Best Lenin biography?

[Questionable]

What is the best biography on Lenin available to purchase?

I'd like something that portrays him in the most neutral light possible. Obviously I don't want to read an anti-communist ranting about how many millions he killed, nor do I want to read an old Soviet biography about how he was the most brilliant Marxist to ever live. I just want the facts.

[Brutus]

Try these. (http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/02/helen-rappaport-top-10-books-lenin) It seems to have a overall neutral tone.

[Flying Purple People Eater]

How can a biography be about how he killed millions? Lenin never killed anyone as far as I'm aware. That'd be a factually incorrect and heavily criticised biography, methinks.

[Akshay!]

Try these. (http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/02/helen-rappaport-top-10-books-lenin) It seems to have a overall neutral tone.

At least 3 of these authors are known anti-communists. And Robert Service? Really?? He's not even a liberal! He worked in the right wing Hoover institution. :thumbdown:

[Brutus]

It has some pro-Lenin biographies, and anti-Lenin biographies, plus some neutral ones.
It is neutral overall.

Now shoo! Go and contribute more useless posts to other threads! Apologies for the paradox.

[bad ideas actualised by alcohol]

I found Lars T. Lih's Lenin in the critical lives series a very interesting biography. He tries to combat a lot of assumptions about Lenin appearing in the historiography. It is from a fairly sympathetic point of view though. He has a lot of articles and lectures about Lenin that can be found online or at the video section of the CPGB website.

I found Chris Read's Lenin also a interesting biography.

Along with the things in the list Brutus posted you can get a fairly neutral point of view.

[Lenin1986]

Did Isaac Deutscher write a biography of Lenin?

[CatsAttack]

There is no such thing as a neutral biography of a major political figure.

[Kalinin's Facial Hair]

Did Isaac Deutscher write a biography of Lenin?

I thought so, but it seems he wrote about Lenin's childhood only.

[Lenin1986]

I thought so, but it seems he wrote about Lenin's childhood only.

I wasn't sure if he done one of Lenin. Iv read his other ones on Trotsky and Stalin which I thought were very good. Its a pity he didn't do a biography on Lenin's whole life.

[Astarte]

I know you didn't want anything written by Soviets, but Lenin's contemporaries did write a good deal about him, and the volumes are full of biographical events which display his character well. The best one of these which depicts him "warts and all" I consider to be Gorky's "Days With Lenin" which is very balanced and even goes into how Lenin could be overly harsh in brow-beating or verbally berating comrades during polemics, or even Lenin's "childish", as Gorky recall's, reaction to losing a chess match to Bogdanov. There also exists in English Krupskaya's "Memories of Lenin" and an essay by Lunacharsky on Lenin in his "Revolutionary Silhouettes".

[goalkeeper]

There is no such thing as a neutral biography of a major political figure.

No, but there is still a difference between a hagiography and an honest piece of scholarship.

[Teacher]

I've heard very good things about the Lars Lih biography.

[ElleR]

I appreciate what Lars Lih was trying to do in the book recommended above, but just as far as a straightforward biography goes it either assumes a fair amount of prior familiarity with the period from about 1915 onward, or it just plain suffers from space limitations. Either way it could stand some supplementation.

[CyM]

The best one remains Trotsky's "Lenin". There is no such thing as neutral. Whatever else you read, be sure to read this one.

Lenin (http://marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1925/lenin/index.htm)

[connoros]

This is a little off-topic, but there are a couple of good biographies by Lenin, like his Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.