Robert Servis, "Lenin" Summary and Impressions - A masterpiece of Lenin's biography that has received worldwide acclaim.
Lenin, written by Robert Servis and translated by Hidekazu Kawai, was published by Iwanami Shoten in 2002.
So far on this blog, you've read Victor Seveschen's "Lenin, Power and LoveThis is a book that features a more hard-hitting, biographical narrative compared to the "The Last of Us".
Let's take a quick look at the book.
The definitive biography of Lenin by a leading scholar of contemporary Soviet and Russian history. Based on secret documents released after the collapse of the Soviet Union, this book introduces Lenin's previously unknown personal details, including his origins, personality, and relationships with women, as well as his criticism of Stalin, interpersonal relationships among leaders, and the underside of the Soviet system, providing a skillful portrait of the revolutionary who moved the 20th century. This book has received wide acclaim in the British and American media.
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I'll just mention here one part of the book that particularly impressed me. That is here.
By most standards, no politician was more unsuited to fight a civil war than Lenin. As the oldest son of a widow, he was exempt from military service in the Reich forces. He did not conceal the fact that he had no military experience.
Indeed, he had read Clausewitz's classic work, Theory of War. But his notes on "Theory of War" were strange notes. The conclusion Lenin drew from Clausewitz on waging war was that war was becoming more and more a simple technical problem. He did not expect war to become more complex.
Once the party seized power, he left the detailed practicalities of military affairs to others and stayed away from the Red Army. Lenin wore a black Browning pistol for protection. Only he never fired it. His most militaristic act was when he went hunting with his gun outside Moscow and shot ducks and foxes. That was the extent of his own direct violence.
His experience with large-scale armed conflicts between two human groups was always indirect. He had little perspective on how violent the civil wars raging throughout the former Russian Empire would become.
But in at least one sense, he was preparing for war. Although quiet and inexperienced, Lenin had no hesitation in ordering the use of military force, nor did he spend sleepless nights fretting over the resulting bloodshed.
The writer Maxim Gorky once asked him how he knew how many troops to use. In Gorky's opinion, Lenin was too hasty in mobilizing the Cheka (Emergency Committee) and the Red Army. But Lenin did not regret it.
By what metric do you measure how many blows need to be dealt in a particular battle and how many are superfluous?" For Lenin, it was important to win the battle. To meticulously measure the extent of an outburst would be nothing more than empty talkers. Lenin believed that it was better to attack too much than to risk the enemy surviving an attack.
Iwanami Shoten, Robert Servis, translated by Hidekazu Kawai, Lenin, vol. 2, p. 165-166
Some line breaks have been made.
Lenin's policy was to be willing to use violence to achieve the goal of revolution.
But I am struck by the fact that Lenin himself had almost nothing to do with violence. He rarely got his hands dirty. He never had the graphic sense of killing someone with his own hands.
He has not tasted the splattering blood, the groans of agonized desperation, the smell of blood, or the feeling that he has killed.
For him, violence and murder may be nothing more than theories in his head.
I felt the horror of a person who has no real sense of murder just giving orders to kill.
Influence of 18th century Enlightenment thinkers, Marx, Lenin
The great theorists of the 19th century-Harvard Spencer, Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and others-were mostly heirs to the 18th century Enlightenment. They were mostly heirs of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Their understanding of human culture, organization, and behavior was tied to the assumption that humans were fundamentally rational and therefore predictable. However, not everything was explained by such assumptions. Thomas Carlyle proposed that most people in most societies cannot act rationally and purposefully without being given direction by a charismatic leader.
Theologian Seren Kierkegaard and novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky noted that there are deep, dark corners in the motivation of human action. At the end of the nineteenth century, Sigmund Freud and other psychologists advocated that the psyche has an unconscious power to make people do things they are not consciously trying to do. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche rejected the idea of progress that the Enlightenment stood for.
Iwanami Shoten, Robert Servis, translated by Hidekazu Kawai, Lenin, vol. 1, p. 270
This seems to be a very important point to make here. Marx's thought is an ideology associated with the "assumption that man is fundamentally rational and therefore predictable. Moreover, Marx was strongly influenced by Hegel and other German idealists. In other words, the basis of Marx's thought is not individual human nature, but rather a series of abstract theories he constructed in his mind about humanity as a whole (this is just one way of looking at it, as there are many different interpretations).
Dostoevsky disliked this abstract, rational understanding of human beings.
This is most clearly depicted in the work "Memoirs in a Basement" mentioned above. Dostoevsky's works after "Crime and Punishment" also strongly reflect his insistence that rational understanding of human beings is basically a no-no.
This section was also very interesting to read because I was able to get a better sense of Dostoevsky's character by comparing him to the giant that is Lenin.
I got to know Lenin in this book, which is told from a slightly different perspective than Victor Seveschen's "Lenin: Power and Love," which was surprisingly interesting to read.
After all, it is very helpful to read different biographies about the same person.
As the definitive biography of Lenin, this book has been acclaimed around the world. It is a hard-hitting, biography-like biography. This biography is also highly recommended.
The above is "Robert Servis, Lenin - A Masterpiece of Lenin's Biography," which has received worldwide acclaim.
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