Reminiscences of Lenin

The most intimate book ever written about Lenin, by the person who knew him best.

Nadezhda Krupskaya was his wife for a quarter of a century and his political comrade for longer - secretary of Iskra, a Bolshevik in her own right before she was ever a Bolshevik's wife, and after the revolution one of the founders of Soviet education. She wrote these reminiscences at the turn of the 1930s, and they carry a warmth and an ordinariness no official Life could counterfeit: Lenin cycling in the Geneva hills, losing his temper over a chess game, poring over library catalogues, learning to skate, arguing half the night and then insisting everyone go to bed.

For the daily texture of underground and emigre Bolshevism - the smuggled newspapers, the split-hair polemics, the poverty, the codes and safe houses and endless moving on - there is no better witness, because there was no closer one.

She is not a hagiographer by temperament but a precise, unsentimental woman describing a life she shared, and the precision is the charm. She records arguments as arguments rather than as scripture descending, and lets Lenin be wrong, be tired, be human.

It is also, incidentally, one of the better political histories of Russian Marxism from the inside: the fight with the Economists, the split of 1903, the years of reaction and the return.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, on what she could not say.