Lenin: A New Biography.

IN THE first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, published in the early 1970s, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn stressed one central point: that the system of state terror constructed in the Soviet Union was the work of Vladimir Lenin himself, not an aberrational misdeed of Josef Stalin perverting the essential goodness of the Leninist design. Solzhenitsyn's achievement was to document, with heroic thoroughness (since all his research was clandestine), the establishment of the concentration camps and slave-labor system, the secret police, the show trials, and the purges, and to demonstrate that they began with the very inception of the Soviet state.

That is why Solzhenitsyn's Gulag volumes were so profoundly subversive. Ever since Nikita Khrushchev denounced the crimes of Stalin in 1956, blaming Stalin was the Party line, and a way of preserving the myth of the purity of the original conception. Many in the West (especially devotees of Leon Trotsky or Nikolai Bukharin) were, and some still are, beguiled by the myth of a benign and hopeful Communism, an idealistic experiment distorted by Lenin's barbarian successor.

In the Soviet Union itself, the very legitimacy of the system depended on this myth.

Thus it was that under Mikhail Gorbachev a fierce battle raged within the Politburo over whether to permit public criticisms of Lenin's cruelties and, in particular, whether to permit publication of the Gulag volumes. In the end, both were permitted, and who can say that their shattering impact did not accelerate the demise of the Soviet system?

Now comes a stunning book of revelations from the liberated Bolshevik archives, documenting the most intimate official secrets of the Communist Party under Lenin's rule. When the USSR was dissolved at the end of 1991 and the Party banned, reformers uncovered a cache of 3,700 super-secret documents in a steel-doored vault deep in the basement--Lenin's archive. One of the first allowed into the archive was Colonel-General Dmitri Volkogonov, respected military historian and author of a devastating biography of Stalin (also based on revelatory documentation). Mr. Volkogonov became chairman of the parliamentary commission that took custody of Party files, and also served as an advisor to President Boris Yeltsin. His discoveries in the Lenin archive became the basis for this book.

Among its most important contributions is the full story of Lenin's secret sources of funding in Western Europe, particularly Imperial Germany, before the Revolution--and of the German High Command's assistance in arranging Lenin's return to Russia in 1917. All this was long suspected; now it is proved, down to the bookkeeping details. And it is a grimly fascinating story as well. The old Bolshevik Yakov Ganetsky, one of the financial wizards who arranged the secret German funding that saved the Bolsheviks, was later executed during Stalin's purges--to silence him forever.

Lenin's personal role in the creation of the totalitarian state is also definitively outlined. It was Lenin who personally ordered the execution of Tsar Nicholas II--and his entire family--so as to "remove the possibility of the monarchist banner reappearing on the scene." It was Lenin who laid down the principle of unremitting class war and called for systematic terror against the bourgeoisie, the Church, the more prosperous farmers, and others who resisted Soviet power. Stalin later carried out the policies with a death toll a few orders of magnitude higher, but the policies were launched by Lenin. Lenin's internal instructions to his Politburo colleagues repeatedly used a phraseology that later became familiar under the Nazis and, more recently, the Serbs: the language of "cleansing" the land of "harmful insects," "parasites," bandits"--i.e., opponents. Other examples of Lenin's hands-on management style:

--In 1921, he sent this order to a local Party leader: "The forest where the bandits are hiding must be cleared with poison gas; careful calculation must be made to ensure that the cloud of asphyxiating gas spreads throughout the forest and exterminates everything hidden there."

--In 1922, after hearing that Patriarch Tikhon was resisting the confiscation of Church valuables, Lenin wrote the Politburo calling for punishment "of such ferocity that it [the Church! will not forget it for decades to come ... the greater the number of reactionary clergy and bourgeoisie shot the better."

--As early as 1918, the Bolsheviks were organizing concentration camps and, as Volkogonov notes wryly, "those who were spared the bullet began filling them." A penal colony was built at Ukhta in 1921, then another in Kholmogory, then an endless archipelago of prison camps that covered the country. What Solzhenitsyn laboriously wove together from hundreds of smuggled eyewitness accounts of the camps, Volkogonov confirms and documents from the inner decision-making of the Politburo.

The volume is filled with the vituperative Lenin, the egotistical Lenin, the fanatical Lenin. No wonder this archive was kept hidden away. For good measure, Volkogonov throws in a few titillating personal details, such as the story of Lenin's long love affair with his fellow revolutionary Inessa Armand, and some grotesque photos of Lenin following his strokes in 1922.

There will be no account more authoritative.

Mr. Rodman, an NR senior editor, is the author of More Precious than Peace: The Cold War and the Struggle for the Third World (Scribners).