Lenin: His politics still reverberate around the world even after the end of the USSR. His name elicits revulsion and reverence. And yet Lenin the man remains largely a mystery. This biography shows us Lenin as we have never seen him, in his full complexity as revolutionary, political leader, thinker, and private person. Born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in 1870, the son of a schools inspector and a doctor's daughter, Lenin was to become the greatest single force in the Soviet revolution-and perhaps the most influential politician of the twentieth century. Drawing on sources only recently discovered, Robert Service explores the social, cultural, and political catalysts for Lenin's explosion into global prominence. His book gives us the vast panorama of Russia in that awesome vortex of change from tsarism's collapse to the establishment of the communist one-party state. Through the prism of Lenin's career Service focuses on dictatorship, the Marxist revolutionary dream, civil war, and interwar European politics. And we are shown how Lenin, despite the hardships he inflicted, was widely mourned at his death in 1924. Service's Lenin is a political colossus but also a believable human being. This biography stresses the importance of his supportive family and of its ethnic and cultural background. The author examines his education, upbringing, and the troubles of his early life to explain the emergence of a rebel whose devotion to destruction proved greater than his love for the "proletariat" he supposedly served. We see how his intellectual preoccupations and inner rage underwent volatile interaction and propelled his career from young Marxist activist to founder of the communist partyand the Soviet state-and how he bequeathed to Russia a legacy of political oppression and social intimidation that has yet to be expunged.
There is nothing approaching Service's book in Russian. In English, no one has examined Lenin's career as microscopically as Service or attempted to bring the man and his works into a single and, at the same time, comprehensive focus. Service makes quite clear the inordinate costs of Lenin's revolutionary activity for Russia and the world. But he conveys this assessment by scrupulous reconstruction of his subject's career and careful criticism of existing interpretations. This is the ablest, the most accurate, and the most up-to-date treatment of the subject that we have, or will have for a very long time.
Abbott Gleason
Service knows as much about Lenin's life as anybody around. What he has done is to write a more personal biography of Lenin than has ever been written before. A great deal of new material has come out since 1991 or even a bit earlier, especially on Lenin's personal life--on his health, physical and psychic. The book enriches Lenin's life with detail and should be made widely available. — Abbott Gleason, author of Totalitarianism
Martin Malia
There is nothing approaching Service's book in Russian. In English, no one has examined Lenin's career as microscopically as Service or attempted to bring the man and his works into a single and, at the same time, comprehensive focus. Service makes quite clear the inordinate costs of Lenin's revolutionary activity for Russia and the world. But he conveys this assessment by scrupulous reconstruction of his subject's career and careful criticism of existing interpretations. This is the ablest, the most accurate, and the most up-to-date treatment of the subject that we have, or will have for a very long time. — Martin Malia, author of Russia Under Western Eyes
