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.
VICTOR SEBESTYEN was born in Budapest. He has worked as a journalist on many British newspapers including The Times, the Daily Mail, and the London Evening Standard, where he was foreign editor and editorial writer. He has also written for many American publications, including The New York Times, and was an editor at Newsweek. He is author of Twelve Days: The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, and 1946: The Making of the Modern World.
Maps xi–xvii List of Illustrations xix Introduction 1 Prologue: The Coup d’État 7
1 A Nest of Gentlefolk 25 2 A Childhood Idyll 33 3 The Hanged Man 42 4 The Police State 49 5 A Revolutionary Education 58 6 Vladimir Ilyich – Attorney at Law 68 7 Nadya – A Marxist Courtship 76 8 Language, Truth and Logic 82 9 Foreign Parts 86 10 Prison and Siberia 92 11 Lenin Is Born 107 12 Underground Lives 121 13 England, Their England 127 14 What Is to Be Done? 138 15 The Great Schism – Bolsheviks and Mensheviks 145 16 Peaks and Troughs 154 17 An Autocracy Without an Autocrat 159 18 Back Home 171 19 ‘Expropriate the Expropriators’ 179 20 Geneva – ‘An Awful Hole’ 192 21 Inessa – Lenin in Love 202 22 Betrayals 215 23 A Love Triangle – Two into Three Will Go 224 24 Catastrophe – The World at War 231 25 In the Wilderness 240 26 The Last Exile 253 27 Revolution – Part One 258 28 The Sealed Train 271 29 To the Finland Station 285 30 The Interregnum 291 31 ‘Peace, Land and Bread’ 301 32 The Spoils of War 310 33 A Desperate Gamble 316 34 The July Days 320 35 On the Run 329 36 Revolution – Part Two 339 37 Power – At Last 346 38 The Man in Charge 358 39 The Sword and Shield 367 40 War and Peace 372 41 The One-Party State 380 42 The Battle for Grain 392 43 Regicide 401 44 The Assassins’ Bullets 410 45 The Simple Life 421 46 Reds and Whites 436 47 Funeral in Moscow 451 48 The ‘Internationale’ 457 49 Rebels at Sea and on Land 464 50 Intimations of Mortality 476 51 Revolution – Again 483 52 The Last Battle 488 53 ‘An Explosion of Noise’ 500 54 Lenin Lives 503
Principal Characters 511 Notes 519 Select Bibliography 538 Acknowledgements 548 Index 551
