Wednesday, December 20, 2017

My Amazon Review of Victor Sebestyen's "Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror"


Paving the Way for Stalin

Victor Sebestyen has written a masterful biography of V.I. Lenin in which he covers both the personal and the political. On the personal side it is obvious Lenin, the son of an upper middle class family was no proletarian. His tastes and lifestyle strived to be middle class. Although he lived austerely he was very sensitive for the need for creature comforts. He enjoyed mountain walks and hunting. He also skillfully managed his very socialist ménage a trois with his wife Nadya Krupskaya and his 10 year mistress Inessa Armand.

However it is on the political side where Lenin becomes a man of history. He was strategically inflexible in pursuing a socialist dictatorship for Russia, and oh did he succeed. Nevertheless on the tactical side Lenin was extraordinarily flexible and was willing to be expedient to further his strategic goals. He could be for democracy and against democracy, he could hate the Germans and then become their ally, and when “war communism” failed he flipped and supported the proto-capitalist New Economic Program (NEP). All of this was in the service of his communist dictatorship.

Sebestyan clearly portrays how Lenin paved the way for Stalinism. It was Lenin who created the Cheka (forerunner to the KGB) with its terror cells for political opponents. It was Lenin who initiated the forced grain requisitions from the peasantry and made villains out of the better off by calling them Kulaks. Stalin would kill millions of them a decade later. It was Lenin who attacked deviations from the Left and the Right turning those into anti-party enemies. And it was Lenin who showed no mercy when he crushed the Kronstadt sailors rebellion. All of this was in place by 1924, the year he died. All Stalin had to do was to refine it and make a cult out of Lenin in whose name he ruled.

On two minor notes, I am glad that Sebestyen highlighted the role of the Russian feminist Alexandra Kollontai as one who was very close to Lenin and was in the room when the decision was made to overthrow the Kerensky government in October 1917. I did catch one error in that Sebestyen described Armand Hammer as an oil magnate when he entered into deals with the Soviet government under the NEP. True Hammer was an oil magnate, but that came much later. In Russia he sold pencils.


All told Sebestyen has told the story of a personality whose iron will made Soviet communism possible. For reader interested in learning more about this period in history I would suggest the Stephen Kotkin biographies of Stalin.






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