30
PETER WEISS
TR.OTSKY: Is that confinued?
TEL. OPERATOR: Not yet. But Kerensky has bolted.
SOLDIER 2: The women are still under cover.
SVERDLOV: Comrades, in a few hours the congress will begin. Let's go
into the chamber. Get things organized.
Most go off. Only
LENIN
and
TROTSKY
remain at front. At back
the telephone operator, and now and again messengers coming and
going.
LENIN
lies down on the camp bed.
TROTSKY
stretches out on
a row of chairs near him. A female worker puts a few military
coats over them.
LENIN : T he people in the town still think the workers are incapable of
running the state machinery. The old machinery. As if that were im–
portant. The machinery won't be taken over, nor adapted. It will be
smashed. And what we put in its place, every worker will be able to
run that.
9. TWENTY-SIXTH OF OCTOBER
TROTSKY: Yet all the same. Far too few workers
ill
the government
ranks. Far too many intellectuals, orators.
LENIN: You mistrust the party leadership?
TROTSKY: Vladimir Ilyich, you know your decisions are accepted by
everybody. Sverdlov, Rykov, Bukharin, most of the others, they
couldn't believe their ears when you talked in May of a proletarian
revolution, no longer a middle-class democratic one. Many thought
you'd gone mad, that exile had robbed you of your sense of reality.
LENIN: Said I'd become a Trotskyist. Ha. Ha ha ha.
TROTSKY: They jibbed for a while. Then came over to the new course.
Kamenev, Zinoviev. We threatened to expel them, they threatened to
resign. But they stayed on. All of them. Unity was preserved. The
group leadership works. Because you are there. And because behind
it is the real power. The workers, the soldiers.
LENIN : You think, if the White Guards were to kill you and me, the
party would collapse?
TROTSKY: Let's hope they don't kill us.
LENIN: But if we weren't here? Do you think without us the October
Revolution could never have taken place?
They lie a few moments in silence.
SVERDLOV
comes in and looks at
them, then withdraws.
TROTSKY: Sometimes I think so. Sometimes not. In February the mon–
archy was simply swept away. In a huge outburst of energy. No lead–
ership then. After that the short period of bourgeois rule. A provi–
sional government with no links to the people. New initiatives from
