LENIN
I
IN the year 1889 there appeared at a meeting of the Committee for the Relief of Famine in Samara a young student who had been "sent down." In the midst of an anxious and zealous discussion by the members of the committee of the measures to be taken to fight the catastrophe, which was assuming more and more alarming proportions, the unknown student rose and declared, to the general consternation, that it would be a crime to try to help the starving population, for all measures of relief would mean support for the Tsarist dominion. Any increase in the famine should, on the other hand, be welcomed, for it caused difficulties for the authorities and contributed to the overthrow of the existing regime. That was the real evil and only its destruction could once and for all put an end to future famines.
This utterance of the nineteen-year-old Lenin, which sounded so extraordinary to those who heard it, already contains all that is most characteristic in his later doctrine: in the next three decades, with the same disregard of the effect of his opinions, obsessed by this one idea, he applied all his mental and physical energies to bringing about the overthrow of the existing world order.
As one of the countless political conspirators of that period, in Petersburg as well as in exile in Siberia, shut up in his poor little attic room in Germany, France, Italy, or Switzerland, in libraries, and in little smoky coffee houses, he worked unremittingly on his great campaign for the overthrow of the mighty Russian
B
