Lovable Lenin

Lenin was moved almost to tears by Beethoven, and he loved flowers; once, gazing at a clump of broken lilac branches, he murmured: "It pains me, you know." But Lenin could also sign a sheaf of blank execution orders, leaving Trotsky to fill in the names. Last week Izvestia splashed a story across its pages designed to show that Lenin could feel as kindly toward people as toward flowers.

The time: April 1920. The place: a shabby eighth-floor attic in Moscow, where Yuli Martov, a leader of the defeated Social Democrats, is in hiding. As he is cooking supper on a tiny stove, he is interrupted by Sofia Markovna, a secret emissary from Lenin. Martov and Lenin were once the closest friends when both were Social Democrats, but since Lenin turned Bolshevik and later seized power, Martov is Lenin's bitterest enemy. Whispers the messenger: kindly Lenin, taking pity on his old buddy, has arranged to whisk Martov out of town before he is arrested. A seat is waiting on the Minsk-Warsaw night express. Not even the Council of People's Commissars knows about the deal because, as Lenin says: "There are some people who are more Leninist than Lenin himself." Moral of the story: a disarmed antagonist is better than a political martyr.

The moral was highly pertinent: kindly Nikita Khrushchev, again wrapping himself in Lenin's magic mantle, was justifying the relatively lenient treatment meted out to his own defeated rivals--former Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, ex-Premier Georgy Malenkov--who faced only obscurity, not firing squads.

One flaw in the story: it is not true.

Though Lenin really did hold Martov in deep affection, Martov never went underground, and spoke at a meeting of the Moscow Soviet a month after his supposed escape. He asked for an exit visa and left legally via Estonia. Izvestia's version proved the aptness of a Russian proverb Khrushchev has known since childhood: "Better a clever lie than the dull truth."

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