New Books Network

A number of years ago I read Robert Service’s excellent biography of Lenin and came away thinking “We don’t really know enough about the women who surrounded Lenin throughout his life.” Katy Turton, a lecturer in modern European history at Queen’s University Belfast, has fixed that. Her Forgotten Lives: The Role of Lenin’s Sisters in the Russian Revolution, 1864-1937 (Palgrave, 2007) does a wonderful job of filling in the many blanks. She shows that the Lenin’s sisters, as well as his wife Nadezhda Krupskaia, were not merely caretakers. Rather, they were powerful political actors in their own right. It’s a terrific book.
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