Page:Through Bolshevik Russia - Snowden - 1920.djvu/123

 At the same time, I believe him to be altogether too sane to be ready to throw away when it offers opportunities of really beginning to develop the Communist State.

Lenin, like all the Communists, conveys the impression of awful sureness of himself, of an immovable and overpowering self-confidence. It is not the smiling self-complacency, the shallow cocksureness of that very common individual amongst us who is sure that wisdom will die with him. It is the deadly certainty that he is right and everybody who differs from him is wrong, of the scholar and fanatic who would sacrifice his own head as readily as he would sacrifice yours in the believed interests of the thing he loves. The war has proved the danger of entrusting the world's training and the affairs of State to professors. And Lenin is a Love all things the keen-brained, dogmatic professor in politics.

Radek is a different kind of personality. His speech and his movements are quick. In appearance he is a thin, ascetic-looking man, with side-whiskers and curly hair, and looks not unlike a picture of an early Victorian squire. He has long, thin, nervous hands, very eloquent in gesture. Conversation with him is a monologue, in which he runs on endlessly from one subject to another, and from one point to another, anticipating your