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The Life and Death of Lenin, by Robert Payne
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Who was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin?
He was a man with vast potential for good and evil.
He was one of the twentieth century’s political geniuses.
He was the revolutionary leader who envisioned backward, feudal Russia as the world’s first socialist country.
He bent Karl Marx’s theories into a weapon for conquering state power, and built the Bolshevik Party into an efficient political machine capable of leading the workers and seizing power.
He held the Russian Revolution together through a bloody civil war, and yet he lived to see the betrayal of his ideals by the rise of Stalin.
As much as any leader, his ideas and personality shaped the 20th century.
‘Mr Payne’s book on Lenin is an impressive work and as interesting as it is impressive’ - Bertrand Russell
‘Splendid character study of a human dynamo’ - The Scotsman
‘a powerful delineation of the man and revolutionary leader … Mr. Payne highlight with a sure touch the main line of Lenin’s drive to power, selecting the significant details of speech, gesture and daily life that bring the man and his intimates to life. The Life and Death of Lenin will clarify both the political and human realities of the Soviet revolution and of communism’ - Philip E. Mosely, Saturday Review
‘to this large-scale study [Mr. Payne] has given his full measure of devotion … [with his] ability to pace a vast, detailed narrative; political sense; an unforced feeling for drama; a firm conception of the central character; and control over an English style that always both fluent and sharply edged … Not only do we watch the unlocking of the vaults of [Lenin’s] character, but we are also enabled to follow the development of the single revolutionary idea that dominated him.’ - Clifton Fadiman, Book-of-the-Month-Club News
‘All the talents of Edgar Allan Poe, Alfred Hitchcock and Charles Addams couldn’t produce a more chilling tale’ - Associated Press
Robert Payne (1911-1983) had over a hundred books published on a wide range of subjects during his lifetime. Critics raved about ‘his vast erudition,’ ‘his magic power over words,’ and that rare ability ‘to capture the spiritual essence of his subject.’ The Russian series, in particular ‘The Life and Death of Lenin’ and ‘The Rise and Fall of Stalin’, raised his reputation as biographer to enormous stature.
Endeavour Press is the UK’s leading independent publisher of digital books.
- Sales Rank: #150729 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-04-21
- Released on: 2015-04-21
- Format: Kindle eBook
Most helpful customer reviews
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful.
From atheist to icon
By Edward
He was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov and Lenin was only one of his many noms de guerre, but Lenin is the one that stuck, the name of the mummy idolized in Red Square. Robert Payne's "The Life and Death of Lenin", published in 1964, is a highly readable biography of the man who, having absorbed Marx, molded the philosophy to his own means. The government of the proletariat envisaged by Marx (I don't think he had mass executions in mind) became the dictatorship of Lenin, and his dictatorial nature became evident very early in his career. The book contains two striking photographs taken ten years apart. The portrait taken in 1887 depicts a clean-shaven clear-eyed schoolboy with a full head of hair. The group photo taken in 1897 shows a bald, bearded man facing the camera with a steely gaze. A mixture, I suspect, of nature taking its course and a case of concentrated re-invention. Lenin was still a youth when his beloved older brother was executed as a terrorist and when his father died (evidently of a stroke) in the teenager's presence. (Lenin said later: "I was sixteen when I gave up religion.") It was after these two events that Lenin became increasingly revolutionary, a stand confirmed by his reading of "Das Kapital" in 1888. Payne follows his revolutionary activities, his arrest, his exile to Siberia. The long period of Lenin's traveling outside Russia, consolidating his Communist leadership mainly through his writings, is made consistently engrossing. Even more fascinating is Lenin's struggle after the Revolution with Kerensky, who was determined not to become "the Marat of the Russian Revolution" (according to Payne, the slaughter of Nicholas II and his family was directly ordered by Lenin) and the obssession Lenin had of witnessing the proletariat domination of Europe. (He was particularly concerned about England, perhaps because Marx lived there so many years and is buried in London.) The irony of the final chapters is Lenin's relationship with Stalin. Payne writes: "Stalin was a monster. Yet it is important to observe that there could have been no Stalin without Lenin. Stalin was Lenin's child; and Lenin, who hated and despised and feared him, must bear sole responsibility for bringing Stalin to power." Lenin suffered several strokes in his early fifties and officially it was a stroke that killed him; but Payne states categorically that Stalin had him poisoned, citing the discrepencies in the stories of Lenin's last hours. After Lenin's death the mythology began immediately. I think Vladimir Ilyich, a hard-nosed unethereal type, would have been appalled at what happened to himself after his death, his body mummified, his spirit deified. Robert Payne's book neither mummifies nor deifies the man. Terrible and undeniably dynamic, here is the presence that altered the 20th Century and the world.
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
An Oldie But Goodie
By Amazon Customer
Payne's biography of Lenin goes along way toward humanizing the architect of the 1918 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. However, having been written during the Cold War years, his scholarship is somewhat limited to sources then available and takes a decidedly pro forma anti-Communist tone. Which I suppose was necessary to be published by a respectable mainstream publishing company in those days (1964).
Payne spends too much time with Lenin's early life, way more than I cared for anyway, but I would gather that this was done for the sake of completeness. Some interesting facts Payne's book revealed to me: Lenin's brother was hung by the authorities for being part of a anti-Czarist underground group (1905); Lenin was briefly held captive by bandits while driving around in the countryside during the 1920's; that he kept a Irish-French mistress for a time; and that the purges, show trials, executions, and deportations that followed the successful campaign over the counter-revolutionary White Armies and their European Allies was Lenin's idea, and not Stalin's. (Although Stalin carried out the program after gaining power and on a scale well beyond what Lenin had in mind.)
Payne's style of writing is easy to follow and replete with interesting personal information about Lenin, such as anecdotes about the items he kept on his desk at the Kremlin and their personal significance to him as well as the portraits on his walls. It all reminded me of how People Magazine might do a cover story about Lenin if they existed in those days.
A weakness in Payne's work is his failure to use footnotes to document the sources for these personal glimpses of Lenin. Official acts and formal documents that Lenin worked on were of course pretty easily available to historians and scholars, even in 1964, and so those aspects of Lenin's official duties in the government and CP are in less need of thorough documentation than are the personal things about him. But it would be nice to know where these personal glimpses of Lenin came from and how credible they are.
I would recommend this book while noting that there are newer biographies of Lenin that are far easier to obtain. I bought my copy at a garage sale for two dollars and, for me at least, it was well worth the price.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
One of History's More Colorful Characters
By Solipso
The Goodness: I got a good look at the life and person of one of history's most charismatic individuals. It was entertaining to learn how Lenin's charisma moved him up through the ranks of the revolutionaries. I was pleased at the peeks that Payne gave me of Lenin's private moments. Also, Payne delivered many interesting anecdotes. Especially good were moments of Lenin's childhood, his exile in Siberia, his secret train ride through World War I Germany and his return to Russia, and the near-miss assassination attempt by the female revolutionary Fanya Kaplan.
The Blas�: I guess Payne felt obliged as a professional biographer to make comments on various persons and events, especially about his main subject. Maybe he didn't believe his comments, but he just felt he had to say something. Certainly I didn't believe in everything he said. These comments were the dullest sections of the book.
The Badness: "The Life and Death of Lenin" was published almost half a century ago, and parts of it are outdated. Though I recommend it as a good read, I can't recommend that you read it without reading something more contemporary; for example Robert Service's biography, "Lenin." Otherwise you may get your facts wrong. What follows is my summary of three events that Payne inaccurately describes:
1. The assassination of German ambassador Mirbach: Payne says that Lenin ordered it. But Orlando Figes, in "A People's Tragedy" (published in 1996), gives a convincing account placing sole responsibility on the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. The Bolsheviks, including Lenin, had nothing to do with it.
2. The slaughter of Nicholas Romanov and his family: Payne does say that Lenin ordered the killings, but he gives some convoluted explanation for it. From "A People's Tragedy," I think the order was given for one simple reason: The White Army had surrounded Yekaterinburg, where the Romanovs were imprisoned. If the Whites were to perform a rescue, they would use the Romanovs as a rally flag, which might allow them to win the civil war and defeat Lenin's Red Army. Bye-bye revolution. The safest thing for Lenin to do was just to kill them.
3. Lenin's Death: I think Payne is stretching the facts when he says, "...if there is no evidence to permit us to point directly to the murderer, there is such an abundance of clues that it is no longer possible to believe he died a natural death.... Lenin's death...was brought about by Stalin." Orlando Figes's account of Lenin's death is much more sober. He says nothing about Stalin, or anyone else, murdering Lenin. I go along with the prima facie evidence of Lenin's autopsy: He died of a stroke.
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