Lenin the Revolutionary

Not a biography, and a reader should know that going in. This is a short thematic textbook of a little over fifty thousand words, written by six Soviet academics and assembled for the 110th anniversary of Lenin's birth in April 1980.

Unusually, the contributors are named on the copyright page, which is more than the Institute of Marxism-Leninism managed for its own official biography: Professor V. P. Filatov took the address to the reader, the chapter on the making of the Party and the conclusion; Professor A. A. Babayants the chapter on the Soviet state; Professor V. N. Konyukhovsky four of the five sections on the revolution; with V. T. Kuzmin, G. P. Pozhidayev and Yu. A. Sherkovin taking one section each.

Four chapters organise it: Lenin as thinker, on philosophy, social psychology and economic theory; the building of the Party; the revolution; and the state. The narrative spine is deliberately thin and the exposition thick - whole years pass in a sentence while a dozen pages go to the theory of surplus value. It is a Party-school primer dressed for export, the sort of book a foreign communist or a sympathetic student would be handed as a first serious approach: short enough to finish and authoritative enough to trust.

That combination is what makes it worth examining. A short book cannot mutilate a document at length; it can only omit.

There is no dating problem here - a 1980 book about 1980, arguing from the mature Brezhnev doctrine.

Translated by Liv Tudge. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.