Lenin The Man And His Work Author:Albert Rhys Williams LENIN The Man and His Work BY ALBERT RHYS WILLIAMS and the impressions of COL. RAYMOND ROBINS and ARTHUR RANSOME YORK SCOTT AND SELTZER 1919 Copyright, 1919, By Scott and Seltzer, Inc. All Rights Reserved Printed in the United States of America CONTENTS PAGE ALBERT RHYS WILLIAMS INTRODUCTION 9 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .... 23 TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN ..... more ». 43 RAYMOND ROBINS IMPRESSIONS, As TOLD TO WILLIAM HARD 125 ARTHUR RANSOME LENIN IN 1919 167 CONSERVATIVE OPINIONS ON LENIN . . 191 Two ADVERSE OPINIONS 196 LENIN. BY ANISE ...... ... -201 LENIN THE MAN AND His WORK INTRODUCTION BY ALBERT RHYS WILLIAMS . The First Wild Tales About Lenin THE world knows very little of the man who for two years has been the Premier of Russia. The London Times says that this is due to the natural reticence and aloofness of Lenin. If Lenin appears to the average Englishman as a red-shirted, high-booted pirate-chief, the fault is chiefly of his own making. Hardly. Lenin is not entirely to blame. The blockade and the British censorship have had considerable share in it. They completely severed Russia from the rest of the world. Even the Associated Press could not break 9 io INTRODUCTION through that censorship. It has never been accused of revolutionary leanings, but a large percentage of its mild cable despatches were regarded by the British as dangerous to the American people. The British held to be dangerous any facts that reflected favorably on the Soviet Government or its Premier. Consequently, in lieu of facts about Lenin the public was served with fancies and leg ends by the special correspondents in Paris, London, Stockholm and Copenhagan. In one cabled despatch Lenin would appear in the morning narrowly escaping out of the clutch of the enemy by leaping from an ar mored train in Siberia, while an afternoon despatch would reveal Lenin looking through the bars of his Moscow prison where he had been thrown and chained by the terrible Trotzky. The third, not to be outdone by this startling piece of news, would have Lenin with portfolio under his arm walking debonairly down the gang-plank of a Spanish steamer, INTRODUCTION 11 landing at Barcelona. Individually the cor respondents showed great inventive ingenuity but collectively they failed from lack of team work. They proved too much. To flit from Siberia to Moscow and then to Spain in the course of a few hours is more than a human performance. Lenins detractors endowed him with omnipresence. Earlier they had given him another attri bute of Deity omnipotence. For they said that Lenin through his coterie had organized the Soviets, and with them he had distilled poison into the minds of 15,000,000 soldiers and disintegrated the army. Then his little group had overthrown the Provisional Gov ernment and had led by the nose a nation of 180,000,000 up to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and made them sign it. Such prowess is not of man it is superhuman. He also seemed to be possessed of omni science. There is more than a hint of it in the pitiful plaint of one of the factions pleading 12 INTRODUCTION against going to Prinkipo We cant meet with Lenin. These Bolsheviks are clever rascals. They know everything in politics and economics, and they can out-talk us. Finally, immortality was his, too. Scores of times Lenin had been shot, yet he still lives. When devotees in the future set out to prove Lenin a god they will find abundant material in the papers of the last two years. Our own government took a hand in thick ening the fog around Lenin by loosing those classics of official stupidity known as the r Sisson documents...« less