Reconstructing Lenin reviewed by International Socialism

‘Reconstructing Lenin’ by Tamás Krausz

Reviewed by Kevin Corr

Reconstructing Lenin is a thoughtful and compelling study of Lenin. Tamás Krausz reveals Lenin as an activist revolutionary whose thoughts were shaped by immediate political events but who also at the same time never strayed far from a coherent theoretical framework. As a work of scholarship it deserves to be up there with Lars Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered.

Krausz is a long-time activist scholar who has lived all his life in Hungary. Thus he is able to bring a fresh Eastern European erudition to the “Lenin Renaissance” of recent years. He can be linked to the “Budapest School”, a group of Hungarian philosophers and historians who were taught or influenced by Georg Lukács and whose pre-eminent figure in Britain is the esteemed Marxist writer and thinker István Mészáros. Even when on the other side of the iron curtain, the best among them, like Krausz, never accepted the folding of Lenin’s heritage back into Stalinism and suffered for it. When the Berlin Wall came down their courage left them well placed to reject the equally malevolent perspectives of the Western Cold War ­ideologues and their successors….

Read the entire review in International Socialism