Lenin the Ideologist

Lenin: The Compulsive Revolutionary, by Stefan T. Possony. Regnery, $7.95 The Life of Lenin, by Louis Fischer. Harper, $10.00 The Life and Death of Lenin, by Robert Payne. Simon and Schuster, $8.50 Nineteen-sixty-four marks two important even-year anniversaries for the Communist movement. Exactly one hundred years ago the First International was founded, giving Marxism its first institutional grip on the world. (It was later put to an early grave by Marx himself who, threatened with loss of its control, transferred its headquarters to New York rather than let it fall to his “opponents.”) And it is just forty years since the death of Lenin. The latter anniversary was the impetus for the appearance of these three biographies, ranging from good through first-rate to outstanding.

Perhaps the cardinal defect of Western, and particularly American, understanding of modern Communism is its inability to recognize the motive force of ideology in general, and the contribution made by Lenin to the development of Communist ideology in particular. That inability stems, in the first place, from an unwillingness to attribute to others a faith in any pattern of ideas, much less in a completely radical and palpably “nonsensical” body of doctrine like Communist ideology.

About the Author

Richard V. Allen

Mr. Allen is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was the national-security adviser to President Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1982, the chief foreign-policy adviser to Reagan from 1977 to 1981, and the foreign-policy coordinator in the 1968 presidential campaign of Richard M. Nixon.

Featured Tags

Lenin: The Compulsive Revolutionary, by Stefan T. Possony. Regnery, $7.95 The Life of Lenin, by Louis Fischer. Harper, $10.00 The Life and Death of Lenin, by Robert Payne. Simon and Schuster, $8.50 Nineteen-sixty-four marks two important even-year anniversaries for the Communist movement. Exactly one hundred years ago the First International was founded, giving Marxism its first institutional grip on the world. (It was later put to an early grave by Marx himself who, threatened with loss of its control, transferred its headquarters to New York rather than let it fall to his “opponents.”) And it is just forty years since the death of Lenin. The latter anniversary was the impetus for the appearance of these three biographies, ranging from good through first-rate to outstanding.

Perhaps the cardinal defect of Western, and particularly American, understanding of modern Communism is its inability to recognize the motive force of ideology in general, and the contribution made by Lenin to the development of Communist ideology in particular. That inability stems, in the first place, from an unwillingness to attribute to others a faith in any pattern of ideas, much less in a completely radical and palpably “nonsensical” body of doctrine like Communist ideology.

About the Author

Richard V. Allen

Mr. Allen is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was the national-security adviser to President Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1982, the chief foreign-policy adviser to Reagan from 1977 to 1981, and the foreign-policy coordinator in the 1968 presidential campaign of Richard M. Nixon.