SOLZHENITSYN AND LENIN
Souvarine, Boris
Solzhenitsyn and Lenin We don't know whether this article will be of interest to all our readers, but those who care about 20th-century history, and especially the history of radicalism, will...
...Hanecki was not an intimate...
...In a 1968 issue of Contrat social (Vol...
...For that matter, our author constantly mistakes the relationships of Lenin with his partisans...
...Nor should he suggest without any basis that the Mezhrayontsy (non-Bolshevik and nonMenshevik socialists) were also in the pay of the Germans...
...We have also the private letters of Lenin to his family, to [Alexander] Shliapnikov, [Alexandra] Kollontai, Inessa Armand, Jacob Hanecki, Bukharin, Gorky, Radek, and others...
...He goes on to account thus for the wide distribution of Pravda...
...A quarter of his blood, but nothing in his character, his will, his inclinations made him kin to that slovenly, slapdash, eternally drunken people...
...it is he who has caused to be heard beyond the frontiers of his native land the memorable cry of the conscience of a great people that has been tortured and martyrized: "Not to live in falsehood...
...To his chagrin, Boris 335 Nicolayevsky was consulted as an expert, and declared that they were false...
...Solzhenitsyn gives an excellent six-line summary of it...
...One observation that may strike the reader as surprising must be made at the outset: Solzhenitsyn is the victim of the tendentious and more often than not deceptive Communist historiography with which he has provisioned himself, no doubt by consulting the copious glosses that accompany the works of Lenin...
...Von Romberg [Baron Gisbert von Romberg], the German ambassador in Bern, says that this astute person "has managed to discover" Lenin's program in the event of a revolution but that the information must be kept very secret so as not to rob it "of its full value...
...to make that a fact...
...Such incoherence defies comment...
...Lenin was maniacal on the question of separateness...
...In Novy Journal (No...
...At the time, I did not know that Sir Lewis Namier considered KiihImann a "liar" (Avenues of History, London, 1952), but I judged his telegram to be an obvious way for him to push himself forward without risk of contradiction...
...At any rate, German money did not count...
...Petitpas, the master choreographer in Petersburg, arrived there straight from Marseilles...
...Pierre Pascal, who is also the author of Avvakum et les abuts du raskol, the translator of Dostoievsky and of the Old Russian version of "The Siege of Jerusalem," from Flavius Josephus's History of the Jewish War, and who is a professor of Russian studies at the Ecole des Langues Orientales and at the Sorbonne, is the author of a pertinent article, "Octobre et fevrier ne sont qu'une Revolution" (Revolution prodtarienne, November 1967...
...Is Miliukov also supposed to have dipped into Parvus's funds...
...What were the connections between Lenin and Parvus...
...In the March 1974 issue of Encounter, Joel Carmichael accepts all the inaccuracies of his predecessors and adds a few of his own ("German Money and Bolshevik Honour...
...In late May of that same year, Parvus approached Lenin in a restaurant in Bern...
...Solzhenitsyn's allusions to and evocations of the 1905 Revolution are equally contrary to historical truth...
...It lasted for some 50 days...
...No one then assigned any importance to the so-called left, which went unnoticed before the Russian Revolution...
...everything has been done to attract attention...
...He should rather believe Machiavelli, who wrote in his Discourses on the First Decade of Livy, "Nothing can be falser than the vulgar opinion which affirms it [money] to be the sinews of war...
...In his own, original way, Solzhenitsyn has added his contribution to the already long list of works that are more or less historical, more or less tendentious and contradictory, with hypotheses that never take the place of proofs...
...And at the end:] Another Bolshevik secret, the story of Germany financing Lenin, has been elucidated with the help of documentary proofs...
...And he was always very miserly about his own time...
...Prior to the April 1915 International Conference of Socialist Women in Bern and a conference of pacifist youth that followed it—at both of which Lenin resorted to spokesmen to win a hearing for his discordant message, to which no one on the outside was listening—an Italian-Swiss colloquy had taken place in Lugano...
...One can select a quotation from the Bible to justify the Inquisition...
...The Provisional Government, by terms of its secret treaties, was sworn to solidarity with the Allies until a final victory was won...
...Parvus could tell fables and make boasts to German officials but not to Lenin—for example, about the 1905 Revolution...
...It is not gold . . . that is the sinews of war, but good soldiers...
...The "liar" does not dare mention the name of Lenin...
...Day and night, even in response to the smallest thing, Lenin seems to be whirling...
...Keskiila affirms that he saw Lenin once, in 1914...
...So every accusation or insinuation about German gold is calumny pure and simple—at least until April 1917...
...Then what were Parvus's millions for...
...The references to Lenin's "choice of words, his way of thinking and acting" do not have the conclusive value that Solzhenitsyn believes they have...
...The analyses and observations of the two American professors are couched in the understated style appropriate to their academic background, and in substance are compatible with my own articles that have appeared over the last 18 years in Contrat social ("Un point d'histoire," Vol...
...Yet his allusions and suggestions, perhaps unbeknown to him, do connect him with the aforementioned authors—something one could not fully appreciate from a mere abstract of such extensive materials...
...The Petersburg Soviet, on the other hand, was of regional and ephemeral importance, and had no significance such as that conferred on it retrospectively by the Petrograd Soviet of 1917...
...So, it is worthwhile to examine this documentation...
...For reasons of space, I shall not contest a large number of other points Solzhenitsyn has taken from his tainted sources, and shall proceed to the "sealed railway carriage" that was not sealed...
...But this is no reason for thereafter relating stories that have nothing to do with history under the cover of writing a novel with historical pretensions...
...To charge Lenin with inexpiable grievances is more than legitimate if one considers only his pseudodictatorship of the proletariat—or his creating and then entrusting to Stalin a monstrous state apparatus for coercion that is without historical precedent...
...The two authors on whom Solzhenitsyn has relied were unable to avoid the habitual reef for biographers who make their main character the center of the history of his period, and they exaggerated beyond all measure in elevating Parvus to the principal in the 1905 Revolution...
...This does not excuse the totalitarian despotism that was established subsequently, or the enslavement and the Gulag Archipelago...
...i.e., his professional revolutionaries, his Red Guards, and the Petrograd garrison whose members certainly had not read Materialism and Empirico-Criticism but quite simply did not want to go back to the front...
...However, his offer to unify the disparate socialist groups and subgroups was either an absurdly utopian notion or an outright lie...
...his notes were transcribed for publication more than 50 years after the events they record...
...In March 1915 he submitted a memorandum to the German government...
...Without any external assistance whatever, the paper had been appearing since 1912, albeit intermittently and under various names depending upon confiscations...
...In point of fact, contending against a provisional government that lacked defenders, Lenin seized power with good soldiers...
...whatever other purposes Parvus may have had in mind, its purposes were indicated in the name—the Institute for Research Into the Consequences of War...
...The novelist has dipped into sources that are partly questionable, partly doctored, in order to devise a portrait that bears little resemblance to Lenin...
...First, he undertook to unite the diverse and deeply divided Russian socialist organizations and factions...
...An intense traffic was carried on in the Baltic Sea to evade the German blockade...
...He also notes, in very moderate terms, "a strong tendency among Western writers to exaggerate Helphand's [Parvus's] activities in Switzerland from 1915 to 1917" (op...
...Or of Lermontov, who was Scottish of origin (Learmonth...
...Similarly, it is difficult to disregard the indications of themes—brief but nonetheless suggestive—that in the present work are preludes to pages to come...
...Lenin was always capable of facing up to adversity coolly...
...Nor should he wrongly interpret the various conditions Lenin worked out in the interests of all the exiles who were in a hurry to get home...
...it would be out of the question to begin all over again here...
...The publication dates are not definitive because the texts had originally been published in leaflet form...
...In it, Professor Senn presents and comments on 14 documents, 9 of which are in Russian and 5 in German...
...If it were a matter of literary technique, such as the interior monologue to which Solzhenitsyn so often resorts, it would nonetheless be essential that the speakers keep to an acceptable discourse...
...On this point, proofs leave nothing to be desired...
...Dallin clearly stated that Parvus duped his (German) money-lenders and that no serious evidence exists that his enterprises produced the results he boasted of...
...he goes so far as to involve Trotsky, who had absolutely nothing to do with the affair...
...From 1917 on, torrents of "exposes," denunciations, and accusations have passed Lenin off as an agent of the Kaiser, a German spy, a traitor who was shipped back to Russia in a "sealed" railway carriage so that he might betray his country in behalf of German 324 imperialism...
...it spread throughout the Empire and lasted for more than a year...
...It was not until mid-June that he was to raise for the first time the theoretical candidacy of his party to take power, and it was in September that he judged the moment opportune *Miliukov was the leader of the Kadets, a bourgeois liberal party...
...As early as March 19, when socialists of various tendencies were meeting in Bern, Martov had advanced the idea of suggesting to Germany an exchange of Russians desirous of returning home for an equal number of Germans and Austrians then detained in Russia...
...Telegraphic messages make it evident that the transfers of funds between Stockholm and Petrograd were payments related to business and had nothing to do with Parvus's political wheeling and dealing...
...the two men went outside to talk, but as soon as Lenin got a whiff of Parvus's views, he sent him packing...
...Keskilla also tried without success, to compromise Shliapnikov, who later wrote, inA la veille de 1917 (Moscow, 1923): An Estonian by the name of Keskilla presented me with letters of recommendation from the Estonian Social Democratic group in Switzerland, and offered me...
...This one must not lose sight of if one is interested in his connections with imperialist Germany, with "social patriots" and "social traitors," and most particularly with Parvus...
...The latter emphasized that the original idea was Martov's and, in My Life As a Rebel (New York, 1932), wrote: The arrangement implied no compromise or favor on the part of either government...
...A good topic for an academic dissertation...
...It was finished between them...
...ergo, also of civl war...
...Another message from the same source, dated September 29, 1917, appears in the collection...
...This was unanimously agreed to...
...Everything went off without Parvus, even if on his own he played the busybody...
...An occasion, surely, on which to quote Credo quia absurdum...
...admission of all travelers without distinction as to political opinions...
...After October, Parvus pushed obtuseness to the point of wanting to go to Petrograd, but Lenin objected: "The cause of the revolution must not be soiled by dirty hands...
...in other words, more personal receipts than payments to third parties...
...Willetts...
...It would be to Solzhenitsyn's interest to read them...
...On this score, Solzhenitsyn is irreproachable: he affirms that the Ulyanov couple lived in poverty, that Lenin's parsimony was such that he economized by not buying newspapers (he read them in the public library), etc...
...And may Solzhenitsyn take care not to use the writings of Gregory Alexinski...
...Solzhenitsyn seems not to be aware of this...
...Our novelist should have read the very sincere and truthful little book by Angelica Balabanoff, lz litchnykh vospominani Tsimmerwaldtsa (Leningrad, 1925), to get an accurate idea of the conference, and also to be convinced that "the Zimmerwald left" enjoyed no importance for any length of time...
...19 in Zeman), not by Lenin alone...
...By 1917, Trotsky's prestige was such that in retrospect his brilliance was reflected back onto the ephemeral 1905 Soviet, the memory of which Communist literature enlivened by inflating it...
...Unhappily for them, on April 27 the Ulyanovs [Lenins] had changed lodgings and were living in the Waldheimstrasse (cf...
...When, shortly after the snub, Parvus brought out his periodical Die Glocke (The Bell), Lenin described it as "a sewer of German chauvinism .. an organ of renegades and vile flunkies," and he called Parvus "an adventurer [who has] fallen as 330 low as possible . . . who licks Hindenburg's boots . . . miserable poltroon . . . incapable of an honest thought" (Oeuvres Complkes, Vol...
...Why "might seem...
...Even without such an invitation, historical evaluation would have been inevitable since Lenin in Zurich deals with a 20th-century man whose stature dominates our era...
...Lenin's misreading has circled the globe...
...In fact, the initiative belonged to the Italian Socialist party, and the preliminary steps were taken by its emissary, Oddino Morgari, in Paris and in London, as well as in Switzerland...
...Zeman and Scharlau permit themselves to state that a conversation took place at Lenin's residence, and they give the address—Distelweg...
...A further example: Lenin quoted Marx to justify the Soviet regime identified as "the dictatorship of the proletariat," whereas by this phrase Marx meant 325 "political hegemony" resulting from "universal suffrage"—which has nothing to do with the monopoly of one party, the omnipotence of an "oligarchy," an inquisitorial G.P.U., and a Gulag Archipelago...
...Hanecki and his friends, as militants enjoying temporary prosperity, helped the Party somewhat out of their own pockets, a fact that conceals no mystery...
...In that case, a host of troublesome questions arises in the realms of politics, history, and culture—but according to 334 what criteria...
...Lenin's "Open Letter to B. Souvarine...
...He would see there that Lenin was not wrong when he affirmed that "the masses," who wanted peace and land, were much farther "to the left" than the Bolsheviks...
...21, No...
...However, he gives himself away and discredits his story with the detail about Pravda...
...228-29...
...He examines the works of numerous authors, and he shows that an impartial analysis of both the pertinent "documents" and related commentaries reveals the absence of any proofs...
...One can only wonder what Parvus went to Berlin to accomplish in 1915, since everything had been decided three years before...
...And it was with his good soldiers that Lenin was able "to find gold" in bank vaults, public savings, etc., however studiously his detractors still seek for it in "documents" they distort to make them say what they do not say...
...The book was a flop, but it did spark several imitators, whose accounts I settled in the article "Faux et faussaires," in Contrat social (Vol...
...Solzhenitsyn himself writes: "A single wasted hour made Lenin ill...
...he created the most monstrous military-police-bureaucratic state that history has known...
...Boris Souvarine is a man uniquely qualified to write such a criticism...
...Translated by ADRIENNE FOULKE q 336...
...Had they informed the Allies that it was absolutely essential they be freed of their treaty obligations, history would have taken a different turn...
...He shows—he proves—that Lenin's decrees following the October coup responded to the unsatisfied aspirations of the people who had spontaneously carried out the February-March revolution...
...The first beneficiary of secret funds is Parvus, who deserves further attention (see below...
...The second is an Estonian nationalist and Social Democrat, [Alexander Eduard] Kesktila, who had been an unknown until then...
...Indeed, at the time a bus ticket cost a million marks...
...It is a particularly flagrant improbability that bodes ill for the chapters to follow...
...Parvus grew weary of vegetating as a second ranker in Social Democratic Germany, where the bigwigs kept him on short rein...
...As for the Bolshevik clandestine organization, at the time it was reduced to almost zero...
...In addition, Solzhenitsyn invents a visit to Lenin's home by a certain Sklarz, when Lenin did not want to see him: "To make use of the services of people connected with the editor of Die Glocke, that of course I cannot do," he wrote on March 30, 1917 (Oeuvres Completes, Vol...
...The autobiographies of Shliapnikov, Radek, Hanecki, and other dramatis personae in the Dictionnaire Encyclopd'dique Granat were not written to satisfy any partisan purpose, and they contribute indirectly toward establishing the truth about Parvus's connections with the Bolsheviks' office in Stockholm...
...Furthermore, the Georgian socialist Mikhail Tskhakaya, one of the first group of 32, has testified to the vain efforts of the German Social Democrats to make contact with the travelers...
...he disagreed with Trotsky and the theory of "the permanent revolution...
...3, p. 333...
...EDS...
...Radek says to Lenin, "It comes to this, Vladimir Ilyich: six months from now we will either be ministers or we will be hanged...
...But this would not only create confusion for the reader but would also be an ungrateful task, since one respects to the full measure the immense merits of the admirable author of "Matryona's House," and The Gulag Archipelago...
...Money had nothing to do with it...
...Immediately after the March revolution was announced, Lenin redoubled his efforts to return home by way of France and England...
...for while gold by itself will not gain you good soldiers, good soldiers may readily get you gold...
...The Wilhelmstrasse people, in the government and on the General Staff, were ignorant in these matters, and they allowed themselves to be persuaded, for Parvus's arguments were impressive although he shamelessly misled them about the methods to pursue...
...Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas...
...he sought paid work for himself and his wife...
...About the slanders concerning the question of money, he wrote: "Since at that time everything was done through me or with my personal participation, the libels were aimed chiefly at myself, and I found them extremely painful...
...London, 1883, N. H. Thomson, translator—pp...
...And Lenin was not a man to speak to a "social traitor" who disgusted him, addressing him as Israel Lazarevich...
...One must bear in mind that every reference to "German gold" necessarily implicates Shliapnikov, who was an upright man and above suspicion...
...He counseled against their having connections with Parvus, which was normal on the part of an older man...
...Solzhenitsyn has performed a distinguished service by proclaiming the truth about Lenin's liabilities...
...One can detest Lenin, but is that a reason for violating the truth...
...This name does appear 46 times in Zeman's collection, and not once is there any indication of any payment of money...
...There was no secret agreement with Berlin...
...A writer of Solzhenitsyn's stature should not indulge in such vagaries...
...The author quotes Keskiila as saying, "Lenin was my protege...
...Proof of this is found in Lenin's correspondence with Shliapnikov, and Zinoviev confirms as much in his Histoire du Parti communiste russe (Paris, 1926): "The war brought about the almost complete destruction of the [Bolshevik] Party...
...After all, there it is in black and white: "invasion of India by Russian troops" (Point 7...
...For that matter, it was a rule with me to refuse categorically every proposition that was in the slightest suspect...
...2, No...
...This was the prelude to Zimmerwald...
...More resolute and more pressed than the others, who were still waiting for the Soviet's approval, Lenin left with a first group of 32 people (19 Bolsheviks, 6 Bundists, 3 MenshevikInternationalists, and children...
...he left for the Balkans, and there devoted himself to highly lucrative "business activities...
...A blinding deduction from a luminous premise...
...115, 1974), Roman Goul paraphrases everything said previously by Melgunov, David Shub, Kerensky, George Katkov, and other respectable but not infallible Lenin haters, whose judgment is clouded by passion...
...Pascal wrote thus on July 20, 1917: "They accused Kozlovsky of having 2 million francs on deposit...
...Kiihlmann can say what he likes...
...It is our hope to send this article (which first appeared in the French magazine Est-Ouest, and is here somewhat abbreviated) to Solzhenitsyn with an invitation to comment...
...For example, in connection with the extraterritoriality clause that Lenin insisted on...
...All this Solzhenitsyn knows, yet he relies on four volumes from a collection of 55...
...but when he sent the Red Army to put down the Ukraine, Transcaucasia, and Turkestan, it was his quarter of Russian blood that was operative...
...This material is found in collections dedicated to the memory of Lenin...
...His scholarlyintellectual criticism here is all the more noteworthy in that, politically, he has for many years been an opponent of Leninism...
...Furthermore, trite as they are, the references he offers to support the historical soundness of his account impress uninformed readers—which is to say most people...
...everything proves it, Solzhenitsyn knows it, and writes as much...
...Parvus even less...
...And so an investment of 328 10 centimes brought a tidy dividend to the resourceful Estonian...
...144 and 146...
...Idiotic as this is, it did not make Romberg smell a rat...
...There are documents and documents...
...Ever since Marietta Chaguinian, the historiographer of the Ulyanov family, discovered tangible proof of Lenin's mother's Jewish ancestry (proof that by some miracle eluded the G.P.U...
...Some three weeks later, tired of waiting for some response from the Soviet, a second group set out in the same way as the first...
...It must be said that they are not too adequate...
...the conclusive documents are all 333 available, as is first-hand testimony, including Sukhanov's...
...Certain pages should be contradicted line by line...
...and who allowed himself to say, "But you must have capital...
...In France especially, it was even thought that Lenin was some sort of Tolstoyan who on principle opposed all war...
...The figures are so modest that clearly they do not concern the Wilhelmstrasse's millions...
...To whom...
...Yet they feed a historical controversy that has lasted for more than a half-century, and that, in its fashion, Lenin in Zurich prolongs and adds fuel to...
...he had neither a passport nor a visa to enter Russia, and the Russian frontier was well guarded—even by Allied French and British officers...
...Nor did it deserve much...
...Serge Witte observed later, "As for the Workers' Soviet, I did not attribute so much importance to it...
...Parvus can say what he likes, but there is no real trace of his actions...
...Zurabov, Perazitch, Groman, Chudnovsky, Uritsky, and others were sincere militants and devoted to their cause, no matter what one may think of their political orientation...
...And so it is with stupefaction that in Lenin in Zurich one reads imaginary conversations in which the exchanges between Lenin and Parvus are unimaginable...
...It is comprised of notes and observations made day by day at first hand in Petrograd and in the provinces by a French lieutenant on detached service...
...that alone dissuades one from following him step by step, opposing quotations to those he has chosen, for it would mean writing another book...
...He had promised "the peaceful competition of parties within the bosom of the soviets" and then suppressed all parties, including his own...
...Solzhenitsyn does remark incidentally: "Lenin might seem completely in control of his mind and his will...
...Then why does he make a show of forgetting it by taking Parvus's charlatanism seriously...
...It would be impossible in a few lines to disentangle what is factually true in it from what is false...
...Parvus by no means enjoyed top billing...
...In a letter to Riazanov, Lenin wrote on January 9, 1915, "We have not seen Parvus...
...Merejkovsky is a Bolshevik...
...However, he was most careful not to let himself fall into disrepute with the Russian people whom he aspired to raise against the old regime and lead toward social revolution...
...His insistence on the historicity of his narrative and on the contribution of historians to its content is an explicit invitation for the book to be considered from the point of view of historical criticism, independently of a literary appraisal...
...Of course, socialist activities over half a century were indirectly involved, but if one single individual contributed powerfully to bringing army, church, and state into disrepute, it certainly was Leo Tolstoi...
...Shliapnikov recalled "the strict instructions" he gave to the Bolshevik group in Stockholm "not to accept money from no matter whom except the Swedish Socialist party...
...What will you use to seize power...
...Lenin's reasoning was not wide off the mark when he set the conditions that were intended to keep the homeward-bound travelers politically in the clear...
...Had he read the Senn article, Solzhenitsyn would understand how ill-advised he was to rely on Zeman and Scharlau...
...it was a remarkable expose of the weaknesses of the Russian Empire, which he proposed attacking from within...
...To properly appreciate how intelligent and knowledgeable the German diplomat was—and how cheeky the Estonian—one may simply note that Lenin's program had been published in full in the Social-Democrate: a portion of it appeared in the November 1, 1914 issue (No...
...Hahlweg, as I said above, provides only 100, and Solzhenitsyn contents himself with 8. But the Wilhelmstrasse documents are not the only relevant ones...
...As for Lenin, he could not have conceived of or admitted any projection of the future such as Solzhenitsyn puts in Radek's mouth...
...neither did it arouse the suspicions of the Chancellor, to whom the report was addressed, nor of the Lenin-haters, eager to exploit it, nor of Solzhenitsyn...
...Any impulse to explain this in terms of German money will, on reflection, appear puerile and absurd to Solzhenitsyn, whose sincerity is beyond question...
...Only Platten, who was in charge of the convoy as a Swiss citizen and a neutral, ensured their liaison with the authorities...
...The returning travelers had no trouble justifying themselves before public opinion and in the eyes of adversaries of good faith...
...Lenin did rail against his closest comrades, but sometimes he also praised them...
...The reality was quite different from what the biography Merchant and the biographical novel Lenin in Zurich make it appear to be...
...About the trading—ergo, financial—activities of Hanecki, Kozlovsky, and other Russian and Polish Socialists in the Baltic, and about their profitable dealings between the Scandinavian countries and Petrograd (more or less legal, sometimes skirting the black market, cheating with the customs people), Michael Futrell's research (cf...
...no examination of identity papers or of luggage, etc...
...Radek's wife, as well as Hanecki's, typed and hectographed the office's information bulletin and handled the mailings...
...Ten years later, in 1927, Trotsky was in disgrace, and this literature took a sharp turn: there was no more mention of the Trotsky of 1905 except to defame him, and even less of Parvus, who was always passed over in silence until he was resuscitated in Zeman's and Scharlau's biography and now in Solzhenitsyn's novel...
...it is contrary to what even in historical fiction is permissible...
...The Party was scattered and crushed...
...Also, for him Germany was the land of Kultur...
...he knew how to take advantage of it for his fanatical designs...
...Accordingly, it seems that Solzhenitsyn does not doubt that money is the nerve of war...
...Solzhenitsyn's most recent book, Lenin in Zurich,* is presented as one that will enrich the great historical fresco begun with his August 1914...
...last, and hardly deserving of mention, a book by Willi Gautschi that derives from the above books and adds only malicious insinuations...
...in its minute investigations), this indelible stain, which was rigorously concealed by order of the Stalin Politburo, has set incorrigible Moscovite tongues wagging (covertly, of course...
...The funds that von Kilhlmann flattered himself he had transmitted to the Bolsheviks "by various channels and under different labels"—where did they end up...
...Immediately after war broke out in 1914, Parvus took his position: he detested czarism above all else, and in German power he saw a providential means for destroying it...
...Furthermore, in his fashion he was a man of principle, a dogmatist tempered by political suppleness but with very fixed ideas about people and things...
...331 2, No...
...And in this he was not alone...
...in 1913, Lenin wrote to him, "Esteemed Comrade"—a conventional form of address...
...Lenin could forbid neither Bukharin nor Shliapnikov...
...This signifies nothing since Lenin was an active propagandist and saw many unimportant people...
...Lenin thought, as did Martov and the Mensheviks, that the ongoing revolution was a bourgeois revolution...
...Each and every one of them had unshakable reasons for existing separately, especially the Bolsheviks...
...2, Amsterdam, 1975): The essence of the problem does not lie in the source of the quotation but in the degree of awareness of the person who chooses the quotation...
...They were received in Petrograd with great ceremony by (Menshevik) representatives of the Soviet and by an enthusiastic crowd (mobilized by Shliapnikov and his comrades with the help of revolutionary exhilaration...
...This would require a lot of money, he said...
...In an earlier article ("New Documents on Lenin's Departure from Switzerland," International Review and Social History, Vol...
...Almost no one had read what Marx actually said about "the opium of the people" in his "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law...
...The Carmichael article in Encounter, referred to earlier, merits special mention, for the author pretends not to know that from 300 to 400 people traveled the same route as the first group of repatriates, and under the same conditions...
...The Russian philosopher G. S. Pomerants wrote, in a letter published in Polititcheski Dnevnik (Vol...
...Had he done so, he would not be Solzhenitsyn...
...Lenin did not create this state of affairs...
...it was an ordinary train, and the carriage was one of the second and third class...
...I do not suggest that these people are to be suspected of having been indoctrinated by Lenin but that they then embodied the feeling of a nation worn out by a hopeless war and dead-end chaos...
...his book) is fully persuasive...
...There is not a word of truth in any of it...
...SOLZHENITSYN also has no valid reason for incriminating the Mensheviks and Mezhrayontsy who had the good luck to find paid jobs with the research institute that Parvus established in Copenhagen...
...It was I who launched Lenin...
...and he got it...
...No one knows why "sealed" has acquired a special and pejorative sense that is diametrically opposed to its real meaning (see below...
...He advocated democracy and then abolished every vestige of democracy...
...He later wrote the preface to a Trotsky pamphlet that was published in Geneva...
...And Pierre Pascal concludes: "For neither among the people nor among the poets nor in the October decrees was there a trace of Marxism"—in the sense intended by Solzhenitsyn...
...Solzhenitsyn errs when he speaks of events that "have been carefully concealed" and have "received little attention...
...For example, Japanese money allegedly was received by the Bolsheviks and supposedly sparked the mutiny of the sailors aboard the battleship Potemkin...
...But all the same, one must know how to read them...
...and George Kennan disposed of them once and for all in his masterly study "The Sisson Documents," which appeared in 1956 in the Journal of Modern History...
...Parvus was a Russo-German Social Democrat...
...Contrary to what Solzhenitsyn says, nothing has been "carefully concealed...
...Although the author calls his current work a novel, he is careful to affirm its historicity by citing his sources...
...In 1914, it was "Dear Friend," for by then Lenin knew Hanecki better and they had done each other small favors...
...In later years, the pamphlet provided a topic for discussion of "the permanent revolution" among theory-smitten social democrats without exercising the slightest influence on the real movement...
...Here he would see that the Kaiser, Ludendorff, and Parvus took no part in the move, or in the effervescence of the entire Russian colony in Switzerland over this repatriation, and that nothing about it was concealed or confidential...
...Apart from members of his family, Lenin addressed no one with the familiar form except occasionally Inessa...
...A debatable opinion, but not negligible—indeed, quite significant...
...What obvious proof of connivance with German imperialism...
...Evidently, the point is to explain Lenin's thought and actions by bloodlines, by the genes and chromosomes transmitted by parents and grandparents of Kalmuk, German, Jewish, and also Russian stock—not to forget the Swedish woman Lenin's great-grandfather had married...
...in a similar way, he wrongly interprets all the precautions agreed upon to safeguard the travelers' dignity...
...many people are interested in him, but there is nothing he can do about that and he pays them no mind...
...He said, 'Go to the bank and see.' Several tens of thousand were found...
...however, in no way did he play the major role in the Russian Revolution of 1905 that Solzhenitsyn attributes to him...
...The temptation to discuss them is great, but greater still the need to confine myself to a single thread, which is pregnant with meaning—the one that attributes to Lenin only "a quarter of Russian blood...
...Only recently (October 16, 1975), the Paris weekly Penske russe evoked the "sealed" carriage in a eulogistic report on Solzhenitsyn's book...
...Lenin was not one to listen to such foolishness...
...eight official German documents taken from Werner Hahlweg's Lenin's Rockkehr nach Russland, 1917 (Leiden, 1957), which includes 100 documents...
...12, No...
...One must confine oneself to reestablishing the truth on several essential points...
...What has an insignificant Parvus got to do with the historic cataclysms of 1917...
...And what was the solitary Lenin doing in his private train, wandering from one carriage to the next, his pockets stuffed with marks that "the Bolshevik groups in Russia" will make no use of, as Zeman and Scharlau admit...
...One can select a quotation from Lenin to justify an anti-Soviet war...
...But Radek was an Austrian subject...
...And on October 3, 1918: "Troubetskoy, the monarchist, is a Bolshevik...
...how many copies reached Russia and who read them no one can say...
...Solzhenitsyn's merits are exceptional and brilliant, his witnessing to the Soviet regime is unforgettable, his literary talent has won the admiration of every cultivated Russian...
...Only the agonizingly long war and the failure of the ruling caste brought the old regime down...
...4), I analyzed the collection of German documents 326 Zeman edited as well as the Parvus biography— The Merchant of Revolution—he wrote in collaboration with Scharlau...
...Even this connected, in those years at least, with his social revolutionary ideas . . . . For Parvus dreamed of a great Socialist daily newspaper in three European languages, in contrast to the banal Social Democratic press, and his dream would have called for a lot of money...
...Bukharin put it the same way, as did Molotov in a conversation with Djilas...
...the partly mediocre, partly misleading book by Fritz N. Platten, Jr., about his father's trip across Germany with Lenin, in 1917...
...He extolled the Constituent Assembly and mercilessly dissolved it...
...He postulated the extinction of the state and the suppression of the police, army, and bureaucracy...
...The final dialogue between Lenin and Radek is without the slightest historical foundation and thereby transgresses the limits of historical fiction...
...Last, he should familiarize himself with Pierre Pascal's Journal de Russie, 1916-1918 (Lausanne, 1975), with a preface by Jean Laloy...
...Hanecki & Co.'s export-import business made it possible to introduce quantities of urgently needed items into Russia without a license: medical supplies, hygienic supplies, thermometers, hypodermic needles, contraceptives, rubber gadgets, etc., which in small volume had great sales value...
...Herzen's mother was German...
...He refused any passage via Germany (telegrams to Hanecki on March 28 and 30...
...Marx, talking about human poverty, cast his thought in the mold of a phrase of Balzac's: "The lottery was the opium of the people"—t hat is to say, a tranquilizing drug...
...On November 7, Pascal wrote: "M...
...The train was not armored, the railway carriage was not sealed...
...Solzhenitsyn and Lenin We don't know whether this article will be of interest to all our readers, but those who care about 20th-century history, and especially the history of radicalism, will surely find absorbing this detailed criticism of the scholarship and sources behind Solzhenitsyn's recent book on Lenin...
...Toward the end, Parvus did exhibit signs of megalomania, but in 1915 he was not crazy...
...30), and the balance in the issue of October 13, 1915 (No...
...Such foolishness gives a clear enough idea of the Estonian charlatan, who goes on to pat himself on the back for having repaid the 300,000 marks the Wilhelmstrasse had advanced him during the war—but doing so in 1923, which, as Futrell observes, was a period of astronomical inflation...
...he was independent, and Lenin was in no position to give him orders...
...V. I. Lenine, Chronique biographique, Vol...
...A mystery . . . Carmichael reveals, further, that Germany financed the Bolsheviks up until the collapse of her Eastern front, in November 1918...
...in his Memoirs, Thomas G. Masaryk also demonstrated their falseness (quoted in my book Stalin, p. 165...
...This ex-Bolshevik of the left, who entered the service of the Rumanian security forces, was the author of Les amours secrets de Llnine (Paris, 1937), in collaboration with a French writer whose good faith was abused...
...Lenin, for example, committed a flagrant misconstruction in quoting a phrase of Marx about religion: "opium of the people...
...Solzhenitsyn further underlines the historical nature of his book by expressing his "gratitude" to the above-named authors *Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, New York: 1976...
...Even after 50 years, new contributions continually enrich this already superabundant bibliography...
...In April and during the trip back to Russia, he expected to be jailed on arrival at the frontier or in Petrograd...
...a parlor car that never existed...
...Serge Witte is of Dutch origin...
...During the 1840s, opium was esteemed as a beneficial medication...
...Alexinski was a clever forger...
...All of this is making too much of this curious patron of Lenin, but the reason for doing so is the attention Solzhenitsyn pays him...
...Solzhenitsyn was not lucky in having recourse to a "fount" of such impure waters...
...Trotsky mentions Parvus just once in his book about the events of 1905, which was written when the two men were very close...
...It is true that the release of German archives furnished the wherewithal for gossip about this uncommon personality...
...Breaking some years later from the Communist movement, Souvarine became a distinguished historian, most notably in his pioneering biography of Stalin...
...Let us hope that Solzhenitsyn will refrain from consulting the long-famous 70 Creel-Sisson "documents," published in 1918 in the United States on the recommendation of "experts" who knew nothing about the material...
...The 1905 Revolution was a spontaneous and grandiose phenomenon...
...Such a Lenin would not have endured losing one minute with a charlatan who, in talking of the revolution, asked "Aren't you afraid that mere slogans will be useless without money...
...In a resume, Pierre Pascal, who was an exceptional witness to the revolutionary agony, writes that October was a moment of truth, and that it was welcomed not unjustifiably with joy by people and poets, by Alexander Bloy, by Serge Essenin, by Andre Biely...
...This is particularly apparent in connection with the Zimmerwald Conference, at which, according to the novelist, ". . the Zimmerwald left had emerged as a new wing of the international movement, and Lenin was no longer a mere Russian sectarian but its chief," adding that "the hero of the conference, in newspapers throughout the world, was [Robert] Grimm...
...And in the book itself we read that at one moment Lenin dreamed of securing a sealed carriage in which to return to Russia via England and France (Russian edition, p. 227...
...He was against the soviets, for the soviets, then once again against the soviets, and finally for the soviets—but altering them in order to tame them...
...27, p. 82...
...He adjured his correspondent in Stockholm to hasten all steps in Petrograd so that the Soviet would exert pressure in London and Paris on behalf of those who had been proposed to make the trip...
...In homage both to his person and to his work, one owes him the truth also...
...Because theirs is the first biography of the theoretician of "the permanent revolution," a man associated with Trotsky for several years, it is worthy of interest insofar as it is based on reliable documentary data...
...Bulletin communiste, Paris, 1924, Nos...
...it contains a vaguer reference to "the Bolshevik movement," and a more precise and plausible reference to the Finnish and Ukrainian separatists...
...Korolenko, with a Polish mother and a halfPolish father, also had only a quarter of Russian blood...
...also, that in July he truly was pressured on his left by the Kronstadt sailors and the Putilov workers—it being understood that while this applies only to Petrograd, it was there that the decisive action was played out in October...
...It postponed sine die decisions that the peasants and soldiers were awaiting with mounting impatience...
...38, No...
...Report of September 30, 1915...
...Still, none have taken the matter very seriously...
...When no response was forthcoming, the impatient Lenin speeded up proceedings and formulated the conditions applicable to the trip: extraterritoriality...
...I have denounced them as false for some 50 years...
...In fact, how is one to measure the parts of Russian, German, Lithuanian, and Baltic blood in the Romanoff dynasty...
...In the course of imaginary and improbable conversations, Lenin, who has rejected Parvus's offers of [German-supplied] money several times, then says to Parvus, speaking of his Polish Socialist comrade Hanecki, "He's yours...
...The proceedings of the conference were published by Richard Pipes in Revolutionary Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1968...
...The countersign he proposed was "All power to the Soviets"—that is, to the SRs and the Mensheviks who formed the immense majority...
...Then he claimed to be in a position to utilize the clandestine apparatus of the Bolsheviks in order to introduce subversive propaganda into Russia...
...Lenin in Switzerland, the inspiration of "a tiny group, calling itself a party"—Solzhenitsyn dixit—was not yet Lenin in the Kremlin...
...The travelers declined to have any contact en route with German Social Democrats...
...Trotsky, who knew him better than anyone else, wrote in My Life: 329 And yet there was always something mad and unreliable about Parvus...
...1 refuted his "document" (Contrat social, January, 1958) shortly after it was made public...
...While waiting, it would be to his advantage to read Sukhanov, an attentive and impartial observer of the two revolutions that took place in the capital in 1917...
...The majority of the anti-Leninist polemicists I have mentioned and those whom Senn refers to in notes to his paper on "the myth of German money"—not to speak of innumerable journalists—will have it that Lenin was sent to Russia in a sealed railway carriage by, variously, the Kaiser, Ludendorff, or Parvus...
...my article "L'or et le wagon" points out a goodly number...
...Just because a quarter of his blood was Russian, fate had hitched him to the ramshackle Russian rattletrap...
...About Lenin's stay in Switzerland prior to his traveling across a Germany at war, and about his relations with German officials, an enormous body of writing has been produced over more than half a century...
...also, Hanecki and Parvus had known each other for a long time...
...however, it will mislead the relatively uninformed reader insofar as it fills documentary gaps with malicious insinuations, particularly with regard to Lenin...
...Lenin is variously present and invisible...
...The amount of German gold allegedly involved ranges from X to X tenfold...
...Assuredly, Grimm was able to carry out extensive pacifist activities, thanks to his country's geographical position and political neutrality, and with the effective help of Angelica Balabanoff, who worked with him as the representative of the Italian Socialists (and who had the advantage of speaking five or six languages...
...19, 1974), Senn closely examined Parvus's Swiss bank records, and confirmed that they indicate "more investments than payments...
...however, this time it numbered about 208 persons, including Martov, Riazanov, Bobrov, Lunacharsky, and Angelica Balabanoff...
...7 and 9.) One comes upon this Keskilla again in a bizarre book by Michael Futrell, Northern Underground (London, 1963), which is to be read with caution and used only with full knowledge of the facts...
...He suggested two methods: subvention of the revolutionary movement, and the financing of separatist trends among the national minorities...
...Solzhenitsyn has allowed himself to be led into error by Zeman and Scharlau, who have made undiscerning use of "documents" that do not document Lenin...
...for their close attention to events which determined the course of the twentieth century, but which have been carefully concealed from history and which, because of the direction taken by the development of the West, have received little attention...
...one important version introduces a "parlor car...
...Thus, the 300 to 400 travelers did not set foot on German soil...
...In it one reads: According to Burtsev, as early as two years before the war (in May, 1912), Lenin negotiated with the Germans and promised them that in the event of war he would organize a defeatist uprising in Russia...
...A just observation, and one that applies also to Lenin in Zurich...
...an intelligent, cultivated man, an original thinker, and a talented Marxist writer...
...sometimes it was an armored train...
...The Social-Dernocrate was sold at the time for 10 centimes...
...he had imitated Lenin's handwriting to produce some letters to a fictitious "Madame de K—," which he tried to sell to Columbia University...
...These letters are revealing about Lenin's material situation up to the time he left Switzerland: his resources were much reduced after postal connections with Russia were interrupted...
...There are quotations and quotations: one's choice is conditioned by time, place, and circumstances...
...Following his own paths of study, Senn arrives at views that are compatible with those expressed by Alexander Dallin in rebutting the report George Katkov presented during a 1967 conference...
...At that date, no one was aware of Parvus's contacts with certain German officials...
...Anyone who wishes to know the truth about this affair should read the Senn article mentioned earlier, "New Documents on Lenin's Departure from Switzerland, 1917...
...The trains in which we were to cross Germany into Sweden were not sealed, as a stupid legend affirms, but we would not be permitted to leave the train while on German territory, and we were pledged to make no attempt to speak with German citizens when it stopped at the various stations en route [pp...
...When it became known that he advocated civil war—whereas on the whole the Zimmerwaldians were militating for peace, not for war, civil or other—Lenin was considered a utopian or irresponsible except by his handful of partisans...
...The Zeman and Scharlau book is filled with errors, inaccuracies, false allegations, and insinuations...
...To return to the German documents: George Katkov was the first to note one document that he believed—mistakenly—was decisive, and it is one that shortsighted Leninophobes have made much of: a telegram from von Kiihlmann to the Kaiser, dated December 3, 1917—ergo, a month after the October coup—in which the Minister of Foreign Affairs claims credit for having financially aided the separatists (nationalists) and the Bolsheviks "through various channels and under different labels" (which is to say, camouflaged assistance given to beneficiaries who were unaware of the source...
...Hanecki was no boy at the time (he was 35), nor 327 was he in any way a subordinate...
...to accomplish what...
...All this is inexact...
...Obviously, Solzhenitsyn has not read the articles in Encounter and Survey, the Senn and Dallin articles, or those in Contrat social...
...The Czar and the Government fell for the same reason—their fidelity to their alliances...
...Far from being "carefully concealed from 332 history" or having "received little attention," as Solzhenitsyn writes, the "events" he evokes have only too widely attracted the attention of unscrupulous historians, a good number of whom Mr...
...If one understands the implication correctly, when Lenin advocated the right of national minorities to separate from Russia, it was his foreign blood speaking...
...About the entirely legal trip of "the 300 to 400" persons repatriated across Germany: in addition to the information given above and the varied documentation in Lenin's works (including notes and appendices), one has available Krupskaya's Memories of Lenin (London, 1930) and Fritz Platten's account...
...4), which appeared concurrently with Lenin in Zurich...
...Throughout Lenin in Zurich, the reader comes upon hints of certain themes that one may suppose will be developed in the "knots" and chapters to follow...
...parrots repeat it...
...12, No...
...he did not forbid...
...So the obsessive use of the word "sealed" in a pejorative misconstruction is ridiculous...
...Similarly, those fervent Slavophiles, the brothers Aksakov...
...Was Karamzin not of Tartar stock...
...It is difficult to tote up the money Keskilla received for his services in "discovering" these already published documents...
...earlier, he attributes the conference's convocation to Grimm...
...for that matter, he could have economized on the 10 centimes since the leaflets were distributed free...
...They include: four volumes from Lenin's Collected Works...
...When speaking to Lenin he could not brag of having fomented strikes or of having caused a battleship to be blown up, or talk without rhyme or reason about Japanese money...
...Postscript IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE to analyze and comment on Lenin in Zurich without examining the sources Solzhenitsyn dipped into to write his historical novel—or, more exactly, his novel with historical intentions...
...Which is to say, during the first year of the Soviet regime, when the Communists had nationalized the banks, seized public bank deposits, confiscated a quantity of private property, and laid hands on the Mint...
...Radek would have been able to go to Petrograd only after the October Revolution, which in April no one could have foreseen...
...Zeman's collection—Germany and the Revolution in Russia (London, 1958)—reprints 136, taken from German archives...
...Of course, he by no means subscribes to everything said by the writers cited above...
...there is a matter of 60,000 marks, then a further 70,000, and then monthly payments...
...And then came the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which stipulated that Russia pay a war indemnity of 300 million gold rubles...
...Recently, Solzhenitsyn addressed an appeal to his "dear compatriots" in exile, asking that they supply him with documentation on the events of 1917...
...Pascal was a fervent Catholic, a lover of Russia and of the Russian people, their language, and their culture...
...and the crossing of Germany by "three to four hundred" Russians en route to their homeland (Document No...
...In 1926 [the Russian Marxist scholar] David Riazanov said to me, "Emile Pouget once put together a brochure entitled `Variations guesdistes.' We could compile another, made up of Leninist variations...
...Lenin construed Marx's opium as a harmful drug...
...In all this we do not recognize the real Lenin and his habitual self-control...
...This book, by the former secretary of the Communist International, appeared in 1925, when the Lenin personality cult was already in full flower, although not yet as false as it was to become...
...Whereas he writes to Kamenev "Dear Lev Borisovich" and to Safarov "Dear Georgi," the latter being a young man...
...He did not claim to be, because for him everything that could serve the revolution was moral...
...There are numerous variations in detail: sometimes we are told that the entire train was sealed...
...However, it was further agreed to obtain first the consent of the Petrograd Soviet...
...money, arms, etc . . . .Always on my guard, I made inquiries, which proved that I was dealing here with disguised agents of German imperialism, and I rejected their offer...
...via whom...
...Other allusions in the narrative indicate the importance Solzhenitsyn accords it...
...I am and shall be loath to take the idea of "blood" in the sense in which Solzhenitsyn intends it...
...People other than Lenin do receive "German gold" (in actuality, paper marks), but what do they do with it...
...That review required 14 in-quarto pages, and even so was not exhaustive...
...A message from Captain von Hillsen to the Wilhelmstrasse dated March 30 stipulates that the project involved the transport of about "300 to 400" Russians "of all parties" (Zeman document cited above...
...Notwithstanding, many "Soviet experts" rely on such authorities...
...12, No...
...A few sceptics would like to know what physiological phenomenon accounts for the fact that Alexander Ulyanov, Lenin's brother, who was similarly supplied with the same quarter of Russian blood, behaved with such gentleness and delicacy, even toward adversaries, in contrast to Vladimir's curt brusqueness...
...The eve of departure for Russia has arrived...
...One of the early founders of the French Communist party in the years after World War I, Souvarine knew well the leading figures of Bolshevism, including Lenin...
...Nothing happened in Petrograd on the date he specified, but the next year, in March, the Empire of the Czars collapsed to general surprise and without anyone's being able to claim credit for the event...
...It was only when he learned that Chernov had left England with his papers in order yet had been turned back in France that Lenin grasped the necessity of passing through Germany (letter of March 30 to Hanecki...
...he was active primarily as a writer, collaborating effectively, as did Trotsky, with the Russkaya Gazeta and the Menshevik Natchalo...
...A respect for truth imposes limits on a novelist's rights, especially when contemporary events are involved, of which witnesses as well as unimpeachable documentation survive...
...It is to the point that the term "sealed" railway carriage long ago entered the vocabulary of people who have dealt with this controversial matter...
...Burtsev insists that Lenin had similar discussions with the Poles and other nations...
...translated by H.T...
...Influenced by The Merchant of Revolution, by Zeman and Scharlau, the novelist makes Alexander Parvus out to be "the Father of the First Revolution," and puts some extravagant statements into his mouth...
...The German soldiers were politically stupid and apprehensive that dangerous individuals might escape en route, so they multiplied precautions and had three doors locked in order to maintain closer watch over the fourth and only other exit...
...From the very first pages of Lenin in Zurich, one gains the impression that when Solzhenitsyn was staying in this same city he not only became excited by the idea of evoking the presence of Lenin in that ambience but also in writing imparted his own excitement to his main character, who in real life did not share it...
...This tardy report is characteristic of the Foreign Minister, who here boasts after the fact and without proof of having played a part in events, knowing that his sovereign would be unable to verify anything...
...But there is better still to come: to beef up "the program," KeskUla added an invention of his own—an alleged plan of Lenin's to invade India with a Russian army...
...1; "Autre point d'histoire," Vol...
...He gave a few very modest figures relating to Party finances...
...he was alarmed by rising prices, etc...
...How will he be able to screen the evidence he will receive from those few who survive...
...Later on, Parvus's occasional impulses to approach Lenin were rejected with scorn...
...the biography of the Russo-German Social Democrat Alexander Parvus, by Z. A. B. Zeman and W. B. Scharlau (The Merchant of Revolution, New York, 1965...
...Its president, Nosar (alias Khrustalev), was an unaffiliated socialist...
...Its enormous success in 1917 was due to its unbridled propaganda in favor of an immediate peace...
...Lenin was no paragon of morality...
...Putilov told me he had voted for the Bolsheviks...
...The Bakunins came from Hungary...
...What to say of Pushkin, who was descended from an Abyssinian black...
...In document after document, we learn that Parvus imprudently announced the revolution in Russia for January 22, 1916, and that he claimed to have sent 1 million marks to Petrograd...
...he was arrested in December, and was succeeded by a quasi-anonymous troika, whose most active member proved to be Trotsky...
...the "armored train" that was not armored...
...What's more, every subvention of the Bolsheviks would have had to pass through Shliapnikov, or at least be known to him...
...Extraterritoriality is a judicial fiction by virtue of which the beneficiaries are considered to be residing in their own country when actually they are elsewhere...
...And as for the end of the novel, it is more than disconcerting...
...Miliukov had proclaimed that the war must be pursued until Constantinople was conquered...
...All this is inexact...
...2; and "L'or et le wagon,"Vol...
...For example, in connection with Parvus...
...Similarly, it is not true that Lenin addressed Zinoviev with the familiar pronoun form, tu...
...Solzhenitsyn knows and says that the proposal that the trip be made on the basis of an exchange goes back to Martov, not to Parvus, much less to Ludendorff or the Kaiser, but he gives it a sarcastic twist...
...Let it be said in passing, the Romberg report specifies as point 5 of "the program" that Germany shall renounce any annexation of territory and any war indemnity...
...Churchill adopted it in his memoirs, and even Trotsky did so in his memoirs (but in quotation marks...
...1, 1976), in which he refutes the too lightly voiced suspicions and the too hastily drawn conclusions that have allowed the elaboration of this "myth...
...and he does not hesitate to repeat that Lenin, having "accepted a sealed train" for himself alone, must have accepted German money...
...49, p. 418...
...In the 55-volume edition of Lenin's Collected Works (still incomplete), one finds everything— and its opposite...
...The work Grimm began subsequently was carried out under the aegis and with the constant collaboration of the Italians...
...However, to the best of this layman's knowledge, the classification of the various types of human blood, in biology and in pathology, is not determined by criteria of race or nationality...
...Senn mentions in his article on "the myth of German money...
...Another serious British review, Survey, published an article by David Anin (Vol...
...Professor Alfred Erich Senn has published an article, "The Myth of German Money During the First World War" (Soviet Studies, Vol...
...Similarly, in connection with Bukharin, Solzhenitsyn writes: ". . Lenin forbade his young comrade to associate with the shady Parvus, just as he forbade Shliapnikov to go near the dubious Hanecki...
...But with Chapter 47 the novel begins to shape up badly...
...The troika lasted barely a week...
...Nor should he continually multiply unfounded accusatory allusions that I refrain from refuting so as not to give this report the dimensions of a doctoral thesis...
...Adequate refutation of statements such as these would entail a critique of Zeman's and Scharlau's book, the principal source for this chapter, in which the pseudo-Father of the First Revolution permits himself to mouth lucubrations while asleep on his feet...
...And had their railway carriages actually been sealed, that would only have underscored—entirely to their honor—the fact that they were not in Germany, rather than providing the basis for a valid grievance against them...
...The few followers Lenin had at the time of the Zimmerwald and Kienthal conferences represented only themselves...
...This blood-and-race theme rings a bell for us...
...4, December 1968...
...In addition to all his other ambitions, this revolutionary was torn by an amazing desire to get rich...
...Miliukov's paper, the Rech,* saluted their return in these words: "A Socialist leader as universally known as Lenin ought to enter the arena, and we can only hail his arrival in Russia, whatever may be our opinion of his political doctrine...
Vol. 24 • July 1977 • No. 3
