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...
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