Lenin the Dictator cover art

Lenin the Dictator

An Intimate Portrait

 Preview
Try Premium Plus free
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Lenin the Dictator

By: Victor Sebestyen
Narrated by: Jonathan Aris
Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £16.99

Buy Now for £16.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

Victor Sebestyen's intimate biography is the first major work in English for nearly two decades on one of the most significant figures of the 20th century. In Russia, to this day, Lenin inspires adulation. Everywhere he continues to fascinate as a man who made history and who created a new kind of state that would later be imitated by nearly half the countries in the world.

Lenin believed that 'the political is the personal', and while in no way ignoring his political life, Sebestyen's focus will be on Lenin the man - a man who loved nature almost as much as he loved making revolution and whose closest ties and friendships were with women. The long-suppressed story of his ménage a trois with his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and his mistress and comrade, Inessa Armand, reveals a different character to the coldly one-dimensional figure of legend. Told through the prism of Lenin's key relationships, Sebestyen's lively biography casts a new light the Russian Revolution, one of the great turning points of modern history.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio on our desktop site.

©2017 Victor Sebestyen (P)2017 Orion Publishing Group Ltd Politics & Activism Politics & Government Presidents & Heads of State Russia Imperialism Socialism Soviet Union War Capitalism

Listeners also enjoyed...

 The Ancient City cover art
Collapse cover art
A People’s Tragedy cover art
A Certain Idea of France cover art
History of the Russian Revolution cover art
The Empire Must Die cover art
Gulag cover art
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich cover art
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World cover art
The Thirty Years War cover art
The Soviet Century cover art
The Vladimir Lenin Collection: State and Revolution, What Is to Be Done?, & Imperialism: The Final Stage of Capitalism cover art
Trotsky in New York, 1917 cover art
Hitler cover art
The Brothers Karamazov [Naxos AudioBooks Edition] cover art
Prague Winter cover art
All stars
Most relevant  
Brilliant from start to finish. I could not put this book down and raced through it!

Amazing!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
An absolutely brilliant audiobook superbly narrated . A harrowing account of one of history’s most brutal regimes led by a certifiable despot

Bolshevik bluster

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Well written and researched, Lenin was an appalling dictator who set the stage for what was to come for the next 100 years in Russia

Excellent book, well read

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Great story with perfect level of detail - not too much to make it boring and not too little to make it too casual

Impressive Package

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Very well researched, and exceedingly well narrated.
Kept me enthralled throughout and most importantly, I learnt a great deal 👌

A most excellent listen!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I have always been fascinated by the Russian Revolution, which would not have ended the way it did without Lenin. This was a very detailed account of the man who started the Communist Cancer that has spread throughout the world in one form or another.

I was quite surprised to learn of the sheer brutality of the Tsarist regime, and how implicated Nicholas was. If you want a deep dive into the man revered and loved by so many and equally hated - this is the book.

Deep Dive Into Lenin

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Knew only the basics about Lenin (and much of what I thought I knew turned out to be contradicted by this book) and so it was exactly what I was looking for.

Thoroughly enjoyed the book and the performance
Hard for a male to do female voices , which I found a little jarring is only minor criticism

Highly recommended

Excellent

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
amazing detail on the life of Lenin. read clearly and with great enthusiasm. a great audiobook for any history fan

brilliant

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Lots of detail on Lenin in the pre-revolutionary years and provides into how his uncompromising mindset developed.

Excellent detail and insight

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I was enjoying the book - fun, pacy and pop, until one little aside about the clown duo ‘Bim Bom’. Sebestyen writes that the Cheka opened fire on the act, resulting in the death of one of the performers. This immediately rang bells and after some digging in Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin, I found what I had been looking for - Bim & Bom, both alive and well in 1920!

I appreciate this is a ridiculously minor point, but it really jumped out and after finding the total inaccuracy, I’m left doubting the veracity of other aspects of the book too. Basic primary sources can be found to disprove this story, so what was Sebestyen doing? Assumedly, repeating a story from The Peoples Tragedy or the KGB.

I’d recommend a read / listen as it’s a pacy and dynamic telling of Lenin. Weak on theory, but to the benefit of pacing. However, I would warn the reader / listener that Mr. Sebestyen isn’t too vigorous in inspecting his sources.

Fun Telling - With One Red(!) Flag

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.