Finished reading Dmitri Volkogonov's Lenin. I give it four out of five stars. It's the second biography I've read by him. With Lenin, Volkogonov does a good job of chipping away at communism, much better than The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 by Martin Malia, whose subtext oozed with the anti-Slavic condescension of an American imperialist.
Here are passages that caught my eye:
Lenin was the inspirer, Trotsky the agitator, and Stalin the executor.
p. 261
bureaucratic totalitarianism
p. 312
the path of dogmatism is the shortest way to dictatorship
p. 317
Everything connected with Lenin was anti-capitalist, anti-democratic, anti-liberal, anti-reformist, anti-human and anti-Christian. There can scarcely have been another man in history who managed so profoundly to change so large a society on such a scale.
p.326
[[Next to last chapter, starting with "The demise of the Union", and the last chapter]]
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