This is CBS, I on the World.

I'm John Batchel, visiting with Professor Sean McMeekin.

The new book is to overthrow the world,

The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism.

We spent our time in the 19th century with Karl Marx and his antecedents.

Now the man himself,

Vladimir Iliich Ulyanov, the son of school teachers, principals, a man who has a very

colorful 54 years, I believe. Born in 1870, died in 1924 after a series of strokes. How did he come to be a Marxist? What is it that compelled

him? Probably the family story, but also a communist manifesto and Dust Capital were published

in Russian and were very large successes, especially Dust Capital. The manifesto I have, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin,

he calls himself Lenin. His name is Uyanov, but he takes up the Norm de Guerr during his publishing

of something called the Iskra, the Spark. He reads it for the first time and adopts it in 89.

What about the manifesto that appealed to him? Was it the leveling? Was it the

transformation of all that is into something new? Did he have some magical connection to it,

Professor? Well, I think Lenin was certainly inspired by the overall vision, the radicalism of it,

but particularly, I think the aspect of it, but particularly, I think, the aspect of it,

which did require political violence, something that Lenin was always quite adamant about advocating

himself. To the extent Lenin updated Marx's ideas, and one can see that as early as Shodielit

or what is to be done, published in 1902, which was really a manual of revolutionary tactics, sometimes

called vanguardism, Lenin's idea that you had this top-down party that, because the workers

weren't really doing it themselves or figuring out the doctrine, you had to have these professional

revolutionaries, these intellectuals, these cadres who do it for them. Lenin's other, I think,

...