The best biography of Lenin
On his 155th birthday
Lenin would have turned 155 today. If Alexander Bogdanov had come through with his communist life-extension tech, rather than accidentally killing himself by injecting himself with the wrong type of blood, maybe Lenin would still be with us.
We’ve had have some great material on Lenin here on NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS. Particularly great, in my opinion, is the episode we did about the ongoing preservation of Lenin’s body and the secretive lab that still carries out the job:
But on his birthday, I figured I’d give you a reading recommendation: I know the best biography of Lenin. It’s not an obvious choice because it’s been out of print for decades.
I wrote about it a few years ago but I figured no one remembers anything anymore so I might as well give it another boost.
I found this biography back in 2018 when I was doing research at the New York Public Library on the origins of various CIA propaganda projects for a book project that never quite came together. The book is Lenin. And it’s by David Shub. Last I checked it can be bought online very cheaply. Make sure to get the revised paperback edition, which has updates and additions not found in the original hardback.
The author, David Shub, came from a similar background to my own family. He was born to Russian Jews in the Russian Empire in Ukraine at the end of the 19th century. Like my grandparents on my father’s side, he believed in the dream. He joined Russia’s socialist revolutionaries in his teens, spent time as a minor player in the exiled scene in Europe, met Lenin and other main players in that world, and ended up on the Menshevik side when the Social Democratic Labour Party split. He went back to Russia to take part in the 1905 Revolution, but was arrested and conscripted into forced military service in Siberia. He escaped and made his way to New York, where he then spent the rest of his life — mostly working at the city’s Yiddish lefty newspaper, The Forward. A pretty standard life for a young radical who got thrown out of the revolution and to sidelined life of an unknown intellectual on the Lower East Side. Still, he was lucky. If he had stayed in Moscow he would have been executed by Stalin.
David is a good, clear, and fair writer. Lenin is as polarizing at topic as you can imagine. But he does a good job of trying to stay objective. But what makes the biography particularly good is that David was there…