On the eve of my departure to America, 14 years ago, I was received by Lenin in his office in the Kremlin. That was not the first time that I was there. Many times I had the privilege of meeting him, of receiving favors at his hands. For even in the most critical stormy days of the Revolution nothing was too trivial or trifling for him.
He gave me advice on how to set about learning the Russian language. He even acted as interpreter of a speech that I made in Petrograd from the top of an armored car. He helped me collect a trunkful of pamphlets and books. With his own hand, he wrote out a letter to the Siberian railwaymen, telling them to take every care of that trunk that it should not be lost. He joyfully congratulated me on joining the Red Army and suggested that I form an International Legion.
And so it happened that many times I was in the anteroom of Lenin. Here, as always, a varied assortment of dignitaries were awaiting an interview—diplomats, officers, old bourgeoisie, correspondents. All these, even the avowed enemies of Communism, Lenin received in a straightforward manner—courteous and candid. An Englishman, negotiating with him at this time, says his attitude was like this: “Personally I have nothing against you. Politically, however, you are my enemy and I must use every weapon I can think of for your destruction. Your government does the same against me. Now let us see how far we can get along together.”
Lenin could not have found any personal joy in such contacts. But it was his official duty, and he did it. But he got it over as quickly as possible. His natural affiliations were with his party colleagues, with the workers and peasants. He preferred to spend his time with them. And when it came to rationing out his time they were in the first category. This was forcibly brought home to me in that last interview.
In the anteroom there were a number of us waiting our turn. And for some time we had been kept waiting. That was very unusual, because Lenin was always quite punctual in keeping his appointments. So we concluded it must be some unusually important affair of state, some unusually distinguished personage that was thus detaining him. A half-hour, an hour, an hour and a half, we sat there impatiently cooling our heels, while from the inner office came the muffled voice of his visitor steadily booming away. Who indeed was this plenipotentiary being granted this lengthy audience with Lenin? Finally, the door opened, and to the general astonishment of all in the anteroom, out of it emerged—neither officer, diplomat, or other high-placed dignitary—but a shaggy-haired mujik in sheepskin coat and bast shoes—a typical poor peasant, such as one meets by the million all over the Soviet land.
“I beg your pardon,” said Lenin as I entered his office. “This was a peasant from Tambov, and I wanted to hear his ideas about Electrification, Collectivization, and the Nep. And it was so interesting that I quite forgot the time.”
Of course, out of his university education, out of his travels, out of his own 30 volumes that he wrote, Lenin knew infinitely more, theoretically, academically, than this Tambov mujik could ever know. But, on the other hand, out of the hard school of bitter life and toil, the mujik knew a lot of things practically. In him was the wisdom of the soil. And what he knew Lenin was eager to know. Like all truly great men he was humble enough to understand that even the most illiterate had something to give him. Thus his lines of information reached out into the most varied places and peoples. And the thousands of facts gathered in, he carefully weighed, sifted, analyzed. And that gave him that advantage over his enemies that enabled him so often to outwit and out-maneuver them. He didn’t have to guess about the attitude and ideas of the Siberian peasant, the Red Armyist or the Cossack of the Don. It was no secret to him what the Leningrad moulder, the Volga bargeman, or the Moscow charwoman were thinking and feeling. He talked with them first-hand or with some trusted comrade who had just talked with them.
They had something to give him. That was one reason he was ever ready to receive them. A second reason was that he had something to give them—his knowledge of social forces and strategy of the Revolution, his plans and projects for the building of Socialism. Still another and most potent reason was that he liked them—fundamentally liked and loved them. Just as Lenin had a peculiar aversion to the parasites and henchmen of capitalism—brokers, speculators, the manipulators, and jugglers of wealth—so, on the other hand, he cherished a peculiar affection for the producers of wealth, the workers in coal and stone and metals, the toilers in the fields and forests.
He would have been ready fourteen years ago, not only to receive that one mujik of Tambov but all the millions of them. Were it possible, he would gladly have welcomed the workers and peasants of all the world, streaming into his office.
Today I was at the Lenin Mausoleum and suddenly it flashed upon me that this was precisely what Lenin was doing. He was receiving the peoples of Moscow, of the Soviet Union, of all the world. And it was so similar to the reception of fourteen years ago. True, the building where Lenin now receives in its dark-grey and dark-red granite is more imposing and more impressive. True, the anteroom where the people await their turn to go in to see Lenin is vastly larger—now it is the Red Square, backed by the serrated Kremlin Wall, flanked by the Spasskaya Tower playing the International, and the tombs of the heroes of the Revolution.
It is the greatest anteroom in all the world. And the number of people waiting their chance to go in and see Lenin is now a hundredfold, a thousandfold greater. In these respects there is a difference between now and fourteen years ago.
But in one aspect—a most important and fundamental aspect—it is exactly the same. That is, in the kind of people that are waiting their opportunity to go in and see Lenin. The great queue that begins to form soon after noon is composed mainly of workers and peasants, the sort of people whom Lenin liked, the people on whose energy and sweat and devotion he relied for the building of Socialism. Almost exclusively these are the ones in the great double line that keeps growing with ever swifter pace. Before two o’clock, the opening hour, it stretches a mile or more away from the Mausoleum, winding back and forth on the white snow-mantled floor of the quadrangle.
True, vainglory is the motive that impels a few that are here. They want to boast to their fellows that they really looked on the face of Lenin. True, a few are here out of curiosity. They are the bourgeoisie, many foreigners among them, who want to see in the flesh this man whose name, like a nightmare, is haunting their dreams, disturbing the sleep of the imperialists and reactionaries of the world. But in this great queue these are so insignificant as not to be counted. All but a few are here out of respect, reverence and affection for their leader. Very real and warm these feelings must be to keep them standing here in the dead of winter.
I walk down the line, stopping here and there to put a question:
“Where did you come from?” “What do you do?” “Why did you come?” “When did you first hear of Lenin?”
It is a bit impertinent for a stranger with a strange accent to come prying into their lives. They have a right to resent it. But I preface my questions with the remark, “I knew Lenin. I talked with him. Shook his hand.” That makes it all right. That gives me standing in their eyes and they talk freely. First an artel of five Mordvins in bast shoes, priding themselves on having their own republic and their leader (starosta) who had heard about Lenin way back in 1905.
This was a bit discomfiting to a Buriat who had to confess that not until 1920 did he hear of Lenin. But now there was a picture of him in every Buriat house, and last winter they carved a huge statue of him out of ice. In the Far North from which he came so cold and long is the winter that Moscow was somewhat like a tropic clime. He was almost ready to complain about it.
Not so the Uzbekistan, wrapping closer to his limbs his frog-green raw silk robe, (khalat), a vivid splash of color on the white square. He wishes that Lenin were alive to visit old Bokhara and see their flourishing kolkhoz reclaiming the waste sands with gardens and orchards.
Quite the contrary a brigadier from Vladimir reports his kolkhoz as not flourishing at all. The undug potatoes are perishing in the fields, the unthrashed oats resprouting in the stacks. However, if he could look at Lenin, somehow he felt he would take heart and go at it again.
Another kolkhoznik is Orlov, Michael Ivanovich, from Smolensk. Many times as a Red Armyist passing through the Kremlin he had a glimpse of Lenin. That was fourteen years ago, and not until today had he had a chance to come up again to Moscow. He had fought on all the main fronts. Living for days on raw potatoes, once buried completely beneath an avalanche of earth hurled by a shell. Then out of the trenches into the Soviet. But still waging war against local bandits, bureaucrats, and moonshiners. Then organizing the kolkhoz “New Way of Living” (Novy Bull). Thirty-five landless families before the Revolution were now (inhabiting) 340 dessiatines of first-class flax and fodder land with 12 horses and 57 horned cattle. To an ardent glowing enthusiasm he added a wide experience. Yes, he knew how kolkhozes went. Some of them badly organized went badly. But this one was a good one—a top-notch one. Why, he wouldn’t be afraid to have Vladimir Ilyich himself come and see it.
From the far reaches of the Soviet Union, from the end of the earth they are coming to this rendezvous with Lenin. Here was an American who as a sailor had sailed the seven seas and later as a longshoreman had fought the long battle for his Union on the docks of San Francisco. A Communist student from Berlin who had read all the works of Lenin translated into German. A Chinese partisan who had fought with the Red Guerillas in the deep forests of Siberia.
There are scores, hundreds, of stories of toil and battle and high adventure in this line that outwardly in its winter garb looks grey and drab and dull. So colorful and absorbing are these stories it is difficult to make much progress along the line.
A Volga stevedore who has lived only thirty versts from the Ulianov homestead in old Simbirsk. From his neighbors he has been hearing about the Ulianovs all his life; today he is to have the privilege of seeing the greatest of them. A very young zealous Komsomol improving the time by citing the words of Lenin on Collectivization and kindred subjects. A peasant in bast shoes and shaggy sheepskin—the prototype of the Tambov peasant in Lenin’s office fourteen years ago. With his big-breasted baba from Riazan he is seeing Lenin for the second time. It is the first time for two members of a shock brigade from Nizhni Novgorod. Likewise with a group of porters coming up from Turkestan. Indeed the overwhelming number are here for the first time. But still more striking—aside from the fact that they come thronging here from the ends of the earth—so many are making the Mausoleum their first objective as soon as they arrive in Moscow. But nevertheless, they don’t have the first chance of entering it. That belongs to the children.
It is school vacation and there are thousands of them out today, the frost sending the blood tingling into their cheeks painting them as ruddy as the banners that they are carrying. On one banner are the words “All for the Five-Year Plan!” “We will grow strong, and when we grow up we, too, will build machines along with our elders.” A group of three-year-olds, holding aloft a huge paper sunflower, white-petalled, and in the center, the well-known portrait of Lenin as a child.
“What do they know about Lenin?” I ask their teachers.
“Ask the children yourself,” they reply with proud confidence. And quite justified. For weeks they have been learning about Lenin. And today as a climax to this course in reading and writing about Lenin, they are seeing him. Long before the time approaches for opening the Mausoleum, the bronze gates are swung apart and for an hour we watch the children marching in.
Now it is our turn. Steadily, two abreast, the throng moves up the steps of the Mausoleum. Hats off and hushed we pass into the dim-lit interior, down twenty-four steps into the great granite hall unadorned and simple like the man who is lying there. Never stopping, the line moves on. It does not merely pass the casket. Rising three steps it goes almost completely around upon an elevated dais, thus for each one there is time for a long, uninterrupted look straight into the face of their leader. Then turning right we climb the stairway to the north-western exit. And out again upon the Red Square.
I stop and watch them emerging, and it seems to me that out of the sepulchre they come, not as mourners, in sad and sorrowing mood. Rather, as if burdens had been left behind, with new resolve, with expressions of ease and lightness in their faces. And on their lips, too.
"Somehow, after seeing him the heart is not so heavy," confides the baba from Riazan.
"He looks almost the same as when I saw him ten years ago," says the kolkhoznik from Smolensk. "Just as if he were taking a little sleep, and at any time might wake up and talk to us."
"I’m going to buy all the works of Lenin and start reading them this winter," resolutely asserts the young Komsomol.
There is occasionally a minor note, such as the regrets of two men from the Nizhni shock-brigade: "If only he were alive to see what we are doing today—building, building, building." There are tears in the eyes of two old men, one without an arm, the other minus a leg, sacrificed in the Civil War, fighting for the ideas of Lenin. However, very few of these are the crippled, the white-haired, and the aged. The overwhelming majority are the strong, the young, and the stalwart—those fighting for Lenin’s ideas right now.
Some are not satisfied with one look but hurry around and join the line again. This line that seems to be endless, inexhaustible in its reserves. This line ever renewing itself with new arrivals coming up from the offices and factories and mills of Moscow, from the mountains and mines, the far away steppes and villages of the Soviet lands, from every quarter of the globe. They come up to give a new pledge of allegiance to their dead leader, and to take from him the inspiration for a new and better fight.
Great and powerful was this man in his life, and now more powerful. If you would see his monument, look around. The Five-Year Plan with the Dnieperstroi, Magnetostroi, Traktorstroi, Gigant—all these enterprises are staggering the imagination of mankind.
What are all these but the mind and science of Lenin taking form and substance. The Lenin Institutes and libraries in all lands, the works of Lenin translated into countless languages, into millions of volumes. What are these but the seed thoughts, the ideas of Lenin germinating, and bringing forth their rich and abundant harvests.
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the millions under the banners of the Communist Parties in sixty lands: What are these but the dynamics of Lenin marching forth to the replacement of the Capitalist order through the world.
In the same degree that the reception of Lenin in the Kremlin fourteen years ago has grown into the colossal reception of today at the Mausoleum, so has grown the power and might and influence of Lenin. And it will grow, until the triumph of Socialism through the Soviet Union and throughout the world.
1932
