No Less Than Mystic: A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

by John Medhurst

Published in the centenary year of the 1917 Russian Revolution,  No Less Than Mystic  is a fresh and iconoclastic history of Lenin and the Bolsheviks for a generation uninterested in Cold War ideologies and stereotypes.

Although it offers a full and complete history of Leninism, 1917, the Russian Civil War and its aftermath, the book devotes more time than usual to the policies and actions of the socialist alternatives to Bolshevism – to the Menshevik Internationalists, the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), the Jewish Bundists and the anarchists. It prioritises Factory Committees, local Soviets, the Womens’ Zhenotdel movement, Proletkult and the Kronstadt sailors as much as the statements and actions of Lenin and Trotsky. Using the neglected writings and memoirs of Mensheviks like Julius Martov, SRs like Victor Chernov, Bolshevik oppositionists like Alexandra Kollontai and anarchists like Nestor Makhno, it traces a revolution gone wrong and suggests how it might have produced a more libertarian, emancipatory socialism than that created by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. 
Although the book broadly covers the period from 1903 (the formation of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks) to 1921 (the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion) and explains why the Bolshevik Revolution degenerated so quickly into its apparent opposite, it continually examines the Leninist experiment through the lens of a 21st century, de-centralised, ecological, anti-productivist and feminist socialism. Throughout its narrative it interweaves and draws parallels with contemporary anti-capitalist struggles such as those of the Zapatistas, the Kurds, the Argentinean “Recovered Factories”, Occupy, the Arab Spring, the  Indignados  and   Intersectional feminists, attempting to open up the past to the present and points in between. 

We do not need another standard history of the Russian Revolution. This is not one.

Genres: History, Russia, Nonfiction, Politics, Russian History, Russian Revolution

654 pages, Paperback

Published August 22, 2017

Reviews

[Nathan Canning · Rating 5 out of 5]

All leftists should read this RIGHT NOW (or at least just the conclusion)

[Charlie · Rating 3 out of 5]

"It is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the counterpart of older and even defunct forms of social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness."
- The Civil War in France (1871), Karl Marx

John Medhurst's history of the Russian Revolution is a bit of a mixed bag. There are some necessary and iconoclastic insights scattered throughout, but it is undermined by the book's incurable structural problems and a tendency to hero worship that seems frankly inconsistent with his hatred of Lenin-idolatry.

Medhurst states his goal clearly on the book's first page. Stressing that he wants to "present a history of Lenin and the Russian Revolution that is relevant to today's democratic, libertarian left", he claims that his book:

"continually examines the Russian Revolution through the lens of a 21st-century, non-Marxist, participatory socialism, and draws parallels with recent anti-capitalist struggles, attempting to open up the past to the present and points in between. It suggests that corporate capitalism should be opposed not with a set of revolutionary formulations which were questionable one hundred years ago and have even less relevance now, but with popular social movements built on people's needs and experience."
- No Less Than Mystic (2017), John Medhurst (pg 1)

So far so good, I thought to myself, except what does he mean about drawing parallels?

It obviously couldn't mean that he would frequently break off from his in-depth analysis of trade union politics in 1917 Russia to spend two or three pages every chapter talking about the Occupy movement, or the British miner's strike. Right? That would be far too gimmicky, and also self-defeating because the discrepancy between the detailed description of Russian history with the surface-level summary and armchair analysis of other events in other countries in other centuries by completely different political movements would be too vast to take seriously.

Well, that's exactly what he does. Just as the narrative about some crucial Bolshevik-Menshevik conflict is coming to boil, Medhurst will break off with some clumsy tangent about how it is exactly like something else. And then he'll do it again in the next chapter, and the next. One could be forgiven for thinking that Medhurst misses the Medieval concept of the Wheel of Fortune, wherein all the world and all we do within it is stuck on the same damn inescapable cycle. Of course history has patterns, but the past is a distant mirror, a distorted reflection of where we are with every new second of this eternal nightmare, and the lessons we draw from it must be weighted against the genuine difference of every situation. The world is chaos, really, and when we think we hear a faint harmony through the static, we must not ignore the overwhelming reality of noise.

Now it is the case that I recently finished reading Raymond Geuss' Philosophy and Real Politics, a book by a self-described Leninist who argues that abstract political concepts and analysis don't have any meaning in and of themselves except in relation to what is possible and necessary within specific historical circumstances. So I am wary that my irritation with Medhurst might be momentarily inspired by this neo-Leninist rebuttal, but that doesn't change the fact that these tangents are inherently self-defeating. It is my personal belief that the quality of a historian can be most succinctly summarised by whether they offer you enough raw data and material that it is then possible for you to question their conclusions. You don't have to disagree, but you need to be given enough scope and detail to decide whether your agreement with their analysis is warranted.

This is a difficult art, of course, and Medhurst's detailed analysis of Russian events is strong, well-argued, and convincing because of the wide range of his analysis and the generosity of his surveying of competing viewpoints. On the other hand, the 3-5 page tangents on Latin American anarchists or the naval gazing of late 2nd wave Feminism are so shallow that, even if they seem to make some interesting points, they are undermined by their one-dimensional brevity. It is obvious that the reader is simply being propagandised at because we aren't offered the necessary depth of analysis to decide whether or not Medhurst is obscuring any important details from us. This isn't something that could really be fixed with a bit of editing. It is a feature of the book that simply does not work.

What does work, however, is Medhurst's analysis of the Revolution itself. The Russian Revolution has always had the power to grip the minds of those who consider it, and a historian in its grasp is as likely to ooze the slime of hypocrisy as a sponge full of water is likely to wet the hand that holds it. Leftists, drawn to the dream, engage in hasty special pleading, or fall deathly silent when the subject of revolutionary horrors are mentioned and hope readers won't notice the omission. (Looking at you, Eric J. Hobsbawm!) Reactionaries, meanwhile, puff up their chests and unleash a howl of such inspiring moral indignation that one would have to admire them if they possessed the consistency to apply that same level of venom to the status quo.

The only ones to emerge from this quagmire even half-uncorrupted are the men and women who value truth above loyalty, study the suffering behind the slogans, and maintain the ability to quite frankly hate everyone, whilst still holding onto the idealism for a way out of the global crab bucket humanity has constructed for itself. George Orwell is admirable, Victor Serge too, Bertrand Russell and C.L.R. James had clear eyes, and, to a lesser extent William Hazlitt fits into that category as well for his own time period. You could fill a whole list with activists from Rosa Luxemburg and Emma Goldman to authors like Iain M. Banks, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Stanisław Lem who held themselves and their political imaginations to high standards, but the point always comes to a dead end. The Leninists stand at the end of the track, arms crossed, smug looks on their faces, and say, 'Yeah, well you guys never had power. Politics is about achieving the least-bad possibilities within specific historical circumstances. Whilst you were dreaming, we had to be realistic.'

Medhurst has no truck with this. Setting aside his awkward attempts to glue past events onto later struggles, the book has two central arguments. The first is a rebuttal to the Leninist argument that any degeneration the revolution underwent was due to the stresses of the civil war and siege by capitalist nations. Medhurst very convincingly marshals up the evidence to argue that the degeneration had already happened before the civil war broke out and that this was explicitly because of Lenin's anti-democratic ideology. To Lenin, the party was the literal personification of the 'enlightened' part of the proletariat, so if the working class ever did something the party didn't want then it was logically because they weren't 'real' proletarians. "All power to the Soviets" was a great slogan, but, as Medhurst argues, every time the Soviets elected a Menshevik or SR representative, Lenin's men would go in with guns and shut them down. Apparently this form of democracy was more 'dialectical'.

Medhurst is at his best when dissecting this disaster, exploring how local workers successfully ran their own affairs until the Central Committee, spreading its tendrils like a political cancer, puppeted everything from the top-down. As a trade unionist himself he interprets the autonomy of trade unions very optimistically, and can scarcely contain his rage when Lenin and his cadre of snotty, middle-class intellectuals repeatedly barge in on their affairs, waving rifles and claiming that the Party represents the real revolution. For Medhurst, the Revolution was not televised. It was a massive network of men and women fighting for their own autonomy, taking it, and then forced to watch in horror as it was ripped from their hands by an intellectually insecure dictator with a hard-on for organisation.

Lenin does not come out of this book well at all. As Medhurst characterises him, he's a clever idiot that hates arguments, resorting to poisonous ad hominems whenever the (historically hard-done-by) communist, Karl Kautsky makes an intellectually astute challenge to his doctrine. He's a genocidal warmonger, eager to exterminate opponents using the CHEKA, and full of violent rhetoric about the need to rob banks or kill policemen who himself hides when a crowd asks him to lead them into a fight. He's a conniving moron, who wastes his time in Europe without acquainting himself with the socialist activity there, then becomes confused when it doesn't launch into spontaneous revolution like he expected. Party meetings are rigged, votes misrepresented, doctrines hastily revised whenever politically expedient, and then, after fetishising centralism his whole career, he has the gall to be confused at the resulting bureaucracy in his regime, and adds more bureaucracy in his effort to fix the bureaucracy his bureaucracy birthed!

Based on the little of his writings I've read myself, this doesn't strike me as a particularly unfair description. I particularly appreciate Medhurst's tactic of attacking Leninist apologists at their most precious claim - that they are realists. When we survey the flip-flopping blundering and chaos of Lenin's actual policies, and how his childish approach to criticism was institutionalised by the deliberately brutal CHEKA, this notion is hard to sustain. Instead, we should understand Lenin as having fetishised a pose of realism in order to prop up his own shaky theory that (arguably) he didn't even follow all that sincerely anyway.

Similarly, Trotsky comes in for a quite brutal kicking. (Which is only fair. The man gave as good as he ever got). Trotsky in this narrative emerges as a kind of proto-Napoleon, a fantastical genius of brilliant insight who sells out his principles to join the Bolsheviks, establishes the ideological foundations of Stalinism by clamping down on the hard-won democratic features of the February Revolution, and then fails to realise this in his own later analysis of the revolution's degeneration. That said - and I'm honestly not too sure how he managed that after the above condemnation - Trotsky still comes out of this book fairly well compared to Lenin. Medhurst's scrutiny of Trotsky's inconsistencies is highly sympathetic, since he interprets in Trotsky's more incoherent rhetoric a kind of repressed guilty awareness of the festering rot within the revolution and himself. It's a striking character sketch and shows Medhurst's writing and analytical skills at their best.

The second argument of the book, meanwhile, is that rather than fetishise the Bolsheviks and the October Revolution, today's leftists should turn their attention to the February Revolution instead. Here democratic features were brought to the fore, workers began to take control of their own workplaces through soviets with free elections, and peasants benefited from land reform that legitimised their seizure of land and property. Though Lenin has his place in the title, the hero of this book is the leader of the Mensheviks, Julius Martov, who Medhurst basically describes as the second coming of Christ. It's a charming depiction, and Medhurst does his best to dig out the principled figure buried under mountains of Bolshevik propaganda, but there is a kind of political reluctance and lack of energy to his actions that Medhurst seems unwilling to notice in his praise. The effect is paradoxical. If Lenin won because he played dirty, doesn't Martov deserve the blame for not rolling up his sleeves?

Nevertheless, Martov represents what is most appealing about Medhurst's vision, which is that of democracy trumping everything else in importance. Medhurst has a very good eye for quotation, and deploys a legion of pre-civil war analysis from participants and contemporary observers that saw where Leninism was going. One Kautsky quote in particular, in response to Lenin's claim that democracy was a bourgeois con-trick to deceive the working classes into not agitating for real economic freedom, stands out as a particular highlight:

"They are telling us something we have known for half a century. Except our conclusion was simply that mere democracy is insufficient, not that it was detestable."
- Demokratie und Demokratie (1920), Karl Kautsky

The book is full of gems like these which, combined with some great character sketches and an iconoclastic demolishing of older analysis by drawing on the research of newer historians, makes this a mostly worthwhile antidote to toxic hagiographies of the revolution. The attention paid to figures like Martov and Alexandra Kollontai is refreshing, although it veers very frequently into hero worship. This magnifying of Great Individuals is at odds with the attempts to do more sociological analysis of how the masses operated independently within their factories or fields, and can sometimes make you wonder what Medhurst's model of history really is. Sometimes the descriptions of Lenin's fanatical talent for organisation make it seem like he engineered the entire revolution by himself, and it is hard to square this kind of analysis with the passionate democratic analysis of bottom-up social history espoused elsewhere.

What's more, many features of the book don't really work as a coherent narrative. I wouldn't recommend this book as an introduction to the Russian Revolution simply because it takes so much for granted. WW1 basically happens off-screen, and after a lengthy discussion of internal bureaucratic voting drama, the Civil War erupts with barely any analysis of its causes. There's a kind of rapid whiplash to it all, especially when combined with the frequent tangents into modern politics, that weakens the book's picture of events. Hell, despite Medhurst constantly reiterating, again, and again, that the SRs (Socialist-Revolutionary Party) were the most popular political force in Russia (having the favour of the peasantry), his laser-focus on the Mensheviks means that we never really meet Victor Chernov or get a solid sense of what the SRs actually stood for.

Finally, the bibliographic apparatus is just a mess. For a start, there is no bibliography at all, which makes deciphering the abbreviated references unnecessarily time-consuming, and the book is also missing an index. These are rather large oversights considering the academic rigour that Medhurst attempts to employ throughout his text, and they end up giving a frankly amateurish feel to this otherwise ambitious work.

Perhaps there is a space for a book that weaves together the past and present to produce a synthetic analysis of where we should be going in the future, but Medhurst has not quite written that book. His analysis of the Revolution is impressive, but I can only recommend it if you are willing to put up with a lot of awkwardly inserted (and only superficially informative) accounts of later leftist struggles. His furious defence of democracy at all stages of socialism is an inspiring and important lesson for all socialists who are tempted by the Leninist chimera of 'realism', and the scale of his ambition, even if it overreaches itself, is still admirable. What's more, though we must be careful not to reanimate the past as a painted puppet for our own purposes, the task of relating the struggles of history to the problems of today is, and likely always will be, essential.

Nevertheless, although Medhurst is cautious in his conclusion to defend free-thinking, contradiction, and openness to new ideas, there is something about the way he tries to recruit those later political conflicts into his analysis of the Revolution that I find alarming. These tangents are too superficial to educate the reader, and though I came away from them knowing the sentiment that Medhurst wanted me to have, I didn't feel like I had learned anything from them. I can tell you what Medhurst thinks the Zapistas reveal about the Russian Revolution, but nothing about the Zapistas themselves. That, to me, is a sign that I am reading propaganda, and detracts from the book's better qualities.

[Mandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Essential reading for anyone interested in Russian history, this intelligent and informative account of the Russian Revolution of 1917 looks at the events from a political point of view rather than just chronicling the facts, and debunks the idea that Lenin was at the forefront of what was happening wand had a clear agenda. Medhurst suggests that far from being an ideologue Lenin was a demagogue and that things need not have turned out as they did. There were other viable parties and individuals, and he describes the machinations and power struggles that went on behind the scenes. He posits that an over-romanticised view of Lenin has evolved, and in this book gives credit to the other potential leaders who might have emerged. Medhurst relates the Russian Revolution to other socialist revolutions and uprisings throughout the world, right up to the Arab Spring, and I found this aspect of the book particularly interesting. It’s not an easy read and I found it challenging (and long). There’s a lot to take in and consider and it probably merits a re-read. It’s a through and considered analysis and requires much concentration, but I found it well worth the effort.

[Daniel A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every leftist enticed by Marxist/Leninism should read this book. While giving a thorough history of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Medhurst intersperses democratic alternatives to the authoritarianism of Leninism which ultimately won out. There are so many possibilities for modern left movements and we should not fall prey to the failures of the past.

[Hazel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads.

No Less Than Mystic: A Story of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st Century Left by John Medhurst is an in-depth historical and political insight to the truth about what really happened in Russia before, during and after the Bolshevik insurrection of October 1917. Beginning with the end of the Tsars rule and ending with Stalinism, Medhurst unearths the fact from the fiction, challenging the information the world has been led to believe.

As mentioned in Medhurst lengthy introduction, previous books on the subject are often biased and inaccurate. Swayed by political beliefs, authors and historians often pass judgement by using the information they have chosen to believe, dismissing anything that goes against their viewpoint. In this book, Medhurst filters through these false histories, preferring to cite from publications written at the time rather than those penned by people who did not witness the events between 1903 and 1921.

Medhurst’s narrative is more political than historical, often going off on tangents. In order to for the reader to obtain some sort of connection with the events described, the author contrasts them with more recent occurrences that readers may have observed or at least understand. These include the British miner’s strike, feminist movements, the Greek economy and a variety of other capitalist struggles.

The Russian revolution is a complex affair that cannot easily be condensed. As a result, No More Than Mystic exceeds 600 pages and covers every event, no matter how big or small, that contributed to the rise of USSR. Russia was a dangerous place to live during the 20th century, particularly when Leninism spiralled into Stalinism. However, Leninism was not all the history books make it out to be.

During GCSE History, one teacher led his class to believe that Lenin was good and Stalin was bad, however, the reality was much more complicated than that. Lenin was not the good guy that many painted him to be. Thousands died as a result of his policies from both execution and starvation. Yet, at the same time, Medhurst tries to point out the reasoning behind the ideas of the communist rulers, refusing to give a personal opinion without laying bare both sides of the argument.

Although this book is accurate and educational, it is not the easiest to sit down and read. Extensive chapters full of mind-numbing information detract from the comprehensive insightfulness of the content. Notwithstanding the fact that the inclusion of contrasting capitalist examples helps the reader to establish some form of familiar ground, the sudden changes in topic, location and time period are often confusing and hard to follow.

No Less Than Mystic is for the intellectual person with a great interest in 20th-century Russian history and communist affairs. Without any prior education on the topic, this book will not mean anything. It attempts to challenge the ingrained beliefs people have about what happened during the Bolshevik insurrection. Those who do not know anything will not benefit from the confronting enlightenment.

In all, No Less Than Mystic is a well-researched academic text that brings a fresh history of Lenin and the Russian Revolution. Those who want an unbiased truth need to read this book and be sceptical about any other on the topic. In order to form opinions, one must know the facts.

[Eric Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Medhurst's new book is essential reading for anyone who (a) thinks of themselves as being progressive or on the left or (b) has something positive to say about Lenin or Trotsky. Actually, (b) is optional, because John's book is essential reading for all socialists, full stop.

What he has done in forensic detail over the course of 600 pages is to bury completely the notion that the moment that Bolshevism went bad was in 1939 (when Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler), or 1937 (when the Great Purge began), or 1929 (when Stalin's control over the Soviet state became complete) or even 1921 (with the crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion). No, the Bolsheviks were a nasty lot, especially Lenin and Trotsky, from the coup d'etat in November 1917, and indeed even before. If there a single hero to emerge from this story, it is the tragic figure of Julius Martov, the revolutionary democratic socialist who led the Mensheviks until they were rushed by the victorious Bolsheviks.

I could say that I agree with pretty much every word John writes with one exception: in an attempt to make the book relevant for contemporary leftists, he often digresses to discuss current politics. Sometimes, in my view, he's absolutely right. Sometimes, he ignores examples that I would have embraced -- for example, when discussing cooperatives and communes around the world, he focusses on Mondragon in Spain, but skips any mention of the kibbutz movement in Israel. Sometimes, he chooses examples that I wouldn't touch with a barge pole, such as Hugo Chavez' Venezuela.

As socialists, of course we will probably spend the rest of our lives arguing about the 1% of this book which I think gets it wrong, rather than focussing on the 99% which is completely right and essential reading. Let's just say that I've spent many years of my life reading about these very subjects, and still I found much to learn from this outstanding book. I cannot recommend it highly enough and I regret that Amazon doesn't offer the option of six stars.

[Juan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a lot to take in. It's an important book regardless of where you stand on the theoretical political spectrum.

[Joseph Spuckler · Rating 4 out of 5]

No Less Than Mystic: A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left by John Medhurst is a detailed history of the Russian Revolution as a political event. Medhurst is a Trade Union Industrial Officer with a background in Civil Service and Public Sector policy issues. He was born in London and has a B.A in History & Politics from Queen Mary College, University of London. He has worked at all levels in the civil service including Job Centres, the HSE and Whitehall, in all of which he was an active trade unionist.

I have read quite a bit about the Russian Revolution since college and this book is different from most. First, it looks at the revolution as a political event. It concentrates on the political moves for power and the behind-the-scenes rather than the actual physical fighting.  The struggle between the Bolsheviks and the several other political parties (including the Mensheviks) are discussed in detail.  The revolution is shown not to be a glorious progression, but rather a series of errors, deceit, corruption, and bullying. Lenin planned the revolution but made no plans for the aftermath. 

Secondly, and most importantly, it relates aspects of the Russian Revolution to other historical uprisings such as literacy programs in Latin America to educate the peasants. The American socialist movement is also covered as well the sedition act of 1918. European socialists were active but also very critical of what was happening in Russia. Liberation Theology,  The Zapatistas,  FSLN, FMLN, and the Arab Spring movement are also covered and tied into historical events in Russia.  Thatcher and the striking coal miners are also given a mention in a socialism versus capitalism in the West. 

What this also shows is the corruption of Marxism under Lenin.  It was a slow, methodic move from a revolution of the peasants and workers, to Soviets (unions), to a dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally Lenin's Dictatorship of the party.  Russia was far from a prime target for Marxism.  The vast majority of the population, over 90%, lived outside of the city.  Although Russia had a developing industrial infrastructure, the majority of the population were still in agriculture.   World War I accelerated Russia's demise. Russia could not participate in the industrial driven warfare nor was it ready for the workers to rise up in revolt.  The revolt did happen, but it lacked direction.   

Lenin was not the leader at the forefront.  He seemed to hide when the trouble arose and was more interested in consolidating his power than creating a workers' paradise. Despite elections and their results, Lenin proclaimed his own General Will.  Trotsky gave the great speeches.  Stalin saw his opportunity to gain power.  The removal of the Czar was the beginning of Russia's problems, not its solution.  

No Less Than Mystic presents the complex process of revolution in Russia beginning 1905, through the civil war, and finally the rise of Stalin.  There was no one clear opposition movement as in the American Revolutionary War.  The system was broken and Czar Nicholas was making things worse.  There was no shortage of reasons to revolt but the desperate situation splintered opposition and Lenin managed to pick off the opposition through brute force or "legal" means.  The reader will discover how the promise of a new start evolved into a tyranny that came to represent the Evil Empire.  

[Ryan Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

By detailing letters, writings, political meetings, and historical documents from before, during, and after the Russian revolution, Medhurst reveals the true politics behind Bolshevism and Leninism. He argues that Lenin was a political opportunist who seized on a message of working class and peasant solidarity to overthrow the government, but his political philosophy was never truly socialist or democratic. He regarded the workers as uneducated and unable to understand their own needs and advocated for a single-party, unelected centralized state government that used terror, violence, and suppression to achieve its goals. Rather than being forced into this position by the Civil War as his apologists claim, Medhurst argues that this was always Lenin's approach, supported by Trotsky. His utter disregard and persecution of other socialist parties and any opposition or dissent and lack of forward economic planning actually led to the conflict, and the police state and economic framework he put in place paved the way for the horrors of Stalinism.

This book is critical for anyone trying to wrestle with the current blacklisting of socialism in the US. Medhurst offers thorough analysis and compelling arguments for why Lenin and the fascination with him and his brutal movement by leftists is to blame for this and as to why socialism never recovered. He also offers ideas on how socialists and other leftists can cooperate and move forward and gives lots of examples of different strategies by current political groups that have been successful as well as lessons to be learned from those that have failed.

[Bill FromPA]

Unreadable. The Russian narrative, which I found interesting, is continually interrupted for lengthy digressions detailing tenuous semi-parallels with 21st century revolutionary movements, material that should have been consigned to the forward and afterword or, less conventionally, to a lengthy series of Pale Fire-like footnotes. The absence of an index makes impossible for the reader to pick up the narrative thread in the face of these digressions.

I will never try to read another book from Repeater Books nor, probably, one blurbed by Noam Chomsky.

[Andrew Stone · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very thorough intervention into what is already an exhaustively covered historical period, of which I am very familiar. But there was still lots here that was fresh and convincing. It crystallises a critique of Leninism that eschews the 'original sin' account of conservatives, instead seeing the potential for real soviet democracy within the factory committees, the Kronstadt sailors, Menshevik internationalists such as Martov (from whom the title is quoted), the Makhno insurgency and much more. Medhurst develops his discussion with a range of recent and contemporary connections, which mostly succeeds in being relevant rather than tenuous (though I think he is too uncritical of Hardt and Negri). Overall though its highly recommended.

[Aaron · Rating 2 out of 5]

A good diagnosis of the failures of Leninism and the blindspots of its modern devotees.
Less strong in its scattered prescriptive suggestions for a transition into post-capitalism, whatever label we want to attach to it.

Overall, it is great when we get to read the words of Shliapnikov, but worrying when the suggestions out of our current capitalist predicament are voiced by the preeminent political philiosopher of our time, Russell Brand.

The book also lacks an index and a bibliography to keep track of the ibids scattered throughout the end notes. It was frustrating not to have either when the narrative/analysis was so frequently interrupted by loosely applicable contemporary parallels, all of which should have been relegated to an afterword.

[John de Frece]

Excellent tour de force and in my view, essential reading .

[Holly Vandiver Rector · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very informative. I wanted to learn more about a historical figure (a bad one obviously) that I don't know much about. The only reason I gave it 4 stars and not 5 is because I felt sometimes like it was too much information crammed into a book, so it took me a while to get through.

[Martin Turner · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hard to read. Very disappointing. I'm not a socialist by the terms of this book.

[Duncan Swann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good history of the Russian Revolution trying to show where it all went wrong, and putting most of the blame on Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks as a whole. Bit of a focus on trade unionism and it ended up being a bit dry without a narrative 'hook', but I certainly learned a lot.

[Holcombea]

This is a detailed primer on the Russian revolution, and how Lenin was an authoritarian from near the beginning, blocking the democratic aspirations of his conspirators. It grinds that axe quite hard. It's very detailed, so I got tired of it after awhile.