Portrait of a Fanatic
SHUB, ANATOLE
Portrait of a Fanatic Lenin: A New Biography By Dmitri Volkogonov Translated by Harold Shukman Free Press. 529 pp. $30.00. Reviewed by Anatole Shub Author, "An Empire Loses Hope" SEVENTY YEARS...
...Newly published letters confirm that Lenin's affair with Inessa Armand involved, at least for some years, a physical relationship...
...Perspective and pathos are further sacrificed in the abridgment...
...Volkogonov also draws on similar statements by Lenin and others that were published in the early years of the Soviet regime but subsequently suppressed by Stalin...
...A list of items collected from churches up to November 1, 1922, "provides an idea of the scale of operations: 1,220 pounds of gold, 828,275 pounds of silver, 35,670 diamonds, 71,762 items of unspecified valuables, 536 pounds of gem-stones," and much else...
...Others will contest his putdown of the New Economic Policy (1921-27) as a forced retreat and his firm insistence on the continuity between Lenin's "War Communism" and Stalin's "liquidation of the kulaks as a class...
...All in all, this is a provocative work for the specialist as well as many a casual student of world affairs...
...Unlike him, a dwindling few may continue to view the Bolshevik Revolution as progressive...
...Petersburg regained its old name in the euphoria of 1991, but the surrounding province is still Leningrad oblast...
...Volkogonov's Lenin, by contrast, is eminently readable...
...It is more than a simple biography in that it follows Leninist theory and practice through the Stalin and post-Stalin periods down to 1991, with many interesting disclosures on relatively recent events...
...He notes many of the suspicious circumstances surrounding the arrest and execution of the half-blind Fanya Kaplan for the crime...
...He was fired from that post in 1984 for proposing radical reforms...
...Though many such documents are missing and there has been nothing like a full accounting, it is clear that great sums were raised by seizing gold, precious jewels and other Russian state and church treasures and selling them in the West...
...However, such statistics are meaningless...
...Nor does he probe the official account of the assassination on July 6, 1918, of the German Ambassador, Count Wilhelm Mirbach, which set off Bolshevik terror against the Left Socialist Revolutionaries...
...As far back as 1900, he was complaining to his mother about his "nerves...
...It is strong stuff, as revolting as Hitler's ravings...
...omits quotations from the last Tsar's coronation oath, abdication statement and historic manifesto of October 17,1905, establishing a semi-constitutional regime...
...It drops?inter alia—the insightful epigraphs from the philosopher Nikolai A. Berdyaev at the head of each chapter...
...But he stops short of endorsing a recent claim that she was framed, and that the real culprit was a Cheka member named Protopopov...
...Some of Volkogonov's interpretations are open to debate...
...yet strangely enough, after his escape to Ukraine, Blumkin was pardoned in 1919 and went on to serve the Cheka and its successor security agency, the OGPU, at home and abroad for a dozen years before being liquidated under Stalin...
...Two volumes and 894 pages in the original, it was published last spring in a first printing of 15,000 copies...
...Volkogonov explicitly cites my father's Novy Zhurnal articles in discussing Lenin's genealogy (Russian-Kalmyk on his father's side, German-Swedish-Jewish on his mother's) and his covert collaboration with Imperial Germany between May 1915 and July 1916...
...Especially painful are Volkogonov's accounts of Lenin's responsibility for the murders of the Tsar and his family, the vicious campaign against the Orthodox Church, and the suppression of peasant resistance in 1921-22...
...in 1917 as an envoy of the Provisional Government...
...An opinion poll last summer reported that 46 per cent of the people still viewed Lenin positively (64 per cent did so in 1990), and the revived Communist Party is the only organized political organization in the country...
...and condenses a sensitively balanced 18-page discussion of Aleksandr Kerensky into six pages, with a distinctly cooler overall effect...
...In one document, Red Army commander Mikhail N. Tukhachevsky orders the use of poison gas against peasant rebels in the forests of Tambov Province...
...Across Russia, Lenin monuments still stand...
...Vyacheslav M. Molotov was not joking when he remarked, late in life, that Stalin was a "lamb" compared to Lenin...
...Aleksandr D. Blank, and discloses an unsuccessful attempt by Lenin's sister Anna in 1932 to publicize their family origins in the interests of the struggle against anti-Semitism...
...This appears quite modest, compared with the 653 million copies of Lenin's works in 125 languages issued by the Soviet regime between 1918 and 1990...
...The authentic voice of Lenin heard in scores of the documents, both "old" and "new," dominates the book...
...Volkogonov himself is one of the more impressive Russians of recent years...
...A few errors have also crept into the abridgment (for example, it should be Aleksandr, not Nikolai, Potresov and Yevgeni, not Aleksandr, Gnedin...
...The author skillfully correlates the successive medical bulletins and personal observations by Lenin's wife, Nadezhda K. Krupskaya, and others with his political actions at the time—such as his campaign to exile the cream of the Russian intelligentsia when he himself could no longer perform simple tasks, and his dictation of the ill-fated "Testament" after a second stroke on December 16 left him more infirm...
...It is at least as lively and incisive in the original (sent to me by my son Adam, a U.S...
...As many long suspected and Volkogonov confirms, books by Communist leaders were read by "astonishingly few people in the USSR...
...My father hinted in the endnotes to his Lenin biography (1948) that "Elizabeth K." may have been Alek-sinsky's wife Tatyana...
...His account of Lenin's early years freely quotes the work of Nikolai Valentinov (Volsky), who lived to a ripe old age in Paris, while the account of 1917 draws frequently on the celebrated Notes by Nikolai N. Sukhanov, who ultimately paid with his life for a passing reference to Stalin as a "gray blur...
...Volkogonov's treatment of the shots fired at Lenin outside the Michelson factory in Moscow on August 30, 1918, is gingerly...
...Many of the documents disclosed here were first "classified" by Lenin himself, and kept secret for 70 years afterward, because they show him at his most fanatical—continually urging on his subordinates to ever more terror, shootings, hostage takings, confiscations, and expropriations...
...If Volkogonov's researches have not answered every possible question about Lenin, he has provided new detail on lesser-known aspects of Lenin's life, such as his brief careers as lawyer and farmer, his finances in exile, and the state of his mental health before and after 1917...
...Reviewed by Anatole Shub Author, "An Empire Loses Hope" SEVENTY YEARS after his death, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and his cult have yet to be finally buried...
...Volkogonov insists in the original that this is "not strictly a biography of Lenin," and indeed the Russian edition is subtitled A Political Portrait...
...As for the dealings with the Germans, Volkogonov details the role of a key intermediary, Yakov S. Ganetsky, as Lenin's longtime confidence man, and spells out how Lenin enabled the Reichswehr to violate the Versailles Treaty by training soldiers and producing weapons in Russia...
...Five years later, while serving as director of the Institute of Military History, he was fired again during a controversy over Soviet unpreparedness in 1941...
...These are largely matters newly illuminated by 3,724 Lenin documents the Soviet Communist Party long kept secret, to which Volkogonov has had unique access...
...My own quibbles with the author are relatively minor (I tend to doubt that Trotsky ever was, or thought he was, a credible successor to Lenin...
...In the original, Volkogonov also expresses high respect for the New York-based Russian monthly, Novy Zhurnal, founded after World War II by Professor Michael Karpovich of Harvard (who came to the U.S...
...Fully credited as well are Western biographies or studies of Lenin by Stefan Possony, Robert Payne, Louis Fischer, Ronald Clark, Dora Sturman, and 15 Russian-born authors, among them Angelica Balaba-nova, Berdyaev and my father, David Shub...
...In both cases, Volkogonov has corroborated and substantially amplified my father's findings...
...All the more timely, then, for Russian readers, General Dmitri Volkogonov's powerful work of demystification...
...Petersburg) as in this abridged translation by Harold Shukman of St...
...It assumes a knowledge of basic Russian history between 1905 and 1924, and thus often scants chronology, context and non-Communist personages in order to concentrate on key themes and issues formerly disputed or obscured...
...consular officer in St...
...The basic mass of Lenin documents interested only propaganda specialists...
...On the other hand, the book is somewhat less than definitive for the foreign, nonspecialist reader...
...The book includes a photograph of Lenin's Jewish grandfather, Dr...
...But Volkogonov's book is by no means limited to the content of Soviet documents...
...Antony's College, Oxford...
...In this English-language edition he acknowledges the use of U. S. archives at Harvard University and the Hoover Institution...
...Although his father was shot as an "enemy of the people" and his mother died in exile, he rose to become deputy chief political commissar of the Soviet Armed Forces...
...A deputy in both the current Russian Parliament and its predecessor, and an adviser to President Boris N. Yeltsin on historical and other matters, he is the author of 30 books, including new biographies of Stalin and Trotsky...
...Another group of long-classified papers ticks off the dollars, gold marks and gold rubles dispatched abroad by Lenin for the incitement of "world revolution" (e.g., $1,008,000 to John Reed...
...The biographer sheds light, too, on episodes in Lenin's personal life...
...A third set of documents worth mentioning are the detailed medical records for the period after Lenin's first stroke (May 26, 1922...
...The assassin, Yakov Blumkin, was a Left SR armed with Cheka credentials...
...But Volkogonov does not connect this with the articles entitled "Lenin's Romance with Elizabeth K.," published in Paris in 1936 and copyrighted by Aleksinsky...
...He has, in his own words, gone through "a painful evolution of views, from a Stalinist through long Marxist orthodoxy to a complete rejection of Bolshevik totalitarianism...
...Volkogonov also discusses earlier love letters to an unnamed woman that were offered to the Bolsheviks in 1935 by a former comrade and later foe, Gregory A. Aleksinsky...
Vol. 77 • September 1995 • No. 12
