One mid-October evening in 1927, three friends were dining at the Casenave Restaurant in the Rue Boissy-d’Anglas in Paris. They were Christian Rakovsky, the Soviet ambassador to France, Panait Istrati, the Rumanian who wrote in French and had been a …
While Lenin was still alive, Soviet writers and artists found it quite easy to obtain permission and the means to go to the West and stay for a few weeks or even longer. As Napoleon said to Savary, who succeeded …
Solzhenitsyn’s most recent book, Lenin in Zurich, is presented as one that will enrich the great historical fresco begun with his August 1914. Although the author calls his current work a novel, he is careful to affirm its historicity by …
Lenin’s death in 1924 produced in the Soviet Union a flood of apologies, memoirs and eulogies, no less sincere because their author had criticized Lenin on previous occasions. Among them was Gorky, who paid tribute to Lenin in many moving …
The celebrated episode of the trip of the `Bolshevik leaders” across Germany within a “sealed train” has caused as much ink to run as the accusation of being in the pay of the Kaiser, examined below. But the episode is …
