all here. Wisely, Sebestyen doesn't belabor comparisons, but he leaves the lessons for us to figure out. Don't miss the photos, as they demonstrate vividly the personalities let loose.

[Olaf Koopmans · Rating 3 out of 5]

Struggling to get to 3, more like 2,5 stars.
This biography is a very accessible account of the life of one of the most important historical figures of the 20th Century. But at the same time this makes it a unbalanced and at times sloppy account, which at many points even struggles to be a real biography, turning in to a more general history of the Russian Revolution.
And although Sebestyen has no calms about portraying Lenin as a ruthless dictator, you can not help but feel that in some ways he admires him for what he has achieved and at some points even tries to make up for his horrible deeds. One reason for having a milder view about the bloody acts of Lenin is that at least he didn't enjoy them like Hitler or Stalin. Another apology is that he didn't do it for self enrichment, power or personal cult, but always for the cause he believed in. Like that makes it any better. As they say, 'The road to hell is paved with good intentions'. Well if there's one person who was the living example of that, then it's Lenin and all the the leaders and dicators after him that he inspired.
Another point which makes it a somewhat messy book to read, is that Sebestyen uses a lot of quotes from Lenin's contemporaries to make an obeservation or analyses. For one thing it shows a lack of courage to make your own conclusions and instead hide behind other people's view's. But besides that, it takes a great writer to make a good flow from your own writing to crossover to used quotes and back again to your own writing. Sadly Sebestyen doesn't have that skill, which makes reading this book sometimes like riding on a broken road, with potholes and different patches of surface. You'll get there, but it's not a smooth ride.
The main fault of this book however is the lack in structure and rhythm of the story he tries to tell. At some points Sebestyen get's lost in details and is sidetracked by unimportant stuff. At other points he wants to tell the whole story of the Revolution, losing track of Lenin. Editorial wise it's not a great book as well. Some chapters are 1,5 Page, some ramble on for ever.
But the most annoying thing in this biography is the use of explanatory notes by the writer. He has no clue what the 'does or don't's' are in this. And apparantly his editor didn't have the guts to correct him.
First of all, there are way to many. That should be a red flag straight away. Some parts of the book have explanatory notes on almost every other pages, and some notes take up a fifth to sometimes half of the pages.
Besides that, Most of the explanatory notes are unnecesary. The major part of them gives extra information which has nothing to do with the story at all, and sometimes gives the impression that they're only there for the writer to show off his knowlegde.
And then there are a lot of notes as well which actually are important, but should have been written in to the main narrative in the first place.
Of course there are also a few notes which actually do what explanatory notes should do: A short segment of additional Information. Interesting enough to mention, but not interesseting enough to hold up the story. But they are a minority.

The books has some nice insights about the way Lenin started a conflict cult in the Socialist and Communist Groups at the time of their coming of age, which still is the major form of handling subjects up to this day. And although I'm not sure Lenin was the sole responsible one for the culture of 'Playing the man, instead of the ball', it is an interesting point worth looking at, because up to today we in the Western World are still struggling to get around the way a former Communist Countrie like Russia is handling International relations and Conflicts.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

When The Spouse and I visited Russia in 2012 (well before anti-Russian sentiment reached its current peak) we were surprised to see that statues of Lenin were still intact and still in place. And by coincidence, as I was drafting this review, the Twitterfeed of the often hilarious @SovietVisuals offered an example that shows that young people still hold Lenin in regard. Since it goes some way towards explaining this persisting affection for the leader of the Soviet Revolution, this new biography, Lenin the Dictator by Victor Sebestyen is timely, and not just because of the 100th anniversary of the revolution. As I said when reviewing Tony Kevin’s Return to Moscow, IMO in our messy interconnected world, it’s now more important than ever to understand countries like Russia.

Lenin the Dictator is also very good reading. From the first chapters about Lenin’s childhood to the story of the revolution itself, this book kept my attention throughout. Just occasionally I had some doubts about the author’s objectivity*, but by and large this biography seems to be a balanced account of the life, achievements and flaws of one of the most significant figures of the twentieth century. Inevitably, the story of Lenin’s life is also the story of the Russian Revolution, and this book is also a clear and lucid explanation of how this remarkable event took place.

Because it was remarkable. The Bolshevik revolution could have faltered at so many different moments in time, but Lenin as its leader was lucky that it happened at all and was then utterly ruthless in maintaining it in its early days. And yet in some ways, revolution of some sort was inevitable: Russia in the early twentieth century was an economic basket case and there had been agitation for reform for decades. Sebestyen makes it clear that the collapse of the Romanov dynasty was brought about by their own stupidity, incompetence, refusal to change and the epic, thoughtless scale of the bacchanal, the drinking and promiscuity, [which] went beyond decadence. One after the other the Tsars had presided over a country that desperately needed political and economic reform, and they maintained their grip on power with ruthless repression that was a model for the Bolsheviks to subsequently follow. Lenin’s own brother was hung at the age of twenty-one for agitating for political reform, and the entire family was one of thousands exiled to keep the activists out of Petrograd (Leningrad/St Petersburg).

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/05/23/l...

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have had a strong curiosity to learn more about the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc lately. I lived in Hungary and the Czech Republic, so I saw the influence from that period after World War II. My apartment in the Czech Republic was influenced by communist architecture and design. It was very simple. I worked with and met people who told me their stories growing up during those times. I have friends who grew up in East Germany. I also knew someone who was a huge fan of Lenin. Because of my experiences, I want to learn more.

Before reading this book, I had an idea about Lenin and what he had done. Since I would like to learn more about Soviet history, I figured I would begin with the man that started it all. He was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov and his mother thought he was mentally challenged because his head was huge and disproportionate to his body. However, he did very well in school. His brother was a revolutionary and was executed by the tsar for his actions against the state. Ironically, Lenin's parents were not very political at all and even supported the Russian monarchy. Lenin read Marx and we all know what happened next.

Victor Sebestyen's writing style kept me captivated. I devoured this book and wanted to keep reading. As I said before, we know the ending of this story, but I learned so much about Lenin and the writing just made me not want to put this book down. I generally skim parts of biographies because I don't find every aspect of someone's life interesting, and I am including my own life in this. However, Lenin was a fascinating figure. This easily makes my top biography list along with Edmund Morris' Teddy Roosevelt trilogy, Volker Ullrich's Hitler biographies, Caro's Lyndon Johnson's books and Chernow's Grant book.

This book was well researched, and it offered new things. After all, this is the first Lenin biography published in two decades. I wanted to learn new things and be engaged. Sebestyen achieved his goal. It is a readable book that teaches a lot of valuable information.