An Interview with Lenin
I am not so foolish as to think that one brief interview of an hour
and a half entitles one to be dogmatic about any individual, much
less about the character of Lenin. It is not possible to know anyone
in so short a time. I had read much of what Lenin had written, and
disagreed very profoundly with most of it; but I knew that he had kept
together his Government in circumstances of tremendous difficulty and
discouragement for more than two and a half years. One after another
he and his tireless colleague, Trotsky, had overcome his country’s
enemies, both civil and alien. Koltchak, Denikin, Judenitch, Petliura
and all the great host of lesser foes I had seen go down before the
more terrible hosts of Lenin, and had marvelled, as had the whole world
with me. What sort of man was this Lenin, it was questioned? Was he
man or devil? Whence came his power over the people? What helped and
enabled him to keep all the main forces of his country together and to
sweep, one by one, his enemies out of his path?
We visited him in his room in the Kremlin. Every approach to this room
was guarded by a sentry. We were required to show our passes several
times before we reached the inner sanctum. He received us quietly but
graciously. An artist was engaged upon a bust of him whilst we talked.
He is a small man with a bald head, having a fringe of reddish hair
at the back and a tiny red beard. His mouth is large and his lips
thick; his eyes are red-brown, and possess the merriest twinkle. Do
not, gentle visitor, when you meet the great man fall victim to this
twinkling eye, and make the mistake of thinking it betokens a tender
spirit. I am sure Lenin is the kindest and gentlest of men in private
relationships; but when he mentioned his solution of the peasant
problem, the merry twinkle had a cruel glint which horrified. “Do you
not have a great deal of trouble with the peasants?” he was asked.
“Do they not, as in the rest of Europe, object very strongly to the
communisation of land?”
“Oh, yes,” was the reply, “we have trouble occasionally; but it is with
the rich peasants chiefly. But we soon get over that. We send to the
village a good Communist, who explains to the poor peasant the position
and shows to him how the rich peasant is his enemy, and the poor
peasant does the rest. Ha! ha! ha!”
Lenin’s method with his visitors is clever. He has a most engaging
frankness. He suggests by his manner a more or less confidential
exchange of opinions. But when the interview is over, it is found that
he has told you far less than you have told him.
He impressed me with his fanaticism. This is surely the source of
his driving power. And yet I am told that compared with the really
fanatical Communist Lenin is mildness itself and should be classed with
the “Right.” It was rumoured that he is engaged on a new book to be
given the name “The Infant Diseases of Communism,” or some such title,
which suggests an honest confession of mistakes made in the early days
of the Commune. If this be true there is hope of happiness for Russia
yet. But I must confess, his firm belief in the necessity of violence
for the establishment throughout the world of his ideals makes one
doubt miserably.
He showed a surprising lack of knowledge of the British Labour
Movement. He gave to conscious and intelligent Communism a far larger
place in British politics than can truly be accorded to it, seeing
there is as yet no organised Communist party, but only a handful of
extremists of the older Socialist movements.
When asked why he considered a certain individual to be of importance
in the political world of Great Britain he gave as his reason that the
British Government had arrested her! He did not seem to be aware of the
fact that the policy of the British Government during the war was, as
a rule, to arrest the little people who were without following and let
the bigger folk go free. Scores of examples of this could have been
supplied to him had it been of importance, which was not the case.
Lenin believes that a very tiny Communist group, working upon a mass
of inflammable human beings, suffering from unemployment and hunger,
can make the revolution necessary to establish a new order of society.
He urges all Communists in Great Britain to get together in one party
and work to this end. He appears to think that the British revolution
is imminent. He has no use for the pacifist philosophy of life and
believes that only the working classes should be armed and the rest
disarmed. He looks for a world-revolution in which the toiling masses
shall own and control everything. I do not know from personal speech
his opinion on the Polish business; but I was credibly informed that he
is more or less indifferent to peace and cares little about the raising
of the blockade and the resumption of trade with Great Britain. His
view is simple. Everything that promotes conditions favourable for a
world-revolution is to be approved. The rest matters little.
At the same time, I believe him to be altogether too sane to be ready
to throw away when it offers opportunities of really beginning to
develop the Communist State.
Lenin, like all the Communists, conveys the impression of awful
sureness of himself, of an immovable and overpowering self-confidence.
It is not the smiling self-complacency, the shallow cocksureness of
that very common individual amongst us who is sure that wisdom will die
with him. It is the deadly certainty that he is right and everybody
who differs from him is wrong, of the scholar and fanatic who would
sacrifice his own head as readily as he would sacrifice yours in the
believed interests of the thing he loves. The war has proved the
danger of entrusting the world’s training and the affairs of State to
professors. And Lenin is above all things the keen-brained, dogmatic
professor in politics.
Radek is a different kind of personality. His speech and his movements
are quick. In appearance he is a thin, ascetic-looking man, with
side-whiskers and curly hair, and looks not unlike a picture of an
early Victorian squire. He has long, thin, nervous hands, very eloquent
in gesture. Conversation with him is a monologue, in which he runs on
endlessly from one subject to another, and from one point to another,
anticipating your questions. He deals much in irony, but his large,
pleasant eyes covered with horned spectacles gleam not unkindly whilst
he scorches you with his words. He shows an infinite knowledge of the
Socialist movements of the world, connecting personalities therein
with events in a most marvellous fashion. Like most fanatics he is
intolerant of the opinions of others and uses strong and even abusive
language in dealing with those from whom he differs. He is a shrewd
judge of men and events; but I am convinced that his is the fanaticism
which would run the ship of State upon the rocks if not controlled by
more temperate men.
His great interest is the Third International, an organisation of
Communists who have adopted the dictatorship of the proletariat,
government on the Soviet plan, and revolution by violence as the three
main points in their platform. This International is the rival to
the Second International held at Berne in 1919, three months after
the armistice. Their principal quarrel with the Second International
is the inclusion in it of those Socialists who supported the war and
joined bourgeois governments. These men, they say, deny Socialism, if
not in words, by the implication of their actions, and they can have
nothing to do with such. The Second International also maintains an
old-fashioned belief in political democracy which they declare has
been tested and found wanting.
Communists in Moscow themselves told me that there is little to be
hoped from the Third International as at present constituted; that
it was formed irregularly by a few forceful and domineering men,
who thrust a programme upon it, which they made it accept; that
the representatives of foreign countries who were present at the
initial gathering were not accredited, but were the returned exiles
who happened to be on the spot; and that the insistence of a rigid
discipline within the organisation, whilst it might exclude weak and
wavering societies who would be a weakness and not a strength, would so
restrict its numbers and eventually weary its members that it could not
become effective as it is. These men were themselves in favour of the
world social revolution, so that their criticism is important.
The document sent to this country by the Executive Committee of the
Third International in reply to questions addressed to it by some of
the British visitors will definitely exclude all but the bitterest and
extremest of British Socialists, who for their intellectual sport play
with vast explosive human forces very much as a little child plays
with fire. Since this document is immediately to be published in a
separate volume, and so made available for all who care to read it,
it is unnecessary to quote it at length. Sufficient to say, it follows
the lines already indicated as the plan of action proposed for the
proletarians of the whole world by the Third International sitting in
its Second Conference in Moscow as I write these words.
Dr. Semasco, the People’s Commissar of Public Health is one of the most
admirable and devoted men it has been my lot to meet. Against the most
appalling sanitary conditions left by war, poverty, pestilence and
famine, this heroic doctor is putting up a magnificent fight. He and
his band of gallant helpers have few means with which to work. They are
almost entirely lacking soap and disinfectants, as the needs of the
army must be first supplied and production in these things is almost
at a standstill; but in spite of this, he is doing marvellous things
and rapidly stamping out some of the epidemic diseases which have raged
all over the country. As every town and village in Russia has been, in
a more or less degree, affected by one or another of the plagues of
typhus, small-pox, dysentery, cholera and recurrent fever, the first
line of attack on these things has been through the strict control of
the means of communication. Every train carries its medical staff, and
includes in its make-up a carriage to which discovered cases of actual
or incipient disease can be at once removed and attended to. Control
stations have been placed at fixed points on the lines, and here people
have to undergo compulsory examination, bathing and disinfecting as far
as means will permit.
Besides these measures, a house-cleaning campaign, for which women
have been largely employed, is undertaken at frequent intervals, when
people are made thoroughly to clean the insides and outsides of their
dwellings and their furniture. Stern treatment follows neglect of this
order and the result shows great improvement.
The figures for typhus cases for all Russia for some of the months of
the present year reveal the excellent progress being made.
February 369,859 (civilians)
March 313,624 ”
April 158,308 ”
January 66,113 (army)
February 75,978 ”
March 57,251 ”
April 16,505 ”
Dr. Semasco is a short, spare man, dark in appearance, energetic in
action. He is a stern foe of all alcoholic drinks and is, besides,
an opponent of the smoking habit, both on purely health grounds.
He neither drinks nor smokes himself. He is one of the very few
doctors who are Communists, and has served a term in prison under the
old régime for some inoffensive piece of Socialist activity. It is
impossible properly to judge Russia, after all, without taking into
account its revolutionary history and its inheritance from the past.
The slightest thing was regarded as an offence against the Government
by the stupid Autocracy which has gone, and punished with abominable
severity; such things, for instance, as the teaching of the peasants
to read and write. If there is much to be condemned in the present
suppression of freedom, in common fairness it must be remembered where
the present rulers learnt their lessons in tyranny.
One of the very ablest of the People’s Commissars is the
Acting-Commissar for Ways and Communications, Sverdloff. We travelled
in his company from Nijni-Novgorod to Astrakhan. He it was who kindly
put at our disposal the train _de luxe_ which carried our sick friend
from Saratov to Reval, and whose considerate kindness on the ship
enabled us to save his life.
He is in appearance slight and pale, of Jewish birth, with dark
expressive eyes and rather autocratic manner. He has been many times
in prison for his political faith, although his revolutionary record
appears to have been less lurid than that of his brother who recently
died of the pestilence. He was in exile in America and England for
some years, and studied with acute intelligence American business
methods, particularly American business discipline. He has brought
this knowledge and training to bear upon Russia’s greatest internal
problem--the restoration of her lines of communication. He realises
that these can be fully and quickly restored only by the hardest work
and severest discipline. His colleagues and subordinates he works
eighteen hours a day. When they are disobedient or neglectful in the
slightest degree the punishment is severe. But the work is done, and
the men adore him. An officer of high rank who was five minutes late
to the ship was given twenty-four hours in prison, to be worked off in
his leisure and not in his labour time. Rebellious workmen, loading a
ship with fish in the hot sun at Astrakhan, who struck for a rest were
driven back to their work by Communist sailors with loaded rifles.
These two things I know to be true, for I saw them.
But the importance of his work cannot be exaggerated, and Sverdloff’s
impatience with Soviet interference in industry can be well understood.
People dying for lack of food and medicines cannot wait for the debates
of Committees to decide this or that point in the organisation of
train or steamship communication. Managerial responsibility is the only
way.
Through Sverdloff’s able organisation the whole of the railways
and bridges destroyed by the Koltchak bands have been restored.
Communication with Siberia has been re-established. Fleets of oil-ships
are bringing from Baku millions of poods of oil, so necessary for
railway engines and workshop machinery. And when the economic life of
Russia is fully restored, no small part of the credit must be given to
this extraordinarily able and commanding personality.
There are others of the Communists who might with interest be
described, men like Serada, the Commissar for Agriculture, of blameless
life and lofty idealism; Tchicherine, Commissar for Foreign Affairs,
gentle by nature, artistic by temperament, uncomfortable in the
whirlpool of politics as it seemed to me, and shrinking, sad-eyed,
into nothing with the burden of the office unto which he was not born,
turned tyrant through suffering, the instrument of less admirable men
than himself. Of the able Communist women Madame Colontai was reported
in Kharkoff. Madame Lenin was too seriously ill to be seen. Madame
Trotsky never came to see us, though she was said to be in the Opera
House when her husband made his sudden and dramatic appearance. Madame
Kameneff, who has charge of one department of educational work, is a
charming little lady who gives the impression of great ability joined
to an amiable manner. Of the humbler men and women Communists talked
with I shall have something to say in later chapters.