A winner of the Isaac Deutscher Prize Liebmann highlights democratic dimensions in Lenin's thinking as it developed over 25 years.

In this volume, Neil Harding presents the first comprehensive reinterpretation of Leninism to be produced in many years. Challenging much of the conventional wisdom regarding Leninism's effectiveness as a mobilizing body of ideas, its substance, and its origins and evolution, Harding offers both a controversial exposition of this ideology and a critical engagement with its consequences for the politics of contemporary communism. Rather than tracing the roots of Leninism to the details of Lenin's biography, Harding shows how it emerged as a revolutionary Marxist response to the First World War and to the perceived treachery-the support of that war-by social democratic leaders. The economics, politics, and philosophy of Leninism, he argues, were rapidly theorized between 1914 and 1918 and deeply imprinted with the peculiarities of the wartime experience. Its complementary metaphysics of history and science was as intrinsic to its confidence and sureness of purpose as it was to its contempt for democratic practice and tolerance. But, as Harding also shows, although Leninism articulated a complex and coherent critique of capitalist civilization and held a powerful appeal to a variety of constituencies, it was itself caught in a timewarp that fatally limited its capacity to adapt. This book will engage not only Russian and Soviet specialists, but also readers concerned with the varieties of twentieth-century socialism.

Refuting the assumption that orthodox Marxist theory contains anything of relevance on international relations, this book, originally published in 1980, clarifies, reconstructs, and summarizes the theories of international relations of Marx and Engels, Lenin, Stalin and the Soviet leadership of the 1970s. These are subjected to a comparative analysis and their relative integrity is examined both against one another and against selected Western theories. Marxist-Leninist models of international relations are fully explored, enabling the reader to appreciate the essence and evolution of fundamental Soviet concepts as such as proletarian, socialist internationalism, peaceful co-existence, national liberation movement and détente.

Caricatured as a superhuman idol in the former Communist states, the Russian revolutionary socialist V. I. Lenin has long been reversely caricatured in the West as an authoritarian elitist. In this brilliant, carefully researched analysis, Neil Harding upends these traditional Cold War interpretations of Lenin's thought and activity. Harding shows how Lenin's flexible and continuously changing theoretical, strategic, and tactical insights were firmly grounded in the emancipatory potential for working-class revolution in Russia and around the world. Neil Harding is an internationally renowned scholar of Soviet history.

On the facets and the implications of the theory developed by V.I. Lenin.

Translated from the Russian in 1933, this and the first volume of the same title give an invaluable picture of what the Russian leader Joseph Stalin understood by Leninism. Building on the pamphlet Foundations of Leninism, (which forms the first part of this book) the work presents a unified and complete work on the problems of Leninism and socialist construction as they were manifested in the 1920s, as well as discussion of the October Revolution and the relationship of the USSR and the West in the years following the First World War.

Translated from the Russian in 1928, this and the second volume of the same title give an invaluable picture of what the Russian leader Joseph Stalin understood by Leninism. Building on the pamphlet Foundations of Leninism, (which forms the first part of this book) the work presents a unified and complete work on the problems of Leninism and socialist construction as they were manifested in the 1920s, as well as discussion of the October Revolution and the relationship of the USSR and the West in the years following the First World War.