Reddit reviews Lenin (Critical Lives)

There's a great little book called "Lenin for Beginners", which I highly recommend.
If you're looking for something more standard, give this one a go.


If you ask me, I'd say you can't view Lenin in a proper context without understanding the workings of the Party as well. The official History of the CPSU is the best one for a complete overview as far as I'm concerned.

I'd recommend Lars T. Lih's recent Lenin biography and also any of his other works on Lenin.

I think I'd be just fine explaining just what Lenin's idea of the vanguard is, what it was for, what he specifically meant etc, but I don't feel fully educated in regards to the arguments that it somehow led to everything bad under Stalin or anything bad under the USSR just because I'm not that versed in the politics/internal struggles etc post-revolution (and especially not post-Lenin) yet.

As for Lih's book, I actually found an excellent in-depth 6-page review of it last night that makes me feel almost as though I've read it.

Here are the links (too lazy to make them nice)

http://www.socialistdemocracy.org/Reviews/ReviewLeninRediscoveredPart1.html

http://www.socialistdemocracy.org/Reviews/ReviewLeninRediscoveredPart2.html

http://www.socialistdemocracy.org/Reviews/ReviewLeninRediscoveredPart3.html

http://www.socialistdemocracy.org/Reviews/ReviewLeninRediscoveredPart4.html

http://www.socialistdemocracy.org/Reviews/ReviewLeninRediscoveredPart5.html

http://www.socialistdemocracy.org/Reviews/ReviewLeninRediscoveredPart6.html

Also if you're looking for a biography of Lenin I'd recommend Lih's which I just got and am already half way through. As I said he has a strange way of framing it; it's based around the idea that Lenin had a romantic/heroic notion of the workers revolution. It makes sense to a degree and I'm sure Lenin did have a somewhat "heroic" idea of the workers, class struggle etc but Lih sells that a bit hard. Outside of that he does an excellent job of sticking to the facts and disassembling many misconceptions of Lenin's personality, deeds and (to some extent) ideas.