Lenin: A Biography

"Lenin has some claim to being the most influential person in all of the 20th century. Without Lenin, there would have been no Russian Revolution. It was he who insisted, against the initial resistance of his Bolshevik colleagues, that the Bolsheviks seize power in the then capital of the Russian Empire, St Petersburg. They did that in 1917 and consolidated it in a bloody civil war thereafter. Without the Russian Revolution, there would have been no Chinese Revolution and no communism in power anywhere. Now, by some estimates, communism in power resulted in the premature deaths of 100 million people. So Lenin’s great influence on the 20th century cannot be said to have been benign. The book that I found most useful is a biography by the British historian Robert Service, who is an expert on the Soviet Union. He has written a number of books, knows all of the literature about Lenin, and has written a relatively compact single-volume biography. It shows Lenin warts and all, and there were lots of warts. There is a view that Lenin intended something much more benign for the Soviet Union, and it was Stalin who twisted it in the wrong direction. In the chapter on Lenin I argue that that is wrong. Stalin used to call himself the best Leninist, and that’s accurate. What the Soviet Union became and what Stalin did had clear precedent in Lenin and his life and works. Stalin was the contractor of the Soviet Union, but Lenin was the architect. All of that can be found in the Robert Service book."