As the work of a scholar who yearns for global political change, this slim volume is both compelling and unusual. Christopher Read, who has published multiple works on the 1917–22 era, including a biography of Vladimir Lenin, is dismayed by our “dystopian” (151) present. In his opinion, rapacious global capitalism has brought about “obscene” inequalities, a real nuclear threat, and an environmental deterioration so deadly that that it represents an “existential threat to modern human life” (8). Read attempts to show that—despite the near silence about the author of Bolshevism a century after his death—Lenin can yet serve to inspire steps towards necessary global governance and socialist strategies.

“Lenin—lived. Lenin—lives. Lenin—will live.” Vladimir Maiakovskii’s 1924 paean to the dead leader has inspired more than one book title. In Read’s book, little attention is paid to the widespread Lenin cult of the Soviet period. The focus is rather on Lenin as a heroic model for international communism. The argument is complex, because socialist countries, and China in particular, hailed Leninism-Stalinism, with direct references to Lenin alone not easy to tease out. Read’s earnest attempt to squeeze every possible drop of impact, guidance, or influence out of the ossified Lenin, who, ever since the end of the Soviet Union, has faded out of view in Russia and elsewhere, is perhaps not quite successful. At the 2017 centennial of the revolution, its mastermind was all but ignored. His 150th birthday in 2020 and the centennial of his death in 2024 too passed almost without notice. The book does include Vladimir Putin’s oft-repeated condemnations of Lenin. In order to show evidence of continued interest in Lenin, Read lights on recent (decidedly thin, but engaged) scholarship about him. He chooses to largely ignore Lenin’s occasional presence in Russia as an object of ridicule, particularly in memes and funky works of art. And likely his book went to press too late to discuss the significance of Russia’s practice of reinstalling Lenin monuments in occupied Ukraine.

The most engaging—and colorful—part of Lenin Lives? is a short, vivid portrayal of Lenin’s character. A workaholic prone to extreme anxiety, he was also prone to illnesses brought on by stress, for which his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia, prescribed vigorous exercise. He also describes Lenin as a revolutionary ascetic, a Rakhmetov, who lived for nothing but revolution, with “no thought to his personal interests” (28). Indeed, Lenin appears as Captain Ahab, furiously chasing down the hated whale of capitalism and the old order, or as Ferdinand Magellan, forcing his dangerous way to “set sail on the great ocean of socialist transition” (43). Read’s Lenin is unbalanced and prone to hysteria, but also a brilliant tactician, as is evident in the genius of the 1917 April Theses, which Read lauds as the revolutionary leader’s most dazzling stroke, with its visionary denunciation of the Provisional Government, a move that would help catapult the Bolsheviks into power only six months later. Read admires Lenin, but criticizes his “Confucian approach to revolution,” in which the master teaches his pupils, the masses, whom he would win over only “after the seizure of power” (4). Read also finds fault with Lenin’s fanatical opposition to religion, which exceeded that of Karl Marx, and squandered a potent source of support.

Lenin Lives? opens with the startling assertion that, although he believed that a revolution to bring about true social justice would of necessity require the use of force, “Lenin detested violence” (1). Anyone who has read Lenin’s notorious “hanging order” of August 11, 1918, commanding Penza commissars to crush an insurrection of local kulaks, would dispute Read’s claim. They were to hang “without fail” at least 100 kulaks and “bloodsuckers.” Two days earlier, Lenin had charged a comrade in Nizhni Novgorod to shoot and deport hundreds of prostitutes, who, he claimed were driving soldiers and officers to drink.

For Read, Lenin does—or at least, might—live as a model and inspiration in a world controlled by reactionary forces, as a man whose bold and brilliant tactics enabled him to achieve transformative goals, giving global capitalism “the worst fright it ever had” (163). It is always fascinating to speculate on why historians choose to write the books that they do. I suspect that Christopher Read’s fundamental purpose was dual: to promote the living Lenin as a possible spur to bold political action in a time of global crisis and to rescue the author of Bolshevism from the “dustbin of history.”