DECEMBER 2017 - AudioFile
Sebestyen’s detailed biography of the founder of the Soviet state is given a lively reading by Jonathan Aris. Using sources not available to researchers until now, Sebestyen gives us a Lenin who is not a “coldly one-dimensional leader of the Bolshevik Revolution” but, rather, a coldly three-dimensional leader of the Bolshevik Revolution. Russophiles and those who enjoy accounts of the Russian Revolution will find Aris’s reading to be a fine match of text and voice. His British accent, which seems to now be obligatory for almost all histories of Russia, is a pleasing and expressive baritone. He enunciates well and affects different voices for characters with various British accents. M.T.F. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
The New York Times Book Review - Josef Joffe
Can first-rate history read like a thriller? With Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror, the journalist Victor Sebestyen has pulled off this rarest of feats—down to the last of its 569 pages. How did he do it? Start with a Russian version of House of Cards and behold Vladimir Ilyich Lenin pre-empt Frank Underwood's cynicism and murderous ambition by 100 years. Add meticulous research by digging into Soviet archives, including those locked away until recently. Plow through 9.5 million words of Lenin's Collected Works. Finally, apply a scriptwriter's knack for drama and suspense that needs no ludicrous cliffhangers to enthrall history buffs and professionals alike.
From the Publisher
Sebestyen has managed to produce a first-rate thriller by detailing the cynicism and murderous ambition of the founder of the Soviet Union.”
–The New York Times Book Review, “100 Notable Books of 2017”
“An accessible, fair, and marvelously written biography…For anyone interested in an introduction to the world’s greatest revolutionary that draws on the latest research, Mr. Sebestyen’s Lenin would be the place to start.”
–Douglas Smith, The Wall Street Journal
“Can first-rate history read like a thriller? With Lenin: The Man, the Dictator and the Master of Terror, the journalist Victor Sebestyen has pulled off this rarest of feats . . . How did he do it? Start with a Russian version of “House of Cards” and behold Vladimir Ilyich Lenin pre-empt Frank Underwood’s cynicism and murderous ambition by 100 years. Add meticulous research by digging into Soviet archives, including those locked away until recently. Plow through 9.5 million words of Lenin’s “Collected Works.” Finally, apply a scriptwriter’s knack for drama and suspense that needs no ludicrous cliffhangers to enthrall history buffs and professionals alike.”
—Josef Joffe, The New York Times Book Review
"Intriguing"
—Karl Ove Knausgaard, The New York Times
"The absence of a post-Soviet Lenin biography has finally been corrected, with this brilliant and compelling portrait of the Soviet state’s founder…Sebestyen covers Lenin as a private person as well as a thinker and revolutionary… [this] superb biography is a commentary on how, with even the best of intentions, adoption of a revolutionary ideology can lead to a living hell.”
–Ronald Radosh, The National Review
“Lenin is the best biography I’ve read in years. It takes Victor Sebestyen less than five pages to perform the hardest of all literary tricks: making the person he’s writing about seem like a familiar human being.”
–Bob Blaisdell, The Christian Science Monitor
“An illuminating new biography of the cold, calculating ruler on whom the subsequent Soviet state modeled itself . . . Sebestyen ably captures the man, "the kind of demagogue familiar to us in Western democracies." A compelling, clear-eyed portrait of a dictator whose politics have unfortunate relevance for today.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Insightful . . . A compelling portrait of an epoch-making figure . . . Readers explore the complexities of [Lenin’s] personality: sophisticated intellectual and shameless demagogue, cerebral logician and emotional rageaholic, sensitive lover of music and callous murderer. But no complexities will fascinate readers more than those characterizing Lenin’s tangled relationships with the women who influenced him. Taking readers deep into a marriage that previous biographers have dismissed as merely functional, Sebestyen illuminates moments of real tenderness—and of painful tension—as Lenin succumbs to the charms of a beautiful émigré, whom he makes his mistress without abandoning his wife.”
—Booklist (starred review)
"[An] excellent, original and compelling portrait of Lenin as man and leader."
—Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of The Romanovs
“A fresh, powerful portrait of Lenin, and just at the right time: As Bolshevik ideas and tactics return to world politics, Victor Sebestyen focuses our attention on man who invented them.”
—Anne Applebaum, author of Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine
"A vivid and rounded picture of Lenin the man. Serious and deeply reserved, the great revolutionary had few friends but loved at least two women deeply, and at the same time. Lenin's life has been told before, but Sebestyen brings to the task a gift for narrative and for describing his rich cast of characters."
—Margaret MacMillan, The Oldie (UK)
"An entertaining read . . . Sebestyen writes in a lively journalistic style and has an eye for memorable anecdotes and quotations . . . He brings Lenin the man to life and shows persuasively how 'he was driven by emotion as much as by ideology.'"
—Orlando Figes, The Sunday Times (UK)
“Richly readable . . . Sebestyen does full justice to the astonishing, thriller-like tale of [Lenin’s] return to Russia to organize the October uprising . . . Lenin saw enemies everywhere. Blaming peasant farmers for the shortage of food, he ordered provincial officials to round them up and hang them. Even Josef Stalin was rebuked for not being ‘merciless’ enough . . . An enthralling but appalling story.”
—The Mail on Sunday (UK)
"Sebestyen brings Lenin's complexities to life, balancing personality with politics in succinct and readable prose, [and] describes particularly keenly how this ruthless, domineering, often vicious man depended on women to sustain him. "
—David Reynolds, The New Statesman (UK)
“Sebestyen, whose family fled Hungary as refugees when he was a child, revives a style of history familiar to the Cold War, in which leading Bolsheviks appear as black sheep in an unhappy eastern bloc family history. Like the Polish-born historian Richard Pipes, his writing is full of caustic asides and asterisks and daggers leading down wormholes of communist lore. His well-sourced narrative feels as if it was honed around kitchen tables for decades before he sat down to write it.”
—Roland Elliott Brown, The Spectator (UK)
Library Journal
11/01/2017
Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) had a populistic style that helped him gain political advantage in many situations. Here, journalist Sebestyen (Revolution 1989) attempts to show that the Russian communist leader was not a revolutionary by definition; rather, he was someone who happened to be close to the revolution. To create the first comprehensive study of Lenin in two decades, the author has gathered sources from diaries, letters, and personal papers that provide extraordinary detail about Lenin's personal life, including his relationships with his wife and mistress. Also described are the momentous decisions of the 1917 Russian Revolution, such as the decision to murder Tsar Nicholas II and his family. Lenin later become known for his challenges to intellectual freedom and purging libraries of books that were considered unacceptable. VERDICT This well-documented work will satisfy amateur and professional historians alike.—Harry Willems, Great Bend P.L., KS
DECEMBER 2017 - AudioFile
Sebestyen’s detailed biography of the founder of the Soviet state is given a lively reading by Jonathan Aris. Using sources not available to researchers until now, Sebestyen gives us a Lenin who is not a “coldly one-dimensional leader of the Bolshevik Revolution” but, rather, a coldly three-dimensional leader of the Bolshevik Revolution. Russophiles and those who enjoy accounts of the Russian Revolution will find Aris’s reading to be a fine match of text and voice. His British accent, which seems to now be obligatory for almost all histories of Russia, is a pleasing and expressive baritone. He enunciates well and affects different voices for characters with various British accents. M.T.F. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2017-09-25
An illuminating new biography of the cold, calculating ruler on whom the subsequent Soviet state modeled itself."Secretive, suspicious, intolerant, acetic, intemperate." Such is the essence of the portrait of his subject that Budapest-born journalist Sebestyen (1946: The Making of the Modern World, 2015, etc.) extracts from the considerable record. The author does not overwhelm with detail, and he focuses especially on how Lenin's most important relationships were with women, such as his mother, his wife, Nadya, and his mistress, Inessa Armand. From his beginnings as a brilliant youth to his maturation as a driving, relentless intellectual whose favored method of leadership was merciless carping, Lenin was consistently concerned with the nitty-gritty of power and how to attain it. He was also criticized for fleeing from trouble, as he believed he was too important to the struggle to get arrested. Radicalized at the age of 18 after the "violent drama" of his beloved older brother Sasha's execution by the czar's police force in 1887 for attempting to assassinate the czar, Vladimir Ulyanov, as he was then known, "was heir to a long tradition of revolutionary opposition to the Tsars." Prohibited from studying at university, sent briefly to Siberia, closely monitored by the czar's police state, the Okhrana (from which Lenin's Cheka would subsequently and ironically derive its model), and largely supported in every way by his mother and wife, Lenin moved about in exile honing the revolutionary message. Although not as eloquent a writer as Marx or Trotsky, Lenin created a style of argument altogether his own; as the author writes, "he was nearly always domineering, abusive, combative and often downright vicious." Operating brutally but haphazardly, rather than by a truly coordinated effort, and not averse to using a "criminal gang" to steal on the party's behalf, Lenin prevailed by sheer force of will. Sebestyen ably captures the man, "the kind of demagogue familiar to us in Western democracies."A compelling, cleareyed portrait of a dictator whose politics have unfortunate relevance for today.
