Word: leninization
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...Ulam's style that keeps his book in the mineral world. He handles mountains of detail as concisely as any man can. Ulam has an engaging way of making his material seem contemporary. To describe the small provincial town where Lenin spent part of his youth. Ulam quotes a contemporary journalist's description of a typical evening and adds "If only nineteenth century Russia had had television!" Or he defines the Kadets, or Constitutional Democrats, with the following sentence...
...history. Part of his reticence can be attributed to his initial concept of the book as the history of a Party rather than a biography. When he speaks of guilt at all it is in subtly collective terms: "Insofar as the peasant was concerned, no dialectic, no contradiction within Lenin's own thinking could obscure or explain away the essentially repressive and hypocritical policy of the Bolsheviks...
Ulam explains Lenin's attitude toward terror in purely intellectual terms...
That the Communist should consider the human cost of social engineering was for Lenin almost unthinkable...It was, then, almost natural to suggest that for the people at large the Revolution and the Civil War were accompanied by only minor inconveniences when weighed against the glory and excitement of participating in the heroic struggle... When he did remember the human cost of the Revolution Lenin, following the example of Marx and Engels, was fond of the image of birth pains...
Perhaps Ulam understands Lenin as a completely intellectual idealist, but this clashes with earlier statements about Lenin's pragmatism. Furthermore, Ulam dehumanizes his subject by denying him any disenchantment or disillusionment, claiming that his ideology would not tolerate...