where I had stayed

I arrived in London from Zurich by way of Paris, in the autumn of 1902. I think it was in October, early in the morning, when a cab, engaged after I had resorted to all sorts of pantomime, drove me to the address written on a slip of paper. My destination was Lenin’s house. I had been instructed before I left Zurich to knock on the door three times. The door was opened by Nadyezhda Konstantinovna, who had probably been wakened by my knocking Business Broadband Service . It was early, and any one used to civilized ways would have waited quietly at the station for an hour or two, instead of knocking at the door of a strange house at such an unearthly hour. But I was still impelled by the force that had set me off on my journey from Verkholensk. I had disturbed Axelrod in Zurich in the same barbarous way, although that was in the middle of the night, instead of at dawn. Lenin was still in bed, and the kindly expression of his face was tinged with a justifiable amazement. Such was the setting for our first meeting and conversation. Both Vladimir Ilyich 1 and Nadyezhda Konstantinovna already knew of me from Kler’s letter, and had been waiting for me.

I was greeted with: “The Pero has arrived!” At once I unloaded my modest list of impressions of Russia: the connections in the South are bad, the secret Iskra address in Kharkov is wrong, the editors of the Southern Worker oppose amalgamation, the crossing at the Austrian frontier is in the hands of a student at the gymnasium who refuses help to followers of the Iskra. The facts in themselves were not of a sort to fill one with much hope, but there was faith enough to make up for it, and to spare.

Either the same or the next morning, Vladimir Ilyich and I went for a long walk around London. From a bridge, Lenin pointed out Westminster and some other famous buildings. I don’t remember the exact words he used, but what he con veyed was: “This is their famous Westminster,” and “their” referred of course not to the English but to the ruling classes. This implication, which was not in the least emphasized soho serviced apartment, but coming as it did from the very innermost depths of the man, and expressed more by the tone of his voice than by anything else, was always present, whether Lenin was speaking of the treasures of culture, of new achievements, of the wealth of books in the British Museum, of the information of the larger European newspapers, or, years later, of German artillery or French aviation. They know this or they have that, they have made this or achieved that — but what enemies they are! To his eyes, the invisible shadow of the ruling classes always overlay the whole of human culture — a shadow that was as real to him as daylight.

The architecture of London scarcely attracted my attention at that time. Transferred bodily from Verkholensk to countries beyond the Russian border which I was seeing for the first time, I absorbed Vienna, Paris and London in a most summary fashion, and details like the Westminster Palace seemed quite superfluous. It wasn’t for that, of course, that Lenin had taken me out for this long walk. His object was to become acquainted with me, and to question me. His examination, it must be admitted, was very thorough indeed.

I told him all about our Siberian discussions  Hong Kong Customs, especially on the question of a centralized organization; about my essay on the subject; about the violent encounters I had had with the old Populists in Irkutsk,  for a few weeks; about the three essays by Makhaysky, and so forth. Lenin knew how to listen.

“And how did you fare in questions of theory?”

I told him how we, as a group, had studied his book, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, in the transfer-prison in Moscow, and how in exile we had worked on Marx’s Capital, but had stopped at the second volume. We had studied the controversy between Bernstein and Kautsky intently, using the original sources. There were no followers of Bernstein among us. In philosophy, we had been much impressed by Bogdanov’s book, which combined Marxism with the theory of knowledge put forward by Mach and Avenarius. Lenin also thought, at the time, that Bogdanov’s theories were right. “I am not a philosopher,” he said, with a slightly timorous expression, “but Plekhanov denounces Bogdanov’s philosophy as a disguised sort of idealism.” A few years later, Lenin dedicated a big volume to the discussion of Mach and Avenarius; his criticism of their theories was fundamentally identical with that voiced by Plekhanov.