Not By Politics Alone: The Other Lenin

by Vladimir Lenin

A collection of letters, diaries and various writings depicting the Lenin beyond political commitments

This vivid selection, compiled and introduced by Tamara Deutscher, written by Lenin and those who knew him, brings us the revolution in his everyday life – the man who lived by politics but not by politics alone.

Here, we see the Lenin of leisure as well as work, geared to his life’s purpose and yet enjoying to the full all the pleasures of a healthy human existence – neither the humourless, monolithic cult hero of Soviet mythology nor the bogeyman of official anti-communism. What did Lenin read? How did he relax? What did he think and feel? This surprising collection, covering everything from his passionate baritone singing voice to his love of hunting wild game and beyond, reveals the man beyond the myth.

296 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 16, 2024

About the author

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, leader of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks), statesman and political theorist. After the October Revolution he served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 until his death in 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death in 1924.

Reviews

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very wholesome selection of memories of and letters by Lenin - I guess read it alongside that Richard Pipes anthology that is all Lenin signining death warrants and you have the whole man.

[Julio The Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

"You will never be a Social Democrat!". Lenin to his friend and alleged lover Inessa Armand. "And you, you will never be anything but a Social Democrat!". Inessa Armand to Lenin. The last judgment is the one most clearly illustrated in this fascinating collection of vignettes, articles, letters and diary entries concerning the man Tamara Deutscher, wife of Marxist scholar Isaac Deutscher and an important historian in her own right, calls "the mounting figure of the twentieth century". An anthology of Lenin published, "in these unrevolutionary times", is most welcome, but Deutscher has presented more a picture of two Lenins rather than one unknown. The first Lenin, writing before the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in 1917, is an ardent polemicist writing of such seemingly non-political subjects as the death of Leo Tolstoy and of his place in Russian literature and thought. Tolstoy the novelist is "a literary genius who perfectly captured the decline of feudalism in Russia and the first stirrings of peasant unrest against the aristocracy and Orthodox Church". Tolstoy the thinker is "an idiot who speaks of 'Eternity' and 'Eternal values' bringing relief to the peasant masses through non-violence and non-resistance to evil". For a piece of Marxist literary criticism this is crude but valuable, along with Lenin's ruminations on underground newspaper work, learning foreign languages and remembering the Paris Commune, "an event all proletarians the world over, and not just France, hail". The Lenin in power, 1917-1922, when he suffered his last stroke, is a different fellow all together; a cranky, grumpy old man, though he was still in his fifties, who despises modernist art and literature, sexual freedom and feminism. In one diatribe he rails against free love, "a bourgeois, not Marxist ideal", sexual relations outside of marriage, "sex is not like drinking a glass of water, as youth nowadays say, it is a social act with consequences for society", and bourgeois feminism, "women's emancipation is emancipation from housework through socialized kitchens and nurseries, all else is secondary". Is it any wonder young people, especially women, in revolt in the West, and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, came to reject this "other Lenin". A provocative collection, but one that hardly sheds a halo on its subject, which I assume is what Tamara Deutscher intended.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

what a cutie

[BROM STONKER · Rating 4 out of 5]

"They write about me... Exaggerating everything, calling me a genius, a kind of extraordinary man - there is an element of mysticism in all this... All our lives we fought against exalting the individual... This is not good at all. I am just like everyone else."

A collection of articles or letters by or about Lenin which counters the cult of personality which was developed around him after his death, showing him for what he was - a real person. Well worth reading

[Niko · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great little collection of articles and letters written by and about Lenin. Highly recommend

[T W · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cute book featuring various letters of Lenin and conversations about him detailing his views and mannerisms towards literature, art, bureaucracy and friends. It is a fun read and interesting to see how Lenin infuses politics into anything he engages with; he lives and breathes Marxism.