The man and the moment

The centenary of the Russian Revolution has arrived right on time, just as the liberal democratic world is getting a taste of what it’s like to feel political gravity give way. In 2017, Lenin lives. ‘In many ways he was a thoroughly modern phenomenon,’ writes Victor Sebestyen in Lenin the Dictator,

the kind of demagogue familiar to us in western democracies, as well as in dictatorships. In his quest for power, he promised people anything and everything. He offered simple solutions to complex problems. He lied unashamedly. He identified a scapegoat he could later label ‘enemies of the people’. He justified himself on the basis that winning meant everything…. Lenin was the godfather of what commentators a century after his time call ‘post-truth politics’.

Sebestyen, whose family fled Hungary as refugees when he was a child, revives a style of history familiar to the Cold War, in which leading Bolsheviks appear as black sheep in an unhappy eastern bloc family history. Like the Polish-born historian Richard Pipes, his writing is full of caustic asides and asterisks and daggers leading down wormholes of communist lore. His well-sourced narrative feels as if it was honed around kitchen tables for decades before he sat down to write it. ‘If anything disproves the Marxist idea that it is not individuals who make history but broad social and economic forces,’ he writes, ‘it is Lenin’s revolution.’

Parts of the story are familiar. In 1887, when Lenin was a teenager, the tsarist regime hanged his older brother Alexander for plotting to assassinate Tsar Alexander III. His family’s subsequent ostracism by the Simbirsk bourgeoisie fired his contempt for his social peers. That same year, he was expelled from Kazan university for participating in a demonstration. He delved instead into a resentful if disciplined self-education in socialist classics and discovered Marx — a writer tsarist censors thought no one would read.