Lenin: A Biography

by David Shub

"One of the very few books, absolutely indisoensible to the student of contemporary history and of international relations, of Russia and of social revolution. At the same time, it is so full of historic drama, of incredible figures, of the Czar's secret police, of plots stranger than fiction, that it will fascinate the general reader."
-Hans Kohn, New York Times Book Review
"It must be read by everyone who wants to penetrate the minds and analyze the behavior of the men who created the most powerful and dangerous machine in the world today"
-L.J. Schweitzer, Catholic World

Genres: Biography, History, Politics, Russia, Nonfiction, Historical, Economics

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1948

Reviews

[Tim Pendry · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little caution is required in approaching this book, published first in 1948 and then again in a revised edition in 1966, but it has some significant merits.

The caution arises from it being a book by an exiled Russian Menshevik opposed to the Bolshevik faction who was not present during the 1917 Revolution and who is writing from the US at the peak period of the Cold War. It also includes no research after the date of revision.

So, why is it on the reading list? Partly because Shub was part of the pre-revolutionary Marxist social democrat community and understands what he is studying, partly because the book is filled with clearly well evidenced factual material and partly because he strikes me as honest.

Taking the caution as read, Shub appears to paint a fair warts and all picture of what I allowed myself to be quoted to Russian TV journalists recently as the 'greatest professional revolutionary in history'. Shall we start with the negative or the positive? I think the negative first.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (aka Lenin) was a monomaniac whose cold ruthlessness showed a remarkable disregard for the effects of his mission. He treated adult human beings as a means to an end with consummate cynicism even if his ends were (theoretically) noble.

The degree of absolute personal will bears comparison with a younger politician - Adolf Hitler. Both appeared to have a remarkable capacity to take possibly life-terminating risks and neither can be said to have lacked personal courage.

If anyone has any doubt about Lenin's ruthlessness, it can be found in his role as political organised crime boss (to raise funds before the revolution), his cynical collaboration with the Germans, his conduct towards the Russian Constituent Assembly and his advocacy of terror.

After that, it might seem difficult to say anything positive about him but Shub still manages, fairly, to point out that the private man was not a dullard (except about the arts), could sustain friendships and maintain a rather modern polyamorous relationship.

Still, and this is where a dash of doubt about Shub's polemic comes in, Shub is good on the man and his circle and the machinations of politicians but one senses that he has forgotten why Lenin existed and what little choice he had once a personal decision for social change had been taken.

There is, of course, the matter of an original psychological flaw - from his deep personal response to the arbitrary state murder of his brother arose something like a lust for revenge that he cloaked in ideology and in an alternate morality unrecognisable to most people.

There is an interesting question why the a-moral ends-directed politics of revolutionary international and national socialism emerged to wreak such destruction at this time. I have my ideas but not for this review.

What has to be admitted in the case of Lenin (regardless of the fact that Bolshevik brutality would prove more bloody and terrible than anything Tsarist since the days of Ivan) was that he would not have existed if it were not for an incompetent, thuggish and arbitrary regime.

The point was not that his brother was murdered but why he was murdered. His idealist middle class brother was part of a generation that seemed to show that Tsarism had left the vast majority in hopeless misery and was not reformable.

There could be many conclusions to this which are played out in the various factions that would sit in the Duma or just outside it but the Bolshevik one - of a seizure of power by the selfless representatives leading edge of the poorest in society was not intrinsically an incorrect analysis.

What does not really come out in Shub's book is just how awful the condition of the Russian people was in 1917 (indeed had been for centuries) and how urban intellectuals seemed not to understand that hunger must lead to rage and revenge.

We have already reviewed Kut Hamsun's 1890 book which was set in Norway, far more developed than Russia, What is striking about that book is not just the gnawing physical pain of the hungry but the resentment, hatred and desire for revenge on the community.

The Bolsheviks, like the National Socialists later, tapped deep into this justifiable rage, hatred and resentment that had long since moved on from the 'opiate' of religion. Therein lay the genius of Lenin - to use his high intelligence to create an infrastructure that could focus this rage.

There was nothing inevitable about the Bolshevik seizure of power. Any establishment under any normal circumstances can feel reasonably sure that, although a different type of middle class may dominate, the middle class will always command the masses. So it is in the West today.

In early 1917, Lenin was just a has-been around whom events were happening. His path to dictatorship was not only one of ruthless determination, making his own luck, but of complacency by every other faction not only towards a 'man of will' but towards that rage in the working classes.

Rage could be manipulated by Lenin over the heads of even soldiers and peasants to eliminate a constitutional democracy which was still paradigmatically persisting in sending men to their deaths in war and failing to provide cheap bread.

Stage by stage Shub takes you through every critical step that took Lenin from the Finland Station to the Kremlin and, as his toughened and disciplined crew won each victory, Bolshevism grew in power until (under Trotsky) it could even crush the radical-democratic Kronstadt sailors.

The lesson is an awe-inspiring one that has inspired the wilful from Hitler to Saddam. When a people is angry (a lesson for today), the professional revolutionary prepared to take risks can out-class every amateur so long as they are prepared to commit any act to get to the top.

And this, again, is why we have to pause and ask (as Lenin did) some hard questions about our 'bourgeois morality' because he was not seeking power for himself but working himself into the ground and taking risks with his life for the people. He was seen as a hero later because he was one.

He seems to have been a man who recognised his own mistakes when he made them and to have reversed direction so long as it never got in the way of the communist dream. This was essentially one of bread and leisure for all the peoples of the world. His internationalism is not in doubt.

At this point in history, we now know two things about the Soviet experiment. It achieved spectacular results in terms of life chances for the working class at immense human cost for a significant, mostly middle class but also peasant, minority. Second, it failed miserably.

The Soviet experiment is never a simple matter of good and evil despite the best efforts of American propagandists. It was a failed experiment, one that was based on human rights crimes (a 'bourgeois concept' of course) but one which did get a people from A to B in double quick time.

Romantic liberals and democratic socialists persist in claiming that either a Stolypin-type capitalism under a 'good Tsar' or a democratic Constituent Assembly might have had better results but I have my doubts. The condition of the Russian masses required drastic action.

Many people, especially intellectuals and the middle classes, would have been vastly more comfortable if Lenin had never existed but could the same be said of the vast mass of the population (taking the Great Patriotic War out of the equation)? I am not sure at all.

Lenin raises some uncomfortable questions but the most uncomfortable of all is often evaded. Are middle class socialist intellectuals actually concerned at all about the condition of the masses? Their good will is not in doubt but amelioration is rarely at their own expense.

The question is important because believing that you can change something or wanting to change something is not the same as actually having an effect. It may be that, if not Lenin, then radically globalised capitalism may be more useful than liberal-socialist tinkering for the very poor.

Radical global capitalism destroys elites, creates a new middle class from below, develops an educated working class and provides the means to build roads and railroads that get food from resource rich to resource poor areas. So did Bolshevism - social democracy often just manages.

Russia desperately needed these changes. A dim-witted self-regarding landowning elite was getting in the way. It had to be removed and fast. Nobody else succeeded in all the years before 1917 and those who did succeed in 1917 failed to bring peace and bread.

So, unlike Hitler, whose entirely potty racial theory damns him in the eyes of history as much as his propensity to warfare and mass murder, we find ourselves with a man in Lenin who is more morally ambiguous. He is a monster who only exists because middle class liberals fail.

The book is valuable because of the amount of contemporary evidence Shub provides including an Appendix of selections from Lenin's writings that demonstrate incontrovertibly that his ruthlessness was ideological as much as pragmatic or driven by circumstances.

Although ostensibly about a man, by the nature of things, Shub makes it a tale of one significant Revolution. However, the other revolutionaries are (wrongly, of course) bit players in this particular history and lots of questions remain unanswered.

Shub does not help us to understand how Bolshevik power was constructed, why Lenin held such a hold over men his colleagues, to what degree social and economic conditions (and external threats) forced the pace of brutality or even whether the revolutionary elite were driven by their base.

But those are for another book by another man. For anyone wanting an informed (albeit to be read with a critical eye) political biography of Lenin, you could do worse than this one. The game now should be never to allow in the first place the conditions that would allow another Lenin to exist.

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This may well have been the first book-length biography of Lenin I ever read--the other contender being Fisher's biography. The emigre author, David Shub, was a Russian revolutionary himself and knew many of the principals, particularly Kerensky, personally.

As an adolescent, Lenin was not my favorite. Everyone who worked with him seemed to respect, if not like, him a great deal, but he was certainly not a romantic idealist like, say, Nestor Makhno. Indeed, his wheeling and dealing, the compromises and betrayals, served as a challenge to my friends and myself. The Bolsheviks had been successful by such methods. The Makhnos of the world had not. All in all I was most personally comfortable with the great pacifist revolutionaries, people like Gandhi and Menno Simons.

[Jerrod · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great read I recently picked up at the library. Written in 1948 it gives interesting perspective as much of what 'we' know of communism is so clouded with propaganda.
I would recommend this read to anyone with interests in communism, socialism and the likes. As well as those who are interested in the corruption of those in power. We find Lenin had no qualms about his implicit views of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the explicit actions used to keep the same people in check.

[Dr. Carl Ludwig Dorsch · Rating 3 out of 5]

A standard American Lenin biography of its time.

This book went through many editions apparently, from 1948 through 1976, some of them abridged. The edition I read seems to have been the New American Library/Mentor abridgement.

[David Casler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a biography in any traditional sense, although it did include his birth and death dates, and he is the main character in it. It's a well-detailed history of the Russian Revolutions from the last years of World War I (AKA The Great War) until Stalin seized power. Yes, the book doesn't end when Lenin dies; like i said, not exactly a traditional biography. It was very detailed, though, and i learned a great deal from it. The author did a wonderful job of making sense out of an extremely complex and chaotic period of history, and he deserves great credit for that. The reason i gave it only three stars is that it utterly failed to deliver what it promised - a biography of V. I. Lenin. I don't even know his wife's name, his parents' names, or whether he ever fathered any children or not. I wouldn't have even known that he'd been married if members of his opposition hadn't been suspected of planning to kidnap her to use her against him.

It was a quick read and yet intricately informative. The narrative was well-constructed and flowed well, telling an extraordinarily complicated story in a very effective way. I'd highly recommend it to anyone wishing to learn more about that period of Russian/Soviet/Eastern European history, but i would NOT recommend it to anyone wishing to learn more about the man V. I. Lenin himself.

[Jared Perovic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lenin's older brother, Alexander, proclaims the power of the people (11)
Land (13)
Sergei Nechaev, Russian revolutionary (15)
Revolutionary state (16-17)
Terror (19)
Newspaper (28)
1902 program (36)
Party machine (36)
One-man rule (42)
1905 Soviet as rival to party (50)
Boycott, arrests, strike, and insurrection (52)
Need for a bourgeois revolution (53)
Party unity as formal (54)
Lenin's campaign against the Duma (56)
Lenin's tone--when not to convince (57)
Lenin wins majority in the party's central committee (58-59)
Fundraising by expropriations (64)
Lenin's policy regarding trade unions (67)
Malinovsky affair (73-74)
WWI (79)
Civil war (80)
Defeatism (80, 86)
The Duma and the revolution which begins in 1917 (94)
Tsar abdicates too late (99)
Unique meaning of the March revolution (101)
Lenin's April Theses received poorly even by Bolsheviks (109)
Dual Power (113)
Lenin debates Kerensky (114)
Confused Bolsheviks hesitate and have to abort their plot to revolt in July 1917 (115-116)
Kornilov's march of counter-revolution is defeated (122)
Russia becomes a republic for the first time (123)
Violent reprisals on officers (123)
The fateful order is written on a page torn from a child's exercise notebook (129)
Military Revolutionary Committee orders the insurrection (130)
Provisional Government arrested (135)
Lenin's victory speech (136)
Forming new organizations after the seizure of power (141)
Dissolving the Constituent Assembly (152)
Lenin threatens to resign (154)
Comintern (170)
Kronstadt rebellion (172)
New Economic Policy (NEP) Lenin names state capitalism (174)

[Sikandar Marwah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have rated this book 4 stars for its educational value. This biography of Lenin is riddled with details which reveal the knowledge the author of the book, David Shub, has. David Shub was, in fact, born and educated in Russia. This might explain the reason for the extremely long sentences, typical of Russian writers. To keep this review humorous and educational, I shall conclude by saying that: "despite the countless headaches you shall undergo in the arduous task of reading this book of very high educational value, you shall find yourself amply rewarded by the knowledge you shall acquire after the hardship is over. Through pain and utmost patience, you shall learn a great deal about a pivotal part of World history. This book is, truly, a must-read for any mind curious about Communism."

Sikandar Marwah, October 26, 2024, in a certain country.

[Mark Emmanuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The most fun I've had reading history. I love it when history is written in such a way as to remind us that those great people lived human lives and experienced the same emotions as us. While I'm not educated enough to comment on how accurate it is, and there are points where it feels like Shub's Menshevik perspective slips through in his description of Lenin, I'd definitely recommend it to someone who wants to see the revolution from a different perspective that humanises the affair.

[Julio The Fox · Rating 3 out of 5]

A case of overkill. The fact that David Shub knew Lenin, and practically the entire Bolshevik team from 1917, does not excuse shoddy journalism, turgid prose and dense, plus thick, political understanding of the causes of the Russian Revolution. LENIN: A BIOGRAPHY is overlong and under-thought. The man who Robert Conquest, a bitter critic, called "the most consequential figure of the twentieth century", deserves better.

[Todd Holdren · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is a good primer detailing what socialism is and the path to comminism. Lots of good quotes.

[Mohsen Hasanpour · Rating 5 out of 5]

اگه بخوام مقایسه ای.داشته باشم در برابر کتاب لنین ترجمه بیژن اشتری این کتاب خلاصه تر و بدون پیش داوری لنین بررسی میکنه
و ترجمه خوب جناب مهرآبادی

[Robbie Herbst · Rating 4 out of 5]

Impressive to squeeze such a dense history into a pocket-sized book. Enjoyed getting the scope of things; the anti-leninism of the author (nevertheless a socialist) certainly shines through. well-researched, with plenty of reference to Lenin's own words. but only one piece of an important history, to be sure.