10
PARTISAN REVIEW
have joined forces
if
the Soviet Union had not decided to prevent it,
by direct orders to the German Communists.
Now,
if
you ask why the Soviet revolution succeeded: this was in
large measure due to the genius of Lenin as a man of action.
If
Lenin
had been run over by a train and had not been there in 1917, I do not
believe that Trotsky, Stalin, Kamenev, Zinoviev could have made a
successful Soviet revolution. I don't know what would have hap–
pened. There might have been a civil war; you might have ended
up with a right-wing or a left-wing regime, but certainly not with
Leninism.
If Churchill had not been alive in 1940, it is possible that a
German invasion of Britain might have been successful-at least in
the short run-and things would have been very different. I have, at
times, been accused of exaggerating the role of individuals in history. I
do not
think
that I do. It seems clear to me that
if
Hitler had not taken
it into his head to attack Russia, the situation in Europe would be
totally different now. Of course, people cannot operate against condi–
tions that they cannot change; of course, the conditions that make par–
ticular operations possible must exist, and the man who matters is the
man who, in some fashion, instinctively or rationally, understands the
main factors involved-such factors are not something that can be
thought or wished away. This is true. But the explosion of what is
called the
critical
mass
can be caused by the act of an individual or a
group of individuals. Yet these people need not have done what they
did;
in
that case the critical mass might have remained quiescent.
When Engels,
if
it was he, said that
if
Napoleon had not existed a
thousand other people of smaller stature would have ultimately pro–
duced the same result, I do not accept this. Somebody once said about
the coin of the nineteenth century called the
Napo/£on d'Or:
Change
from a Napoleon is not a Napoleon. Most historians today tend to
believe in the decisive influence of impersonal factors in history,
whether they are Marxist or not. What I have just said would be
regarded by them as a naive, old-fashioned, individualistic, subjective
point of view, of no scientific validity. Yet I believe that there are turn–
ing points in history, when the acts of individuals, free to choose
among alternatives, can have vast consequences.
Krauze:
But wasn't there some element in Russian history, in its culture
and mentality, that appealed more to Marxism than to liberalism?
Berlin:
That is an exceedingly interesting question. When you have a
rather primitive country that comes into contact with a civilization
