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Lenin : A Biography by Robert Service (2000, Hardcover)

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About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherHarvard University Press

ISBN-100674003306

ISBN-139780674003309

eBay Product ID (ePID)1662753

Product Key Features

Book TitleLenin : a Biography

Number of Pages592 Pages

LanguageEnglish

TopicRussia & the Former Soviet Union, Political Ideologies / Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism, Revolutionary, Political, Historical

Publication Year2000

IllustratorYes

GenrePolitical Science, Biography & Autobiography, History

AuthorRobert Service

FormatHardcover

Dimensions

Item Height1.9 in

Item Weight36.2 Oz

Item Length9.2 in

Item Width6.1 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

LCCN00-021394

Dewey Edition21

ReviewsIn this thorough biography, Robert Service uses the abundant new archival evidence to describe Lenin's personal idiosyncracies, and also to underline, once again, his many ideological contradictions...Service then goes on to show how Lenin betrayed, in practice, virtually all of his paper principles, which had themselves changed several times in any case: far from creating a state in which ordinary workers took decisions about the running of society, Lenin created a totalitarian dictatorship., Throughout this massive and exhaustive biography of Lenin, British historian Robert Service does not lose sight of his subject's stature as the father of the twentieth century's feast of horrors. What interests Service more, however, is an exploration of the person behind the political persona...Service has diligently incorporated his archival findings into this work, which has enabled him to take issue with the many biographies that tend to portray Lenin as either a sociopath or savior...This lucidly written, insightful biography will no doubt come to be regarded as a definitive interpretation of Lenin., The wonder of this particular account is that Service succeeds in explaining how Lenin came to [his] determined confidence and the complex and ultimately tragic circumstances that led to the triumph of his ambitions...The most significant contribution of this book is the wealth of personal information that makes Lenin a far more accessible, if not appealing, individual...Such details make Lenin all the more human and so all the more vivid and frightening...Service never allows his narrative to slip into sentimentality or forgets whom he is dealing with., The best place to begin assessing Boshevism's founder is the work of the British historian Robert Service. The present volume, Lenin: A Biography, is the fourth the author has devoted to his lifelong subject, its three predecessors, published between 1985 and 1995, being a meticulous chronicle of Lenin's political life. Yet the past decade has produced sufficient archival material to make possible a biography of Lenin the man, and this is the new volume's task. It may also serve as a summary of the preceding trilogy, to which readers can refer back for fuller details at any point...Even in Russia, historians prefer Service's nuanced and judicious account to the more sensational work of the late Dmitri Volkogonov, as well as to the standard Western treatments. Indeed, Service is consciously writing against the predominant Lenin canon in both East and West...[He] seeks to reconstruct Lenin's motives historically, decision by decision, as the settings of his action changed. Moreover, his analysis has been refined by the vicissitudes of time., In his massive, all-encompassing biography, British historian Robert Service does not lose track of his subject's stature...but what interests Service more is the person as opposed to the persona...The reader is left with a personality rooted in paradox: a coldly calculating individual capable of deep emotion; a man who possessed little empathy yet became outraged by the slightest injustice...This lucidly written, sharply observed biography will no doubt come to be regarded as a definitive portrait of Lenin for some time., Lenin was the one essential personality of the communist movement that shook the world for most of the twentieth century. In this marvelous synthesis of previously known history and information newly available since the dissolution of the Soviet Union that Lenin founded, Robert Service lays out how that came to be...Service is able to humanize Lenin without suggesting that in that humanity lies any explanation of or excuse for the excesses of the revolution he led., [A] significant addition...Without doubt, Service's life-of should answer all curiosities about Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin)--about his personality, attitudes, intellect, ruthlessness, and significance...As Service notes, but for contingencies that pushed history his way, Lenin might have remained an anonymous exile; why it was otherwise is adroitly argued throughout this superb biography., The most authoritative and well-rounded biography of Lenin yet written--and the one that is, in its quiet way, the most horrifying. Oxford historian Service ( A History of Twentieth Century Russia ) makes good use of Party and Presidential archives that were previously closed to historians. The portrait that emerges therefore has many elements that were either altogether unknown or have only recently emerged...An important study that goes far in tracing the roots of the dire legacy Communism bequeathed to the third of mankind unfortunate enough to have suffered its rule., In Lenin: A Biography , Robert Service argues that Lenin's importance evolved from three major achievements: He led the October Revolution, he founded the Soviet Union, and he laid out the rudiments of Marxism-Leninism...This is a fascinating and engaging book, not the least because it is the first comprehensive Lenin biography to appear since crucial Soviet archives have been opened., The demise of the country and the ideology its elite professed (at least externally) to the very end requires a new evaluation of the founder of the Soviet state. The opening of the Russian archives provided an additional incentive for such work. In a new biography, Robert Service...provides fresh material as well as an original vision of Lenin. Readers will enjoy his information and observations, even if they do not share his views...Readers will find a lot of details about Lenin's Jewish ancestral links, his supportive family, his love affairs, and the last hours of his life. At the same time, Service presents him as a calculating yet compulsive politician obsessed to the point of mania with his vision of history and the future...One should read Service's excellent book not so much to ponder the problems of the past but of the present and future., With the help of previously unpublished documents recently released from central party archives, [Service] has managed to skillfully depict the surreal life of an obsessive, brilliant and stubborn individual who usually found himself the champion of the minority opinion within a minority of just a small number of revolutionaries--who, for most of their lives, did not have a revolution in sight.

Dewey Decimal947.084/1/092 B

Table Of ContentPreface Note on Transliteration and Calendars List of Illustrations Glossary of Names of Lenin and his Family Maps Introduction Part One: The Rebel Emerges 1. The Ulyanovs and the Blanks 2. Childhood in Simbirsk 1870-1885 3. Deaths in the Family 1886-1887 4. The Ploughing of the Mind 1887-1888 5. Paths to Revolution 1889-1893 6. St Petersburg 1893-1895 7. To Siberian Italy 1895-1900 Part Two: Lenin and the Party 8. An Organization of Revolutionaries 1900-1902 9. 'Holy Fire' 1902-1904 10. Russia from Far and Near 1905-1907 11. The Second Emigration 1908-1911 12. Almost Russia! 1912-1914 13. Fighting for Defeat 1914-1915 14. Lasting Out 1915-1916 Part Three: Seizing Power 15. Another Country February to April 1917 16. The Russian Cockpit May to July 1917 17. Power for the Taking July to October 1917 18. The October Revolution October to December 1917 19. Dictatorship Under Siege Winter 1917-1918 20. Brest-Litovsk January to May 1918 21. At Gunpoint May to August 1918 Part Four: Defense of the Revolution 22. War Leader 1918-1919 23. Expanding the Revolution April 1919 to April 1920 24. Defeat in the West 1920 25. The New Economic Policy January to June 1921 26. A Question of Survival July 1921 to July 1922 27. Disputing to the Last September to December 1922 28. Death in the Big House 1923-1924 Lenin: The Afterlife Notes Select Bibliography Index

SynopsisLenin's politics continue to reverberate around the world even after the end of the USSR. His name elicits revulsion and reverence, yet Lenin the man remains largely a mystery. This biography shows us Lenin as we have never seen him, in his full complexity as revolutionary, political leader, thinker, and private person. Born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in 1870, the son of a schools inspector and a doctor's daughter, Lenin was to become the greatest single force in the Soviet revolution--and perhaps the most influential politician of the twentieth century. Drawing on sources only recently discovered, Robert Service explores the social, cultural, and political catalysts for Lenin's explosion into global prominence. His book gives us the vast panorama of Russia in that awesome vortex of change from tsarism's collapse to the establishment of the communist one-party state. Through the prism of Lenin's career, Service focuses on dictatorship, the Marxist revolutionary dream, civil war, and interwar European politics. And we are shown how Lenin, despite the hardships he inflicted, was widely mourned upon his death in 1924. Service's Lenin is a political colossus but also a believable human being. This biography stresses the importance of his supportive family and of its ethnic and cultural background. The author examines his education, upbringing, and the troubles of his early life to explain the emergence of a rebel whose devotion to destruction proved greater than his love for the "proletariat" he supposedly served. We see how his intellectual preoccupations and inner rage underwent volatile interaction and propelled his career from young Marxist activist to founder of the communist party and the Soviet state--and how he bequeathed to Russia a legacy of political oppression and social intimidation that has yet to be expunged.

LC Classification NumberDK254.L4S4323 2000