Modern biographies of Lenin

But in any case, Lenin’s activity is not exhausted by the question whether he took money from the Germans or not.

BBC: Before the revolution, Lenin lived in several European countries, including Britain. How did life in this country affect him? Lev Trotsky said that at some point, columns with Marx and Lenin would be erected on Trafalgar Square in London. Before the revolution, everything went to the fact that communism was supposed to defeat England, since a conscious proletariat was formed there, which was supposed to become a burial to the bourgeoisie, but something went wrong.

In England, there was no intelligible socialist party, and as a result, it developed a certain immunity from communism. The city has a small patch - square meters - where Marx, Engels and Lenin lived at different times. By the way, Lenin spoke English well and even translated two books from English into Russian. With Inessa Armand, he quite often corresponded and talked in English.

BBC: That is, it can be called to some extent Angloman? For example, he knew where in London you can buy a good hat, he generally knew London and his environs well. Unlike his socialist friends, Lenin was obsessed with tourism, especially on foot tourism, which is so popular in England. Apparently, it was the country where it was most convenient for him to work. He really liked that in the library of the British Museum, each reader had a separate table, unlike the Swiss libraries, where everyone was sitting at the same table and pushing each other's elbows.

He was comfortable there, but for various reasons, some collective affairs constantly lured him out of there. Maybe if the revolution did not happen, then he would have lived his century precisely in England, like Marx and Engels. There are many places in London, one way or another associated with Lenin. This is the Lenin city. BBC: What were Lenin’s relationship with his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya?

Was it true love or rather business cooperation? What was his connection with Inessa Armand? Perhaps, from Lenin’s closest encirclement, this was the most interesting person. In fact, all biographies in which we are talking about Lenin as a person, in one way or another are based on Krupskaya memoirs. In her memoirs, Lenin does not appear in the usual image of a revolutionary, but as a funny and funny person who could suddenly start a fight or commit some other extravagant act.

The degree of this co -authorship is quite difficult to establish, since it was his secretary for a long time. Perhaps some classic texts that we know as Leninsky actually belong to her pen. Krupskaya was not some kind of shadow of Lenin or Duenya, who guarded him, this is an absolutely independent figure. As for Armand, they had some kind of relationship, but they were rather strange and, rather, friendly.

We know about them exclusively by his letters that she kept, and by her drafts. There are references to some romantic relationships, but, in fact, they very rarely turned out to be together. BBC: Lenin died early from a serious illness. Many associate this with the fact that he was an incredibly working person, a workaholic, and this passion for work adversely influenced his health.

How true are these theories? Although Lenin is perceived as a person constantly sitting at work, not crawling out of libraries or from an armored car, he actually spent weeks and months in the country, in hikes in the mountains. Tourism occupied an important part in his life. As for his early death, he died exactly at the same age as his father and approximately from the same illness.

Apparently, it was hereditary atherosclerosis. But before the illness, his body was very strong. At the summer, he could not sleep for several nights in a row, he withstood the colossal race of G. But by the year many Bolsheviks broke and went to the sanatorium, including Lenin. Few people know that he was resting not only in the hills, but also in the village of Kostino near Moscow.

In exile, Lenin loved to walk along the mountains of Switzerland, where he and Krupskaya once passed kilometers. He was among the first people who mastered this type of transport, and for 20 years almost did not get off the bicycle. Sometimes it could be seen at a party congress with bruises obtained as a result of accidents or falling from a bicycle. There are stories that once he drove kilometers from Poland to Hungary for a bottle of wine.

Today, Lenin is easy to imagine lying in a mausoleum or in the form of a monument, but few represent him sitting on a bicycle. BBC: What were Lenin’s relationship with Stalin? Many historians write that at the end of his life Lenin regretted that Stalin made to the top of power. Much can be gleaned from the memoirs of Trotsky, but this is a notorious witness, cut down by order of Stalin.

Most of the preserved documents, in fact, do not register a long conflict of Lenin and Stalin.Joseph Stalin: The path to the communist throne knows the episode when Stalin shouted to Krupskaya, after which his relations with Lenin allegedly completely deteriorated, but the reliability of this episode remains in question. The concept of the 10th - 10ths about the bad Stalin and the good Lenin, which has excited him in recent years, is not indisputable.

And Lenin’s famous letter to the congress the so -called “Testament of Lenin” from the year that Criticism of Stalin was found - approx. The BBC was already written at the moment when Lenin was seriously ill and did not control the situation. Many letters were then written on his behalf, and there are different theories regarding the authorship of this letter. BBC: Lenin, unlike Stalin, did not seek to create a personality cult?

He himself never initiated such renaming. At the same time, he knew very well the price of monumental propaganda and understood that new monuments and symbols would make people understand that the country had changed. BBC: How would you describe the image of Lenin in modern mass culture? In contemporary art? For example, in Poland they tried to make an advertisement with the image of Lenin, but this was unsuccessful.

At the same time, in the same Poland there are hostels named after Lenin. Probably, Lenin could become a kind of grotesque modern pop symbol in the style of Andy Warhol, but in fact this never happened. Read also.