Re: Lenin the head-banger

[Carlos Eduardo Rebello <crebello@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This stuff is, of course, of the same quality as that in Kerensky's
memoirs - Kerensky being also a native of Samara - that said that Lenin
had, at age nine, set fire to a cat and shot a raven (I've read this
stuff in Bertran Wolfe's triple biography of Lenin/Trotsky/Stalin - and
that was sacrifice enough). After having looked my 8-year-old girl
nephew collection of stark naked and mutilated Barbies, Lenin's torn
papier maché (BTW, what a material for a small child plaything!)horse
doesn't impress me a bit. What Robert Service has failed to realize, is
that Lenin, after the his older brother's execution, seems to have
become the recipient of his mother's unconditional love, and that, said
Freud, is perhaps the greatest sole condition for a man to become a
winner by becoming able to stand adversity, a capacity for which Lenin
was deservedly noted in his day.

Carlos Rebello


> The Sunday Times (UK)12 March 2000[for personal use only]
> Kremlin papers reveal Lenin the head banger Tom Robbins

> Lenin's parents were deeply concerned that he would end up mentally
> retarded. As well as his headbanging habit, Lenin had boisterous and
> destructive tendencies which upset his cultured family. "It was such
> obsessive behaviour that the family were very worried," said Robert
> Service, author of the biography which will be published later this month.
>
> "He was very noisy and extremely disruptive as a child."
> At three, he stamped all over his brother's collection of theatre posters.
> His parents gave him a papier-mâché horse for his birthday but he twisted
> its legs off one by one. After Lenin's death in 1924, anything that might
> have been perceived as even mildly critical was censored. As the Communist
> party developed the cult of Lenin, personal details vanished.  His sister
> abandoned the drafts of her memoirs, which contained frank details of his
> personal life that she knew would not pass the censor. They remained locked
> in the Kremlin until discovered by Service after the fall of the communist
> state in 1991.
>
> "What has been brought out is how spoilt the little brat was by all the
> women around him," said Dominic Lieven, professor of Russian history at the
> London School of Economics. "This family correspondence gives you an awful
> lot of little insights into the hatreds which boiled up inside him, as well
> as the strength of his personality."
>
> Service has played an important role in uncovering the Kremlin's secrets
> since he was granted access to its archives. Three years ago he revealed
> that Lenin kept his mistress in the Kremlin alongside his rejected wife.
>
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