Trotsky on Lenin by Leon Trotsky

Author:Leon Trotsky
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2018-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

15

The Young Lenin

The innumerable insults that Lenin meted out to opponents, both to individuals and, later, to entire social classes, have prompted a number of writers, both journalists and novelists, to portray him, even in childhood, as a redheaded monster, full of cruelty, conceit, and vindictiveness. Yevgeni Chirikov, who had been expelled from Kazan University together with Ulyanov, in a novel written after the October Revolution, when he was already a member of the White emigration, endowed Vladimir with “pathological vanity and readiness to take offense.” Vodovozov relates that “Vladimir’s crude behavior, coarse gestures, acrimonious remarks, etc.—and there were many—greatly shocked Maria Alexandrovna. Often she couldn’t help saying, ‘Oh, Volodya, Volodya, how can you!’” In actual fact, however, Vladimir was too aware of his own importance to fall prey to pathological vanity. Further, he really had no occasion to take offense, because there were all too few who dared give offense. But there can be no doubt that Vladimir’s rough-edged ruthlessness did not always spare the vanity of others. According to Yasneva, some opponents “felt hostile toward him from the very first encounter,” and their hostility was intense enough to last through their lifetimes.

The late Vodovozov must be counted among those who had been insulted once and forever. When he had first arrived in Samara, Vladimir had treated him in a friendly way and helped him to get settled, but he very soon saw through Vodovozov, that sterile eclectic who could neither be won over as a partisan nor taken seriously as an opponent. Their clashes in connection with aid to victims of the famine and the message to the governor left their imprint: Vodovozov’s irritation with young Ulyanov has given us several pages of reminiscences in which the author, to the reader’s profit, tells more than he had intended.

In describing Vladimir’s appearance, Vodovozov says, “His face as a whole startled one by its odd mixture of intelligence and crudeness. I would say it showed a sort of animality. One’s attention was drawn to his forehead—intelligent but sloping. A fleshy nose…’ something stubborn and cruel in these features was combined with undoubted intelligence.” In his slanderous novel, Chirikov has some young people of Simbirsk speak as follows about Valdimir Ulyanov: “His hands are always damp! And yesterday he shot a kitten… then grabbed it by the tail and threw it over the fence!…” Another fairly well-known Russian writer, Kuprin, discovered, although in later years, that Lenin had green eyes “like a monkey.”1 Thus even physical appearance—what one would take to be the aspect least open to question—was subject to tendentious transformation by memory and imagination.

A photograph of 1890 shows a fresh young face in whose calm one senses reserve. The stubborn forehead has not yet been accented by baldness. The small eyes look sharply forth out of Asiatic slits. The cheekbones, too, hint slightly at Asia. Below a broad nose, fleshy lips and a strong chin are lightly covered with a sparse growth that has not yet known scissors or razor.

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