As He may now enjoy the two men who have at last reached the crater’s edge. Here one breathes the vapours of the underworld. They are not recommended for either man’s particular complaint, but are said to do wonders for gout and conjunctivitis. They peer into the dark, simmering void at their feet and feel the moment to be almost indecently symbolic. Something ought to be done about it. The idea probably comes to both at once, though Lenin later says it was Gorky’s and Gorky says it was the Old Man’s. “Let’s piss into it.” Their flies are already undone. There is, inevitably, a slight pause. Nothing happens. They concentrate. They steal glances sideways. We, meanwhile, are forced into increasingly awkward angles of observation and, finally, into mind-reading. The chronicler is by now no less uncomfortable than the reader. He would happily get the business over with, but certain natural processes dislike being hurried. Indeed, the greater the urgency, the less urgent they become. Lenin is the shorter man and therefore enjoys a better view of the writer’s equipment. A long, crooked muzhik’s prick, of the sort whose dimensions are not greatly altered by erection. Gorky, being built on a more vertical scale, would have to bend considerably to inspect Lenin’s rather smaller apparatus. Fortunately he is too modest. He blushes at nudes in museums; one may search his novels with a magnifying glass for any expression of carnality, let alone obscenity. Besides, leaning forward on the lip of Vesuvius merely to inspect Lenin’s penis would be an undignified way to die. Let us spare him. We know what he wants to know. Two rumours require testing: is Ilyich really syphilitic, and is he really Jewish? Even from the ideal angle he would probably learn very little, whereas we are at liberty to answer without climbing into Gorky’s line of sight. At this stage, after more than a decade of latency, syphilis leaves nothing obvious to inspect. The disease may be busy enough elsewhere, but the penis is no longer its principal theatre of operations. There is nothing to see. Circumcision promises no more enlightenment. If Lenin keeps any account of his maternal great-grandfather, Mozesz Blank of Zhytomyr, he does not boast of him. He was baptised according to Orthodox custom and educated, in every visible respect, as a Russian of his time. It may never have occurred to him that a sufficiently diligent reconstruction of the family tree could bring him a little closer to Marx—or would never have occurred to him, had the Tsarist secret police not recently shown such ingenuity in reminding revolutionaries of their ancestry. For this is the period, after the revolution of 1905, in which The Protocols of the Elders of Zion begins its useful work. The pamphlet, produced in the atmosphere of the Okhrana, connects the leaders of the underground revolution with a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. Its circulation is limited by the inconvenient shortage of readers in Russia, but the lesson is plain enough: ancestry is another thing best kept underground. Inside the party, the Bolshevik–Menshevik quarrel is occasionally simplified into the more manageable form of Russian versus Jew, and Lenin sees no urgent need to object. Nor does he protest when Stalin, whom he is at present encouraging—and who is already known in the party as the Old Man’s left leg—writes of the Mensheviks as a “purely Jewish faction” and the Bolsheviks as a “Russian faction”, concluding with the suggestion that perhaps the party itself is in need of a pogrom. The small, yellow-eyed Georgian has, by the end of the sentence, become Russian. One can see the appeal. Stalin’s remark comes in his report on the London Party Congress, whose undeniable star is Trotsky. Trotsky has the additional misfortune not merely of being Jewish but of looking splendidly so; not merely of being a revolutionary but of looking exactly as a revolutionary ought to look. Slender, handsome, mane flying, forehead broad, profile sharp, fashionable spectacles flashing: worse still, he speaks with such force that even his opponents rise to applaud him. How is one to compete with that? Ideology will only take one so far. Sooner or later one reaches for ancestry. The Jewish card lies conveniently to hand. Lenin sees to it that Stalin is invited to every congress.
