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Lenin's Comrades-in-Arms: Episodes from the Lives of Lenin's Foreign Comrades-in-Arms and Contemporaries

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Fine cloth copy in an equally fine dw. Particularly and surprisingly well-preserved; tight, bright, clean and especially sharp-cornered. ; 337 pages; Contents include episodes from M. Cachin, G. Dimitrov, E. Flynn, W. Foster, S. Katayama and many others.

337 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1969

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M. Cachin

1 book

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173 reviews10 followers
January 5, 2026
Consisting of memoirs of various personalities in the communist movement who knew and worked alongside Lenin, this collection of stories which includes recollections of such outstanding figures as Gramsci, Dimitrov, Thalmann, and Thorez, this book contains many inspiring and truly beautiful stories about perseverance in difficult times, revolutionary heroism, and communist selflessness. What’s more, the stories contained often offer examples of initiative, creativity in revolutionary work when beset by even the worst repression, helping to paint a picture of how the communists worked in these conditions and thus serving almost as a guide to future communists who would be quite unfamiliar with the methods of working in illegality and evading repression.

Unfortunately, owing to when these articles were written, well into the revisionist period, a lot of them feel very watered down as if trying to lead the reader to a preconceived notion of illegal conditions being a thing of the past and adopting primacy of parliamentary action. Certain articles are more guilty of this than others, however, and there are pieces like the one on Gramsci which are from beginning to end uplifting. Owing to the period in which this book was put together, there are certain outstanding personalities who have been left out while counter-revolutionaries who had entered the employ of the imperialists like Bela Kun and Friechrich Platten are included without so much as a word about their later traitorous actions. It was quite disappointing (and telling about the politics of the editors) that room was found for snakes like Kun, Platten, Palmiro Togliatti, and William Z. Foster, but not Harry Pollitt — the beloved leader of the British Communists who led the famous Jolly George strike and was instrumental in the British anti-fascist movement — or Matyas Rakosi — Stalin’s best Hungarian disciple who, at the end of his life, took to calling himself “the last living co-fighter of Lenin” as a jab at the treachery of the Soviet revisionists.

The downsides of this book aside, it still contains many great and inspiring stories and has some educational value in organising and day-to-day work, also offering insight into what Lenin the man was like through his interactions with foreign communists.
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