H.N. Brailsford. When Lenin and Trotsky were in London. // The Plebs. Tillicoultry, Scotland, 1948. Vol. XL, No. 5, May, p. 86-88.
Reprinted from The Listener, 1 January, 1948.
{p. 86}
It was an odd train of events that brought Lenin and Trotsky to London in 1907 and a lucky chance that brought me into contact with them. What a vastly different world it was 40 years ago! Three Emperors were still reigning. It was a much humaner age than ours of to-day, but one cruel despotism still survived. In our innocence many of us imagined that Tsardom was the last and the worst of the tyrannies that scourged mankind and we were eager to see it fall.
Among the Russian exiles in London I had several friends and I was an active member of a little group called the Friends of Russian Freedom, to which C. P. Scott also belonged. Among these friends I recall first of all Felix Volkhovsky, a charming and gentle old man, who spent his leisure, when he was not actively conspiring, in writing fairy tales for children! Volkhovsky had a life of danger and adventure behind him. He had escaped from Siberia disguised as a Russian general, and rode on horseback, taking the salute due to his imaginary rank, all the way from Tomsk to Vladivostok. He was an S.R. — a revolutionary socialist. For this party the assassination of tyrants was a duty. It descended in the direct line from the idealists whom Turgenev described in Virgin Soil — most of them students, who "went back to the people" and lived among the peasants in their villages. The S.R.s had a romantic ideology of their own and were involved in hot disputes with the hard-shell, scientific Marxists. They believed that the Russian peasants could easily be won for socialism, because they still retained their loyalty to the Mir, the prehistoric village community. Even in the black days of serfdom the peasants clung to their tradition that the land belonged, not to the usurping owners, but to the Mir.
Another of my friends was Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist, whom everyone — even The Times —respected as the scientist who wrote Mutual Aid. He came of a princely family and had served as a cadet in the Guards before he turned to biology and made the journeys of exploration in Siberia that first brought him fame. I recall him as an elderly man, rather short, squarely built, with a long reddish beard, who dressed correctly in a frock coat. He lived very simply among untidy heaps of books in a little house in Highgate. Was there, I wonder, in all London a kindlier old man ? He radiated goodness. In his own person he incarnated the idea of co-operation, which he used to preach against the Darwinian theorists of the struggle for existence. I saw him once surrounded by a group of young Russian Marxists who were questioning him. They differed hotly from some of his fundamental opinions, but instinctively they loved him, and they showed it. I saw a good deal of hime at this time, because i was helping him to write a big pamphlet exposing the savage repression under Stolypin that followed the dissolution of the first Duma.
But it was the Marxists, the Social Democrats, who turned out to be decisive for the shaping of the Russian Revolution. This party build its hopes on the industrial workers. At this period they were split into two warring factions which differed furiously over tactics. The Mensheviks believed that struggle for freedom in backward Russia must follow the pattern of the English and French revolutions. First of all, Tsardom had to be overthrown, in alliance with middle and upperclass liberals: thereafter in a democratic republic, the workers would carry on the struggle for socialism. The Bolsheviks under Lenin contemptuously rejected the idea of an alliance with Liberalism and believed that with the aid of peasants they could drive straight towards a social revolution.
I knew several members of this party. One of them, then in his years of exile, was Ivan Maisky. Another was Vera Zasulich. Outwardly she looked like a beautiful and distinguished old lady bred in the Victorian tradition. She was famous for one of the most daring acts in the long history of the revolutionary movement. In 1878 she shot General Trepov, the governor of St. Petersburg, because he had flogged political prisoners.The strangest part of her story was that a Russian jury acquitted her. I once introduced her to the Bishop of Hereford of those days, a saintly and generous old man. We met in the Keep of Lambeth Palace, and I think that he too acquitted her. A third friend from this party was Fedor Rothstein, an able journalist. He was the son of a well-known Russian doctor and has come to London with his exiled father as a schoolboy. After the Revolution he filled a high post in the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs and later was the editor of the new Russian encyclopedia.
A Bankrupt Party
And now for my meeting with Lenin and Trotsky. In those days I was working on the staff of the old Daily News; later the News Chronicle. Into my office one morning in May, 1907, with a look of excitement and anxiety on his face, walked Fedor Rothstein, who was also a member of its staff. On this spring day he startled me by asking me to lend, beg or borrow for him immediately a sum of £500. What for do you suppose? The Russian Social Democratic Party needed it and it couldn't wait a day. He revealed that the party was meeting in congress, of all places in the world, at New Southgate, in the northern suburbs of London — N. 1 to be exact. The sitting had run on for three weeks, but now they were nearly over and somehow the three hundred delegates would have to find their way back to Russia. But the party was stony broke. The cheapest way home would be by sea, and £500 was the smallest sum on which the thing could be done.
I asked Rothstein how on earth the party had got into such a predicament, and he told me they had originally intended to hold their conference just outside the grip of the Tsarisi police at Helsingfors in Finland. Finland was under Russian sovereignty in those days, but enjoyed rather precarious form of Home Rule with the right of free speach. But just as they were about to meet, the Tsar struck a blow at Finnish liberties and the party had to change its plans. And so these Russian socialists chartered a ship and sailed for Copenhagen. There the Danish police, fearing the Tsar's anger, forbade them to land. They sailed on cheerfully to Stockholm, and there once again the same thing happened. But there was still one hope left : they would try England : there things went better. They landed safely on the shores of the Thames. Our English police force in those days, if it was not exactly hospitable, was at least indifferent!
After that fantastic journey in search of the right of free discussion, it was not surprising that the funds of {p. 87} his adventurous party were exhausted. So what were we to do? I could not myself produce £500, but, after a little reflection, I thought of a man who might. Joseph Fels was an eccentric and generous millionaire, who had made his money in America from a popular household soap. He was born in Russia, and had fled in his early days from the land of pogroms to New York. So I guessed that he might have a fellow-feeling for these rebels stranded on our shores. Not that Fels was a socialist. He was a convinced Henry Georgeite, who believed that all would go well with mankind if only we would adopt the single tax on land values. But for all that, Fels was no bigot and he had not forgotten his hatred of the Tsar's tyranny. So off we went, Rothstein and I, to Fels' office in the City. He received us in the friendliest way, listened patiently, and was on the point of saying "Yes," when he pulled himself up and said that he must first consult his almoner. My heart sank — until I saw in the doorway the familiar, kindly features of George Lansbury. Of course George agreed that this would be a splendid way of using superfluous wealth!
Soon four of us were in a taxi that took us to Islington, after calling for the cash at Fels' bank. The party was meeting in a rough temporary building made of corrugated iron, known as the "Socialist Church." We were shown up to the gallery. On the floor below us Lenin was speaking to an audience that listened with rapt attention. He had started his speech the evening before. He broke it off round about midnight and resumed it in the morning. Now — it was nearly one p.m. — he was drawing to a close. I need not tell you in detail what Lenin looked like. Everyone can now recall his portraits, though in those days few Englishmen had even heard of him. Rather short and squarely built, he made an impression of sturdy strength : what his head, with its Tartar features, suggested was a formidable power of concentration. He spoke easily : there wasn't a trace of fatigue. Though in those days I knew no Russian, one could tell that this was a closely reasoned speech without rhetoric and without the distractions of emotion. From time to time, however, he made a joke, doubtless at the expense of his opponents at which everybody laughed. Finally he sat down, manifestly well content, for in this speech he had contrived to split the Russian Social Democratic Party beyond repair. The breach between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks was never healed, and after the October Revolution Lenin's faction dropped the old name and called themselves Communists.
Lenin used to remind me of the Old Testament hero, Gideon, whe tested the spirit of his soldiers by leading them down to a river to drink. He did not want a big host behind him : he would rather command the resolute few, the "professional revolutionists" as he called them, who would not compromise. In this conference in the tin tabernacle at New Southgate, held though it was in the darkest days of his party's history, days of black reaction and persecution, he was sorting out those he could trust and rejecting the rest. It looked at the time like the tactics of a fanatic, but this fanatic, as history was to show, was also a realist with an uncanny gift of foresight.
When Lenin sat down, the conference broke into groups. Evidently the news ran round among the delegates that there were friends in the gallery who had brought the money for which they were hoping. One by one the leaders came up to thank us. The first of them was Plekhanov, the head of the Mensheviks, at that time the most famous of the Russian Socialists. He came of an aristocratic family and wrote with distinction in the Marxist tradition on history and political theory. I still recall with pleasure his graceful manners and the perfect French in which he thanked us. I found him sympathetic and we arranged to spend that evening together. Trotsky came next. At that time he belonged to neither of the warring factions, but headed a little group bent on conciliation. Among these eager students of the theory of revolution he was the man of action to whom there had come such a chance of leadership as had fallen to no one else. He had been chosen chairman of the Workers' Soviet in St. Petersburg which led the political strike of 1905 and extorted from the Tsar his panic-striken concession of the first Duma. A good deal had happened to him since those thrilling days : he had subsequently been exiled for life to Siberia : but had promptly escaped, and here he was, a free man but an exile. Trotsky was a handsome man, vigorous and erect, who carried himself with confidence. In any group, one felt, this man would soon be a leader. He spoke to us in fluent German. I cannot recall what he said, but he voiced the thanks of his group with frank cordiality.
Thanks for the Loan.
Down below, meanwhile, on the floor of the Church, with a cluster of his friends around him, Lenin was moving towards the iron ladder that led to the gallery. They were joking an laughing and finally they pushed tb sturdy bear-like figure of their leader up the ladder. What, I wondered, were they saying ? " Comrade, you've got to do it. Up you go and thank the queer old bourgeois who's rescued us in the nick of time." It may have been something like that. So Lenin came round to us. He didn't make a formal speech as Plekhanov and Trotsky had done. Just a few words of thanks in German, rather brusquely spoken. And then he sat down beside Joseph Fels.
{p. 88}
A document had been drawn up in which the party acknowledged that it had received from Fels a loan of £500 which it undertook to pay back after the victory of the Revolution. Lenin signed it. As he rose to go, Fels pressed into his hand one of the tracts on the single tax which he always had ready in his pocket. I infer from the subsequent course of Russian history that it failed to convince Lenin !
Thanks to Fels' money most of the delegates got safely home to Russia, among them Stalin, at this time a junior and inconspicuous figure. The leaders remained
as exiles scattered over western Europe. They went on debating the tactics of revolution hotly among themselves in pamphlets and periodicals, which they smuggled into Russia. Seven years later came the first world war, which Lenin knew best how to use to serve the Revolution. Ten years after that obscure conference of penniless rebels and exiles in the tin tabernacle at Islington, the workers of St. Petersburg swept the Tsar of all the Russias from his throne, captured the Winter Palace with Trotsky as their general, and set up, under Lenin's leadership, the Soviet Government that endures to this day. The bankrupt party which had borrowed its fare home from Joseph Fels remembered its debt in the hour of victory. In the interval that kindly and generous personality had died, but the £500 owing to him was duly paid to his widow.