Isaac Deutscher's celebrated biographies of Stalin and Trotsky had always been conceived as a
part of a larger project eventually culminating in a study of Lenin's life and politics. The
three works would have constituted he hoped a triptych of some artistic unity. But it was not
to be by the time of his sudden death in 1967 Deutscher had only managed to complete the
first chapter this book which covers Lenin's family background birth and early years in the
backwater town of Simbirsk up to the execution of his brother Alexander Ulyanov a traumatic
but formative event. Based on a lifetime of background research including access to the closed
section of Trotsky's archives Lenin's Childhood gave at the time of its posthumous
publication a novel interpretation of the earliest influences in Lenin's personality and
thinking. Most of all it offers a glimpse into a work unfinished a work which would have
striven save Lenin from fanatical anti-revolutionary condemnation and perhaps more
importantly from uncritical communist beatification--
