132

The Nation

[Vol. 118,No. 3057

Lenin
E N I N is dead. Ahalf million people aremarching
past his red-draped bier in Moscow, and all over the
world men are mourning or exulting.
Whatwasthesecret
of hismight?
It is hardto
analyze. No man of position in the world ever felt his power
less. I have never met a person so destitute of self-importance, said Bertrand Russell, and i t was probably literally
true. Lenin struck me as a happy man, said Arthur Ransome. I tried to think of any other man of his temperament who had had a similar joyous temperament. I could
think of none. This little, bald-headed, wrinkled man, -whotilts his chair this way and that, laughing
over one thing or
another, ready any minute to give serious advicet o any who
interrupt him t o ask for it, advice so well reasoned that it
is to his followers f a r more compelling than any command
-every one of his wrinkles is a wrinkle of laughter, not of
worry: I think the reason must be that he is the first great
leader who utterly discounts t-he value of his own personality. Heutterly lacked dignity; none of the outward
trappings with which politicians and statesmen usually enhance their appearances played any part in his influence.
He did not cut his hair
impressively,likeLloyd
George,
or even Trotzky; he probablyneverwore a tall hat
a
frock coat in his life; he had no pomp of manner. Sometimes, coming late t o a party congress or Soviet assembly,
he would stray down the crowded aisle and seat himself
half way up the steps to the tribune, leaning over the next
step to take notes,andwhen
an opponentscored
point
against him he would lean forward, ironically applauding.
Yet this undignified little man became the idol of his
. people.
The hundreds of thousands who marched past d his
casket were notby any means all Communists, or even revolutionaries.TheyweresimplyRussians,mourning
their
natio,nal hero. WithinRussia
eventhose
who despised
Lenins communisttheories trusted him somehow to lead
Russia out of the slough into which the years of revolution, war, and blockade had plunged her. No other leader,
within o r without the ruling party, had a tithe of the universal respect and devotion
which was Lenins. Thepeasants affectionately called him Ilyich; within his party he
was the old man, and his word carried conviction.
His strength, Bertrand Russell thought, came from
his honesty,
courage,
and unwavering faith-religious
faith in the Marxian gospel, which takes the place of the
Christianmartyrs
hopes of paradise, except that it is
lessegotistical.
Hehasaslittle
love of libertyasthe
Christians who sufferedunder
Diocletian and: retaliated
when they acquired power. Perhaps love of liberty is incompatible with wholehearted belief in a panacea for all
human ills. It must have required a terribly intense belief
to hold ofice through the period of the Red terror.
The generation of revolutionaries which came t o power
with Lenin had indeed been tried by fire. No group of men
in the history of government has matched them in readiness for sacrifice. Lenins own brotherwashangedfor
participationas a studentin a revolutionary movement.
Lenin himselfgave up his position as a member of the
lesseraristocracy,spentthreeyears
. a s a prisonerin
Siberia, and mostof his life in exile in devotion to his principles. In 1905 he directed, from Finland, the work of the
bolshevist minority in the first Duma. As an exilehe was
~

recognized as leader by his own party, though almost- u known outside it. During the war he led the tiny band of
internationalsocialists who sawthe whole carnageas a
conflict of rivalcapitalismsandmetinSwitzerland
to
preachpeace-peacebyrevolution.
When the revolution
came he sought the first opportunity to return to
and was soon regarded in Petrograd as the most dangerous
of those fiery street speakers who denounced the comprornises of Kerensky andthe imperialism of Miliukov. He
believed in the destined mission of the -industrial working
class. He believed that parliamentarydemocracy, in a nation
90 per cent illiterate, with an aristocracy and
oligarchy
used to the technique of-rule, was a farce. Someone would
have t o dictate, and he was determined that
it should be
the class-conscious minority of the working class. It was.
That class rule infuriated theclass which ruled the rest
of the world. GermanyinvadedRussia,
but fellvictim
to the virusof revolution ; the Allies blockaded Russia, shut
it off from the rest of the world by a sanitary cordon,
then invaded it from all sides. Theysupportedthe
Czecho-Slovak legion invadingfromwithin,
Tchaikowsky
invading from the north,
Kolchak from the east, Denikin
and Wrangel from the south, Petlura,
Yudenich, and the
Poles from the west. But Soviet. Russia, under Lenin, stood
.
the test of battle. It fouglit off the world, and then set
an example unparalleled in historyintheseries
of generous treaties which i t made with its neighbors. That l-ong
struggle, however, following four years of war, sapped t h e
strength of the nation. It was left in no condition t o attempt
the
largest-scale
social
experiment
of history.
Whether,under
other circumstances,communism
might
have worked, we do not know. It never had
fair chance
in Russia. And Lenin, still far-sighted, was the first to proclaim the necessary compromises.
Compromise was another of hisstrangevirtues.
He
was trained in the dialectic school of exiled revolutionaries,
where theorists usually learn chiefly to chop logic in a thin
world of abstractions. In office this cafe scholar directed t h e
government of ahundredmillion
people. Trotzkywas a n
abler administrator, but Trotzky looked t o Lenin f o r guidance and often enough after debating with him for months
accepted his dictum and reversed his own position. Lenin
early lost interest in world revolution. He made
righb
about faces in his policy toward the peasants. But where
lesser men would have devised ingenious arguments to show
that theyhad never changedtheir minds, Lenin had thecow-.
age to say, We were wrong; we must change our policy.?
Lenin is dead. Hiscountry-hashadto
make many
painful compromises since his ragged crew took power, but
it is running the railroads land marketingthewealth
of
Russia today. The Communist Government preaching and,
to the best of its ability, practicing the gospel of economic
revolution, still fills the breast of Mr. Hughes with alarm.
Whatever may come of it in Russia that doctrinethatPOlitical democracy without ecoaomic liberation is a farehas swept the Western world, and the Western world
never again be quite the same. The French Revolution was
crushed, but it molded thehistory of nineteenth-century
Europe.TheRussian
Revolution is compromising;Lenin
is dead and Trotzky is in, but they will longcontinue to
makehistory.
I