help, not hinder, revolution in England and France. 4. He
pointed out that "All power to the Soviets" now means "All
power to the Bolsheviks," and said that he wished that the
Soviets should actually have all power instead of merely
supporting the Bolshevik bureaucracy. He was asked for
his own programme, but said he had not time to give
it. I watched the applause carefully. General
dissatisfaction with the present state of affairs was obvious,
but it was also obvious that no party would have a chance
that admitted its aim was extinction of the Soviets (which
Dan's ultimate aim certainly is, or at least the changing of
them into non-political industrial organizations) or that was not
prepared to fight against reaction from without.
I went to see Sukhanov (the friend of Gorky and Martov,
though his political opinions do not precisely agree with
those of either), partly to get the proofs of his first volume
of reminiscences of the revolution, partly to hear what he
had to say. I found him muffled up in a dressing gown or
overcoat in an unheated flat, sitting down to tea with no
sugar, very little bread, a little sausage and a surprising
scrap of butter, brought in, I suppose, from the country by a
friend. Nikitsky, a Menshevik, was also there, a hopeless
figure, prophesying the rotting of the whole system and of
the revolution. Sukhanov asked me if I had noticed the
disappearance of all spoons (there are now none, but
wooden spoons in the Metropole) as a symbol of the
falling to pieces of the revolution. I told him that though I
had not lived in Russia thirty years or more, as he had, I
had yet lived there long enough and had, before the
revolution, sufficient experience in the loss of fishing
tackle, not to be surprised that Russian peasants, even
delegates, when able, as in such a moment of convulsion as
the revolution, stole spoons if only as souvenirs to show
that they had really been to Moscow.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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