Vladimir Lenin’s Time in England Would Shape Him Forever
After he left Siberia in 1900, Lenin would spend much of the next decade in London. He didn’t much like the food — but his time in the émigré milieu would help make him the revolutionary he was.
Vladimir Lenin and the other delegates to the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party’s Third Congress held in London, 1905.
One hundred fifty years after his birth, it seems biographers are paying ever more attention to Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. While the revolutionary and statesman known as Lenin is the object of an immense literature, for the last couple of decades, it seems rather more attention has turned to the man himself — from his pre-revolutionary biography to his personal life.
In part, this is driven by the 1990s opening of Soviet archives, which had once forbidden researchers from delving too deeply into a state icon’s more human dimension. We could also cite a certain “defanging” of the Bolshevik leader, combined with an academic turn to questions once considered trivial: perhaps most emblematic is Carter Elwood’s amusing essay on “What Lenin Ate.”
Yet such a turn to what Elwood (citing Nikolai Valentinov) calls the “non-geometric Lenin” does not just mean downgrading his historical stature. Rather, disembalming him and looking closer at his personal existence can shed light on the world he revolted against — and how his particular notions of political action and organization took form.
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