“
I remember that on the morning of the second or third day after the uprising, I dropped into a room at the Smolny and found Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin] there with Lev Davydovich. With them, if I remember correctly, were Dzerzhinsky, Joffe, and a crowd of others. Their faces were a grayish-green from lack of sleep; their eyes were inflamed, their collars soiled, and the room was full of smoke . . . Some one was sitting at a table surrounded by people waiting for orders. Lenin and Trotsky were also in the midst of a waiting mob. It seemed to me that orders were being given as if by people who were asleep
youfind . There was something of the somnambulist in the way they talked and moved about. For a moment I felt as if I were seeing it all in a dream, and that the revolution was in danger of being lost if ‘they’ didn’t get a good sleep and put on clean collars; the dream was closely bound up with those collars. I remember that next day I met Lenin’s sister, Marya Ilinishna, and reminded her hurriedly that Vladimir Ilyich needed a clean collar. ‘Oh, yes, of course,’ she replied, laughing. But by that time this matter of clean collars had lost its nightmarish significance for me.”
The power is taken over, at least in Petrograd. Lenin has not yet had time to change his collar, but his eyes are very wide-awake, even though his face looks so tired. He looks softly at me, with that sort of awkward shyness that with him indicates intimacy. “You know,” he says hesitatingly, “from persecution and a life underground, to come so suddenly into power . . . He pauses for the right word. “Es schwindelt,” he concludes
, changing suddenly to German, and circling his hand around his head. We look at each other and laugh a little. All this takes only a minute or two; then a simple “passing to next business.”
The government must be formed. of the Central Committee. A quick session opens over in a corner of the room.
In 1924, in my recollections of Lenin, I described this incident for the first time. I learned afterward that the members of what was then a “trio” Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev felt terribly offended by it, although they did not dare contradict it. But the fact remains that Lenin only mentioned Svyerdlov and Bukharin. He did not think of any others.
Since he had spent fifteen years in his two exiles abroad, with only short intervals between, Lenin knew the main figures of the party who were living in Russia only from his correspondence with them or from his few meetings with them abroad . It was not until after the revolution that he was able to see them at close range and actually at work. And consequently he had to revise the old opinions, based on indirect reports, or else form new ones. A man of great moral passion, Lenin could not imagine such a thing as indifference toward people. A thinker, observer, and strategist, he was subject to spasms of enthusiasm for people. Krupskaya also mentions this trait of his in her memoirs. Lenin never weighed a man at a glance, forming some average estimate of him. His eye was like a microscope; it would magnify many times the trait that came within its field of vision at a particular moment. He would often fall in love with people, in the full sense of the word. And on such occasions I would tease him: “I know, I know, you are having a new romance.” Lenin realized this characteristic of his, and would laugh by way of reply, a little embarrassed but a little angry, too.
