The purpose of any conversation is to understand your partner fully without unnecessarily exposing yourself.
With a sharp, probing look and a skeptical grin, he asked, “Why do you need wealth of your own? Come on, tell me! Explain yourself.”
A child’s question. One of those “whys” it is ridiculous to answer. So that every wish can become reality, of course. The feeling it gives you is probably like that which a physical giant gets from the play of his muscles. Affirmation of his rights on earth. The meaning of life.
Parvus sighed. “It’s only human to like being rich. Surely you understand, Vladimir Ilyich?”
But looking at that bald brow, at the aging skin of his temples, at the too sharp, too tense vee of his eyebrows, Parvus suddenly suspected that Lenin really didn’t understand, that he wasn’t pretending. His all-penetrating gaze saw only what was in front of him.
Parvus spoke again, more gently. “How shall I put it? … It’s pleasant to have perfect sight or perfect hearing, and it’s just the same with wealth …”
But was his decision to get rich really the result of conscious thought, of a theoretical belief? No, it was an innate necessity, and his commercial impulses, his flair for Geschäft, his reluctance to let slip any profit which loomed in his field of vision, were not a matter of plans and programs, but almost a biological function which proceeded almost unconsciously yet unerringly. It was a matter of instinct with him always to feel the movement of economic life around him, the emergence of disproportions, imbalances, gaps which begged him, cried out to him to insert his hand and extract a profit. This was so much a part of his innermost nature that he conducted his multifarious business transactions, which by now were scattered over ten European countries, without a single ledger, keeping all the figures in his head.
(Lenin, of course, accepted that in the final analysis personal wealth was a Privatsache, a private matter. But his eyes bored into Parvus, probing for an answer: was he or was he not a Socialist? That was the problem. Twenty-five years of socialist journalism—but was he a Socialist? …)
Parvus hurriedly returned to the point. “Let me tell you—wealth means power. Power is what the proletariat aspires to, isn’t it? I was a big name for twenty-five years, better known than you, and it did nothing for me. But all roads are open to the wealthy. Take these negotiations, for instance. What government would believe a beggar and give him millions for a project? Whereas a rich man obviously won’t take it for himself, he has his own millions.”
The inordinately large, asymmetrical head tilted trustfully, and the colorless, philosophical eyes gazed amicably and peaceably at Lenin.
“Don’t miss your chance, Vladimir Ilyich. Life offers you opportunities like this only once.”
Yes, this he understood. At the beginning of the war he had enjoyed an unaccustomed luxury; a friendly eagle (Austrian in this case) had taken him on its wing and carried him in a twinkling where it was bidden. (There was no passenger transport to Switzerland, and the Ulyanovs had traveled on a troop train.) Lenin had discovered with a thrill that it might be better not to hover helplessly, to drift on a sea of words and ideas, but to abandon once and for all his helpless and uneasy émigré existence, and cling instead to real material forces, move in unison with them. As always, and in everything, Parvus had been ahead of him.
“To make a revolution takes a lot of money,” Parvus insisted, his friendly shoulder pressing against Lenin. “But to hold on to power when you get there will take even more.”
An odd way of putting it, but strikingly true.
The innermost nucleus of Parvus’s thought was undoubtedly correct.
But the innermost nucleus of Lenin’s thought was also undoubtedly correct.
“Just think, if only we combined your capacities with mine. And with such powerful support! With your incomparable talent for revolution! How much longer do you want to go on kicking your heels in these émigré holes? How much longer can you go on waiting for a revolution somewhere ahead—and refusing to recognize it when it arrives and grabs you by the shoulder? …”
Oh dear, no! Nothing, neither shared joy, nor fervent hope, and still less flattery, could dim Lenin’s vigilant gaze. He had a quicker and keener eye for the narrowest chink of disagreement than for the broad expanse of converging platforms. He might be an outcast and a failure, but he had invariably known that Parvus in all his successes, all his prophecies, was wrong, or at least not altogether right! Although he himself had achieved nothing—right was on his side!
Now Parvus was amused. Laughter was shaking that unwieldy body which so loved its bottle of champagne before breakfast, its leisurely bath, its little suppers with the ladies, when it was not chained to its couch by rheumatism.
“Do you intend to go on in the same way, raising money through bank raids? What are you going to do next—rob the Crédit Lyonnais? You’ll be deported to New Caledonia, comrades! To the galleys!”
He was overcome with laughter.
Lenin’s brows twitched slightly in disagreement. But his searching gaze considered the problem dispassionately.
There was no theoretical objection to raiding a bank before general expropriation was legalized—it was, so to speak, borrowing against your future. But in practice it might or might not be worthwhile. If there was one thing the Bolsheviks had undoubtedly been good at in the revolutionary years it was the “exes.” They had begun with raids on ticket offices and trains. The first 200,000 from Georgia had simply transformed the life of the Party. And if only they had succeeded in taking that fifteen million from Mendelssohn’s Bank in Berlin in 1907 …! (Kamo was arrested en route, and it fell through.) It was a risky method, but very effective, and in any case it dirtied the Party’s hands less than dealings with the general staffs of foreign countries.
“Don’t like dirtying your hands? Afraid of getting found out?” Parvus too narrowed his eyes to slits, deliberately, contemptuously, shaming and reproving him. “You can rely on my experience: in big enterprises you’ll never be found out. It’s those who balk at little ones who get caught.”
What a pachyderm! He didn’t give a damn what people said, just clumped about the world on his great flat feet, crushing everything in his path.
Lenin’s right eye darted an angry glance at him.
Parvus became sympathetic. He took both of Lenin’s hands in his own jellylike paws (an unpleasant habit of his) and spoke like the closest of friends. (At one time they had almost been on first-name terms.)
“Vladimir Ilyich, you must not neglect to analyze the reasons for your failure in one revolution already. Perhaps the fault lies in you? It is important to recognize that for the future. Be careful you don’t lose next time.”
Where did he get his brazen self-assurance? Where the hell does he get off setting himself up as a teacher? Was this another attempt to impose his leadership? Self-infatuation must have blinded him.
Lenin wrenched his hands free and spoke with a savage grin, one of those grins of spontaneous mockery that forced up his eyebrows and brought a flush of joy to his face as he savored his triumphant retort.
“Izrail Lazarevich! It’s you who should rather be analyzing your own failings! I didn’t lose last time, because I wasn’t running the revolution! You were the one who lost! How did you come to grief?”
So far he had said nothing irreparable. Just a businesslike argument. He could still stop in time. But all those years of gasping for breath with that great hulk crushing his ribs, and the spontaneous urge to tease, made him go further than he had to. (And was there anything to the man except ambition? Except the thirst for power? Except wealth?)
“Why did you lose heart so quickly in the Peter–Paul Fortress—was it the solitary confinement, the dampness? Why such tender concern for your miserable carcass? How do you explain that diary full of cheap pathos for German philistines? All those delusions about amnesties? How you came as near as all hell to petitioning the Tsar? Is that the behavior of a revoluti
onary leader?”
And he himself? A baldheaded, spiky-browed, flinty-eyed little man with fussy, fidgety movements?
Yet, except for the two of them, there was no one left to do the job.
Parvus never blushed, as though the fluid coursing in his veins was not the usual red, but watery green, like the color of his skin. There was no reason at all for him to lose his temper, but when Lenin thrust that sarcastic grin in his face, and shook with mocking laughter, and went on shaking, Parvus suddenly forgot his great qualities and foolishly retorted, “Anybody would think you had fought on the barricades! Or that you had marched just once in a street demonstration with Cossack whips waiting for you! At least I escaped from a transit prison on the way to Siberia! But why should you run for it, when you had a false medical certificate and got yourself sent to the Siberian Riviera instead of the north?”
(There were plenty of other things on the tip of his tongue. All very well for you, he thought, to give the call to arms from neutral Switzerland, especially when you’ve never been called up in your life!)
If anyone insulted you like that in public you would have to commit political murder, fatally blacken his reputation, but when it happens in private you have a choice. You can even suppose that this criticism is not wholly unsympathetic. Or admit that you have been unnecessarily rough yourself, as you often are in discussion.
No, thought Parvus, it was stupid of me to speak like that! I didn’t come to Switzerland just to quarrel.
Parvus, thought Lenin, may be very useful. He is in a unique position. Why quarrel with him?
Lenin is the pillar on which the whole Plan rests. If he deserts me, who will make the revolution?
Another smile from Lenin, but a different one, not at all caustic, but infinitely knowing, a smile to be shared between the cleverest people in the world. His hand fell on Parvus’s shoulder, and he spoke in a half whisper. “I tell you what. Do you know what your main mistake was in 1905? Why the revolution was a failure?”
Parvus responded with selfless objectivity, like a scientist ready to admit error however painful it might be. “The Financial Manifesto? Was I in too much of a hurry?”
Lenin wagged his finger in the little space left between their heads, and smiled like a Kalmyk extolling a melon in an Astrakhan bazaar. “No, no, no. The Financial Manifesto was a stroke of genius. But those Soviets of yours …”
“My Soviets united the whole working class instead of splitting it up like the Social Democrats do. My Soviets were gradually becoming the center of power. If only we’d succeeded in getting the eight-hour day—that and nothing else—there would have been risings in imitation of us throughout Europe, and there you would have had your permanent revolution!”
Slyly, slit-eyed, Lenin watched Parvus erecting defenses for his vanity, and was in no hurry to interrupt. This damned muddle over permanent revolution was another reason why he, Parvus, and Trotsky had quarreled. As though they were riding behind each other on a merry-go-round, they had all at different times moved to this position, and as each of them emerged from its shadow he had insisted that the other two were wrong. The other two were always somewhere ahead or still far behind.
Lenin parried in a confidential whisper, with the same slyly good-natured Asiatic smile. “Not at all. As you yourself so rightly said at the time, there must be uninterrupted civil war! The proletariat must not lay down its weapons! Where were your weapons, though?”
Parvus frowned. Nobody likes remembering his blunders.
Lenin had thought so much about it, never thought so much about anything, and now, still gripping his companion by the shoulder, bending toward him, narrowing his eyes to a piercing squint, he was in the mood to share his thoughts.
“You shouldn’t have waited for a National Assembly in addition to the Soviets. Once you’d convened the Petersburg Soviet you had your proletarian National Assembly. What you should have done …”
He leaned forward as though sharpening the focus of his gaze, his mind, his words, and spoke still more confidentially. “What you should have done was to set up the very next day an armed punitive organization under the Soviet. That would have been your weapon!”
Then he sat silent, with Parvus fixed in his searchlight beam. Nothing seemed so important to him.
A typical armchair philosopher, a dreamer. After years of thought he had made his discovery, and although it was a decade late he thought it incomparably important. The crippling frustrations of émigré existence, remote from the scene of action, from the real forces—what a miserable fate! All his energy for years and years had gone into quarrels and wrangles, and schisms and squabbles, and now Parvus had flung wide the gates into the world arena! But all he did was sit curled up on his bed like a gopher and grin.
The second most powerful mind in European socialism was going to waste in an émigré hideout. He must be saved—for his own sake.
But also for the Cause.
For the Plan.
“Well, then, do you understand my Plan? Do you accept it?”
How to break through that frozen fixity? Had he dozed off? Was he in a trance? He wasn’t taking anything in.
Parvus moved still nearer, and spoke right into his ear, so that he could not help hearing. “Vladimir Ilyich! Will you join our alliance?”
Like a man deaf and dumb. His eyes were unreadable. His tongue did not answer.
Holding on to his shoulder, Parvus tried again.
“Vladimir Ilyich! Your hour has struck! The time has come for your underground to work and conquer! In the past you had no strength, I mean no money, but now I’ll pump in as much as you like. Just open the pipes for it to flow in. Tell us which towns we should give money, and to whom. Give us names. Who is to receive leaflets and literature? Transporting weapons is more difficult, but we’ll take weapons in too. And how are we going to coordinate our actions? I can’t imagine how you manage from here, from Switzerland. Should I arrange a move to Stockholm? It’s very simple …”
On and on. Pushing. Pumping in his hippopotamus blood!
Lenin wriggled his shoulders and shook off Parvus’s hand.
[49]
He had heard and understood it all perfectly. But a candid answer would not have passed the barrier of distrust and distaste in his breast.
His frankness about 1905 was quite enough to be going on with.
Of course he saw the merits of Parvus’s Plan. If he couldn’t, who could? A splendid program—a sound program! The offensive tactics were practicable, the means chosen reliable, the forces enlisted adequate.
Now he could admit it: there was no third thinker of such power, such penetrating vision in the International. Just the two of them.
And that was why he must be immensely circumspect. In political negotiations, always suspect a trap where the ground looks smoothest.
Had Parvus, then, stolen a march once again? No. Theoretically, and in a general way, Lenin had formulated the same ideas when war first broke out. But what was impressive in Parvus was his businesslike attention to concrete detail. Parvus the financier.
Faced with this grandiose program Lenin could question neither its soundness nor its desirability.
It was all well thought out. On the simple calculation that my worst enemy’s worst enemy is my friend, the Kaiser’s government was the best ally in the world. That such an alliance was permissible he agreed without a moment’s hesitation: only an utter fool disdains serious assistance in a serious struggle.
An alliance—yes. But the dictates of caution must come before the alliance. Caution not as a merely negative measure, but as the condition of any effective action. Without super-super-caution, to hell with your alliance and to hell with your Plan! We don’t want the chorus of Social Democratic grannies all over Europe tutting and spluttering! Lenin too admitted to himself—cautiously—that he had no qualms about France, the rentiers’ republic. But he always knew where to stop, what to leave unsaid, where to keep an emergency exit open. Where
as Parvus had paraded his wild views, and irredeemably compromised his political reputation.
This was when Lenin had realized the other man’s weakness and his own superiority. Parvus had always been first to discover new ground, and tramped on ahead, blocking the way. But he lacked the stamina for a long race. He hadn’t been able to lead the Soviets more than two months. Twenty years and more of trying to reeducate the German Socialists was too much for him—he had come unstuck, fallen by the wayside. Whereas Lenin felt that he had the stamina to run forever, without ever losing his breath, to run as long as he was conscious—if need be, he would collapse into the grave with his race unfinished. But he would never drop out.
An alliance—certainly, with pleasure. But in this alliance he would be the coy bride, not the eager bridegroom. Let them run after you. Behave in such a way that even when you are weak you keep the upper hand and your independence. In fact, Lenin had already done something of the sort in Bern. He had, of course, not gone knocking on the door of the German ambassador, Romberg, the way Parvus did in Constantinople. But when he had made his theses public he knew very well whose ears they would please—and the theses had reached the right ears. Romberg himself had sent the Estonian revolutionary Kesküla to discuss things with him and discover his intentions. And, of course, while remaining within the limits of his actual program—the overthrow of Tsarism, a separate peace with Germany, secession of the non-Russian peoples, renunciation of the Turkish straits—he felt entitled to offer a slightly juicier bribe: without being untrue to himself, or distorting the line, he could and did promise Romberg the invasion of India by a Russian revolutionary army. In this there was no betrayal of principles: an assault on British imperialism was necessary, and who if not Russia could mount it? One of these days we will invade. Of course, it was a concession, a sop, a swerve, a skid, but there was no danger in it. True, Kesküla had a wolfish look and wolfish ways, and he was stronger-minded and more effective than any wishy-washy Russian Social Democrat, but here too Lenin sensed no danger. Since Estonia must in any case be released, like all the subject peoples, from the Russian prison, there was no distortion of the line: each of them used the other without fear of stumbling. They introduced Artur Siefeldt and Moisei Kharitonov into the chain, and Kesküla went off to Scandinavia, where he was most helpful, especially with publications. He found money for pamphlets and helped organize contacts with Shlyapnikov, and so with Russia.
November 1916 Page 101