5
at
meme. Lenin, like Marx, spent seventeen years sitting in libraries,
poring over the records of the Paris Commune and researching the
techniques of street fighting. He was an exile from his mother-country,
forced to while away the hours between articles and books with a
handful of other radical Russians whose extremist views had also
gotten them tossed out of the land of their birth.
Lenin frequently took time out from his research and writing to
lecture at meetings and issue orders to underground cells back in the
motherland. But even these efforts, ironically, underscored his
isolation. At times, Lenin's communication with his co-conspirators
back home was so tenuous that, as Harrison Salisbury puts it, "He was
almost completely cut off from Russia."7
Lenin attempted to spread the idea of which he was the
incubator through a series of newspapers--one of those singularly
useful devices with which a meme reaches out and acquires power
over new minds. But the circulation of those papers was abysmal. For
example, during the First World War, Lenin put out Sotsial-Demokrat.
Only five or six copies of the debut issue straggled into Russia. Later,
things got better. Lenin managed to have twenty copies smuggled in a
pair of shoes. 8
Then a curious accident occurred. In 1905, Tsar Nicholas went to
war with Japan--a nation that had just climbed out of feudal
backwardness and built its first modern military machine. Astonishing
as it seems, the tsar lost nearly his entire Baltic fleet to the post-feudal
upstarts.9 A moment of defeat is a great time for an ambitious idea to
seize the minds that are fleeing from the precepts of a luckless leader.
The result was a revolution. Angry crowds rampaged in the streets of
Petrograd calling for the tsar's befuddled head.
But Marx's fragile idea was trapped, unable to seize the
opportunity. Why? Lenin and his friends were too busy squabbling to
join the revolution, much less lead it. Fortunately for the meme lodged
in their minds, fate would give the quarrelers a second chance. After
first, seemed pretty wretched prospects for the multiplication of a
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