LENIN AND RUSSIA

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 77, 21 October 1942, Page 5

LENIN AND RUSSIA

MAKER OF REVOLUTIONS TWENTY YEARS’ EXILE; LIVE YEARS’ POWER I By Philip Guedalla, broadcast in the 8.8.C.s Short Wave Overseas Services] There are some names in history that matter. The men who bore them really made a difference. If they had not been there, things would not have worked out the same way and the whole course of late, history must have gone round by another channel. I doubt h them in any century. But they exist and there is no mistaking them when they occur. Napoleon is one. Napoleon made an immense difference to the last century. He gave France a new lease of life, though, in a way, the drain which he imposed on French man-power set a clear limit to how long that life could be: he paved the way for a united Germany: his intervention in Spain was the direct cause of the liberation of Latin America from Spanish rule. Those were all big things. Some of them were tilings he meant to do. and some of them were not. (Most dictators get their best effects unintentionally). In this century, although we are not half-way through, you can see plainly what an immense difference was made by Lenin. 1 doubt if Russia would be a modern State to-day. I am quite convinced that Russia would not present the solid obstacle it does to our common enemy, if Lenin had not been born. And there is just this difference between Lenin and Napoleon. Some of the largest consequences of Napoleon’s career were unintentional. All that Lenin did was precisely what he meant to do. His life was full of accidents; but the effect that he produced on history was just what he intended it to be. He had a will; he had a mind; and. better still, he had an education. The world is suffering to-day from the accident that has let power slip into the hands of a few ill-educated men. Lenin was a school-teacher's son: and he did well at school himself. I am continually exasperated by those complacent imbeciles Who tell us of helpless schoolchildren that, when they were at school they were always at the bottom of the elkss—and look at them now. There is no need for those who have the sense to work, when they are tojd. to feel discouraged by the subsequent success in life of those who never did a stroke. When prize-winners feel discouraged, let them remember that Lenin once won a gold medal at school. His university career was interrupted, though, because his politics kept getting in the way. He had developed a burning interest in politics for a simple reason. The Czar’s police, who often made mistakes, had made the gravest error of their lives. They made it when they hanged a young man in the Fortress of Peter and Paul at Petrograd. That is the reason why it is called Leningrad to-day. because the man they hanged that day was Lenin’s elder brother. He was devoted to his brother: and that execution turned him into a revolutionary. I have often wondered how thing? would have worked out for Russia if the Czar’s police had left that young man alive and Lenin had gone on being educated as a lawyer. Now he turned a formidable mind to another side of education. He began to learn the reasons and the method of revolution: and this time the Czar’s police were more than usually helpful. They did not mean to be. But there is one feature of the old Russian penal system that is frequently misjudged. Under the Czar. Siberia was always a name of terror. But it was not always quite so bad as it sounded; and I have often thought that Siberia was just what brought the Russian Empire down, not because it was so terrible, but because it gave the revolutionaries time to think. What could be a better university for young revolutionaries than a little room on the far side of Siberia beyond the Yenisei, where Lenin could read and read and argue with the girl who had crossed half a continent to marry him. (Their hone3 T moon took the austere form of translating the Webbs’ Industrial Democracy together). He was an exile now, and after Siberia, there was an interminable succession of little rooms in foreign lodging-houses, first in Germany and then in London. I hope that grateful revolutionaries will repay their debt to London one day. After all. Karl Marx could hardly have written Das Kapital without the reading-room of the British Museum; and that was where Lenin came to study the development of Marx’s theory. The tops of London omnibuses and the view from Primrose Hill gave him an airing; and after that he moved on to Switzerland, where the library was not quite so good, but the views were better. One accident, if one can call the tragedy of his brother’s execution an accident, had turned him to politics: and now another accident very nearly ended his political career, when he cycled absent-mindedly into the back of a Geneva tram. His dream was to create a small body of whole-time professional revolutionaries of “people whose profession consists of revolutionary activity. This organisation must not be very broad and as conspirative as possible. . . . Give us an organisation of revolutionaries —and we shall turn Russia upside down.” Large numbers did not interest him greatly, and he was not impressed by amateurs. (Perhaps that is why his later interview with Mr H. G. Wells was hardly a complete success). What Lenin wanted was a group of sympathisers whose whole-time occupation was to make the coming revolution, and whose numbers might be very small indeed. He got it in his Bolsheviks; and when the Russian Revolution seemed to start in 1905, all the exiles sang the Revolutionary Funeral March in a Geneva restaurant and he asked a faithful follower in Russia to “send a tor-pedo-boat for me at once.” Geneva being where it is. another method was adopted; and Lenin at 35 was soon flitting up and down St. Petersburg without his beard and hoping for a time when there would be fewer speeches and more practical street-fighting. For 1905 was the false dawn of the Revolution. Russia was not yet the place for Lenin; and as he stumbled through a winter night across the frozen sea off the coast of Finland to catch a steamer and go back to exile, the ice began to shift beneath him, and he thought quickly that this seemed a fooxish way to die. But Lenin did not die in 1905. He lived on in Switzerland, working hard all day in the public library and then going to the pictures until they got too silly and there was nothing left but a walk by the lakeside. He was getting older now. The return to exile had been a dreary business that made him feel “as if I had come here to lie down in my grave.” But Lenin's grave is not in Zurich, though the Red Square at Moscow seemed a long way off in those years before the war of 1914. when he began to doubt “whether I will live to see the next rise of the tide.” (That may be worth remembering when smaller men than Lenin feel discouraged). There he was, a baldheaded man in a Swiss lodging-house. He was getting on for 50: and he told an audience early in 1917 that “we of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution.” Before the year was out he had made the revolution of his dreams and was ruling Russia. But how was he to get there? They were still in Switzerland; there was a war on; and the whole width of Germany lay between him and his country. By a strange twist of German policy, the German Minister in Switzerland made a solemn treaty with Lenin and his little party by which they were to be conveyed across the Continent. As Germany seemed to have nothing to lose by keeping its word, the agreement (unlike some other German treaties with the Russians) w'as duly kept; and Lenin travelled home to Russia by consent and with the assistance of the German. High Command. It must be

pleasant for the Germans to reflect toI day upon the debt they owe to the | great General Staff of 1917. For they j made Lenin possible; and Lenin made ! the Russian Revolution Not that it j was a foregone conclusion by any means. When a train that I was in a few years ago clanked across a little bridge at Byelo-Ostroff out of Finland into Russia, I remembered that when Lenin’s train crossed it in 1917, he asked someone at the station if they would arrest him when he got to Petrograd. And when my train arrived at the Finland Station with its wooden platform and depressing iron pillars, that was exactly where Lenin had seen a line of waiting soldiers as he got out of the railway-carriage and wondered whether they were going to arrest him. An officer came up; but instead of doing anything unpleasant, he saluted, and a relieved Lenin saluted back. A large bouquet appeared from somewhere; and they all went into a waiting room, where someone made a speech of welcome. It was rather a high room, and Lenin stared at the ceiling. He had never been in there before, because it was the Czar's waiting-room. Then they went outside: a band played: and Lenin climbed on to an armoured car, and made a speech. That was how he came home to Leningrad. The rest is Russian history It was an odd career. Fifty-four years of life, twenty years of exile, five years of power make a strange pyramid of time. But if Napoleon oi.ee said grandiloquently. as his army was going into action against the Turks in Egypt, that from the Pyramids forty centuries were looking on it is a good deal truer that a good many centuries will contemplate with interest the strange truncated monument of Lenin's life. His achievement was the unaided product of his mind and will. He thought harder than most n.en: he worked far longer at things of which nothing seemed to com:', he passed half his life in the darkness of exile or prison. But in the end he lifted his whole country forward towards the light.