Robert Service, Lenin: A biography (2002)
GoodReads meta-data is 561 pages rated 3.83 by 1163 litizens.
Genre: Biography
Verdict: Superb.
In this biography the reader can see the man in the boy and the boy in the man. As a boy Lenin was energetic, determined, self-righteous, a loner, and never wrong. Just ask him. Even as an adolescent, youth, and young man as he became a Marxist revolutionary he was cold, analytical, and bloodless. It should be noted that the heavy hand of Tsarism was personal. His elder brother was executed for plotting the murder of the Tsar and he was indeed guilty. His older sister was later imprisoned for sedition. As a consequence, his family was proscribed and ostracised. Tsarist repression was personal not theoretical, and soon its weight fell on him.
While he turned to revolution to right the manifold wrongs of Russian society he had no interest whatever in most members of that society. He never met a peasant and was revolted by those he saw. He supposed that all peasants who had bettered themselves, the so-called kulaks, were capitalists whose successes would impede the revolution, and so in that way, they were the worst enemies of the Forces of Right.
When other revolutionaries proposed immediate practical steps to relieve the suffering of the victims of the regime, Lenin ridiculed both the proposers and the sufferers as anti-revolutionary. His Marxism was born from the page, not the reality. There would be no sewer socialism for this man to ameliorate conditions in the now.
He differed from many other opponents of the ancient regime with his abiding interest in organisation, committee, dicta, regulations, definitions, words and more words which he then wielded to overcome objections, isolate opponents, and excise the weak from the paper revolution he created in his flow of words. Like Jim Kirk, he was willing and able to talk anyone to death. Lenin was never one given to self-doubts even as he chopped and changed.
His activities soon made him suspect, and he was exiled first internally and then abroad, and for seventeen years moved hither and yon, rootless and restless, but always pronouncing dicta, writing calls to arms, manoeuvring to dominate emigré publications, and vying for legitimacy among tiny leftist groups. Most of that time was spent in Switzerland.
At times he saw revolution an inevitable, like an earthquake, and when it happened the group that was organised, disciplined, ruthless, and prepared would prevail, no matter if the group was large or small, or played any role in precipitating the earthquake. But it had to be be ready, and he was the man to ready it.
During the disastrous Russo-Japanese War when thousands of hapless conscripts were dying in Manchuria, and the Russian fleet was sinking with all hands on board in the Pacific, while St Petersburg reeled after the massacre of the Father Gapon’s innocents before the Winter Palace, Lenin’s bottomless supply of invective, energy, abuse, derision, malice was aimed at half a dozen rivals on an obscure émigré publication in Geneva who threatened his status. Such were his priorities. As always he schemed, he plotted, he undermined his many rivals 24/7 like a relentless force of nature that never tired, never needed a rest, never took a break. (Yes, he did take vacations but rarely.) At times the Tsarist secret police monitoring émigré groups funded Lenin’s sect because he was so disruptive and destructive of the wider body of wanna be revolutionaries that it prevented any unified action. Lenin’s implacable self-righteousness would keep the opponents of the regime from coalescing, and it did.
Likewise, later Germany facilitated his return to Russia in 1917 in the hope that he would destabilise the Provisional Government after the abdication of the Tsar. There is considerable circumstantial evidence that even while he was in Petrograd, Germany was funding Lenin’s coterie. The German assumption was that Lenin’s agitation would be further pressure to get Russia to leave the Great War on terms dictated by Germany, and it was. Bolsheviks could hardly admit the German aid at the time and subsequently many records were destroyed, and with later purges reduced the number of eye witnesses.
In these pages the October coup d’état is anti-climatic and Lenin had no association with it on this telling though as soon as Leon Trotsky announced it, Lenin pounced on the opportunity, and the rest became history. While his years of exile had made him cautious, once in power the emotions he had long suppressed came to the fore, namely, his hatred for the imperial order and all who had served it.
His earlier theoretical studies had led him to the conclusion that a European wide social revolution would occur and events in Russia were just the beginning. He clung to that belief as an article of faith thereafter despite the contrary evidence. He always believed what he said, once he had said it, and could never admit error. Yet he did change his tune at times but never with a mea culpa.
After he had been shot in an assassination attempt, while a British Expeditionary Force had occupied Murmansk, as White Russian forces threatened to overwhelm the Red army, starvation was general, industrial production had fallen to zero, the Czech Legion turned on the Bolsheviks, an American Expeditionary Force landed in Vladivostok, Poland made war on Russia to secure borders, Ukraine agitated for independence, what then did Lenin do? He turned to writing a refutation of the detested Karl Kautsky’s The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx. Theory almost always came first for him. Millions might die of starvation, disease, and economic breakdown, while thousands of others might die defending the Revolution from the British or the Whites, but exposing Kautksy’s intellectual errors took priority over such matters. The few dozen readers of Kautsky’s turgid and vague book had to be set straight with Lenin’s turgid and vague prose.
While Comrade Number One was civil to rivals, opponents, and allies in the Party he casually consigned thousands of others to state terrorism, arbitrary arrest, torture, imprisonment, murder, exile, forced labour without even the pretence of a fair process. All this and more was justified in his mind by the need to embed the Revolution and the Regime. This was a judgement only he could make, according to him. He turned loose a generation of thugs and they reproduced themselves in the coming generations.
He was a valetudinarian for decades, and perhaps there was something to it, though the many doctors, physicians, and specialists consulted, including some imports from Germany and England, could make no diagnosis. His workload was punishing because he was a micro-manager who found it difficult to delegate, because he did not trust any of his comrades to be as perfect as he thought he himself was. Age wearied him and as he strength failed he tried to cement his regime. Comrade Jospeh Stalin was there and Lenin saw him as a rival to Leon Trotsky for succession. Few others, including Trotsky, realised that Stalin had the ambition and ability to push himself forward. Ah huh.
There is a splendid closing chapter about Lenin’s afterlife as a symbol that is worth reading on its own. In short, much of the promotion of Lenin as the Saint of Communism served as a smokescreen for Stalin to out manoeuvre and oust rivals for supreme leadership. By reprinting all of Lenin’s innumerable publications, carefully edited with hindsight, by naming Petrograd after Lenin, by naming streets for him here, there, and everywhere, by putting Lenin’s name on the masthead of Party publications, preserving the body, building a temple for the cadaver, storing the deceased’s brain that science might one day understand his genius, putting Lenin’s profile on stamps, rubles, and bus tickets, Stalin was acting as the conservator, curator, and heir to Lenin’s legacy. That includes the display of the embalmed body, which we trooped by in the Kremlin as 2016 after a forty-five minute shuffle in the line.
But that was about the only thing left. Leningrad is now St Petersburg again. Nowhere did I see any sign of the First Comrade. There were plenty of fellows dressed and made up as Stalin selling photo ops to tourists but not one Lenin. Still less were there any of his likenesses anywhere. I saw only one Hammer and Sickle symbol on the flag at a tennis club. On many buildings I could see the shadow of that symbol which had been removed or sandblasted off. Instead the national iconography was Romanov and Imperial — the last Tsar and the double-headed eagle — whom and which Lenin hated beyond reason.
An astounding irony of history emerges in these pages. When Lenin was a high school student preparing for University entry examinations in 1886, the headmaster of his school in Simbirsk in the sticks on the south western Volga about 900 kilometres from Moscow and twice that far from St Petersburg, wrote a testimonial. This writer was Fyodor Mikhailovich Kerensky whose own son Alexander was five years old at the time. The cognoscenti will know these rest.
Thirty-one years later in October of 1917 the names of Kerensky and Lenin came together again. In the long fallout of the February 1917 upheavals Alexander became the Prime Minister of the Provisional Government of Russia and Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov whose code name was…Lenin became his successor.
*L During the summer hiatus of In Our Time (BBC 4 podcast) I came across an old episode on Vladdy and became interested in this title. After all I had seen Vladdy in Red Square a couple of years ago, looking as bad as the fraternity brothers on Sunday morning, or much like Jeremy Bentham these days.