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Victor Sebestyen

Biography

Victor Sebestyen

Victor Sebestyen was born in Budapest. He has worked as a journalist on many British newspapers, including The Times, the Daily Mail and the London Evening Standard, where he was foreign editor and editorial writer. He has also written for many American publications, including The New York Times, and was an editor at Newsweek. He is the author of TWELVE DAYS: The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, REVOLUTION 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, and 1946: The Making of the Modern World.

Victor Sebestyen

Books by Victor Sebestyen

Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror
by Victor Sebestyen - Biography, History, Nonfiction

Brought up in comfort and with a passion for hunting and fishing, chess and the English classics, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was radicalized after the execution of his brother in 1887. Victor Sebestyen traces the story from Lenin's early years to his long exile in Europe and return to Petrograd in 1917 to lead the first Communist revolution in history. Uniquely, Sebestyen has discovered that throughout Lenin's life his closest relationships were with his mother, his sisters, his wife and his mistress. The long-suppressed story told here of the love triangle that Lenin had with his wife and his beautiful, married mistress and comrade reveals a more complicated character than that of the coldly one-dimensional leader of the Bolshevik Revolution.