By Victor Sebestyen. Through masterful storytelling, it casts new light on a complex character who managed almost by himself to bring alive what had been just an idea: the concept of communism. He was regarded as kind, modest, simple, charming, lighthearted, good-humored, well-mannered and fond of children, though he would never have any of his own.
He also was an avid reader and a perfectionist who enjoyed nature, hunting and exercise. Despite his well-to-do upbringing, he had little concern for special treatment or comfort.
Some of his contemporaries went so far as to say that the Lenin they knew had no human weaknesses. At the same time, he developed a reputation for being a clever, secretive person and a formidable orator. When Vladimir was 16, his older brother, who belonged to a terrorist group, was executed for trying to assassinate the czar. After that, the Ulyanov family was shunned by the middle class, at which point Vladimir started to distrust the middle class.
That seems to have been the beginning of a trajectory that would eventually disrupt Western Europe and forever change the global political landscape. He eventually worked as a British journalist, wrote for American newspapers and published several books; one about the Hungarian uprising and another about the collapse of the Soviet empire. In this latest book, Sebestyen uses archives, memoirs, newspapers of the time and original letters to paint a compelling portrait of Lenin amid the pivotal circumstances of early 20th-century Europe.
In what reads more like a historical novel than a biography, Sebestyen emphasizes how slim the odds were that something as cataclysmic as the October Revolution of could happen in the first place.
Even slimmer were the chances that it would fully dismantle the czarist regime and successfully foster communism in Russia. That success, however, would prove to be possibly the most crucial event of the last years, making Lenin one of the major figures of the 20th century. For example, when Vladimir was a young man, the government did not allow him to enter university for political reasons, yet due to family connections, he was eventually allowed to attend the top school, St.
Petersburg University, where he earned the highest grades and a law degree. Others were better orators and public speakers, though many people who heard him were impressed by the manifest force of his intellect. But he possessed qualities that other revolutionaries lacked: he had subtle tactical flair and a sense of timing, and he understood the nature of power, how to achieve it and what it could be used for. This is why Lenin succeeded while other revolutionaries whose names we no longer remember were discarded into the dustbin of history.
The Germans helped Lenin and some of his supporters return to Russia, gambling that he would seize power, make a separate peace and take Russia out of the war.
Back in Russia, Lenin cleverly built on that luck. Lenin was an adroit tactician, while the liberal Provisional Government that took over from the tsar was no match for him. Lenin took power in a coup — not a democratic process, but then the tsar was not a democrat, and nor were several figures in the government. He persuaded, hectored and bullied his reluctant Bolsheviks into taking over the government when many of his comrades opposed him.
Eventually they came round. That is what Trotsky, originally one of his opponents, meant by his categorical claim that if Lenin had not been in Petrograd in there would have been no Bolshevik takeover.
From the first moment after his Bolshevik revolution in October , Lenin and his comrades felt insecure. He thought that power could slip away at any time, which explains so much of the year history of the Soviet state.
He allowed a freely elected parliament to sit for just 12 hours before abolishing it — perhaps a record in brevity. There would not be another elected parliament in Russia for more than 70 years. Throughout its existence the Soviet Union identified itself with the founder of the state, both while alive and after his death. The regime that Lenin created was largely shaped by his personality: secretive, suspicious, intolerant, intemperate. The state that Lenin founded was moulded very much in his own ascetic image — but there were other aspects to Lenin, too.
He wrote reams of text about Marxist philosophy, much of it now unintelligible. But he loved mountains almost as much as he loved making revolution, and wrote lyrically about walking through the countryside. One of the reasons he remained in Switzerland for so long during his exile from Russia was to be near the Alps. He loved nature, hunting, shooting and fishing. He could identify hundreds of species of plants.
For a decade Lenin had an on-off love affair with a glamorous, intelligent and beautiful woman, Inessa Armand, who became a close friend of his wife. He did not make a very good impression on me at first sight. His appearance struck me as somehow faintly colourless and he said nothing very definite apart from insisting on my immediate departure for Geneva. Even Gorky, whose tribute to Lenin after his death was more hagiographic than he would have cared to admit, recalled his first impressions in these unflattering terms:.
I had not imagined him that way. I felt there was something missing in him. The question is, did Lenin the man really answer to such a dreary description? Lenin addressing a crowd in Sverdlov Square, Moscow, Before we turn to the more substantive questions, let us get H. As incredible as it may sound, Wells himself was 5 ft 5 inches tall! For good measure, Trotsky called his own essay on the Wells affair The Philistine and the Revolutionary.
Apparently, Wells had been quite patronising, even pompous, throughout his interview of Lenin. What an awful petit-bourgeois! We will presently look at Lenin through the eyes of some of his closest associates and colleagues. But lest that be a somewhat partisan perspective, let us first consider the views of someone who was far from being wholly sympathetic to the Weltanschaung that Lenin represented. Bertrand Russell has left behind a much more nuanced picture of Lenin than Wells. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
This is a fascinating portrait of a highly evolved, many-sided personality, a far cry from a colourless demagogue in an ideological straitjacket. Both Trotsky and Lunacharsky happened to have worked with Lenin for many years, both before the October Revolution and after it. I f I were to attempt briefly to define what sort of man Lenin was, I would stress that his whole being was geared to one great purpose. He possessed the tenseness of striving towards his goal.
Gorky is right when he says that Lenin is the extraordinary and perfect embodiment of a tense will striving towards the goal. It should now be possible to see why Lenin appeared cold and humourless to the casual observer.
Upon everything he did, Lenin brought to bear the enormous weight of his powerful will, the tenseness of striving towards his goal. He had an extraordinary ability to concentrate all his energies and his entire attention upon the task at hand, and he would never allow his attention to flag on account of, or his energies to be dissipated by, any other consideration. But when the future course of the Russian revolution was to be settled, a bitter ideological struggle ensued between Lenin and Plekhanov.
When that struggle took a dramatic turn, Zasulich had this to say to Lenin:. This showed clearly in his public speeches as well.
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