Never mind, his swipes at Kautsky would not go to waste—he would put them in somewhere else.
He was also drafting an important and detailed summary of policy for the Swiss leftists, so that they could systematically correct their failures at the Congress. But this could be more conveniently done in the Center for Socialist Literature than here.
No, she had always helped, always translated for him. Any day now she would leave the mountains for Clarens, and might come to him. Why imagine the worst? He had not been thinking straight.
He had arrived feeling that he had also left something undone, overlooked something in his article against disarmament. He had finished it once (it was there in his bag), but doubt still nagged at the back of his mind. The main ideas were all there: disarmament is a counsel of despair; disarmament means renouncing any idea of revolution; those who look for socialism without revolution and dictatorship are no Socialists; we will have women and children of thirteen and upward fighting in Russia in the coming civil war. All true enough, but he was still left with a feeling that some statements were inadequately qualified. You must be super-cautious, never give your enemies a thing to quote against you. You must equip all dangerous sentences with protective subsidiary clauses, make sure that every sentence is defended at all points, hedged with qualifications, carefully balanced, so that no one can find a vulnerable spot. The article, then, could do with some reexamination—and in fact he had already started. Here, for example, was something written in the heat of the moment: “We support the use of violence by the masses.” They’d pounce on that! Tack a bit on “… against their oppressors.”
But this was something he could do elsewhere, and time was going by.
He started looking over the theses for the Swiss leftists. Still a lot of work there. Everything had to be chewed up very small for them. House-to-house distribution of leaflets—to whom? To the poorest peasants and farm laborers. Which agricultural holdings should be subject to forcible expropriation? Let’s say those over fifteen hectares. After what period of residence should foreigners qualify for Swiss citizenship? Let’s say three months—and gratis, that’s important. What is meant by “revolutionary rates of taxation”? Too general. Must compile a table showing concretely what percentage is to be paid on property over 20,000 francs, 50,000 francs, and so on. How should people in guesthouses be assessed? Draw up a precise scale for them too—nobody ever seems to get down to practical details. A guest paying five francs a day is one of us—one percent is enough—but anyone paying ten francs should be charged twenty percent immediately.
His gorge rose as he thought of Grimm’s and Greulich’s latest dirty trick. Filthy opportunists, sneaking scoundrels—just you wait, we’ll have you in the pillory!
He seemed unable to escape these vexations and distractions. It’s always the same: let them get out of hand and it’s impossible to concentrate, to work methodically, or even to sit still.
Then there was that frantic and still unsettled argument with the “Japanese,” which had wasted so much of his energy and was still interfering with his work. He had thought that after several articles and a couple of dozen letters the conflict was resolved, but it was still not quite dead!
He could never manage to concentrate all his efforts on a single major objective. He was forever discovering enemies in secondary sectors which might at present look quite unimportant; but no front was ever unimportant—at some future moment these secondary fronts might be decisive. So that you must furiously round on those snapping at your flanks and show them your teeth. It wasn’t just the “Japanese” (Pyatakov and that Bosch woman of his, who had escaped from Siberia via Japan). Bukharin was siding with them too. They, who hadn’t an ounce of brains between them, had reduced themselves with Radek’s assistance to a state of collective stupefaction, to the ultimate in cretinism—if it wasn’t “Imperialist economism” it was the self-determination of nations, or “democracy.” These little rosy piglets, this younger generation of Party members, were so self-satisfied, so very sure of themselves, so ready to take over the leadership at any moment, and yet they were thrown by every sharp turn, not one of them had the trained skill and flexibility to swerve instantly to left or right, anticipating every fall with which the tortuous road of revolution threatened them.
Take democracy. Bukharin undervalued it in a primitive, adolescent fashion. He wrote openly that “we will have to dispense with democracy in the period of the seizure of power.” Not at all! In a general way socialist revolution was impossible without a struggle for democracy, and the piglets should have their little pink snouts rubbed in this truth. But, of course, it must always be remembered that this was true only in a particular situation, in a certain sense, for a certain period. A different time would come when democratic aims of any kind would only be a hindrance to socialist revolution. (Double underlining here!) Suppose, for instance, when the battle is already raging, when the revolution is underway, we need to seize the banks—and they call on us to wait, to put the republic on a legal basis first?
Lenin had explained it over and over again, in letters many pages long, but they had turned up their noses. He had bothered so much with these troublemakers and intriguers only because the “Japanese” had money for a journal. Kommunist could not have been started without their help. All the same, the alliance made sense only as long as Lenin had a majority on the editorial board. (Equality with such fools was unthinkable. To hell with them! It would be idiocy, it would ruin everything!) It was better to drag the fatheads through the mud. You wouldn’t accept a peaceful solution, so we’ll bash your ugly mugs in!
He had confined his argument with Bukharin to letters, and not let it come into the open. But he had been too furious to answer the letter Bukharin had written before his departure. Now he had gone off to America—probably he had taken offense.
To himself Lenin acknowledged that Bukharin was very clever. But his constant resistance was exasperating.
All opposition exasperated him—especially on theoretical questions, where it implied a claim to leadership.
Radek was another matter, and it would be well worthwhile thrashing the little shit as a lesson to the rest. Radek’s lowest trick yet was surreptitiously egging on the piglets while hiding behind the Zimmerwald left. (At Kienthal he had tried to make Lenin quarrel with all the leftists, and had caused him to fall out with Rosa.) Radek’s political behavior was that of a barefaced, impudent Tyszko-type huckster—the only politics such snotty-nosed guttersnipes had ever known. After the way he had slung Lenin and Zinoviev off the board of Vorbote the only thing to do was to punch him on the snout or turn your back on him. If you forgive this sort of thing in politics, people regard you as a fool or a knave.
In the present case the right thing was to snub him. Especially as there was no disagreement on general matters, but only on Russo-Polish problems. Where Switzerland was concerned, Radek had no choice. Since he opposed Grimm, he was forced into alliance with Lenin—and what an ally he was!
Zinoviev, too, had acted like a scoundrel in this business of the “Japanese,” and urged him to give in. They were all unstable. You couldn’t rely on the closest of them.
To put a stop to Bukharin’s capers it was necessary to carry the argument to Russia too, and finish off the “Japanese” on Russian soil. Shlyapnikov had been ordered to do so. But Shlyapnikov was another muddlehead, and his girlfriend Kollontai was worse. (Incidentally, he mustn’t forget that it would be a good idea to sneak her into the Scandinavian Conference of Neutrals, perhaps as interpreter to one of the delegates, and sniff out their plans!)
There were so many of them, these pseudo-Socialist muddlers, everywhere, in the warring countries, among the neutrals, in Russia. Was Trotsky any better, though, with his pious fatuities—"neither victors nor vanquished”? What rubbish. No, of course he was seeking cheap popularity, but let’s see to it that Tsarism is nevertheless vanquished, don’t let it wriggle out of the present free-for-all! You ca
n’t be “against all wars” and remain a Socialist.
Where Shlyapnikov was at present he didn’t know. Still in Stockholm? Or had he already gone to Russia? Letters reached Sweden through Kesküla and his people as occasion offered, but did they get any further? There was nobody with any sense there, no system. There was no end to Shlyapnikov’s delays; he went to Russia only rarely, and once there always stayed too long, the sluggard. If you said anything to him he took offense. And if he didn’t go, there was nobody else. So to make him look important they had had to co-opt him to the Central Committee.
At this point the librarian came up to Lenin’s desk and with a whispered apology and an apologetic bow laid the pile of material on Persia before him.
Many thanks! Half an hour or so to the lunch break, and along comes Persia! Should he make a start, or not?
Of course, Shlyapnikov was not yet ripe for membership on the Central Committee, he lacked Malinovsky’s maturity. But he had taken Malinovsky’s place, and the titles “member of the CC” and “chairman of the Russia Bureau” had turned his head, given him a taste for power. First he was shouldering Litvinov aside to get in on talks with foreign Socialists, then he was giving idiotic advice in practically every letter he wrote: “Why don’t you move to Sweden?” He was sickeningly sure of himself, but he couldn’t be cut adrift, he was doing a serious job, and he had to be answered, formally at least, with respect.
Somehow he couldn’t settle down to his work. His brain was in too much of a whirl. He couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t adjust to the leisurely movement of Persia’s feudal economy.
Malinovsky, Malinovsky! The Russian Bebel manqué. How he could work! How well he had handled the masses! What a remarkable type, what a personality! A natural leader of workingmen, a collective symbol of the Russian proletariat. Lenin had long felt the lack of such a working-class leader in the Party at his right hand, to complement him, to convert his ideas into mass action. What Lenin had particularly liked in him was that he molded himself to his allotted place, carried out orders with alacrity and without demur—but brilliantly and effectively. He had what is called in bourgeois terms a criminal record—a few thefts—but this only threw into relief his proletarian intolerance of private property and the colorfulness of his character. So that, when excessively suspicious comrades began casting aspersions, Lenin’s confidence in him grew stronger all the time. Imagine him as a provocateur? Impossible! (And it was still impossible.) After his incendiary speeches in the Duma, and his skillful management of the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in the Duma group, Lenin not only had been glad to introduce Malinovsky himself to the Central Committee but had brought in others solely on the strength of Malinovsky’s recommendation—Stalin, for instance. When they were living in Poronin, no guest from Russia was more welcome than Malinovsky. Except for that last, dreadful night in May, when he had appeared unexpectedly after his sudden and unauthorized withdrawal from the Duma. But still, he had put in an appearance and not run away. Would he have dared to do so if his hands were not clean? … Their discussion had gone on all night. It was in any case impossible to prove anything against Malinovsky. (And what good could it do?) Who could believe the stupid tale that the secret police themselves had found it “embarrassing” that one of their informers was among the best orators in the Duma and had ordered him to withdraw? What rot! Were the secret police stupid enough to work against themselves? He, Kuba, and Grishka had constituted themselves a sort of party tribunal, found Roman Malinovsky not guilty, and vouched for his innocence before the International Socialist Bureau.
Nonetheless, they had quietly parted company for the time being. For personal reasons.
Lenin would never have another such helper! … Shlyapnikov? No, no.
Now the lunch break was upon him. How on earth did these Swiss manage to work up an appetite for lunch by twelve o’clock?
However, Lenin had noticed that the librarian on duty today did not always go to lunch. He went over and inquired. No, he wasn’t going. Was it at all possible to stay through the lunch break? It was.
Here was a bit of luck. Lunch wasn’t worth the disturbance it would involve. It was easier to work on an empty stomach. And he would gain time.
He needn’t hurry now. The best thing in fact, though, would be to stock up with newspapers right away. To save money, Lenin never bought them, never took out subscriptions, though he needed to read thirty or forty of them—all the various Arbeiters and Stimmes.
He collected all there were and carried them over to his desk.
Reading the papers was one of his most important daily tasks, his entrée to the world outside. Reading the papers heightened his sense of responsibility, his firmness of purpose, his militancy, helped him to feel that his enemies were alive and real. Socialists, social patriots, and centrists from every spot on the face of the earth, not to mention all the bourgeois donkeys, seemed to crowd around you in the reading room, gesturing, babbling, all speaking loudly at once, and you seized your opportunity to strike back, to note their weak points and hit out at them. Reading the papers meant making abstracts at the same time. By analogy, by association, by contradiction, sparks of thought were continually struck off, flying at a tangent to left or right, onto loose scraps of paper, onto the lined pages of exercise books, into blank margins, and every thought must be stitched to paper with a fiery thread before it could fade, to smolder there until it was wanted, in a draft summary or else in a letter begun there and then so that he could forge his sentences red-hot. Some of these thoughts were intended to clear his own mind, others for use in argument, to sting or to stun, others as a more effective rehash of things which the stupid found difficult, others again to keep distant comrades, perhaps as far away as Russia, theoretically attuned to him.
Vandervelde and Branting, Huysmans and Jouhaux, Plekhanov and Potresov, Ledebour and Haase, Bauer and Bernstein, the two Adlers, even Pannekoek and Roland Holst—Lenin felt as though all these exasperating opponents were close enough to touch. No matter where their nests were, in Holland, England, France, Scandinavia, Austria, or Petersburg, he felt them to be within sight, within hearing, he was connected with all of them in a single complex of throbbing nerves—asleep or awake, at his books, at table, or out walking.
There were no readers left. Evidently the lunch break had begun. The librarian went through a glass door into the depths of the book stacks. All the desk lamps were extinguished and the reading room was lost in the soaring dimness, the tomblike silence of the church it once was. Taking advantage of this rare opportunity to discharge his excess nervous tension, Lenin began briskly pacing the longest straight walk in the building, the central aisle from the entrance under the wooden gallery to the two long transverse steps before what had been the altar. A distance of fifty paces unobstructed by bookshelves or desks.
He was used to walking in city streets or in the mountains, and he had always lived in poky little places with no room to move around. Now, pacing faster and faster with his hunter’s stride, brushing aside the Hilferdings, Martovs, Greulichs, Longuets, Pressmanns, and Chkheidzes, abruptly choking them off in mid-sentence, pulling them up short, routing them—in this frenzied, pendulumlike oscillation he beat off wave after wave of enemies.
He was liberating himself from his enemies.
And he felt more and more ready for methodical work.
At a certain moment, halfway along the aisle, he suddenly felt that it was enough.
And sat down to work.
He had been wrong to think like that about Inessa. He had nothing at all to go on.
No! He had been sitting at the wrong desk. Now he would have to move it all—books, newspapers, notebooks—into the gallery, to his usual desk. He had to make two trips.
The steps creaked slightly in the gray Gothic hush.
And suddenly he felt very weary. He almost collapsed into his chair.
His head was …
Although he had missed lunch he did not feel at
all hungry. He could make do with very little food: he generated energy almost without eating.
Right by the window, without lamplight for the time being. But it was a gloomy day.
He started reading the newspapers. He read about the general military situation. There was nothing there to cheer him.
Not so bad, of course, as in August, at that terrible moment when a still fresh Romania had suddenly joined in, enormously reinforcing her allies, and it had seemed that Russia would extricate herself after all. But Germany had proved strong enough to smash Romania almost effortlessly. It was astonishing—no one could have prophesied it two months earlier. Nevertheless, and also contrary to all predictions, Ger many was not winning the war in Europe as a whole. On the Western Front there was an unbreakable and hopeless impasse. On the Eastern Front too—and this was the greatest shock—1916 had brought no victory. A year ago Tsarism had already been close to collapse, was already shaken to its foundations, yet now it was on its feet again and holding its own. The greatest hope, the greatest victory, had ebbed, seeped away, vanished.
In one corner of his head, just in that one little spot, near his left temple, it was as though a vacuum had formed. That was bad. He had let himself get too excited.
In no country did it appear that even the third year of this bloody war had awakened the people to reality. The Russians, as always, were the most hopeless of all. It was they who were suffering the most extravagant losses, they whose stacked bodies barred the way to German efficiency and German technology. Reporting on the Eastern Front was generally vague and inaccurate, there were no war correspondents there, people knew and cared little about it, and of course the press in the Entente countries tried not to say much about an ally of which it was ashamed. But it often gave figures of Russian casualties. Lenin always looked for these figures and made a mark by them—with surprise and satisfaction. The bigger the figures, the happier they made him: all those soldiers killed, wounded, or taken prisoner were stakes falling out of absolutism’s fence and leaving the monarchy weaker. But at the same time the figures drove him to despair: no people on earth were so long-suffering and so devoid of sense as the Russians. Their patience knew no bounds. Any abomination, any filth dished out to them they would lap up with nothing but reverent gratitude for their beloved benefactor.
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