Lenin: A Biography

by Robert Service

Overview

Lenin is a colossal figure whose influence on twentieth-century history cannot be underestimated. Robert Service has written a calmly authoritative biography on this seemingly unknowable figure. Making use of recently opened archives, he has been able to piece together the private as well as the public life, giving the first complete picture of Lenin.

This biography simultaneously provides an account of one of the greatest turning points in modern history. Through the prism of Lenin's career, Service examines events such as the October Revolution and the ideas of Marxism-Leninism, the one-party state, economic modernisation, dictatorship, and the politics of inter-war Europe. In discovering the origins of the USSR, he casts light on the nature of the state and society which Lenin left behind and which have not entirely disappeared after the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991.

'Immensely scholarly but also vivid and readable. This is a splendid book, much the best that I have ever read about Lenin ...I was overwhelmed by the power and vividness of this portrait.' Dominic Lieven, Sunday Telegraph

'He has managed skilfully to depict the surreal life of an obsessive, brilliant and stubborn individual' Guardian

'Lenin's life was politics, but Service has succeeded in keeping Lenin the man in focus throughout . . . This book deserves a place among the best studies of one of the most fascinating figures in modern history' Harold Shukman, The Times

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780330476331
Publisher:	Pan Macmillan
Publication date:	02/21/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	624
Sales rank:	498,351
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Robert Service is a Fellow of the British Academy and of St Antony's College, Oxford. He has written several books, including the highly acclaimed Lenin: A Biography, Russia: Experiment with a People , Stalin: A Biography and Comrades: A History of World Communism, as well as many other books on Russia's past and present. Trotsky: A Biography was awarded the 2009 Duff Cooper Prize. Married with four children, he lives in London.

Table of Contents

	Preface	xi
	Note on Transliteration and Calendars	xiii
	List of Illustrations	xv
	Glossary of Names of Lenin and his Family	xvii
	Maps	xix
	Introduction	1
1	The Rebel Emerges
1.	The Ulyanovs and the Blanks	13
2.	Childhood in Simbirsk 1870-1885	31
3.	Deaths in the Family 1886-1887	47
4.	The Ploughing of the Mind 1887-1888	61
5.	Paths to Revolution 1889-1893	74
6.	St Petersburg 1893-1895	91
7.	To Siberian Italy 1895-1900	107
2	Lenin and the Party
8.	An Organisation of Revolutionaries 1900-1902	129
9.	'Holy Fire' 1902-1904	147
10.	Russia From Far and Near 1905-1907	166
11.	The Second Emigration 1908-1911	184
12.	Almost Russia! 1912-1914	202
13.	Fighting for Defeat 1914-1915	222
14.	Lasting Out 1915-1916	235
3	Seizing Power
15.	Another Country February to April 1917	253
16.	The Russian Cockpit May to July 1917	270
17.	Power for the Taking July to October 1917	287
18.	The October Revolution October to December 1917	308
19.	Dictatorship Under Siege Winter 1917-1918	324
20.	Brest-Litovsk January to May 1918	338
21.	At Gunpoint May to August 1918	356
4	Defence of the Revolution
22.	War Leader 1918-1919	373
23.	Expanding the Revolution April 1919 to April 1920	391
24.	Defeat in the West 1920	406
25.	The New Economic Policy January to June 1921	421
26.	A Question of Survival July 1921 to July 1922	435
27.	Disputing to the Last September to December 1922	451
28.	Death in the Big House 1923-1924	464
	Lenin: The Afterlife	481
	Notes	495
	Select Bibliography	522
	Index	531

What People are Saying About This

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

Editorial Reviews

A comprehensive and intimate biography of the Russian revolutionary.

Washington Post

The best place to begin assessing Boshevism’s founder is the work of the British historian Robert Service. The present volume, Lenin: A Biography, is the fourth the author has devoted to his lifelong subject, its three predecessors, published between 1985 and 1995, being a meticulous chronicle of Lenin’s political life. Yet the past decade has produced sufficient archival material to make possible a biography of Lenin the man, and this is the new volume’s task. It may also serve as a summary of the preceding trilogy, to which readers can refer back for fuller details at any point… Even in Russia, historians prefer Service’s nuanced and judicious account to the more sensational work of the late Dmitri Volkogonov, as well as to the standard Western treatments. Indeed, Service is consciously writing against the predominant Lenin canon in both East and West… [He] seeks to reconstruct Lenin’s motives historically, decision by decision, as the settings of his action changed. Moreover, his analysis has been refined by the vicissitudes of time.

New York Review of Books - Martin Malia

The demise of the country and the ideology its elite professed (at least externally) to the very end requires a new evaluation of the founder of the Soviet state. The opening of the Russian archives provided an additional incentive for such work. In a new biography, Robert Service…provides fresh material as well as an original vision of Lenin. Readers will enjoy his information and observations, even if they do not share his views… Readers will find a lot of details about Lenin’s Jewish ancestral links, his supportive family, his love affairs, and the last hours of his life. At the same time, Service presents him as a calculating yet compulsive politician obsessed to the point of mania with his vision of history and the future… One should read Service’s excellent book not so much to ponder the problems of the past but of the present and future.

World and I - Dmitri Shlapentokh

In his massive, all-encompassing biography, British historian Robert Service does not lose track of his subject’s stature…but what interests Service more is the person as opposed to the persona… The reader is left with a personality rooted in paradox: a coldly calculating individual capable of deep emotion; a man who possessed little empathy yet became outraged by the slightest injustice… This lucidly written, sharply observed biography will no doubt come to be regarded as a definitive portrait of Lenin for some time.

Houston Chronicle - Rob Stout

With the help of previously unpublished documents recently released from central party archives, [Service] has managed to skillfully depict the surreal life of an obsessive, brilliant and stubborn individual who usually found himself the champion of the minority opinion within a minority of just a small number of revolutionaries—who, for most of their lives, did not have a revolution in sight.

The Guardian

[A] significant addition… Without doubt, Service’s life-of should answer all curiosities about Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin)—about his personality, attitudes, intellect, ruthlessness, and significance… As Service notes, but for contingencies that pushed history his way, Lenin might have remained an anonymous exile; why it was otherwise is adroitly argued throughout this superb biography.

Booklist - Gilbert Taylor

The wonder of this particular account is that Service succeeds in explaining how Lenin came to [his] determined confidence and the complex and ultimately tragic circumstances that led to the triumph of his ambitions… The most significant contribution of this book is the wealth of personal information that makes Lenin a far more accessible, if not appealing, individual… Such details make Lenin all the more human and so all the more vivid and frightening… Service never allows his narrative to slip into sentimentality or forgets whom he is dealing with.

Wall Street Journal - Joshua Rubenstein

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

Lenin was the one essential personality of the communist movement that shook the world for most of the twentieth century. In this marvelous synthesis of previously known history and information newly available since the dissolution of the Soviet Union that Lenin founded, Robert Service lays out how that came to be… Service is able to humanize Lenin without suggesting that in that humanity lies any explanation of or excuse for the excesses of the revolution he led.

Boston Globe - Charles Radin

In this thorough biography, Robert Service uses the abundant new archival evidence to describe Lenin’s personal idiosyncracies, and also to underline, once again, his many ideological contradictions… Service then goes on to show how Lenin betrayed, in practice, virtually all of his paper principles, which had themselves changed several times in any case: far from creating a state in which ordinary workers took decisions about the running of society, Lenin created a totalitarian dictatorship.

Herald on Sunday - Anne Applebaum

In Lenin: A Biography, Robert Service argues that Lenin’s importance evolved from three major achievements: He led the October Revolution, he founded the Soviet Union, and he laid out the rudiments of Marxism-Leninism… This is a fascinating and engaging book, not the least because it is the first comprehensive Lenin biography to appear since crucial Soviet archives have been opened.

Washington Times - Amos Perlmutter

A comprehensive and intimate biography of the Russian revolutionary.

Washington Post

The best place to begin assessing Boshevism's founder is the work of the British historian Robert Service. The present volume, Lenin: A Biography, is the fourth the author has devoted to his lifelong subject, its three predecessors, published between 1985 and 1995, being a meticulous chronicle of Lenin's political life. Yet the past decade has produced sufficient archival material to make possible a biography of Lenin the man, and this is the new volume's task. It may also serve as a summary of the preceding trilogy, to which readers can refer back for fuller details at any point...Even in Russia, historians prefer Service's nuanced and judicious account to the more sensational work of the late Dmitri Volkogonov, as well as to the standard Western treatments. Indeed, Service is consciously writing against the predominant Lenin canon in both East and West...[He] seeks to reconstruct Lenin's motives historically, decision by decision, as the settings of his action changed. Moreover, his analysis has been refined by the vicissitudes of time.
— Martin Malia

New York Review of Books

The demise of the country and the ideology its elite professed (at least externally) to the very end requires a new evaluation of the founder of the Soviet state. The opening of the Russian archives provided an additional incentive for such work. In a new biography, Robert Service...provides fresh material as well as an original vision of Lenin. Readers will enjoy his information and observations, even if they do not share his views...Readers will find a lot of details about Lenin's Jewish ancestral links, his supportive family, his love affairs, and the last hours of his life. At the same time, Service presents him as a calculating yet compulsive politician obsessed to the point of mania with his vision of history and the future...One should read Service's excellent book not so much to ponder the problems of the past but of the present and future.
— Dmitri Shlapentokh

World and I

In his massive, all-encompassing biography, British historian Robert Service does not lose track of his subject's stature...but what interests Service more is the person as opposed to the persona...The reader is left with a personality rooted in paradox: a coldly calculating individual capable of deep emotion; a man who possessed little empathy yet became outraged by the slightest injustice...This lucidly written, sharply observed biography will no doubt come to be regarded as a definitive portrait of Lenin for some time.
— Rob Stout

Houston Chronicle

Lenin was the one essential personality of the communist movement that shook the world for most of the twentieth century. In this marvelous synthesis of previously known history and information newly available since the dissolution of the Soviet Union that Lenin founded, Robert Service lays out how that came to be...Service is able to humanize Lenin without suggesting that in that humanity lies any explanation of or excuse for the excesses of the revolution he led.
— Charles Radin

Boston Globe

Throughout this massive and exhaustive biography of Lenin, British historian Robert Service does not lose sight of his subject's stature as the father of the twentieth century's feast of horrors. What interests Service more, however, is an exploration of the person behind the political persona...Service has diligently incorporated his archival findings into this work, which has enabled him to take issue with the many biographies that tend to portray Lenin as either a sociopath or savior...This lucidly written, insightful biography will no doubt come to be regarded as a definitive interpretation of Lenin.
— Rob Stout

Central Europe Review

In Lenin: A Biography, Robert Service argues that Lenin's importance evolved from three major achievements: He led the October Revolution, he founded the Soviet Union, and he laid out the rudiments of Marxism-Leninism...This is a fascinating and engaging book, not the least because it is the first comprehensive Lenin biography to appear since crucial Soviet archives have been opened.
— Amos Perlmutter

Washington Times

The wonder of this particular account is that Service succeeds in explaining how Lenin came to [his] determined confidence and the complex and ultimately tragic circumstances that led to the triumph of his ambitions...The most significant contribution of this book is the wealth of personal information that makes Lenin a far more accessible, if not appealing, individual...Such details make Lenin all the more human and so all the more vivid and frightening...Service never allows his narrative to slip into sentimentality or forgets whom he is dealing with.
— Joshua Rubenstein

Wall Street Journal

[A] significant addition...Without doubt, Service's life-of should answer all curiosities about Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin)—about his personality, attitudes, intellect, ruthlessness, and significance...As Service notes, but for contingencies that pushed history his way, Lenin might have remained an anonymous exile; why it was otherwise is adroitly argued throughout this superb biography.
— Gilbert Taylor

Booklist

In this thorough biography, Robert Service uses the abundant new archival evidence to describe Lenin's personal idiosyncracies, and also to underline, once again, his many ideological contradictions...Service then goes on to show how Lenin betrayed, in practice, virtually all of his paper principles, which had themselves changed several times in any case: far from creating a state in which ordinary workers took decisions about the running of society, Lenin created a totalitarian dictatorship.
— Anne Applebaum

Sunday Herald

★ 01/01/2017
Service (Trotsky: A Biography; Stalin: A Biography) here comprehensively covers Lenin's entire life, beginning with his early influences in Ulyanovsk through his end-of-life deterioration. Lenin is shown to be a brilliant, difficult, and strident person from beginning to end.

Library Journal