The Fanatic as Cyclist
SHUB, ANATOLE
The Fanatic as Cyclist Lenin: A Biography By Robert Service Harvard. 561 pp. $35.00. Reviewed by Anatole Shub Author, "An Empire Loses Hope, "The New Russian Tragedy" Unlike "the vast and...
...He seems to have visited nearly all of Lenin's rented flats in London, Paris, Geneva, Zurich, Munich and elsewhere...
...The author is excellent on Lenin's family: his parents, their multiethnic genealogy, social status and European values...
...A subsequent book by Volkogonov, Autopsy for an Empire, added dramatic new material from the archives on Lenin as well as on his successors (see my "Russia: The Awful Truth," NL, April 6-20, 1998...
...Years later I learned from Arkady Vaksberg of Literaturnaya Gazeta that two Russian translations of my father's book had circulated simultaneously in Moscow: one commissioned by the Soviet Party Central Committee, the other prepared in samizdat by dissidents...
...But in an effort to "humanize" him the author is attentive to his recreational activities, particularly bicycling (Service is also a cyclist), and to his need for physical rest謡hich the biography relates to his failing health, well before the first stroke in 1922...
...As time passed the quality of the Lenin literature declined...
...The further along he read, the paler he became, and those standing next to him could...
...his brothers and sisters...
...He is good on Lenin's Siberian exile in Shushenskoe, even better in identifying Lenin's hiding places in Finland, and how he was gotten from one to another between July and October 1917...
...physically feel him gasping for breath...
...The book is best enjoyed if one ignores the author's insistence in the opening chapter on Lenin's continued "importance...
...and published a three-volume "political life" of Lenin in 1985, '91 Land '95...
...So who needs a new biography of Lenin now...
...That was slavery...
...In 1994, General Dmitri Volkogonov, formerly chief political commissar of the Soviet Armed Forces, with unique access to Communist Party archives as well as familiarity with my father's and other Western works, published a rich, hugely informative two-volume biography, later abridged in one volume in English (see my review, "Portrait of a Fanatic," NL, December 19, 1994-January 16, 1995...
...Service, who taught at the London University School of Slavonic Studies and is currently at St...
...Service's book is well written...
...co-authored a history of the Russian Revolution from 1910 to 1927...
...Yet much of it remained in controversy for nearly 70 years, mainly between those for whom the Bolshevik Revolution was "progressive" and those for whom it was a disaster...
...Stalin's terror wiped out most of the Russians who had known Lenin...
...Its director, M. S. Olminsky, had bound together the Tsarist files on Alexander's case: transcripts of the police interrogation (he took full personal responsibility, refusing to implicate others) and of the trial (he waived the right to a defense attorney), as well as the official report on his execution...
...The major historical revival these days is of Nicholas II and his family (slain at Lenin's orders), whom the Orthodox Church has now declared to be martyrsaints and who are the subject of a film spectacular to be released shortly...
...he showed how not to make a socialist revolution...
...his wife-secretary Nadezhda Krupskaya...
...For a while, there was a "middle" camp of Trotskyites and others who considered Stalin a villain but Lenin a god...
...The example Lenin set for posterity was an entirely destructive one...
...produced a scholarly study of organizational change during the Bolshevik Revolution...
...Reviewed by Anatole Shub Author, "An Empire Loses Hope, "The New Russian Tragedy" Unlike "the vast and trunkless legs of stone" of Ozymandias, giant Lenin statues still stand unimpaired in Russian cities these days...
...In 1970, the centenary of Lenin's birth, a review-article on the Pelican edition in the journal of Moscow State University attacked the book while quoting it directly at great length...
...Vyacheslav M. Molotov told an interviewer that Stalin was a "lamb" compared with the "more severe" Lenin...
...Cumulatively, we are reminded of how little time Lenin spent in Russia proper before he took power: After 1900, barely two years in 1905-07 and three months in the spring of 1917...
...Lenin's Lutheran mother, who supported him financially over many years, emerges as a force in her own right...
...he is too focused on what he considers to be "contradictions" in Lenin's character...
...He might have gained greater insight had he dipped into the reminiscences of a former Kremlin secretary, E. Drabkina, in Novy Mir for November 1987...
...Lenin, already pale, shuddered when he saw the bound documents...
...Thus the main audience for this new book by the British scholar Robert Service is likely to be in the West, among the dwindling ranks of Lenin professionals...
...In contrast to Nikita S. Khrushchev and Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Vladimir V. Putin has shown no interest in Lenin, preferring to light candles and cross himself on visits to Russian Orthodox churches...
...There seems little of real importance to be added to Volkogonov's work...
...Nor have Russians, since the General's death, shown much interest in revisiting Lenin...
...If guides are asked about the monuments, most say, "It's part of our history...
...Khrushchev's disclosures and the Allies' release of captured German documents, confirming Berlin's financing of the Bolsheviks, prompted an improved (Pelican) edition in 1966...
...I must acknowledge a personal interest in the question: In 1948 my father, David Shub, who had met Lenin in Geneva in 1905, published his one-volume biography...
...Despite all the new detail, however, Service does not offer a coherent vision of Lenin's life...
...Service does not explore Lenin's relationship to the Russian culture of his day...
...Their execution, Tolstoy warned, would only engender further violence...
...And he felt qualified to remake the world...
...After perestroika had run its course, one of its architects, Alexander N. Yakovlev, looked back at the Soviet regime and put it simply: "That wasn't socialism...
...Most of the reasons cited, such as his founding "the world's first Socialist state" and creating the USSR, are less impressive now than they seemed to some a dozen years ago...
...He could not open the book at first, slowed down, held it in his hands while forcing himself to suppress his trembling, and only then opened it...
...The difference was that Lenin also ordered the killing not only of the Tsar's immediate family and their servants but of as much of the extended family as the Bolsheviks could lay their hands on...
...But people rarely look at them...
...Then came glasnost, and with it the "good Lenin-bad Stalin" view evaporated...
...The text is accompanied by an excellent set of photographs...
...Service also clarifies, in some detail, Krupskaya's separation from Lenin in the wake of his affair with Inessa Armand...
...Antony's College, Oxford, translated Lenin's State and Revolution...
...I like to think this may explain, in small part, why Khrushchev's and Gorbachev's attempts to revive Leninism were both met with deafening silence...
...Four days later, Lenin suffered his first stroke...
...The Tsar was no more capable of heeding such an appeal熔r, in 1887, the appeal of Lenin's mother for the life of her son Alexander葉han the vengeful Lenin was of sparing Nicholas II in 1918...
...In the West, personal memoirs and works rooted in expert knowledge of Russian history gave way to "Soviet studies" that often lacked the taste, smell and feel of Russia...
...The ultimate putdown was Venedikt Yarofeyev's "My Little Leniniana," a mocking collage of quotations from Lenin and his intimates...
...The narrative moves briskly from scene to scene, telling us what Lenin was doing with a minimum of digression for minor characters, historical background or doctrinal discussions...
...When Lenin died in 1924, everything essential was known about him...
...Even the Communist Party cares more for Stalin要ictor of World War II and postwar empire-builder葉han for the erstwhile "leader of the world proletariat...
...With one or another new bit of evidence, all sides tried to amplify points originally made in 1917-18 if not in 1903...
...When I first read this account, I thought of Tolstoy's appeal to Alexander III to spare the lives of the terrorists who had killed his father, Alexander II, on March 1, 1881...
...Gavril Popov, in a memorable exegesis, demonstrated how faithfully Stalin had followed the 1919 Communist Party program that was drafted by Lenin...
...This might appear to be enough, but with the aid of various newly opened archives in Moscow, Service's latest book attempts a personal biography, which in fact fills a variety of gaps in the available Englishlanguage literature...
...Service is most energetic in tracking Lenin's movements over the years...
...She tells how on May 21, 1922葉he 35th anniversary of the hanging of Lenin's older brother, Alexander Ulyanov, for his part in a plot to assassinate Tsar Alexander III有enin, his wife and his two sisters visited the new Archive of the October Revolution...
Vol. 83 • September 2000 • No. 4
