OK, so this is not a book that I finished in a day, although, considering its length, I still blew through it fairly quickly. On our last trip to the library in Montpelier I checked out Robert Service's Lenin: A Biography. I've always had a bit of a man-crush on Lenin, mainly because I find him and his age fascinating. The biography didn't disappointed, although I think it would have benefitted from another hundred pages of so, devoted to events such as the actual events of the takeover of power, his conflict with Stalin, or the New Economic Policy; these were all discussed, but a deeper dive would have made it an even richer experience. This led to a discussion over the breakfast table this morning over the balancing act in biographies between evenly running through the subject's life and focusing in more deeply on a couple key moments or themes. Again, I liked this biography a lot and would definitely recommend it to others, but I do think it would have benefitted from a little more granularity in some key areas. In the end I came away with a sense that Lenin was even more of a prick than I thought he was, but there are people who accomplish extraordinary things in extraordinary ages, and seldom are they pleasant people. There were some very human moments in the story, however, and one that jumped out to me was his reaction to the death of his one-time mistress and long-time Bolshevik colleague, Inessa Armand:
"Inessa called herself a 'living corpse'; it was not only cholera but also a broken heart that did for her. Ten days late she contemplated the meaning of her life:
For romantics, love holds the first place in a person's life. It's higher than anything else. And until recently I was far nearer to such a notion than I am not. True, for me love was never the only thing. Alongside love there was public activity. And both in my life and in the past there have been not a few instances where I've sacrificed my happiness and my love for the good of the cause. But previously it used to seem that love had a significant equal to that of public activity. Now it's not like that. The significance of love in comparison with public activity becomes quite small and cannot bear comparison with public activity.
On the point of death, she tried to persuade herself that her work for the Revolution meant more to her than the man she loved.
"The matter-of-fact official telegram to Lenin cut him to the quick: 'It has been impossible to save Comrade Inessa Armand who was ill with cholera. She died on 24 September. We are accompanying the body to Moscow. Lenin had been responsible for her convalescing in the chaotic Caucasus rather than in France, and now she had perished there. It took a fortnight before her body was brought back in a leaden coffin to Moscow. The train arrived in the early hours of 11 October, and the cortege made its way from the railway station after dawn. Lenin and Nadezhda Konstantinovna (his wife) had been waiting at the station. As the cortege neared the capital's centre, Lenin was obviously overcome with grief. Nadezhda Konstantinovna understood, and gripped him by the arm to hold him up. No one could forget the pitiful condition of the man. The young Bolshevik Yelizaveta Drabkina watched the horse-drawn hearse and the draped black flag: 'There was something inexpressibly sad about his drooping shoulders and lowly bent head.' Angelica Balabanova had the same impression at the funeral: 'I never saw such torment; I never saw any human being so completely absorbed by sorrow, by the effort to keep it for himself, to guard it against the attention of others, as if that awareness could have diminished the intensity of his feeling.'
"Lenin did not record his feelings on paper. He had given up many pleasures for 'the cause': material comfort, profession, chess, classical music, and cycling. He had avoided a permanent association with Inessa: the Revolution for him was always dominant. But he grieved deeply when her corpse was delivered from Nalchik.
"By his side were friends and associates who thought that he was never the same again. Some said that he would have lived longe had he not lost Inessa. Shaken he certainly was; yet he had not lost the power of his will. Since 1912 he had accustomed himself to living apart from her. He could also cope with the froideurs of Nadya. Throughout his career he displayed an ability to be undistracted the matters of the heart. Usually it had been his physical health of his polemics that had thrown him off balance. 'Romance' did not get in his way, and Inessa's death did not destroy him. If his external reaction is any guide, he was hurt worse than by any other event since his brother's execution in 1887. But he quickly recovered. He had an enormous capacity for emotional self-suppression. He loved politics and lived for the political life He was fixated by the importance of ideas. He was not a robot and did not deny, at least to himself, the benefits of a deep relationship, but personal love - the love of a man for a woman - was secondary to him, and, if politics so demanded, he thought he could survive without it."
Robert Service also wrote biographies of Stalin and Trotsky, so I suspect I'll be reading more of his books in the future.
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