"Lenin" by Victor Sebestyen

Full Title: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror.

Completed on 7^th of February 2018

Rated 4 stars

Review: 

Three stars for the biography and one more for the interesting style. A lucid overview of the monster who enslaved the millions of innocent people. A man who did no serious work in his life and was supported by his mother well into his forties ended up ruling the lives of many. His obsession with revolution and power crippled him in the end.

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Notes:

New materials discovered after 1991 proved that Lenin was financed by Germany to re-establish his Pravda and resume his propaganda offensive in Russia.

Josef Pilsudski participated in Alexander Ulyanov’s assassination attempt on tsar. He provided the nitric acid for the detonators. For his part he was sentenced for five years in exile. His brother Bronislaw, who smuggled the acid was sentenced to 15 years of hard labour.

In the last 25 years of Tsarist rule nearly 20,000 ministers, officers and senior civil servants were assassinated.

The February revolution was sparked by bread riots but it succeeded because every regiment in the Petrograd guard mutinied. The radical groups had played virtually no part in the Revolution.

The fatal weakness after the February Revolution was an establishment of two rival seats of power. The Duma set up the Provisional Government of Prince Lvov (later Kerensky), to secure seamless transition of power. However, the government recognised the Soviet of Soldiers’, Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputes as a partner and accepted that all government measures had to be approved by the Soviet.

In November 1917 Lenin needed money to pay his supporters workers and soldiers. He sent his State Bank Commissar Nikolai Osinsky, who surrounded the Russian State Bank, demanded open the vault and carried away 5 million roubles.

The first and last free election in November 1917, Bolsheviks got 24% of votes, the Socialist Revolutionaries 39%, Kadets 5%, and Mensheviks 3%. On 5^th of January 1918 the Assembly gathered in Petrograd. The SR leader Viktor Chernov was elected to chair the Assembly. When Lenin wanted the Assembly to ratify his decrees until then, it was defeated by a big margin. Bolsheviks walked out. As proceeding continued, at around 4 am, the Navy Commissar ordered to empty the chamber. In the morning, Lenin issued a decree to dissolve the Assembly.

The Socialist Revolutionaries had split in two after the Bolshevik coup. The ‘Lefts’ became junior partners in Lenin’s regime. They were led by Maria Spiridonova, who emerged in February from 11 years in jail. The Bolsheviks’ war against the villages prompted the Left SR to action. On 6^th of July 1918 they murdered the German Ambassador to Moscow – Count Wilhelm von Mirbach. Another group took Dzerzhinsky hostage. Trotsky led 700 Latvian troops and crashed the uprising. The officer in charge of SR Left – General Mikhail Muravyov and 200 others were executed and 600 jailed. Spiridonova was jailed for year and then sent to a psychiatric hospital. She was exiled, arrested many times, and finally executed in Gulag in 1941.

In Civil War the Whites were fragmented in three armies separated by thousands of kilometres. In the south was army led by Anton Denikin. The east was led by Alexander Kolchak. The 3^rd Army in the north-west was led by Nikolai Yudenich

Family:

Maria Alexandrovna Blank – mother born in 1835 in Petersburg. Her father was Sril Moiseyevich Blank, born in Odessa, a Jew who converted to Orthodoxy and changed his name to Alexander Dmitriyevich. Was an army surgeon, police doctor and an inspector of hospitals at Zlatoust in Western Siberia. Her mother was Anna Groschopf, a daughter of a wealthy German merchant, who died when Maria was three years old.

Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov – father. Born in 1831 of Kalmyk woman. Teacher and later an Inspector of Schools in the Simbirsk Region. Died in 1886 from stroke.

Anna Ilyinichna Ulyanova – sister born in 1864

Alexander – brother born in 1866

Olga Ilyinichna Ulyanova – sister born in 1868. Died in 1869.

Olga Ilyinichna Ulyanova – sister born in 1871. Died from typhoid in 1890.

Maria Ilyinichna Ulyanova – sister born in 1878

Timeline:

1870	Born in Simbirsk, on the Volga.
1886	His father dies of stroke.
1887	His brother Alexander is hung for planning to assassinate the Tsar. One of the plotters had been arrested a few days before the attempt and revealed the plot. Family moves to Kazan and Vladimir starts at a local university and having attended a peaceful student demonstration is thrown out in December.
1888	Is exiled to family property at Kokushkino and joined by the rest of family.
1891	Passes law exam as an external student at St Petersburg University and finds a position as an assistant barrister in Samara.
1893	Moves to St Petersburg and finds a job with a lawyer. Never appeared in court, but occasionally provided advice in litigation cases.
1894	Joins the Union of the Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class and is noticed by the Okhrana. Meets Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, who was born in 1869.
1895	Embarks on a four-month trip around Austria, Switzerland, France and Germany. Arrested for preparing the articles to be published in the paper of the Union of the Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class. Imprisoned from December 1895 till February 1897.
1897	Sentenced to 3 years of administrative exile in Siberia and travelled to Shushenskoye on the River Yenisei.
1898	Joined by Nadezhda Krupskaya and married her on 10 July 1898.
1900	His exile ended, he settles in Pskov, 140 km south-west of St Petersburg. Adopts the name Lenin in a letter to Georgy Plekhanov. Leaves Russia and settles in Munich, having been joined by Krupskaya. Initiates ‘Iskra’ with Plekhanov in Geneva.
1902	Publishes “What Is to Be Done?”. Moves to London to organise production of Iskra there. Visited by Trotsky.
1903	With Plekhanov bringing the printing of Iskra to Geneva, Lenin moves to Geneva. Attends the Second Conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in Brussels and London. Uses the results of one of the points voted on where his fraction gained majority to call his group the Bolsheviks, and the other fraction led by Martov as Mensheviks.
1905	Organises a Party Congress to work out implications of Bloody Sunday in St Petersburg. Returns incognito to St Petersburg. Meets Stalin at the First All Russian Bolshevik Conference in Tampere.
1906	Appoints Leonid Krasin head of the ‘technical committee’ to organise funds by robbing the banks.
1907	Attends the Fifth Party Congress in London. A huge bank stagecoach is held up in Tbilisi. Fifty bystanders are killed and the other fifty injured. The team was led by the Bolshevik Kamo, with Stalin attending. Anything between 250 and 340 thousand roubles were taken. Lenin returns from London to Finland. Lenin publicly distances himself from the crime. He attends the Congress of the Socialist International in Stuttgart, as the Bolshevik representative.
1908	Returns to Geneva. Moves to Paris.
1909	Meets Inessa Armand, his lover and co-worker.
1912	Launches ‘Pravda’. Moves to Krakow to be closer to the Russian border to help with editing Pravda.
1913	Krupskaya suffers from thyroid. They spend summer in Poronin. She is operated on in Berne.
1914	Lenin is arrested in Poronin six days after the Austrians declared war on Austria. Is interrogated in Nowy Targ and released after 11 days. Pravda is closed down and Lenin moves to Berne.
1916	Moves to Zurich. Completes “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism”
1917	On 27 March leaves Zurich and boards a sealed train on Germany’s border. Travels through Germany. Arrives in Sweden and travels through Finland to St Petersburg, arriving on 3 April. With German money he re-establishes Pravda and makes huge propaganda impact for the Bolsheviks. On 4 July demonstrations organised by Bolsheviks got out of hand, whilst Lenin was on holiday. He returns to Petrograd and calms his supporters down. Kerensky orders Lenin’s arrested, and he goes into hiding in Finland. Lenin returns on 7 October and keeps stressing to the executive of his party that they should overthrow the current government of Kerensky as soon as possible. They finally storm the Winter Palace on 25 of October. The next day Lenin starts closing the opposition papers. Kerensky organises a few hundred Cossacks and they approach Petrograd on 30 October. Bolsheviks promise them free passage and autonomy and they give up the fight. On 7 November Lenin sends his guards to open the vaults of the State Bank and take at least 5 million roubles to pay his supporters. In December Bolsheviks start peace talks with the Germans.
1918	On 23 February Bolsheviks sign the Brest-Litevsk peace agreement with the Germans. On 10th of March Lenin moves to Moscow. On 13th of May he sets up a Food Commissariat with Alexander Tsyurupa in charge. On 16th of July tsar, his family and staff are murdered in Ekaterinburg. On30th of August assassinated by Fanny Kaplan, a Socialist Revolutionary, who managed to hit him with two bullets.
1921	Lenin initiates NEP.
1922	On 26 May suffers his first serious stroke. On 13 December suffers from two strokes.
1923	On 10 March suffers another massive stroke.
1924	Dies on 21 January.

Quotes:

Marx in his letter to Engels wrote: “I do not trust any Russian. As soon as a Russian worms his way in, all hell breaks loose”. (Page 144).

Trotsky’s comment about Lenin: “ When Lenin talks about the dictatorship of the proletariat… he means the dictatorship over the proletariat”. (Page 153).

Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, Volume Two, 1929. “For Russians, their worst misfortune was Lenin’s birth; their next worst, his death”. (Page 503).