The World in Time

Victor Sebestyen

Friday, February 02, 2018

Night Scene on the Volga, Alexei Kondratievich Savrasov. The Met.

Night Scene on the Volga, by Alexei Kondratievich Savrasov, 1871. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Humanities Fund Inc., 1972.

“Two and a half decades after the collapse of the USSR, it seems the strangest of anachronisms that Vladimir Illyich Lenin can continue to draw such crowds,” Victor Sebestyen writes of Lenin’s tomb. “Everyone knows the havoc he wreaked; few people now believe in the faith he espoused. Yet he still commands attention—even affection—in Russia.” That attention also made the historian’s exhaustive new look at the man overshadowing recent Russian history possible. For this episode of The World in Time, he discussed his biography of Lenin and the conclusions he reached about its protagonist: “Even when he was wrong about things, he was often wrong in an interesting and challenging way. But I actually grew to hate him much, much more as I was working on it.”

 

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Victor Sebestyen, author of Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror.

 

Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Discussed in this episode

More Podcasts

The Country School, by Winslow Homer, 1871.

November 13, 2020

The World in Time:

Derek W. Black

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy. More

March 10, 2023

The World in Time:

Ben Jealous

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing. More

June 29, 2018

The World in Time:

Catherine Nixey

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Catherine Nixey, author of The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. More

The Cantino planisphere, made by an anonymous cartographer in 1502, shows the world as it was understood by Europeans after their great explorations at the end of the fifteenth century.

May 26, 2017

The World in Time:

Ian Mortimer

Lewis Lapham talks with Ian Mortimer about the past millennium of human innovation. More

June 10, 2022

The World in Time:

Leo Damrosch

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of Adventurer: The Life and Times of Giacomo Casanova. More