Faraway the Southern Sky by Joseph Andras

Author:Joseph Andras
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2024-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

The SFIO had sent two activists. All the delegates stayed close to the Kremlin, at the Delovoy Dvor hotel—a wealthy industrialist had built it before getting murdered in 1918, under circumstances the inquisitive still need to untangle. Between its walls, three hundred rooms, electricity, hot water, a telephone, and the famous John Reed, who hadn’t scribbled a book but a handbook, Ten Days That Shook the World, prefaced by Lenin himself. Reed suffered from scurvy and would soon die of typhus; his native America took this ballsucker of a bleeding heart for an undesirable, and Finnish law enforcement had just thrown him in a cell after rooting him out of a ship’s coal bunker with a hundred diamonds or so in his pockets. More than just a novelistic veneer to that story; but there was also this Congress in four languages, official at that, Russian, German, French, and English, and the journalist had taken the opportunity to lend a hand in its organization.

When they weren’t debating, the delegates went to the theater, went for walks in Moscow, or were invited to admire the benefits of volunteer work, which, as the president of the Council of People’s Commissars asserted, allowed the replacement of “every man for himself” by “every man for all,” free market by communist labor. No doubt there were some this rhetoric transfixed, while others were less inclined to join in. It’s all very well to laugh, in the ease of time passed; if candor unfastens the world, cynicism nails it in place. They could also consult Trotsky’s and Lenin’s last two books, graciously left in their hotel room—from the latter, “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder (to summarize: iron Party, practical compromises, anarchist bastards).

And then there were Lenin’s theses, him again, on the national and colonial questions. And so we return to Nguyên Ai Quôc.

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