Alan Brien's Lenin: The Novel (1988) takes the form of a diary written by Lenin from 1886 to 1923, the year before his death. Brien sets out to reproduce the kind of diary Lenin might have written had he kept one. What emerges is a "self-portrait" of a gifted, highly intelligent, and, when the occasion demanded, utterly ruthless individual. Brien convincingly depicts the details of Lenin's life, his probable reactions to specific events, and his feelings toward particular people, for example, his preference for Leon Trotsky ("my only hope for perpetuation of my policies") over Joseph Stalin ("too crude and domineering") as his successor. Brien has clearly made every effort to authenticate and verify the attitudes and ideas he attributes to Lenin. The result is a very readable and reliable account of the momentous events that gave birth to the Soviet Union.

Lenin: The Novel does not give the reader enough sense of the interior Lenin, the man within the public figure. What we see instead is a perfectly plausible reconstruction of Lenin's thinking, with a curious lack of insight or, as in Solzhenitsyn's case (Lenin in Zurich (1975)), passion that makes us care about him as a character in fiction. In short, although probably more historically accurate in its representation of its subject than Lenin in Zurich, Brien's novel lacks the emotional power, the energy, and the narrative drive of Solzhenitsyn's. One book gives us the facts; the other, not the but a truth.

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