Who Should Be the Person of the Century?

By John Keegan; Tom Wolfe

TIME's coverage of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century will culminate in December, when we name the Person of the Century. To help the magazine's editors make the choice, we've asked a select group of people to indicate whom they would pick. The latest nominations:

VLADIMIR ILYICH LENIN A great person may be bad as well as good. Lenin, whose use of power in the Soviet Union, which he created and whose influence in the wider world was wholly for the bad, is undoubtedly the century's dominant figure. The ideas of Karl Marx were of little more than philosophical importance until 1917, when Lenin applied those ideas with revolutionary force and established the Bolshevik Party throughout the government. Bolshevik Russia became an example to Marxist revolutionaries everywhere and energized nationalist reactionaries, of whom the most important was Adolf Hitler. Hitler's ideological war on the Soviet Union devastated Europe. After Lenin's death, his followers in Europe, Asia and Africa created other Bolshevik regimes that propagated regional wars, fostered terrorism and destroyed economies. Not until 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, was Lenin's malign influence definitively reversed. Its aftereffects will persist into the 3rd millennium. --John Keegan, historian

BORN April 22, 1870 1903 Forms Marxist Bolshevik Party 1917 Leads the revolution, heads new Soviet government 1918 Bolshevik Party changes name to Communist Party Died Jan. 21, 1924

ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN No individual in all of history, completely on his own, using only the power of one, has changed the lives of more people than Soviet dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Lenin set the stage by creating the first totalitarian socialist state system of concentration camps, which exterminated 60 million Soviet citizens in 50 years. Solzhenitsyn survived eight years in prison camps and three years of internal exile and, in secret, wrote The Gulag Archipelago, revealing for the first time the existence of this chain ("archipelago") of death mills. The moment the manuscript of the book's first volume was smuggled out of Russia and published in France in 1973, it was as if a stake had been driven through the heart of Marxism. It was only a matter of time before the body and the tentacles rotted away, a process that became obvious on Nov. 9, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall came down. Only China and a few morbid extremities--Tibet, Mongolia, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba--still hold on. --Tom Wolfe, author

BORN Dec. 11, 1918 1945-53 In prison 1970 Wins Nobel Prize for Literature 1973 The Gulag Archipelago, Vol. I, is published in France 1974 Expelled from Soviet Union 1994 Back to Russia