My Recollections of Lenin

This slender book is where a great deal of what the twentieth century thought it knew about Lenin's mind actually came from.

When people quote Lenin on the woman question, or Lenin on art, they are more often than not quoting Clara Zetkin. These three short memoirs, written in the years just after his death, are the source of the most-cited conversations he ever had.

Zetkin had earned the right to write them. She was not a disciple who had met the great man once but one of the towering figures of international socialism in her own right: the organiser of its women's international, the founder of International Women's Day, and a leader of the German left through the SPD, the wartime opposition and the founding of the German Communist Party at the end of 1918.

She came to Lenin as something close to an equal, and the recollections have the texture of that standing. She argues with him, presses him, and records his impatience and his charm without awe. The long conversations of 1920 - the two famous talks on the women's movement, and the talk on art and culture - are set down with a novelist's ear, and they are why the book has never gone out of print in the movement.

A source this small carrying a load this large is exactly the kind of text a state learns to curate.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.