Lenin: A New Biography.

• Author: Pringle, Peter

Dmitri Volkogonov, Translated by Harold Shukman Free Press, $30

The picture is of Lenin sitting at his desk in the Kremlin, scribbling yet another of his endless orders, notes, and jottings having to do with the running of the Russian Revolution. But this one is not about purging generals, executing White Russians, sending landowners into exile, or expelling wayward party members. This is an instruction about "sanitary rules for the inhabitants of the Kremlin." It reads, "All those arriving [by train] shall before entering their accommodation take a bath and hand the dirty clothes to the disinfector [at the baths] ... Anyone refusing to obey the sanitary regulations will be expelled from the Kremlin at once and tried for causing social harm."

Tried for causing social harm? For being scruffy? With such stories, some never before told, the indefatigable Russian military historian Dmitri Volkogonov has given us a glimpse of the Lenin that official Soviet historians did not want anyone to know: of how Lenin, leader of the people's revolution, laid the foundations of the gulags and cruel repression of the church and the intelligentsia, and of how he launched a cult of personality. In this first look at long secret Communist archives, Volkogonov finds Lenin becoming "maniacally ruthless in his use of unbridled violence"--overseeing orders to shoot on the spot those citizens who refused to give their names and to immediately execute the eldest member of a family which concealed weapons. "We did not realize," writes Volkogonov, "that despite the common sense of his ideas on cooperative farming, Lenin was always profoundly hostile to the peasants."

To go on a search of these archives with Volkogonov is to be led behind a massive steel door in the basement of the former Central Committee Building in Moscow's Staraya Square and to emerge with Lenin in a devil's costume, fangs bared, tail twitching, terrorizing the populace. In this vault, on special shelves, in special metal boxes, Volkogonov, formerly a Stalinist army officer and now a liberal historian of Soviet history, was the first to be given access to more than 6,000 of Lenin's unpublished documents.

The cause--the Great Idea--for which Lenin fought so uncompromisingly and for which millions lost their lives now lies in ruins, its idols literally toppled from their plinths, its socialist icons torn down. It is now up to historians like Volkogonov to use the new material emerging from the...