‘Based on research among thousands of unpublished documents concealed in the Communist Party archives until the fall of the regime, Lenin: Life and Legacy is a crushing indictment of the regime’s founder…’Sally Laird, ObserverIn the first fully documented life of one of the greatest revolutionaries in history, Dmitri Volkogonov is free for the first time to assess Lenin’s life and legacy, unconstrained by 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 crippled the final months of his life
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Harold Shukman. Lenin: A biography
LENIN. Life and Legacy
Copyright
Contents
Map
Abbreviations
Chronological Table
Editor’s Preface
Introduction
1 Distant Sources
Genealogy
Vladimir and Alexander
The Forerunners
The Discovery of Marxism
Nadezhda Krupskaya
Inessa Armand
Financial Secrets
2 Master of the Order
Theorist of Revolution
The Phenomenon of Bolshevism
Lenin and the Mensheviks
The Paradox of Plekhanov
The Tragedy of Martov
3 The Scar of October
Democratic February
Parvus, Ganetsky and the ‘German Key’
Lenin and Kerensky
The July Rehearsal
October and the ‘Conspiracy of Equals’
Commissars and the Constituent Assembly
4 Priests of Terror
The Anatomy of Brest-Litovsk
White Raiments
Regicide
Fanya Kaplan’s Shot
The Guillotine of Terror
5 Lenin’s Entourage
The Most Capable Man in the Central Committee
The Man with Unlimited Power
The Bolshevik Tandem
The Party’s Favourite
The Leninist Politburo
6 The One-Dimensional Society
The Deceived Vanguard
Peasant Predators
The Tragedy of the Intelligentsia
Lenin and the Church
The Prophet of Comintern
7 The Mausoleum of Leninism
The Regime and the Illness
The Long Agony
The Mummy and the Embalming of Ideas
The Inheritance and the Heirs
Lenin as History
POSTSCRIPT Defeat in Victory
If you enjoyed Lenin: A Biography, check out these other great Dmitri Volkogonov titles
Index
About the Author. LENIN: LIFE AND LEGACY
Notes
About the Publisher
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DMITRI VOLKOGONOV
Translated and edited by Harold Shukman
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On the same day he wrote, as head of the Soviet government: [To whom it may concern] ‘I request that you help in every way possible to arrange the best accommodation and treatment for the writer, Comrade Inessa Fedorovna Armand, and her elder son. I request that you give complete trust and all possible assistance to these Party comrades with whom I am personally acquainted.’94 He also cabled Ordzhonikidze, asking him to put himself out over Inessa’s safety and accommodation in Kislovodsk, and ordered his secretaries to help see her off to the Caucasus. Although Russia was still enduring the civil war, the Bolshevik leadership were accustomed to frequent holidays. Hence Lenin could insist on the fateful trip.
For a decade, since they had met in Paris in 1909, Inessa Armand had occupied an enormous space in the life of a man whose dedication to the Great Idea left little or no room for anything else. She had succeeded in touching chords hidden deep in his near-puritanical heart. He had felt a constant need to be with her, write to her, talk to her. His wife did not stand in their way. As Alexandra Kollontai recalled in the 1920s, in conversation with her colleague at the Soviet legation in Norway, Marcel Body, Krupskaya was ‘au courant’. She knew how closely ‘Lenin was attached to Inessa and many times expressed the intention of leaving’, but Lenin had persuaded her to stay.95
