I met Lenin in 1920 when I was in Russia. I had an hour's talk dinner date with him. And he spoke English much better than you would have expected, the whole conversation was in English. I expected it to have been in German, but I found his English was quite good. I was less impressed by Lenin than I expected to be. He was of course, a great man. He seemed to be a reincarnation of Cromwell, with exactly the same limitation that Cromwell had: Absolute orthodoxy. He thought a proposition could be proven by quoting a text in Marx. And he was quite incapable of supposing that there could be anything in Marx that wasn't right, and that struck me as rather limited. I decide one other thing about him which was his great readiness to stir up hatred. I poked certain questions at him to see what he answer would be and one of them was: "You profess to be establishing socialism, but as far as the countryside is concerned, you seem to be re-establishing peasant proprietorship. Which is a very different thing from agricultural socialism". And he said "Oh dear me, no, we're not establishing peasant proprietorship." He said, "You see, there are poor peasants and rich peasants. And we stirred up the poor peasants against the rich peasants, and they soon hanged them to the nearest tree, oh ho ho ho!". I didn't much like that.
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