Harold Shukman - Lenin - A biography

DMITRI VOLKOGONOV

Translated and edited by Harold Shukman

HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollins Publishers 1994

Copyright © Dmitri Volkogonov 1994

Translation copyright © Harold Shukman 1994

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780007291649

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2012 ISBN 9780007392674

Version: 2016-03-21

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Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Map

List of Abbreviations

Chronological Table

Editor’s Preface

Introduction

1 Distant Sources

Genealogy

Vladimir and Alexander

The Forerunners

The Discovery of Marxism

Nadezhda Krupskaya

Inessa Armand

Financial Secrets

2 Master of the Order

Theorist of Revolution

The Phenomenon of Bolshevism

Lenin and the Mensheviks

The Paradox of Plekhanov

The Tragedy of Martov

3 The Scar of October

Democratic February

Parvus, Ganetsky and the ‘German Key’

Lenin and Kerensky

The July Rehearsal

October and the ‘Conspiracy of Equals’

Commissars and the Constituent Assembly

4 Priests of Terror

The Anatomy of Brest-Litovsk

White Raiments

Regicide

Fanya Kaplan’s Shot

The Guillotine of Terror

5 Lenin’s Entourage

The Most Capable Man in the Central Committee

The Man with Unlimited Power

The Bolshevik Tandem

The Party’s Favourite

The Leninist Politburo

6 The One-Dimensional Society

The Deceived Vanguard

Peasant Predators

The Tragedy of the Intelligentsia

Lenin and the Church

The Prophet of Comintern

7 The Mausoleum of Leninism

The Regime and the Illness

The Long Agony

The Mummy and the Embalming of Ideas

The Inheritance and the Heirs

Lenin as History

Postscript: Defeat in Victory

Keep Reading

Index

About the Author

Notes

About the Publisher

Until February 1918 dates in Russia conformed to the Julian or Old Style Calendar, which by the twentieth century was lagging thirteen days behind the Gregorian Western Calendar, or New Style. Thus, the February Revolution of 1917 took place in March according to the Western calendar and the Bolsheviks seized power on 25 October 1917, when in the West the date was 7 November. In the text we have used New Style dates, adding Old Style where any ambiguity might arise. In the following table, all dates are according to New Style.

With the demise of the Soviet Union an era of Russian history was closed. It was an era that began in 1917 with the seizure of power by the Bolshevik Communist Party and ended with the disgrace and eviction of the same Party in August 1991, followed by the formal termination of the Soviet state itself at the end of the same year. From its inception to its end the Soviet state was identified with Lenin, whether alive or dead. Without him, it is generally accepted, there would have been no October revolution. Following the revolution, his name, his image, his words and his philosophy embellished, informed, exhorted and inspired generations of ordinary Soviet citizens, and especially those raised to positions of authority. He was made into an icon, a totem of ideological purity and guidance beyond questioning. All other Party leaders were found to be fallible in due course, many of the 1917 cohort in the great purge of 1936–38, and most famously Stalin in 1956 when Khrushchev debunked his ‘cult of personality’ at the Twentieth Party Congress. But Lenin remained untouched. As more and more topics of Soviet history were re-examined during Gorbachev’s enlightened leadership, and the Bolshevik old guard, exterminated in the 1930s, were rehabilitated, it became obvious that the spotlight must sooner or later fall on the last dark place on the stage – that occupied by Lenin.

A new reading of Lenin was made possible not only because Dmitri Volkogonov was granted access to the archives in the 1980s, but also, indeed chiefly, because Leninism itself had totally collapsed in the former Soviet Union. As the author of this book himself confesses, even after he had spent years collecting the incriminating evidence for his major study of Stalin, mostly written before 1985 and published in 1988, Lenin was the ‘last bastion’ in his mind to fall. Lenin has at last passed into history. No longer is he the prop of a powerful regime, the object of an ideology, or the central myth of a political culture. To engage in debate about Lenin and to assess his actions is no longer to challenge the legitimacy of an existing political system. Like him, it too has become history.