Between Lenin and Gorbachev: Memoirs of Lenin's Relative and Critic.

Between Lenin and Gorbachev: Memoirs of Lenin's Relative and Critic (1989) is a singular document in the literature of Russian émigré autobiography, written by Nikolai Vsevolodovich Pervushin - published in English as Nicholas V. Pervushin - Lenin's second cousin once removed, who lived to see both the Bolshevik Revolution that his famous kinsman made and the Gorbachev-era reforms that began to undo its legacy. Born in Kazan into a family of hereditary physicians, Pervushin was twice saved from Soviet arrest in his early years by the intercession of Lenin's sisters, who appealed directly to their brother on his behalf. Despite this proximity to the inner circle of Soviet power, Pervushin chose not to return to Moscow in 1930 when recalled from Paris, where he had been working, becoming one of the earliest and most principled of the Soviet non-returnees - figures who, in the terminology of the era, chose freedom. Rather than devoting his émigré years to anti-Soviet agitation, he dedicated himself to the propagation of the Russian language and culture abroad, ultimately settling in the United States and spending the final decades of his life building and sustaining a Russian school in Vermont. Published in the year of his ninetieth birthday, the memoir offers a perspective on seven decades of Soviet history available to almost no one else - a man who knew Lenin personally, rejected the system Lenin built, and lived long enough to witness the beginning of its unraveling under Gorbachev.