Lenin
Robert Service
Macmillan, £25, 592pp
Buy it at BOL
For several years a faction of the Kurdish liberation movement, the PKK, used to meet twice a week in a McDonald's in Hackney. Over coffee and McNuggets they would discuss, with great intensity, the situation back home, berating the PKK leadership and each other for their vacillations and/or deviations from whatever line they had adopted on the struggle. Occasionally they would develop strategy for their comrades in "the field".
It was a curious but inspiring sight: here were people who lived, ate and slept liberation. Their dedication to the cause was in no way diminished by their exile and in many ways enhanced by it. East London is a long way from the battlefields of what remains eastern Turkey and yet, if they had doubts about their purpose, they were not apparent. True, their bodies were in a fast-food chain in Hackney, but all their hopes and their passions were for Kurdistan.
Whenever I saw them I thought of Lenin. We know him as the leader of the Bolshevik revolution; one of a handful of politicians who shaped 20th-century history. But for almost two decades before the revolution he would have looked like just one more Russian emigré sitting among many of his kind in a Swiss, British, French or German cafe. Here was a man who had scarcely held down a full-time job, who was almost completely unheard-of in his native land, but who pledged: "Give us an organisation of revolutionaries and we'll turn all of Russia upside down."
Herein lies the strength of Robert Service's biography. With the help of previously unpublished documents recently released from central party archives, he has managed skilfully to depict the surreal life of an obsessive, brilliant and stubborn individual who usually found himself the champion of the minority opinion within a minority of just a small number of revolutionaries - who, for most of their lives, did not have a revolution in sight.
A man whose perspective (or lack of it) was such that during the most brutal period of the first world war, when the trenches were filling up with corpses and an uprising looked possible in Germany, he turned to the philosophy of Hegel and Aristotle in a search for essential truth. An ideologue who, like the Kurds in McDonald's, had to concentrate on doctrine because his ultimate goal remained so remote in so many ways.
Service explains how Lenin was sustained by his Marxist faith: "Through Marx and Engels he 'knew' that the future would bring about a final and wonderful stage in world history. His life had purpose. Lenin clung to a rock of attitudes and assumptions, and on it he was able to construct almost any notions of politics and economics he wanted."
Where Service is weakest is in analysing the value of these political and economic notions when the goal - revolution - became more attainable. Like many Russian historians and biographers of Lenin, he demands far higher moral, economic and political standards of the system that the revolution brought in than of the one it replaced. He continually describes Lenin as "amoral" because his key priority during the turbulent years of the revolution was not fairness but defence of the revolution itself - as though any other state, then or since, has had moral ideals that transcend self-preservation. He criticises Lenin for his dictatorial tendencies as though he were ruling an established democracy in peacetime rather than a ravaged nation emerging from autocracy, at war first with itself and then with foreign powers.
Not that there are not severe criticisms to be made. Lenin in particular and the Bolsheviks in general made many mistakes, some of them unforgivable, which set the tone for dictatorship and repression for the rest of the century. Given that, at least in theory, they were attempting something nobody had ever tried before - to build a country based not on profit but on the collective power of the poor - this is not surprising. But they did not find themselves at the helm by chance. The Bolsheviks promised peace when nobody else would and seized power when nobody else dared. One may argue about what they did with it when they arrived, but it is impossible to ignore the reasons why they got there and the insurrectionary route they had to take to achieve it.
Biographies of Lenin tend to canonise or demonise him; Service, to his credit, does neither, although his assertion in the introduction that too many works "give him the benefit of too many doubts" leaves one in little doubt that he approaches his subject with more than just a critical historical eye.
In The Age of Extremes Eric Hobsbawm argues that, compared with the move from agricultural to industrial labour, "the history of the confrontation between 'capitalism' and 'socialism'... will probably seem of more limited historical interest - comparable in the long run to the 16th- and 17th-century wars of religion or the Crusades". We may have to establish some temporal and ideological distance from the cold war before a truly critical, rather than partisan, assessment of Lenin can be made. Until then, Service's work will remain a valuable if flawed contribution to our understanding of a remarkable if flawed man.
