Veteran journalist and author
Joseph C. Goulden offers a good review of Victor Sebestyen's Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror for the Washington Times.
Let not October pass by
without proper notice of the 100th anniversary of one of the greater calamities
of modern history: the seizure of control of Russia on Oct. 25, 1917, by what
became the Communist Party.
As biographer Victor
Sebestyen writes in his horrifying biography of Vladimir Lenin, under communism
“millions of people were killed, jailed or sent into the great maw of the
gulag.” The estimated body count, in Russia and the rest of the world, is in
multi-digit territory.
Should we fret about
communism now that the Soviet Union and its subsidiaries are defunct? Think
again. Recent public opinions show that some 80 percent of Russians look with
favor upon Joseph Stalin, Lenin’s successor as dictator. President Vladimir Putin
recently spent millions restoring Lenin’s tomb in Moscow — an artifice that Mr.
Sebestyen labels as “part shrine, part tourist trap.” Mr. Putin’s goal of
“restoring Russia’s rightful grandeur” is frequently stated.
The Hungarian-born Mr.
Sebestyen, a foreign correspondent for several London dailies, including the
Times, the Daily Mail and the Evening Standard, traces Lenin’s origins as a
member of the comfortable minor nobility. Born Vladimir Ulyanov, he was radicalized
when an older brother was hanged for working against Czar Nicholas II.
You can read the rest of the
review via the below link:
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