Vladimir Lenin
Source: Wapedia
Lenin: Revolutionary - Documentary (Part 1)
Essential Works of Lenin: "What Is to Be Done?" and Other Writings
Essential Works of Lenin: "What Is to Be Done?" and Other Writings
Amazon Price: $9.20 (as of 01/05/2010)
Nice introduction to Lenin
This is a great intro to Lenin, in his own words, so you don't have to care about anyone else's bias and you see for yourself what the man is all about. Further reading that would complement this would be 'Lenin's Struggle For A Revolutionary International'.
Lenin: Revolutionary - Documentary (Part 2)
(Part 2) Lenin: Revolutionary - Documentary
PLEASE READ: Sorry about not having this up earlier, I had little idea that it wasn't working originally. So I deleted that video and put this one in its place. Hopefully it works! Part 2 to a documentary about Vladimir Lenin.
Runtime: 576
20192 views
56 Comments:
curated content from YouTube
Lenin: A Biography
Lenin: A Biography
Amazon Price: $16.00 (as of 01/05/2010)
Service is a British historian of Soviet Russian history who has written this quite good narrative of the life of Lenin. While not definitive, it is nevertheless the best synthesis of the political and personal life of Lenin
One of the better reasons to read Service is that while he has no qualms about outlining the viciousness and brutality of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, he is also not a hard line ideologue. He is a historian and he takes history as he finds it. There is none of the strident cold-war dogmatism of Conquest or the russophobia of Pipes that often make their writings come uncomfortably close to political diatribes rather than analytical histories.
Service walks the fine line between personal and political biography fairly well. He also has the added bonus of being a good narrative historian which makes this an immensily readable book.
Lenin's early life is covered in good detail. What Service does well is to show how, after brother Alexander's excecution, the Ulyanovs were marginalized by the very class of society they had aspired to, and how this effected both Lenin and his sisters. Service goes on to show the interaction between Lenin and his female relatives and how this carried on throughout his life.
Being a total biography- personal and political- the political side gets a bit of a short shrift at times. Lenin as shown as the "bookish fanatic" and hypocondriac who is all revolution all the time with little time to spare in life for other diversions.
His single-mindedness is such that he dictates executions (never naming individuals just groups) to achieve his ends. What Service show best is how his temperament in childhood carried on to his political life- never brooking disagreement- throwing tantrums and denounciations- and rarely compromising.
And yet Lenin is at heart, a middle class bourgeois in his social manners. His personal relationships with women are not especially notorious save for a life-long relationship with Inessa Armand who may or may not have been his mistress.
Personal without being gossipy and showing Lenin's idiocincracies without being psychoanalytical, Service handles his biography well. All in all this is a highly readable, not perfect, but enjoyable biography of the life of one of the century's most notorious figures.
Chomsky on Lenin, Trotsky, Socialism & the Soviet Union
Latest News on Lenin
Fetching RSS feed... please stand byExplore related pages
40-Minute Russian- 40-Minute Russian - Learning Russian is a must for all people working in the hos...
Pseudo-Socialism- How come? Capitalism is an economic system but socialism is just a movement? Pro...
Russian Revolution- In 1917, two revolutions occurred in Russia. These ended up by overthrowing the...
Leon Trotsky- Leon Trotsky was one of the leaders of the October Revolution in Russia and was...
Peter the Great
- Peter the Great (or Peter I) (1672-1725) was the czar of Russia in the period 16...
Crimean War- The Crimean War (1854-56) was a war between Russia the allied powers of Britain,...
