The fat political biography has an antipodal relationship with the fat literary biography: even if it's dull, it's useful. (Literary and political autobiography are also, for the most part, opposites: the former is an exercise that should be compulsory, while the politician's memoirs are almost invariably mendacious and self-serving.) Robert Service, as a prose stylist, is no Trotsky; but with his bland and strangely exculpatory account of Lenin's life we can finally claim to get some way inside the mind of one of the previous century's more enigmatic dictators (as well as the chance to carry around a large red book with "Lenin" printed on it in big letters, which guarantees the reader a wide berth on public transport).
This is a boiled-down, rejigged version of Service's three-volume political life of Lenin, which was made possible by the opening up of Kremlin archives; until then, biographies of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov were thin on the ground and hedged by protocol, dogma or fear. It emerges that the individual perhaps more responsible for the 20th century's shape than any other was not so much a monster as a weirdo - and not even a particularly outlandish weirdo. The ultimate policy wonk (even his death mask appears to be frowning in concentration), he was strict with himself and others. He had frighteningly little time for loafers; or, indeed, for much that distracted him from the business of the Revolution. We may speculate that had his elder brother, a more affable and humane type altogether, not been executed for plotting against the Emperor Alexander III, history would have taken a very different turn.
But there is something tantalisingly human about Lenin. He maintained his bicycle as if it were "a surgical instrument"; he played boisterously with his nephew. He may have been given to grim jokes about what he was going to do to the Mensheviks, but at least he had a sense of humour; and, when he took office in the Kremlin, one of the first things he did was get a cat, which would sleep in his armchair in the certainty that no one would disturb it. One shudders to think of the penalty for doing so.
The book has its flaws and its difficulties. It is not in any sense a walk in the park; but then, it's not Service's fault that Lenin spent so much time wrangling over policy in various socialist congresses. The passages which deal with Lenin's intellectual development - his reliance on a mixture of Marx, Hegel and Aristotle - are among the most interesting. Service goes a little dotty over Inessa Armand, who was probably Lenin's lover for a while ("her nostrils were wonderfully flared"), but the book's chief fault - which, I assume, comes with the territory of being a specialist in Soviet history - is that Service assumes a level of background knowledge the reader may well not possess. The transformation from plotter to ruler seems somehow magical; the picture of how much influence Lenin had before 1917 is unclear, as is the level of oppression in pre-revolutionary Russia (how many political prisoners and exiles were there, for instance?). But it's still surprisingly absorbing, and a lot less creepy than reading about some other dictators I could mention.
