The Dilemmas of Lenin. Tariq Ali

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      immense brow

      matched by thought immense.

      A forest of flags,

      raised-up hands thick as grass …

      Thousands are marching

      beneath him …

      Transported,

      alight with joy,

      I rise from my place,

      eager to see him,

      hail him,

      report to him!

      ‘Comrade Lenin,

      I report to you –

      (not a dictate of office,

      the heart’s prompting alone)

      This hellish work

      that we’re out to do

      will be done

      and is already being done.

      We feed and we clothe

      and give light to the needy,

      the quotas

      for coal

      and for

      iron fulfill,

      but there is

      any amount

      of bleeding

      muck

      and rubbish

      around us still.

      Without you,

      there’s many

      have got out of hand,

      all the sparring

      and squabbling

      does one in.

      There’s scum

      in plenty

      hounding our land,

      outside the borders

      and also

      within.

      Try to

      count ’em

      and

      tab ’em –

      it’s no go,

      there’s all kinds,

      and they’re

      thick as nettles:

      kulaks,

      red tapists,

      and,

      down the row,

      drunkards,

      sectarians,

      lickspittles.

      They strut around

      proudly

      as peacocks,

      badges and fountain pens

      studding their chests.

      We’ll lick the lot of ’em ’

      but

      to lick ’em

      is no easy job

      at the very best.

      On snow-covered lands

      and on stubbly fields,

      in smoky plants

      and on factory sites,

      with you in our hearts,

      Comrade Lenin,

      we build,

      we think,

      we breathe,

      we live,

      and we fight!’

      Awhirl with events,

      packed with jobs one too many,

      the day slowly sinks

      as the night shadows fall.

      There are two in the room:

      I

      and Lenin –

      a photograph

      on the whiteness of wall.¹²

SECTION ONE

       1

       Terrorism versus Absolutism

      The land of the knout and the pogrom. Tsarist Russia – patriarchal, sumptuous, barbaric – buttressed ideologically by the Orthodox Church (with its genetic anti-Semitism) and its own self-belief, defended militarily by stiff-necked braggadocio and geometric garrison towns, dominated economically by huge estates and a nobility dependent on the goodwill of a savagely oppressed peasantry, had long avoided both the revolutionary upheavals that had transformed England, Holland and France as well as the radical structural reforms from above that later united Germany. Because of this, Russia was rarely free from a dissent that sometimes emerged in the highest places. And the lowest. Russian absolutism created its opposites.

      Later, over the course of the long nineteenth century, an oppositional intelligentsia (the word itself of Russian origin) emerged and continuously provided the country with liberal, Populist, anarcho-terrorist, pacifist, nationalist, socialist and Marxist thinkers who became a vital force in the history of Europe. It was a century that had given birth in Western Europe, Japan and North America to an accelerated industrial capitalism and its offshoot, imperialism. In normal conditions, there would be a reconciliation with the rising bourgeoisie whereby the latter would help to individualise the intelligentsia and in return would be provided with the bare necessities of civilised discourse. In Russia, however, the process was explosively uneven.

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