Lenin Landslide

THE LIFE OF LENIN by Louis Fischer. 703 pages. Harper & Row. $10.

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LENIN by Robert Payne. 672 pages. Simon & Schuster. $8.50.

LENIN: THE COMPULSIVE REVOLUTIONARY by Stefan Possony. 418 pages. Regnery. $7.95.

IMPRESSIONS OF LENIN by Angelica Balabanoff. 152 pages. University of Michigan. $5.

Since there has never been a really good biography of Lenin in English, the idea of doing something about it came more or less simultaneously to three authors. As soon as each heard the others were at work, the race to get published was on. Stefan Possony won it, but Authors Payne and Fischer were close behind.

Each biography seems tailored to a specific audience. Robert (The Terrorists, Forever China) Payne, a prolific as well as a catholic writer, has produced a Book-of-the-Month selection aimed at romantics. Stefan Possony, political studies director at Stanford's Hoover Institution, will appeal most obviously to believers in the conspiratorial view of history, since his research comes largely from police and foreign office files, ranging from Japan to France, and covering mostly Lenin's life as a fugitive conspirator.

Fed Suspicion. On balance, Louis Fischer's is the best of the three biographies. Fischer has devoted much of his long lifetime to the study of Russia (The Soviets in World Affairs; Russia, America, and the World), and he soberly weighs those episodes that the other two biographers sometimes accept as fact, offering the pros and cons of each argument. There is, for example, a genuine riddle about Lenin's racial background. Author Payne insists "there was not a drop of Russian blood" in Lenin, and claims his ancestry was German, Swedish and Chuvash (a Tatar tribe living along the Volga), and that it shaped his personality. Without citing any evidence, Author Possony argues that the "evidence indicates" Lenin's grandfather "was born a Jew." Fischer places the responsibility where it belongs, on the Soviet government. "The records were undoubtedly available in Russia's bulging archives," he writes, "but the Bolsheviks saw fit to suppress them. This feeds the suspicion that there is something to conceal."

What emerges most strikingly from all three biographies is the awesome power of a single and single-minded man to change the course of history. If the Kaiser had flatly refused to let Lenin cross wartime Germany and enter Russia, if the Kerensky government had succeeded in arresting and executing Lenin (as he fully expected it to try to do), would the Bolsheviks now be merely a footnote to history? Not the least of the paradoxes is the fact that Communism, which teaches the inevitability of historical forces and the impotence of the individual in swaying them, owes its conquest of Russia to the energy and confident thrust of Lenin alone.

Refused Axiom. But it is in the slim memoir of Angelica Balabanoff that the most human--and in some ways the most terrifying--portrait of Lenin emerges. Memoirist Balabanoff is now 86 and lives in Rome. The daughter of a wealthy Russian family, she eagerly and early espoused Lenin and his cause. But she always preferred to be "a victim of power rather than a holder of it," and has spent half a century defending the downtrodden in a variety of furnished rooms from Moscow and Paris to New York and Vienna. Both naive and deeply ethical, Angelica Balabanoff had obviously no place in the Soviet power setup, but Lenin wanted her there, and she tried her best to please him.

Refusing the axiom Lenin lived by, "everything that is done in the interest of the proletarian cause is honest," Angelica repeatedly carried her complaints to Lenin until he finally said in despair, "Comrade Balabanoff, what use can life find for you?"

Her incorruptibility of spirit seems to have touched even his amoral heart.

At their last interview, Angelica said sadly to Lenin, "Perhaps Russia does not need people like me." Prophetically, Lenin replied, "She needs them but does not have them."

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