But reputations are cyclical, and it may be Lenin’s turn again, or so some unreconstructed socialists hope. Lenin Reloaded was the title of a 2007 collection edited by the irrepressible intellectual provocateur, Slovenian Marxist Slavoj Žižek, who a few years earlier had argued that Lenin was still an exemplar, notably for his impatience with the idea that Marxists have to wait until ‘objective conditions’ are right before launching a revolution. Tamás Krausz’s Reconstructing Lenin is a sober scholarly analysis, not a call for revolution, but his sympathy with Žižek and the Lenin-reloaders is evident. Lenin hasn’t become irrelevant, Krausz argues, as long as socialism matters; and socialism is still the only viable alternative to capitalism.

Krausz comes out of the old socialist world; a Hungarian Marxist, professor at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, an anti-Stalinist who grew up in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe. A Russian/Soviet historian by trade – always a dodgy position in Soviet-bloc universities because of suspicions of kowtowing to the Russians – he spent time in Moscow as a graduate student in the 1970s (getting into minor trouble for possessing a book by Trotsky) and in the 1980s was sufficiently trusted to be allowed a research trip to the United States. The Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács is an authority for him, along with Gramsci, Žižek, and the Hungarian István Mészáros, but he has read the Western scholarship and knows what he is doing when he argues with it. His anti-Stalinism is indicated by his 1990s doctoral dissertation on Stalinism and Thermidor (i.e. revolutionary degeneration). He was a political activist as well, critical of the post-communist Hungarian regime for nationalism and fascist tendencies as well as embourgeoisement. He didn’t fear marginalisation, he told a Russian interviewer in 2004 rather defiantly: all opposition-minded Marxists of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s took it for granted. I got something of a sense of that attitude when, in the 1990s, I was invited to Budapest to give a lecture at the Central European University, a new and admirable post-Communist institution funded initially by (capitalist) George Soros. Krausz managed to organise a lecture for me at his institution, too, but I saw how uncongenial it was for him and his colleagues from Eötvös Loránd, the old top university in Hungary, to play second fiddle to my friends (Americans, as it happens) at CEU.

‘reputations are cyclical, and it may be Lenin’s turn again, or so some unreconstructed socialists hope’

In his Lenin, first published in Hungary in 2008, Krausz set out to write a serious study that was neither an exposé, like those written in the West, nor an apologia. It is an intellectual biography, not a personal one: the neurotic collapses of Lenin’s last years, featured in Robert Service’s Lenin: A Biography (2000), are not of interest to Krausz, who in his extensive footnotes frequently takes Service to task on points of fact or interpretation. His knowledge of his subject, as well as his emotional involvement in it, are both in fact deeper than Service’s, though Service’s book is an easier read.

Lenin after having been freed from Austrian prison, August 1914

Krausz’s Lenin is certainly not beyond criticism. If October 1917 appeared to confirm many of Lenin’s predictions, ‘after October ... not a single one of his prognoses had been validated, or if they were … their form and course was accompanied by unforeseen catastrophes’. He wasn’t a big systems man, and the various theoretical justifications of his policies in power after 1917 (for example, War Communism and NEP, the New Economic Policy of the early 1920s) ‘were developed either parallel to their introduction, or as a follow-up’. Lenin’s expectation that Polish workers would rise up in solidarity with the Red Army in 1920, rather than seeing it as Russian imperialism reborn, was misguided; and when it came to the use of military force to establish revolutionary regimes in the Caucasus soon after, his ‘revolutionary internationalism was already linked to the superpower politics of the new, potential great power’. He never felt ‘pangs of conscience’ about the consequences of seizing power, and could be ruthless in his advocacy of force. ‘What the Bolsheviks did might well have been necessary to uphold any form of power,’ Krausz argues, but at the same time he writes about the Bolsheviks’ ‘almost psychotic fear of losing power’ without exempting Lenin from this. On the other hand, Krausz resists the notion (favoured by many Western Sovietologists) that Stalinism, in particular Stalinist repression, was just a continuation of Lenin’s work. His Lenin, unlike Moshe Lewin’s in Lenin’s Last Struggle (a Western revisionist Marxist work of the 1960s), doesn’t have a late-life conversion to democratic gradualism. Nevertheless, Krausz seems to assume that Lenin, committed to working within the admittedly unsatisfactory but non-confrontational NEP framework, would not have attempted anything like the Great Leap Forward, with all its repressive consequences, that Stalin launched at the end of the 1920s.

‘‘‘after October ... not a single one of his prognoses had been validated, or if they were … their form and course was accompanied by unforeseen catastrophes’’’

It is Lenin’s ‘methodology’ that Krausz admires, and his use of dialectics, a favourite Marxist concept whose invocation generally reduces non-Marxists to baffled silence. I think what he means is that Lenin, though thinking within a firm Marxist theoretical framework, wasn’t hidebound by it and could seize opportunities and adjust his course in response to the contradictions that always emerge in practice.

The most interesting section of the book, at least for me, is the twenty-page discussion of Lenin’s evolving position on the Jewish question, where Krausz strongly, and to my mind convincingly, contests Richard Pipes’s suggestion that Lenin was ever indifferent to anti-Semitism and investigates some of the complexities of the Bolshevik–Jewish relationship. Krausz – born Jewish in 1948 in a country which, having just lost the majority of its Jewish population in the Holocaust, was now led by a Soviet-backed Jewish communist (Mátyás Rákosi) – has written elsewhere on anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and socialism.

The book ends with a quotation from Žižek that ‘to repeat Lenin does not mean that we must repeat what he achieved, but rather what he was not able to achieve’. That is a fairly double-edged tribute, and its ambiguity is reflected in the cover photograph of Lenin in his last illness, staring sternly and warily out at a world in whose transformation he could take no further part.