Lenin's Private War: The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia

by Lesley Chamberlain

Book Overview

In 1922, Lenin personally drew up a list of some 160 'undesirable' intellectuals - mostly philosophers, academics, scientists and journalists - to be deported from the new Soviet State. 'We're going to cleanse Russia once and for all' he wrote to Stalin, whose job it was to oversee the deportation. Two ships sailed from Petrograd that autumn, taking Old Russia's eminent men and their families away to what would become permanent exile in Berlin, Prague...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312367309
• ISBN13: 9780312367305
• Release Date: August 2007
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 414 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

A valuable portrait

Chamberlain recounts the voyage of a luckier part of the Russian intelligentsia - in that they lived. This is the tale of their forcible exile by Lenin and Stalin in 1922, to "cleanse" Russia of "undesireables." A valuable portrait of the intellectual community whose loss would cost Russia dearly for decades. Later cleansings were, of course, less humane. (Reviewed in Russian Life)

Russia In Exile

A book that helps one better understand the havoc created among the Russian intelligentsia by the Bolsheviks after the overthrow of the czar. Ms. Chamberlain traces the expulsion by Lenin of some of the best thinkers in Russia and uses their often sorry fates (many go to Berlin or Prague, in short time to become victims of Hitler) to help explain the various strands of philosophical thinking that were such a threat to the world view of the new autocrat, the Communist Party. It is clear to the author that Stalin was a product of Lenin's thinking, not an aberration. Readers, who make the effort, will learn much that will help them understand the deep divisions within present day Russia. Conflicting views on the essence (spiritual and political) of Russia, that were present in the early 1920s and long before, have reemerged since the thankful crash in the 1980s of Lenin's deadly party.