biography only political enthusiasm he showed was for pogroms. Even monarchists failed to weep at his end. It is a tribute to Service that he can bring all this out and still arouse the reader’s sympathy.
Sebestyen, whose family fled Hungary after the failed revolution of 1956, has a better appreciation of totalitarian ruthlessness than most British historians. But his study of Lenin tries to humanise him. ‘Lenin was not a monster,’ Sebestyen asserts, despite giving examples (perhaps too few) of Lenin’s gratuitous calls for shootings, hangings and terror. By Sebestyen’s standards, there are no monsters at all: after all, Timur loved to be read Persian poetry in bed, Hitler was kind to his dog and Stalin sang church music. Yet Lenin’s decrees, at times almost daily, show him to be even more maniacal than Stalin: ‘when I talk of machine guns, they’re for people now called Mensheviks, Social revolutionaries … for dissenters’; ‘try to punish Latvia and Estonia by crossing the frontier and hanging 100 or 1,000 of their civil servants and rich people; then we’ll go 10–20 kilometres and hang all the farmers, priests, landowners: a bonus of 100,000 roubles for each person hanged’; ‘shoot on the spot every tenth idler’ (a member of the bourgeoisie who refused to dig trenches). Even Lenin’s reputedly soft-hearted associates were infected with this mania: Bukharin, the ‘darling of the party’, proposed ‘putting up against a wall and shooting anyone earning 4,000 roubles’. In 1922, when the New Economic Plan seemed to herald a phase of tolerance and free enterprise, Lenin was still raging that the People’s Commissariat of Justice was not meeting targets for shooting merchants or bourgeois journalists.
The life of Lenin is easier to rewrite than the life of Jesus: at least the paper trail is there. But the biographer is faced with the same hurdles of established myths and interpretations. Lenin’s political acumen and revolutionary courage were less crucial than his luck in facing down a Provisional Government too incompetent, conciliatory and lacking in public support to catch and hang him. Regarding Lenin’s early years, especially the motive force behind his ruthless single-mindedness, we have either official pieties or recent psychobabble. The hanging of his elder brother in 1887 for attempted regicide may have inspired him at least to be more professional in his approach, but the ostracism to which the bourgeoisie of Simbirsk sub-
jected their mother following this event almost certainly infuriated Lenin more. Lenin was, when not taking action, a drab, even absurd figure. Take his return to Russia by train under German auspices – a brilliant act of bacterial warfare: Lenin drew up tickets for the train lavatory, got out at Stockholm to buy himself a suit and bowler hat, then in Finland bought a workman’s cap and in Petrograd purchased a wig. Lenin was coddled by women. He had a wife who functioned as a secretary, a mistress, Inessa Armand, whose shoulder he wept on and two adoring sisters. (Sisterly devotion is one of the few common features of Soviet politicians: Felix Dzerzhinsky, although he accidentally killed one sister in his youth, adored another sister, Aldona; Viacheslav Menzhinsky loved his sisters Vera and Liudmila more than any other human beings; even Lavrenti Beria doted on his deaf and mute sister Anna. But none of this explains anything.) True, Lenin was more sociable than Stalin, and genuinely grieved at the death of Armand. But his entire life was devoted to grabbing and retaining power: intimacy was incidental. To order these books from our partner bookshop, Heywood Hill, see page 20.
david gelber
The Woman Who Would Be King
Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen
By Linda M Heywood (Harvard University Press 310pp £23.95)
Half a dozen years after the death of Queen Njinga of Ndongo in 1663, a Capuchin priest called Antonio da Gaeta published an admiring biography in which he ranked this ‘highly noble lady’ alongside Minerva, Cleopatra and St Apollonia in the pantheon of female renown. The tale da Gaeta narrated was a Pauline paradigm, involving the transformation of a pagan idolater – a practitioner of human sacrifice and cannibalism – into a devout Christian. The following century, the Marquis de Sade, more impressed by the heathen customs Njinga had renounced than the Christian piety she latterly discovered, characterised her as the ‘cruelest of women’, a queen who ‘killed her lovers as soon as they had their way with her’ and ‘to flatter her ferocious spirit … had every pregnant woman under the age of thirty ground in a mortar’. The contrasting portrayals of Njinga have persisted until modern times. In 20th-century Portugal, she was typecast as a ‘black savage’, the antithesis of the ‘civilised’ white colonists who had occupied her land. In contemporary Angola, the successor state to Ndongo, she is celebrated as an anti-imperialist freedom fighter and commemorated by a colossal statue in the centre of Luanda.
In her biography of this fascinating character, Linda Heywood seeks to blow away the smoke of infamy and adulation. She reveals a figure no less protean in life than her reputation has proved to be in the three and a half centuries since her death – an individual who overstepped boundaries of religion, gender and nationhood. The monarch who emerges is someone who attempted with courage to resist Portuguese imperialism, yet ultimately was prepared to betray her native culture and forsake tens of thousands of her subjects in order to secure her survival.
Njinga was born in 1582 into the royal dynasty of Ndongo. She emerged from her mother’s womb in the breech position with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck, a portent that she would lead an exceptional life. The Portuguese had arrived in Ndongo two decades earlier. Relations between the Europeans and the native Mbundu people had been cordial at first but were rapidly deteriorating, a result of
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