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One of the very first men released from prison by the Bolsheviki was one Doctor Doubrovine, who had been a leader of the Black Hundreds, an organizer of many pogroms. He became an active Bolshevik. Kamenev, the Bolshevik leader, friend of Lenine, is a journalist. He was formerly a member of the old Social Democratic party.
At this session Lenine bitterly assailed the proposed offensive. He said that it was impossible for either side to win a military victory, revamping all the defeatist arguments that were familiar in every country.
As a young man Lenine, like most of the Intelligentsia of the period, gave up a good deal of his spare time to teaching small groups of uneducated working-men the somewhat abstract and intricate theories and doctrines of Socialism. To that excellent practice, no doubt, much of Lenine's skill as a lucid expositor and successful propagandist is due.
From the first this problem had to be faced by the Bolshevik government. We find Lenine insisting that the workers must be inspired with "idealism, self-sacrifice, and persistence" to turn out as large a product as possible; that the productivity of labor must be raised and a high level of industrial performance as the duty of every worker be rigorously insisted upon.
The foxy old Polenov explained to us after bridge that he would not be surprised if Kerensky would say to the Lenine crowd that the Emperor should be taken somewhere in the country on account of the German advance, and to Buchanan ... on account of the growing strength of Lenine. "Many more people are interested in this affair," he said, "than even Kerensky knows.
There was another moment of hush. Archelaus was sitting, his face suffused, staring in front of him; a murmuring of "the pretty lil' dear" ... ran amongst the women. It was Lenine who brought the moment to its fit rounding. "Three cheers for Missus and the lil' Squire," he called, and on that able blend of sentiments all voices met with a roar.
It is not necessary to believe the charge that was made at the time and afterward that Lenine was in the pay of the government and a tool of the Black Hundreds. Subsequent incidents served to fasten grave suspicion upon him, but no one ever offered proof of corruption.
According to Litvinov, who is certainly not an unfriendly authority, as soon as Lenine arrived in Russia he submitted a new program to his party which was so novel, and so far a departure from accepted Socialist principles, that "Lenine's own closest friends shrank from it and refused to accept it."
Having made these declarations quite candidly, he takes pains to assure us that there was no such defection from principle in establishing the absolute rule of an individual dictator, that there was absolutely no contradiction in principle in this. Moreover, there is no reason for regarding this dictatorship as a temporary thing, if Lenine himself is to be accepted as an authoritative spokesman.
It is said, however, that the arrest caused his expulsion from the university. Lenine was not the only young man to be profoundly impressed by the execution of the youthful Alexander Ulyanov; another student, destined to play an important rôle in the great tragedy of revolutionary Russia, was stirred to bitter hatred of the system.
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