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Title: Lenin: A Biography by Robert Service ISBN: 0-674-00828-6 Publisher: Belknap Pr Pub. Date: March, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.65 (17 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Biography of the "bookish fanatic" who led a revolution
Comment: Service is a British historian of Soviet Russian history who has written this quite good narrative of the life of Lenin. While not definitive, it is nevertheless the best synthesis of the political and personal life of Lenin
One of the better reasons to read Service is that while he has no qualms about outlining the viciousness and brutality of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, he is also not a hard line ideologue. He is a historian and he takes history as he finds it. There is none of the strident cold-war dogmatism of Conquest or the russophobia of Pipes that often make their writings come uncomfortably close to political diatribes rather than analytical histories.
Service walks the fine line between personal and political biography fairly well. He also has the added bonus of being a good narrative historian which makes this an immensily readable book.
Lenin's early life is covered in good detail. What Service does well is to show how, after brother Alexander's excecution, the Ulyanovs were marginalized by the very class of society they had aspired to, and how this effected both Lenin and his sisters. Service goes on to show the interaction between Lenin and his female relatives and how this carried on throughout his life.
Being a total biography- personal and political- the political side gets a bit of a short shrift at times. Lenin as shown as the "bookish fanatic" and hypocondriact who is all revolution all the time with little time to spare in life for other diversions.
His single-mindedness is such that he dictates executions (never naming individuals just groups) to achieve his ends. What Service show best is how his temperament in childhood carried on to his political life- never brooking disagreement- throwing tantrums and denounciations- and rarely compromising.
And yet Lenin is at heart, a middle class bourgeois in his social manners. His personal relationships with women are not especially notorious save for a life-long relationship with Inessa Armand who may or may not have been his mistress.
Personal without being gossipy and showing Lenin's idiocincracies without being psychoanalytical, Service handles his biography well. All in all this is a highly readable, not perfect, but enjoyable biography of the life of one of the century's most notorious figures.
Rating: 5
Summary: Lenin: A Biography
Comment: Service (history, St. Anthony's College, Oxford) endeavors to rehabilitate Lenin, whose fame in his own homeland since the collapse of the USSR has been badly bruised. Not only are there studies that portray Lenin as the architect of 20th-century violence, he is considered a failed state builder whose actions ultimately led to the 1991 debacle. On a conceptual level, the author will need to compete with the works of Martin Malia, Alexander Solzhenitsin, and Dmitri Volkoganov. Although Service contends that in Soviet hagiography Lenin's biographies were taboo, the author in some parts skirts the danger of falling into an overglorified Sovietlike portrait of the first Bolshevik. This is a full political biography that covers Lenin's life from birth in Simbirsk to the end at Gorki. Regardless of the pro-Leninist tilt, this is a good read, offering a great deal about a life that since the beginning of the USSR has been abused by partisans of both sides. Surprisingly there is no reference to Stefan Possony's biography (Lenin: The Compulsive Revolutionary, CH, Jul'64.) Well-footnoted and illustrated and containing a reasonably good bibliography and sufficient index, this book is recommended for all public and college libraries.
Rating: 4
Summary: Lenin the man - superb; Lenin the Russian - needs work.
Comment: This biography is incredibly thorough, and is entirely fixated on Lenin. In fact, that would be my one complaint. The book was so thoroughly focused on Lenin (and I can appreciate how silly this must sound as the book was a biography of Lenin), that it missed properly characterizing what was going on in Russia. In certain sections the book did discuss what was taking place in Russia, but usually only within the very limited scope of how Lenin was responding to the problem. I felt the narrative on Lenin would have benefited from an expanded discussion of what was going on socially within Russia as Lenin came to power. This weakness of the book is perhaps exacerbated by the fact (something I did not know) that Lenin lived for 18 years outside of Russia as an adult man. As his ideology was developing he was fully outside of Russian culture.
Lenin was an average ideologue, but he was an above-average politician. His works on political philosophy, as Service says, were barely above the standard of a college student. They were not insightful and were not worthy of prominent distinction. Lenin was a consummate politician who did believe in the essential goals of socialism.
I believe he would have been disgusted at what Stalin did with the gulag system; however, Lenin was a pragmatist. He did not allow Stalin to rise to power on accident. Did he see Stalin as a balance against Trotski who Lenin may have feared would be more willing to compromise? The life of Lenin illustrates the core problem of socialism: it has never been embraced by people who did not prove to be brutally totalitarian and completely unwilling to allow individuality.
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Title: Stalin : The First In-depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia'sSecret Archives by Edvard Radzinsky ISBN: 0385479549 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 18 August, 1997 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Hitler and Stalin : Parallel Lives by Alan Bullock ISBN: 0679729941 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 02 November, 1993 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Khrushchev: The Man and His Era by William Taubman ISBN: 0393051447 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: March, 2003 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Stalin: Breaker of Nations by Robert Conquest ISBN: 0140169539 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: November, 1992 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Beria by Amy Knight ISBN: 0691010935 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 11 December, 1995 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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