all moral responsibility. What would have been utter hypocrisy in a man of little faith appeared in him as flexible intelligence wrestling with the exigencies attendant upon implementing high principle. It is characteristic that those who struggled with him most bitterly in the arena of revolutionary struggle—where no blows or holds are barred—acknowledge his absolute sincerity and his moral force on others. They were fascinated by him even when they most detested him. He wanted nothing for himself—except to determine the destiny of mankind. His judgment could not be swayed by women, friends, or comforts, or tempered by mercy or pity. When Berkman and Goldman pleaded with him to release imprisoned anarchists who had criticized the Bolsheviks, he replied in effect: “Genuine, thinking anarchists agree with us: only bandits posing as anarchists are in jail.”[1] This was monstrously false—but undoubtedly Lenin believed it. When he advised foreign Communists, introducing Trojan horses into democratic organizations, to lie about their beliefs and membership, he was firmly convinced that this would be loyalty to a “higher” truth. When Otto Bauer interpreted the New Economic Policy introduced by Lenin as a partial return to capitalism, Lenin complained, and with honest indignation: “And the Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries, all of whom preach this sort of thing, are astonished when we say that we will shoot those who say such things.”[2] What is significant here, as elsewhere, is the way Lenin takes it for granted that the rights of opposition he claimed for himself when he was out of power are completely without validity when claimed by others when he is in power.
Few pen portraits or biographies of Lenin of any worth have until now been written. What we have are primarily contributions to the fierce factional disputes that raged after Lenin’s death. It is to the relatively scant characterizations of Lenin written while he was still alive that we must go for a reliable account of the way he impressed the men who worked with him. That is why the following lines by A. V. Lunacharsky, a keen observer and co-worker of Lenin, are so telling. “Lenin does his work imperiously, not because power is sweet to him, but because he is sure he is right, and cannot endure to have anybody spoil his work. His love of power grows out of his tremendous sureness and the correctness of his principles, and if you please,
