Books: Lenin Speaking

THE LETTERS OF LENIN—Translated & edited by Elizabeth Hill & Doris Mudie— Harcourt, Brace ($4).

Of the thousands of letters written by Vladimir Ilich Ulianov in his 54-year life, about 1,000 are left. That is not because his correspondents were thoughtless but because Vladimir Ulianov was a revolutionary. Many a missive he wrote in invisible ink, bound inside book covers, traced between lines of bromidic gossip; many were destroyed when read, some were intercepted, some went to the dead letter orifice. In Russia, where Vladimir Ulianov’s tomb is Moscow’s most sacred sight, three volumes of his letters have been published. Last week U. S. readers were glad to be able to see for themselves what kind of letters were written by the No. 1 Revolutionary of the 20th Century, were also glad that Editors Hill & Mudie’s ample selection did not include any more.

For nonrevolutionary readers, Lenin’s letters are likely to be disappointingly unexplosive. Such readers may not even agree at first with Editors Hill & Mudie that from them “there emerges above all the vivid figure of Lenin himself.” Lenin’s letters are like business letters. But it was a big business he was about, and as his scheme slowly progresses from small successes to failure to near-success to triumph, even businessmen readers will scarce forbear to cheer. Irritation, anger when schemes go wrong or partners fail him, Lenin frequently shows; personal feeling, almost never. The letters to his wife, Krupskaya, and references to her before and after marriage, are as impersonally businesslike as all the others. Only in his letters to his mother does he show a personal face: to her he is unfailingly tender.

Lenin’s letters begin in 1895, when he was a 25-year-old lawyer and already a fledgling revolutionary. Little less than a year later he writes from a Petersburg prison, awaiting his long journey to three years in Siberia. Krupskaya, arrested later, was allowed to join him there. They were married, but when Lenin’s term was up she still had a year to serve. Lenin’s first letter to her after their separation is a lengthy dissertation on intraParty politics. When Krupskaya was released she joined Lenin’s exile in Europe, and for the next 16 years they led a lonely, hand-to-mouth life, supporting themselves by translations, lectures, literary work, trying to patch together a working revolutionary organization. Once, in a letter to his mother, Lenin allowed his discouragement to appear: “My life goes on as usual and fairly lonely . . . and unfortunately pretty senseless.”

As their correspondence grew, the revolutionaries referred to themselves and each other by various nicknames. Lunacharsky became “the Destroyer.” Litvinoff “Papa”‘; Lenin, after trying various signatures such as “Meyer” and “Petroff,” became the “Old Man.” Lenin’s organizing ability, implacable common sense and long view gradually put him in control of the majority (Bolsheviks) in the organization. His letters show that he was not an opportunist but a confessed “necessitarian.” “I know, I know it very well, I never forget this, but that is the tragedy (I promise you ‘tragedy’ is not too strong a word!) of our position; that we have to act in such a way . . . after all we are not creating ‘human material’ for ourselves, but are taking, and cannot refuse, what is given to us.”

Sometimes he admits losing his temper (“We have lost our tempers to the point of neurasthenia. . . .”), sometimes he does it before your eyes: “Do not bother me about leaflets: I am not a machine and cannot work in the present disgraceful situation. . . . For Christ’s sake do understand. . . . Unforgivable and shameful . . . simply a disgrace and death to the cause! . . . Yet here you are busy with the devil knows what kind of dirty business! … If we don’t break with the Central Committee and with the Council, then we shall only be worthy of being spat at.” When he knows he is right he never stops saying so until he gets his way: “Again and again I repeat: this is the only salvation.”

U. S. readers will be sure to note his only mention (1915) of the late great Eugene Debs: “And who is Eugene Debs? He writes sometimes in a revolutionary manner. Is he only spineless like Kautsky?” And everyone but Bolsheviks will enjoy this passage, in a letter to ,Maxim Gorky: “Your news that a Bolshevik, although a former Bolshevik, was treating you by a new method, has made me really very anxious. God preserve us from ‘comrade’ doctors in general and Bolshevik doctors in particular. But seriously, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, ‘comrade’ doctors are asses, as a brilliant doctor once told me. I assure you that one should be treated only by first-class foreign specialists (except in unimportant cases).”

In Lenin’s big hour, when the Revolution had brought him hurrying back to Russia, the tone of his letters hardly changes. He writes Karl Radek in Stockholm: “The position is arch-complicated and arch-interesting.” But with Kerensky out of the way and Lenin and his Bolsheviks in charge at last, his discursive letters shrink to notes and telegrams, their subjects swell to dictatorial size: “Advise you send them six months forced labour in mines. . . . Today at all costs Rostov must be taken. . . . Mobilize all forces. Immediately set afoot everything for catching the culprits. Stop all motor cars and detain them for triple checking.” At the same time characteristically the little old pamphleteer who had spent so much of his exile dreaming and scribbling in the World’s libraries pens a humble request to a librarian to be allowed to take out reference books after hours: “I would return them by the morning.” Realist, necessitarian to the last, he ends the final letter with the same old plea for common sense: “You have been carried away by your thoughts.”