Solzhenitsyn and Lenin

Solzhenitsyn’s most recent book, Lenin in Zurich, is presented as one that will enrich the great historical fresco begun with his August 1914. Although the author calls his current work a novel, he is careful to affirm its historicity by citing his sources. It must be said that they are not too adequate. They include: four volumes from Lenin’s Collected Works; eight official German documents taken from Werner Hahlweg’s Lenin’s Rockkehr nach Russland, 1917 (Leiden, 1957), which includes 100 documents; the biography of the Russo-German Social Democrat Alexander Parvus, by Z. A. B. Zeman and W. B. Scharlau (The Merchant of Revolution, New York, 1965); the partly mediocre, partly misleading book by Fritz N. Platten, Jr., about his father’s trip across Germany with Lenin, in 1917; last, and hardly deserving of mention, a book by Willi Gautschi that derives from the above books and adds only malicious insinuations....