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From International Socialism (1st series), No.59, June 1973, p.26.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Bride of the Revolution
Robert H McNeal
Gollancz
This is the story of the love and marriage of a serious, devoted, but not very clever woman, Nadezhda Krupskaya. and her rather hard, power-hungry husband. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who, making her first secretary of the Bolshevik Party for 14 years, used her as the mouthpiece for his cunning schemes.
The rather uninteresting power game they played was revolutionary politics. They won. Our Nadya became ‘First Lady’ to Volodya’s First Man, turning after his death into ‘Mother of Her People’. Her own contribution of original and beautiful creative thinking on revolutionary education was mere ‘stuffy platitudinous homilies on pedagogy’, totally unrealistic. (Not a single quotation, mind you, till well after her crushing under Stalinist reaction.)
The best travesty of political biography I have ever read!
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Last updated: 18.2.2008