Leon Trotsky: The Philistine and the Revolutionary

April 6, 1924

[Leon Trotsky, Portraits Political & Personal, New York 1977, p. 55-63, title “H.G. Wells”]

In one of the many anthologies on Lenin I found an essay by the English writer H.G. Wells under the title “The Dreamer in the Kremlin.” The editors of the volume remark in the preface that “even such progressive people as Wells had not understood the meaning of the proletarian revolution which occurred in Russia.”

This, it would seem, was not a sufficient reason for including Wells’s essay in a volume devoted to the leader of that revolution. But I do not want to be quarrelsome; in any case I personally have read not without interest Wells’s few pages. This, however, as will be seen later, has not been due to the author.

I vividly remember Wells’s visit in Moscow. This was during the cold and hungry winter of 1920-21. There was in the air an anxious presentiment of the difficulties which awaited us in the spring. Starving Moscow lay buried in thick snow. The economic policy was on the eve of a sharp change. I remember very well the impression which the talk with Wells made on Lenin: “What a petty bourgeois! What a philistine!” he kept on repeating, raising both his arms, laughing and sighing in a way characteristic of him when he felt inwardly ashamed for another man. “Oh, what a philistine!” he repeated, recalling the conversation.

We were both waiting for the opening of a session of the Politburo, and in fact Lenin said nothing more about Wells, except what I have just quoted. But this was quite enough. I admit I have read little of Wells, and I have never met him. But I could well imagine the personality of this English drawing-room socialist, one of the Fabians, a novelist, and the author of fantastic and utopian stories, who had journeyed to Moscow to take a look at the communist experiment. Lenin’s exclamations, and quite especially their tone, completed and enlivened the picture.

Now, Wells’s essay, which providence in its mysterious ways introduced into a Lenin anthology, not only evoked in my memory Lenin’s exclamation, but filled it with living content. Although there is hardly a trace of Lenin in Wells’s essay about him, there is in it the whole of Wells himself as clearly seen as the back of one’s hand.

Let us start from the beginning, from the first complaint made by Wells: poor man, do you know it took him quite some time and some effort to get an appointment with Lenin and this was “tedious and irritating” to him. Why should it have been? Had Lenin invited Wells there? Did he promise to see him? Perhaps Lenin had too much time on his hands? On the contrary, during these difficult days every minute of Lenin’s time was taken up; it was not easy for him to carve out one hour in which to receive Wells. This should have been plain even to a foreigner. The trouble was that Wells, as an illustrious foreigner and for all his "socialism” a rather conservative Englishman of imperialist habits, was absolutely convinced that in fact he was by his visit conferring a great honor on this barbarian country and its leader. His whole article, from first to last, oozes this quite groundless conviction.

The characterization of Lenin begins, as one might have expected, from a great discovery. You see, Lenin “is not a writer.”

Who, in fact, should know this better than Wells, a professional man of letters? “The shrill little pamphlets and papers issued from Moscow in his name, full of misconceptions of the labor psychology of the West … display hardly anything of the real Lenin mentality. …” The honorable gentleman does not know, of course, that Lenin is the author of a whole series of fundamental works on the agrarian question, on economic theory, on sociology and philosophy. Wells knew only the “shrill little pamphlets”; he also remarked that they were issued “in his name,” hinting perhaps that they were written by other people. The real “Lenin mentality” reveals itself not in the dozens of volumes which he had written, but in the hour-long conversation into which the eminent visitor from Great Britain so generously deigned to enter.

One would have expected Wells to give at least an interesting description of Lenin’s physiognomy. For a single well-observed, well-rendered feature we would have been ready to forgive him all his Fabian trivialities. But there is nothing of the kind in the essay.

“Lenin has a pleasant, quick-changing brownish [!] face with a lively smile… ” Lenin “is not very like the photographs you see of him. …” “he gesticulated a little with his hands during our conversation. …” Wells did not go beyond the banalities of a commonplace reporter, who has to fill a column of his capitalist paper. In addition Wells discovered that Lenin’s head resembled the “domed and slightly one-sided cranium” of Arthur Balfour, and that, generally speaking, Lenin is a “little man: his feet scarcely touch the ground as he sits on the edge of his chair.” As far as Arthur Balfour’s skull is concerned, we can say nothing about this worthy object and we are ready to believe that it is domed. But all the rest! What indecent trash! Lenin had a reddish-blond complexion and one could not by any means describe him as “brownish.” He was of medium height, or a little below that; but that he looked a “little man,” whose feet hardly touched the floor, might have been only the impression of a Wells who arrived feeling like a civilized Gulliver on a journey to the land of northern communist Lilliputians. Wells also noticed that Lenin, whenever there was a pause in the conversation, was “screwing up one eye”; this habit, explains the shrewd writer, “is due perhaps to some defect in focusing.” We know this gesture of Lenin’s well. It was always there when Lenin had before him a stranger with whom he had nothing in common: covering his eyes, he used to throw a rapid glance through his fingers and the “defect in focusing” consisted in no more than that he saw through his interlocutor, saw his self-satisfied vanity, his narrow-mindedness, his “civilized” conceit and his “civilized” ignorance. Long afterwards, remembering the occasion, Lenin would shake his head: “What a philistine! What an awful petty bourgeois!”

Comrade Rothstein was present during the talk and Wells en passant made the discovery that this fact was “characteristic for the present condition of Russian affairs.” Rothstein, you see, controls Lenin on behalf of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs in view of Lenin’s extreme frankness and his “dreamer’s imprudence.” What can one say about such a priceless observation? Wells went to the Kremlin, his mind stuffed with all the rubbishy information purveyed by the international bourgeoisie, and with his penetrating eye — without any “defect of focusing” — found in Lenin’s office the confirmation of what he had earlier fished out of the pages of The Times or from some other source of respectable and genteel gossip.

But what then was the conversation about?

Here Wells conveys to us some hopeless platitudes which only show what a pitiful and hollow echo Lenin’s thought evokes in some other heads whose one-sidedness incidentally we have no reason to question.

Wells turned up “expecting to struggle with a doctrinaire Marxist,” but in fact he “found nothing of the sort.” This should not surprise us. We have already learned that “the real Lenin mentality” has been revealed not during the more than thirty years of his political and literary activity, but in his conversation with the citizen from England. “I had been told that Lenin lectured people; he certainly did not do so on this occasion.” How, indeed, to lecture a “gentleman” so full of self-importance? That Lenin liked to lecture people or to teach them was quite untrue. It was true that one could learn a good deal from a conversation with him. But this happened only when Lenin was of the opinion that his interlocutor was able to learn something. In such cases Lenin spared no time and no effort. After two or three minutes in the company of the wonderful Gulliver who by a lucky chance found himself in the office of the “little man,” Lenin must have become firmly convinced that the inscription at the entry to Dante’s hell — “Abandon all hope!” — was quite appropriate in this situation.

The conversation touched upon the problem of big cities. Precisely in Russia, as Wells himself said, a remarkable idea occurred to him, namely, that the outlook of a city is determined by the trade in the shops and in the marketplaces. He shared this revelation with Lenin. Lenin “admitted” that under communism cities might become much smaller. Wells “pointed out” to Lenin that the renovation of cities and towns would constitute a gigantic task and that quite a few of the enormous buildings of Petersburg would retain their significance only as historical monuments. Lenin agreed with this original platitude. “I think it warmed his heart,” added Wells, “to find someone who understood a necessary consequence of collectivism that many even of his own people fail to grasp.”

Well, this gives you the measure of Well’s level of thinking. He treats as proof of his extraordinary perspicacity the discovery that under a communist regime the existing huge urban concentrations will disappear and that our present monsters of capitalist architecture will preserve their significance as historic monuments only (unless they will be granted the honor of being demolished). Of course, how would poor communists (“the tiresome class-war fanatics”) arrive at such discoveries, which, by the way, have a long time ago been described in a popular addendum to the old program of the German Social Democratic Party. We shall not mention that all this was quite familiar to the classical Utopians of socialism.

Now you will understand, I hope, why Wells did not at all notice that famous laughter of Lenin about which he had been told so much. Lenin was in no mood to laugh. I even fear that he might have been a victim of quite the opposite temptation. But his versatile and clever hand, as usual, rendered him a service by concealing just in time an unkind yawn from a visitor preoccupied with his own person.

As you have learned, Lenin did not lecture Wells — for reasons which seem to us quite obvious. In return, however, Wells persisted in giving Lenin advice. He kept on impressing upon Lenin the completely new idea that for the success of socialism it is necessary to change not only the material side of life but also “the mentality of a whole people,” He drew Lenin’s attention to the fact that “the Russians are by habit and tradition traders and individualists”; he also explained to him that communism “was pressing too hard and too fast, and destroying before it was ready to rebuild,” and so on, and so forth, all in the same spirit. “And that,” relates Wells, “brought us to our essential difference — the difference of the collectivist and Marxist.” By “evolutionary collectivism” one should understand a brew of the Fabians which consists of liberalism, philanthropy, a stingy social legislation together with Sunday meditations about a brighter future. Wells himself thus formulates the essence of “evolutionary collectivism”: “I believe that through a vast sustained educational campaign the existing capitalist system could be civilized into a Collectivist world system.” Wells does not make it clear, however, who is going to introduce this “vast sustained educational campaign” and who will be subjected to it: are we to suppose that English milords with “domed” heads will exercise it over the English proletariat, or, on the contrary, that the English proletariat will subject milords’ heads to this education? Oh, no, anything but the latter. For what purpose do we have in this world the educated Fabians, the intellectuals, with their altruistic imagination, the gentlemen and the ladies, the Messrs. Wellses and Mmes. Snowdens, if not that they should, by a planned and prolonged process of sharing what they themselves carry concealed in their own heads, civilize capitalist society and transform it into a collectivist one, with such a sensible and happy gradualness that even the British monarchy will not notice this transformation?

All this Wells went on expounding to Lenin, and Lenin sat listening. “For me,” Wells graciously remarked, “it was very refreshing” to talk to “this amazing little man.” And for Lenin? Oh, long suffering Ilyich! He certainly had quite a few expressive and racy Russian words on his tongue. He did not utter them aloud nor did he translate them into English, not only because his English vocabulary would not stretch that far, but also because he was much too polite for this. But he could not limit himself to a polite silence alone.

“He [Lenin] had to argue …” relates Wells, “that modem capitalism is incurably predatory, wasteful and unteachable.” Lenin quoted facts and figures published, inter alia, in the new book of [Leo] Chiozza Money [The Triumph of Nationalization, 1920], and showed how capitalism destroyed the English shipyards, how it prevented a sensible exploitation of coal resources, and so on. Lenin knew the language of facts and figures. “I had, I will confess,” Mr. Wells unexpectedly concluded, “a very uphill argument.” What did this mean? Wasn’t this the beginning of a capitulation of evolutionary collectivism before the logic of Marxism? No, no. “Abandon all hope.”

This admission, which on first sight seems unexpected, is not at all fortuitous, but forms an integral part of the typically Fabian evolutionary and didactic system. It was, in fact, addressed to the English capitalists, bankers, peers, and their ministers. Wells was telling them: You see, you behave so stupidly, so greedily, so selfishly, that you make it extremely difficult for me to defend the principles of my evolutionary collectivism in the discussions with the dreamer in the Kremlin. Listen to reason, take part in the Fabians’ Sunday ritual ablutions, civilize yourself, march on to the road of progress.

Wells’s melancholy admission was not the beginning of a critical revision of his views, but a continuation of that educative work of the same capitalist society, which, after the imperialist war and the Versailles treaty, has so much improved, so much moralized and fabianized itself.

Not without condescending sympathy, Wells remarks that Lenin “has an unlimited confidence in his work.” With this statement we shall not quarrel. Indeed, Lenin had faith enough in the justice of his cause. What is true is true. This faith was also, incidentally, the source of the patience with which Lenin entered into conversations, during these harsh months of the blockade, with any foreigner who could serve as a contact, albeit indirectly, between Russia and the West. So Lenin met Wells. He talked a quite different language with English workers who used to visit him. With them he entered into a lively exchange; he taught them and he learned from them. With Wells the intercourse could not have anything but a strained, diplomatic character. “Our … argumentation ended indecisively,” sums up the author. In other words, the match between evolutionary ‘collectivism and Marxism this time ended in a draw. Wells returned to Great Britain, Lenin remained in the Kremlin. Wells wrote up his pompous “correspondence” for his bourgeois public, and Lenin, shaking his head, kept on repeating: “What a petty-bourgeois! Aye, aye, what a philistine!”

One may ask why and for what purpose I have given so much attention to an insignificant article by H.G. Wells, four years after its publication. The fact that the article was included in one of the anthologies brought out in connection with Lenin’s death “is not a valid reason. Nor is it a sufficient justification to say that I wrote these lines in Sukhum, where I was undergoing medical treatment. But I had more serious considerations too.

Just now in England, Wells’s party is in power. At the head of the party we see the enlightened representatives of evolutionary collectivism. It seemed to me — perhaps not quite unreasonably — that Wells’s words devoted to Lenin may perhaps better than anything else reveal to us the spirit of the leaders of the Labour Party. After all, Wells was by no means the worst of them.

How terribly these people lag behind, pressed down by the leaden weight of their bourgeois prejudices. Their pride, which is nothing else but a timeworn reflex of their historical role in the past, prevents them from penetrating, as they should, the minds of other nations, from examining new ideological phenomena, new historical processes which all pass them by. Routine-ridden, narrow-minded empiricists, with blinkers of their bourgeois public opinion over their eyes, these gentlemen carry with them all over the world their own prejudices; they have a peculiar talent for noticing nothing around them — except themselves. Lenin had lived in various countries of Europe, had learned foreign languages, read, studied, listened, pondered matters deeply, compared, generalized. At the head of a great revolutionary country, he never missed an opportunity to inform himself, attentively and conscientiously, to inquire, to learn. He never ceased to follow the events of the entire world. He read and spoke German, French, and English fluently, and he could read Italian too. In the last years of his life, overloaded with work, stealthily, during the Politburo’s meetings, he studied a Czechoslovak grammar in order to have a more direct contact with the working class movement of that country. Sometimes we used to “catch him out,” and, embarrassed, he would laugh and try to excuse himself. Beside him Wells was the embodiment of those pseudo-educated, narrow-minded bourgeois who look without seeing, who do not want to learn anything because they feel so comfortable behind their barrier of inherited prejudices. Then you have Mr. MacDonald, a more solid and gloomy variety of the same type, reassuring public opinion in England: We have fought against Moscow and we have won.

Have they won? They are indeed poor “little men” even if they have grown tall in size. Even now, after all that has happened, they still have no inkling of what the future has in store for them. Liberal and conservative businessmen easily manipulate these pedantic “evolutionary” socialists now in power, deliberately preparing not only the downfall of their government but their political debacle as well. At the same time, however, only unknowingly, they prepare the path to power for English Marxists. Yes, precisely for the Marxists, for those “tiresome class-war fanatics.” The English social revolution too will proceed according to the laws defined by Marx.

Wells, with his peculiar humor so much like a stodgy English pudding, once threatened to cut off Marx’s “doctrinaire" head of hair and his beard, to anglicize him, to make him more respectable and to “fabianize” him. But nothing came of this project, and nothing will ever come of it. Marx will remain Marx, just as Lenin will remain Lenin, even after subjection to Wells’s blunt razor blade for more than a full tiresome hour. We dare to venture a forecast that in the not too distant future in London, perhaps, in Trafalgar Square, there will appear, next to each other, two monuments in bronze: one of Karl Marx and the other of Vladimir Lenin. And English workers will say to their children: “What a good thing it was, that the little men of the Labour Party did not manage either to cut the hair or to shave the beards of these two giants.”

Awaiting this day, which I hope to be alive to see, I shut my eyes for a second and I see clearly Lenin’s figure in the same chair in which Wells saw him, and I hear — after Wells’s visit or perhaps a day later — the slightly mournful yet good-natured voice: “What a petty bourgeois! What a philistine!”