Figes view on lenin biography

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    Lenin: A Biography

    Lenin: A Biography is a biography of the Marxist theorist and revolutionary Vladimir Lenin written by the English historian Robert Service, then a professor in Russian History at the University of Oxford. It was first published by Macmillan in 2000 and later republished in other languages.

    Reviews

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    Writing in The New York Review of Books, Martin Malia described Service's book as the "best place to begin assessing Bolshevism's founder".[1]

    In The Tribune, Bhupinder Singh praised Service's ability to avoid the "extreme conclusions" regarding Lenin and the Russian Revolution that have been made by the historians and biographers Dmitri Volkogonov, Edvard Radzinsky, Orlando Figes, and Richard Pipes. Singh noted that Service nevertheless tried to emphasise "the negative aspects of Lenin", having no sympathies with the far left. He asserts that there was little new information here that had not appeared in prior biographies, with the exception of some data on the influence of agrarian socialists on Lenin's thought and the description of how some of Lenin's edicts aided the development of a totalitarian state. He nevertheless believed that Service was wrong to see Stalinism as "a direct and legitimate continuation" of Leninism, instea

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    A PEOPLE'S TRAGEDY
    A History of the Russian Revolution.
    By OrlandoFiges.
    Illustrated. 923 pp. New York:
    Viking. $39.95.


    Text:

    THE collapse of the Soviet Union represents more than a geopolitical watershed; as time passes, historians will increasingly see it as the end of an intellectual era as well. Leninism is in worldwide retreat, with few serious defenders. But for most of this unhappy century a disappointingly large number of Western intellectuals viewed the Soviet system as a plausible alternative to the Western model. To be sure, few supported the vast crimes of Stalin, but many made careful, casuistic distinctions between his evil misrule and the alleged humanism of Lenin's original Bolshevism.

    A soft-focus view of Lenin has, for the most part, suffused accounts of the Soviet Union. He has been portrayed as a man drawn into revolutionary activity by the execution of his brother and driven by a selfless desire to improve the lot of working people. As for the undeniable violence of his rule, this was often explained away as a legacy of czarist statism and oppression as well as a response to the exigencies of civil war and foreign intervention. In this view, the supposedly moderate Lenin of his last years pointed the way toward a more huma

  • figes view on lenin biography

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