This book was written to put Lenin in proper historical context. It has been immensely pleasurable to reread his key texts and related material. One reads them differently now than in the last century, but they retain their power. Usually I write a book after a great deal of discussion with audiences at public lectures and meetings. This time, my only companions were books. Of these (listed in the Further Reading section), I must single out the remarkable work of the late John Erickson, a military historian par excellence, whose studies of the Red Army and its command structures from 1917 to 1991 have no peer in any language.
For brief discussions on particular subjects I must thank Perry Anderson; Robin Blackburn and Susan Watkins, my colleagues at the New Left Review; and Sebastien Budgen, editor at Verso, Paris, who, as usual, sent me extremely useful texts to digest. For reading the manuscript and suggesting useful alterations and elucidations I am grateful to David Fernbach, a comrade of almost fifty years, and Leo Hollis, my editor at Verso, London – whose grandfather, Christopher Hollis, was an early biographer of Lenin who certainly would not have agreed with most of my assessments. Mark Martin at Verso, Brooklyn, and Rowan Wilson and Bob Bhamra at Verso, London, ensured a smooth transition on the production front. Many thanks as well to Ben Mabie at Verso, Brooklyn, for preparing a first draft of the Glossary of Personal Names.