TO THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE GREAT RUSSIAN REVOLUTION. In the USSR they said about Lenin that he was “eternally alive.” And this is the honest truth. What he accomplished still causes heated debate: Ilyich is either admired, calling him a “genius of global scale,” or hated, considered the incarnation of the Antichrist. Meanwhile, this multifaceted figure is much more complex and richer than the flat image created at the beginning of Soviet and then post-Soviet propaganda . Ilyich was not only a theorist of Marxism, a revolutionary and the creator of the Soviet state, but also an excellent draftsman, a talented chess player, a lover of Russian classics and good humor. This book for the first time shows the reader the real Lenin - a living person who had both weaknesses and shortcomings, and undeniable advantages, a person who was able to radically change the course of world history.