Stuart Andrews, Lenin's Revolution

An exciting acount and analysis of Lenin's role in the Russian Revolution and the creation of the Soviet system

How did a revolutionary leader who was frequently surprised by events— and was often compelled to observe them from abroad—finally seize power in a bloodless coup?

This study, besides charting his rise to power, examines Lenin’s propagandist skill in crafting resonant slogans to fit every changing situation. He made failure look like success, and won the debate while seeming to lose it.

Lenin’s legacy of government by propaganda still survives in Putin’s ‘sovereign democracy’—itself a propaganda triumph.

This is the Bolshevik Revolution seen from the 21st century, when President Putin attends Christmas eucharist in Moscow Cathedral and commends religion for promoting traditional Russian values. If historians of the Kruschev era did not foresee so improbable a transformation of Lenin’s Russia, Lenin himself was also ‘unexpected’.

Stuart Andrews

Stuart Andrews is now Librarian of Wells & Mendip Museum, UK, after more than 30 years of teaching. His special interest is the way in which slogans, ‘spin’ and full-blooded propaganda—rather than historical reality—shape public perceptions of events. Among his recent publications on this theme are The British Periodical Press and the French Revolution, 1789–99 (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2000) and Irish Rebellion: Protestant polemic 1798–1900 (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2006). He now focuses on the role of slogan-making in the Bolshevik Revolution. Political theorists (he concedes) may not themselves orchestrate revolution, but they can provide a ready-made vocabulary with which to justify it.

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