A While to Reach October

It takes a while to reach October in any year.  Indeed, it takes nine months.  Reading Robert Service’ biography of Lenin, one is consciously aware that everything is building to that year, to that month. Last night I was back to my room early and made a resolution to push forward to the October Revolution.  Not for lack of interest, I found myself nodding off in the comfy chair my hotel provided and considered my bed, across the way.  Somehow, around midnight, or whatever time my body believed it was, having dropped into my third, time zone of the week, I caught a second wind and drove through passed the revolution and through the last six years of the revolutionary’s life. 

I was struck by his complete, confidence in what he was doing.  Lenin felt that Marxism was a science and that his objectives were an economic inevitability.  Armed with his intellectual athleticism, and buttressed by his research into the Hegelian and Aristotelian underpinnings of Marx’ thinking, he appeared utterly convinced that nearly any sacrifice, at least any sacrifice required of someone else, was justified to secure and defend the revolution that he wanted nurtured. 

I think of hard driving CEO’s I’ve known.  Uncompromising military leaders or politician’s with conviction come to mind as well.  There may have been something singular about Lenin’s particular, combination of zealotry, focus, conviction and luck.  In the chaotic period after the revolution he is shot at mistakenly by Bolshevik guards, he is wounded by enemies, he is brought low by bad head health and till the end he rises, driven almost seemingly by his large, bald dome back into the fray until at last, mortality’s fingers pull him under, denying him the chance to resolve his final struggle, concerning succession. 

I don’t know when I finally went to bed, but I woke late and rushed to the sunny breakfast place.  I wanted to discuss Lenin now with the person who’d ordered me the omelet and the client team members at the coffee break and the old colleague we met for drinks, later in the evening at the striking roof top bar, overlooking the town of Laguna Beach but there wasn’t much to say beyond a quick phrase or two.  “Yes.  Vladimir, not John.”  I can recommend the title, but these days, unless it is available as a movie, or a podcast somehow it is unlikely that the majority of anyone around me will ever make the time.  Indeed, I don’t have the time, for much more than this simple summary.   Lenin wilfully changed the world and as Professor Service suggests in his final sentence, we are all rather lucky that his unique, and extraordinary capacity was singular. 

Thursday, 02/01/18