Lenin

By Sean Sheehan

Lenin (Wladimir Ilyisch Ulyanow: 1870-1924). Views of Lenin are currently set in stone. He is portrayed as inflexible and doctrinaire, a man whose cold-blooded personality and indifference to culture led to political extremes that paved the way for Stalin and totalitarianism. Enshrined as an icon of Soviet ideology and power, the statues of Lenin that were once a common sight in eastern Europe and across Russia have now been toppled and his reputation too has crumbled into fragments of merely historical interest.

When a world figure falls into such universal disrepute it is time for a reappraisal and Life & Times: Lenin looks afresh at the man, the politics and the age he inhabited. A comfortable childhood shattered by the execution of his older brother, his political radicalism and self-imposed exile to western Europe, utter shock at the collapse of the Left in the patriotic fervour of World War I, the return to St Petersburg in 1917 and his urging of a second revolution that would smash capitalism once and for all.

It is time for Lenin's extraordinary life and his enduring significance to be acknowledged. In this book, the real Lenin will be brought out from behind the decades of both deification and condemnation, revealing the creator of one of the 20th Century's most influential, yet most bloodstained, ideologies.

Seán Sheehan has written Anarchism, a guide to cultural and political aspects of libertarian socialism, and is also the author of Socrates in our Life & Times series. Born and brought up in London, Seán Sheehan now lives in Ireland.