Lenin: A Biography

 This biography was brought to my attention in a guest post by David Josef Volodzko on Konstantin Kisin's Substack. It had to do with the author's being fired from The Seattle Times for criticizing Lenin. I won't go into the article here—you can go and read it for yourself—but he does cite Service's biography of Lenin, in particular quoting this paragraph:   In Lenin: A Biography, Oxford professor of Russian history Robert Service writes that Lenin was an “often unkind” child, abusive and destructive, with “malice in his character.” Service notes, “moral questions for him were an irrelevance,” adding that Lenin was “coldly calculating” and displayed “massive” antisocial behavior. During the Russian famine from 1891 to 1892, Service writes that Lenin showed shocking “emotional detachment.” So that gives some insight into the tone of Volodzko's article, and of Service's biography. A quotation from Molotov is cited in Volodzko's article:  People sometimes make the claim that it was Stalin, not Lenin, who was the great evil of Soviet Russia. I like to remind them, as New Yorker editor David Remnick wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Lenin's Tomb, that someone once made a similar comment to the Soviet diplomat Vyacheslav Molotov, one of the few people in history who personally knew both Lenin and Stalin. Molotov replied, “Compared to Lenin, Stalin was a mere lamb.” I'll back this up with another quotation from Robert Service's book:  Machiavelli, he confided to Molotov, ‘correctly said that if it is necessary to resort to certain brutalities for the sake of realising a certain political goal, they must be carried out in the most energetic fashion and in the briefest possible time because the masses will not tolerate the prolonged application of brutality'. Chilling. I've been interested in Russian—particularly Soviet—history for a few years now, and have done some reading. But my brain is such that I tend not to retain information very well. It is my hope that writing reviews and making videos for BookTube will help me learn how to read more deeply and retain information better. So, V.I. Lenin. Or Volodya Ulyanov, as he was known to his mum and dad. Obviously, he's the father of the October Revolution in 1917—I'm sure most people know at least that much. But why? And how? Having an interest in learning the answers to those questions is really what drew me to this book. Did it deliver? Well, yes. It absolutely did. The book is split into four parts: One: The Rebel Emerges Two: Lenin and the Party Three: Seizing Power Four: Defence of the Revolution The October Revolution doesn't happen until page 308 of a 494-page, so that gives some idea of just how much detail Service gives us of Lenin's life up to that point. There's lots of detail about his family life, and it plays heavily on the influence of his brother Alexander's death by hanging for his participation in the attempted assassination of Tsar Alexander III at the age of 21 (Lenin was 17). We learn a lot about how that affected the family, how they were ostracised by the townspeople of Simbirsk, and led to the family's moving away. There was one section that really stood out to me, which was when Lenin and his entourage were travelling back to Petrograd from Switzerland in 1917 after the fall of Tsar Nicholas II on the famous sealed train. First of all, the notion of the train's being sealed wasn't entirely correct. People were getting on and off at stations to buy supplies—booze and cigarettes, by the sounds of it, with some snacks, I would imagine, because Russians can't drink without their zakuski! Lenin was getting annoyed with the revellers in the next carriage and tried to get them to quieten down, but it didn't work out very well. A couple of standout sections of writing that made me laugh are these ones:  The participants, led by Lenin, decided to replace the Foreign Organisational Commission with a Committee of the Foreign Organisation and to empower this new body to hold a party conference. That one made me think of the Judean People's Front scene in Life of Brian. I don't suppose a book about Lenin is supposed to have much humour in it, so it was a welcome reminder. And this one, from p298:  In particular, the Congress agreed to drop the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets'. After a lengthy debate about slogans, it was decided to replace it with ‘All Power to the Proletariat Supported by the Poorest Peasantry and the Revolutionary Democracy Organised into Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies'. A clumsier slogan can hardly be imagined. Perhaps his Bolsheviks needed the absent Lenin more than they recognised. Lol, right? It's a slow read, with small text and lots of detail. I felt that I had to take my time over it in order for it to sink in, but I'm not sure how much it did or has. I'd like to go back to the beginning again and read it with the knowledge of the rest of the story, but I think my time would be better spent reading other authors' takes on the same information or adjacent information. Or perhaps if I were to read the same author's biographies of Stalin and Trotsky. Maybe that was Service's goal because this book was light on information on both of those characters. Of course, they are mentioned, but they're given short shrift. Kautsky gets more airtime and I'd never even heard of him. Ah, but Service hasn't written a biography of Kautsky. Ha! The detail of Lenin's health condition was covered in great detail. I suppose a lot of this information is only recently available, so it makes sense. It's actually quite astounding how much work Lenin was able to achieve while dealing with headaches and burnout. He was nothing if not driven. Even after getting shot and being so close to death, he was determined to carry on working as soon as he possibly could. It's also made quite clear just how tenuous the October Revolution really was. It felt like it could have collapsed many, many times. Yes, Lenin was, of course, its architect, but circumstances also played a big part in its longevity. The same could be said about Stalin's succession. If Lenin had lived only six months longer, Soviet history could have been very different. I'm very glad that I read this and I'm tempted to buy my own copy after reading this library copy. I made a video review of this book for my BookTube channel: Lenin: A Biography