Lenin's Last Struggle

Lenin's Last Struggle" is basically an overview of Lenin's opinions and views on a great variety of policy matters in the period from the Revolution to his death, as portrayed by the Soviet historian Moshe Lewin. Lewin has a tendency to be too positive about Lenin (at least in a moral kind of estimation) than is perhaps warranted, and that goes for this book as well, but it is fortunately not uncritical. The overview of Lenin's views itself is excellent and his contrasting of Lenin to Stalin well-done. The book's main flaw is that it is too short, with a mere 141 pages of actual content, and that Lewin generally assumes a pretty strong knowledge of history of the Soviet Union. In that sense, this book is mostly useful as a good summary of the Lenin of 1918-1924 for people already interested and somewhat knowledgable about the USSR. The book includes a series of appendices with primary documents by Lenin. Very useful is the inclusion of Lenin's famous essay "Better Fewer, But Better", which is crucial for understanding Marxism-Leninism in practice.