There are not dozens, not hundreds, but thousands upon thousands of pages written about Lenin. Yet from all this enormous literature you hardly get any sense of what material conditions his life took place in. Were these conditions favorable to him, or did he have to suffer from need and deprivation? Where did the money he needed come from—did it come from literary earnings, or were there other, more substantial sources of livelihood? What did Lenin live on from the time he came of age—up to October 1917, when the revolution, elevating him to power, would thereby make Lenin a gigantic historical figure? We emphasize “thereby,” because if it hadn’t happened, Lenin would have died as an ordinary, little-known emigrant, and people would have remembered him no more than they would remember Babeuf, Blanqui, or Tkachev.