Lenin

In Our Time

BBC

History

4.6 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 16 March 2000

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For some time, in some intellectual quarters in the West, Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov - also known as Lenin - was regarded as an understandable revolutionary, perhaps a necessary revolutionary given the actions of the Tsars, certainly a sympathetic revolutionary compared with his successor - Stalin. He became an icon in Russia - his body unburied, lying in Red Square in a state of permanent, imminent resurrection. The Russian Presidential Elections take place at the end of the month, and the Acting President, Vladimir Putin, promised that if he won he would finally take the body of Lenin from Red Square and bury him. But whether the country will be able to escape the extraordinary influence of the man, his ideas and his machinery of oppression is another matter. In his short period in power between 1917 and 1924 Vladimir Illyich Lenin invented the one party state, developed a model to export communism around the world and built a completely original political system that remained intact for over seventy years. What drove him and enabled him to achieve success?Robert Service, lecturer in Russian History and Fellow of St Anthony’s College, Oxford and biographer of Lenin; Vitali Vitaliev, author, columnist, broadcaster former Soviet Journalist of the Year.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for downloading the Inartime podcast. For more details about Inartime and for our terms of use
0:05.4	Please go to bbc.co.uk forward slash radio for I hope you enjoy the program
0:12.2	Hello the Russian presidential election stake place at the end of the month and the acting president Vladimir Putin has promised that if he wins
0:19.6	He'll finally take the body of Lenin from Red Square and bury him
0:23.7	But whether the country will be able to escape the extraordinary influence of Lenin his ideas and his machine of oppression
0:29.5	Is another matter
0:31.0	Robert service is the first biographer to have had access to the Lenin archives in Russia and his book a Lenin a biography
0:37.1	Contains a lot of new and illuminating information. I'm also joined by Vitaly Vitaliev former Soviet journalist of the year who was brought up in Russia
0:44.8	Well, Lenin was the father of the nation Robert service
0:48.7	There's a great deal in your book that's new what most
0:52.6	strikingly is
0:55.2	New to people who think they know a bit about Lenin. Well, I think that in years gone by it was possible to write
1:02.8	political studies of the man
1:04.8	In terms of what he was like as a party boss or as a world statesman or as a Russian revolutionary
1:11.4	What he's now possible is to see where the man came from
1:15.4	What his family was like what his cultural background was what his
1:20.7	Philosophical assumptions were as they were laid down in his early manhood
1:26.2	How he related to people as human beings what sort of family he had what sort of associates
1:32.5	He hadn't and what they did in order to enable him to become the
1:37.1	Great revolutionary that he was in 1917
1:40.0	Why was it so important to keep so much of this information under wraps?
1:43.9	Well, what sort of thing was kept under wraps? Oh well practically everything about the personal life that was thought to be
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