Another book about Lenin? You have to be kidding.


Why should anyone want to read, let alone write, yet another 500-page tome on the man whose mummy remains, somewhat ridiculously, embalmed on Red Square, when his achievements and legend have been rejected as a cruel sham?


The best reason to read Dmitry Volkogonov's "Lenin, Life and Legacy" is that it is not really about Lenin. It is an exorcism, the first attempt by a Soviet historian -- one who for all his life was a devout Leninist -- to come to terms with the false religion in which he firmly believed.


"It is hard to write this," Volkogonov says in his introduction.


"As a former Stalinist who has made the painful transition to a total rejection of Bolshevik totalitarianism, I confess that Leninism was the last bastion to fall in my mind."


Volkogonov is a historian of some stature. His biography of Stalin was well received in the West, but it was written at a time when Lenin, the foundation on which the Soviet Union was built, remained untouchable.


"We saw Lenin as a man whose life had been stolen from him at a cruelly young age, preventing him from completing the task he had begun," he writes. "We were deluding ourselves."


Volkogonov has been the keeper of the Communist Party and secret Lenin archives since they were opened for public scrutiny three years ago. This was where the numerous documents relating to Lenin that reflected poorly on his character and judgement were squirrelled away. Taken together, they offer a chilling portrait.


After reading Volkogonov, only the sick or ideologically blinded could continue to hold Lenin as a hero. Strong and single-minded he certainly was, a great revolutionary styled self-consciously in the Jacobin mold. But he was also a fanatic in the worst sense, and casually cruel.


The great proletarian leader, it seems, was a hypocrite. His parents were wealthy land- and serf- owners; he never held a job in his life until he became the leader of an entire nation. He was a man of means. Under his own orders concerning such people, Lenin might well have been exiled or shot.


He was also a poor Marxist. Lenin took what he wanted from Marx, namely some scant talk about the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat," and used it to turn a complex doctrine into a simplistic tool for the acquisition of power. He was less a socialist than an apostle of violence.


He was arrogant, and scornful of Russians. In one letter he advises a friend to give only the donkey work to Russians, because in his view they were idiots.


He took money from the German government, militated for Russia's defeat in World War I and for the onset of a terrible civil war. To be sure, Lenin was not, as some have said, a German spy. But he made common cause with Berlin for the destruction of Tsarist Russia.


Lenin understood, according to Volkogonov, that without a civil war the Bolshevik party stood little chance of competing for power with parties of social compromise, such as the Mensheviks.


As the end of power justified all means, civil war was therefore to be welcomed with open arms.


Lenin talked of "cleansing Russia," and at various times wrote that "one of every ten people guilty of parasitism should be executed on the spot."


Volkogonov may carry the venom of a lapsed believer, but this is probably irrelevant. Lenin condemns himself sufficiently in his own words.


In "Lenin: Life and Legacy," Volkogonov has dug up a considerable amount of new detail about Lenin's life. There are revelations about his affair with the French socialist Inessa Armand, about his acceptance of German money, and about the fortunes he spent on supporting revolutionary movements abroad while Russians starved to death in the terrible famine of 1921.


But Volkogonov's main interest is not so much in Lenin personally as in Leninism. Much of the book discusses the Bolshevik leader's effect on his successors, and on the development of the country he created. Volkogonov uses Politburo minutes to show the craven use that Soviet leaders made of Lenin's legacy to justify or guide their behavior.


Stalin, for example, was Lenin's creature, perhaps magnified in his crudity, but in his attitude to power a loyal pupil. The use of terror, concentration camps and loose orders that simply encouraged the lower authorities to brutality -- all of these Stalinist attributes were taken directly from his teacher. Khrushchev, Andropov, Gorbachev -- all are shown as devout Leninists.


Volkogonov has unearthed fascinating material about Lenin's death. For more than a year before he died, Lenin suffered a series of strokes that destroyed half his brain. Shockingly, while he was still making decisions of state, Lenin was relearning how to do basic arithmetic, because his faculties had been so badly damaged.


Such, according to Volkogonov's account, was the great revolutionary's thirst for power that even when he could barely speak he still was trying to run an empire.





"Lenin: Life and Legacy," by Dmitri Volkogonov, HarperCollins, 484 pages, ?25. The book can be ordered through Zwemmer.