EVENING BELL:
Welcoming the End of the Day

On October 6, 1920, the British science fiction writer H.G. Wells met with Soviet Prime Minister Vladimir Lenin in the Kremlin. We'd been taught since school that the naive Brit understood nothing about Russia and dismissed Lenin as a "Kremlin dreamer."

Today, I decided to skim through Wells's bestseller, "Russia in the Shadows," for the first time.

"Lenin is not a man of the pen; his published works don't convey a true picture of him. Brochures and pamphlets, written in a harsh tone and full of false concepts, hardly reflect even a fraction of Lenin's true mind."

"I expected to encounter a Marxist dogmatist with whom I would have to engage in a showdown, but nothing of the sort happened. I've been told that Lenin enjoys lecturing people, but he certainly wasn't doing so during our conversation." In fact, I encountered a person completely unlike what I had imagined.

"The Bolshevik government is the boldest and at the same time the most inexperienced of all governments in the world. In some respects, it is astonishingly inept and in many matters completely ignorant. But at its core, it is honest. It is the most straightforward government in the world today."

"The Marxist Bolsheviks came to power in Russia in complete contradiction to the teachings of Karl Marx."

"I always considered Marx a most boring figure. I would gladly resurrect him just to see him pensively gaze at Lenin over his beard. Such a beard doesn't grow by itself; it is groomed, cherished, and patriarchally elevated above the world. In its senseless exuberance, it is remarkably similar to Capital."

"It wasn't communism, but European imperialism, that dragged this vast, shaky, bankrupt empire into a six-year, grueling war. And it wasn't communism that tormented this suffering and perhaps perishing Russia with incessant, foreign-subsidized attacks, invasions, and rebellions, strangling it with a monstrously cruel blockade."

This fantasist isn't so naive after all...