He couldn’t run over to the window—the swollen black case stood big as a trunk in the way. And there was no strength in his legs.
In that revolution Lenin had been bruised by Parvus, as though he had stood too near an elephant. He had sat at meetings of the Soviet, listening to the heroes of the day with his head in his hands. Parvus’s slogans, repeated and read out over and over again, were perfectly correct: after the victory of the revolution the proletariat must not let go of its weapons, but prepare for civil war! It must regard its liberal allies as enemies! Excellent slogans, and he himself was left with nothing to say from the platform of the Soviet. Everything was going almost as it should, indeed so well that there was no room for the Bolshevik leader. His whole life had been adjusted to the demands of the underground, and his legs would not carry him up into the broad daylight. Lenin had not gone to Moscow when the rising began there, no longer caring whether the insurgents were following his own, earlier instructions from Geneva or someone else’s. His self-confidence had failed him, and he had skulked through the revolution in a daze, sitting it out in Kuokkala, forty miles from Petersburg and over the Finnish border, where he was safe from arrest, while Krupskaya traveled to the capital every day to gather news. He couldn’t understand it himself: all his life he had done nothing but prepare for revolution, and when it came his strength had ebbed and deserted him.
Next, from the shadows—he always tried to operate behind the scenes, not to get in front of cameras, not to provide material for biographers—Parvus had fathered an anonymous resolution on the Soviet, its Financial Manifesto. What looked like a set of uncouth and primitive demands from the illiterate masses was really the program of a clever and experienced financier striking at the foundations of the hated Russian state, to bring it down in ruins at a single blow. Give Parvus his due—it was a superb, a most instructive revolutionary document. (But the government too had seen its significance and arrested the whole Petersburg Soviet on the following day. As it happened, Parvus was not present, and had survived to set up a second Soviet at once, with a different membership. They came to arrest this new body, and again Parvus escaped.)
There was no kerosene in the lamp, yet it had been burning for an hour, giving no less light than before.
It took years for the ribs dented by Parvus to straighten out again, for Lenin to regain his assurance that he too was of some use in the world. What had helped most was seeing Parvus’s mistakes and his failures, seeing this hippopotamus, this elephant, crashing blindly through the thickets, his hide punctured by broken branches, seeing him stumble into holes in his headlong charge. He had been expelled from the Party for misappropriation of funds, become a ruthless profiteer, boozed with his bosomy blondes in public—and ended by openly supporting German imperialism: he had expressed his views frankly in print and in speeches, and defiantly left for Berlin.
The hat behind the lamp shifted and revealed its satin lining.
No, it was lying quietly, just as Sklarz had left it.
Rumors had already reached Lenin, through Christo Rakovsky in Romania and David Ryazanov in Vienna, that Parvus was coming to him with interesting proposals—so careless was he about covering his tracks. But Parvus’s reputation as an undisguised ally of the Kaiser had preceded him, while he was boozing in Zurich on the way. They were all used to poverty, year in and year out, and suddenly their former comrade turned up in the role of an Oriental pasha, something of a shock to the émigré mind, but also a source of largesse. When he had found Lenin in the canteen at Bern, wedged his enormous belly behind the table, and loudly declared in the presence of a dozen comrades that they must have a talk, Lenin, without hesitation, without even thinking about it, had replied with a curt rebuff. He had come from warring Germany to chat like a peacetime tourist, had he? (Lenin was no less eager for a talk!) Well, then, Lenin must request him to take himself away again! (It was the only possible thing to do!)
The handle of the big case flopped to one side.
But they had to see each other, of course! They couldn’t keep putting things on paper, in case one of their letters fell into the hands of enemies. So Lenin whispered to Siefeldt, who ran after the fat man and gave him the address. (Lenin told Siefeldt afterward that he had sent the shark away unfed.) And in the Ulyanovs’ spartan room the broad-beamed Parvus, with diamond studs in his dazzlingly displayed cuffs, had with some difficulty seated himself on the bed next to Lenin, lolling against him and pushing him toward the pillow and the iron bedstead.
Snap! The suitcase had finally burst open … and, freeing his elbows, straightening his back, he unfolded, rose to his full height and girth, in his dark blue three-piece suit, with his diamond cuff links, and, stretching his cramped legs, he came one step, two steps closer.
There he stood, life-sized, in the flesh, with his ungovernable belly, the elongated dome of his head, the fleshy bulldog features, the little imperial, looking at Lenin with pale watchful eyes. Amicably, as ever.
True, true—they should have had a talk long ago. They had always talked in hasty snatches, been out of touch or at loggerheads, and it was so difficult for them to meet: with enemies, and friends too, on the lookout. The utmost secrecy was necessary! But now that he had found his way here, this was better than writing letters. The critical moment for an eye-to-eye talk had arrived.
Izrail Lazarevich! You surprise me! Whatever has become of your remarkable intelligence? Why are you so indiscreet? Why have you put yourself in such a vulnerable position? You yourself are making it quite impossible for us to collaborate.
No hello, no proffered hand (and it was just as well, because Lenin lacked the strength to rise and greet him, his hand seemed paralyzed, and a hello would have stuck in his throat), Parvus simply slumped, not of course on the chair, but on the bed again, his unwieldy bulk sprawling against Lenin and squeezing him into the corner.
Training his protuberant, colorless eyes directly on his companion’s face, he spoke with casual irony, teasing a friend, not addressing an audience.
“I’m surprised too, Vladimir Ilyich. Have you still nothing to occupy you but agitation and protests? What’s the use of all this childish noisemaking? All these so-called conferences—thirty silly women in the Volkshaus one day, a dozen deserters the next?”
He unceremoniously pushed Lenin farther along the bed, and his unhealthily enlarged head loomed close.
“Since when have you sided with those who want to change the world with a broad-nibbed pen? What children all these Socialists are, with their eternal indignation! But you mustn’t be like them! If you want serious action, should you really be hiding in holes and corners, not letting it be seen where your sympathies lie in this war?”
Although speech was still difficult his head was clearer, as though he had drunk strong tea. Even without words they understood each other perfectly.
Well, of course, this was no pathetic Kautsky, demonstrating “for peace” and refusing to meddle with the war.
“Neither of us looks at war like a sister of mercy. Casualties, bloodshed, suffering are inevitable. What matters is the outcome.”
Well, of course, Parvus was utterly right. If Russia was to be shattered, Germany must be victorious, and they must seek German support. So far, so good. But Parvus had overstepped the mark. Not for the first time.
“Izrail Lazarevich, if a Socialist has one real asset, it is his honor. If we lose our honor, we lose everything. Between ourselves, the closeness of our positions naturally makes us allies. And of course we will need each other and help each other very much. But nowadays you are politically in such bad odor … It would take just one Burtsev to ruin everything. So we will have to make a show of disagreement, attack each other in the press. Not a full-time controversy, of course … just occasionally … so if I should call you …” (even face to face Lenin never moderated his language: the more harshly you speak, the better you understand each other) “… if I should call you, for instance … Hindenburg’s morally
degenerate toady … that renegade, that filthy lackey … you can see for yourself that you leave me no alternative …”
“By all means, it doesn’t matter a bit.” A bitter smile creased Parvus’s puffy face. “In Berlin last spring I was given a million marks, some of which I sent at once to Rakovsky, to Trotsky and Martov, and to you here in Switzerland—did you get it? … What? You weren’t aware of it? Do please check with your treasurer, maybe he’s pocketed it … Trotsky took the money … although he’d already publicly disowned me. ‘Falstaff in politics’ he called me … He’s written my obituary before I’m dead. I say nothing. It’s all right, of course, I understand.”
A fixed, glassy stare from under the faint raised brows. Parvus and Trotsky had parted company earlier over the theory of permanent revolution. He had loved Trotsky like a younger brother.
But now he had high hopes for Lenin, and leaned on him with all his pudgy immensity, forcing him farther and farther along the bed, until he was sitting on the pillow and could feel the headboard against his elbow.
“Aren’t you afraid that mere slogans will be a dead letter without money? With money in your hands, power will be yours! How else will you seize power? That’s the unpleasant question. And if you don’t mind my saying so, I seem to remember you in 1904 taking what looked very much like Japanese money for the Third Congress and for Vperyod. That was all right, wasn’t it? And now I’m Hindenburg’s lackey, am I?” He did his best to laugh.
It was just like the last time. Perhaps it was the last time? … In Bern, in the room he had rented from a housewife? Or was he in his room in the Zurich cobbler’s house? Or not in a room at all? He seemed to be hearing it all for the second time. No table, no Sklarz. Just a massive Swiss iron bed, with the two of them upon it, great men both, floating above a world pregnant with revolution, a world which looked up to them expectantly, as they sat with their legs dangling, and the bed sped again around its dark orbit. There was just enough light from some invisible source for him to see his companion, just enough sound for him to hear.
“Never mind … It’s all right … I understand.”
Parvus despised the world. That world, far below, under the bed.
“As I see it, if you want to convert the war into a civil war, one ally is as good as another. At present you have—how much?” He was being funny. “I won’t ask you, it isn’t done. But I have—not for myself, but for the Cause—well, I got a million last spring, and I’ll get another five million this summer. And there’s plenty more to come. What do you say to that?”
He and Parvus alike had always despised the émigré community for its unreality, its ineffectualness, its driveling intellectualism—it was all talk, nothing but talk. But money was something more serious. Oh, yes.
Lenin was sickened by his self-assurance, but fascinated by the reality of his power.
Parvus opened his pale eyes wide and smacked his lips under the straggly mustache.
“The Plan! I’ve produced a master plan. I’ve submitted it to the German government. And, let me tell you, I can get as much as twenty million to carry it out. Only I have reserved the most important place in my plan for you. What are you …”
A gust of marsh breath, right in his face.
“… going to do? … Go on waiting? … Well, I …”
His dome was no smaller than Lenin’s, half his face was bare brow, half his head a thinly covered backward slope. Ruthless, inhuman intelligence in his eyes, as he spoke.
“I AM SETTING THE DATE OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION FOR 22 JANUARY NEXT YEAR!”
[48]
How are great yet simple plans born? Ideas are conceived and grow in the subconscious before you have any definite purpose for them. Then, suddenly, elements long familiar perhaps to others as well as yourself spontaneously converge, and it is in your head that they fuse to form a single plan, a plan so clear and simple that you wonder why no one had arrived at it before.
Why had it not taken shape earlier in the minds of the German General Staff, who should have been the first to think of it? True, they did not understand Russia very well. Since the autumn of 1914 and the battle on the Marne, they had realized that their plans for a quick victory had failed, but until the autumn of 1915 they had gone on hoping for a separate peace with Russia, busily putting out feelers, never imagining that the Romanovs would rebuff them. This was what had distracted them.
Parvus, insulated from the main events, stranded in bronze-and-blue Constantinople, in possession of the riches he had so desired, and with them every imaginable carnal delight—the East knows how to sate the male soul and slake male desire—remote from the great battle (“in the reserve socialist army,” as Trotsky had put it), and in no danger of experiencing its consequences, had never, even at his most jaded and dissipated, abandoned the quest which had begun in his distant youth on the diagonally opposite shore of the Black Sea.
He had not abandoned it when, earlier, he went to the Balkans, where he was more widely read than Marx and Engels. He had not forgotten it when he was earning his bread in the low dives of Constantinople and rallying dockside beggars for a May Day demonstration. He had been still more mindful of it when he rose in the world under the Young Turks and converted his financial genius from an ax hacking at the Russian trunk to a gardener’s spade mulching the Turkish sapling. The millions which so mysteriously flooded in on him and carried him along on their tide had not dazed him or made him forgetful. He did not forget while he was founding banks and trading with mother Odessa or stepmother Germany. The shot at Sarajevo had stung him like the lash of a whip. Parvus had a seismographic sense of movement in the depths, he knew at once that the landslide was coming! That the stupid old bear would be trapped! At last it had come, the Great War, the World War! He had long foretold it, described it, evoked it—the most powerful locomotive of history! The first chariot of socialism! While socialist parties all over Europe were in an uproar over war credits, Parvus made not a single speech, published not a single line. He wasted no time, there was not a minute to lose, but scurried about his secret passages, trying to persuade Turkey’s rulers that only by siding with Germany could their country break loose from the endless chain of “capitulations.” He hurried up the delivery of equipment and spare parts for Turkish railways and flour mills, to supply the towns with grain and put Turkey in a position not only to declare war in the autumn but to begin serious military operations in the Caucasus as soon as possible. (He was working just as busily on Bulgaria, which he also succeeded in preparing for war.) Only after these essential feats could Parvus allow himself to settle back comfortably into his favorite and long-neglected occupation—propaganda: this time in the Balkan press, with the slogan FOR DEMOCRACY! AGAINST TSARISM!
This needed explanation, careful argument, to convince as many as possible—and the sparks rained merrily from his unblunted pen. Why ask who bears the “war guilt,” “who attacked first,” when world imperialism has been preparing for this fight for decades? Somebody had to attack first, and it might have been anyone. Don’t look for meaningless “causes” but think like Socialists: how are we, the world proletariat, to make use of the war, or in other words, on which side should we fight? Germany has the most powerful Social Democratic party in the world, Germany is the stronghold of socialism, and so for Germany this is a war of self-defense. If socialism is smashed in Germany it will be defeated everywhere. The road to the victory of world socialism lies through the reinforcement of German military power, while the fact that Tsarism is on the same side as the Entente reveals even more clearly where the true enemies of socialism are: thus, the victory of the Entente would bring a new age of oppression to the whole world. So workers’ parties throughout the world must fight against Russian Tsarism. Advising the proletariat to adopt neutrality (as Trotsky does) means opting out from history, it is revolutionary cretinism. So the object of world socialism is the crushing defeat of Russia and a revolution in that country! Unless Russia is decentralized and
democratized the whole world is in danger. And since Germany bears the main burden of the struggle against Muscovite imperialism, the revolutionary movement there must be suspended for the time being. At a later stage victory in war will bring class victories for the proletariat. THE VICTORY OF GERMANY IS THE VICTORY OF SOCIALISM!
The first to come and consult Parvus in response to this publication were members of the League for the Liberation of the Ukraine, based in Vienna (there were old acquaintances from Iskra days among them), then the Armenian and Georgian nationalists. His door in Constantinople was open to all engaged in fighting Russia.
Thus Parvus’s dynamism magnetically attracted people of different experience, and from this explosive combination of socialist and nationalist interests the Plan was born. Until then socialist programs had always babbled about autonomy. But no! Only the disruption and dismemberment of Russia could bring down absolutism, and give the nations freedom and socialism simultaneously.
While the first Ukrainian and Caucasian expeditionary groups were collapsing (in their haste they had recruited all sorts of braggarts and adventurers, the conspiratorial scheme was suddenly made public in the émigré press, and Enver Pasha stopped the expeditions), the magnetic combination of iron components into a single plan was gradually perfected in Parvus’s grotesquely capacious head. Just as engineers like triangular supports because of their resistance to deformation, so Parvus found that the nationalist and socialist components lacked a third partner—the German government. The aims of all three very closely coincided!
Parvus’s past life might have been deliberately designed for the faultless creation of the Plan. It now only remained for him—happy amalgam of theorist, operator, and politician that he was—to formulate the Plan point by point in December 1914, give the German ambassador an inkling of it in January, receive a hospitable summons to Berlin, and stagger the higher-ups at a personal interview in the ministry. In nineteen years that country had not even tossed him a set of naturalization papers, it had closed down all his journals, hounded him from city to city, contemplated handing him over to the Russian secret police, and now the highest in the government gazed deferentially into his prophetic eyes. In March 1915, on presentation of a definitive and detailed memorandum, he received his first advance of a million marks.
November 1916 Page 99