Lenin: an introduction

Abstract

As has been said time and again, writing a book about Lenin requires courage—both intellectual and theoretical. If this statement was true in the 1960s, when Marxism was particularly prominent in intellectual debates, it is even more so today; as Jean Salem put it in his short book *Lenin and the Revolution*, written in 2008 (and published by Expressão Popular): “If it were possible today to draw up a list of the ‘dead dogs’ in the history of ideas, it would certainly be in the shadow of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known as Lenin, that the top spot would have to be awarded”.