Lenin; the man and his work

a^tttmll WximtBitVi 2Iihtatg

IMfUta, SSew ^oik

BOUGHT WrTH THE INCOME OF THE

JACOB H. SCHIFF

ENDOWMENT FOR THE PROMOTION

OF STUDIES IN

HUMAN CIVILIZATION

1918

APR 19 1948 J R

, - P 7948^
flAR 7 1949 J

„MY>^rT954G

OCT 1 i\ lOFii^ P "^"

i^l ?£'/(

u

APR 4,9-.8B "P" 22 '355 J »

irno

19670 V

^ .i ao."ias 2.

fi R APR 8 -55

Cornell University Library
DK 254 .L57W721

Lenin;

3 1924 027 005 606

Ft;

V'

LENIN
The Man and His Work

« Cornell University
M Library

The original of tliis book is in
tine Cornell University Library.

There are no known copyright restrictions in
the United States on the use of the text.

http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027005606

Copyrifiht, Underwood 4 Underwood, New York

Nikolai Lenin

LENIN

The Man and His Work

BY

ALBERT RHYS WILLIAMS

and the impressions of

COL. RAYMOND ROBINS

and

ARTHUR RANSOME

V

IS'EW Yqrk

SCOTT AND SELTZER

1919

,C4-^

A 4^0X3-8

Copyright, 1919,
By Scott and Seltzer, Inc.

All Eights Reserved

Printed in the United States of America

^£/

V

CONTENTS

PAGE

AlBERT Rhys Williams

Introduction 9

Biographical Sketch .... 23
Ten Months with Lenin ... 43

RAYMOto Robins

Impressions, As Told to William

Hard 125

Arthur Ransome

Lenin in 1919 167

Conservative Opinions on Lenin . . 191

Two Adverse Opinions 196

Lenin. By Anise 201

LENIN

The Man and His Work

INTRODUCTION

By Albert Rhys Williams

I. The First Wild Tales About Lenin

The world knows very little of the man who
for two years has been the Premier of Russia.
The London Times says that this is due to the
natural reticence and aloofness of Lenin. "If
Lenin appears to the average Englishman as
a red-shirted, high-booted pirate-chief, the
fault is chiefly of his own making."

Hardly. Lenin is not entirely to blame.
The blockade and the British censorship have
had considerable share in it. They completely
severed Russia from the rest of the world.
Even the Associated Press could not break

9

lo INTRODUCTION

through that censorship. It has never been
accused of revolutionary leanings, but a large
percentage of its mild cable despatches were
regarded by the British as dangerous to the
American people. The British held to be
dangerous any facts that reflected favorably
on the Soviet Government or its Premier.

Consequently, in lieu of facts about Lenin
the public was served with fancies and leg-
ends by the "special correspondents" in Paris,
London, Stockholm and Copenhagan.

In one cabled despatch Lenin would appear
in the morning narrowly escaping out of the
clutch of the enemy by leaping from an ar-
mored train in Siberia, while an afternoon
despatch would reveal Lenin looking through
the bars of his Moscow prison where he had
been thrown and chained by the terrible
Trotzky. The third, not to be outdone by this
startling piece of news, would have Lenin with
portfolio under his arm walking debonairly
down the gang-plank of a Spanish steamer,

INTRODUCTION n

landing at Barcelona, Individually the cor-
respondents showed great inventive ingenuity
but collectively they failed from lack of team-
virork. They proved too much. To flit from
Siberia to Moscow and then to Spain in the
course of a few hours is more than a human
performance. Lenin's detractors endowed
him with omnipresence.

Earlier they had given him another attri-
bute of Deity — omnipotence. For they said
that Lenin through his coterie had organized
the Soviets, and with them he had distilled
poison into the minds of 15,000,000 soldiers
and disintegrated the army. Then his little
group had overthrown the Provisional Gov-
ernment and had led by the nose a nation
of 180,000,000 up to the Treaty of Brest-
Litovsk and made them sign it. Such prowess
is not of man — it is superhuman.

He also seemed to be possessed of omni-
science. There is more than a hint of it in the
pitiful plaint of one of the factions pleading

12 INTRODUCTION

against going to Prinkipo: "We can't meet
with Lenin. These Bolsheviks are clever
rascals. They know everything in politics and
economics, and they can out-talk us." Finally,
immortality was his, too. Scores of times
Lenin had been shot, yet he still lives. When
devotees in the future set out to prove Lenin a
god they will find abundant material in the
papers of the last two years.

Our own government took a hatnd in thick-
ening the fog around Lenin by loosing those
classics of official stupidity known as the
Sisson documents. It was a lunatic attempt
to prove that the world's most powerful enemy
of Junkerism, the one man who had never let
up in his war on Imperialism, was, in fact,
the chief promoter of Junkerism and Imperi-
alism — the Kaiser's own hired agent.

Then followed the stories holding Lenin up
to the reprobation of mankind as a cruel mon-
ster thirsting for the blood of the bourgeoisie,
callous' to human suffering. On the one hand

INTRODUCTION 13

the famished Russians were pictured attack-
ing with knives a horse or a dog dropped dead
upon the streets, and bearing the smoking flesh
away. On the other hand Lenin was pictured
as a Mongolian monarch in the Kremlin
surrounded by his Chinese mercenaries, liv-
ing in Asiatic splendor, his fruit-bill alone
amounting to more than 2,000 roubles a day.
As some of the truth began to filter through
the blockade these stories were too fantastic
for even a credulous public and had to be
retired.

2. Other Misleading Stories About Lenin

In their place has arisen a second series.
They come from the too facile pens of writers
like John Spargo and the Princess Radziwill.
Some are pure fabrications, others have a
basis in fact, but the venom of the writer en-
tirely discolors the portrait. They make a
show of being scientific, carrying an air of
authority, bristling with "official documents"

14 INTRODUCTION

and the statements of "revolutionary leaders."
The layman, having no way of verifying the
facts in the case, accepts these versions as
authentic. But again he has been led astray.
For example, take the man Vladimir Burt-
zev. On his statements John Spargo bases a
great part of his Saturday Evening Post arti-
cle on Lenin, while another writer hails
Burtzev as "the old-time Revolutionist, the
stern, whole-souled leader." Such a eulogy
fits Burtzev of the past, but Burtzev like many
others, when the Revolution arrived, turned
reactionary. So reactionary in fact did he
grow, so bitter did he become in his assaults
upon the Kerensky government that he was
arrested. Some time after the Bolsheviks
came into power he was released and he went
to Paris breathing out slaughter against his
releasers. There he allied himself with the
Kolchak crowd and the other reactionary
groups carrying on a campaign to destroy the
Revolution in Russia. Some of his best friends

rNTRODUCTION 15

regarded him as insane in his onslaughts upon
the revolutionary leaders. When Kerensky
was the head of the Revolution, Burtzev led
a furious attack against men like Verkhovsky,
Kerensky's Minister of War. When Lenin
became the leader of the Revolution he led an
even more venomous attack against Lenin.

In Paris, Burtzev, now blinded by rage, an
open champion of Kolchak and Denikin, as-
sembles the literary material for the assault
on Lenin. John Spargo enrolls in the mud-
slinging brigade and is duly supplied with
"facts" and "documents." Consider the long
route by which some of these "facts" have
come:

It is alleged that Lenin did something
which came to the attention of Malinovsky,
the agent provocateur. Malinovsky related
this to Beletzky, the Chief of the Czar's Se-
cret Police, imprisoned in the Fortress of
Peter and Paul. Beletzky related this to
Burtzev, now turned reactionary and im-

1 6 INTRODUCTION

prisoned in Peter and Paul. Burtzev goes
to Paris and in a mood of rage and bitterness
produces something which he said Beletzky
told him that Malinovsky told him that Le-
nin did. Spargo takes this diatribe, rewrites
it and offers it to the American public as a
true picture of Lenin. And yet along this
chain there are at least three whose testimony
would be ruled out of court as incompetent
witnesses if not plain liars.

No one would take as trustworthy evidence
the words of this notorious agent of the Czar.
If I were to believe anything that Beletzky
said about Lenin I would believe what I got
first-hand.

With two other Americans in an Investi-
gation Committee from the Petrograd City
Duma, I visited Beletzky in his cell in Peter
and Paul in December, 1917. For an hour I
listened, while he discoursed on revolutionists
he had known. With a sneer in his voice
and a leer in his eye he descanted on the

INTRODUCTION 17

venality of this one and the weakness of that
one. Pretending to no ideals himself, he took
great delight in pointing out the black and
yellow spots upon these idealists supposed to
be all white. One after another he be-
smirched them, telling how this one had
taken German money and the other one had
proven a coward in a crisis. Then we brought
up the name of Lenin. A complete change
came over the face of the grizzled old wolf,
the sneer went out of his voice, the leer left
his eyes. Very quietly he said, "Lenin! A
true revolutionist! An honest man!"

'3. Authors' Close Acquaintance With Lenin

To turn from these fanciful stories of Lenin
to the shortcomings of the present volume.
It is unfinished. It makes no pretense of
being a full survey of Lenin and his work.
That can be made only in the perspective of
history, and Lenin is still making history.

1 8 INTRODUCTION

But the glimpse it offers of the man and his
work is, it is hoped, not without interest and
significance.

It shows Lenin in action, hard at work in
the vortex of the Revolution. It records the
impression made upon three foreigners who
came into close relations with him. They
have very distinct advantages over any others
who have written about Lenin. Nearly all the
writers in the class mentioned above never
spoke with Lenin, never heard him, never
saw him, never came within a thousand miles
of him. They have woven a great part of their
stories out of rumor, phantasies and pure
fiction.

In this book the three men met Lenin,
heard him speak, or talked with him person-
ally week after week through the critical
months of the Revolution.

Colonel Raymond Robins, head of the
American Red Cross Mission went to Lenin
as a diplomat. He probably saw more of Le-

INTRODUCTION 19

nin than all the foreign diplomats of all the
other Allied countries combined.

Arthur Ransome went to Lenin as a jour-
nalist. Knowing the language and the peo-
ple, he had a remarkable background for un-
derstanding the Revolution and its leader.
He told me that he had performed the not
inconsiderable task of reading all of Lenin's
numerous volumes.

For myself, I came to Lenin as a Social-
ist from America. I rode on the same train
with him, talked from the same platform, and
lived with him in the National Hotel at Mos-
cow for two months. In this book I give a
series of contacts I had with him during the
Revolution.

Acknowledgment goes to the editors of
"Asia for the use of my article published in
their August number. For the right to re-
produce Arthur Ransome's material on Lenin
I am indebted to B. W. Huebsch. It is but
a few pages from that excellent book, "Rus-

20 INTRODUCTION

sia in 1919." For the right to reproduce
Raymond Robins' material I am indebted to
Mr. William Hard and to Mr. Carl Hovey,
editors of the Metropolitan. The significant
articles which appeared in that magazine are
to be published by Harper & Brothers, under
the title "Raymond Robins' Own Story." It
is a book that no one who wishes to under-
stand the Russian situation can afford to miss.
It is not only of the greatest permanent historic
value, but is throughout as vivid, dramatic
and as vital in its content as is the sketch of
Lenin in this book.

The facts for the outline of Lenin's life were
obtained from the archives of the Moscow
Okhrana. These archives of the Czar's Se-
cret Police furnish authoritative records of
the Russian revolutionists. The account of
the execution of Lenin's brother is taken from
"Russia's Ruin" by E. H. Wilcox.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

By Albert Rhys Williams

I. His Early Days and Education

The real name of the Premier of Russia
is not Nikolai Lenin but Vladimir Ilyich
Ulianov. He was born April lo, 1870, in
Simbirsk, a province on the great river afifec-
tionately referred to by the Russians as the
Mother Volga.

In some accounts he is the "son of a peas-
ant" ; in others he is the "son of a noblfeman."
Both statements are correct.

In old Russia a man who became a senior
captain in the navy, a colonel in the army or
a Councillor of State in the Civil Service au-

23

24 LENIN

tomatically attained the rank of the nobility.
Lenin's father came from peasant stock and
rose to the position of Councillor of State.
So Lenin is referred to as the "son of a peas-
ant" or the "son of a nobleman" according to
the animus of the writer. Lenin's mother,
Maria Alexandrovna, had a small estate in
the Province of Kazan, and after her hus-
band's death was in receipt of a pension.

His father was master in a gymnasium and
then inspector of schools. An enthusiast for
education, he was everywhere fostering and
encouraging intellectual interests. In his five
children, three boys and two girls, he met with
a wonderful response. Their home became a
little university in itself, in which all were
devoted to art and music and science and
literature. This community of interest begot
a warm and close family spirit. All the
brothers and sisters were deeply attached to
one another and to their parents.

Sensitive to the things of the mind, they

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 25

became likewise increasingly sensitive to the
sufferings of the great masses. The beauty
and interest of their own home life was such
a contrast to the dullness and misery of the
life of the millions around them groaning
under the tyranny of Czardom. The joy in
their own liberty was sullied always by the
constant spectacle of slavery in the masses.
Along with their passion for knowledge they
began to develop an increasing passion for
the people. One after another they committed
themselves to the task of liberation and edu-
cation of the workers and peasants.

2. The Execution of Lenin's Brother

On May 20, 1886, occurred a tragedy which
is said to have made a profound impression
on Lenin. His brother Alexander was hanged
in the courtyard of the Schliisselburg Bas-
tile.

This brother was a young man of rare mind

26 LENIN

and character. He was a dreamer, a lover of
music, often wandering through the woods or
drifting iri his boat down the Volga. He was
also a hard worker and a brilliant student, al-
ways at the head of his class and winning the
gold medal of the gymnasium.

With his sister Anna he went to the Uni-
versity of St. Petersburgh. There he labored
with extraordinary intensity, attending lec-
tures, working in the laboratory, writing an
essay on the visual organs of worms, winning
a prize in zoology, devouring books on social
sciences, drawing up a Party program, trans-
lating a work on the philosophy of Marx, or-
ganizing societies, agitating among the dOck-
laborers, helping poor students, even to the
pawning of his gold medal. And his regret
was that he could work but sixteen hours a
day.

All the time his rebellion against the tyranny
of the Czar was growing. Outrage after out-
rage drove him nearer to the camp of the

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 27

revolutionists. He organized a procession to
pay honors to the grave of the poet Dobroliu-
bov, but it was broken up on the Nevsky by a
patrol of Cossacks and many students were
arrested. Alexander thereupon joined "The
People's Will," an association of terrorists.
Their plot upon the Czar was discovered by
the secret police and fifteen members were put
on trial.

"At his trial," Wilcox says, "Alexander re-
fused legal aid and denied nothing that was
said against him. Indeed, his chief desire
seemed to be to shield those implicated with
him. The Crown Counsel said of him, 'He
admits himself guilty of everything, probably
of what he did not do as well as what he did.'
It is said that by thus taking blame of others
on himself, he saved the life of one of his fel-
low-conspirators. In his speech to the Court
he declared his conviction that, in the con-
ditions then existing in Russia, the Terror was
the only possible method of political struggle.

28 LENIN

When the names of the five condemned to
death were read, Alexander Ilyich Ulianov
was among them.

"While awaiting execution, his mother
was allowed to visit him. The first time
she came to see him he flung himself at
her feet in tears and implored her to forgive
him for the sorrow he had caused her. But
he tried to prove to her that a man had higher
duties than those that he owed to his parents,
and that in Russia one of those duties was to
fight for the political emancipation of the
whole people. When she objected that his
methods were terrible, he replied : 'But what
is one to do if there are no others?' His
mother entreated him to petition for mercy;
but this he steadfastly refused to do, saying
that it would be insincere. 'I have tried to kill
a human being,' he said, 'and therefore they
must kill me.'

"He showed great anxiety that all his out-
standing obligations, even the most trifling

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 29

ones, should be wiped out before he parted
from life. Remembering that he owed an ac-
quaintance thirty roubles, he asked his mother
to redeem his gold medal and sell it to satisfy
his debt. He also asked her to return to their
owners certain borrowed books that were in
his keeping. In his efforts to console her he
reminded her that she would still have her
other children, and especially the boy and girl
who came after him and who had both just
finished their school courses with as much dis-
tinction as he himself. And in this spirit he
died on the Schliisselburg gallows. v

"The brother whom Alexander designated
as his mother's comforter is the present Pre-
mier of Russia, at that time seventeen years of
age."

J. Lenin as Student, Organizer and Exile
in Siberia

Lenin attended the Simbirsk Gymnasium,
whose master was Feodor Kerensky, the father

30 LENIN

of Alexander Kerensky, the Minister-Presi-
dent of the Provisional Government. It
doubtless never entered the head of this pro-
vincial schoolmaster that his own son Alex-
ander Kerensky was to rise to the highest post
in all Russia. Nor in his wildest dreams
could he have seen that this young member of
the Ulianov family, this quiet, serious lad,
would some day become Lenin, the man of
iron will, the man who was to rise and take
the power from his son and with iron nerve
guide the destinies of Great Russia against a
world of enemies.

After graduating from the Simbirsk Gym-
nasium Lenin entered the University of Ka-
zan. His career here was short. He was
expelled for preaching Socialism and taking
part in a student rebellion. Later he was ad-
mitted to the bar, but pleaded only one case.

In 1 89 1 he turned from the provinces to
the great metropolis upon the Neva. While
studying law and economics at the University

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 31

of Petersburgh he published a remarkable
treatise upon Marxism which immediately
established him as an authority. Plekhanov,
the Father of Russian Socialism, on reading
his manuscript, said, "Some day this young
man will be dangerous." That was a pro-
phetic word. About fifteen years later Lenin
took the leadership of the Social-Democratic
Party from the old veteran's hand and twenty-
five years later ousted him from the Great
Soviet Congress.

But the Russian authorities right then, in
1 89 1, thought him a very dangerous person-
age. For from the beginning he was as ar-
dent in life as in theory and plunged deep
into the activities of the Socialist movement.
Organizing the Union for the Liberation of
the Artizan Class, he became a prominent
workingmen's leader.

But he took no lead in terrorist plots as had
his brother Alexander, but devoted himself
to instructing the workers in politics and eco-

32 LENIN

nomics. But to the Czar any champion of
the people was perforce an enemy of the gov-
ernment. Its heavy fist at last came down on
Lenin. He was arrested, and by Imperial
ukase, on January 29, 1897, was exiled to
Eastern Siberia.

With thousands of others, bravest and best
of the children of Russia, he took the long
trail that reaches out across the vast wastes of
Asia. However, he did not let Siberia mean
to him simply silence, snow and stagnation.
It meant to him a rich opportunity to think
and to study. In the village of Sushenskoy he
gave himself to incessant work with brain and
pen. Out of this came numerous works which
appeared over the names of "Ilyich," "Ilin,"
"Tylin" and "Lenin."

5. A. Propagandist and Organizer in Europe

On the expiration of his sentence he was
forbidden to reside in any of the large cities,

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 33

factory centers or university towns of Russia.
So he slipped away from Russia and began
his new career in Western Europe. With
Plekhanov, Martov, Axelrod and Zasulich, he
founded the paper Iskra, which soon became
the active center for all the Russian Socialists
in exile. In this circle of ardent revolution-
ists Lenin developed his organizing ability.
To this center came all the young people who
wished to study to fit themselves for the work
of liberation. From this center went out all
the propaganda for the transformation of
Russia.

Tracked by all the European police in the
service of the Okhrana, Lenin lived succes-
sively in Munich, Brussels, Paris, London
and Geneva, which he made his permanent
home. His wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, was
secretary of the Party. She almost ruined her
health by the exhausting work of copying
messages in cipher, all written out in invisible
chemical ink.

34 LENIN

6. Lenin Becomes Leader of the Bolsheviks

The Russian Social-Democratic Party was
organized in 1898. At the Second Congress
held at Brussels and London in 1903 came the
famous breach in the Party. Lenin fought
for a centralized party with a central body di-
recting all activities. On this and other
points he was bitterly opposed by a determined
minority. Agreement was impossible, and the
congress split into two factions : the Menshe-
viki, which means literally "members of the
minority," and the Bolsheviki, "members of
the majority." (It must be remembered that
to-day there is no such party in Russia as a
Bolshevik party. In 191 8 the name of the
party was officially changed to Communist.
In this book the two names are used inter-
changeably.)

Lenin became the leader of the Bolsheviks.
All the old-time celebrities, including Plekha-
nov, voted with him. Afterwards they went

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 35

over to the Mensheviks and became his an-
tagonists. Although alone in a strange land,
without a paper, with no means of action,
Lenin did not lose courage. He published a
book called "Economic Studies," which had
a large success in Russia. With the money
which this book brought him and with the
help of Lunacharsky, Bogdanov and Vorovsky
he founded a new paper. Forward.

At the congress of 1904, when the revolu-
tionary movement was re-awakening in Rus-
sia, Lenin introduced all the questions which
he was to solve later as chief of the Soviet
government — dictatorship of the proletariat,
confiscation of capitalist property, the devel-
opnient of revolutionary action even to Jts ex-
treme limits, preparation of the Russian
^evoiution_asa_£r elude to theJLiteraational
Socialist Revolution.

In 1905, when the first Russian Revolution
broke out, Lenin, receiving amnesty, returned
to his country. When the forces of reaction

36 LENIN

were again in the saddle he fled to Finland
(1906), then to Switzerland (1907), and to
Paris (1908). He brought out two papers,
The Social Democrat, a propaganda paper,
and The Proletariat, a more theoretical jour-
nal. He settled with his co-workers at Cra-
cow, near the Russian frontier, where he
could keep in touch with the revolutionists
and direct their movements.

7. Lenin As a Scholar and Author

Besides these propaganda activities Lenin
did a man's work in many other fields. Wil-
cox, the English writer, says of him, "Like
Karl Marx, he was never happier than when
exploring the treasures of the British Mu-
seum. This institution, one of his friends has
told us, he regarded with enthusiastic admira-
tion. His eyes always shone when he spoke
of it, and it was his fondest dream to live near
it. It was here that he found his favorite
recreation."

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 37

He made an excellent translation of Sidney
and Beatrice Webb's "Industrial Democra-
cy." His own original works may be num-
bered by the score. The following are im-
portant:

"Development of Capitalism in Russia,"
"Economic Sketches and Essays," "What Is
To Be done? The Painful Problems of Our
Movement," "One Step Forward, Two Steps
Backward: The Crisis in Our Party,"
"Twelve Years: Two Trends in Russian
'Marxism; The Agrarian Problem," "Materi-
alism and Empiro criticism: Critical Remarks
to a Reactionary Philosophy," "Imperialism
as the Last Stage of Capitalism," "The State
and Revolution."

Unfortunately at the present time there are
very few translations of Lenin's works in
English. A number of his recent speeches
and papers have been gathered into a well-
edited volume, entitled "The Proletarian
Revolution," ^\xh\nhc& by The Communist

38 LENIN

Press, New York. A pamphlet called "The
Soviets at Work," published by the Rand
School, New York, gives an insight into the
constructive genius of Lenin's mind.

8. His Return to Russia Through Germany

The outbreak of the great war found Lenin
in Austria trying to stir the workers to rebel-
lion. He was imprisoned but released, thanks
to the action of the French Socialists. He re-
turned to Switzerland, and there took up the
fight for peace and the International. He
took a very active part in the organization of
the Zimmerwald Conference. In April-May,
1917, after the fall of Czarism, he wished to
return to Russia. The Allied governments
opposed this. He then accepted the proposals
of the Swiss Socialist Party. The Federal
Councillor Platen and others made the neces-
sary plans, and he was allowed to pass through
Germany accompanied by one hundred revo-

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 39

lutionists of all factions. This fact has been
cited as proof that the Bolsheviks were Ger-
man agents. It should be remembered that in
this same train went scores of Socialist Revo-
' lutionists and Mensheviks, notably Axelrod
and Martov, the bitter opponents of Lenin
and the Bolsheviks. On his arrival at Petro-
grad, the people, the army and the navy gave
him a triumphal reception.

From that time the story of Lenin blends
with that of the Russian Revolution itself.

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN
By Albert Rhys Williams

/. Young Disciples of Lenin

I SAW Lenin first not in the flesh but in the
minds and spirits of five young Russian work-
ingmen. They were part of the great tide of
exiles flowing back into Petrograd in the
summer of 19 17.

Americans were drawn to them by their
energy, intelligence and their knowledge of
English. They soon informed us that they
were Bolsheviks. "They certainly don't look
it," said an American. For a time he would
not believe it. He had seen in the paper the
picture of the Bolsheviks as long-bearded,

43

44 LENIN

ignorant, indolent ruffians. And these men
were clean-shaven, polite, humorous, amiable
and alert. They were not afraid of responsi-
bility, not afraid to die, and most marvellous
of all in Russia, not afraid to work. And
they were Bolsheviks.

Woskov hailed from New York, where he
had been the organizer of the Carpenters' and
Joiners' Union, Number 1008. Yanishev, a
mechanic, the son of a village priest, bore on
his body the marks of labor in mines and mills
all around the world. Niebut, an artizan, al-
ways carried a pack of books and was always
enthusiastic over his latest find. Volodarsky,
working day and night like a galley slave, said
to me a few weeks before he was assassinated,
"Oh, what of it! Supposing they do get me!
I have had more joy working these last six
months than any five men ought to have in all
their lives." Peters, a foreman, who later
appeared in the press reports as a bloody
tyrant signing death-warrants until his fingers

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 45

could no longer hold the pen, was often sigh-
ing for his English rose-garden and the poems
of Nekrasov.

These men quietly assured us that, in brains
and character, Lenin led not only all the Bol-
sheviks, but everybody else in Russia, in Eu-
rope and in all the world.

For us who daily read in the papers of
Lenin, the German agent, and daily heard the
bourgeoisie outlaw him as a scoundrel, a
traitor, and an imbecile, this was indeed
strange doctrine. It sounded fantastic and fa-
natical. But these men were neither fools nor
sentimentalists. Knocking about the world
had hammered all that out of them. Nor were
these men hero-worshippers. The Bolshevik
movement was elemental and passionate, but
it was scientific, realistic, and uncongenial to
hero-worship. Yet here was this quintette of
Bolsheviks declaring that there was one Rus-
sian, great in integrity and in intelligence, and
his name was Nikolai Lenin, at that time an

4.6 LENIN

v^atlaw hunted by the Provisional Govern-
ment.

The more we saw of these young zealots
the more we desired to see the man they ack-
nowledged as their master. Would they take
us to his hiding-place?

"Wait a little while," they would reply,
laughing, "then you shall see him."

Impatiently we waited through the summer
and into the fall of 191 7, watching the Ker-
ensky Government grow weaker and weaker.
On November 7 the Bolsheviks pronounced it
dead and at the same time proclaimed Russia
to be a Republic of Soviets with Lenin as its
Premier.

2. First Impression of Lenin

While a tumultuous, singing throng of
peasants and soldiers, flushed with the triumph
of their revolution, jammed the great hall at
Smolny, while the guns of the Aurora were

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 47

heralding the death of the old order and the
birth of the new, Lenin quietly stepped upon
the tribunal and the Chairman announced,
"Comrade Lenin will now address the Con-
gress."

We strained to see whether he would meet
our image of him, but from our seats at the
reporters' table he was at first invisible.
Amidst loud cries, cheers, whistles and stamp-
ing of feet he crossed the platform, the demon-
stration rising to a climax as he stepped upon
the speaker's rostrum, not more than thirty
feet away. Now we saw him clearly and our
hearts fell.

He was almost the opposite of what we
had pictured him. Instead of looming up
large and impressive he appeared short and
stocky. His beard and hair were rough and
unkempt.

After stilling the tornado of applause he
said, "Comrades, we shall now take up the
formation of the Socialist State," Then he

48 LENIN

went into an unimpassioned, matter-of-fact
discussion. In his voice there was a harsh,
dry note rather than eloquence. Thrusting
his thumbs in his vest at the arm-pits, he
rocked back and forth on his heels. For an
hour we listened, hoping to discern the hid-
den magnetic qualities which would account
for his hold on these free, young, sturdy spir-
its. But in vain.

We were disappointed. The Bolsheviks
by their sweep and daring had captured our
imaginations; we expected their leader to do
likewise. We wanted the head of this party
to come before us, the embodiment of these
qualities, an epitome of the whole movement,
a sort of super-Bolshevik. Instead of that,
there he was, looking like a Menshevik, and
a very small one at that.

"If he were spruced up a bit you would
take him for a bourgeois mayor or banker of
a small French city," whispered Julius West,
the English correspondent.

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 49

"Yes, a rather little man for a rather big
job," drawled his companion.

We knew how heavy was the burden that
the Bolsheviks had taken up. Would they be
able to carry it? At the outset, their leader
did not strike us as a strong man.

So much for a first impression. Yet, start-
ing from that first adverse estimate, I found
myself six months later in the camp of Wos-
kov, Niebut, Peters, Volodarsky and Yani-
shev, to whom the first man and statesman of
Europe was Nikolai Lenin.

'^. Lenin Injects Iron Discipline into the
State Life

On November 9th I desired a pass to ac-
company the Red Guards then streaming out
along all roads to fight the Cossacks and the
counter- revolutionists. I presented my cre-
dentials bearing the signature of Hillquit and
Huysmans. I thought they were a very im-

so LENIN

posing set of credentials. But Lenin didn't.
Quite as if they came from the Union League
Club, he handed them back with a laconic,
"No." ^

This was a trivial incident, but indicative
of a new, rigorous attitude now appearing in
the councils of the proletarians. Hitherto, to
their own destruction, the masses had been in-
dulging their excessive amiability and good
nature. Lenin set out for discipline. He
knew that only strong, stern action could save
the Revolution, menaced by hunger, invasion
and reaction. So the Bolsheviks drove their
measures through without ruth or hesitation,
while their enemies ransacked the arsenals of
invective for epithets to assail them. To the
bourgeoisie Lenin was the high-handed, iron-
fisted one. At this period they referred to
him not as Premier Lenin, but as "the Tyrant
Lenin," "Lenin the Dictator." And the Right
Socialists said, the old Romanov Tsar, Nicho-
las II, has given place to the new Tsar, Niko-

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 51

lai Lenin, and in derision shouted, "Long
live our new Tsar Nicholas III!"

They seized with joy upon the humorous
incident of the peasant. It was the night
when the Soviet of Peasants' Deputies, throw-
ing its support to the new Soviet government,
celebrated with a glorified love-feast in the
halls of Smolny. The intelligentzia had
spoken for the village; there was a demand
that the village should speak for itself. An
old fellow in peasant's smock came to the plat-
form. His face showed rosy through his
white beard ; he had twinkling eyes, and spoke
in the village dialect.

"Tovarishchi, how happy I was tonight as
we came here with banners flying and mu-
sic playing. I didn't come walking on the
ground. I came flying through the air. I am
one of the dark people, living in a dark vil-
lage. You gave us the light. But we don't
understand it all, so they sent me here to find
out. But, Tovarishchi, we are all very happy

52 LENIN

over the wonderful change. In the old days
the chinovniki used to be very hard and beat
us, but now they are very polite. In the old
days we could only look at the outsides of the
palaces, now we can walk right inside them.
In the old days we only talked about the Tsar,
but they tell us now, Tovarishchi, tomorrow
I can shake hands with Tsar Lenin himself.
God grant him long life!"

The audience exploded. Astounded at the
roars of laughter and applause, the old peas-
ant sat down. But the next day he was pre-
sented to Lenin, and later was the peasants'
representative at Brest-Litovsk.

During these chaotic weeks only iron will
and iron nerve would suffice. Rigid order
and discipline were evident in all depart-
ments. One could note the stififening of the
morale of the workingman, a tightening up of
the loose parts in the Soviet machinery. Now
when the Soviet moved out into action, as for
example in the seizure of the banking sys-

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 53

tem, it struck hard and effectively. Lenin
knew where to be precipitate in action, but he
knew also where to go slow. A delegation
of workingmen came to Lenin asking him if
he could decree the nationalization of their
factory.

"Yes," said Lenin, picking up a blank form,
"it is a very simple thing, my part of it. AW
I have to do is to take these blanks and fill in
the name of your factory in this space here,
and then sign my name in this space here, and
the name of the commissar here." The work-
men were highly gratified and pronounced it
"very good."

"But before I sign this blank," resumed
Lenin, "I must ask you a few questions.
First, do you know where to get the raw ma-
terials for your factory?" Reluctantly they
admitted they didn't.

"Do you understand the keeping of ac-
counts," resumed Lenin, "and have you
worked out a method for keeping up produc-

54 LENIN

tion?" The workmen said they were afraid
they did not know very much about these
minor matters.

"And finally, comrades," continued Lenin,
"may I ask you whether you have found a
market in which to sell your products?"

Again they answered, "No."

"Well, comrades," said the Premier, "don't
you think you are not ready to take over your
factory now? Go back home and work over
these matters. You will find it hard; you
will make many blunders, but you will learn.
Then come back in a few months and we can
take up the nationalizing of your factory."

4. Iron Discipline in Lenin's Personal Life

The same iron that Lenin was injecting into
the social life he showed in his individual
life. Shchi and horshch, slabs of black bread,
tea and porridge made up the fare of the
Smolny crowds. It was likewise the usual
fare of Lenin, his wife and sister. For twelve

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 55

and fifteen hours a day the revolutionists
stuck to their posts. Eighteen and twenty
hours was the regular stint for Lenin. In his
own hand he wrote hundreds of letters. Im-
mersed in his work, he was dead to every-
thing, even his own sustenance. Grasping her
opportunity when Lenin was engaged in con-
versation his wife would appear with a glass
of tea, saying, "Here, tovarishch, you must
not forget to drink this." Often the tea was
sugarless, for Lenin went on the same ration
as the rest of the population. The soldiers
and messengers slept on iron cots in the big,
bare, barrack-like rooms. So did Lenin and
his wife. Wearied, they flung themselves
down on their rough couches, oftentimes with-
out undressing, ready to rise to any emer-
gency. Lenin did not take upon himself these
privations out of any ascetic impulses. He was
simply putting into practise the first princi-
ple of Communism.

One of these principles was that the pay

56 LENIN

of any Communist ofRcial should be no larger
than the pay of an average workingman. It
was fixed at a maximum of 600 rubles a
month. Later there was an increase. As it
is to-day, the Premier of Russia receives less
than $200 a month.

I was in the National Hotel when Lenin
took a room on the second floor. The first
act of the new Soviet regime was the abolition
of the elaborate and expensive menus. The
many dishes that comprised a meal were cut
down to two. One could have soup and meat
or soup and kasha. And that is all that any-
one, whether Chief Commissar or kitchen-
boy, could have, for it is written in the creed
of the Communists that "No one shall have
cake until everybody has bread." On some
days there was very little even of bread for
the people. Still each person got just as much
as Lenin. Occasionally there were days with-
out any bread at all. Those days, too, were
breadless days for him.

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 57

When Lenin was near death in the days fol-
lowing the attempt upon his life, the physi-
cians prescribed some food not obtainable on
the regular food-card and which could be
bought only in the market from some specu-
lator. In spite of all the entreaties of his
friends, he refused to touch anything which
was not part of the legitimate ration.

Later when Lenin was convalescing his
wife and sister hit upon a scheme for increas-
ing his nutriment. Finding that he kept his
bread in a drawer, in his absence they slipped
into his room and now and then added a piece
to his store. Absorbed in his work, Lenin
would reach into the drawer and take a bit,
which he ate quite unconscious that it was any
addition to the regular ration.

In a letter to the workers of Europe and
America, Lenin wrote: "Never have the
Russian masses suffered such depths of mis-
ery, such pangs of hunger as those to which
they are now condemned by the military in-

58 LENIN

tervention of the Entente!" But these same
sufferings Lenin was enduring along with the
masses about whom he writes.

Lenin has been accused of gambling with
the life of a great nation, an experimentalist
recklessly trying out his communistic formu-
las upon the sick body of Russia. But he
cannot be accused of lack of faith in those
formulas. He not only tries them on Russia,
He tries them on himself. He is willing to
take his own medicine. To pay homage to
the doctrines of Communism from a distance
is one thing. To endure, as does Lenin, the
privations and rigors that the introduction of
Communism entails on the spot is a vastly dif-
ferent thing.

Starting a communistic state should not,
however, be portrayed entirely in sombre col-
ors. In the darkest days in Russia, art and
the opera flourished. Romance, too, played
its part. It touched even the chief characters
of the revolutionary stage. We were as-

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 59

tounded to find one morning that the versatile
Kollontay had married the sailor Dybenko.
Later, for ordering a retreat before the Ger-
mans at Narva, he came under censure. In
disgrace he was expelled from office and
party, Lenin approving and Kollontay natu-
rally resentful.

Talking with her at this juncture I suggest-
ed that Lenin might have gone the way of all
flesh, the poison of power entering his veins
and inflating his ego. "Bitter as I feel now,"
she answered, "I couldn't think of imputing
any action of his to personal motives. No one
of the comrades who had worked with Com-
rade Lenin for ten years could believe that
there was a single drop of selfishness in
him."

5. Practise of Communism Rallies the
People to the Soviet

Lenin was of course pictured in the bour-
geois press as the opposite of this. A fiend

6o LENIN

incarnate, a selfish, grasping monster. But
gradually the real Lenin emerged from this
shroud of lies. And as the news spread
through Russia that Lenin and his colleagues
were taking pot-luck with the people, the
masses rallied around them.

The miner in the Urals, inclined to grum-
ble at his meagre ration, remembers that each
one draws alike from the common store of
food and clothes and shelter. Why, then,
should he grumble at his morsel of black
bread? At any rate it is as large as Lenin's.
The rankling pangs of injustice are not added
to the pangs of hunger.

The peasant wife shivering in the icy blasts
that sweep off the Volga knows little of the
man who has taken the place of the Czar,
But she hears that he often has an unheated
room. Now though she suffers from the cold
she does not suffer from the inequalities of
life.

The engineer at Nizhni, finding the six

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 6i

hundred rubles in the pay-envelope woefully
inadequate to cover the needs of his family,
begins to be bitter. Then he recollects that
the man in the Kremlin draws no more. That
helps to take the rancor away.

The Soviet soldier facing the drum-fire of
the Allied guns knows that Lenin is also on
the firing line though he is in the rear. For
danger, like everything else in Russia, has
been socialized. No one is immune from it.
The percentage of Soviet leaders killed and
wounded at the front. Uritzky, Volardsky
percentage of Soviet soldiers killed and
wounded at the front. Uritsky, Voladarsky
and scores of others have been assassinated
while Lenin's body has twice stopped the as-
sassin's bullets. To the Red Soldier Lenin
then is not someone aloof from the fray, but
a comrade-in-arms sharing the risks and
hardships of the campaign.

The American Mission to Russia report by
Bullitt says :

62 LENIN

"Lenin today is regarded as almost a
prophet. His picture, usually accompanied
by Karl Marx's, hangs everywhere. When I
called on Lenin at the Kremlin I had to wait
a few minutes until a delegation of peasants
left his room. They had heard in their vil-
lage that Comrade Lenin was hungry. And
they had come hundreds of miles carrying
eight hundred puds of bread as the gift of
the -village to Lenin. Just before them was
another delegation of peasants to whom the
report had come that Comrade Lenin was
working in an unheated room. They came
bearing a stove and enough firewood to heat it
for three months. Lenin is the only leader
who receives such gifts. And he turns them
into the common fund."

Sharing alike in the common wealth and
the common dearth created a common bond of
sympathy running from Premier to poorest
peasant, bringing to the Soviet leaders the in-
creasing support of the people.

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 63

6. Practice of Communism Gives Lenin
the Pulse of the People

Living so close to the people, the Communist
leaders knew the ebb and flow of popular
feeling.

Lenin did not need to send out a commis-
sion to discover the sentiments and psychology
of the people. A man going without food
doesn't have to speculate upon the mood of a
hungry man. He knows. Hungering with
the people, freezing with the people, Lenin
was feeling their feelings, thinking their
thoughts, and voicing their desires.

Now this is precisely the way in which the
Communist Party claims to function — as an
instrument directly reflecting the thoughts of
the masses and as a mouthpiece articulating
them.

The Communists say: "We did not cre-
ate the Soviets. They sprang out of the
life of the people. We did not hatch up some

64 LENIN

program in our brains and then take it out
and superimpose it upon the people. Rather
we took our program directly from the peo-
ple themselves. They were demanding 'Land
to the Peasants,' 'Factories to the Workers,'
and 'Peace to All the World.' We wrote these
slogans upon our banners and with them
marched into power. Our strength lies in our
understanding of the people. In fact, we do
not need to understand the people. We
are the people." This was certainly true
of the rank and file of the leaders, who,
like the five young Communists we first met
in Petrograd, were flesh and bone of the
people.

But intellectuals like Lenin — ^how can they
speak for the people? How can they under-
stand the hearts and minds of the masses? The
answer is that they never can. That is cer-
tain. But it is equally certain, as Tolstoy
showed, that he who lives the life of the peo-
ple gets closer than he who holds himself

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 65

aloof from their struggles. So Lenin had one
great advantage over his opponents. He did
not have to guess about the feelings of the
Ural miner, the Volga peasant or the Soviet
soldier. He knew them, approximately, at
any rate. For their experiences were his ex-
periences. So while his opponents were
fumbling in the dark, Lenin drove ahead with
the assurance of the man who knows his
ground.

This practice of communism by the Soviet
leaders is one of the powerful factors in ral-
lying strength to the Soviet government. Out-
side Russia this fact has been passed over, or
it has been minimized. Lenin, however, did
not minimize it. He held it to be essential in
the Soviet system. In the vortex of events he
took time to write, in the "State and Revolu-
tion," an exposition upon the practice of com-
munism as the true road for proletarian
statesmen to take. It is a hard road. There
are few that follow in it.

66 LENIN

J. Lenin in Public Address

Despite these rigors and the drain of this
day and night ordeal, Lenin appeared con-
stantly upon the platform, concise, alert, diag-
nosing the conditions, prescribing the reme-
dies, and sending his listeners into action to
administer them. Observers have wondered
at the enthusiasm which Lenin's addresses
roused in the uneducated class. While his
speeches were swift and fluent and crowded
with facts, they were generally as unpictu-
resque and unromantic as his platform ap-
pearance. They demanded sustained thought
and were just the opposite of Kerensky's.
Kerensky was a romantic figure, an eloquent
orator, with all those arts and passions which
should have swayed, one would think, "the ig-
norant and illiterate Russians." But they were
not swayed by him. Here is another Russian
anomaly. The masses listened to the flashing
sentences and magnificent periods of this bril-

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 67

liant platform orator. Then they turned
around and gave their allegiance to Lenin, the
scholar, the man of logic, of measured thought
and academic utterance.

Lenin is a master of dialectics and polem-
ics, aggravatingly self-possessed in debate.
And in debate he is at his best. Olgin says:
"Lenin does not reply to an opponent. He
vivisects him. He is as keen as the edge of a
razor. His mind works with an amazing
acuteness. He notices every flaw in the line of
argument. He disagrees with, and he draws
the most absurd conclusions from, premises
unacceptable to him. At the same time he is
derisive. He ridicules his opponent. He cas-
tigates him. He makes you feel that his vic-
tim is an ignoramus, a fool, a presumptuous
nonentity. You are swept by the power of his
logic. You are overwhelmed by his intellec-
tual passion."

Occasionally he relieves the march of his
argument by a bit of humor or a stinging re-

68 LENIN

tort as: "Comrade Karellin's queries remind
me of the adage, 'One fool can ask more ques-
tions than ten wise men can answer.' " Again,
when Radek, the Bolshevik journalist, turned
once on Lenin saying, "If there were five
hundred brave men in Petrograd we would
send you to jail," Lenin quietly replied,
"Some comrades indeed may go to jail, but
if you will calculate the probabilities you
will see that it is more likely that I will send
you than you me." Occasionally he would
bring in a homely incident illustrating the
new order: the old peasant woman gathering
firewood in the landlord's forest with the sol-
dier of the new day acting as her protector
instead of her persecutor.

Under suffering and the stress of events the
fire and passion which lies in the man seemed
to have broken through the usual reserve. A
recent observer says that in a great meeting
Lenin began with sentences somewhat halting
and heavy, but as he got under way he spoke

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 69

more clearly. He became fluent and viva-
cious, without much external effort but with
an increasing internal agitation that was more
and more effective. "A sort of controlled
pathos pervaded his soul. He used many
gestures and kept walking a few steps back-
ward and forward. Remarkably deep and ir-
regular wrinkles formed upon his brow, giv-
ing evidence of an intensive pondering, an al-
most tormenting labor of intellect." Lenin
aimed primarily at the intellect, not at the
emotions. Yet in the response of his audience
one could see the emotional power of sheer
intellectuality.

Only once did I see him miss fire. That
was at the Mikhailovsky Manege, in De-
cember, when the first detachment of the new
Red Army was leaving for the front. Flar-
ing torches lit up the vast interior, turning the
long lines of armoured cars into a group
of strange primeval monsters. Swarming
through the great arena and clambering over

70 LENIN

the cars were the dark figures of the new re-
cruits, poorly equipped in arms, but strong
in revolutionary ardor. To keep warm they
danced and stamped their feet and to keep
good cheer they sang their revolutionary
hymns and the folksongs of the villages.

A great shout announced the arrival of
Lenin. He mounted one of the big cars and
began speaking. In the half darkness the
throngs looked up and listened attentively.
But they did not kindle to his words. He fin-
ished amidst an applause that was far from
the customary ovation. His speech that day
was too casual to meet the mood of men going
out to die. The ideas were commonplace and
the expressions trite. There was reason
enough for this deadness — overwork, preoc-
cupation. But the fact remained. Lenin had
met a significant occasion with an insignifi-
cant speech. And these workmen felt it.
The Russian proletarians are not blind hero-
worshippers. One cannot long capitalize

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 71

one's past exploits and prestige, as the Grand-
father and the Grandmother of the Revolu-
tion discovered. If one did not acquit oneself
like a hero now, one did not get the hero's
meed of plaudits.

When Lenin stepped down, Podvoisky an-
nounced, "An American comrade to address
you." The crowd pricked up its ears and I
climbed upon the big car.

"Oh, good. You speak in English," said
Lenin. "Allow me to be your interpreter."

"No, I shall speak in Russian," I answered,
prompted by some reckless impulse.

Lenin watched me with eyes twinkling, as
if anticipating entertainment. It was not long
in coming. After using up the first run of
predigested sentences that I always carried in
stock, I hesitated, and stopped. I had diffi-
culty in getting the language started up again.
No matter what a foreigner does to their
tongue, the Russians are polite and charitable.
They appreciate the novice's effort, if not his

72 LENIN

technic. So my speech was punctured with
long periods of applause which gave me each
time a breathing spell in which to assemble
more words for another short advance. I
wanted to tell them that if a great crisis came
I should myself be glad to enlist in the ranks
of the Red Army. I paused, fumbling for a
word. Lenin looked up and asked, "What
word do you want?" "Enlist," I answered.
"Vstupit" he prompted.

Thereafter, whenever I was stuck, he would
fling the word up to me and I would catch it
and hurl it out into the audience, modified, of
course, by my American accent. This, and
the fact that I stood there in the flesh, a tangi-
ble symbol of the internationalism they had
heard so much about, raised storms of laugh-
ter and thundering applause. In this Lenin
joined heartily.

"Well, that's a beginning in Russian, at any
rate," he said. "But you must keep at it
hard. And you," he said, turning to Bessie

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 73

Beatty, "you must learn Russian, too. Put an
advertisement in the paper asking for ex-
change lessons. Then just read, write and
talk nothing but Russian. Don't talk with
Americans — it won't do you any good, any-
how," he added humorously. "Next time I
see you I'll give you an examination."

8. Lenin's Constant Exposure to Danger

It very nearly came about that there was
no next time. As the automobile with Lenin
in it swung out of the Manege, there were
three sharp reports and three bullets crashed
through his car, one of them wounding Plat-
ten, the Swiss delegate, who sat in the seat
with Lenin. Some assassin up a side street
had tried and failed.

The Bolshevik leaders were, of course, in
constant danger of their lives. The chief ob-
ject of attention on the part of the bourgeois
plotters was naturally Lenin. In his active

74 LENIN

brain, they said, were wrought the plans for
their undoing. Oh, for a bullet to still that
brain! That was the prayer that every day
fervently went up from the altars of the
counter-revolutionary homes.

In such a home in Moscow we were always
welcomed with a lavish hospitality. The
great table with its steaming samovar was
loaded with fruits and nuts, a bewildering ar-
ray of zakuska, and what Arthur Ransome
called "sweets," his particular failing. The
war had done very handsomely by this house-
hold. Speculation in all its branches, running
goods by the underground route to Germany,
and profiteering, grand and petty, had put
this family upon the roof garden. Now sud-
denly out of the darkness, knocking away the
very foundations of the roof garden, came the
Bolsheviks. They wanted to put a stop to
the war. There was no reasoning with them.
Wild, insane fellows I They wanted to put a
stop to everything, to speculation, to profiteer-

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 75

ing, to everything! The only thing to do was
to put a stop to them. String them up!
Shoot them down! Begin at the top with
Lenin.

"I have a million roubles this minute for
the man who will kill Lenin," this rising
young Moscow speculator informed me
gravely, "and there are nineteen other men
whom I can place my hands upon tomorrow,
each with a million more for the cause."

We asked our Bolshevik quintette whether
Lenin was aware of the risk he was running.
"Yes, he is quite aware of it," they said. "But
he doesn't worry. You see, nothing really
worries him." And apparently nothing did.

Along a path beset. with mines and pitfalls
he walked with the composure of a country
gentleman, while crises that shook men's
nerves and blanched their faces found him
cool and unruffled. Plan after plan of the
counter-revolutionists and foreign imperial-
ists to assassinate Lenin miscarried. But on

76 LENIN

the last of August, 1918, the plotters almost
succeeded.

The Premier had finished his address to
the 15,000 workmen at the Mikhelson Works.
As he was returning to his car, a girl ran out
holding a paper as if presenting a petition to
the Premier. He reached out to take it and
as he did so another girl, Dora Kaplan, fired
three shots at him, two of them taking effect
and stretching him out upon the pavement.
He was lifted into his car and driven to the
Kremlin. While bleeding profusely from his
wounds he insisted upon walking up the steps.
He was wounded more seriously than he
thought. For weeks he was close to death.
The strength left from fighting the fever in
his veins he gave to fighting the fever of re-
venge that ran through the country.

For the masses, enraged that the dark
forces of reaction had struck down the man
who stood as the symbol of all their liberties
and aspirations, struck back at the bourgeoisie

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 77

and at the monarchists with the Red Terror.
Many of the bourgeoisie had to pay with
their lives for the assassinations of the com-
missars and the attempt upon Lenin. So
fierce was the wrath of the people that hun-
dreds more would have perished had not
Lenin pleaded with the people to restrain
their fury. Through all the furor it is safe
to say that he was the calmest man in Russia.

g. Lenin's Extraordinary Self-Composure

On all occasions he maintained the most*^
perfect self-control. Events that stirred
others to a frenzy were an invitation to quiet
and serenity in him.

The one historic session of the Constituent
Assembly was a turbulent scene as the two
factions came to death-grips with each other.
The delegates, shouting battle-cries and beat-
ing on the desks, the orators, thundering out
threats and challenges, and two thousand

78 LENIN

voices, passionately singing the International
and the Revolutionary march, charged the
atmosphere with electricity. As the night ad-
vanced one felt the voltage of the place going
up and up. In the galleries we gripped the
rails, jaws set and nerves on edge. Lenin sat
in a front tier box, looking bored.

At last he rose, and walking to the back of
the tribunal he stretched himself upon the red
carpeted stairs. He glanced casually around
the vast concourse. Then as if saying, "So
many people wasting nervous force. Well,
here's one who is going to store some up," he
propped his head on his hand and went to
sleep. The eloquence of the orators and the
roar of the audience rolled above his head,
but peacefully he slumbered on. Once or
twice, opening his eyes, he blinked about him,
and nodded off again.

Finally, rising, he stretched himself and
strolled leisurely down to his place in the
front tier box. Seeing our opening. Reed and

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 79

I slipped down to question him about the pro-
ceedings of the Constituent Assembly. He
replied indifferently. He asked about the ac-
tivities of the Propaganda Bureau. His face
brightened up as we told him how the ma-
terial was being printed by tons, that it was
really getting across the trenches into the Ger-
man army. But we found it hard to work in
the German language.

"Ah !" he said with sudden animation, as he
recalled my exploits on the armored car, "and
how goes the Russian language? Can you
understand all these speeches now?"

"There are so many words in Russian," I
replied evasively. "That's it," he retorted.
"You must go at it systematically. You must
break the backbone of the language at the out-
set. I'll tell you my method of going at it."

In essence, Lenin's system was this: First;
learn all the nouns, learn all the verbs, learn
all the adverbs and adjectives, learn all the
rest of the words ; learn all the grariimar and

8o LENIN

rules of syntax, then keep practicing every-
where and upon everybody. As may be seen,
Lenin's system was more thorough-going than
subtle. It was, in short, his system of the con-
quest of the bourgeoisie applied to the con-
quest of a language, a merciless applica-
tion to the job. But he was quite exercised
over it.

He leaned over the box, with sparkling
eyes, and drove his words home with gestures.
Our fellow reporters looked on enviously.
They thought that Lenin was violently ex-
coriating the crimes of the opposition, or di-
vulging the secret plans of the Soviet, or
spurring us to greater zeal for the Revolution.
In a crisis like this, surely only such themes
could draw forth this burst of energy from
the head of the Great Russian state. But
they were wrong. The Premier of Russia
was merely giving an exposition on how to
learn a foreign language and was enjoying
the diversion of a little friendly conversation,

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 8i

In the tension of great debates, when his
opponents were lashing him unmercifully,
Lenin would sit in serene composure, even ex-
tracting humor from the situation. After his
address at the Fourth Congress, he took his
seat upon the tribunal to listen to the assaults
of his five opponents. Whenever he thought
that the point scored against him was good,
Lenin would smile broadly, joining in the ap-
plause. Whenever he thought it was ridicu-
lous, Lenin, smiling ironically, would give a
mock applause, striking his thumb-nails to-
gether.

10. Lenin's Manner in Private Address

Only once did I see evidence of weariness
in him. After a midnight meeting of the
Soviet, he stepped into the elevator of the
National Hotel with his wife and sister.
"Good evening," he said, rather wearily.
"No," he added, "it's good morning. I've

82 LENIN

been talking all day and night, and I'm tired.
I'm riding the elevator though it is but one
flight up."

Only once did I ever see him hurried or
rushed. That was in February, v^^hen the
Tauride palace was again the scene of a fe-
vered conflict — the debate over war or peace
with Germany. Suddenly he appeared, and
with quick, vigorous stride was fairly hurtling
himself down the long hall toward the plat-
form entrance. Professor Charles Kuntz and
I were lying in wait for him, and hailed him
with "Just a minute, Tovarishck Lenin."

He checked his headlong flight and came
to attention in almost military fashion, bowed
very gravely, and said, "Will you be so good
as to let me go this time, comrades? I haven't
even as much as a second. They are await-
ing me inside the hall. I beg you to excuse
me this time, please." With another bow
and a handshake he was off in full stride
again.

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 83

Wilcot, an anti-Bolshevik, commenting on
the amenity of Lenin in intimate relation-
ships, says that an English merchant, in order
to rescue his family from a critical situation,
went to seek Lenin's personal aid. He was
astonished to find the "blood-thirsty tyrant" a
mild-mannered man, courteous and sympa-
thetic in bearing, and almost eager to afford
all assistance in his power.

In fact, at times he seemed over-courteous,
exaggeratedly so. This may have been due
to his use of English, lifting bodily from the
books the elaborate forms of polite conversa-
tion. More probably, it was part of his tech-
nic in social intercourse, for Lenin was highly
efficient here as elsewhere. He refused to
squander his time upon non-essential persons;
he was not easily accessible. In his ante-room
is this notice:

"Visitors are asked to take into considera-
tion that they are to speak to a man whose
business is enormous. He asks them to ex-

84 LENIN

plain clearly and briefly what they have come
to say."

It was hard to get at Lenin, but once you
did you had all there was of him. All his
faculties were focused upon you in a man-
ner so acute as to be embarrassing. After a
polite, almost an effusive, greeting, he drew
up closer until his face would be no more than
a foot away. As the conversation went on he
often came still closer, gazing into your eyes
as if he were searching out the inmost reces-
ses of your brain and peering into your very
soul. Only an extraordinarily brazen liar
like Malinovsky could withstand the steady
impact of that gaze.

We often met a certain Socialist who in
1905 had taken part in the Moscow uprising
and had even fought well on the barricades.
A career and the comforts of life had weaned
him from his first ardent devotion. He wore
now an air of prosperity, acting as correspond-
ent for an English newspaper syndicate and

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 85

Plekhanov's Yedinstvo. Bourgeois writers
were regarded by Lenin as wasters of time;
but by playing up his past revolutionary rec-
ord this man had managed to secure an ap-
pointment with Lenin. He was in high spir-
its as he went away to meet it. Some hours
later I saw him in a state of perturbation. He
explained :

"When I walked into the office I referred
to my part in the 1905 revolution. Lenin
came up to me and said, 'Yes, comrade, but
what are you doing for this revolution?' His
face was not more than six inches away and
his eyes were looking straight into mine. I
spoke of my old days on the Moscow barri-
cades, and took a step backwards. But Lenin
took a step forward, not letting go my eyes,
and said again, 'Yes, comrade, but what are
you doing for this revolution?' It was like an
X-ray — as if he saw all my deeds of the last
ten years. I couldn't stand it. I had to look
down like a guilty child. I tried to talk, but

86 LENIN

it was no use. I had to come away." A few
days later this man threw in his lot with this
revolution and became a worker for the
Soviet.

//. Lenin's Sincerity and Hatred of
Unreality

One of the secrets of Lenin's power is his
terrible sincerity. He was sincere with his
friends. He was gratified, of course, with
each accession to the ranks, but he would not
enlist a single recruit by painting in roseate
hues the conditions of service, or the future
prospects. Rather he tended to paint things
blacker than they were. The burden of many
\oi Lenin's speeches was: "The goal the Bol-
sheviks are striving for is far away — further
away than most of you dream. We have
led Russia along a rough road, but the course
we follow will bring us more enemies, more
hunger. Difficult as the past has been, the

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 87

future promises harder things — harder than
you imagine." Not an alluring promise.
Not the usual call to arms ! Yet as the Italians
rallied to Garibaldi, who came offering
wounds, prison and death, the Russians rallied
to Lenin. This was a little discomforting to
one expecting the leader to glorify his cause
and to urge the prospective convert into join-
ing it. He left the urge to come from within.

Lenin is sincere even with his avowed ene-
mies. An Englishman, commenting on his
extraordinary frankness, says his attitude was
like this : "Personally, I have nothing against
you. Politically, however, you are my enemy
and I must use every weapon I can think of
for your destruction. Your government does
the same against me. Now let us see how far
we can go along together."

This stamp of sincerity is on all his public
utterances. Lenin is lacking in the usual out-
fit of the statesman-politician — bluff, glitter-
ing verbiage and success-psychology. One

88 LENIN

felt that he could not fool others even if he
desired to. And for the same reasons that he
\could not fool himself : His scientific attitude
of mind, his passion for the facts.

His lines of information ran out in every
direction, bringing him multitudes of facts.
These he weighed, sifted and assayed. Then
he utilized them as a strategist, a master chem-
ist working in social elements, a mathemati-
cian. He would approach a subject in this
way:

"Now the facts that count for us are these :

One, two, three, four " He would briefly

enumerate them. "And the factors that are
against us are these."

In the same way he would count them up,

"One, two, three, four Are there any

others?" he would ask. We would rack our
brains for another, but generally in vain.
Elaborating the points on each side, pro and
contra, he would proceed with his calculation
as with a problem in mathematics.

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 89

In his glorification of the fact he is the very
opposite of Wilson. Wilson as a word-artist
gilds all subjects with glittering phrases,
dazzling and mesmerizing the people and
blinding them to the ugly realities and crass
economic facts involved. Lenin comes as a
surgeon with his scalpel. He uncovers the
simple economic motives that lie behind the
grand language of the imperialists. Their
proclamations to the Russian people he strips
bare and naked, revealing behind their fair
promises the black and grasping hand of the
exploiters.

Relentless as he is toward the phraseolo-
gists of the Right, he is equally as hard upon
those phraseologists of the Left who seek
refuge from reality in revolutionary slogans.
He feels it his duty "to pour vinegar and bile
into the sweetened waters of revolutionary-
democratic eloquence," and he treats the sen-
timentalist and shouter of shibboleths with
caustic ridicule.

90 LENIN

When the Germans were making their drive
upon the Red Capital a flood of telegrams
poured in on Smolny from all over Russia,
expressing amazement, horror and indigna-
tion. They ended with slogans like "Long
live the invincible Russian proletariat!"
"Death to the imperialistic robbers!" "With
our last drop of blood we will defend the
Capital of the Revolution!"

Lenin read them and then dispatched a tele-
gram to all the Soviets, asking them kindly
not to send revolutionary phrases to Petro-
grad, but to send troops; also to state precisely
the number of volunteers enrolled, and to for-
ward an exact report upon the arms, ammu-
nition and food conditions.

12. "Lenin at Work in a Crisis

With the advance of the Germans came the
flight of the foreigners. The Russians mani-
fested a mild surprise that all those who had

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 91

so wildly cried to them, "Kill the Huns!" now
fled precipitately when the Hun came within
killing range. It would have been good to
join the hegira, but there was my pledge made
upon the armored car. So I went out to join
the Red Army. Bukharin, the Left-Bolshe-
vik, insisted that I should see Lenin.

"My congratulations! My felicitations!"
said Lenin. "It looks very bad for us just
now. The old army will not fight. The new
one is largely upon paper. Pskov has just
been surrendered without resistance. That is
a crime. The President of the Soviet ought
to be shot. Our workers have great self-sac-
rifice and heroism. But no military training,
no discipline."

Thus in about twenty short sentences he
summed up the situation, ending with, "All
I can see is peace. Yet the Soviet may be for
war. In any case, my congratulations for
joining the Revolutionary Army. After your
struggle with the Russian language you ought

92 LENIN

to be in good training to fight the Germans."
He ruminated a moment and added :

"One foreigner can't do much fighting.
Maybe you can find others." I told him that
I might try to form a detachment.

Lenin was a direct actionist. A plan con-
ceived, at once he proceeded to put it into
execution. He turned to the telephone to ring
up Krylenko, the Soviet commander. Fail-
ing, he picked up a pen and scribbled him a
note.

By night w^e had formed the International
Legion and issued our call summoning all men
speaking foreign languages to enroll in the
new company. But Lenin did not drop the
matter there. He was not content merely with
inaugurating something in the grand manner.
He followed it up relentlessly and in detail.
Twice he telephoned the Pravda office in-
structing them to print the call in Russian and
in English. Then he telegraphed it through
the country. Thus, while opposing the war,

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 93

and particularly those who were intoxicating
themselves with revolutionary phrases about
it, Lenin was mobilizing every force to pre-
pare for it.

He sent an automobile with Red Guards
to the fortress of Peter and Paul to fetch part
of the counter-revolutionary staff imprisoned
there.

"Gentlemen," said Lenin, as the generals
filed into his office, "I have brought you here
for expert advice. Petrograd is in danger.
Will you be good enough to work out the
military tactics for its defense?" They as-
sented.

"Here are our forces," resumed Lenin, in-
dicating upon the map the location of the Red
troops, munitions and reserves. "And here
are our latest reports upon the number and
disposition of the enemy troops. Anything
else the generals desire they will call for."

They set to work and toward evening
handed him the result of their deliberations.

94 LENIN

"Now," said the generals ingratiatingly, "will
the Premier be good enough to allow us more
comfortable quarters?"

"My exceeding regrets," replied Lenin.
"Some other time, but not just now. Your
quarters, gentlemen, may not be comfortable,
but they have the merit of being very safe."
The staff was returned to the fortress of Peter
and Paul.

13. Lenin as a Prophet and Statesman

It is clear that Lenin's prowess as a states-
man and seer arises not from any mystic in-
tuition or power of divination, but from his
ability to amass all the facts in the case and
then to utilize them. He showed this ability
in his work, "The Development of Capital-
ism." There Lenin challenged the economic
thought of his day by asserting that half the
Russian peasants had been proletarianized,
that, despite their possession of some land,
these peasants were in effect "wage-earners

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 95

with a piece of land." Bold and daring as the
assertion was, it was corroborated by investi-
gation in later years. Lenin had not merely
guessed at it. It was his verdict after exten-
sive marshalling of statistics in the Zemstvos
and in other fields.

One day, discussing with Peters the roots
of Lenin's prestige, he said, "Often in the
closed sessions of our party Lenin made cer-
tain proposals based upon his analysis of the
situation. We voted them down. Later on it
turned out that Lenin was right and we were
wrong." On the question of tactics there have
been Homeric struggles between Lenin and
other members of the party, in which later
events have generally vindicated his judgment.

Prominent Bolshevik leaders like Kame-
nev and Zinoviev held that in the proposed
November revolution it was impossible to suc-
ceed. Lenin said, "It is impossible to fail."
Lenin was right. The Bolsheviks made a ges-
ture, and the governmental power fell into

96 LENIN

their hands. None were more surprised than
the Bolsheviks at the ease with which it was
accomplished.

The other Bolshevik leaders said that
though they might take the power they could
not hold it. Lenin said, "Every day will bring
us fresh strength." Lenin was right. After
two years of fighting against enemies hem-
ming them in from all sides, the Soviet ad-
vances on every front.

Trotzky pursued his juggling tactics with
the Germans, decoying them along but refus-
ing to sign the treaty. Lenin said, "Don't play
with them. Sign the first treaty offered, how-
ever bad, or we shall have to sign a worse
one." Again Lenin was right. The Russians
were forced to sign "the brigand's" "the ban-
dit's" peace of Brest-Litovsk.

In the Spring of 191 8, while the whole
world was ridiculing the idea of a German
revolution, and the Kaiser's army was smash-
ing the Allied line in France, Lenin in a con-

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 97

versation with me said, "The Kaiser's down-
fall will come within the year. It is abso-
lutely certain." Nine months later the Kaiser
was a fugitive from his own people.

"If you are going back to America," said
Lenin to me in April, 1918, "you should start
very soon, or the American army will meet
you in Siberia." That was an amazing state-
ment, as at that time, in Moscow, we had come
to believe that America was cherishing only
the largest good-will toward the new Russia.
"That is impossible," I protested. "Why,
Raymond Robins thinks there is even a pos-
sibility of recognition of the Soviets."

"Yes," said Lenin, "but Robins represents
the liberal bourgeoisie of America. They do
not decide the policy of America. Finance-
capital does. And finance-capital wants con-
trol of Siberia. And it will send American
soldiers to get it." This point of view was
preposterous to me. Yet later, June 29, 19 18,
I saw with my own eyes the landing of Amer-

98 LENIN

ican sailors in Vladivostok, while Czarists,
Czechs, British, Japanese and other Allies
hauled down the flag of the Soviet Republic
and ran up the flag of the old autocracy.

Lenin's predictions have so often been veri-
fied by the events that his view of the future
is, to say the least, interesting. Here is the
gist of Naudeau's famous interview as it ap-
peared in the Paris Temps in April, 1919.

"The future of the world?" said Lenin. "I
am not a prophet. But this much is certain.
The capitalist state, of which England is an
example, is dying out. The old order is
doomed. The economic conditions arising out
of the war are driving towards the new order.
The evolution of mankind inevitably leads to
Socialism.

"Who would have believed some years ago
that the nationalization of railroads in Amer-
ica was possible? And we have seen that
Republic buy all the grain in order to use it
to the fullest advantage of the state. All that

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 99

is said against the state has not retarded this
evolution. True it is necessary to create and
contrive new means of control in order to
remedy the imperfections. But any attempts
to prevent the state from becoming sovereign
are futile. For the inevitable comes and
comes of its own momentum. The English
say, 'The proof of the pudding is in the eat-
ing.' Say what you will of the Socialistic
pudding, all the nations eat and will eat more
and more of it.

"To sum up. Experience seems to prove
that each human group goes on towards So-
cialism by its own particular way. Even the
Letts go at it differently from the Russians.
There will be many passing forms and varia-
tions, but they are all different phases of a
revolution which tends toward the same end.
If a Socialistic regime is established in France
or Germany, it will be much easier to per-
petuate it than here in Russia. For in the
West Socialism will find frameworks, organi-

loo LENIN

zations, all kinds of intellectual auxiliaries
and materials, which are not to be found in
Russia."

14. Lenin's Attitude Toward Men of
Brains

"For every honest Bolshevik there are
thirty-nine scoundrels and sixty fools." This
widely quoted sentence h^s been put into the
mouth of Lenin in an attempt to picture him
as the grand patrician with cynical mistrust of
the masses. To support this curious charge a
statement of fifteen years ago is dug up. It
says that the working-classes of themselves de-
veloped only a trade-unionist consciousness,
that is, the sense of organization, striking
against employer, the eight-hour day, etc.
But the ideas of Socialism have come to the
workers largely from outside, from the intel-
lectuals.

It is true that in all their actions and de-
crees Lenin and the Soviet government show

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN loi

the high value they set upon brains. In every
realm Lenin defers to the expert. He looks
to the generals even of the Czar's regime as
the authorities in military affairs. If Marx,
the German, is Lenin's authority in revolu-
tionary tactics, Taylor, the American, is his
authority in efficiency production. And he
always was stressing the value of the expert
accountant, the big engineer, the specialist in
every field of activity. He believed that the
Soviet would be a magnet drawing them from
around the world. He believed they would
see in the Soviet system a wider range for the
play of their creative abilities than in any
other system.

It is said that Harriman was worn out not
so much by the task of operating his great
railroad as by the problem of financing it.
Under the Soviet system he would not have to
divert his energy from the work of adminis-
tering to financing. For, under the Soviet,
economic power is delegated to the head ad-

I02 LENIN

ministrator quite as we delegate political
power to our representative in Congress. He
is given the vast resources of Russia to work
upon. Besides, Russia under the Soviet offers
to the engineer or administrator not only its
vast wealth to work upon but also a labor force,
enthusiastic and alive, with which to work it.

This latter condition does not obtain under
the capitalist system where the workman's
greatest interest lies in his wages rather than
in his work, and where the management and
the labor force come into constant conflict.
Under the Soviet the energies of the men, in-
stead of being spent in quarreling over the
division of the product, are liberated for the
task of larger production. Lenin believed in
the great results arising from the Soviet sys-
tem calling out the enthusiastic creative en-
ergies of the masses and at the same time giv-
ing a free hand to the men of brains and
genius.

In his survey of social forces Lenin made

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 103

his estimate of the value of all the different
elements. The intellectuals had their place
before and after the Revolution. As agitators
they could help make the Revolution pos-
sible. As experts with skill and technic they
could help make the Revolution permanent
and stable.

75. Lenin's Attitude Toward Americans,
Capitalists and Concessions

American technicians, engineers and admin-
istrators Lenin particularly held in high
esteem. He wanted five thousand of them, he
wanted them at once, and was ready to pay
them the highest salaries. He was constantly
assailed for having a peculiar leaning toward
America. Indeed, his enemies cynically re-
ferred to him as "the agent of the Wall Street
bankers," and in the heat of debate the extreme
Left hurled this charge in his face.

As a matter of fact, American capitalism

104 LENIN

was to him not less evil than the capitalism of
^any other nation. But America was so far
away. It did not offer a direct threat to the
life of Soviet Russia. And it did offer the
goods and experts that Soviet Russia needed.
"Why is it not then to the mutual interest of
the two countries to make a special agree-
ment?" asked Lenin.

But is it possible for a communistic state to
deal with a capitalistic state? Can the two
forms live side by side? These questions were
put to Lenin by Naudeau.
^ "Why not?" said Lenin. "We want techni-
cians, scientists and the various products of
industry, and it is clear that we by ourselves
are incapable of developing the immense re-
sources of this country. Under the circum-
stances, though it may be unpleasant for us,
we must admit that our principles, which
hold in Russia, must, beyond our frontiers,
give place to political agreements. We very
sincerely propose to pay interest on our for-

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 105

eign loans, and in default of cash we will pay
them in grain, oil and all sorts of raw mate-
rials in which we are rich.

"We have decided to grant concessions of
forests and mines to citizens of the Entente
powers, always on the condition that the es-
sential principles of the Russian Soviets are
to be respected. Furthermore, we will even
consent — not cheerfully, it is true, but with
resignation — to the cession of some territory
of the old Empire of Russia to certain En-
tente powers. We know that the English,
Japanese and American capitalists very much
desire such concessions.

"We have granted to an international asso-
ciation the construction of the Veliky Severny
Put, The Great Northern Line. Have you
heard of it? It is about 3,000 versts of rail-
road, starting at Soroka, near the Gulf of
Onega, and running by way of Kotlas across
the Ural mountains to the Obi River. Im-
mense virgin forests with 8,000,000 hectares

io6 LENIN

of land and all kinds of unexploited mines will
fall within the domain of the constructing
company,

"This state property is ceded for a certain
time, probably eighty years, and with the
right of redemption. We exact nothing dras-
tic of the association. We ask only the ob-
servance of the laws passed by the Soviet,
like the eight-hour day and the control of the
workers' organizations. It is true that this is
far from Communism. It does not at all cor-
respond to our ideal, and we must say that this
question has raised some very lively contro- -
versies in Soviet journals. But we have de-
cided to accept that which the epoch of tran-
sition renders necessary."

"So you believe, then," said Naudeau, "that,
considering the dangers run here by foreign
capitalists — dangers which do not seem to
have been removed, and which one fears may
be aggravated at any time — you believe that
financiers will have courage enough to come

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 107

to Russia and let it swallOfW up new treasures?
They will not begin such a task without the
protection of an armed force from their own
country. Will you consent to such an occu-
pation?"

"It will be quite superfluous," said Lenin,
"because the Soviet Government will observe
faithfully what they have bound themselves to
observe. But all points of view may be con-
sidered."

The reports from the Great Moscow Eco-
nomic Council in June, 19 19, show Lenin
with Chicherin battling for the policy of eco-
nomic alliance with America against the en-
gineer Krassin leading the fight for economic
alliance with Germany.

16. Lenin's Tremendous Faith in the
Proletarians

To Lenin, of course, the driving force of
the Revolution, its soul and its sinew, was the

io8 LENIN

proletariat. The only hope of a new so-
ciety lay in the masses. This was not the
popular view. The conception of the Russian
masses generally current makes them but
shambling creatures of the soil, shiftless, lazy,
illiterate, with dark minds set only upon
vodka, devoid of idealism, incapable of sus-
tained effort.

Over against this stands Lenin's estimate of
the "ignorant" masses. Through the long
years, in season and out of season, he insisted
upon their resoluteness, their tenacity, their
capacity for sacrificing and suffering, their
ability to grasp large political ideas, and the
great creative and constructive forces latent
within them. This seems like an almost reck-
less trust in the character of the masses. How
far have results justified Lenin's venture of
faith in the Russian workinmen?

Their ability to grasp large political ideas
has astounded all observers who have gone
below the surface in Russia. It made a mem-

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 109

ber of the Root Mission ask in wonder, "How
came so much of the mass of the Russian peo-
ple, viewed by all the truly learned as igno-
rant and stupid, to seize upon a social philoso-
phy so new to the rest of the world and so far
in advance of it?" The hundreds of young
men sent over by the Y. M. C. A. and other
agencies were a puzzle to the Russian work-
ingman. These "educators" were the grad-
uates of American universities and yet they
did not know the difference between Social-
ism, Syndicalism and Anarchism, which was
the A B C in the education of millions of
Russian workingmen.

The American propaganda agents spread
President Wilson's Fourteen- Points Speech in
Russia by hundreds of thousand of copies.

Passing these out to workers or peasants,
they would ask, "What do you think of it?"

"It sounds very good," they would gener-
ally reply, "but there is nothing back of it.
President Wilson may have these ideals in his

no LENIN

head, but there will be none of these ideals in
the Treaty of Peace unless the workers have
control of the government."

An eminent American professor who heard
the Russians say this laughed at their scep-
ticism. To-day he laughs at his own credulity
and wonders how these "dark people" in the
little Soviets in the remote parts of backward
Russia had a better grasp on international
politics than himself.

The British worked on the plan that it was
only necessary to appeal to the immediate self-
interest of the masses. They arrived in Arch-
angel bringing jam, whiskey and white flour
with which to seduce the people. The fam-
ished folk rejoiced to receive the gifts, but
when they saw that these were bribes to blind
them and that the price of these goods was
the integrity and freedom of Russia, they
turned upon the invaders and drove them
from the country.

Time has also justified Lenin's faith in the

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN iii

tenacity and resoluteness of the Russian mas-
ses. Compare the dire prophecies of 1917
with the facts of to-day. "Three days and
their power is gone," croaked the enemies of
the Soviets then. The three days passed into
as many more, arid the cry became, "Three
weeks is the utmost that the Soviet can last."
Again they had to change the cry. This time
it became "Three months." Now, after eight
times three months, the best the enemies of the
Soviets can offer their backers is "Three
years."

IJ. The Achievements of the Workers and
Peasants greater than his Expectations

The strength and persistence of the Soviet
Government does not lie, as some infer, in the
violation of all law, the strange whimsy of an
inscrutable Providence. It rests just where
Lenin said it would — on the solid achieve-
ments of the workers and peasants.

In the economic field they have started new

112 LENIN

processes for the manufacture of linen,
matches and the utilization of the great peat-
beds of Russia. They have completed vast
engineering enterprises ranging from the set-
ting-up of power-plants and electric stations
to the dredging of the great canal between the
Baltic Sea and the Volga River and the build-
ing of hundreds of versts of railways.

In the military realm the workers and peas-
ants submitted themselves to a stern military
discipline which transformed the Red Army
into one of the most formidable fighting-
machines in the world. These proletarians
have a distinct morale and spirit. Hitherto
they have always fought in the interests of
some superior caste. Now for the first time
they are fighting — consciously — battles in
their own interest and in the interests of the
toiling and exploited peoples of the world.

But it is in the cultural realm that the tri-
umphs of the "dark people" have been most
significant. Make man free and he creates.

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 113

Under the quickening touch of the new spirit
there have grown up ten new universities,
scores of theatres, thousands of libraries,
and common schools by the tens of thou-
sands.

It was these realities that converted Maxim
Gorky from a bitter enemy into a partizan of
the Soviets. "The cultural creative work of
the Russian Government," he writes, "is about
to have a scope and form hitherto unknown in
the history of mankind. The historian of the
future will be unable to avoid admiring the
magnificence of this last year of the Russian
workers in the realm of culture."

More stupendous and significant are these
achievements when one considers the handi-
caps under which the masses labored. When
they took over the government they had as
their heritage a people brow-beaten, impov-
erished and oppressed for centuries. The
Great War had killed two million of their
able-bodied men, wounded and crippled an-

114 LENIN

other 3,000,000 and left them with hundreds
of thousands of orphans and hundreds of
thousands of the blind, the deaf and the dumb.
The railways were broken down, the mines
flooded, the reserves of food and fuel nearly
gone. The economic machinery, dislocated
by the war and further shattered by the Revo-
lution, had suddenly thrown upon it the task
of demobilizing 12,000,000 soldiers. They
raised a bumper grain crop, but the Czechs,
supported by the Japanese, French, British
and Americans, cut them off from the grain
fields of Siberia, and the other counter-revolu-
tionaries from the grain fields of the Ukraine.
"Now," they said, "the bony hand of hunger
will clutch the people by the throat and bring
them to their senses." Because they separated
the church from state they were excommuni-
cated. They were sabotaged by the old offi-
cials, deserted by the intelligentzia and
blockaded by the Allies. The Allies tried by
all manner of threats, bribery and assassina-

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 115

tion to overthrow their government, British
agents blowing up the railway bridges to pre-
vent supplies reaching the big cities, and
French agents, under safe-conduct from their
consulates, putting emery in the bearings of
the locomotives.

Facing these facts, Lenin said:

"Yes, we have mighty enemies, but against
them we have the iron battalion of the pro-
letarians. The vast majority are not as yet
truly conscious and they are not active. And
the reason is clear. They are war weary,
hungry and exhausted. The Revolution now
is only skin deep, but with rest there will
come a big psychological change. If it
only comes in time the Soviet Republic is
saved."

To Lenin's mind the episode of November,
19 1 7 — the masses spectacularly crashing into
power — ^was not the Revolution. But these
masses becoming conscious of their mis-
sion, passing into discipline and orderly work.

ii6 LENIN

and bringing into the field their great creative
and constructive forces — that would be the
Revolution.

In those early days Lenin was never cer-
tain that the Soviet Republic was saved. "Ten
days more!" he exclaimed, "and we shall
have lasted as long as the Paris Commune."
In opening his address to the Third AU-Rus-
sian Congress in Petrograd, he said, "Com-
rades, consider that the Commune of Paris
held out for seventy days. We have already
lasted for two days more than that."

More than ten times seventy days the great
Russian Commune has held out against a
world of enemies. Great was the faith of
Lenin in the tenacity, the perseverance, the
resoluteness, the heroism, and the economic,
military and cultural potentialities of the
proletarians. Their achievements are not
merely the vindication of his zealous faith.
They are a source of amazement to him-
self.

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 117

18. The Russian Revolution a Success
apart from Lenin

As Lenin arises in Russia to become the
central figure on the world's stage, a storm of
controversy rages around him.

To the terrified bourgeoisie he is a bolt
from the blue, an awful portent of nature, a
world-devastating scourge.

To the mystically minded he is the great
"Mongolian Slav," mentioned in that
strangely fulfilled pre-war prophecy attribut-
ed to Tolstoy. After predicting the outbreak
of the Great War, its causes and its place, it
goes on to say : "I see all Europe in flames and
bleeding. I hear the lamentations of huge
battlefields. But about the year 1915 a strange
figure from the North — a new Napoleon —
enters the stage of the bloody drama. He is
a man of little military training, a writer or
a journalist, but in his grip most of Europe
will remain till 1925,"

ii8 LENIN

To the reactionary Church Lenin is the
Anti-Christ. The priests try to rally the peas-
ants around the sacred banners and ikons and
lead them against the Red Army. But the
peasants say, "He may be Anti-Christ, but
he brings us land and freedom. Why then
should we fight him?"

To the man in the street Lenin has almost
a superhuman significance. He is the Maker
of the Russian Revolution, the Founder of
the Soviet, the cause of all that Russia is to-
day. "Kill Lenin and Trotzsky and you kill
the Revolution and the Soviet."

This is to view history as the product of
Great Men, as if great events and epochs were
determined by their great leaders. It is true
that a whole epoch may express itself in a
single personality, and that a great mass-
movement may focus itself in an individual.
But that is the utmost that can be conceded to
the Carlylean view.

Certainly any interpretation of history that

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 119

makes the Russian Revolution hinge upon a
single person or group of persons is mislead-
ing. Lenin would be the first to scoff at the
idea that the fortunes of the Russian Revo-
lution lie in his hands or in the hands of his
confreres.

The fate of the Russian Revolution lies in
the source vi^hence it has sprung — in the hearts
and hands of the masses. It lies back in those
economic forces, the pressure of which has set
those masses into motion. For centuries these
masses had been quiescent, patient, long-suf-
fering. All across the vast reaches of Rus-
sia, over the Muscovite plains, the Ukranian
steppes, and along the great rivers of Siberia,
they toiled under the lash of poverty,
chained by superstition, their lot little better
than that of the beast. But there is an end to
all things — even the patience of the poor.

In March, 1917, with a crash heard round
the world, the city masses broke their fetters.
Army after army of soldiers followed their

120 LENIN

example and revolted. Then the Revolution
permeated the villages, going deeper and
deeper, firing the most backward sections with
the revolutionary spirit, until a nation of i8o,-
000,000 has been stirred to its depths — seven
times as many as in the French Revolu-
tion.

Caught by a great vision, a whole race
strikes camp, and moves out to build a new
order. It is the most tremendous movement
of the human spirit in centuries. Based on
the bed-rock of the economic interest of the
masses, it is the most resolute strike for jus-
tice in history. A great nation turns crusader
and, loyal to the vision of a new world,
marches on in the face of hunger, war, block-
ade and death. It drives ahead, sweeping
aside the leaders who fail them, following
those who answer their needs and their aspira-
tions.

In the masses themselves lies the fate of the
Russian Revolution — in their discipline and

TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN 121

devotion. Fortune, indeed, has been very kind
ta them. It gave them for guide and inter-
preter a man with a giant mind and an iron
will, a man of vast learning and fearless ac-
tion, a man of the loftiest idealism and the
most stern, practical sagacity.

RAYMOND ROBINS' IMPRESSIONS

RAYMOND ROBINS' IMPRESSIONS

As Told to
WILLIAM HARD

/. Lenin in the Kremlin, Citadel of the
Czars

Walking through the Most Holy Gate,
Colonel Robins, the head of the American Red
Cross mission in Russia, arrived in the inside
of the Kremlin. He entered the famous build-
ing that had been the High Court of the Czar,
and went up three flights of stairs to a little
room, the walls of which were draped with
velvet hangings. Here, at a great desk of
beautiful wood, beautifully carved, the Czar
had been accustomed to sit and sign certain
papers of state.

125

126 LENIN

There now sits Lenin, short-built and
staunch-built, gray-eyed and bald-headed and
tranquil. He wears a woolen shirt and a suit
of clothes bought, one would think, many
years ago, and last pressed shortly afterwards.
The room is quite still. As he deprecates "the
intoxication of the Revolutionary phrase,"
so he seems to reject the intoxication of
Revolutionary excitement. He busies himself
with reports of accounts and departments, and
receives visitors for stated lengths of time —
ten minutes, five minutes, one minute. He is
likely to receive them standing, and he speaks
to them in the low tones of a man who does not
need to raise his voice.

In his manner of easy authority one may,
perhaps, see his father, hereditary nobleman
and State Councillor of the government of
Simbirsk. In his ways of thought one is cer-
tainly reminded of his brother, executed as a
political offender by the Czar's police when
Lenin was but seventeen years old.

RAYMOND ROBINS 127

Colonel Robins never visited Lenin in this
High Court Building of the Czar without
thinking of that execution and of the sanction
given to it — and to all such executions — by the
State Church of Russia. Behind the gallows,
generation after generation, in every part of
Russia, stand the priests, with their vessels of
gold, their vestments of lovely weavings, and
their ikons, preaching obedience to autocracy,
speaking the word of God in support of the
word of the Czar, and blessing the hangman.

Out of that background came Lenin's utter-
ances. He talked with no other assumption
than that religion had departed out of the pub-
lic life and out of the public policy of Russia,
along with the Czar. He talked only of secu-
lar effort, of material organization.

2. Lenin's Growing Prestige as a Prophet

On a momentous occasion, the occasion of
the Brest-Litovsk treaty, Trotzky, in his pro-
paganda, appealed to the German soldiers to

128 LENIN

rise up and break their masters who made
them march.

Would the German soldiers march? That
was the immediate question.

"No," said Trotzky. Like all artists, he be-
lieved in the irresistible appealingness of his
work. He had shown the German working-
men the folly and wickedness of marching,
and they would not march.

"But they will," said Lenin.

There was a certain private meeting of cer-
tain members of the All-Russian and Petro-
grad Soviets. It was a time of supreme ten-
sion, of the stretching and snapping of many
judgments and many reputations. The Ger-
man Government had made its open and full
announcement of its imperialistic and annexa-
tionistic policies toward Russia. In the So-
viet there was consternation, indignation, fury.
But would the Russian Army, in the field,
fight?

"It will," said loud voices.

RAYMOND ROBINS 129

"But it will not," said Lenin. "It did not
fight at Tarnopol. Kerensky was in power.
He used all his influence and all his eloquence
to make it fight. With the Allies he ordered
the great advance. But the Russian army did
not advance and did not fight. It ran, and it
had to run. It is now no longer an army. It
is only peasants wanting bread and land. It
is going home. The Russian army will never
fight again until it is reorganized into a new
revolutionary army. The present army will
not fight."

Lenin spoke very calmly. He had written
out his ideas into "twenty-one theses," as
though he had prepared a course of lectures
for a college. Those "twenty-one theses" were
his reasons for believing that Russia would
have to sign the peace. They were crushing.
But Lenin did not try to crush with them at
that meeting.

He spoke for only about twenty minutes,
and he spoke entirely without emphasis. He

I30 LENIN

merely stated his position. The Germans
would advance; the Russian army would not
fight; and the Russian Socialist Republic, in
order not to be trampled militarily out of ex-
istence, would have to sign the peace.

Then Trotzky swayed the meeting. The
Revolution was afoot in Germany. Trotzky
saw it striding on. Comrade Lenin was mis-
taken. The German comrades were not so
base as to fight for the terms of Brest-Litovsk.
Besides, there was Poland, and there was
Lithuania, and there was Letvia. They must
not be surrendered to the Germans. The
Polish comrades and the Lithuanian comrades
and the Lettish comrades must not be desert-
ed. We must hold them for the Revolution,
said Trotzky.

"We must not be intoxicated by the Revolu-
tionary phrase," said Lenin.

But Trotzky swayed the meeting, and Lenin
let him. When Robins afterwards asked
Lenin why he had permitted it, he said :

RAYMOND ROBINS 131

"I am willing to let Trotzky see if he can
put oflF the peace. I am willing to let him see
if he can save us from it. I would rejoice if
he could. But I wanted the comrades to know
what I am thinking. I wanted them to know
it, so that they can remember it a few days
from now. I have to keep their confidence."

During those few days and until they ended,
Lenin was very unpopular. Most of the lead-
ers of the Soviet were on Trotzky's side. To
many of them Lenin's position seemed to be
monstrous. But everything turned out as
Lenin said it would. Yet each new thing he
said was spoken amid a storm of protest.

"We will call the Fourth All-Russian Con-
gress of Soviets," he said. "What?" was the
answer. "Call the Congress now? It can't
be done. Russia can't send delegates now. If
can't bring its mind to think of sending them.
And the delegates can't come, they won't
travel, at this time. Impossible !"

"We will call it at Moscow," said Lenin.

132 LENIN

"What?" was the answer, "Moscow? The
stronghold of the reaction? Go to Moscow
and the Hall of the Nobles and the haunts of
the old regime? Leave Petrograd, the revo-
lutionary city? Never!"

But it happened. The Fourth All-Russian
Congress of Soviets was called, as Lenin had
said. The Germans had advanced, as Lenin
had said. The Congress met at Moscow in the
Hall of the Nobles, as Lenin had said. It
ratified the peace, as Lenin had said.

The shadow of Lenin grew upon Trotzky.
It grew upon Radek. It grew upon Karolin.
It grew upon everybody. More than ever
they were eclipsed. More than ever Lenin
was master. He had out-analyzed and out-
seen everybody. His books and his documents
and his reports and his theses and all his scho-
lastic methods and manners had not hindered
him — perhaps they had helped him — in be-
coming his party's absolute realist and almost
absolute ruler.

RAYMOND ROBINS 133

3' Lenin, Accused as a Traitor, Faces the
Armed Mob

One day, back in Petrograd, when the Ger-
mans were advancing, Robins went out from
his hotel to walk along the Nevsky Prospekt.
He made toward the Neva. A crowd of peo-
ple was gathering at a corner. Robins saw
that they were reading a placard, spread on a
dead wall, and that they were greatly excited
by it. He joined them. The placard, in pur-
port, said:

"Lenin has absconded to Finland with 30,-
000,000 roubles in gold from the State Bank.
The Russian Revolution has been betrayed by
false leaders. But there is hope now for Holy
Russia. The Little Father is coming back.
The Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich is ad-
vancing from the Crimea with 200,000 brave,
true Russian soldiers who will save Russia
from the Bolshevik traitors."

Robins turned and hurried back to his hotel

134 LENIN

to get his sleigh. He drove to Smolny, and
waved his card at the doorkeepers, and ran
upstairs. In the corridors were crowds of
commissioners and clerks and guards, running,
shouting, and running again, getting ready for
something very imminent. Machine-guns
were being unhooded. Their cartridges were
being filled into them. The crowds, with the
guns, surged over to one side of the building.
Robins looked out from that side across the
yard of Smolny, toward the Viborg — the Vi-
borg workmen's quarter.

Two streets stretched from there toward
Smolny. They were black with two streams
of armed workmen flowing toward Smolny,
They would overwhelm Smolny and clean it
out and then flow to the Front against the Ger-
mans. Such was the cry.

Robins drew back from his window and
worked his way through a corridor of dense,
panic-stricken people toward Lenin's private
office.

RAYMOND ROBINS 135

Lenin was there, receiving telephone mes-
sages from the Front. He was receiving per-
sonal reports from couriers. He was writing
orders and sending them out. He was work-
ing without pause, as usual, and, as usual, with-
out haste. He seemed quite unaware of any
crisis.

Robins was thrust into the room by shouting
men behind him who cried to Lenin, "The
order to fire!"

Lenin jumped to his feet. For just one mo-
ment he, too, was excited. "No ! No !" he said.
Then again he said, "No ! No !" this time an-
grily. "Shoot them? We will talk to them.
Tell their leaders to come in."

Somebody went to call them, and Lenin sat
down to his messages and his orders. The
leaders of the mob began to come in and began
to fill Lenin's office — ^workmen — in workmen's
clothes — each with a bayoneted rifle in his
hands and with a magazine pistol at his waist
— ^workmen — soldiers — the men Lenin had to

136 LENIN

rely on — the armed Revolutionary proletariat
—the nucleus of the future Red Army of
Lenin's Russia. They grounded their rifles.
Somebody said to Lenin, "They are here."
The outer door was closed.

Lenin rose and walked over toward his
visitors.

"Comrades," he said, "you see I have not run
away. Comrades, I was fighting for the Revo-
lution before some of you were born. I shall
be fighting for the Revolution when some of
you are dead. I stand always in danger. You
stand in more danger. Let us talk frankly."

He put his hands in his pockets and walked
up and down, meditated, and spoke :

"Comrades, I do not blame you for not al-
ways trusting your leaders. There are so
many voices in Russia today! I wonder that
you have trusted us as much as you have.

"Among honest Revolutionists to-day there
arc two voices. One of them is right. One is
wrong.

RAYMOND ROBINS 137

"Many comrades say:

" 'You must go to the Front and fight the
Germans and die fighting — die fighting for
the Revolution.'

"They do not pretend, these comrades, that
you are willing to fight for anything except
the Revolution. But they say, and they say
truly, that the Germans are against the Revo-
lution. And so they say, *Go and fight the
Germans.'

"I do not say so. I say:

" 'You are the new army. You are the only
army of the Revolution. You are the begin-
ning of it. What will happen if you fight the
Germans? The old army is not fighting. It
cannot fight. It is exhausted. Only you, with
the Revolution in you, want to fight. You
know what will happen. You will fight. You
will die. And the soldiers of the Revolution
will be dead, and the Czar will come back.'

"Would that be dying for the Revolution?
Comrades, when we die, let us die really for

138 LENIN

the Revolution. Let us die when by dying we
can win victory for the Revolution.

"Comrades, my voice is right. They tell
you I will make a shameful peace. Yes. I
will make a shameful peace. They tell you I
will surrender Petrograd, the Imperial City.
Yes. I will surrender Petrograd, the Imperial
City. They tell you I will surrender Moscow,
the Holy City. I will. I will go back to the
Volga, and I will go back behind the Volga to
Yekaterinburg; but I will save the soldiers of
the Revolution and I will save the Revolution,

"Comrades, what is your will?

"I will give you now a special train to the
Front. I will not stop you. You may go. But
you will take my resignation with you. I have
led the Revolution. I will not share in the
murder of my own child.

"Comrades, what is your will?"

"Lenin ! Lenin ! Lenin !" The room held no
other sound. "Comrade Lenin! Comrade
Lenin !" It was a judgment delivered. Hav-

RAYMOND ROBINS 139

ing delivered it, the judges picked up their
rifles and marched out of the room and down
the corridor, still delivering their judgment:
"Comrade Lenin."

Such was Lenin face to face with his follow-
ers. Such was Lenin the personal leader.

4' Lenin Explains the Advantages of the
Soviet System over the American

On a certain day when Colonel Robins
called on Lenin in that famous room with the
velvet hangings, Lenin said to him:

"We may be overthrown in Russia by the
backwardness of the Russian people, or by a
foreign power, but the idea in the Russian
Revolution will break and wreck every politi-
cal social control in the world. Our method
of social control must dominate the future.
Political social control will die. The Russian
Revolution will kill it — everywhere."

"But," said Robins, "my government is a

140 LENIN

democratic government. Do you really mean
that the idea in the Russian Revolution will
destroy the democratic idea in the government
of the United States?"

"The American government," answered
Lenin, "is corrupt."

"That is not so," answered Robins. "Our
national government and local governments
are elected by the people. Most of the elec-
tions are honest and fair, and the men elected
are the true choice of the voters. You cannot
call the American government a bought gov-
ernment."

"Ah, Colonel Robins," replied Lenin, "you
do not understand. It is my fault. I should
not have used the word corrupt. I do not
mean that your government is corrupt through
money. I mean that it is corrupt in that it is
decayed in thought. It is living in the politi-
cal thought of a by-gone political age. It is
living in the age of Thomas Jefferson. It
is not living in the present economic age.

RAYMOND ROBINS 141

It is, therefore, lacking in intellectual integ-
rity. How shall I make it clear to you?

"Take your states of New York and Penn-
sylvania. New York is the center of your
banking system. Pennsylvania is the center of
your steel industry. Those are two of your
most important things — ^banking and steel.
They form the base of your life. They make
you what you are. Now if you really believe
in your banking system, and respect it, why
don't you send Mr. Morgan to your United
States Senate? And if you really believe in
your steel industry, in its present organization,
why don't you send Mr. Schwab to the Sen-
ate? Why do you send men who know little
about banking and less about steel and who
protect the bankers and the steel manufactur-
ers and pretend to be independent of them?
It is inefficient. It is insincere. You refuse
to recognize the fact that the real control is no
longer political. That is why I say that your
system is lacking in integrity. That is why

142 LENIN

our system is superior to yours. That is why
it will destroy yours."

"Frankly, Mr. Commissioner," said Rob-
ins, "I don't believe it will."

"It will," said Lenin. "Do you know what
our system is?"

"Not very well as yet," said Robins. "You've
just started."

"I'll tell you," said Lenin. "Our system will
destroy yours because it will consist of a social
control which recognizes the basic fact of
modern life. It recognizes the fact that real
power to-day is economic, and that the social
control of to-day must therefore be economic
also. So what do we do? Who will be our
representatives in our national legislature, in
our national Soviet, from the district of Baku,
for instance?

"The district of Baku is an oil country. Oil
makes Baku. Oil rules Baku. Our represen-
tatives from Baku will be elected by the oil
industry. They will be elected by the work-

RAYMOND ROBINS 143

ers in the oil industry. You say, Who are
the workers? I say, The men who manage
and the men who obey the orders of managers,
the superintendents, the engineers, the artisans,
the manual laborers — all the persons who are
actually engaged in the actual work of pro-
duction, by brain or hand — they are the work-
ers. Persons not so engaged — persons whp are
not at labor in the oil industry but who try to
live ofif it without labor, by speculation, by
.royalties, by investment unaccompanied by
any work of daily toil — they are not workers.
They may know something about oil, or they
may not. Usually they do not. In any case,
they are not engaged in the actual producing
of oil. Our republic is a producers' republic.
"You will say that your republic is a citi-
zens' republic. Very well. I say that the man
as producer is more important than the man
as citizen. The most important citizens in
your oil districts^ — ^who are they? Are they
not oil men? We will represent Baku as oil.

144 LENIN

"Similarly we will represent tKe Donetz
coal basin as coal. The representatives from
the Donetz basin will be representatives of the
coal industry. Again, from the country dis-
tricts, our representatives will be representa-
tives chosen by peasants who grow crops.
What is the real interest of the country dis-
tricts? It is not store-keeping. It is not
money-lending. It is agriculture. From our
country districts our Soviets of peasants will
send representatives chosen by agriculture to
speak for agriculture.

"This system is stronger than yours because
it fits in with reality. It seeks out the sources
of daily human work-value and, out of those
sources, directly, it creates the social control
of the State. Our Government will be an eco-
nomic social control for an economic age. It
will triumph because it speaks the spirit, and
releases and uses the spirit, of the age that
now is.

"Therefore, Colonel Robins, we look with

RAYMOND ROBINS 145

confidence to the future. You may destroy us
in Russia. You may destroy the Russian Revo-
lution in Russia. You may overthrow me. It
will make no difference. A hundred years ago
the monarchies of Britain, Prussia, Austria,
Russia overthrew the Government of Revolu-
tionary France. They restored a monarch,
who was called a legitimate monarch, to power
in Paris. But they could not stop, and they
did not stop, the middle-class political revolu-
tion, the revolution of middle-class democracy,
which had been started in Paris by the men
of the French Revolution of 1789. They could
not save feudalism.

"Every system of feudal aristocratic social
control in Europe was destined to be destroyed
by the political democratic social control
worked out by the French Revolution. Every
system of political democratic social control in
the world to-day is destined now to be de-
stroyed by the economic producers' social con-
trol worked out by the Russian Revolution.

146 LENIN

"Colonel Robins, you do not believe it. I
have to wait for events to convince you. You
may see foreign bayonets parading across Rus-
sia. You may see the Soviets, and all the lead-
ers of the Soviets, killed. You may see Russia
dark again as it was dark before. But the
lightning out of that darkness has destroyed
political democracy everywhere. It has de-
stroyed it not by physically striking it but
simply by one flash of revealment of the fu-

ture."

5. Lenin Adapts Programme to Facts

On the very night on which he came into
power, at Petrograd, Lenin spoke in the All-
Russian Congress of Soviets on the decree re-
garding land. He said, in effect:

"You will notice, comrades, that in many
ways this is not our decree. In many ways
this is the decree of some of our political oppo-
nents. But we have taken into consideration
the answers given by the peasants to the ques-

RAYMOND ROBINS 147

tions sent out to them. We cannot settle the
problem of the land without regard for the
ideas of the peasants. Time alone can tell, life
alone can tell', whether we are right or they
are right. In the meantime we must remem-
ber that we cannot impose our ideas when it
is impossible to impose them. We must keep
our ideas to put into force when we can, not
when we can't."

Some months later, when Lenin was re-
proached for failing to carry out the nationali-
zation of all industries more rapidly, he ex-
pressed himself to his critics in some such
words as these:

"What would you have? I cannot make a
Revolution anything but a Revolution. Our
task a few months ago was to bring the Revo-
lution in. Now we have to make the Revo-
lution work. The formula then was: 'All
Power to the Soviet' The formula now is:
'Labor Discipline.' "

He went on then to the writing of his mes-

148 LENIN

sage in which he said that all persons not work-
ing must be obliged to work, and that middle-
class specialists must be hired, at any salaries
necessary, to give technical direction to the
factories of Soviet Russia. His critics took
him to task at a great meeting of Soviet repre-
sentatives. The hall was filled for hours with
cries of "Bourgeois Lenin" and "Czar Lenin,"
from the extremists of the Left, and with seri-
ous hostile arguments from speakers moderate
but alarmed.

At the end, when the night was far spent,
Lenin rose to reply. He said that all the argu-
ments made against him could be divided into
a certain number of classes. He would an-
swer them class by class. He proceeded to do
so. He spoke for perhaps half an hour. He
got a vote of confidence as unmistakable as the
vote from the Red Guards in his office at Pet-
rograd. Then he went back to the Kremlin
and continued to pursue his policy of "Labor
Discipline."

RAYMOND ROBINS 149

He said:

"I will cause a sufficient number of men to
work a sufficient number of hours at a suffi-
cient rate of speed to produce what Russia re-
quires."

It was a sufficiently Russian remark.

One day a man — an American — came to
Robins in great trouble. "I'm going to be
ruined," he said.

"How? Where?" said Robins.

"My factory."

"Won't your men work?"

"Certainly they work. We're getting ten to
twenty per cent more product per man under
Lenin than we did under Kerensky."

"Well, what's your complaint?"

"Listen! This workers' control may be all
right in the factory. But now they're going
to put it into the buying and selling. They're
going to put it into the office. It's all wrong
in the office. It won't go. But they've sent us
an ultimatum. I tell you it'll kill us."

I50 LENIN

"I agree with you," said Robins. "What do
you want me to do?"

"Well, they say you can see Lenin. See
him."

Lenin listened while Robins told him that
this American company certainly has a lot of
manufacturing knowledge, and that it is will-
ing to go on using that knowledge in Russia
and giving Russia the benefit of it if only the
Bolshevik Government will compromise and
not insist on putting workers' control into the
office.

The compromise was made. Lenin wrote
out an order stopping the putting of workers'
control into the office.

Robins met the manager of that factory
some time later,^ and asked him how he was
getting on.

"All right," said he. "First-rate."

"Going to keep on?"

"Sure."

"Tell me. If you get out of Russia, who

RAYMOND ROBINS 151

will take your place making harvesters for
Russia?"

"Why, some German."

"Of course," said Robins. Robins' advice
was: "Stay in Russia. Stick. Russia has a
Revolution. Lenin did not make it. He has
led it, but he did not make "it. Yet he does
lead it. And he leads it, all the time, as much
as he can, toward work — toward the task of
actually earning a living in a living world. He
is calling for engineering advisers now, for fac-
tory managers. To get them he is willing to
negotiate, and he has tried to negotiate with
foreign 'bourgeois' governments, and espe-
cially with the United States. To get them he
is willing to compromise, just as he has com-
promised with my American business man.
If we break with him altogether he will find
it more and more difficult to make his Govern-
ment compromise with American business
men. If we go away altogether, and leave
Russia, he will make his compromises and get

152 LENIN

his factory managers where he can — and the
quickest and easiest place is Germany. To
fight Lenin is to play the German game."

6. Lenin Shows how to Preserve Law and
Order

Lenin, by April of 191 8, had two immediate
aims : work and order. About the middle of
April, Robins went to see Lenin and said to
him:

"About this May Day parade on the first
of May. My men tell me there is going to
be a lot of trouble. Why do you have the par-
ade? It will cost a lot of money; and Russia
is hungry and poor, and there will be shooting
and murdering. Besides, what has it got to
do with work?"

Lenin looked really quite surprised.

"We have to have work," he said, "but we
have to have May Day. On every May Day
past, for many years, we marched in honor of

RAYMOND ROBINS 153

the Revolution to come. Now, on the first
May Day of the Soviet Republic, we march
for the first time in honor of the Revolution
accomplished. It has to be. We may march
without shoes, but we will march."

Robins, however, persisted and went to see
Lenin again, later in the month. He said to
Lenin :

"It's just as I told you. There's going to be
trouble. I'll give you just one case. My men
saw a coffin being carried into a building on
the line of march. Then they saw another cof-
fin going into that same building. They kept
on watching, and the coffins kept on coming;
and now there are seven coffins in that build-
ing. And my men have taken a look at them
inside. They're not coffins. They're machine-
guns. That's what's going to happen."

Lenin, rather wearily, scratched some words
on a piece of paper. Robins thought it was
an order to capture and confiscate the machine-
guns. It turned out to be much more.

154 LENIN

On the afternoon of April 30th, Robins
was in his room in the Hotel Europe.
Some men came in. They closed the windows
and sealed the fastenings of the windows.
They warned Robins against breaking the
seals till the parade next day was over. A
regulation had been issued. It had been issued
to the legally responsible "house committee"
of every house along the line of march. Should
a shot be fired at the parade by anybody in
that house, then the whole "house committee"
would be arrested and tried.

On the next day 42,000 people marched nine
miles through a city filled with revolution-
ists and counter-revolutionists. Not a shot
was fired, and not one man or woman was
hurt.

It was a holiday; it was a workless day; but
Lenin, after all, had not been able to forget
work. He had caused certain words to be dis-
played conspicuously everywhere. They met
Robins' eyes all day long. To Moscow cele-

RAYMOND ROBINS 155

brating the joyous overthrow of capitalism,
these words everywhere said : "Labor Disci-
pline," "Labor Discipline," "Labor Disci-
pline."

Such is the temperament of Lenin the ruler,
in working pursuit of his economic social-con-
trol state.

7. Potency of Soviet Idea Source of Lenin's
Power — Not Physical Force

In addressing a meeting of American busi-
ness men Robins said :

"Gentlemen, the people who tell you that
the Soviet system is nothing but riots and rob-
beries and mobs and massacres are leading you
to your own destruction. They are giving you
your enemy's wrong address and starting you
off on an expedition which can never reach him
and never hurt him. To hurt Bolshevism you
need at least to get its number. Bolshevism is
a system which in practice, on its record, can

156 LENIN

put human beings, in millions, into an ordered
social group, and can get loyalty from them
and obedience and organized consent, some-
times by free will, sometimes by compulsion,
but always in furtherance of an organized idea
— an idea thought out and worked out and liv-
ing in human thought and human purpose as
the plan of a city not yet made with hands but
already blue-printed, street by street, to be the
millennial city of assembled mankind.

"Gentlemen, it is a real fight. We have to
fight it with the weapons with which it can be
fought. Against idea there must be idea.
Against millennial plan there must be millen-
nial plan. Against self-sacrifice to a dream
there must be self-sacrifice to a higher and
nobler dream. Do you say that Lenin is noth-
ing but Red Guards? Gentlemen, let me tell
you something. I have seen a little piece of
paper with some words on it by Nikolai Lenin
read and re-read, and then instantly and scru-
pulously obeyed in Russian cities thousands of

RAYMOND ROBINS 157

miles beyond the last Red Guard in Lenin's
army."

Robins was alluding to his experience on
his way out from Russia back to the United
States. He left Moscow on May 14, 1918,
with a Bolshevik pass, but also with five rifles
and one hundred and fifty rounds of ammu-
nition in his special car. The rifles and the
ammunition were the property of the Soviet
Government. To get them Robins had to get
a most special permit. He went to the Soviet
Government and got the permit, and went
around to say good-by to his friends and ac-
quaintances in Moscow. He told them he was
going out by Vladivostok.

"What?" said the experts in boulevard up-
per-world underground information. "What?
Going out by Vladivostok? Not by Archan-
gel? Not by Murmansk? Not by Finland?
Do you mean it? By Siberia? My dear man,
don't you know that Lenin stops having any
say-so about anything at all when you get to

158 LENIN

a point 500 miles east of here? Don't you
know that all Siberia is overrun with Soviets
who pay no attention to Lenin, and with brig-
ands who pay no attention to the Soviets?
Don't you know that the Soviets and the brig-
ands between them will take all your money
and probably all your clothes?"

"No, I do not," said Robins. He was weary
of answering such questions in any other way.
"No, I do not," he said, and boarded his train.

He got to Vladivostok. He got there in a
running time only a few hours greater than
would have been consumed by the running
time of the Siberian Railway under the old
regime. He himself has seen the Siberian
Railway under the Kerensky regime. The
Bolsheviks were doing better by it. There was
less clutter. There was more energy. Inci-
dentally there was food at every station. And,
above all, the local governments were not
raising their heads against Lenin as they had
raised them against Kerensky.

■■:' tvl-

■■■-" ■ ' 1

,. , wjijum i«n(tsiiur>.

'/■/'' ' ' '■■,•'■ ■

\«

- ' ■'" '■''' ' ,■ ' J -

. .'■' ■ ■ '.

;A-;-' -'-^ / -V',-

^

President People's Commissioners, Moscow, Kremlin

5/11/1918.
To All Councils of Deputies and Other Soviet Organizations :
I beg you to give every kind of assistance to Colonel Robins
and other niembers of the American Red Cross Mission for
an unhindered and speediest journey from Moscow to Vladi-
vostok. President C. P. C,

V. Ulianov (Lenin).

i6o LENIN

In 19 1 7, when Robins came into Russia
through Siberia, the Red Cross Mission with
which he traveled wa^ stopped at Chita by a
local government, and had to run by stealth
through Krasnoyarsk in order to avoid being
stopped by a local government there. In 191 8,
when Robins came out of Russia, his Red
Cross car was stopped nowhere. Nowhere did
any local government interrupt it. Nowhere
did any local government, after Robins had
shown his credentials from Moscow, even at-
tempt to examine it.

Between Moscow and Vladivostok Robins
passed through fifteen different successive
Soviet jurisdictions. At the first town within
each jurisdiction there would be a commis-
sioner and a platoon of soldiers. They would
start going through the train to which Robins'
car was attached. They would arrest persons
whom they called rebels — counter-revolution-
aries. They would confiscate property —
vodka, for instance, and rifles — ^which they

RAYMOND ROBINS i6i

called contraband. Robins had no vodka, but
he had rifles. Moreover, he was a bourgeois.
According to the boulevards he was entitled
to be shot at sight by any true Soviet any-
where. Nevertheless, he would venture to
show the Commissioner a certain paper. The
Commissioner would sit in Robins' car, with
his soldiers outside, and read this paper. Hav-
ing read it, he would rise and bow, and say,
"Please, thank you, good-day." And that
would be the last Robins ever saw of him ; and
the soldiers never came into the car, and noth-
ing in the car was ever examined or censored
or in any way subjected to any local stoppage,
interference or scrutiny.

The paper was a wish by Lenin. He could
not physically enforce it; because at that time
his Red Army was not large enough to reach
so far; but it Was a wish by Lenin. It said in
effect that courtesy to Colonel Robins of the
American Red Cross was desired by Lenin. It
bore the words Vladimir I. Ulianov, and then

1 62 LENIN

in parentheses the word Lenin. It was enough.

It was enough on the Volga, and it was
enough on the Amur. On the Amur, at Kha-
barovsk, Robins came to a Soviet farther away
from Moscow than any other Soviet on Rus-
sian soil. It was "The Soviet of the Far
Eastern District," bordering the Arctic, bor-
dering the Pacific. Its President Commis-
sioner, A. M. Krasnoschchekov, read Lenin's
letter, and at once, in due form, gave Colonel
Robins of the American Red Cross the official
freedom of the city of Khabarovsk and took
him to attend a conference of the local Coun-
cil of People's Commissioners, since Lenin
wished him to have courtesy. On the Amur,
four thousand five hundred miles beyond, the
farthest line then reached by any soldier in
Lenin's Guard, Lenin's name was enough. It
was the name of the Revolution, of the Soviet
idea, of the Soviet system.

At Vladivostok Robins took his rifles and
his cartridges and surrendered them to the

RAYMOND ROBINS 163

Vladivostok Soviet. He had not fired one
shot. He had not read one shot fired by any-
body else.

That was Siberia of the Bolsheviks. To-
day in Siberia the anti-Bolshevik ruler Kol-
chak cannot get obedience from the Siberian
population and cannot keep the Siberian Rail-
way for one day free from raiders and ma-
rauders without the help of scores of thou-
sands of foreign Allied and Associated troops.
In May of 1918 a letter from Lenin, without
even a headquarters policeman behind it, could
send a car across all Siberia from Cheliabinsk
to Vladivostok unmolested and unsearched,
and could get from every local governmental
capital an immediate response of loyal fellow-
ship.

LENIN IN 1919

LENIN IN 1919
By Arthur Ransome

/. Lenin's Views of George Bernard Shaw
and the Revolution in England

Whatever else they may think of him, not
even his enemies deny that Vladimir Ilyich
Ulianov (Lenin) is one of the greatest per-
sonalities of his time. I therefore make no
apology for writing down such scraps of his
conversation as seem to me to illustrate his
manner of mind.

He was talking of the lack of thinkers in
the English labor movement and said he re-
membered hearing Shaw speak at some meet-
ing. Shaw, he said, was "a good man fallen

167

i68 LENIN

among Fabians" and a great deal further Left
than his company. He had not heard of "The
Perfect Wagnerite," but was interested when
I told him the general idea of the book, and
turned fiercely on an interpreter who said that
Shaw was a clown. "He may be a clown for
the bourgeoisie in a bourgeois state, but they
would not think him a clown in a revolution."

He asked whether Sydney Webb was con-
sciously working in the interests of the capi-
talists, and when I said I was quite sure that
he was not, he said: "Then he has more in-
dustry than brains. He certainly has great
knowledge."

He was entirely convinced that England was
on the eve of revolution and pooh-poohed my
objections. "Three months ago I thought it
would end in all the world having to fight the
center of reaction in England. I do not think
so now. Things have gone further there than
in France, if the news as to the extent of the
strikes is true."

ARTHUR RANSOME 169

I pointed out some of tile circumstances,
geographical and economical, which would
make the success of a violent revolution in
England problematical in the extreme, and
put to him the same suggestion that I put to
Bukharin, namely, that a suppressed move-
ment in England would be wo^jse for Russia
than our traditional method of compromise.
He agreed at once, but said: "That is quite
true, but you cannot stop a revolution . . .
although Ramsay Macdonald will try to at the
last minute. Strikes and Soviets. ~Li these two
habits once get hold, nothing will keep the
workmen from them. And Soviets, once
started, must sooner or later come to supreme
power." Then: "But certainly it would be
much more difficult in England. Your big
clerk and shopkeeping class would oppose it,
until the workmen broke them. Russia was
indeed the only country in which the revolu-
tion could start. And we are not yet through
our troubles with the peasantry."

lyo LENIN

I suggested that one reason why it had been
possible in Russia was that they had room to
retreat.

"Yes," he said. "The distances saved us.
The Germans were frightened of them, at the
time when they could have eaten us up, and
won peace, which the Allies would have given
them in gratitude for our destruction. A revo-
lution in England would have nowhere
whither to retire."

Of the Soviets he said : "In the beginning I
thought they were and would remain a purely
Russian form; but it is now quite clear that
under various names they must be the instru-
ments of revolution everywhere."

2. Lenin's Opinion of Colonel Raymond
Roiins, De Leon and Others

He expressed the opinion that in England
they would not allow me to tell the truth about
Russia, and gave as an example the way in

ARTHUR RANSOME 171

which Colonel Robins had been kept silent in
America. He asked about Robins, "Had he
really been as friendly to the Soviet govern-
ment as he made out?" I said: "Yes, if only
as a sportsman admiring its plvldk and cour-
age in difHculties." I quoted Robins' saying:
"I can't go against a baby I have sat up with
for six months. But if there were a Bolshevik
movement in America I'd be out with my rifle
to fight it every time." "Now that," said
Lenin, "is an honest man and more far-seeing
than most. I always liked that man." He
shook with laughter at the image of the baby,
and said, "That baby had several million other
folk sitting up with it, too."

He said he had read in an English Socialist
paper a comparison of his own theories with
those of an American, Danel De Leon. He
had then borrowed some of De Leon's pamph-
lets from Reinstein (who belongs to the party
which De Leon founded in America), read
them for the first time, and was amazed to see

172 LENIN

how far and how early De Leon had pursued
the same train of thought as the Russians. His
theory that representation should be by indus-
tries, not by areas, was already the germ of the
Soviet system. He remembered seeing De
Leon at an International Conference. De
Leon made no impression at all, a gray old
man, quite unable to speak to such an audi-
ence, but evidently a much bigger man than he
looked, since his pamphlets were written be-
fore the experience of the Russian Revolution
of 1905. Some days afterwards I noticed that
Lenin had introduced a few phrases of De
Leon, as if to do honor to his memory, into the
draft of the new programme of the Commu-
nist Party.

Talking of the lies that are told about Rus-
sia, he said it was interesting to notice that they
were mostly perversions of the truth and not
pure inventions, and gave as an example the
recent story that he had recanted. "Do you
know the origin of that?" he said. "I was

ARTHUR RANSOME 173

wishing a happy New Year to a friend over
the telephone, and said, 'And may we commit
fewer stupidities this year than last!' Some-
one overheard it and told someone else. A
newspaper announced, 'Lenin says we are
committing stupidities,' and so the story
started."

3. Sources of Lenin's Poise and Happiness

More than ever, Lenin struck me as a happy
man. Walking home from the Kremlin, I
tried to think of any other man of his caliber
who had a similar joyous temperament. I
could think of none. This little, bald-headed,
wrinkled man, who tilts his chair this way and
that, laughing over one thing or another, ready
any minute to give serious advice to anyone
who interrupts him to ask for it, advice so well
reasoned that it is to his followers far more
compelling than any command — every one of
his wrinkles is a wrinkle of laughter, not of

174 LENIN

worry. I think the reason must be that he is
the first great leader who utterly discounts the
value of his own personality. He is quite
without personal ambition. More than that,
he believes, as a Marxist, in the movement of
the masses which, with or without him, would
still move. His whole faith is in the elemental
forces that move people; his faith in himself
is merely his belief th^t he justly estimates the
direction of these forces.

Lenin does not believe that any man could
make or stop the Revolution which he thinks
inevitable. If the Russian Revolution fails,
according to him, it fails only temporarily, and
because of forces beyond any man's control.
He is consequently free with a freedom no
other great man has ever had. It is not so
much what he says that inspires confidence in
him. It is this sensible freedom, this obvious
detachment. With his philosophy he cannot
for a moment believe that one man's mistake
might ruin all. He is, for himself at any rate,

ARTHUR RANSOME 175

the exponent, not the cause, of the events that
will be forever linked with this name.

4- Lenin's Popularity at the Third
International

The meeting March 3d was in a smallish
room in the Kremlin, with a dais at one end,
in the old Courts of Justice built in the time
of Catherine the Second, who would certainly
have turned in her grave if she had known the
use to which it was being put. Two very
smart soldiers of the Red Army were guarding
the doors. The whole room, including the
floor, was decorated in red. There were ban-
ners with "Long Live the Third Internation-
al" inscribed upon them in many languages.
The Praesidium was on the raised dais at the
end of the room, Lenin sitting in the middle
behind a long red-covered table, with Al-
brecht, a young German Spartacist, on the
right, and Flatten, the Swiss, on the left. The

176 LENIN

auditorium sloped down to the foot of the dais.
Chairs were arranged on each side of an al-
leyway down the middle, and the four or five
front rows had little tables for convenience
in writing. Everybody of importance was
there.

Trotzky, in a leather coat, military breeches
and gaiters, with a fur hat with the sign of the
Red Army in front, was looking very well, but
a strange figure for those who had known him
as one of the greatest anti-militarists in Eu-
rope. Lenin sat quietly listening, speaking
when necessary in almost every European
language with astonishing ease. Balabanova
talked about Italy and seemed happy at last,
even in Soviet Russia, to be once more in a
"secret meeting." It was really an extraordi-
nary affair, and, in spite of some childishness,
I could not help realizing that I was present
at something that will go down in the histories
of Socialism, much like that other strange
meeting convened in London in 1848.

ARTHUR RANSOME 177

March 6th. — ^The conference in the Krem-
lin ended with the usual singing and a photo-
graph. Some time before the end, when
Trotzky had just finished speaking and had
left the tribune, there was a squeal of protest
from the photographer who had just trained
his apparatus. Someone remarked, "The dic-
tatorship of the photographer," and, amid gen-
eral laughter, Trotzky had to return to the
tribune and stand silent while the unabashed
photographer took two pictures. The found-
ing of the Third International had been pro-
claimed in the morning papers, and an extraor-
dinary meeting in the Great Theater an-
nounced for the evening.

I got to the theater at about five, and had
difficulty in getting in, though I had a special
ticket as a correspondent. There were queues
outside all the doors. The Moscow Soviet was
there, the Executive Committee, representa-
tives of the trade unions and the factory com-
mittees, etc. The huge theater and the plat-

178 LENIN

form were crammed, people standing in the
aisles, and even packed close together in the
wings of the stage. Kamenev opened the meet-
ing by a solemn announcement of the founding
of the Third International in the Kremlin.
There was a roar of applause from the audi-
ence, which rose and sang the "International"
in a way that I have never heard it sung since
the All-Russian Assembly when the news came
of the strikes in Germany during the Brest
negotiations.

Kamenev then spoke of those who had died
on the way, mentioning Liebknecht and Rosa
Luxemburg, and the whole theater stood again
while the orchestra played "You Fell as Vic-
tims." Then Lenin spoke. If I had ever
thought that Lenin was losing his personal
popularity, I got my answer now. It was a
long time before he could speak at all, every-
body standing and drowning his attempts to
speak with roar after roar of applause. It was
an extraordinary, overwhelming scene, tier

ARTHUR RANSOME 179

after tier crammed with workmen, the parterre
filled, the whole platform and the wings. A
knot of workwomen were close to me, and
they almost fought to see him, and shouted as
if each one were determined that he should
hear her in particular. He spoke as usual, in
the simplest way, emphasizing the fact that
the revolutionary struggle everywhere wag
forced to use the Soviet forms. "We declare
our solidarity with the aims of the Soviets,"
he read from an Italian paper, and added,
"and that was when they did not know what
our aims were, and before we had an estab-
lished programme ourselves." Albrecht made
a very long reasoned speech for the Sparta-
cans, which was translated by Trotzky. Guil-
beau, seemingly a mere child, spoke of the So-
cialist movement in France. Steklov was
translating him when I left. You must re-
member that I had nearly two years of such
meetings and am not a Russian. When I got
outside the theater I found at each door a dis-

i8o LENIN

appointed crowd that had been unable to
get in.

The proceedings finished up next day with a
review in the Red Square and a general holi-
day.

5. Revolution Caused by Economic Con-
ditions, not by Propaganda

I went to see Lenin the day after the Review
in the Red Square and the general holiday in
honor of the Third International. The first
thing he said was : "I am afraid that the jin-
goes in England and France will make use of
yesterday's doings as an excuse for further ac-
tion against us. They will say, 'How can we
leave them in peace when they set about set-
ting the world on fire?' To that I would an-
swer: 'We are at war, messieurs ! And just as
during your war you tried to make revolution
in Germany, and Germany did her best to
make trouble in Ireland and India, sq we,

ARTHUR RANSOME i8i

while we are at war with you, adopt the meas-
ures that are open to us. We have told you
we are willing to make peace."

He spoke of Chicherin's last note, and said
they based all their hopes on it. Balfour had
said somewhere, "Let the fire burn itself out."
That would not do. But the quickest way of
restoring good conditions in Russia was, of
course, peace and agreement with the Allies.
"I am sure we could come to terms, if they
want to come to terms at all. England and
America would be willing, perhaps, if their
hands were not tied by France. But interven-
tion in the large sense can now hardly be. They
must have learned that Russia could never be
governed as India is governed, and that send-
ing troops here is the same thing as sending
them to a Communist university."

I said something about the general hostility
to their propaganda noticeable in foreign
countries.
Lenin : "Let them build a Chinese wall round

i82 LENIN

each of their countries. They have their cus-
toms officers, their frontiers, their coast guards.
They can expel any Bolsheviks they wish.
Revolution does not depend on propaganda^
If the conditions of revolution are not there
no sort of propaganda will either hasten or im-
pede it. The war has brought about those con-
ditions in all countries, and I am convinced
that if Russia were to be swallowed up by the
sea, were to cease to exist altogether, the Revo-
lution in the rest of Europe would go on. Put
Russia under water for twenty years, and you
would not affect by a shilling or an hour a
week the demands of the shop-stewards in
England."

I told him, what I have told most of them
many times, that I did not believe there would
be a revolution in England.

Lenin: "We have a saying that a man may
have typhoid while still on his legs. Twenty,
maybe thirty, years ago I had abortive ty-
phoid, and was going about with it, had had

ARTHUR RANSOME 183

it some days before it knocked me over. Well,
England and France and Italy have caught
the disease already. England may seem to
you to be untouched, but the microbe is already
there."

I said that just as his typhoid was abortive
typhoid, so the disturbances in England to
which he alluded might well be abortive revo-
lution and come to nothing. I told him the
vague, disconnected character of the strikes
and the generally Liberal as opposed to Social-
ist character of the movement, so far as it was
political at all, reminded me of what I had
heard of 1905 in Russia and not at all of 1917,
and that I was sure it would settle down.

Lenin: "Yes, that is possible. It is, per-
haps, an educative period, in which the Eng-
lish workmen will come to realize their politi-
cal needs and turn from Liberalism to Social-
ism. Socialism is certainly weak in England.
Your Socialist movements, your Socialist par-
ties . . . when I was in England I zealously

i84 LENIN

attended everything I could, and for a country
with so large an industrial population they
were pitiable, pitiable ... a handful at a
street corner ... a meeting in .a drawing-
room ... a school class . . . pitiable. But
you must remember one great difference be-
tween Russia of 1905 and England to-day. Our
first Soviet in Russia was made during the
Revolution. Your shop-stewards' committees
have been in existence long before. They are
without programme, without direction, but the
opposition they will meet will force a pro-
gramme upon them."

Speaking of the expected visit of the Berne
delegation, he asked me if I knew Macdonald,
whose name had been substituted for that of
Henderson in later telegrams announcing their
coming. He said:' "I am very glad Mac-
donald is coming instead of Henderson. Of
course, Macdonald is not a Marxist in any
sense of the word, but he is at least interested
in theory, and can therefore be trusted to do

ARTHUR RANSOME 185

his best to understand what is happening here.
More than that we do not ask."

6. Lenin's Views on Property and Class
Struggle

He then talked a little on a subject that in-
terests me very much, namely, the way in
which insensibly, quite apart from war, the
Communist theories are being modified in the
difficult process of their translation into prac-
tice. We talked of the changes in "workers'
control," which is now a very different thing
from the wild committee business that at first
made work almost impossible. We talked
then of the antipathy of the peasants to com-
pulsory communism, and how that idea also
had been considerably whittled away. I asked
him what were going to be the relations be-
tween the Communists of the towns and the
property-loving peasants, and whether there
was not great danger of antipathy between

i86 LENIN

them, and said I regretted leaving too soon to
see the elasticity of the Communist theories
tested by the inevitable pressure of the peas-
antry.

Lenin said that in Russia there was a pretty
sharp distinction between the rich peasants
and the poor, "The only opposition we have
here in Russia is directly or indirectly due to
the rich peasants. The poor, as soon as they
are liberated from the political domination of
the rich, are on our side and are in an enor-
mous majority."

I said that would not be so in the Ukraine,
where property among the peasants is much
more equally distributed.

Lenin: "No. And there, in the Ukraine,
you will certainly see our policy modified.
Civil war, whatever happens, is likely to be
more bitter in the Ukraine than elsewhere, be-
cause there the instinct of property has been
further developed in the peasantry, and the
minority and majority will be more equal,"'

ARTHUR RANSOME 187

He asked me if I meant to return, saying
that I could go down to Kiev to watch the
Revolution there as I had watched it in Mos-
cow. I said I should be very sorry to think
that this was my last visit to the country which
I love only second to my own. He laughed,
and paid me the compliment of saying that
"although English," I had more or less suc-
ceeded in understanding what they were at,
and that he should be pleased to see me again.

CONSERVATIVE OPINIONS
ON LENIN

CONSERVATIVE OPINIONS
ON LENIN

I. "New York Times," upon the Report of
Lenin's Death, Sept, 2, IQI8

"Lenin was the most remarkable of the
personalities brought by the world-war into
prominence from obscurity. By many he has
been regarded as the mere paid agent of Ger-
many. Of this no proof has ever been forth-
coming. An American, more or less in sym-
pathy with his doctrines, who had rare oppor-
tunities of studying Lenin at close range, de-
scribed him as 'the greatest living statesman
in Europe.' It was a striking tribute to the
personality of the man.

". . . He endeavored to put into practice
theories which he had been preaching for
many years before the Russian Revolution

191

192 LENIN

came to pass. In those years he conceived
and worked out in his mind a principle of so-
cial revolution which distinguished him from
other Socialist thinkers by his uncompromis-
ing appeal to the spirit of class revolt.

"This spirit as an indispensable weapon in
the construction of an ideal Socialist state he
preached with increasing fervor as years went
by, supplementing it . . . with something
that was essentially lacking in the Marxian
doctrine, namely, a political design under
which the economic aims of a thorough-
going Socialism might be put in effect. This
political design found its expression, so far
as it has gone, in the present Soviet govern-

ment."

2. Frank Vanderlip

"The personal picture of Lenin, with which
I have found no disagreement in speaking
with a number of people who are well in-

CONSERVATIVE OPINIONS 193

formed, is that he is a man of most extraordi-
nary ability, and with some truly fine charac-
teristics. He was a Russian idealistic noble
and came to be a man of only one idea. He
believed that the regime of capitalism meant
slavery and that the world would find free-
dom in a communistic state of society. In his
mind every motive was fine, every act moved
by patriotic love and sympathy for the peo-
ple."

•3. London "Times"

"Is Lenin a genius? Many Russians have
denied it and certainly there is nothing in his
personal appearance to suggest even faintly a
resemblance to the super-man. And yet on
second thoughts there is something in those
steel gray eyes that arrests the attention,
something in that quizzing, half-contemptu-
ous, half-smiling look which speaks of bound-
less self-confidence and conscious superiority.

194 LENIN

He is certainly by far the greatest intellectual
force which the Russian Revolution has yet
brought to light.

"The almost fanatical respect with which
he is regarded by the men who are his col-
leagues and who are at least as jealous as poli-
ticians in other countries is due to other quali-
ties than mere intellectual capacity. To
qualities other than mere intellectual force he
owes his predominating position in his own
party. Chief of these are his iron courage,
his grim, relentless determination and his
complete lack of all self-interest.

"He has made use of the demagogue's arts,
but behind all the inconsistencies of his policy,
the tactics, the maneuvering, there lies a
deep-rooted plan which he has been turning
over in his mind for years and which he now
thinks is ripe for execution. Demagogues
have no constructive programme. Lenin at
least knows exactly what he wishes to achieve
and how he means to achieve it.

CONSERVATIVE OPINIONS 195

"In the many attacks that have been made
against him no breath of scandal has ever
touched his private life. He is married —
according to all accounts, singularly happily
married."

4. General Von Hofmann, Who Imposed
the Brest-Litovsk Treaty on the Soviet

"It was a little upstart named Lenin that
defeated Germany. Germany did not play
with Bolshevism. Bolshevism played with
Germany. Immediately after conquering the
Bolsheviks we were conquered by them. Our
victorious army on the Eastern front became
rotten with Bolshevism. We got to the point
where we did not dare to transfer certain of
our Eastern divisions to the West. Our mili-
tary machine became the printing-press for
the Bolsheviks. It was Lenin and the Bol-
sheviks that broke our morale and gave us de-
feat and the revolution you now see ruining
us."

TWO ADVERSE OPINIONS

John Spargo in "How Lenin Intrigued
with Germany"

"Coldly cynical, crassly materialistic, ut-
terly unscrupulous, repudiating moral codes
and sanctions as bourgeois sentimentality,
Lenin has for many years surrounded himself
with desperate and shady characters, many of
them having criminal records. Burtzev
tells an interesting story which throws a strong
light upon the unholy alliance between Lenin
and Malinovsky, the police tool, and almost
compels one to believe that Lenin was delib-
erately conniving at the betrayal of his com-
rades."

196

II

Princess Radziwill in "The Firebrand
of Bolshevism"

"There were some who said that Lenin is an
idealist and that he is honest, too. Lenin is
neither an idealist nor an honest man. He is
only an opportunist and an ambitious crea-
ture. He understands well a certain class of
Russians, who like empty words and eloquent
speeches and who never look ahead and never
care to do so. What he aimed at was to be-
come the absolute master in a land which he
believed to be doomed and out of which he
only hoped to save sufficient wreckage to be
able to live not only in comfort but also in
affluence the rest of his natural life. He was
an exciter of the passions of the mob; he was
no more of a ruler than Kerensky, and he
could not even be called a leader of men,
though he knew how to launch them on a ca-
reer of crime and plunder."

197

LENIN
By Anise

LENIN
By Anise

In a little room

* * *

In the Kremlin

* ♦ *

Just off the high court

^ * Hf

Of the old CZAR,

* At *

In a chair still bearing

* * *

The old czar's crest,

* * *

Sat LENIN,

ii< li' *

A little bald-headed man

i^ * Hi

Of forty-eight years,

* * *

Patient, deliberate,

* * *

No lover of WORDS,

* * *

But a quiet, shrewd executive

* * *

Into whose eyes

* * *

The swift, sharp flash

* * *

Of a GREAT VISION

* * *

Comes for a moment
i * *

And is gone.

* * *
Lenin who saw in his youth

His brother's corpse swing
out

t * At

From the czar's gibbet,

* * *

Who saw the PRIEST

* * *

Hold up the holy IKON

* * *

Blessing the Cossack's rule

* * *

Of WHIP and SWORD,

:* * *

Lenin, the noble

* If *

Who swore in that hour

* * *

ETERNAL ENMITY

* ♦ *

Against the ancient order
if * *

And went forth, suspect

* * *

To danger and prison

* » *

And long, long years of toil

* * *

And final TRIUMPH!

He sat there, calm and sure,

* * *

And said: "Colonel Robins,

* * *

The REVOLUTION

* * *

May FAIL in Russia,

201

202

LENIN

For we are a primitive land

* * *

Forced forward

* » *

BEYOND

* * 4<

Our natural pacel

* * :»

But we will keep alive

* * *

The FLAME of revolution

* * *

Till the WORLD is alight!

* * ♦

It will come first

* ♦ ♦

Iq Bulgaria

4> * *

And the Bulgars

* * *

Will cease fighting.

* ♦ *

It will come next

* * *

In Austria

* * *

And the Austrians

* ♦ *

Will cease fighting,

* * *

And THEN it will cotae

* * *

In Germany,

* * *

And the power of the kaiser

* * *

Will crumble inward.

* * *

When the day comes

* ♦ *

That a Workers' Council

Rules in BERLIN

* * *

REMEMBER

* * ♦

The little man in the Kremlin,

* * *

Who said: "That day

* ♦ »

Marks the beginning

* * ♦

Of the NEW WORLD 1

* * *

Yes, even though the powers

* * *

Of ALL the EARTH

* 4= *

Combine to crush us

* ♦ «

As once they joined to crush

* * *

The Revolution in France.

* * *

Yet as the IDEA

* * *

01 the French Revolution

* * *

Overthrew at last

* * ♦

The feudal lords of earth,

* * ♦

All its own CONQUERORS,

* * ♦

So shall the IDEA

* * *

Of OUR revolution

* * *

Overthrow in the end

* ♦ *

OUR CONQUERORS I"