Volume 44, Number 4 · March 6, 1997
Terrorists
By Robert Conquest
The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archives
edited by Richard Pipes
Yale University Press, 204 pp., $27.50
Stalin's Letters to Molotov: 1925-1936
edited by Lars T. Lih, edited by Oleg V. Naumov, edited by Oleg V. Khlevniuk
Yale University Press, 308 pp., $16.00 (paper)
The two recent collections of documents in the useful Yale series Annals of Communism give us, in slightly different ways, new insights into the political attitudes of Lenin and, after him, Stalin. The Unknown Lenin draws on some 3,714 documents—letters, policy statements, memos—that were withheld as late as 1990 because, as the official responsible put it, they showed Lenin, or the Soviet cause, in a bad light. The Lenin who appears in the documents taken as a whole thus naturally exhibits, more strikingly than before, the personal traits long noted of him by many: his ruthlessness, his drive to power, his closed mind, his ignorance of the world outside Russia, and his petty meanness.
Review, 4652 words
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