Lenin: Life and Legacy

by HaroldShukman (Translator), Dmitri Volkogonov (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1994

  $6.91

  The author destroys the myth of benevolent Grandfather Lenin , showing how political violence and diplomatic double-dealing were part and parcel of the Soviet system from its outset in 1917. The old idea that Lenin created the communist system and Stalin took it to its extreme is shown to be flawed. The Stalinist methods of the Big Lie and violence against the population at home were present from the beginning. The author shows how the Bolsheviks colluded with the German High Command when the Russian Provisional Government was fighting for its life in World War I, and later reveals how Lenin sold off vast numbers of tsarist treasures in the West for the express purpose of financing the launch of Communist Parties in the West. No more definitive analysis of Leninism as a state system, ideological doctrine and way of thinking will be written.

• Used

  Paperback
  1995

  $5.40

  With access to unpublished Lenin documents held in the Communist Party archives and elsewhere, Volkogonov shows that the violence and coercion that characterized the Soviet system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.