Authors: Robert Service
ISBN-13: 9780674008281, ISBN-10: 0674008286
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Date Published: March 2002
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Robert Service is a Fellow of the British Academy and Professor of Russian History at Oxford University.
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 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 revolutionand 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 upon 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 party and the Soviet stateand how he bequeathed to Russia a legacy of political oppression and social intimidation that has yet to be expunged.
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.
Preface | ||
Note on Transliteration and Calendars | ||
List of Illustrations | ||
Glossary of Names of Lenin and his Family | ||
Maps | ||
Introduction | 1 | |
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 |
8 | An Organization 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 |
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 |
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 |