Why did Geoffrey love this book?
Robert Serviceās unbiased analytical biography Lenin, discloses a range of important new insights about its subject, drawn from original research. Legends and erasures based on previous political hagiography are neatly set aside. The remarkably driven, intellectually acid, and in some ways autistic character that emerges comes across as one of the most influential political movers of the last century. If he was cold and austere when it came to dispensing affection to his family and closest companions, Lenin was surprisingly bourgeois in his habits while remaining disinterested in the real lives of the working classes of Russia.
Service shows how the execution of his brother by the Romanovs engendered in him a vindictive and unquenchable urge for payback, accomplished when in 1918 a local Bolshevik firing squad executed almost the entire royal family in Siberia. It was an act that Lenin endorsed but did not openly authorize.
The author eschewsā¦
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Lenin is a colossal figure whose influence on twentieth-century history cannot be underestimated. Robert Service has written a calmly authoritative biography on this seemingly unknowable figure. Making use of recently opened archives, he has been able to piece together the private as well as the public life, giving the first complete picture of Lenin.
This biography simultaneously provides an account of one of the greatest turning points in modern history. Through the prism of Lenin's career, Service examines events such as the October Revolution and the ideas of Marxism-Leninism, the one-party state, economic modernisation, dictatorship, and the politics of inter-warā¦