The Life of Lenin

by Louis Fischer

Since there's never been a really good English biography of Lenin, the idea of doing something about it came more or less simultaneously to three authors. As soon as each heard the others were at work, the race to get published was on. Stefan Possony won it, but Authors Payne & Fischer were close behind.
Each biography seems tailored to a specific audience. Robert Payne, a prolific & catholic writer, has produced a Book-of-the-Month selection aimed at romantics. Stefan Possony, political studies director at Stanford's Hoover Institution, will appeal most obviously to believers in conspiratorial views of history, since his research comes from police & foreign office files, ranging from Japan to France, covering mostly Lenin's life as a fugitive conspirator. On balance, Louis Fischer's is the best of the three. Fischer has devoted much of his long lifetime to the study of Russia (The Soviets in World Affairs; Russia, America & the World). He soberly weighs those episodes the other two biographers sometimes accept as fact, offering the pros & cons of each argument. For example, there's a genuine riddle about Lenin's racial background. Payne insists "there was not a drop of Russian blood" in Lenin, claiming his ancestry was German, Swedish & Chuvash, & that it shaped his personality. Without citing any evidence, Possony argues that the "evidence indicates" Lenin's grandfather "was born a Jew." Fischer places the responsibility where it belongs, on the Soviet government. "The records were undoubtedly available in Russia's bulging archives, but the Bolsheviks saw fit to suppress them. This feeds the suspicion that there is something to conceal."
What emerges most strikingly from all three biographies is the awesome power of a singleminded man to change the course of history. If the Kaiser had refused to let Lenin cross wartime Germany & enter Russia, if Kerensky's government had succeeded in arresting & executing Lenin, would the Bolsheviks be merely a footnote to history? Not the least of the paradoxes is the fact that Communism, which teaches the inevitability of historical forces & the impotence individuals in swaying them, owes its conquest of Russia to the energy & confident thrust of Lenin alone.--Time (edited)

Genres: History, Biography, Russia, Nonfiction, Politics

Paperback

First published January 1, 1964

About the author

Foreign correspondent and analyst of world affairs.

Fischer worked as an European correspondent first in Berlin later in the Soviet Union. The works he wrote during his stay in the Soviet Union are criticised for its apologism and the denial of the Ukraine famine.

Louis Fischer first visited Gandhi in 1942 and again in 1946.

Reviews

[Julio The Fox · Rating 3 out of 5]

At the end of this taxing, confusing, and at times enlightening biography Louis Fischer tells us that had he written up his findings when he first began research on Lenin in 1947, "it would have been a very bad book". Thank God; we wouldn't want that to happen. Why is there no good life of Lenin in English? Fischer is the prototype of the "God that failed" school of ex-communists, or what an old friend and comrade of mine dubbed "I was a commie dupe but now I know better". The anti-communism of the author is not the problem with this book. Robert Conquest contributed a fine volume on Lenin to the Modern Masters series, calling him "the most important figure in modern history, at least in politics". Likewise, Adam Ulam's STALIN: THE MAN AND HIS ERA is a magnificent biography unmarred by the author's hatred of Marxism. If Isaac Deutscher had not been taken way from us at age sixty, while working on his own Lenin biography, alas only the first chapter, "Lenin's Childhood" ever saw print, that erudite genius, with his studiousness, fairness and gift of pen, would have delivered the ultimate word on Lenin and his place in history. Fischer's study contains none of these virtues. Every other paragraph of this massive tome is dedicated to hurling vitriol on Lenin, the Bolsheviks and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as it stood in 1965 when Fischer published his tome. The book is so biased and incoherent that naturally it won the author the National Book Award for biography that year, for his anti-Leninist opinions, not the quality of his research or prose.

Strictu Sensu, this is not a life of Lenin at all. Fischer waltzes through Lenin's youth, entry into Marxist politics, exile and imprisonment and leadership of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, the first Marxist organization in Russian history, in the first fifty pages; after that, we are hurdled into the 1905 Russian Revolution, what Lenin called "the dress rehearsal for 1917". But why, and how? How did Lenin assume such a stature in the party that even from his exile abroad, he directed the Bolsheviks inside Russia and won the support of his old enemy, Trotsky? What gave him stature as a Marxist theorist and revolutionary organizer? Fischer makes a passing, condescending note of Lenin's pre-revolutionary works, THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA, and WHAT IS TO BE DONE? BURNING QUESTIONS FOR OUR MOVEMENT, yet the reader will be at a loss as to why these elevated him to the leadership of the Bolsheviks. The first proved that Russia was moving towards capitalism and creating a proletariat open to Marxist organizing. The second explained how that could be done; a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries must carry the working class beyond economic demands and towards the seizure of power. Lenin turned Marxism from theory to practice, and not for the first time or last.

The dozen years between the 1905 Revolution and the Bolshevik taking of power, with Lenin in exile the whole time, are the crucial years not only in the history of Russia but the birth of communism on a global scale. Naturally, Fischer fumbles this period too. The Bolsheviks rejected the call to war in 1914 precisely because of party discipline and what Fischer dismissively calls "Leninist orthodoxy". Lenin spent those years fighting with the Mensheviks, who advocated limiting the forthcoming revolution to "democratic demands" that did not surpass capitalism. Lenin saw a bridge between those demands, abolition of the monarchy, land reform, better working conditions, and the passing over into socialist revolution led by the working class. Only a part strongly disciplined and dedicated to revolution, not reform, could have and did seize the opportunity to take power and turn "the world war into a civil war" of classes once Kerensky pledged to keep Russia fighting on the side of the Entente. Fischer sees only sectarian quibbles and Marxist hair-splitting in Lenin's polemics, but workers at home and abroad in Europe saw a program for victory. Fischer takes Lenin for a hypocrite for advocating the withering away of the state in his classic THE STATE AND REVOLUTION, written underground while Lenin fled the Kerensky government, and building a strong state after coming to power in Petrograd in November of 1917. That was strategy and staying alive in a sea of White counter-revolutionaries and an imperialist blockade, soon turned into an invasion, not a betrayal of the interests of the workers.

Fischer's book is at its best describing the Russian civil war (1917-21) and Lenin the statesman-revolutionary, but not for the reasons he cites. Fischer begins on a high note, acknowledging Lenin's central place in modern history. No Lenin, no Bolshevik Revolution. Lenin built the Societ state and saved it when others cried "doom!". He was a man of immense mental powers, looked into and corrected the smallest problem, and was not afraid to change his mind. The civil war tested all these qualities in fire and steel. Convincing his fellow Bolsheviks to sign a peace treaty with Germany was the first hurdle to overcome; without peace the revolution would die still born. Buhkarin urged a "revolutionary offensive" to drive the Germans out of Russia and inspire revolutions in Western Europe. Lenin knew that was a pipe dream. Trotsky, his Foreign Minister, favored :no war, no peace". Russia should exit the war but not sign a treaty with any enemy of the European proletariat. Lenin convinced him the Germans would press an offensive against Russia if no treaty was signed. Bitter though it was, the Bolsheviks swore to abide by the peace of Brest-Litovsk, and the new regime made it past seventy days in power, "longer than the Paris Commune", Lenin crowed. Peace brought not stability but more swords. Fourteen Allied armies, chiefly British, French, American and Japanese, invaded Russia from Murmansk to Vladivastok, to in Churchill's words, "strangle the Bolshevik baby in the cradle", while the Whites, ex-tsarist officers, monarchists, anarchists, Mensheviks, paid for and directed by the allies, declared war on Lenin and his regime, now transferred to Moscow. Famine and disease stalked the land. Nothing worked: railroads, oil fields, electricity, hospitals, and water supply all came to a halt. The Germans occupied Ukraine and newly independent Finland, the Baltic states, Armenia, and Menshevik Georgia all waged war on the Bolsheviks. The first workers' state seemed headed for the tomb. Fischer credits Lenin for saving the regime through willpower and incessant personal intervention in the war; appointing Trotsky War Minister, demanding tough measures against Red commanders and recalcitrant villages and provinces, sending food to the most vulnerable areas, and rationing fuel in the large cities. Yet Lenin's brilliance is not what saved communism in Russia. The civil war was a class war. Fischer concedes the key to victory was winning over the peasantry, who constituted close to eighty percent of the Russian population. The Whites stood for a return to the ancient regimes, with landlords getting back the land distributed by the Bolsheviks, restoration of village authority under military strongmen, and anti-Semitic pogroms all in the cards. The peasants went for the Reds who had given out land and kept them safe from the priest and the landlord. This was also a patriotic war. Occupation by foreign armies and White rule went hand in hand. In Georgia the Menshevik regime received troops and money from Britain. What Russian patriot could stand to see his country dismembered and perpetually in the hands of outsiders? When Poland, urged on by France, the young Charles De Gaulle was a military advisor to the Poles, invaded Russia in 1921 Lenin responded with a counter-assault of Warsaw; a case of over-reach, for the Poles proved just as patriotic as the Russians in backing the Pildsuski government. But, the Bolsheviks had proven they could take on every foreign invader and oust him from Russian soil.

Winning the peace proved harder for Lenin than victory in the civil war. The program of War Communism, requisitioning food from the peasants for the Red Army and to feed Petrograd and Moscow, had to be abandoned, lest the peasants turn on the communists by armed uprisings or simply withholding produce. Lenin once more retreated and proclaimed the New Economic Policy (NEP) of allowing peasants to sell their food goods while maintaining a state monopoly over trade, domestic and foreign. Lenin admitted the Russian economy was now "state capitalist", far removed from socialism. The NEP had the potential to become an even bigger threat to the Revolution than the Whites, for as Trotsky warned, with his usual prescience, "commodities are a greater menace to us than tanks". The rich peasants (kulaks) stood the most to gain by free trade, leaving out from the new prosperity the middle and poor peasants the Bolsheviks had counted on to save the Revolution during the war. Speculators began to buy up produce in the countryside and sell it directly to workers in the city, alienating the communists from their proletarian base. Lenin never found a suitable solution to this problem. He assured his fellow Bolsheviks the NEP was only a temporary measure to revive Russian agriculture, but gave no timetable for a return to the road of socialism. Instead, he invoked the chimera and panacea of revolution in the West to come to the aid of backward Russia. But, revolutions in Germany and Hungary failed miserably, and workers in France and Britain remained loyal to the political parties that had sent them to war. Russia stood alone, defiant and poor, by the time Lenin suffered his first stroke in 1922. There are valuable lessons in this episode for evaluating communism in China, Vietnam, following the Chinese model, and Cuba in the twenty-first century. The Chinese Communist leadership insists "socialism with Chinese characteristics" is an adaptation of the NEP to local conditions, just like Lenin intended for Russia in the 1920s. Lenin argued that so long as the Party maintained control of the state it could manage the economy without the danger of a return to capitalism. The heirs of Mao think likewise. Cuba in this century is gripped with many of the ills suffered by Soviet Russia,economic blockade, food shortages, energy crisis, and no revolution in nearby countries, but the Cuban Communist Party has drawn the opposite lesson from the NEP and Lenin. No socialist regime can survive if the economy is opened to market forces.


Lenin was not a solitary dictator in his Russia; Fischer concedes that point. Opposition political parties, Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries, one of whom tried to assassinatessinate Lenin, and anarchists freely published their papers and ran candidates for the Workers' Councils (Soviets) until they crossed the line over to collaboration with the Whites and foreign powers. Debate inside the Bolshevik Party was boisterous and rampant on all questions; relations with the capitalist West, the NEP, education, art, and the status of trade unions under socialism came under serious scrutiny from multiple points of view. Fischer, however, opines that there was one issue Lenin would never compromise on, and that one decided the fate of the Revolution; the Bolshevik Party's monopoly of political power must be unchallenged and unquestioned. In treating this like dogma Lenin ensured the failure of communist parties abroad to gain serious working-class support. The Communist or Third International inaugurated by Lenin in Moscow in 1919 created sectarian parties tolerating no dissent inside their ranks and no alliances with other socialist parties. Inside Russia, monopolization of power prepared the way, practically and theoretically, for Stalin's takeover of both party and stare after Lenin's death in 1924. Is this animadversion justified?

Nowhere in Lenin's published work is there the slightest defense of a one-party state. The Soviets of 1905 and 1917 contained numerous political parties. Fischer demonstrates ably how Lenin's decisions to curtail political rights in Russia came with good reasons. The enemies of the Bolsheviks aligned themselves with first the Germans, particularly in the Ukraine, and next with the the British and French occupying Russia. This does not excuse jailing their leaders in Russia but helps explain this baleful decision. The growth of a bureaucracy in Russia after 1917 is the key reason why Stalin was able to assume power after Lenin. Running the economy, particularly under the NEP, and administering foreign affairs, relations with national minorities, the Red Army, education, and above all the distribution of food supplies to the cities grew the government, filled with both communists and non-communists, including tsarist army officers, at the expense of the Bolshevik Party. The Party and its Marxist ideology became increasingly irrelevant. Whoever could command the allegiance of that bureaucracy, as Stalin did from his position as General Secretary of the Party, would rule Russia. Lenin fought stridently against this disease, as Fischer shows in his chapter, "Lenin Against Stalin", but to no avail. He grudgingly confessed to Buhkarin, "ours is a workers state with bureaucratic deformations". Those are not the words of a dictator. They are a fitting and sorrowful epitaph for a life lived for revolution and watching, from his death bed, that revolution fade away.

For a biography, THE LIFE OF LENIN is unfocused, too narrow in its scope, and filled with Fischer's egotism. Louis Fischer's favorite topic for discussion is Louis Fischer. The reader must suffer through long digressions of the "so and so told me in person" school of bad scholarship. Whole pages are taken up with Fischer's meetings with ex-Bolsheviks, especially diplomats, in the West, along with the inevitable chapter titled "When I Saw Lenin". Fischer was a Communist Party USA fellow traveler, not a Party member, and it shows. Tellingly, Fischer does not say what he and Lenin talked about. A case can be made that this book is the autobiography of Louis Fischer disguised to look like a Lenin biography. He's always right, ex post facto, and Lenin is always wrong. But then, as Lenin said, "revolutions are the locomotive of history, and only the strong will stay on until the end".

[Elisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gigantic book dealing with a gigantic man.

I still don't know how to feel about Lenin, but one thing is for sure: he is undeniable.

Here's what I can say about Lenin, without doubting: he was a tireless zealot in pursuit of what he thought was the greater good, and he meant to achieve it by any means necessary. He was, in the words of Louis Fischer, "the steel that bends", that is, he had an admirable capacity to depart from theory if it did not suit the practice. And when does theory ever do that when thrown into the socioeconomic petri dish?

Louis Fischer does some deep digging not only into Lenin's personality but also into the economic issues during the implementation of the Soviet state. These parts get dense and kinda boring, but they're essential to understand the circumstances that shaped post-revolutionary Russia.

There are a bunch of tidbits in this biography that make it an interesting read: the execution of his older brother Sasha, for attempted murder on the next-to-last tsar, Alexander III; his hatred of Paris, the "cult of personality" (taken to new heights by Stalin after Lenin's death), and capitalists;
his reading preferences, his love-hate relationship with Leon Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky, and his rejection of art for art's sake; his troubles with Stalin and even Trotsky; and, at the end of it all, his health problems, which may or may not have been caused or emphasized by the stress of his workload (the guy was a dictator, a one-man show running the Soviet state).

Fischer can turn a phrase like no other biographer I've read. He's in the narration with a first-person POV (he actually met Lenin) and that may cross a line somehow, but it didn't bother me. On the contrary.

When I closed this book, I came to the conclusion that Lenin was a man painted in chiaroscuro: his whole life, actions, and thoughts were an interplay between light and shadow.

[Marko Beljac · Rating 5 out of 5]

"brilliant, deeply researched, exciting and definitive" - so says Harrison Salisbury on the blurb of this 1964 classic. Each of these words do this book justice. Frankly, I was surprised that a 1964 work, the height of the cold war, and from the heart of the American establishment to boot - Princeton University - could be this good. Fischer makes astute and nuanced judgements, and demonstrates an intimate understanding of his subject matter and Russian culture.

[Buddy Don · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was NOT a good read, at least not in the sense of being an enjoyable book to read. I wanted to know more about Russia in general and have read a series of books on the topic. Obviously, Lenin is an important part of that story. But his life was NOT very interesting, certainly not once the revolution had occurred. I suppose it is interesting to read all of his speculations about how world history would go, though he was wrong on so many different issues (as the author does a good job of indicating). But this man's entire life, at least the part covered in this book (which doesn't do a good job on Lenin's years in exile) was spent reading, writing, speaking in public, and doing little else. So everything has to do with what this man was thinking or speaking or writing, not about what he was doing (though it does describe well how he contolled events as well and as long as he could). The book would have been a better biography (IMO) had it spent much more time and attention to the first 47 years of Lenin's life and less to the final five years. I'm sure one could find a better bio than this, though it's not bad, and if one were studying the first five years of the USSR (not so named then), this would be an indispensable volume.

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read the 1964 Harper and Row edition of this biography while trying to come to grips with Marxism in high school during the late sixties. Fischer, familiar to me from his Life of Mahatma Gandhi, seemed a safe way to proceed with the problematic Lenin after having read Isaac Deutscher's three volume biography of the easier-to-idealize Trotsky.

Although Fischer had been sympathetic to the Soviet experiment in his early years, the excesses following the revolution led to his disillusionment. This did not, however, overly jaundice his approach to socialism in general or Lenin in particular.

In the beginning of 1986 I reread the book.

[Lara Arend · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating and hilarious.