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

[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.