Lenin Biography

Product Description

With access to unpublished Lenin documents held in the Communist Party archives and elsewhere, Volkogonov shows that the violence and coercion that characterized the Soviet system derived entirely from Lenin, and that Lenin's regime designed and set in motion the machinery of the Stalinist terror of the 1930s and 1940s. The author also describes in detail the personal life of Lenin: his family antecedents, his private finances, the early funding of the Bolshevik Party, his relationship with his mistress Inessa Armand, and the illness that crippled the final months of his life.

From the Back Cover

"Based on research among thousands of unpublished documents concealed in the Communist Party's archives until the fall of the regime. 'Lenin: Life and Legacy' is a crushing indictment of the regime's founder".Sally Laird, ' Observer'
"Written with insight and authority…excellently translated by Harold Shukman".Ian McIntyre, 'The Times'
In the first fully documented life of one of the greatest revolutionaries in history, Dmitri Volkogonov is free for the first time t access Lenin's life and legacy, unconstrained by the demands of political orthodoxy. In addition to showing conclusively that the violence and coercion that characterised the Soviet system derived entirely from Lenin, the author also describes in detail the personal life of Lenin: his family antecedents, his private finances, the early funding of the Bolshevik Party, his relationship with his mistress Inessa Armand, and the debilitating illness that finally crippled the final years of his life.
"Volkogonov has done a remarkable job of researching into the newly available archives and reducing them to this manageable size. Harold Shukman has done an equally valuable job of editing and translating. Between them they have 'demolished the icon'".David Floyd, 'Daily Telegraph'
"Serious and impressive…Volkogonov's biography is all the more moving in being an attempt of an honourable and honest representative of the Soviet military establishment to come to terms with the ideology, institutions and symbols which shaped the lifetime".Dominic Lieven, 'The Spectator'