Lenin: A Biography (review)

Service has written a superb biography of Vladimir Lenin that supersedes all others. Dividing Lenin's career into four distinct periods—formative years (1870-1900), formation of the Bolshevik Party (1900-1916), seizure of power (1917-1918), and defense of the revolution (1918-1924)—the author deftly combines Lenin's personal life with his political career, making use of the abundance of hitherto unused new materials that have been made available during the perestroika period and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Some of these archival sources were jealously locked up during the Soviet period in the vaults of the Communist Party archives.

The book takes an interdisciplinary approach, combining history, psychology, anthropology, sociology of knowledge, and political theory. Moreover, Service's book serves as a good example of the study of modern radical revolutionary leaders. Without question, Lenin was the forerunner of modern fanatical radical movements, and as Service correctly states, "The twentieth century was being forged on the anvil of Lenin's seizure and consolidation of power in Petrograd (482)."

Following his monumental work on Lenin's political thoughts, Lenin: A Political Life (Bloomington, 1985, 1991, 1995), 3v., Service boldly stakes his own grounds on the major issues that have been hotly debated by historians over the past four decades. On the crucial issue of continuity/discontinuity between Lenin and Joseph Stalin, Service decisively takes the side of the continuity theory, arguing that the totalitarian system—though he eschews this controversial term—that was perfected by Stalin was Lenin's own creation in its most crucial core. Against the revisionists who stress Lenin's role as a facilitator rather than a maker of historical process, Service, following Hook's famous formulation that Lenin was an epoch-making hero, emphasizes the primacy of Lenin without whom neither the Russian Revolution nor the formation of the Communist dictatorship would have been possible. ¹ On the other side of the political spectrum, he disagrees with neo-conservatives who demonize Lenin as an evil psychopath, and he takes issue with the traditional liberal critics of Lenin who draw a direct, straight line from What Is To Be Done (1902) to the establishment of the Communist dictatorship.

Service painstakingly traces the evolution of Lenin's life and ideas, with a detached mixture of sympathy and revulsion, in concrete historical circumstances. Authoritarian, antidemocratic seeds that existed from the beginning matured in the soil of concrete historical conjunctions, which engendered the offshoot of his chilling penchant for political terror, which, in Service's view, was not a necessary evil dictated by historical exigencies: Lenin enjoyed and cherished terror. Nothing was inevitable, he argues, and nothing was predetermined.

Service is most successful in combining Lenin's personal life with the evolution of his political ideas. The description of his relationship with his family is fascinating. Inheriting ethnically mixed blood (Jewish and German maternally and an unknown mixture of Asiatic blood paternally), Lenin's upwardly mobile family had difficulty being accepted by the privileged society of the provincial town of Simbirsk, much like first generation immigrants. Young Lenin (Vladimir Uliyanov) had no close friends outside his family, and, even within his family, he was a loner. An exceptionally intelligent child, he developed the unpleasant trait of overconfidence in his own infallibility and had a reticence to accept his mistakes; he even bullied his own mother, who doted on him. These personal traits became magnified and accentuated after he became a revolutionary. The development of Bolshevism, his strategy for the October Revolution, and his zigzag policies to maintain the Communist dictatorship all had the indelible and decisive stamp of his personal idiosyncrasies. In reality, however, he was far from infallible. Lenin made numerous mistakes, some of which were monumental. In each case, however, he shifted the blame onto his enemies, attaching bad motivations to those who challenged him.

Ill-tempered valetudinarian, tormented by constant headaches, ulcers, and bouts of depression, obsessed with immaculate...