Review

General Books

"Without revolutionary theory," V.I. Lenin opined in his classic pamphlet What Is to Be Done? there can be no revolutionary movement." In the seventeenth volume of the series, European History in Perspective, James D. White of the University of Glasgow tests Lenin's proposition by examining the nexus of the Bolshevik leader's key thoughts and actions. In and of itself, the method is hardly original; so the reader is brought up sharply when, just a few lines into the preface, these intriguing words appear: "It is not the intention of the present work to be a complete biography of Lenin. Such a work has yet to be written, and would be extremely extensive." What have we here? Even excluding the thousands of volumes of soviet scholasticism and the equally uncritical tomes of western fellow travelers, the Lenin bibliography is one of the world's largest, rivaling in sheer volume that of Napoleon or of the American Civil War. And what about the works of Volkogonov, Pipes, and all the others who have exploited the archives that opened up when the Soviet Union collapsed? What more could possibly be said about the prophet and creator of the greatest human experiment ever? The latter question is the key to appreciating the book's real achievement; but the author resists answering until a substantial introduction and six chapters have prepared his reader sufficiently for the shock.	1
During the journey from preface to conclusion, White sustains interest by constantly presenting familiar elements of the Lenin story in a new light. For example, we learn that the Socialist Revolutionaries were as Marxist as the Social Democrats, and that narodnik (populist) was a pejorative label pasted on them by Lenin and his mentor, Plekhanov. We discover that in refuting Bogdanov, an obsessed Lenin spent an inordinate amount of time and energy in hairsplitting that would have embarrassed a medieval monk. We find that, contrary to conventional assumptions, Lenin was well informed about the February Revolution and even accurately predicted its course, but that the original April Theses were drastically edited before publication. And, perhaps most amazing of all, we are persuaded that Lenin never entertained the idea of "smashing imperialism at its weakest link." That was thought up by Bukharin and subsequently attributed to Lenin by Stalin in his Socialism in One Country. These are but a few samples of White's surprising discoveries.	2
Discussing the "Lenin Legend," the final chapter opens with a sketch of the real Lenin. It transpires that he failed to attain his life's goal of controlling all the Social Democrats, and that he never intended to create the Bolsheviks as a separate party. He came to power as a result of Russia's wartime collapse and the efforts of others like Trotsky. Most telling of all, he found his vaunted theory largely useless in dealing with the realities of establishing the socialist state; the best that could be said for his years of theorizing was that they led him to preside over "a revolution made on false premises." The remainder of White's conclusion shows how in 1920 Lenin created a "highly fanciful" history of his life's work, and institutionalized it as the Commission on the History of the Russian Communist Party and the October Revolution. His official version then became the building material for the equally fanciful and self-serving works by Stalin and Trotsky, as well as for the interpretations of truth-seeking foreign scholars and post-soviet biographers. In a word, the well was poisoned from the very beginning. At the very end of the book the reader suddenly realizes that White had written a concise and persuasive appeal for a complete reappraisal of Lenin, for even the new archival evidence is of little use so long as it is fitted into the received matrix. No wonder that we need a "complete" and "extremely extensive" new biography of the founder of the Soviet Union.	3
As all of the above demonstrates, this is not a book for beginners, if only because it assumes a familiarity with the legendary Lenin. On the other hand, it is completely accessible to any reader with knowledge of modern Russian history, and it has to be an important book for anyone who deals with Lenin at any level. If White succeeds in his appeal for starting over from scratch, then almost everything we have been teaching will have to be rethought.	4
Grand Valley State University Edward Alan Cole

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