Australian Left Review
Article Title
Lenin and the Bolsheviks
Abstract
REVIEWERS HAVE REMARKED of Adam Ulam’s lengthy work Lenin and the Bolsheviks that in it Lenin appears as a much more complex and interesting figure than in any of the lives of him yet written. For what it is worth, this conclusion can hardly be avoided, if one reads the Collected, or even the Selected, Works. Although it is subtitled “The intellectual and political history of the triumph of communism in Russia”, the study falls far short of being either a satisfactory political biography or of giving an account of the political and social environment within which Lenin’s revolutionary ideas were moulded. It does not fill the gap left by Isaac Deutscher’s failure to complete the trilogy of political biographies of Stalin, Trotsky and Lenin.