Lenin’s support for the rights of nations to self-determination, is made clear in Imperialism and the National Question. Three other books from the same publisher throw more light on him.
Sean Sheehan
“Lenin’s childhood” gathers what is known about the third child of Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov and Maria Alexandrovna Blank, born in 1870 and given the name Vladimir.
He had a happy childhood – nothing shocking happened until he was sixteen – and excelled in school where he was remembered by fellow pupils as well-behaved and diligent in class and the most boisterous of them during breaks.
His favourite subject was Latin which he would later tell his wife was one of ‘those dangerous addictions’ he had to forego for revolutionary work (the others were music and chess).
In 1886 his father died of a stroke, aged only fifty-five; Lenin himself was fifty-four when he died of the same cause. In the following year, Vladimir was to suffer an even greater shock when his older brother, Alexander, a student in St. Petersburg, was arrested for taking part in an attempt to assassinate the Tsar. “Lenin’s childhood” gives a moving account of Alexander’s trial and execution, at a time when Vladimir was taking his final school examinations.
Whether Vladimir became Lenin as a result is impossible to know but in all fifty-five volumes of his collected books, letters, articles and speeches his brother is only mentioned twice and then incidentally.
This is terribly understandable, the silence covering feelings which cannot be put into words.
“Not by politics alone: the other Lenin” is a collection of writings by Lenin and those who knew him about aspects of his everyday life.
They demolish the caricature of him as authoritarian and doctrinaire, imposing his will on all those around him. His final notes declare war on Russian chauvinism and insist that the Central Committee should be presided over by a “Russian, Ukranian, Georgian, and so forth. Absolutely”. His final note, dictated on 30-1 December 1922, admonishes Bolsheviks, including himself, as guilty “of an unending number of oppressive acts” against minorities and smaller nationalities.
Boarding a bus on 24 October 1917, for the Smolny Institute where he would head the planning for a second revolution, he asked the conductress if there was any fighting going on in the city centre. He simply didn’t know. His radical act envisaged a different future but the past could not provide a map or agenda for its implementation.
The contingency of the moment was fraught with uncertainty and, with full awareness of the risks involved, he took a subjective decision to engage and intervene in a situation.
What Lenin did between February and October 1917 lies at the heart of his greatness and those events take their due place in “The Lenin scenario”, a screenplay which never became the film it was written for.
It was rejected by Oliver Stone: ‘Too intellectual and too little pussy’. The author drily comments: “Argument was pointless. Laughter essential”.
“Lenin’s childhood”, “Not by politics alone: the other Lenin” and “The Lenin scenario” are published by Verso Books.
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