III

LENIN, TROTSKY AND GORKY

Soon after my arrival in Moscow I had an hour’s conversation with Lenin in English, which he speaks fairly well.  An interpreter was present, but his services were scarcely required.  Lenin’s room is very bare; it contains a big desk, some maps on the walls, two book-cases, and one comfortable chair for visitors in addition to two or three hard chairs.  It is obvious that he has no love of luxury or even comfort.  He is very friendly, and apparently simple, entirely without a trace of hauteur.  If one met him without knowing who he was, one would not guess that he is possessed of great power or even that he is in any way eminent.  I have never met a personage so destitute of self-importance.  He looks at his visitors very closely, and screws up one eye, which seems to increase alarmingly the penetrating power of the other.  He laughs a great deal; at first his laugh seems merely friendly and jolly, but gradually I came to feel it rather grim.  He is dictatorial, calm, incapable of fear, extraordinarily devoid of self-seeking, an embodied theory.  The materialist conception of history, one feels, is his life-blood.  He resembles a professor in his desire to have the theory understood and in his fury with those who misunderstand or disagree, as also in his love of expounding, I got the impression that he despises a great many people and is an intellectual aristocrat.

The first question I asked him was as to how far he recognized the peculiarity of English economic and political conditions?  I was anxious to know whether advocacy of violent revolution is an indispensable condition of joining the Third International, although I did not put this question directly because others were asking it officially.  His answer was unsatisfactory to me.  He admitted that there is little chance of revolution in England now, and that the working man is not yet disgusted with Parliamentary government.  But he hopes that this result may be brought about by a Labour Ministry.  He thinks that, if Mr. Henderson, for instance, were to become Prime Minister, nothing of importance would be done; organized Labour would then, so he hopes and believes, turn to revolution.  On this ground, he wishes his supporters in this country to do everything in their power to secure a Labour majority in Parliament; he does not advocate abstention from Parliamentary contests, but participation with a view to making Parliament obviously contemptible.  The reasons which make attempts at violent revolution seem to most of us both improbable and undesirable in this country carry no weight with him, and seem to him mere bourgeois prejudices.  When I suggested that whatever is possible in England can be achieved without bloodshed, he waved aside the suggestion as fantastic.  I got little impression of knowledge or psychological imagination as regards Great Britain.  Indeed the whole tendency of Marxianism is against psychological imagination, since it attributes everything in politics to purely material causes.