The New Dark Age

Excavating Lenin from His Detractors

There is something poetic about the fact that one of the earliest full-length biographies of Lenin in English was written not by a loyal communist, but by a defector who had once shared rooms with revolutionaries and later found refuge in the empire Lenin swore to destroy. David Shub’s Lenin: A Biography (1948) is a strange, contradictory creature—half witness, half prosecution, born in the shadow of the Cold War yet still carrying the scent of the barricades. Shub knew Lenin. He studied him. He even admired him—until history demanded that admiration be recast as testimony for the prosecution. The result is a document that cannot help but betray itself. For buried beneath the liberal moralizing and the psychoanalytic chatter is something Shub never quite manages to extinguish: a grudging awe for the mind that restructured the world.

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