Date: Fri, 17 Jan 1997 16:16:04 -0500 (EST)
From: Kevin Cabral <kcabral-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: M-I: A Question regarding "The Unknown Lenin"


On Wed, 8 Jan 1997, Jason A Schulman wrote:

> I happened to see Richard Pipes on C-SPAN a couple of days ago, saying
> various unlikely things about Lenin.  I was wondering if this latest work
> of his has been reviewed in the US Left press (The Nation, In These
> Times, Monthly Review, Against the Current, etc.)  I'm afraid I've let
> some of my subscriptions lapse and haven't seen it reviewed anywhere save
> the bourgeois press.
								
	I get a lot of journals and magazines and have seen nothing. If
you want to know about the basics of the book check out it's review by
Orlando Figes in the _New York Times Review of Books_ around November or
late October of 1996. Most people, including Figes, who reviewed the book
seriously thought that many of Pipes' conclusions from the various
archived documents were ridiculously exagerated, and perhaps more of a
by-product of his own ideological hatred of Lenin than good scholarship.
Thus, many thought Pipes was a poor choice to edit the volume. I would
suggest picking it up to read yourself; with a basic grasp of Russian
political history you may be able to pick out some of Pipes' distorted
conclusions yourself, and also sort of the banal from the original. 

Kevin
Cols, Oh





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