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Typos — persuit [= pursuit]


Lenin: an epic of stubborn health

by
Anthony M. Ludovici

The New English Weekly 35, 1949, p. 78


- p. 78 -
David Shub's Biography of Lenin * is a conscientious piece of work. It contains all the essentials about the hero of the Russian Revolution and is also a full story of the rise of his Party to power. For the general reader it might have been pruned with advantage, but the student of politics and the historian will hardly wish to miss a line. The light shed on Lenin's character will seem at times too fierce for those who have already canonized him. But, to the psychologist, it is very welcome. The author, apparently unaware of how often he lets cats out of bags, kindly ushers us into the most secret recesses of the famous Bolshevik's mind; and, as we scrutinize its features, we should have to be dense indeed did we not recognize them as common to the type of all ambitious politicians, whether Russian, German, French or English — yes, even English. Let him who doubts that study the lives of recent British statesmen. That readiness to risk his country's future on a political coup, or to jeopardize it in order to continue enjoying absolute power, and that disregard of the common will and weal in the persuit of personal aims — all these traits of the political climber thirsting for dominion are revealed, sometimes quite ingenuously by Mr. Shub, and they stamp Lenin as only one among a whole gallery of similar European, English and American figures, all cast from the same mould, whose names, if a comprehensive list of them were given, would startle many unsuspecting patriots.
        Speaking of the period immediately preceding the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, for instance, Mr. Shub writes: "To Lenin the sole important issue was whether or not the German peace terms imperilled the Soviet Power. If the Germans should demand the overturn of the Bolshevik Government, then, of course, we would have to fight," Lenin said. "All other demands can and should be granted. We have heard the statement made that the Germans are going to take Livonia and Estonia. We can very well sacrifice these for the sake of the Revolution. If they demand the removal of our troops from Finland, well and good. Let them take revolutionary Finland. Even if we give up Finland, Livonia and Estonia, we still retain the Revolution." [The italics are mine. A.M.L.]
        These words are eye-openers. They betray better than anything else could the reckless power-lust of the political climber, ready to cut his mother-country up provided only that he can be left in undisturbed control over any remaining fragment of it.
        But there are brighter and more inspiring aspects of Lenin's character and, above all, of the characters of his many lion-hearted supporters. Indeed, this biography proves up to the hilt that, without followers who had, as he did, the spirit of the old religious martyrs, the Bolsheviks would never have been heard of, except perhaps as a hand of down-at-heel vagrants, living as beggars in the slums of Western European cities.
        It was men like Kamo and Stalin — to mention only two — who made Lenin's success possible. And where are such men now to be found in Western Europe? Did they exist as members of any Party, or supporters of any Cause, that Party and Cause could not fail ultimately to triumph.
        Consider Kamo's greatest feat. For reasons which cannot be entered into here, it was in the Party interests in 1907 that he should feign madness; and, knowing he was under narrow scrutiny by a team of psychiatrists, he spent four months, day and night, on his feet and never lay down. "To rest himself, he would stand in a corner, facing the wall, and in turn lift up one foot and then the other."
        At one stage, in order to convince his gaolers of his complete dementia, "he pulled out half his hair and arranged it carefully in small mats on a blanket."
        Thus, for four years, "with incredible stamina and will-power, he played the role of a violent maniac," and was never found out by the experts set to test him.
        As for Stalin, he also performed feats of endurance for four years (1913–1917) as an exile in one of the most deadly wildernesses of Siberia — the Turukhansk region on the Jenesei River. "Hardened natives said the devil himself had forgotten that corner of the earth." Here many exiles committed suicide; others went out of their minds. Only a few months after Stalin's arrival, Joseph Dubrovinsky, a prominent Bolshevik, deliberately plunged into the icy river to his death in order to end his torment. Another, Gallin, took his own life by locking himself in his cabin and setting it on fire.
        But, in the village of Kureika, fifteen miles within the Arctic Circle, Stalin contrived to acclimatize himself to his brutal environment. From the warm Caucasus, which was his home, to Kureika was a change few men could have survived. Yet his stamina and will-power conquered. He became an expert trapper, fisherman and lumber-jack, and "learned to live entirely on his own resourcefulness and inner strength during his years of exile."
        We may deplore the cause which inspired these heroic feats, but we can hardly help admiring them. At all events, they set a standard which no amount of exhortation and benevolent tuition, alone, can enable men to reach. For, without that passion and that capacity to feel things deeply, which are both inborn and which no "education" can create, and without that pristine virility which tends to faint by the "warm hearthstone" of civilized comfort, such trials of strength are not only shunned, but are also dismissed in advance as impossible.
        All of which inclines one to ask how much that has permanent value can be taught? A list of those qualities which, if he is to have them, a man must possess from the start, placed beside a list of the things which he can acquire by education, would prove an interesting object lesson to our soft leaders of the West. It might even go some way towards shaking the prevailing faith in schoolmarming as a panacea for all ills. But such considerations are at present unfashionable. The mot-d'ordre has gone out from on high that no one who is at all comme-il-faut must now question the omnipotent magic of education. It is the alternative to detestable ideologies. We are told to expect even our élite as the outcome of it.
        Lenin's biography by David Shub may not have been intended as a text-book for the believers in other methods than education for the regeneration of Man. But, between the lines, it contains much that will confirm such believers in their out-moded attitude.

        * Lenin. By DAVID SHUB. Doubleday & Co. Inc. New York. Demy 8vo. pp. 396. Price $5.

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