An old Lenin number

I have carefully managed to avoid to this venerable age Deutscher's famous Trotsky biography - or I guess I should say once famous. It certainly is very well written with a surprising generosity of spirit (not suitable to the subject area). These things seem now so scholastic, so irrelevant. But I don't think they are, not in the same sense as the old theological disputes were (and those too led to horrific bloodshed and tyranny). To be a communist in any meaningful fashion is surely to be a Marxist-Leninist, and that admittedly is pretty close to theology, a very dead thing. But Marx himself was scarcely even a Marxist, not to speak of a Marxist-Leninist. These were serious issues concerning horrible injustices.

To think about those times, of the editorial board of the Iskra in London in the early years of the 20th century with the famous split starting with mostly just (at the time obscure) personalities pettily clashing: the 2nd congress being already hopelessly divided, the 1st having had, one kids not, 8 persons meeting in Minsk, all shortly arrested - history as farce already at the first time... But from farce an unspeakable horror rose. Still, the context for the insanity of the Russian revolutionary tradition is the utter insanity of the pre-modern Russian society. The heartlessness and sadism rose from horrible, horribly stupid and horribly wasteful oppression. Such loss, such cruelty, such tragedy.