Lenin : a biography / Robert Service
Speaker: Ms Christine Loh 陸恭蕙女士
Moderator: Dr Michael Share
Date: 9 March 2005 (Wednesday)
Time: 7:15 - 9:00 pm
Venue: 1/F, Main Library New Wing
Language: English
About the Books
Lenin : a biography / Robert Service
Lenin: His politics still reverberate around the world even after the end of the USSR. His name elicits revulsion and reverence. And yet Lenin the man remains largely a mystery. This biography shows us Lenin as we have never seen him, in his full complexity as revolutionary, political leader, thinker, and private person. Born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in 1870, the son of a schools inspector and a doctor's daughter, Lenin was to become the greatest single force in the Soviet revolution-and perhaps the most influential politician of the twentieth century. Drawing on sources only recently discovered, Robert Service explores the social, cultural, and political catalysts for Lenin's explosion into global prominence. His book gives us the vast panorama of Russia in that awesome vortex of change from tsarism's collapse to the establishment of the communist one-party state. Through the prism of Lenin's career Service focuses on dictatorship, the Marxist revolutionary dream, civil war, and interwar European politics. And we are shown how Lenin, despite the hardships he inflicted, was widely mourned at his death in 1924. Service's Lenin is a political colossus but also a believable human being. This biography stresses the importance of his supportive family and of its ethnic and cultural background. The author examines his education, upbringing, and the troubles of his early life to explain the emergence of a rebel whose devotion to destruction proved greater than his love for the "proletariat" he supposedly served. We see how his intellectual preoccupations and inner rage underwent volatile interaction and propelled his career from young Marxist activist to founder of the communist partyand the Soviet state-and how he bequeathed to Russia a legacy of political oppression and social intimidation that has yet to be expunged. (FROM THE PUBLISHER)
About the Speaker
Christine Loh is the founder and CEO of Civic Exchange, an independent, non-profit public policy think tank. Loh has an English law degree and a Masters of Law degree in Chinese and Comparative Law. She has been awarded the degree of Doctors of Law, honoris causa, by her alma mater, the University of Hull.
Loh spent 14 years in the commercial world, having held top regional posts in a US multinational company in commodities trading, and subsequently in strategic management for a Hong Kong company.
She was appointed to the Hong Kong Legislative Council in 1992, and then ran two successful elections in 1995 and 1998. She has anchored public affairs radio and television shows, and writes extensively in academic as well as general publications on a variety of subjects. She serves on the boards of a number of local and international non-profit organizations.
She is well known for her policy research work on politics, political economy, sustainable development and corporate social responsibility. She written and co-authored three books on the subjects of civic participation, democratic reform and SARS. Loh is also known for her work in designing and facilitating multi-stakeholder processes to widen and deepen understanding on public policy issues.