370 SEER, 8 i, 2, 2003 Gooding, John. Socialismin Russia. Lenin and his Legay, i890-i99i. Palgrave, Basingstoke and London, 2002. Viii + 253 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ? I4.99 (paperback). THE relationships among Marx, Lenin and Stalin (and their successors)are central to attempts to understand the Soviet and other communist systems, and in my own experience an excellent focal point aroundwhich studentscan explore important issues of the system's identity and its interpretation. The question was, of course, crucial to the politics of the system, as each leader claimed legitimacy by reference to one or other of his predecessors, notably Lenin, without whom therewould probablyhave been no system,or what we think of as 'socialism'would have been very different.The claiming of credit and the casting of blame for the achievements and the disasters associated with the regime continues. In his new book,John Gooding presentsa historyof the Soviet systemthat revolves precisely around Lenin's contribution:what it was; how it related to Marxism; how it developed; how it was taken by Stalin and used; and how subsequent leaders attempted to 'return to Lenin' without disavowing the positive achievements under his immediate successor. The approach is an interestingone, and Gooding's purpose in adopting it is in part polemical: to counter the arguments, specifically,of Martin Malia and of AndrzejWalicki, whose studiespublishedin the mid-i990S -both conceded asmasterpieces are, for Gooding, toojudgmental, and too much focused on Russia's'peculiar political culture'and 'the destructiveeffectsof Marxistideology' (pp. I7- I8). Such an interpretation is more likely to find sympathy among European than North American readers, given different perceptions of Communism over the past century and a half. In presenting it, Gooding develops an interesting case, which sees Lenin's legacy as much less the application of a self-styledscientific,and therefore'correct',ideology, than as the product of a particularpersonality which acquired Marxism in particularcircumstances, and attemptedto apply it in farfromideal conditions. It is, therefore,as much the product of miscalculation, errors of judgement, underestimation of the scale of the operation, and so forth, as it is of the ruthless, determined, even callous pursuit of an unattainable 'shining future'. The dilemmas that the ideology presentedto successiveleaders,obliged at leastto give the impression that they took it seriously,are quite rightlypresented as factorsthat impinged on their actions at least they had to engage in nimble ideological footwork in order to maintain their position. It is too simplisticto see everything shot through with cynicism. However, given the complex provenance of Lenin's legacy, it was broad enough to supportmany differentpolicy lines. Avoidingcategoricaljudgements and morallyloaded termssuch as 'evil'or 'pathological', Gooding attempts (with some success, I believe) to explain through contemporary eyes, avoiding the easy temptations of hindsight. Trotskiiand Stalin were 'men of obvious talent' (p. 88), and Stalin 'an abler politician than his rivals'(p. iii). Khrushchevwas 'too Bolshevikto appeal to the peasants, too peasant to appeal to intellectuals or the middle class [. . .] almost nobody's idea of what a Soviet leader ought to be' (p. I69), and 'ordinary people had never lived so well as they lived under Brezhnev' REVIEWS 37I (p. I76) an endorsement that finds echoes in many post-Soviet opinion polls. As these examples show, the book has many a juicy quotation for studentsto use. There is certainly much food for thought, presented in an accessible style that is a pleasure to read (although the over-use of 'etch' when 'sketch' is probablymeant was irritating,aswas 'linkage'for 'link'). On details, the book can be challenged. Apart from the occasional factual inaccuracy the invasion of Czechoslovakia was on 2I not 25 August I968 -there are contentious points of interpretation.It was not necessary, for example, to go to Czechoslovakia for original ideas on interests in a socialistsociety:these were firstanalysedin the Soviet Union by G. M. Gakas earlyas 1955, and thisand a rangeof otherconcepts significantfordemocracy were explored by, among others,the late Georgi Shakhnazarov,who became an adviserto Gorbachev and whose name shouldundoubtedlyhave appeared alongside those of 'dissidents'in Chapter Eight, 'The Alternative Tradition'. As for Gorbachev, it was as early as the Twenty-Seventh CPSU Congress, in March I986, that he referredto the Party's'infallibilitycomplex...