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By Root 2473 0

and counter-revolutionists were in prison. It seemed unbelievable that a man of his mental stature should stoop to such despicable falsehoods to justify his methods. Mme X shook her head. It was apparent, she said, that I was not conversant with Lenin’s habitual ways. In his early writings I would find that he had for years advocated and defended such methods of attack against his political opponents, methods to “cause them to be loathed and hated as the vilest of creatures.” He had used such tactics when his victims could defend themselves; why should he now not add insult to injury when he had the whole of Russia as his forum? “Yes, and the rest of the radical world,” I added, “for in Lenin it sees the revolutionary Messiah. I had believed him that myself, as did also my comrade Alexander Berkman. We had been among the earliest crusaders in America in his behalf. Even now we find it bitter hard to free ourselves from the Bolshevik myth and its principal spook.”

It was growing late and I was anxious to hear from the old lady about Korolenko. I knew that like Tolstoy he had for decades been a great moral force in Russia. I wondered what influence he had been able to exert since 1917. I had been informed that Mme X was Korolenko’s sister-in-law and very close to the great writer. I begged her to tell me about him.

The prophet of Yasnaya Polyana,30 she said, had fortunately been spared the spectacle of the old autocracy surviving the Revolution in a new dress. He was saved the agony of writing letters of protest to the new Tsar. Not so her brother-in-law. Though almost seventy and in poor health, Vladimir Korolenko had to spend most of his time in the Cheka pleading for some innocent life or penning entreating letters to Lenin, Lunacharsky, and Maxim Gorki to put a stop to the wholesale executions. Maxim Gorki, she continued, had proved a great disappointment. No, Maxim found the company of Lenin a safer haven, and the Kremlin a pleasanter abode, than exile in a desolate village. Maxim Gorki had not even the courage, she added, to live up to the honoured tradition among Russian authors of encouraging and helping members of the profession and standing by them in distress.

My own experience with Maxim Gorki came to my mind. I recalled his lame apology for Bolshevik autocracy. [ ... ] Still I stressed the point that Maxim Gorki might really believe in the righteousness of Lenin’s policies. He was a poet, not a politician; it was probably the glamour about Lenin’s name that made him worship. I preferred to think so rather than to believe Gorki capable of selling his birthright for a mess of pottage.

I expressed my surprise that Korolenko was still permitted to be at large, in view of his repeated offences of lèse-majesté. Mme X did not consider it strange. Lenin was a very clever man, she explained. He knew his trump cards: Peter Kropotkin, Vera Figner, Vladimir Korolenko were names to reckon with. Lenin realized that if he could point to them as remaining at liberty, he could effectively disprove the charge that only the gun and the gag were applied under his dictatorship. [ ... J

I felt too stifled to return to the narrow quarters of my compartment. It was past two in the morning, the break of day already near. I suggested to the friend who accompanied me that we take a walk. The air outside was balmy, the streets deserted. Poltava was soothing in her sleeping peace. Silently we walked on, each absorbed in the impressions of the evening. I was trying to see beyond the immediate and reaching upward to a point that might hold out the hope of a renaissance in the life of Russia. Approaching steps, their thud falling regularly on the granite walk, startled me. A detachment of soldiers marched by, rifles slung over their shoulders, a group of huddled people in their midst. “And shooting is being kept up as a matter of course,” flitted through my mind.

In the morning, still in the throes of the preceding evening, I went, together with Henry Alsberg, to the Korolenko home. It was a little green gem, entirely hidden from view