Lenin

Views of Lenin tend to be highly judgemental: he was inflexible, doctrinaire and a cold-blooded revolutionary, a man whose indifference to culture led to political extremes, paving the way for his successor Stalin’s totalitarianism and some of the most heinous and gruesome committed during the twentieth century. Once enshrined as an icon of Soviet ideology and power, as communism fell the statues of Lenin which were once a common sight across Eastern Europe and Russia were toppled and his reputation crumbled into the dust of historical memory.

This volume in The Library of Modern Biography examines his legacy in light of the complete and total collapse of the ideology he espoused. Sheehan seeks to separate myth from fact, and let the real Lenin emerge from behind the opposing shrouds of deification and condemnation, revealing the creator of the 20th century’s most influential yet bloodthirsty ideologies.

SEÁN SHEEHAN is the author of several works of non-fiction, including Anarchism, A Guide to Cultural and Political Aspects of Libertarian Socialism and a biography of Socrates, also published in the Life & Times series.