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pp. xxxix, (2), 529, b/w photographs, “Director of the Institute of Military History until the 1988 publication of his critical Stalin (LJ 9/15/91) forced his resignation, Volkogonov is now chair of the presidential committee examining formerly classified State and Party archives. As such, he is in an excellent position to provide a revisionist view of Lenin from the inside, and he delivers. From the beginning, Volkogonov challenges the assumption that Lenin’s legacy was perverted by Stalin, documenting in detail how “on every point-peace, land, liberty, Constituent Assembly, freedom of the press and all the rest-[the Bolsheviks’] promises rapidly changed into cruelty, limitation, alteration, a different ‘reading’ or outright denial.” Accounts of Lenin’s cooperation with Germany during World War I and of the new government’s using funds to further revolution abroad even as millions of citizens starved are among the book’s most chilling passages”