CARLA KINGreviews Conspirator: Lenin in ExileBy Helen Rappaport Hutchinson, 373 pp, £20

WITH THE hindsight of a century, it seems to be the private lives and personalities – as distinct from the ideas – of historical figures that attract most attention.

Nevertheless, there is an abiding interest in Lenin that has led to hundreds of historical studies and even some fictional ones, including Alan Brien's Lenin: A Noveland, specifically on Lenin's life before the revolution, we have Solzhenitsyn's Lenin in Zurichand Tom Stoppard's curious play, Travesties.

So the subject of this biography covers well-travelled ground. It focuses on those intense years when the Bolshevik party was taking shape under Lenin’s leadership, but when it might have seemed to an onlooker that they were another group of cafe conspirators. It takes us from the execution of Lenin’s brother Alexander Ulyanov in 1887 to Lenin’s return to Russia in 1917, only six months before the Bolshevik Revolution.

Lenin and his long-suffering wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, were to spend 17 years in European exile, moving from city to city, often living in penury and constantly involved in planning and organising a Russian revolution. Lenin was 47 by the time he returned to Russia and had only seven years to live. To a large degree, this is a double biography, because Lenin and Nadya’s lives were inseparable.

Dedicated to revolution, they made an effective team, Lenin researching, writing, lecturing and conspiring; Nadya managing correspondence with activists across Europe, organising the smuggling of newspapers and looking after the constant flow of party workers and refugees arriving at their door.

One senses that Rappaport’s sympathies lie more with Nadya – devoted, self-effacing but prone to illness and depression – than with Lenin, whose single-mindedness, arrogance and intolerance of criticism are evident.

Nevertheless, he had attractive traits: his love of children, his pattern of remembering assistance given in past difficulties and his solicitude for Nadya’s mother, who lived with the couple for most of their exile. Lenin’s relationship with Inessa Armand is explored as far as one can, given that those involved were so secretive about it. Armand, a significant activist and theorist on women’s rights, evidently remained close to Lenin until her death in 1920.

Lenin’s belief in himself and the correctness of his vision of revolution is striking given the long, hard years of apparently fruitless activity. By 1909, in the wake of the abortive revolution of 1905, his party had virtually ceased to exist.

Even in 1915 at the Zimmerwald conference, Trotsky was to comment that “half a century after the founding of the First International, it was still possible to seat all of the internationalists in four coaches”. Yet Lenin’s dogged confidence in the correctness of his vision was to prove a crucial strength in the uncertain atmosphere of 1917.

This is a thoroughly researched account, drawing on memoirs of Lenin in Russian, French, German and English and tracing his contact with contemporaries – including visiting Gorky on Capri, playing chess with the poet Apollinaire in Paris – and raising the possibility that he met Joseph Conrad in Poland in 1914.

Rappaport’s biography does not explore the context of Lenin’s activism or his ideas in much detail. But what we have is an enjoyable, well-written account of the lives of Lenin and his close circle in the wilderness years before the Russian revolution.

Carla King is a lecturer in modern history at St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, in Dublin