Book Review: U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe: The Life of Lenin, Lenin: The Compulsive Revolutionary
| Author | Robert H. McNeal |
| Published date | 01 December 1964 |
| Date | 01 December 1964 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/002070206401900429 |
| Subject Matter | Book Review |
BOOK REVIEWS
581
Russian
leader
between
Peter
the
Great and
Stalin, but,
until
Von
Laue's
work,
his
contribution has never
been
submitted
to
a
thorough
study
and
critique.
As
student
Von
Laue
is
outstanding
for
his
thoroughness
in
detail
and
his
range
of
knowledge;
as
critic
he
is
eminently
fair
to
a
man who
was,
sooner
or
later,
almost
equally
disliked
by
Russian
monarchists,
liberals
and
socialists.
His
fairness
consists
not
only
in
appreciating
the
exasperating
milieu of
bureaucracy,
court and
critical
public
opinion
in
which
the minister
tried
to
get
things
done,
but
also
in
consistently
relating
Witte's
programme
to
the
long-term problems
of
liquidating
underdevelopment.
From
his
thoughtful analysis
a
central
paradox emerges;
there
was
dramatic
industrial
growth,
especially
in
rails
(Witte's
specialty)
and
metallurgy,
representing
about
as rapid
an
advance
as
one
could
ask
for;
but
at
the
end
of his
ministry,
"Russia
had
not
escaped
from
the
old
impasse"-that
is,
the
country still
seemed
impoverished in
view
of
the protracted
exactions
from the
peasant
masses
required
by
new
investment
and
the
servicing
of
debts. The
persistence
of
underdevelop-
ment
after
ten
years
of
Witte's
"system"
would seem
in
Von
Laue's
presentation
to
be
a
grim
lesson
for
countries,
mostly
less
favourably
endowed
with
resources
than
Russia, which
today
seek
to
industrialize.
And
yet Imperial
Russia, despite
a
widespread
revolution
in
1905
and
despite
the
crashing ineptitude
of
most
of
its
executives,
seemed
to
be
reaping
increasing
rewards
of
modernization,
rather
broadly
distributed
among the
populace,
only
five
years
or
so
after
Witte's
removal
as
minister
of finance.
While
Von
Laue
does
point
to
some indices
of
increasing
consumer
welfare
by
about
1900,
he
does
not
really
do
justice to
the
economic
successes
of
the
last
years
of
the
empire,
growth
partly
vindicating
Witte's
programme
and
partly
its
contemporary
critics,
who
considered
that
more balance between
industrial growth and
other interests,
especially
peasant
welfare,
would
be
healthier.
At
the
end
of
his
appraisal
of
Witte's
work
Von
Laue
intimates
that
the
Russian
drive
for
economic
modernization
was
doomed
to
recreate
suffering
and weak-
ness
as
it
attempted
to
advance.
But
the
removal
of
Witte
in
1903,
while
it
provides
a
logical
concluding
point
for
this
volume,
may
create
an
excessively gloomy
impression
of
the
course of
modernization
in
Tsarist
Russia.
University
of Toronto
ROBERT
H.
McNEAAL
THE
LIFE
OF
LENiN.
By
Louis
Fischer.
1964.
(New York:
Harper
&
Row.
Toronto:
Longmans.
viii,
703pp.
$12.50)
LENIN:
THE
COMPUsIVE
REVOLUONARY.
By
Stefan
T.
Possony.
(Chi-
cago:
Henry Regnery.
Toronto.
S.
J.
Reginald
Saunders.
xvi,
418pp.
$9.75)
These
two
approaches
to
the
biography
of
Lenin
are
so
different
in
their
emphases-and
in
their
shortcomings-that
there
seems
to
be
little
to
be
learned
from
a
comparative
discussion
of
them.
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