Volume 48, Number 17 · November 1, 2001
Lenin and the 'Radiant Future'
By Martin Malia
Lenin: A Biography
by Robert Service
Harvard University Press, 561 pp., $35.00
Lenin's Embalmers
by Ilya Zbarsky and Samuel Hutchinson, translated from the French by Barbara Bray
Harvill, 215 pp., $12.00 (paper)
Following the Russian Revolution of 1905, a minor participant in that inconclusive upheaval, Vladimir Ulyanov, was on the run from Finland (then in the Tsar's empire) to Sweden. It was December 1907, and his route lay over the Gulf of Bothnia separating the two countries. As it turned out, the local comrades guiding him to a remote ferry landing were the worse for drink, and on the last leg to the pier he barely made it over breaking ice. 'What a stupid way to die,' he later recalled his thought at the time—for he was a man with a mission. And that was 'to overturn all Russia' with 'a party of a new type'—a goal proclaimed in 1902 in What Is to Be Done?, the work that made his name in every sense, since it was the first he signed 'Lenin.'
Review, 4656 words
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