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

February 17, 2023

The World in Time:

Edward Achorn

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of The Lincoln Miracle: Inside the Republican Convention That Changed History. More

August 31, 2018

The World in Time:

Jim Holt

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Jim Holt, author of When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought. More

May 03, 2019

The World in Time:

Greg Grandin

Lewis H. Lapham talks with the author of The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. More

October 28, 2022

The World in Time:

Stacy Schiff

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams. More

February 04, 2022

The World in Time:

Joseph J. Ellis

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773–1783. More

September 17, 2021

The World in Time:

Philip Hoare

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of Albert and the Whale: Albrecht Dürer and How Art Imagines Our World. More