immense brow
matched by thought immense.
A forest of flags,
raised-up hands thick as grass …
Thousands are marching
beneath him …
Transported,
alight with joy,
I rise from my place,
eager to see him,
hail him,
report to him!
‘Comrade Lenin,
I report to you –
(not a dictate of office,
the heart’s prompting alone)
This hellish work
that we’re out to do
will be done
and is already being done.
We feed and we clothe
and give light to the needy,
the quotas
for coal
and for
iron fulfill,
but there is
any amount
of bleeding
muck
and rubbish
around us still.
Without you,
there’s many
have got out of hand,
all the sparring
and squabbling
does one in.
There’s scum
in plenty
hounding our land,
outside the borders
and also
within.
Try to
count ’em
and
tab ’em –
it’s no go,
there’s all kinds,
and they’re
thick as nettles:
kulaks,
red tapists,
and,
down the row,
drunkards,
sectarians,
lickspittles.
They strut around
proudly
as peacocks,
badges and fountain pens
studding their chests.
We’ll lick the lot of ’em ’
but
to lick ’em
is no easy job
at the very best.
On snow-covered lands
and on stubbly fields,
in smoky plants
and on factory sites,
with you in our hearts,
Comrade Lenin,
we build,
we think,
we breathe,
we live,
and we fight!’
Awhirl with events,
packed with jobs one too many,
the day slowly sinks
as the night shadows fall.
There are two in the room:
I
and Lenin –
a photograph
on the whiteness of wall.12
The land of the knout and the pogrom. Tsarist Russia – patriarchal, sumptuous, barbaric – buttressed ideologically by the Orthodox Church (with its genetic anti-Semitism) and its own self-belief, defended militarily by stiff-necked braggadocio and geometric garrison towns, dominated economically by huge estates and a nobility dependent on the goodwill of a savagely oppressed peasantry, had long avoided both the revolutionary upheavals that had transformed England, Holland and France as well as the radical structural reforms from above that later united Germany. Because of this, Russia was rarely free from a dissent that sometimes emerged in the highest places. And the lowest. Russian absolutism created its opposites.
Later, over the course of the long nineteenth century, an oppositional intelligentsia (the word itself of Russian origin) emerged and continuously provided the country with liberal, Populist, anarcho-terrorist, pacifist, nationalist, socialist and Marxist thinkers who became a vital force in the history of Europe. It was a century that had given birth in Western Europe, Japan and North America to an accelerated industrial capitalism and its offshoot, imperialism. In normal conditions, there would be a reconciliation with the rising bourgeoisie whereby the latter would help to individualise the intelligentsia and in return would be provided with the bare necessities of civilised discourse. In Russia, however, the process was explosively uneven.
The
