A new anthology of Lenin’s writings, and the first serious collection for decades. The anthology has been put together to show a rather different view of Lenin than that provided by more mainstream commentators. Le Blanc emphasises the commitment to freedom and democracy in Lenin’s writings, and tries to show how Lenin can continue to be an inspirational and insightful thinker for radicals today. Le Blanc also relates Lenin’s thought to contemporary political thought - both within Marxism, within the academy more broadly, and within social and political movements.The anthology concentrates on the shorter works of Lenin, which are often ignored: articles, reports, policy proposals and so forth. The second reader, Lar T. Lih, makes the point that this is a wise move because it is in these articles that Lenin ‘is really himself …in direct contact with his environment’ as a party leader and political player, while the longer theoretical works, while respectfully revered by Leninists, are perhaps less important. However, in recognition of the fact that it is the longer works that are more commonly studied, Le Blanc has revised his initial outline to include some excerpts from the longer works.The book will also include an extensive (c. 25,000 words) essay by Le Blanc, which is an impressive and highly readable introduction to Lenin and his reception and place in political thought today. With commentary on the articles themselves totalling about 8,000 words, and the Lenin material estimated at 80,000 words, this will be a pretty large book. Necessarily so when covering such a prolific and controversial figure as Lenin, but we will work to keep the book under 120,000 words.The translations of Lenin’s work will be taken from the Collected Works of Lenin published by Progress Publishers (Moscow 1960-70). It looks like there is not a problem with us using these texts. As part of the old Soviet regime in Russia, Progress does not exist any more and Russia was not a signatory to the Geneva convention on copyright at the time. There is a tiny possibility a translator with a grievance would pursue us for compensation, but they wouldn’t seem to have much of a case. See my email correspondence with Jim Reische on this matter.
