HISTORIC ENIGMA.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19240, 2 August 1924, Page 17

HISTORIC ENIGMA.

criminal or genius? RUSSIAN AUTHOR'S REMARKABLE NOTE ON LENIN. The following remarkable article on Lenin by Mikhail Petrovitch Artzybasheff, translated by Frida Strindberg, appears in the Juno number of tho Fortnightly Review:—A man has died, “whom some considered the greatest genius and some tho greatest criminal of our time. While he was alive one could praise him, curse him, cover Jum with flattery or threats. Over his grave all this has become futile. It matters not; not one word will reach tho terrible distance whither his red shade has passed. Ho no longer hears tho curses of hired mourners —ho is dead. His corpse lies in a red grave —this corpse which decayed even during liis life, just as crumbled the entire venture to which ho had given his strength. No one will over again see or hear him who was the dictator of Russia and the leader of tho revolution. Years will pass, new people will live, there will bo new wars and revolutions; new ideas, loaders, and prophets will arise, life will assume new forms of which wo aro not granted to know anything. “Sufficient unto tho day is the evil thereof,’’ and tho memory of man will not keep the living image of our revolution and of its leader. Only the laborious historian rummaging in dusty archives among half putrid documents of the past will read in clumsy, antiquated lettering the name of Lenin and dig out the bloody story of our days. And he will ponder heavily over tho historic enigma. Who was inis man'/ By what deeds did ho immortalise his name, what power lay hidden in his round, bald skull—because of which millions of people with passion and despair rushed to destroy their homeland, plunder and kill each other? Was his the mind of a genius, unerringly foreseeing future fate?

No. True, ho calculated the moment; he knew how to use it for the seizure of power; he told beforehand that war would call forth a revolution in Russia. He was able to organise a party and to mould it with iron discipline. He stirred the masses to follow him and made them submit to his will and destroy tho age-old shelters of tho lives of millions of people. But genius and destruction aro irreconcilable concepts. Genius is a creative force, and he—created nothing. Ho only destroyed. His “genius” achieved nothing save “follies and mistakes” which he himself had tho courage to publicly confess All his calculations and prophecies proved to bo one wholesale error, a deadly crime against sanity. . . Tho Communist State revealed itself as an impossibility under contemporary conditions, and collapsed completely. Was ho a fiery fanatic, kindling hearts by tho power of his tragic pathos? No. ffhoro was not in him that exaltation which forces on and up to tho end, regardless of all. Ho was tricky; ho retreated ; ho turned back; he sought breathing spaces and compromises. Was ho “tho greatest criminal?” . . . Objectively, yes. No man over caused humanity so much suffering, and he was the inciter to all tho crimes perpetrated by tho Lhcviks, and the dark masses of the peopie. It was at his word that they plundered, violated —he knew it, wanted it. But subjectively he was not a criminal. Personally he killed no one, robbed no ono, and would hardly have been capable of that. But Lenin’s sin was worse than “tho pitiful sin of ignorance.” Precisely Lenin was the soul of Bolshevism, tho living personification of its horrors. In his brain were bom those ideas which destroyed life and human beings. l Thus, not a “genius,” not a fanatic, not a hero, not a criminal, not a demon, and not a seeker of honours —what tlicn, was he? Wherein lay the secret of his fatal power ? Contemporary science is not able to establish definite boundaries between “genius” and “psychic abnormality.” But the autopsy of Lenin established beyond doubt that he had boon psychically abnormal long before ho became openly insane. He was on tho direct way to complete madness, and only the deviation of tho process on to tho direction of the motory centres, putting an end to his life, saved him from idiocy. Always with tho fixed, sly, malicious smile of the lunatic, his brain seething with diseased ideas, uncontrolled like a- demon, and wily like a beast, came Lenin. Alone and solely in the fact that his mania coincided with tho dark instincts of tho masses and tho secret desires of their leaders lies tho whole secret of his succesa and witchery. Without sotting dates or foretelling tho manner, I can affirm Hie following:— Bolshevism and Lenin wore one and the same thing. Bolshevism is merely destruction. Tho death of Lenin is an event of decisive significance, as it took the ground from under the Soviet power by disclosing the bankruptcy of its ideals. The result of it must be the complete break-up of the Communist Party into three principal groups; reasonable men who, shaking off tho hypnosis, understand the necessity for a complete break with the Communist past, and the need for re-establishing a normal order; extreme Utopians who see salvation in the return to the methods of belligerent Communism; and, finally, adventurers, who only want to seize the power fallen from the dead hands of the leader.

The struggle between these groups must sooner or later end in armed encounters, since their differences are irreconcilable In this struggle, consequently and naturally, must be involved at first the rank and file of tho party, then the Red Army, and, finally, the masses of the people. Whoever will prove the victor in this struggle, tho result will be tho fall of the Soviet power, and tho destruction of Bolshevism. But tho process will be difficult and painful. There will bo street disturbances, plunder, and murder. There will bo mass arrests and executions. The executioners, sensing their ruin, will try to destroy it) advance all those in whom they see their possible rivals and avengers for tho bloodstained past, and the lowest masses will celebrate with pillage and plunder the Lv.fc Red Days of dying Bolshevism.