Lenin: A New Biography

by Dmitri Volkogonov and Harold Shukman

Book Overview

Traces the life of the Soviet leader, uses the secret Soviet archives to reveal new information, and argues that Lenin set in motion many of the worst excesses of the state later expanded by Stalin. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0029334357
• ISBN13: 9780029334355
• Release Date: October 1994
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 529 Pages
• Weight: 2.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.5" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Lenin, The West Still Has A Blind Spot...

As a history teacher, I find it appalling that anyone would write that this book is "biased" or that the fact that he was "dedicated to his cause" as a mitigating factor to his campaign of mass murder, erecting the conspiratorial police state, total destruction of the family, church, and freedom, and of course foisting the bankrupt theories of Marxism on an entire nation...the fact that this almost always requires mass murder should be revealing. The fact that anyone would in anyway mitigate anything done by Lenin is probably autobiographical...an enchantment with socialism...The story always seems to end the same way. The West, espeically the left, still has a blind side when it comes to utopianism. How many millions must be murdered before we get it. Read the book and learn....Read the Venona Secrets and about the GRU by Dr. Raymond Leonard. Good places to start.

Excellent!

The biography will be condemned by remaining True Believers. For this reason alone it should be read by all Americans. Because the author was a dedicated Leninist for most of his life, we can see how wrenching is his education to the truth of the ruthless dictatorship Lenin created and perpetuated. More people murdered in the name of an unattainable goal than by any other regime in the history of the world. And we think Hitler is evil! A must read to get a clear perspective on most of the 20th Century.

A first rate reexamination of Lenin

Simply put, the others below who write of Volkogonov as some mere right wing pedant are far from any truth in the matter. Volkogonov was brought up and schooled in the marxian tradition and lost it honestly, through discovery. Having been intersted historically in Lenin for over fifteen years, I find any conclusion other than Volkogonov's conclusions about Lenin to be simple exercises in propoganda. Let there be no doubt- the two others who wrote about Volkogonov are either amateurs on the subject and bluntly do not know what they are speaking about, or they are hacks in some form or another and are seeking to conceal truth by means of the process that Orwell made so plain in his "Politics and the English Language". The only people who would disagree with as reasonable a conclusion as Volkogonov's fascinating bio of Lenin are either fools or liers. This book is excellent. Add it to your collection.

An Amazing Intellectual Journey

What makes Dmitri Volkogonov's work so important, is not the fact that he is the first to publicize these formerly secret documents, but that as a former Leninist he made the remarkable intellectual journey to form the conclusion that the Bolshevik state was a sham from the start. This is a powerful statement coming from a man who once served the Soviet state as an Army General, a man who as a young officer willingly drove a tank through ground zero of a nuclear blast. His informed view deserves more weight in my opinion than the smug attitudes of comfortable armchair communists in the West or unrepentant apparaciki in Russia. Leninists will of course hate Volkoganov for this in that he has shown their bogus saint for what he was - a cynical opportunist, a close-minded dilitant, operating with but the fig leaf of a political plan. What interested Lenin most of all, as shown by the author, was not the establishment of communism, but rather the raw use of power. Thus he could write of the withering away of the state in "State and Revolution" while at the same time planning the creation a bureaucraticized police state based on mass terror. Volkognov sheds amazing light on various aspects of Lenin which until now were little known, such as his family background, his connections with the German General Staff, his responsibility for the murder of the Czar and his family, his actions in the Kaplan affair, and his unrealistic hopes in spreading the world revolution. What was for me perhaps the most frightening aspect of Lenin is how much his style has been copied since 1917 by cynical political manipulators, especially in the West. The quest for unrestrained power is for them, as it was for Lenin, the sole reason for their political existance.

An updated biography de-mythologizing Lenin

Readers are now treated to an updated biography of Lenin, with a work that includes all the information about him in the once top-secret Soviet archives. The author, Dmitri Volkogonov, was a former Director of the Institute of Military History in Russia and a Colonel-General in the army. He now is a special assistant to Boris Yeltsin and chairman of the presidential commission examining Soviet archives. Volkogonov has also authored two other works on Stalin and Trotsky. In those days before perestroika, Lenin was considered by the people almost as a god and the principal architect of a communist state. He attempted to construct the praxis that Marx had thought of as an ideology. However, the secret Lenin archives have now been opened, containing many unpublished documents of Lenin. Vladimir Ilyitch Lenin has been de- mythologized. He built up the dictatorship of the proletariat. Instead of a society of equals, the state now takes absolute power in an interim stage towards the communist utopia. All this was known; what was not known were the means by which Lenin tried to achieve this: violence to attain and spread communist ideology not only throughout the Soviet Union, but also to neighboring countries; his treachery towards even his once close friends and colleagues. Likewise, the author points out how communist bureacracy started and spread through the years, breeding corruption in government institutions and structures. Unlike many biographies, the work of Volkogonov is light reading, but it is well-documented. If you wish to find out the long-hidden truth about Lenin and the genesis of the now- defunct Soviet state, this book is for you.