20
PETER WEISS
tional liberation movements. Even rebellion can be made to yield
profits.
PARVUS: Vladimir Ilyich, you should be able to appreciate my tactics.
I'm exploiting the situation in imperial Germany. Capitalism shall be
invited to dig its own grave.
LENIN: I know your plans, Parvus. A niche for yourself as reformer
and savior of the Russian revolution. Go away. Tell your foreign
ministry we are not for sale.
PARVUS:
If
you imagine the German proletariat is thinking of revolu–
tion, you're deluding yourself. I tell you, there'll be no revolution in
Germany as long as the war lasts. That can happeR only in Russia.
I can let you have a million roubles at once.
LENIN: Get out. Don't come near me again.
PARVUS: I despise political outcasts who starve for their ideals. What
sort of a life is this? Living in filthy rooms. In attics. You, Lenin,
sleep on top of a sausage factory. I know, the stink of rotting flesh
makes you mad. But hold on. Hold on.
PARVUS
goes off.
TROTSKY,
who has been lying on the camp bed,
sits up.
LENIN
comes forward.
LENIN: Scoundrel. Traitor. An awful example of the collapse of the
second International.
RADEK
laughs.
RADEK: Profiteer. Speculator. But he's got twenty million Swiss francs
in his pocket. We'll need him one day.
RAKOVSKY: We shouldn't mistrust him. He's smuggled a lot of com–
rades through Germany. He thinks all problems can be solved with
money. Maybe he's right. He's the only one who can help us get
back home when the time comes.
LENIN: Certainly we need clever people, Rakovsky. But they must have
clean hands.
RADEK
regards his hands, laughing.
RADEK: Have we got clean hands? Haven't we robbed mail coaches and
trains, raided banks, dispossessed tradesmen and factory owners? Rev–
olution eats money. Haven't we fought side by side with bandits and
sat with them in prison cells? Did we ever ask who was with us
setting traps or laying bombs? Haven't rogues and pimps and thieves
gone to the gallows singing the Red Flag? Don't the social outcasts
belong to us too? The lowest of the low? Wasn't it you, Vladimir
Ilyich, who laughed at Rosa when she complained of the brutality
we thought necessary? Remember Parvus when we come to power,
when we make treaties and alliances with German, French, British
and American supergangsters.
