Since there's never been a really good English biography of Lenin, the idea of doing something about it came more or less simultaneously to three authors. As soon as each heard the others were at work, the race to get published was on. Stefan Possony won it, but Authors Payne & Fischer were close behind. Each biography seems tailored to a specific audience. Robert Payne, a prolific & catholic writer, has produced a Book-of-the-Month selection aimed at romantics. Stefan Possony, political studies director at Stanford's Hoover Institution, will appeal most obviously to believers in conspiratorial views of history, since his research comes from police & foreign office files, ranging from Japan to France, covering mostly Lenin's life as a fugitive conspirator. On balance, Louis Fischer's is the best of the three. Fischer has devoted much of his long lifetime to the study of Russia (The Soviets in World Affairs; Russia, America & the World). He soberly weighs those episodes the other two biographers sometimes accept as fact, offering the pros & cons of each argument. For example, there's a genuine riddle about Lenin's racial background. Payne insists "there was not a drop of Russian blood" in Lenin, claiming his ancestry was German, Swedish & Chuvash, & that it shaped his personality. Without citing any evidence, Possony argues that the "evidence indicates" Lenin's grandfather "was born a Jew." Fischer places the responsibility where it belongs, on the Soviet government. "The records were undoubtedly available in Russia's bulging archives, but the Bolsheviks saw fit to suppress them. This feeds the suspicion that there is something to conceal." What emerges most strikingly from all three biographies is the awesome power of a singleminded man to change the course of history. If the Kaiser had refused to let Lenin cross wartime Germany & enter Russia, if Kerensky's government had succeeded in arresting & executing Lenin, would the Bolsheviks be merely a footnote to history? Not the least of the paradoxes is the fact that Communism, which teaches the inevitability of historical forces & the impotence individuals in swaying them, owes its conquest of Russia to the energy & confident thrust of Lenin alone.

Since there's never been