‘Reconstructing Lenin’ by Tamás Krausz
Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography
Monthly Review Press, New York, 2015. 564pp., $34 pb
ISBN 9781583674499
Reviewed by Chris Nineham
No one seriously concerned with changing the world can avoid Lenin. As Hungarian Marxist Tamás Krausz puts it, ‘the discontented keep running into Lenin’s Marxism at every turn’ (p.316). This, Krausz points out, is above all because Lenin was so central to the Russian Revolution, the first, and up to now most important, anti-capitalist experiment aimed at a stateless society (p.9).
Krausz’s book is not an introduction to Lenin, for that you have to look elsewhere. But it is much more than its billing as ‘an intellectual biography’. Krausz has set himself the ambitious task of examining the principles that motivated and guided Lenin and testing how they matched up against reality. Based on decades of research, the book is a bit obtuse in parts, and the translation feels unreliable, but it makes a series of crucial arguments. One important thing Krausz does is discredit the myths about one the most demonised political figures in history….
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