Men of Our Time; 2; Lenin

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry I'm sorry. The following program is from Net

program in the series Outstanding Men of Our Time. To understand Lenin and the period in which he worked is to understand the coming to power of communism, both in the Soviet Union and in the international world. If the communist deception can be defined as offering the poor peoples of the world, a sheep's clothing of idealism with the wolves of violence and tyranny inside, then it was especially Lenin who symbolized both of these and who managed somehow after his communist fashion to fit the violence and the idealism together. After watching this documentary on Lenin, there will be a discussion about him and his place in history with Harry Schwartz, expert on Soviet affairs of the New York Times. Now let's watch the film. In the hierarchy of human beings

whose footprints on history can never be erased for good or ill, he was perhaps unique. He was small and unkempt, brilliant and pitiless and unforgettable. He was adored and execrated in life and almost defied in death. He is remembered today whenever men's affairs have a meaning with veneration or hatred, but never will out respect. His name was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov known as Lenin. On the shores of the Volga in a tartar country in the very land of Lenin, there was the town of Symbirsk, one provincial

town out of thousands. There, in 1870, in the respectable solid bourgeois home of a provincial bureaucrat was born Vladimir Ilyich, the third child and second son. His family was simple and secure. His father was a government inspector of schools, a man of character and cultivation, Ilya Nikolayevich Around them were always the reminders that were posed the regime meant suffering. A thousand miles away in St. Petersburg when the young Ulyanov was 17, the thing happened that was to shadow his life like a scar. His sister Anna and his older brother Alexander were implicated in a plot to kill the Tsar. Alexander was arrested, asked for no mercy and was hanged. It was then that in his heart Vladimir Ilyich became

Lenin and committed his brain and his body to one end only, the revolution. From then on he was marked the brother of an assassin. At Kazan he was involved in a student's protest and banished from the university. Already he had discovered Karl Marx, his personal revelation, the manual for his own place in history. Denied the right to study, he went to rusticate with his family near Samara. It wasn't hard for a rebel to find fuel for his fury in the country life around, in a rush of a hundred million peasants who lived their racked and wretched lives forever on the edge of famine, scratching what they called from their outworked and ungenerous earth. It

was not difficult in the rush of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin to feel a bitter, an inerradicable certainty of human wrong. It had to change. They let Lenin innocent Petersburg at last to the law school. Here was the other side of the Russian picture, the urban proletarian picture. Here as he sailed through his four -year law course in one year he reached his creed that today's revolutions are born always in cities. On this proposition he began to work. In his workers lodging he met the girl Nadezhda Konstantinova Krupskaya, the militant feminist Marxist who by and by became his wife. Russia was changing, slowly groping to the new 19th century industrialization. The 19th century factories and workshops were huge and primitive. They

were like Russia on a monstrous scale and like Russia suffocated in their own ineffectual size. In them grew a seething and inarticulate resentment expressed in all manner of groups of protest the incoherent raw material of revolt with neither motif power nor guide. In the huge oilfields of Baku rebellion was lost as everywhere else in an almost unconquerable pit of apathy. And above it all, ineffably remote, lingered the strangest phenomenon of all. For 400 years the Tsars had ruled and here was the last Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov by the grace of God, Emperor of all the Russians, Tsar of Moscow and Kiev, Tsar of Astrakhan, Tsar of Poland and Siberia, Grand Duke of Lithuania and Finland, and much else. In

1895 Lenin went abroad for the first time and in Geneva he met the founding father of the Russian socialist movement Georgie Valentinovic Plakanov living in exile. Lenin was to become his bitter foe but not yet. So he returned to Russia and founded the Julius Martoff, the forbidden league of struggle for the liberation of the working class. And he was arrested for 14 months he stayed in jail. There was of course no question of a trial. Yet he had abundant books and he had no special troubles smuggling out of prison, the revolutionary tax he was there for writing. He grew expert at the techniques of invisible writing and ciphers. At the end of his time they sent him to Siberia. It took him two months to reach his place of exile, the Trushenskoyah, far to the east. There he waited and hunted and shot and read and

wrote, interminably. Two years later Nadezhda Kuptskaya too was exiled to Siberia. The authorities obligingly let her join Lenin and there she and Lenin were married. By now the social democrats were on the run. Lenin found his way to Munich where with Martoff and Petrasov in 1900 he founded the rebel paper Iskra, the spark. It was smuggled into Russia by many people. Among them the young Georgian activist Joseph Djukasvili later to be known as Stalin. The paper Iskra became the underground gospel of Russian socialism. The worker's cells began to form in secret everywhere. Lenin's real wanderings began. His restless search for a secure

base bought him and Kuptskaya in 1902 to London, forever writing, haunting the British Museum reading room. Already the exiles were obsessed by their own internal conflicts. Sometimes it seemed the technique of revolution was more important than the end. But the flood of advice and instruction filtered back to the Russian underground. In Russia the mounting miseries suddenly found a momentary expression in a wave of strikes and rising. And Lenin was still far away. It was the Zahs bad luck or folly that brought at this moment the Russian war against Japan, a futile war, destined for disaster. In Russia wars have always carried revolution in their wake. But the 1905 revolt began in a peaceful protest of almost excessive loyalty. A quiet priest called Father Geparn led 200 ,000 men, women and children to the Winter Palace, singing, God save the Zahs and praying simply for an eight -hour day.

And the guards opened fire on them. More than 500 died. That was the bloody Sunday of January 1905. Everywhere the crowds came out in a chain of outbursts defying the Cossacks, driven to a desperation of protest Russia had not known before. This thought Lenin from afar must be it, the time for which he had planned. He hurried back to St Petersburg. But he was wrong. The rising was crushed. The leaders imprisoned. In Moscow the strikers held out a little longer, furiously encouraged by Lenin.

But the army was still loyal to the Zahs and the army had the guns, the cavalry, the resources and the confidence. The strikers had defeat and death. And all night long, seven, seven, seven, eight, eight, eight, eight, eight. The 1905 revolt was confused and incoherent, but it brought the whole revolution removed into the open. The socialist movement was now an evident part of the political pattern of Russia. For those who did not die, there was the long cold road to Siberia. For twelve years then, the revolt was over. Once again, Lenin escaped the rest and fled to Paris. There in the usual back room of the exile's life, he roped and argued and denounced all who disagreed. Lenin insisted

that only he and his group of uncompromising Marxists were Bolshevik, the majority. The moderations of Placanoff and his like were Menshevik, the minority. Capri, improbably enough, was on the list of revolutionary rendezvous. There Lenin went to visit Maxim Gorky and there were more added intellectual contentions. In Prague, at the party conference of 1912, came Lenin's final breach with the old comrades. From now on, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were out to win the revolution their way. That year, in Russia, the revolt stirred again. Of all Russia's melancholy workers, those of the Lena Mines were the most enslaved and degraded. They went on strike and the soldiers from St. Petersburg shot down an unarmed meeting and 270 were killed on the spot. At that there rose in Europe a howl of horror and protest so loud

and in Russia a national strike so great that a certain awe fell on the government and a few tentative measures of conciliation came about. Lenin was closing in, he moved his base to Krakow in Galicia. But all this time another party was at work, the Okhrana, the Tsarist Secret Service. By now they were well onto the revolutionary movement, they had widely infiltrated it. They actually took part in smuggling the papers and running the guns, meanwhile encouraging the schisms and retarding the movement. But, and it was somehow very Russian, even the Secret Service men were divided. Some of them became real revolutionaries. And now it was 1914. Suddenly all over Europe, multitudes of dissidents remember they were loyalists. A wave of patriotism strove the conception of revolution into a balance. Lenin was consumed with impatience. What had happened to European socialism? Where was the worker's solidarity that should quench

this war? The Russian army was immense. In spite of its parade ground appearance, it was also unprepared, under armed, underfed, ill -led and doomed. In their millions the Russian soldiers vanished into the wintery wilderness of Poland, to defeat, after defeat, to catastrophe, after catastrophe. At least four million never came back. At home the privations grew almost beyond the point of toleration. The Russian mood alternated between hysteria and Slavonic despair. By 1917 it was a country ripe for chaos, and Lenin was not there. By now he was in Zurich. What detonated the

February revolution was small enough, an industrial dispute in the puterovware of Moscow. The immense difference between this and all that had gone before was that now the soldiers were moving to the side of the citizens. Most of the garrison of Petrograd, as the capital was now called, moved over to the workers, the needless demonstrators who were now storming and parading streets. This wasn't politics, the politics were to come. And now the Tsar has gone. He's been challenged and had abdicated. After four centuries Russia had no Tsar,

and it still had no Lenin. In your steer bourgeois piece of Switzerland, Lenin was frantic to return, the revolution for which he'd lived his life had begun and he wasn't there. It would go by default, it would get into the wrong hands. Yet how could he Lenin cross the battlefields of a Europe at war? Petrograd without a Tsar, without a Lenin, was now an arena for politicians contending for power. The seething impatience of Lenin and the exiles of Zurich produced a melodrama worthy of the times. The famous sealed train that no one might leave nor enter on its journey. The Germans, most eager to get a good disruptive force like Lenin back among their enemies, agreed to send him there by train. Some thirty men and women traveled on that famous train, the hardcore of the Exile revolutionists. Lenin, Zinophia, Radik, Klaus Etkin, Sakornikov, all pipelined through a Europe at war back to Russia they had none of them seen for years.

And so, after twelve years, Lenin returned to the Finland station. The new battle was joined. The provisional government wanted order at home and victory in the war. Lenin and the Bolsheviks wanted the revolution under the control of the revolution and professional party workers, and they wanted an end of the war, any end. This Lenin expanded in the April thesis to the Petrograd Council of Soviets. The slogan was, land, bread, peace. In 1917, Lenin, the two ableist Marxists in the world, were brought together again in guarded friendship with the return from America of Trotsky. His task was to be to end the war. In the minds of the soldiers, it was already ended. Everywhere along the German front, the opposing armies were fraternizing. Grateful for any respite from this cruel campaign. Whole regiments packed up, quit,

deserted. The Tsar's army defected in tens of thousands. Whatever might be said in Russia, their war was over. That much of the revolution was for them accomplished. In Petrograd, the revolution was established and what had in fact changed. Lenin continually demanded that the provisional government give way to a republic of a proletariat and an end to the war. That July brought out 300 ,000 people into the streets. On the other side, Karenski, whose father had taught Lenin Symbersk. He was Prime Minister and he subdued the impatient bulge. There headquarters, the commandeered house of the Ballerina Crescent Skier, was sacked. The left was routed. Lenin disguised as a railroad man, slipped over into Finland, indicted for treason. For now the story was, Lenin was a German

agent sent in by the Germans, paid to end the war. He furiously denied it, but hiding didn't help. Now in 1917, with Lenin still away, the campaign was on for the elections for the constituent assembly. The Bolsheviks remained in a high condition of exhilaration. As they had once cried, the Tsar must go. They now cried, Karenski must go, power to the Soviets. Yet when the 42 million votes came to be cast later, the Bolsheviks were to get less than 10 million. The other social revolution has got 21 million, 58 percent. But Lenin said the interests of the revolution stand over those of the constituent assembly, and on its first meeting the Bolsheviks imposed their will. The Assembly never met again. Now both sides of this bitter division of the band of

brothers were armying openly, and as openly making ready for the struggle for power. Lenin was still away, but his momentum had persuaded the Marxist to battalion and the peasants from the disintegrating army to opt no longer for Karenski and the Allies, but for Lenin and the end of war. The Tsarist officers faced with Mr. Lemmer were torn with uncertainties. Yet life went on, in some bizarre way, the social scene of the Russian capital continued to function for the phantoms of the old regime. Right to the end, the agreeable civilities of Olsen Petersburg lingered on in their vanishing world. Lenin returned that the party's object was proclaimed, civil war. Now, in October 1917, the thing that had been a generation in gestation, burst forth, the ten days that shook the world.

The Kluzor -Orol was ordered out to sea and refused to go. Street by street and building by building the Bolsheviks took over. Only the winter palace was holding out. The Orora opened fire and it surrendered. And out of all this sound and fury, victory came with practically no one getting hurt. In the winter palace, it came through at last. Lenin handed over all power to the Soviet. For the first time, Bolshevik meant what it said, the majority. In an oddly pedantic phrase, Vladimir Lenin told the nation, we shall now proceed to construct the socialist order. But only now did the real problems begin. Now for the Bolsheviks and for Vladimir Lenin began the real

struggle. As he dedicated the memorial to Karl Marx and Engels, Lenin knew this with a dire certainty. The bread ration was down to two ounces a day. There was no fuel for the factories. Lenin could and did ordain institutionalism, abolishing private enterprise, nationalizing banks and industry, annulling state debts. But he knew that the October victory had not abolished the forces of opposition. He foresaw rightly the coming civil war. But first he had to get out of the Great War, the World War. That was Trotsky's job, and it blessed the Totsky it was done. Russia had lost almost a third of her population, a quarter of her land, half her industry. The capital of Soviet Russia was moved to Moscow,

miles inland, less vulnerable, less identified with a vanished court. Behind the Kremlin walls, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin set up the seat to state authority. His personal apartments were ordinary to the point of stockness. He was, after all, used to austerity, quite careless of all possessions. Lenin at home with his wife, Krupskaya, the childless pair whose only offspring was an abstraction, a revolution. So enduring as the legend of perpetual motion, it hard to believe it could ever be tempered by a cat. Not every Russian may have shared this euphoria. Many who had shared in no revolution, on the contrary, the officials and merchants who had opposed it, they too were set to work in the job of reconstruction, and they had no choice.

The civil war was on the way. Lenin, reviewing the nucleus of the new red army, could only guess what it might face at any moment. The one thing he needed was time and peace and opportunity to gain experience and consolidate, and that he did not get. The outside world now fell upon the confusions of the Soviet state. The Germans marched on the Ukraine and ravaged it to protect it as they loudly claimed from the revolution. The British landed their Marines at Archangel, more than 10 ,000 in a few months. They occupied it over through the local Soviet, and marched on. In the Far East, there came the Japanese, 70 ,000 of them, followed by 9 ,000 Americans. Against all this, the law unimprovised red army. At first, it was only about 150 ,000 strong. Most of them already had

three years of the Tsar's war behind them. They could have done without another. Now, they had to contend with the world, it seemed, on the front of 5 ,000 miles. They were short of everything, uniform, guns, food. Their great hope was that they would grow with partisans along the way. The Soviets were beaten back all over Russia. To check this was the task of Trotsky. His work was desperate, fantastic. But we were looking vain for the word of praise and the Soviet records of today. All Russia was now an armed

camp. This was, in effect, one world against another. The first confrontation of communism versus the rest. No one in those bloody days had a monopoly of cruelty or fear. At this time, there came an act that seemed curiously incidental. On July the 16th, 1918, the Tsar and his family were shot dead. The dynasty of the Romanovs was wiped off the face of the earth. In any case, death was everywhere. In August, it reached out for Lenin. As he left a Moscow meeting, a woman called Kaplan Fad too shocked. They hit him in the chest and shoulder. He nearly died, protesting, why should they make me suffer so? But that was not his time to die. He recovered quickly. By the spring of 1919, the counter -revolutionaries and the interventionists had taken six -sevenths of

Russia from the communists. Moscow was under siege. So much hope was resting on the coming European revolution, and a leader of the Hungarian communist movement was welcomed as its envoy. When the workers everywhere had thrown off their chains, Russia would surge forward at their head. But was it when, or if? All over Russia, then, the huge morale building campaign grew. Here was the heyday of desperate oratory, the fentic argument that things could not be as fateful as they seemed. All the major figures of the party said so, endlessly, in a mounting desperation. Swerglow. Kalinin. Molotov. Ordinakidze. Stalin. All in their different ways insisted on the same thing. After all these awful years, must we

lose now? Slowly it began to work. The recruits poured in. The parties and forces built out. They multiplied in their thousands, and they died in their thousands, too. And slowly their growth came to exceed their extinction. Lenin spared nothing and nobody. He hurled to demand it and insisted. He was not pity for anyone, including himself. It took three years. The counter -revolution had collapsed, the interventionists were

dispersed, and Soviet Russia was at last, and for the first time on its own. In those fantastic days of 1920, the sun seemed to have risen at last, and the millennium was at hand. The infant experiment in the Soviet principle had taken on the jobs of the world, and helped them, and challenged them, and beaten them. Here is the apotheosis of the career of Medimil Ilyash Yuliyanov, the prophet Lenin, the student in jailbird, an exor, and teacher, and considerate and doctrinaire of the century's most extreme philosophy, supreme at last. But over what, a nation torn and destroyed and almost demolished, a country reduced to scratching for existence among the debris of a fearsome and brutal war. Three years had been lost, or stolen. Lenin and the Soviets had been handed back a ravaged and delirid land. Its industries beaten and broken to a standstill. Its resources reduced to rubble. The very face of the country's scarred and distorted setback a decade.

The nation's communications were almost totally broken to bits, in a vast country where they'd never been adequate and now destroyed. This was the problem for Lenin. This was the post -revolutionary problem, for which none of the political revelations of Marx or, indeed, of Lenin had provided. This problem, at least, could not be solved by words, however skillful, however orthodox. Russia was now a land of refugees, three million people without a roof, freed from capitalism, and at the same time from everything else, depending now on a socialist state very nearly as desperate as they themselves. It created what almost all revolutions create, the new community of

the dispossessed. The Soviet state was born to the sound of funeral orations. One by one, the old comrades of the revolution were seen into the ground. The coffins were painted red. There were no priests and no prayers. Inumerable men and women were committed to the Russian earth, Lenin buried them all. Thousands upon thousands had died that the hands of those who opposed the revolution and of those who made it. There's no birth they say without pain. Sometimes in those ruinous days it must have seemed to Vladimir Ilyich that the price had been woefully high. There was of course a time and a place for symbolism, for the ceremonial laying stones, even revolutionary Russia places much value on ritual. Lenin could find time to inscribe plots and formally consecrate them to communism. But there was

so much more to be done. In the military field said Lenin, we've won a complete victory. Now we must prepare for an even more difficult victory. The nation had virtually to be rebuilt, almost from the foundations, and almost the only machine in all the country to help was an inheritance of the war. There may have been some ironic symbolism as a byproduct, but the only thing that worked in Russia was a captured British tank. Lenin spoke endlessly throughout it all, exhorting, insisting, demanding, arguing. It may have been rhetoric, perhaps none of the Russians had any choice. The fact is that somehow or other this terrible job was done. The broken bones of the country were knit together with nothing except hands and feet and muscles and endurance, the simple hard technology of inexhaustible manpower. Life crept back

to a semblance of normal. The elementary process is a peasant economy. The small enski market was in business again. It wasn't much, but it was something. It was now the end of isolation. The first Soviet state was gradually becoming the focus of one world attitude at least. At the Congress of the Communist International in Moscow, the delegates from 39 countries debated the program by which they were to overcome the world. They and the Bolshevik pioneers, Radik, Zenovia, Flanacharski, Litvinov, the old god and the new, including the American John Reed, journalist and historian of his times. Inside, they made their own history. Marx's old friend, Tarazette Kim, on her right, the Japanese Communist, Sen Yatayama, on her left, Zenovia, then Smeral, leader of the Czechs.

At the hub, always, Lenin projected his non -stop combination of magnetism and charm and petulant authority with that characteristic thrusting gesture of the shoulders and the chin, the dominating auditory of a man who said everything so often that it merely remained safe again and again. It was his manner, as with many a personally modest man of extravagant powers, to retreat, as they say, into the limelight by crouching inconspicuously to write his notes in an obscure corner. He was assured of a maximum attention. He always was the apogee of Vladimir Ilyich, the summit of his ten -pestuous

and uncompromising career. His sickness came quite suddenly. In 1922, his first stroke laid him low. He went to recover in the smallest state in the village of Gorky. It was a hemorrhage of the brain, but it was not necessarily of great danger. He seemed to rally, and very soon he was talking as vigorously as ever, or nearly. He rested in Gorky with his wife, Krupska, relaxed with local children, who was visited by the party's secretary general, the young Joseph Stalin. That year, he seemed to recover and hasten back to Moscow to the council of people's commissars, to the central committee, to the central executive, to lean in its hard to accept the business of the Soviet to continue without him.

But by the end of the year, in the bitter winter, the second stroke felled him once again. And once again, Krupska took him back to Gorky, to the snow -bound villa where, in the silence of paralysis, he was to come to an end. So, at half past six on the evening of January the 21st, 1924, in the 54th year of his tireless, tormented and triumphant life, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin died of the sclerosis of the brain. They took him back to Moscow, gripped in the ferocity of the numbing winter's cold. All the way to

Russia. No king, no emperor, no tsar, perhaps no other human being, was ever so saluted at his death. He'd been many things in his time, all to one, compelling and obsessive end. Through him, many had lived, who would otherwise have died. Many had died, who would otherwise have lived. They said what was left of Lenin in the red square, and there, in body, he lies to this day. Of Vladimir Lenin, it was once said by Winston Churchill, the Russian people's worst misfortune was his birth. Their next worst is death. One could admire the neatness of the paradox and wonder. The half century separated that birth and that death transformed everything. But for what, neither we

nor Russia have lived long enough to know. No king, no king, no king. No king, no king, no king. Mr. Schwartz, what was Lenin's personality like? What was that austere, wax -and -figure that people see today in the tomb outside the Kremlin that like an actual life? Well, the people who knew him and who worked with him loved him. He was

apparently a very warm personality. He was simple. He didn't put on ears. He was a genuine idealist. And he was a dedicated man. For example, used to renounce amusements and methods of recreation because they took his mind off the revolution. The story that he was once listening to a lovely piece of music by Beethoven. I mustn't listen to Beethoven. He tends to disarm me. He's too beautiful. He makes me forget the horrible things of the world. It's said that he gave up chess because it took too much time. He was a dedicated man. He was not out for himself. Now, once he took power, he showed that he enjoyed power and he could use it. But not in a way that, shall we say, Hitler or Mussolini or Stalin or Christian enjoyed power for the material benefits it could bring. He

fully expected in the early years that once Germany revolted why the center of gravity of the international communist movement would pass Germany and he had no compunctions about the idea that he would then come into a secondary role. Whereas Stalin's idea was that Russia would rule world communism. Lenin had much more an idea of a world commonwealth of communist countries that would be a commonwealth of equals. What was the state of communism itself during that period before he actually came into power? Well, communism is a doctrine as an ideology. As a doctrine as an ideology, you have to remember that the Russian groups, the Russian Marxist groups, which Lenin was a leader of only one small group. The Russian groups were insignificant. A classical Marxism after all had not expected the revolution to break out in Russia. A classical Marxism was a doctrine by which it was predicted that the capitalist would exploit the workers and make life so unendurable that finally the workers would revolt and take power. But that was seen in the classical Marxist

scheme as happening in the most developed industrial countries, England perhaps, France, Germany, the United States. But backward Russia with its huge peasant majority, the idea of the revolution breaking out in Russia first, was one which seemed very unlikely to the Marxists. In Bradley's phrase, this was the wrong revolution at the wrong time and the wrong place. Well, you know that idea caused a great many of Lenin's difficulties and he and his comrades had to make quite a number of mental gyrations and gymnastics to accept the fact that contrary to all predictions and expectations they had won power. And actually in the first several years they were waiting expectantly for the revolution to break out where it should have broken out. Namely Germany was there, a big hope. And actually too, a great deal of the subsequent history that is why Stalin came to power and so on has to do with the consequences of the Marxist

revolution having won in a country to which Marxism was really quite inappropriate. But I think you have to remember that Lenin's basic notion was that when the opportunity came to seize power, it was the duty of the communist of Russia to seize that power. A, in the expectation that this would help set off the revolution elsewhere and B, he did take into account the possibility that the revolution might not start elsewhere. But he said that in that case why would probably be extinguished and we'll simply have left some memories to inspire future generations. Trotsky and his autobiography has a passage in which he talks about Lenin's concern that if the revolutionary victory should be only of short duration, that there be a maximum number of memories around. And so Lenin apparently devoted a great deal of attention to, for example, setting up museums of the revolution, setting up busts of Marx and Engels all around Russia. He wanted to leave memories in the younger generations so that if they would disappear from the scene, nevertheless they would have planted a seed

for those who would come out. How did Lenin differ from Marx? Marx was primarily a theoretician. In a practical sense, Marx never did very much. Marx lives because he wrote several books that have influenced humanity enormously. Lenin, on the other hand, is an immortal, at least for our era, because he took Marx's ideas and modified them and created a machine which could seize power. That is, he created the idea of the Communist Party as a disciplined army that could be directed in the first to seize power politically and then to govern the country after powered and seized. And he took one element of Marx's schemata, the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which had played only a minor role in Marx's thinking, and he pushed that to the forefront. What was Trotsky's role in this? Trotsky also was very much of a practical revolutionary. Well, yes, and

we see that Trotsky was the man who next to Lenin deserves the greatest credit, first for the revolution itself, and secondly for saving the revolution. It's generally forgotten now, but Trotsky was the man immediately in charge of the actual organization of the revolution that took place on November 7, 1917. Were there any serious ideological differences between Lenin and Trotsky? In most of the period before 1917, Trotsky and Lenin were very bitter enemies. As a matter of fact, one of the things that helped Stalin win later on was that he was able to quote all the nasty things that Lenin had said about Trotsky before 1917, all the nasty things that Trotsky had said about Lenin. And Trotsky actually did not join the Bolsheviks until a few months before the revolution. Now, once he joined the Bolsheviks, he apparently enjoyed a great deal of respect and confidence in the part of Lenin. There were disputes at times, but we now know that in the last

months of Lenin's active life before he died, he actually was trying to push Trotsky to be his successor. He had suddenly woken up to the fact that Stalin, of whom nobody had thought very much, was concentrating all power in his hands, and he much preferred Trotsky. But as a sick man, an inactive and able to speak or write only with great difficulty, Lenin failed. I'm interested that you say that Lenin foresaw Stalin reaching for power and making a bid for power. I hadn't realized that. Well, there is a famous document which was not generally published in Russia until 1956. This document is called Lenin's Testament. It was sort of his last political will. And he wrote it on two different occasions in 1922. And on the first occasion, he simply characterized each of the different people around him, saying what their strong points and what their weak points were, and urging them to work together.

Then after that, Stalin, on one occasion, was extremely rude to Cripskaya, who was of course Lenin's wife. And when Cripskaya came with the story of Stalin's treatment of her to Lenin, Lenin became very angry and wrote a post script to this last will of his, in which he declared that Stalin's rudeness was completely inexcusable, especially in a man who had the key post of General Secretary of the Party, and that Stalin must be removed. Now, when Lenin died, and when this last will of the Lenins was put before the Party Congress, the political constellation was such that Stalin and his henchmen, who at that point were commune in Zenovia, were able to get general agreement that it should be disregarded. Let's talk for a moment about Lenin's ideas on violence. To what extent did he believe in it?

Well, Lenin essentially had the belief that all tactics were fair, if they served the cause of the workers' revolution. He was ready to take power by any means. He wasn't particular. If violence were required, he was ready to use violence. On the other hand, he did not love violence for the sake of violence. If he had seen possibilities for winning peacefully, he would have done so. And actually, again, it's forgotten that the Bolshevik Revolution, if we think of it in terms of the seizure of power in Petrograd in November 7, 1917, was a very peaceful affair. If you read the eyewitness accounts, you'll find that most of the people who lived in the city, and this is a very large city, after all, went about their business. The opera was given the night that the Winter Palace was stormed. Several of the foreign ambassadors there, recorded in their diaries. They took the usual walks. They went to visit their friends. A very small number of people were killed. The violence, you see, came afterward

at the middle of 1918, when the forces of counter -revolution were organized to try to overthrow the Bolshevik. Didn't Lenin expect this? Lenin, I would say, was in a mood where he expected everything. He expected the worst and tried for the best. Actually, there were in early 1918, Lenin and Trotsky both, when negotiating with representatives of the United States government, for possible American help against the Germans. There was a possibility they might have to resume more against the Germans. He was willing to be all things to all men, but his primary goal was after he'd seized power, was to keep power. To what extent was he an idealist? I would say that to a very great extent he was an idealist. It was not a cynical idealist. I would say that he was a man who genuinely believed that he was working to create a better world. He was prepared to pay heavy prices, and to let others pay heavy

prices for it. But he genuinely believed that what he was doing was for the good of humanity. I don't think he ever had any question about that. This was not a man who sought power simply for the sake of power. Again, the Stalin period has distorted our memories. It's forgotten now, for example, that while Stalin lived, while Lenin lived rather, he always allowed free debate at the top of the communist hierarchy. Although he could have been the one man dictator, he was not, in the sense that he let his associates disagree with him. And if he were outvoted as he was occasionally, he would fight in a sort of normal political way. It was not the kind of terror regime that Stalin created. How far had the gay pay you, the secret police, developed when Lenin was alive? Well, the secret police reached tremendous power in the early years of the revolution, because while Trotsky was sort of fighting, leading the fight on the fronts against the white armies, and against the armies of the

foreign powers that intervened, the gay pay you was organized into Zhinsky to fight the fifth column at home. You've got to remember that everywhere that the Bolsheviks had power, lots of the people there hated them and would gladly have cooperated and destroy them. And so the gay pay you was created to terrorize the enemies of the Bolsheviks by killing some and effect threatening the others that if they exposed themselves and did anything, why they would be killed too. Were there any purges when Lenin was still alive? Well, when Lenin was still alive, there were purges, but there were not purges in the sense of communists being shot as was true during the Stalin period. People were expelled from the party because an justification given was not an unreasonable one. That is the minute the Bolsheviks won, why everybody wanted to get on the bandwagon. It pays to be on the winning side in any situation. And so lots of people who weren't communists who just wanted to make a good thing for themselves to join the party and Lenin tried to get rid of them. But

actually, for a man in that difficult position, he was relatively humanitarian. Now, I don't want to say that he didn't condone the killing of people in fighting to defend his victory. He certainly condoned the red terror of Georgiansky and the gay payoo. He certainly supported the building of a huge army, which afforded the white armies and the like. But on the personal level, he was not a monster of the kind that Stalin was. For example, on the Lenin, his great socialist opponents, people like Mottov and Don and others who had fought him for years, both before and immediately after the revolution, were permitted to leave Russia. You've made an extensive study of the relationships between Russia and China and between the two countries in communist days. What was the relationship between the two back in Lenin's time? Well, in Lenin's day, and that is in the period when Lenin was really active, the relationship was just

beginning, and under Lenin's Aegis, the Russians tried to woo Curry favor with the Chinese by promising that all of the old imperialistic gains of Tsarist Russia would be given up. But then, very naturally, as the Soviet regime gains strength, it began to renegade on some of the promises. And for example, under Lenin, the Soviet regime grabbed off the area we call the Mongolian People's Republic or out of Mongolia. Are there any lessons that we can learn from your studies of the Lenin period which would help us to understand the period of Mao's communism in China today? Yes, a very interesting series of things. I have been very much impressed by the very great similarities between what the communist Chinese have actually done and what Lenin's opponents were urging in the early years, let's say, around 1920 and 1921. For example,

in 1929 -21, there was a dissident faction in the Communist Party called the Workers' Opposition led by Alexandra Kalantai, who was usually more famous for advocacy of free love by others. And this group argued that the great thing, it was that of bureaucratic degeneration and therefore all officials, even the highest, should be required to spend at least three months of each year working as ordinary laborers or ordinary farmers. Well, you know, the Chinese have done that sort of thing. That is, Lenin opted for kind of a managerial communism in which the people at the top would be rewarded appropriately. His opponents really were kind of anarcho -sendicalists who had a more primitive notion of communism. And there's great deal of resemblance between what the Chinese communists have done and what Lenin's opponents did. And also, of course, what Lenin himself did in the period of war communism that is 1917 to 1920 when he was fighting the revolutionaries and when Russia was

essentially just one great army and everybody was on the military command whether civilian or military. China is still that very much that way today. Would you care to try to summarize all of this, Mr. Schwartz? How would you see Lenin's place in history? Well, I think, of course, that Lenin is one of the great men of the 20th century in the sense that what he did has lived on after him and has affected hundreds of millions of people and continues to affect hundreds of millions of people. I do not think myself that Lenin wanted that, which his revolution turned into. Lenin was a civilized human being in the European tradition. He was not an Asian barbarian like Stalin. What Lenin's history and what happened after Lenin that teach me at least is that all of us ought to be very careful about going all

out for an ideal because the gulf between the ideal and what actually happens is frequently very great. And if you make people pay a very great price for the ideal, what are you to say if they don't get the ideal to get something quite different, which is, of course, what happened to the Soviet Union? Thank you very much, Mr. Schwartz. Thank you, sir. The next subject on this series, Men of Art Time, the Creator and Mounted Bank of Fascism, Benito Mussolini. This is NET, the National Educational Television Network. Thank you.