Louis Fischer "The Life of Lenin" Limited Edition, 2-Vol. Leather Bound Collector's Set [Very Fine]

"Lenin was a revolution. He lived and breathed and died for it."

Easton Press, Norwalk, CT. 1992. Louis Fischer "The Life of Lenin". Limited edition. Matching two volume collector's set with notes from The Library of Great Lives. Luxuriously bound with full genuine leather with 22kt gold accents. Collector's Edition. Very Fine without any flaws.

• Introduction: Norman Saul
• The Library of Great Lives
• Collector's Notes

Lenin was a revolution. He lived and breathed and died for it. Born in 1870, in the sleepy Volga town of Simbirsk, he died in 1924 at the age of 53 having changed the course of history throughout the world. What was the genius that enabled Lenin to create and sustain a revolution that constantly hovered on the brink of utter chaos? It was his incredible strength of will and personality, his fantastic organisational ability and complete dedication to the goal of revolution, which enabled him to surmount domestic dissension and disorder, political rivalries, and economic ruin. It was his supreme ability to adapt, to change, to pursue any means to achieve his ends that enabled the revolution to survive. Louis Fischer's book is based on meticulous sifting of the Soviet sources. The author first met Lenin in 1922, when the country was in the throes of revolution and remained a devoted scholar of Soviet affairs throughout the rest of his life.

Features

Includes the classic Easton Press qualities:

 * Premium Leather
 * Silk Moire Endleaves
 * Distinctive Cover Design
 * Hubbed Spine, Accented in Real 22KT Gold
 * Satin Ribbon Page Marker
 * Gilded Page Edges
 * Long-lasting, High Quality Acid-neutral Paper
 * Smyth-sewn Pages for Strength and Durability
 * Beautiful Illustrations

About the author

Louis Fischer (29 February 1896 – 15 January 1970) was an American journalist. Among his works were a contribution to the ex-communist treatise The God that Failed (1949), The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (1950), basis for the Academy Award-winning film Gandhi (1982), as well as a Life of Lenin, which won the 1965 National Book Award in History and Biography.

Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (22 April [O.S. 10 April] 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia, and later the Soviet Union, became a one-party socialist state governed by the Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, his developments to the ideology are called Leninism.

Born to an upper-middle-class family in Simbirsk, Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics following his brother's 1887 execution. Expelled from Kazan Imperial University for participating in protests against the Russian Empire's Tsarist government, he devoted the following years to a law degree. He moved to Saint Petersburg in 1893 and became a senior Marxist activist. In 1897, he was arrested for sedition and exiled to Shushenskoye in Siberia for three years, where he married Nadezhda Krupskaya. After his exile, he moved to Western Europe, where he became a prominent theorist in the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). In 1903, he took a key role in the RSDLP ideological split, leading the Bolshevik faction against Julius Martov's Mensheviks. Following Russia's failed Revolution of 1905, he campaigned for the First World War to be transformed into a Europe-wide proletarian revolution, which, as a Marxist, he believed would cause the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement with socialism. After the 1917 February Revolution ousted the Tsar and established a Provisional Government, he returned to Russia to play a leading role in the October Revolution in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the new regime.

Lenin's Bolshevik government initially shared power with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, elected soviets, and a multi-party Constituent Assembly, although by 1918 it had centralised power in the new Communist Party. Lenin's administration redistributed land among the peasantry and nationalised banks and large-scale industry. It withdrew from the First World War by signing a treaty conceding territory to the Central Powers, and promoted world revolution through the Communist International. Opponents were suppressed in the Red Terror, a violent campaign administered by the state security services; tens of thousands were killed or interned in concentration camps. His administration defeated right and left-wing anti-Bolshevik armies in the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1922 and oversaw the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–1921. Responding to wartime devastation, famine, and popular uprisings, in 1921 Lenin encouraged economic growth through the New Economic Policy. Several non-Russian nations had secured independence from the Russian Empire after 1917, but three were re-united into the new Soviet Union in 1922. His health failing, Lenin died in Gorki, with Joseph Stalin succeeding him as the pre-eminent figure in the Soviet government.

Widely considered one of the most significant and influential figures of the 20th century, Lenin was the posthumous subject of a pervasive personality cult within the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991. He became an ideological figurehead behind Marxism–Leninism and a prominent influence over the international communist movement. A controversial and highly divisive historical figure, Lenin is viewed by his supporters as a champion of socialism and the working class. Meanwhile, Lenin's critics accuse him of establishing a totalitarian dictatorship which oversaw mass killings and political repression.