Lenin: A Political Life. Vol. 3, The Iron Ring. by Robert ServiceReview by: R. C. ElwoodSlavic Review, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Winter, 1995), pp. 1094-1095Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2501461 .

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1094 Slavic Review

Lenin: A Political Life. Vol. 3, The Iron Ring. By Robert Service. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. xxi, 393 pp. Index. Plates. $29.95, hard bound.

Robert Service's trilogy, Lenin: A Political Life, has been seventeen years in the making. During this time much has changed for researchers of modern Russian history. When he began work in 1978, the image of "Grandpa Ilich" was well ensconced in Brezhnev's Russia, essential archives in the Institute of Marxism-Leninism were closed even to Soviet scholars and little of interest about Lenin had appeared in the USSR or the west for more than a decade. Vol. 1, subtitled The Strengths of Contradiction, was pub- lished in 1985 and traced Lenin's life to 1910. Based on a close reading of his "Com- plete [sic] Collected Works" and of existing western literature, it presented a fresh if not particularly original picture of Lenin's first forty years. The publication of vol. 2, Worlds in Collision, which took the story up to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, was scheduled for 1989 but delayed two years to allow incorporation of new material suddenly appearing in Soviet archival journals as Gorbachev sought to har- ness Lenin to perestroika. The Iron Ring, which covers the last six years of Lenin's life, is based on this material and also on the author's own work in the former Central Party Archives and the State Archives of the Russian Federation, made possible by the events of 1991. Despite this lapse between conception and fruition, and the changing perceptions of Lenin since 1978, Service's biography when read as a whole is surpris- ingly consistent and provides an admirably balanced picture of the "political life" of the first Soviet leader. It thus takes its place with and stands in good comparison to the other major trilogies of the "three who made a revolution"-Isaac Deutscher's Trotsky and Robert Tucker's Stalin-but with the added advantage of being based on better sources of information and perhaps on a sounder historical methodology.

Service, who teaches at the London School of Slavonic and East European Studies, is most familiar with the post-1917 period covered in the volume under review. It is the setting of his first book, The Bolshevik Party in Revolution: A Study of Organisational Change (1979) and it is the area where his belated archival access proved most fruitful. He provides much more detail on party-state and intra-party relations than is found elsewhere, and certainly more than in other Lenin biographies. Lenin's inability to delegate authority, his insistence on being at the center of things, his loss of an insti- tutional memory with the death of Iakov Sverdlov-all are used to explain the admin- istrative and leadership problems of the early Soviet state. Excellent use is made of new archival material to reveal the difficulties which Lenin faced at the IX and X Party Conferences where his Party proved anything but subservient to his will. Those readers accustomed to the intransigent Lenin of 1917 or during the Brest-Litovsk debates will be interested in how a more subtle Lenin prepared the way inside the Central Com- mittee for NEP, how he carefully orchestrated the X Party Congress to accept this radical change in policy, and how "caution, consultation and the cultivation of willing allies"-not usually seen as leninist traits-"did the trick."

If I had a complaint about this volume it would be that it is too much of a "political life" with too heavy an emphasis on party congresses, conferences and plenums of the Central Committee. One learns little about the personal Lenin until the last two chap- ters when his illness in 1922 forces a discussion of his health and relations with those who took care of him at Gorki. Aided by revealing memoirs of Lenin's secretaries, medical personnel and wife, much of which was published only in the late 1980s, Service paints a picture of a moody, quirky, isolated and unrepentant invalid trying desperately to maintain control of his party and state from afar. He raises the very interesting possibility that the incomplete and inconsistent qualities of Lenin's famous "Testament," rather than being the product of his failing mental faculties, might ac- tually have been the result of Stalin's suppression of supplementary material trans- mitted to him by Lenin's secretaries. While there is no doubt that Lenin was disillu- sioned with his eventual successor, Service is adamant that "nothing said or done by the dying Lenin suggested that he had changed his mind on [the] fundamental essen- tials of post-October Leninism.... The beatification of Lenin as the putative creator of communism with a human face is moonshine: Lenin lived and died a Leninist."

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Book Reviews 1095

Would the history of the Soviet Union have been different had Lenin lived, as neo-leninists in Russia and some academics in the west have argued? Service's answer is a very qualified yes. Both Lenin and Stalin, he concludes, "enthused about dicta- torship, the one-party-state, violence in pursuit of political goals, massive state eco- nomic direction, cultural persecution, militant atheism, ideological monopoly, forcible maintenance of a multinational state." But Lenin "did not envisage a strategy of liq- uidating millions of innocent and hard-working peasants. Nor did he aim to exter- minate his enemies, real and imagined, in the party." This is a balanced conclusion to what is certainly the most scholarly and satisfying biography of Lenin available in either the west or the new Russia.

R.C. ELWOOD Carleton University

The Engineer of Revolution: L.B. Krasin and the Bolsheviks, 1870-1926. By Timothy Edward O'Connor. Boulder: Westview Press, 1992. xix, 322 pp. Index. $55.00, hard bound.

Leonid Borisovich Krasin was involved in an almost unimaginable combination of key events in Russia and Europe from his studies at the Petersburg Technological Institute in the late 1880s until his death in 1926. Up to now, the only English-language biog- raphy was by his wife, published in London a few years after Krasin's death. Timothy O'Connor has provided us with an extensively documented account of Krasin's multi- faceted career, combining wide reading, archival research and interviews with surviv- ing family members. It is an invaluable source for historians of the period.

Krasin was a model of both the student radical and the young technical specialist. He left his native Tiumen' to study at the St. Petersburg Technological Institute, where his "Siberian" group quickly entered into the revolutionary student life of the capital. Expelled and banished for his work with SD groups, he enlisted in an engineering battalion with an eye to eventually completing his education. Over the next few years, Krasin alternated between revolutionary activity, imprisonment and technical work- a combination that was to recur repeatedly in his varied life.

After completing his education at the Khar'kov Technological Institute in 1900, Krasin headed for Baku, where he plunged into both engineering work in the oil industry and the local SD circles. He became one of Lenin's most adept associates and O'Connor states that in 1903-1904 Krasin "was arguably the only serious rival to Vladimir Il'ich's preeminence among the Bolsheviks." During 1905 he was active inside Russia, leading the Petersburg "Fighting Tactical Group" and striving to unify the SD groups abroad in support of the revolution. During the next two years, Krasin's po- sition as the bolshvik's chief financial officer, combined with his interest in explosives and conspiracy, brought him into the world of "expropriations," where his activities provoked bitter dissention within the SD movement.

In 1908 Krasin went abroad, where his focus shifted from revolution to business. O'Connor attributes this re-orientation to political events-reaction in Russia and dissatisfaction with the 6migr6 SD circles. Krasin broke with Lenin and the bolsheviks, and for a decade devoted his considerable talents to work at Siemens-Schuckert. He rose from junior draftsman, to chief assistant, to the director of the Berlin office. In 1911 he was offered the post of manager of the firm's commercial branch in Moscow. The tsarist government permitted him to return and Krasin appears to have concen- trated on business for the next seven years-a period O'Connor covers in some four pages.

Taken by surprise by the February revolution, Krasin rejected overtures from Lenin and only returned to the bolshevik fold in early 1918, mainly at the behest of Leon Trotskii. For the next eight years Krasin energetically sought to mobilize the technical intelligentsia to serve the bolshevik regime, and carried out a diverse range

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