Volume 42, Number 10 · June 8, 1995
The Somber Monster
By Robert Conquest
Lenin: A New Biography
by Dmitri Volkogonov, translated and edited by Harold Shukman
Free Press, 529 pp., $30.00
The image of Lenin, and not only in those countries where it is better described as an icon, provides a major crux in our understanding of the history of our century. And how ideas about him have changed! Back in the Seventies, the present reviewer published a short biography of Lenin in Frank Kermode's Modern Masters series. Though thoroughly critical, it reads very mildly today. Cyril Connolly of all people, reviewing it together with the series' book on Gandhi, while praising mine in general commented that Lenin's ruthlessness had done more good to humanity than Gandhi's peacefulness. It is not that Connolly was notably well disposed toward communism; the point is, rather, that it shows how a fairly favorable view of Lenin had seeped into the intellectual atmosphere, one of many similar examples which could be adduced.
Review, 4166 words
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