This is not a book of history but a book of devotion, and that is exactly what makes it useful.
Lenin in Our Life was issued by Progress Publishers in 1967, the fiftieth year of the October Revolution, and it belongs to that jubilee as surely as a wreath belongs to a monument. It collects eighteen short reminiscence-pieces by Soviet writers, artists and scientists - Lydia Zhak on Gorky, Alexander Deich on Lunacharsky, the sculptor Sergei Konenkov, the cosmonaut chronicler Yevgeny Ryabchikov - each recalling an encounter with Lenin, or the mark Lenin left on a life.
The unsigned foreword states the organising idea with a candour worth keeping in view, because it is the whole method in one sentence. The reader, it says, need not be surprised to find among the rememberers not only those who knew Lenin but people born long after his death. A book of reminiscences that admits on its opening page that some of its rememberers never met the man they remember has stopped being a record of a life and become something else: a liturgy of presence.
Read as that, it is a revealing document. Lenin died on 21 January 1924; this book was made to demonstrate that he had not, in any sense that mattered to the Soviet state of 1967, gone anywhere at all. For anyone interested in how a revolutionary state manufactured and maintained its founder's cult, at the high point of the jubilee, it is a compact and unusually frank specimen.
Translated by Taras Kapustin and edited by Yuri Sdobnikov.
New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
