Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, June 24, 1994                   TAG: 9406290042
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: MOSCOW                                LENGTH: Medium

RUSSIAN BOOK TAKES `HONEST' LOOK AT LENIN

In the first major work about Lenin by a Russian author since the Soviet collapse in 1991, Dmitry Volkogonov reviles the Soviet founder. He called the book, released Thursday, the first honest book about Lenin produced in Russia.

His conclusions echo those of many Western historians, but would not have been publishable in Russia until recently. A decade ago, his views would have been considered treasonous.

Volkogonov, a retired colonel-general and senior military adviser to President Boris Yeltsin, asserts that Lenin unquestionably initiated the terror that his successor, Josef Stalin, used to kill millions.

``The leader's main quality was his enormous, fanatic belief in the Communist Utopia,'' Volkogonov wrote in the preface to ``Lenin.''

``To achieve it in practice, Lenin would not stop at anything: terrorism, lies, hostage-taking.''

Speaking at a news conference Thursday, Volkogonov added, ``This was also a man who banished the intelligentsia and who realized one of his slogans - to turn the imperialist war into a civil war which cost 13 million lives.''

He was referring to the Russian civil war that began shortly after the Bolsheviks signed a harsh treaty with Germany and withdrew from World War I, which they dismissed as an imperialist war.

Volkogonov's findings, some gleaned from Communist Party documents seized by the government after the failed 1991 coup and since disclosed, include:

Lenin wanted to commit suicide in the final months of his life, but his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Stalin and the Politburo all refused to provide him with cyanide. Brain disease or dismay over political chaos may have prompted his wish to die.

In a 1918 letter to Communist colleagues, Lenin ordered that at least 100 peasants be publicly hanged to retaliate for a local revolt. ``This needs to be accomplished in such a way that people will see, tremble, know and scream out,'' Lenin wrote.

Lenin disdained his countrymen. He referred to them frequently as ``fools'' and ``idiots'' in the 3,724 documents he wrote that were kept secret for years by the Communist Party, evidently to protect his image.

Lenin ordered the destruction of more than 70,000 churches.

Volkogonov, 66, is the Russian co-chairman of the U.S.-Russian committee on locating soldiers imprisoned or missing from World War II.

He also has written candid books about Stalin and Leon Trotsky, the other key figures in the Bolshevik Revolution. But the former Soviet army propaganda chief, who once considered Lenin a living god, said he found it painful to reassess the Soviet founder.

Volkogonov said he frequently receives insulting or threatening phone calls, and he estimated tens of millions of people remain loyal to Lenin.