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Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin: The Intelligentsia and Power
Lenin is the focus of this study of three figures whose psychologies of leadership and political interactions played such central roles in shaping the Soviet Union. First tracing Lenin's personal and political development until his emergence as a leader of Russian Social Democracy, Pomper's psychologically oriented book then introduces Trotsky and Stalin. In each case, he shows the impact of family history and adolescent experience upon political commitment. Though psychoanalytically oriented, this study avoids technical jargon and presents both personal development and political behavior in easily grasped terms.
Pomper examines early personal and political traumas and their contribution to matters as diverse as styles of leadership and dialectical method. A historian of the Russian revolutionary movement as well as psycho-biographer, Pomper embeds his subject in the events of late imperial Russia, with special focus on the intersection of the biographies of the three men with processes in the revolutionary subculture and with the mass explosions of 1905 and 1917. Pomper then analyzes the struggles among the Bolshevik oligarchs during the early Soviet period (1917–1924) and the critical months after Lenin's death.
Documents in Trotsky's and Max Eastman's archives previously unused by Trotsky's biographers enrich Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin: The Intelligentsia and Power. The author has also exploited valuable new information on Lenin, Stalin, and the history of the CSPU provided in official Soviet publications and the published writings of émigrés and dissidents. A widely known scholar of Russian and Soviet history, Pomper is the first historian in decades systematically to integrate the lives of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin in a single study. His skillful integration of these three figures, his original interpretations, and his lucid writing style make Philip Pomper's Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin engaging, illuminating, and significant.
Pomper examines early personal and political traumas and their contribution to matters as diverse as styles of leadership and dialectical method. A historian of the Russian revolutionary movement as well as psycho-biographer, Pomper embeds his subject in the events of late imperial Russia, with special focus on the intersection of the biographies of the three men with processes in the revolutionary subculture and with the mass explosions of 1905 and 1917. Pomper then analyzes the struggles among the Bolshevik oligarchs during the early Soviet period (1917–1924) and the critical months after Lenin's death.
Documents in Trotsky's and Max Eastman's archives previously unused by Trotsky's biographers enrich Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin: The Intelligentsia and Power. The author has also exploited valuable new information on Lenin, Stalin, and the history of the CSPU provided in official Soviet publications and the published writings of émigrés and dissidents. A widely known scholar of Russian and Soviet history, Pomper is the first historian in decades systematically to integrate the lives of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin in a single study. His skillful integration of these three figures, his original interpretations, and his lucid writing style make Philip Pomper's Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin engaging, illuminating, and significant.
446 pages, Hardcover
First published December 12, 1989
33 people want to read
About the author
Philip Pomper
12 books4 followersDr. Philip Pomper, Ph.D. (University of Chicago, 1965; M.A., 1961; B.A., 1959) is William F. Armstrong Professor Emeritus of History at Wesleyan University. His major fields are Russian History, Modern European History, and Psychohistory. He became an associate editor of the journal History and Theory in 1991.
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October 28, 2019Had this on my want list for the better part of two decades, haunting used books stores and always fruitlessly glancing to see whether it might turn up. After finally making it through the full-length GULAG, I was halfway into
The Russian Anarchists
when I realized the time had come to suck it up and order it online, finally finding a copy at a decent price from a specialty shop in the UK.
Why bother? Aside from the fiddly details of revolutionary history, the piece I've never been able to quite put together is the interaction between these three men. Was Trotsky Lenin's ally or enemy? Both? Which when? And how did Stalin go from backwater nobody to eclipse them both while one yet lived? And how did the ideals of a workers' utopia become so utterly corrupted? We're they all disingenuous politicians and totalitarians from the outset? (Spoiler: no, but the seeds were there from their youth.)
This being a "psychobiography," Pomper starts with the childhood of each, making a reasonable. if Freudian, attempt to penetrate the hagiographies and official Party propaganda, and particularly making use of material from Trotsky's archives which had only just become available while the work was in progress. The focus here, however, is on the men, not so much on the history: anyone who is not already fairly well versed in Marxism and late-19th to early-20th century Russian history is likely to be quite lost. For example, if you don't already know that you wont learn it from this book. Nor will you get much about political philosophy, except as it regards the continual fallings out and reconciliations among these three figures and their factions.
Since I do finally have just barely enough background from that other reading, this was at last quite useful in resolving many of my questions, though given the deliberate obscuring of history by dissimulation, agit-prop, "fake news," and agenda grinding, I imagine it will never be fully knowable. It is nevertheless quite enough to put me off Communism, Leninism, and even Marxism, despite the putative Marxist leanings of the author. The dialectic will necessarily always be perverted by the naked will to power, and the supposedly-temporary "dictatorship of the proletariat" will always devolve into a dictatorship of he who most effectively claims the helm in the name of the oppressed while oppressing them worse and telling them it's getting better.
Why bother? Aside from the fiddly details of revolutionary history, the piece I've never been able to quite put together is the interaction between these three men. Was Trotsky Lenin's ally or enemy? Both? Which when? And how did Stalin go from backwater nobody to eclipse them both while one yet lived? And how did the ideals of a workers' utopia become so utterly corrupted? We're they all disingenuous politicians and totalitarians from the outset? (Spoiler: no, but the seeds were there from their youth.)
This being a "psychobiography," Pomper starts with the childhood of each, making a reasonable. if Freudian, attempt to penetrate the hagiographies and official Party propaganda, and particularly making use of material from Trotsky's archives which had only just become available while the work was in progress. The focus here, however, is on the men, not so much on the history: anyone who is not already fairly well versed in Marxism and late-19th to early-20th century Russian history is likely to be quite lost. For example, if you don't already know that you wont learn it from this book. Nor will you get much about political philosophy, except as it regards the continual fallings out and reconciliations among these three figures and their factions.
Since I do finally have just barely enough background from that other reading, this was at last quite useful in resolving many of my questions, though given the deliberate obscuring of history by dissimulation, agit-prop, "fake news," and agenda grinding, I imagine it will never be fully knowable. It is nevertheless quite enough to put me off Communism, Leninism, and even Marxism, despite the putative Marxist leanings of the author. The dialectic will necessarily always be perverted by the naked will to power, and the supposedly-temporary "dictatorship of the proletariat" will always devolve into a dictatorship of he who most effectively claims the helm in the name of the oppressed while oppressing them worse and telling them it's getting better.
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