01.31.10
Booknotes: Lenin bio
Comment on Great Lenin’s Ghost
Jim Buck said,
January 31, 2010 at 10:11 am
Lenin may yet urn out to be the once-and-future king.
You point is quite apt, and you may be right, the point of my remark, about the enduring ‘ghost of Lenin’. My point was that the left is stuck on Lenin, and a fantasy Lenin, that doesn’t correspond to the reality.
The left is a gang of people who often don’t read books, certainly not critical books, and the result is a failure to understand either Lenin or the history connected to him. Here’s one of the first post-bolshevik bios of Lenin, using the new open archives. It is hard to consider how Lenin’s reputation can survive the facts. But it has survived, so I don’t know.
Lenin: A New Biography (Hardcover)
~ Dmitri Volkogonov
Jim Buck said,
January 31, 2010 at 2:55 pm
I’ve not read that book, but some of its reviewers describe the writer’s views as “slanted”. And, in any case, the ruthlessness–attributed to Lenin– is seen as a positive quality in some quarters.
I’ve spent some time in Berlin, over the last few years; and I’ve found ostalgie to be very real. I Watched Lenin’s statue being craned out of position, in the “People’s Palace”. and boated down the Spree (to be broken up). Despite my antipathy towards the man, the occasion was redolent of Arthurian myth: the deposed, dead, king being ferried towards the land where the sun sets—to sleep for a hundred years, perhaps, before returning.
nemo said,
January 31, 2010 at 3:20 pm
I hold no brief whatever on this particular book on Lenin (which I got out of the library two days ago and read rather swiftly). The question of bias here depends on who is making the charge. Anyway, by all means, find another book. How about someone who grates on the left (and on me) with known bias, e.g. Richard Pipes, who will go out of his way to present ugly facts about the Bolsheviks and Lenin.
My point is merely to note the way that Lenin’s left biographers tend to suppress the facts of what really happened. It is not an honorable history.
The point here is to understand the horrible betrayal of the left, e.g. the Socialist Revolutionaries, who attempted to produce a reasonable outcome, all of whom were simply wiped out as the Leninists took over and invented something absent in nineteenth century leftism, the Chekist one-party dictatorship plus gulags. We have forgotten what the left was, and the way that Leninists redefined the term, and then proceeded to discredit everything.