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Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror

Victor Sebestyen's riveting biography of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin—the first major biography in English in nearly two decades—is not only a political examination of one of the most important historical figures of the twentieth century but also a fascinating portrait of Lenin the man. Brought up in comfort and with a passion for hunting and fishing, chess, and the English classics, Lenin was radicalized after the execution of his brother in 1887. Sebestyen traces the story from Lenin's early years to his long exile in Europe and return to Petrograd in 1917 to lead the first Communist revolution in history. Uniquely, Sebestyen has discovered that throughout Lenin's life his closest relationships were with his mother, his sisters, his wife, and his mistress. The long-suppressed story told here of the love triangle that Lenin had with his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and his beautiful, married mistress and comrade, Inessa Armand, reveals a more complicated character than that of the coldly one-dimensional leader of the Bolshevik Revolution. With Lenin's personal papers and those of other leading political figures now available, Sebestyen gives is new details that bring to life the dramatic and gripping story of how Lenin seized power in a coup and ran his revolutionary state. The product of a violent, tyrannical, and corrupt Russia, he chillingly authorized the deaths of thousands of people and created a system based on the idea that political terror against opponents was justified for a greater ideal. An old comrade what had once admired him said that Lenin "desired the good . . . but created evil." This included his invention of Stalin, who would take Lenin's system of the gulag and the secret police to horrifying new heights. In Lenin, Victor Sebestyen has written a brilliant portrait of this dictator as a complex and ruthless figure, and he also brings to light important new revelations about the Russian Revolution, a pivotal point in modern history. (With 16 pages of black-and-white photographs)

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Lenin: A Biography

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The real order of Lenin

Vladimir Putin, the first Russian leader of the 21st century, combines the old and the modern in his political style. His presidential campaign was fought with western opinion polls and TV advertising, yet he also acted as both a tsar and a commissar - when Chechnya refused to come to heel, he sent in the army to raze Grozny. Like the communist leaders, he burnishes his image as a man of action without concern for democracy, telling regional politicians to produce a majority for him or face dire consequences, and surrounding himself with friends from his KGB days. And like Lenin in 1917, Putin achieved supremacy while just beginning to learn to make a public speech with confidence.

So the Lenin question has not left the Russian political agenda. Among Putin's few statements in his campaign was the promise to remove Lenin's body from the mausoleum on Red Square and bury it properly. Nine years of de-communisation have lowered Lenin's prestige - he now comes only third, after Jesus Christ and Peter the Great, as the historical figure most admired by Russian people. Yet even many who dislike communism are still in his grasp. Charismatic Lenin founded the Communist party. He created the October Revolution and invented a new state - one party, one ideology - which became the model for states in eastern Europe, China and elsewhere. Lenin's works of Marxist theory were extremely influential. After his death, his ideas were codified as Marxism-Leninism, and his corpse was displayed in the mausoleum, where it is still given a monthly bath in formaldehyde.

He has been a god to some, a devil to others. In the Soviet period, the Lenin papers were locked in an inaccessible vault constructed to withstand an American nuclear attack on Moscow. The nature of Lenin's personality remained a mystery. Only since 1991 has it been permitted to poke around in these papers, and the picture they disclose is remarkably different from his image both in the west and in Russia. He used to be portrayed as a political machine without a personality, supposedly so absorbed in the theory and politics of Marxism that nothing-family, intellectual diversion or even leisure - existed for him.

The Lenin papers tell a more complicated story. Although he did suppress aspects of his personality, he never got rid of basic emotions, and these, compacted at the core of his personality, reinforced the extraordinary power of his outward behaviour. His passionate nature made him difficult to live with. His family had to make him promise not to talk about politics on holiday. In his years of power, he threatened to put colleagues "on bread and water in prison" for failing to implement the economic policy. He was probably being rhetorical, but nobody could be quite sure.

Lenin was also a revolutionary romantic. He carried photographs of Karl Marx, and bought a postcard of Emile Zola when the French writer took up the cause of Alfred Dreyfus in 1898. He was desperate to conserve himself for the inevitable great dawn of revolution, and felt meant for a special destiny. His recurrent fear was that his health would not last long enough to do the job. He was always troubled by insomnia and ulcers and had heart attacks long before his final illness. His nerves played him up. Around 1900, a Swiss doctor gave him the terrible diagnosis: "It's the brain." Already impatient, Lenin lived the rest of his life as if his personal clock were ticking quickly towards midnight.

As his wife Nadya and his sisters, Anna and Maria, make clear in previously censored parts of their memoirs, he depended on their willingness to cosset him when he was depressed. He was cunning in playing them off against each other so that they would carry out his errands uncomplainingly. Nadya even put up with his dalliance with the Marxist activist and feminist Inessa Armand, who was captivated by him. When he broke with her before the first world war, she pleaded: "At the moment I could manage without the kisses: just to see you and talk with you sometimes would be a pleasure - and this could do no one any harm."

Lenin's family also explains much. His ancestry included Jewish, Swedish and German forebears. He may also have had a Kalmyk grandfather. This is a different descent from that claimed for him by Russian nationalists (who argue that his background explains why he was, allegedly, so anti-Russian). His family had come in from the social and ethnic margins of the Russian empire. His school-inspector father and his pianist mother wanted to integrate in the professional elite of the new Russia. As he grew up, Lenin had no time for the old Russia of villages and Christianity. In 1891, when famine and disease plagued his native Volga region, his sister Anna did relief work. Lenin shocked her by saying this was a waste of energy. The peasantry's plight resulted from capitalism and Anna's charitable work simply alleviated the symptoms without curing the disease.

Lenin believed passionately in modernity: industry, urbanism, education and science. When his family was ostracised after his elder brother was executed in 1887 for trying to assassinate the tsar, Lenin concentrated the whole force of his being into the cause of revolution.

Marxism was his preferred doctrine and he owned up to being "in love" with Karl Marx. Ideology meant more to him than women. But privately, he drew on other influences. Machiavelli and Darwin had hugely impressed him. So, too, had the ideas of the Orthodox Church priest Father Gapon, who led the procession to the Winter Palace on Bloody Sunday in January 1905. He closeted himself for days with Gapon, and from him developed the idea of expropriating the entire property of the landed gentry. Lenin sincerely believed in Marxism, but he adjusted it much more audaciously than he pretended.

When I first started writing about Lenin in the early 80s, the trickiest task was to explain how Lenin's ideas were connected with his political activity. Some writers contended that his ideas predetermined the activity, others that the ideas were a disguise for a cynical desire for power. My own position was that neither of these contentions was true, but that Lenin was a man of ideological commitment who nevertheless altered his ideas to suit changing circumstances and new opportunities and threats - and not always for the reasons he gave in public. He had to manage opinion among his associates, his party and society. Sometimes he spoke straight and sometimes he fudged.

He genuinely believed humanity's future lay with communism and the creation of a world without political or economic oppression. But he also thought this required a most ruthless temporary class dic tatorship. He needed to get power before he could explain his strategy to supporters among the workers and even inside his party.

But Lenin's ideas and activity are just two corners of a triangle. The third is his emotional life, and now that the archives are available, we can work out the nature of the triangular relationship. Lenin was not the robotic politician of legend. He was a flesh-and-blood, over-confident, impatient, brilliant, charming and often troubled revolutionary. His story is incomplete until we take the entire triangle into account. Lenin was 47 before he gained power. For most of his adulthood, he had been an émigré. He might easily have given up and become the provincial lawyer he had trained to be in the 1890s, before he turned to revolutionary activism. But he was sustained by internal drives, and although he did not talk about them, they were constant and powerful.

What also emerges from the archives is a sense of the oneness of Lenin. It is sometimes claimed that, as he lay dying, he moderated his dictatorial doctrines. This is supposed to be proved by his call for the removal of Stalin from the party general secretaryship. But the evidence suggests instead that Lenin died a Leninist. Which is to say that he remained an idealist, but this meant to him staying true to the need for revolutionary persecution. Lenin's deathbed disagreements with Stalin were about bureaucratic matters that did not touch on the fundamentals of the one-party state.

We can now also see that Lenin's final illness caused him to behave bizarrely in the two years before his death in 1924. When Lenin spoke to his doctor, Liveri Darkevich, he admitted to thinking that he might be going clinically mad. A series of "obsessions" were unhinging him. Darkevich heard him pour his heart out: "A night doomed to insomnia is a truly terrible thing when you have to be ready in the morning for work, work, work without end." This tiny episode, which happened when Lenin swung between anger and despair, makes it easier to understand why Stalin managed to survive the criticisms made by Lenin. The other central party leaders had reason to think that Lenin's judgment was no longer to be trusted.

Lenin had an enormous impact but he had needed equally enormous luck to make that impact. Without the first world war, Russia would not have plunged into military defeat, economic collapse and administrative disintegration in 1917. Without a radicalised intelligentsia and working class, Lenin would have had few followers and would never have been able to gain power. He made the most of these extraordinary opportunities. Once he had power, he let nothing stand in the way of his keeping it. His successors maintained the basic system of communist rule until Gorbachev dismantled it in the late 80s.

Lenin's influence has declined since the fall of the Soviet Union. Marxism-Leninism is ignored even by the Russian Communist party. But many of the social and institutional arrangements of Lenin's regime have yet to be eliminated; the thinking of the Russian people was not changed overnight by the abolition of the USSR; and in China and Cuba he remains a secular saint. The world still lives in his shadow.

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Lenin Biography

“We want to achieve a new and better order of society: in this new and better society there must be neither rich nor poor; all will have to work. Not a handful of rich people, but all the working people must enjoy the fruits of their common labour. Machines and other improvements must serve to ease the work of all and not to enable a few to grow rich at the expense of millions and tens of millions of people. This new and better society is called socialist society.”

Lenin’s Collected Works, Vol 6, p.366

Early Life – Lenin

Lenin was an able student, learning Latin and Greek. In 1887, he was thrown out of Kazan State University because he protested against the Tsar who was the king of the Russian Empire. He continued to read books and study ideas by himself, and in 1891 he got a license to become a lawyer.

In the same year that Lenin was expelled from University, his brother Alexander was hanged for his part in a bomb plot to kill Tsar Alexander III, and their sister Anna was sent to Tatarstan. This made Lenin furious, and he promised to get revenge for his brother’s death.

Lenin before the Revolution

Whilst studying law in St. Petersburg he learned about the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, both radical Marxist philosophers from Germany. Lenin developed a lifelong philosophy of seeking to overthrow Capitalist society and replace it with a fairer Communist society. He saw existing Capitalist society as inherently unjust.

“Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave-owners.”

– Lenin

For becoming involved and writing about Marxism, Lenin was arrested and sent to prison in Siberia.

In July 1898, when he was still in Siberia, Lenin married Nadezhda Krupskaya. In 1899 he wrote a book called The Development of Capitalism in Russia” . In 1900, Lenin was set free from prison and allowed to go back home. He then travelled around Europe. He began to publish a Marxist newspaper called Iskra, the Russian word for “spark” or “lightning”. He also became an important member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party or RSDLP.

In 1903, Lenin had a major argument with another leader of the party, Julius Martov, which divided the party in two. Lenin wanted a strict system where power would only be given to the government. Martov disagreed, and wanted the government to give power to ordinary people. People who agreed with Martov were called Mensheviks (meaning “the minority”). The people who agreed with Lenin were called Bolsheviks. (“the majority”)

In 1907 he travelled around Europe and visited many socialist meetings and events. During World War I, he lived in big European cities like London, Paris and Geneva. At the beginning of the war, he represented the Bolsheviks at the Second International which was formed of left-wing parties. However, the meeting was shut down when the disparate factions disagreed about whether to support or oppose the First World War. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were one of only a few groups who were against the war because of their Marxist ideas.

1917 Revolution

In 1917, people started rumours that Lenin had received money from the Germans. That made him look bad because a lot of Russians had died fighting Germany in the war. The rumours were so bad he was afraid he could get arrested or even killed. He left Russia and went to Finland, a country right next to Russia, where he could hide and carry on with his work on Communism.

After Tsar Nicholas II gave up his throne during the February Revolution, Germany hoped that they could persuade Russia to leave the war. The German government helped Lenin to secretly return to Russia, in the hope that Lenin would help end Russia’s involvement in the war. Lenin was still considered to be a very important Bolshevik leader, and he saw the great discontent of the population giving a unique opportunity for revolution. He wrote that he wanted a revolution by ordinary workers to overthrow the government that had replaced Nicholas.

In October 1917, the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin and Trotsky, headed the Petrograd Soviet and other Soviets all over Russia in a revolution against Kerensky’s government, which was known as the October Revolution. The revolution was successful as the army was unwilling to turn on the people. Lenin announced that Russia was now a Communist country and by November, Lenin was chosen as its leader.

Because Lenin wanted an end to World War One in Russia, he signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany in February 1918. While the treaty ended the war with Germany, Russia paid a high price in terms of lost land. But to Lenin ending the war was critical.

“The government considers it the greatest of crimes against humanity to continue this war over the issue of how to divide among the strong and rich nations the weak nationalities they have conquered, and solemnly announces its determination immediately to sign terms of peace to stop this war on the terms indicated, which are equally just for all nationalities without exception.”

Report on Peace (8 November 1917), Lenin’s Collected Works, Volume 26

The Russian treaty with Germany made the Allied powers, e.g. Great Britain and France displeased. Also, the great powers feared that if a Communist revolution could happen in Russia, it could happen elsewhere in Europe.  Allied governments sent support to ‘White’ Russians – people loyal to the Tsar or Kerensky’s government. There was an on-going civil war, with the Bolsheviks having to fight across the country. Lenin made rules that as much food as possible was to be given to Communist soldiers in Russia’s new Red Army. This was a factor in winning the civil war, but, during this period, many ordinary many died of hunger or disease.

After the war, Lenin brought in the New Economic Policy to try and make things better for the country. Some private enterprise was allowed, but not much. Businessmen, known as nepmen, could only own small industries, not factories.

After a woman named Fanny Kaplan shot Lenin in 1918, he started having strokes. By May 1922, he was badly paralysed. After another stroke in March 1923, he could not speak or move. Lenin’s fourth stroke killed him in January 1924. Just before he died, Lenin had wanted to get rid of Stalin because he thought he was dangerous to the country and the government.

The city of St. Petersburg had been renamed Petrograd by the Tsar in 1914, but was renamed Leningrad in memory of Lenin in 1924.

Before Lenin died, he said he wished to be buried beside his mother. When he died, Stalin decided to let the people in Russia come and look at his body. Because so many people kept coming, they decided not to bury him and preserved his body instead. A building was built in Red Square, Moscow over the body so that people could see it. It is called the Lenin Mausoleum. Many Russians and tourists still go there to see his body today.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “ Biography of Lenin ”, Oxford, www.biographyonline.net 23 August 2009. Updated 2 February 2018.

Lenin: A Biography

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ISBN: 0674003306

ISBN13: 9780674003309

Lenin: A Biography

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Lenin's politics continue to reverberate around the world even after the end of the USSR. His name elicits revulsion and reverence, yet Lenin the man remains largely a mystery. This biography shows us... This description may be from another edition of this product.

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Making of a despot, biography of the "bookish fanatic" who led a revolution, a fitting biography, to date, the definitive biography, terrific, comprehensive overview of lenin and his ideas, an excellent portayal, popular categories.

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The Life of Lenin Paperback – January 1, 2001

• Print length 720 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Phoenix Press
• Publication date January 1, 2001
• Dimensions 6.14 x 1.77 x 9.21 inches
• ISBN-10 1842122304
• ISBN-13 978-1842122303
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Phoenix Press (January 1, 2001)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 720 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1842122304
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1842122303
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.48 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.14 x 1.77 x 9.21 inches
• #324,745 in Biographies (Books)

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Vladimir Lenin’s life in 13 PHOTOS

Lenin in his Gorki estate, 1922

"When Lenin was a little curly-headed boy…" This popular Soviet phrase was inspired by this 1874 photo of 4-year-old Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin's real last name) with his sister Olga. A fragment from this portrait was also placed on a ‘ Little Octobrist ’ badge. 

Lenin had an excellent memory and an insatiable appetite for knowledge. He graduated from gymnasium with a gold medal and enrolled in the Law Faculty at Kazan University. The below photo is from the 1887 graduating class book.

Lenin joined revolutionary circles after graduating in 1887. At that time, his life was in for a shock, as his older brother was executed on charges of plotting to assassinate the emperor. For taking part in student riots, Lenin was expelled from Kazan University. Later, he was allowed to pass external exams at St. Petersburg University's law faculty. The following photo shows Lenin sitting on the steps at a meeting of the Comintern Congress, 1921.

In 1893, Lenin moved to St. Petersburg, actively studied economics and hung out with other revolutionaries. He then met his future wife Nadezhda Krupskaya and was imprisoned for more than a year. Upon his release, he was sent into Siberian exile and the couple married, so that Krupskaya could follow him. Below is a photo with Krupskaya, 1922.

In Siberian exile, he wrote many articles about Russia's economics. In 1900, Lenin went to Europe and established the ‘Iskra’ newspaper. There, for the first time, he used his pseudonym 'Lenin' (read more on how he came up with it here ). Below is a portrait taken in 1905.

In Europe, Lenin attended congresses of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP). He was immediately radicalized toward socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. And, this way, he headed the Party's “majority” faction, which would be later called ‘Bolshevik’. Lenin also actively supported the first Russian Revolution of 1905-1907. The photo below is from 1914.

In 1912, Lenin launched the ‘Pravda’ newspaper in St. Petersburg and remotely managed its publication. At the beginning of World War I, he was arrested in Austria-Hungary on suspicion of spying in favor of Russia. He was only released from prison in 1916. Below photo: Lenin reading a copy of the ‘Pravda’ newspaper, 1919.

Lenin believed that Russia had entered the First World “imperialist” war in vain. He openly wished his country to be defeated, in order to build a new system on the wreckage of the monarchy. At the same time, the February Revolution of 1917 was a surprise for Lenin. The below photo shows Lenin in 1917, in makeup and wig, which helped him return to Russia safely.

In April in Petrograd (former and current Petersburg), Lenin announced his famous ‘April Theses’, in which he called for the end of the war (and the beginning of a Civil War) and the transfer of power to the Soviets. In October 1917, he initiated the arrest of the Provisional Government and, with this, the October Revolution began. The following photo shows Lenin in his office, 1918.

That same year, the capital was transferred to Moscow and Lenin and the government moved right into the kremlin. On August 30, 1918, revolutionary Fanny Kaplan attempted to assassinate Lenin and severely wounded him. This would later have a detrimental effect on the leader's health. The photo below shows Lenin within the kremlin walls, 1918.

In 1918-1920, Russia was in the midst of a bloody Civil War and Lenin commanded a "merciless mass terror" against rich peasants, priests and monarchist officers, as well as sending all "suspicious" people to concentration camps. This photo shows Lenin addressing the Red Army in 1920.

At the end of 1922, the Soviet Union was established. Stalin proposed that the Soviet republics would join Russia as autonomous republics, but Lenin rejected the idea. He decided that the Soviet republics should join the Union together with the Russian Republic as independent and equal. The photo below shows Lenin and Stalin in 1922. (Read more: How was the USSR formed? )

In 1923, Lenin's health worsened and he moved to his Gorki Estate near Moscow, where he spent the rest of his life. The leader died on January 21, 1924. According to the official conclusion, "the basis of the disease of the deceased is a widespread atherosclerosis of blood vessels on the grounds of premature wear and tear". The photo below was taken in 1923 and is one of the last to be taken of him.

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