Nuanced picture of Lenin: Dilemmas of Lenin, by Tariq Ali

Verson, £16.99

Review by Sean Bell

TARIQ ALI, concluding his ambitious introduction to an equally ambitious book, reproduces Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem Conversation with Comrade Lenin, one of the last completed before the poet’s suicide. Mayakovsky pours out all the passion, bitterness, regret, hope, anger and exhaustion within him, and in response, Lenin remains inscrutable and silent, absent yet present, a ghost trapped within the frame of a photograph, hanging on a white wall. “Without you, there’s many have got out of hand”, Mayakovsky laments. “All the sparring and the squabbling does one in.”

In this, the centenary year of the Russian Revolution, commemorations of what was arguably the single most significant popular revolt in history – yes, the French can disagree – have been muted. Putin’s government wheels out the Soviet nostalgia only when it’s useful, and so long as the Russian Communist Party remains a force of significant opposition, there will be no official memorials of Bolshevism in the nation it transformed. Meanwhile, as the United States endures its own bizarre upheaval, Lenin is so poorly understood and lazily interpreted that Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s white nationalist Falstaff, can call himself some species of Leninist, and few but pedants challenge it. The 1917 revolution, along with its architect, for now exist most vividly in print.

The Dilemmas of Lenin is itself a dilemma: is the book a biography of the man, or a polemical study of his thought? It is both and neither. This is no criticism; the most insightful examinations of Lenin have often been chimerical, as such a fearsome subject makes multidisciplinary demands. To place Lenin “in the proper historical context”, Ali’s study encompasses a concise account of Lenin’s life, brief yet dense studies of Populism, Anarchism and 19th century revolutionary terrorism, a coherent if selective history of currents in European and American socialism, an explication of empire and internationalism during the First World War, and of course, a reckoning with the nigh-incomprehensible vastness of Russian revolutionary history.

As a scholar and a polemicist, Ali has been putting Marxism’s many facets in simple terms for decades (a battered copy of his Trotsky for Beginners, complete with its delightful cartoons, has sat on my bookcase since childhood), and while there are more comprehensive histories out there, Ali brings his subject-matter together with sufficient detail to provide context for both Lenin and the arguments about Lenin Ali wishes to make.

Appraisals of Lenin often reveal much about the writers who perform them. To Trotsky, he was the laudable but nonetheless human victim of revisionism, which Trotsky fought with further revisionism. To Edmund Wilson, he was a heroic intellectual, the “headmaster” of the revolution. To Slajov Zizek, he’s yet another excuse for Zizek to talk a lot.

Ali, too often cast by detractors as a zealot, instead approaches Lenin with a necessary sense of nuance. The Dilemmas of Lenin is undoubtedly a defence of the man, and a limited analysis of the enormous, bloody and complicated legacy he left behind. Ali has no time for the “cult” surrounding the revolutionary; in describing how Lenin’s body was “mummified”, Ali’s disgust is palpable. Similarly, he has contempt for those who would embalm Lenin as a theoretician, without understanding that his theory was never intended to be anything but a working model, flawed and ramshackle, applicable only to the times he lived in. As he wrote near the end of his life, “We didn’t know everything.”

The explicitly biographical sections are the most fascinating, and the chapter devoted to Lenin’s older brother Sasha, hanged at 21 for his involvement in revolutionary activity, provides Ali’s greatest challenge. Historians, hagiographers and armchair psychoanalysts have for decades sought to understand the impact Sasha’s death had upon Lenin, who never once mentions his brother in any of his books, correspondence or speeches. Ali’s conclusions in this regard are conventional, but avoid the lurid speculations that so many indulge in. The death of a loved one at the hands of a regime, and the reactions it may inspire, are not easy feelings to imagine, nor should they be.

Ali is no prose stylist, but then neither was Lenin. He is punchy and direct, workmanlike yet clear, though unfortunately purple when he means to be lyrical (the metaphor of the book’s afterword, concerning one man’s ascent up a mountain, being the case in point. Ali is no Mayakovsky). Many of his conclusions are debatable – debate is perhaps the point – but in achieving the historical context he sought, Ali illustrates not only Lenin, but what Lenin saw.

He saw empires warring and self-sabotaging, caught within inexorable decline or seized with delusions of resurgence. He saw ancient systems as unjust as they were unworkable, their broken gears oiled with blood. He saw the unprecedented and unimaginable begin to happen as a matter of course, as the world veered into the unknown. He saw, in many ways, what we see.