No Less Than Mystic : A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left - John Medhurst

No Less Than Mystic

A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

By: John Medhurst

Paperback | 1 September 2017

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Published in the centenary year of the 1917 Russian Revolution, No Less Than Mystic is a fresh and iconoclastic history of Lenin and the Bolsheviks for a generation uninterested in Cold War ideologies and stereotypes.

Although it offers a full and complete history of Leninism, 1917, the Russian Civil War and its aftermath, the book devotes more time than usual to the policies and actions of the socialist alternatives to Bolshevism - to the Menshevik Internationalists, the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), the Jewish Bundists and the anarchists. It prioritises Factory Committees, local Soviets, the Womens' Zhenotdel movement, Proletkult and the Kronstadt sailors as much as the statements and actions of Lenin and Trotsky.

Using the neglected writings and memoirs of Mensheviks like Julius Martov, SRs like Victor Chernov, Bolshevik oppositionists like Alexandra Kollontai and anarchists like Nestor Makhno, it traces a revolution gone wrong and suggests how it might have produced a more libertarian, emancipatory socialism than that created by Lenin and the Bolsheviks.The book broadly covers the period from 1903 (the formation of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks) to 1921 (the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion) and explains why the Bolshevik Revolution degenerated so quickly into its apparent opposite, and continually examines the Leninist experiment through the lens of a 21st century, de-centralised, ecological, anti-productivist and feminist socialism.

Throughout its narrative it interweaves and draws parallels with contemporary anti-capitalist struggles such as those of the Zapatistas, the Kurds, the Argentinean "Recovered Factories", Occupy, the Arab Spring, the Indignados and Intersectional feminists, attempting to open up the past to the present and points in between. We do not need another standard history of the Russian Revolution. This is not one.

About the Author

John Medhurst was born in London in 1962 and graduated in History & Politics from Queen Mary College, University of London. He has worked at all levels of the British civil service. He is now a full-time officer for the UK's largest civil service trade union, the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS). He was elected to PCS's National Executive Committee 2003-06 and for six years was PCS's representative on the European Public Services Union's (EPSU) Public Services Network. He has written for Novara Media,The Morning Star, Red Pepper, Green Leftand The Journal of Contemporary European Research. He is the author of That Option No Longer Exists: Britain 1974-76, a revisionist history of Britain in the 1970s published by Zero Books in 2014, which Hilary Wainwright, author of Beyond the Fragments and editor of Red Pepper, called "A really excellent book" which had "done the left a huge service". He is married with two daughters. He lives in Brighton, England.
Industry Reviews
"The book is very comprehensive and insightful, and linked in perceptive ways to current affairs."
--Noam Chomsky


"Drawing on relevant scholarship and primary texts....Medhurst seeks to dispel the mystique still surrounding the Russian revolutionary leader. Most non-Leninist leftists will sympathise with Medhurst's aims."
--Publishers Weekly

The brilliance of Medhurst's political histories is his sharp eye for the pivot points and the alternative routes history could have taken. Or, put another way - alternate histories are buried in his actual histories. He will lead you to fly off into fascinating could-have-beens, big ones that start with small corrected missteps or slightly different arrangements of personalities. There are wonders compressed in his books.
This is a big, energetic, ambitious book that deserves every success. A hell of a performance.
--Warren Ellis, author of TRANSMETROPOLITAN, NORMAL, RED and GUN MACHINE

"No Less than Mystic is a stunning work of synthetic scholarship which addresses one of the great historical questions of the modern epoch: was the Russian Revolution the worst thing ever to happen to socialism? No Less than Mystic makes a compelling case that it was. Arguing from a radical democratic, libertarian socialist perspective that is as relevant today as in 1917, Medhurst makes the strongest possible riposte to recent fashionable rehabilitations of Leninism. "This account makes no concession to the canard that the failure of revolutionary socialism is always inevitable, but demonstrates that while socialism with democracy may be difficult, socialism without democracy will always fail."
--Jeremy Gilbert, Professor of Cultural and Political Theory, University of East London. Author of Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism.

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