More from "Finland Station"

Here's Wilson with an anecdote about Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian expatriate revolutionist, rival to Marx, proponent of universal destruction and father of anarchism. Bakunin was passing through a German town where the peasants were revolting, but just [Wilson quoted A. I. Herzen] "making an uproar around the castle, not knowing what to do. Bakunin got out of his conveyance, and, without wasting any time to find out what the dispute was about, formed the peasants into ranks and instructed them so skillfully ... that by the time he resumed his seat to continue his journey, the castle was burning on all four sides."

I had never had any idea what anarchism was all about, but now I gather it stems from a belief that the human world is so rotten that it would be best destroyed.

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Am now in the last part of "To the Finland Station", which part tells the stories of Lenin and Trotsky. My perception is that Wilson's writing is less vibrant here, as if he were mainly paraphrasing traditional Communist Party accounts of their "great founders". Wilson writes of Trotsky in the present tense--it seems that Trotsky must still have been alive when the book came out in 1940, though he was to be assassinated later that year by an agent of Stalin.

In the introduction to the 1971 edition, Wilson attempts to balance his earlier benign depiction of Lenin by relating many examples of Lenin's cruelty and contempt toward his opponents. For the first tiime Wilson suggests that revolutionary ideals may have been tools in aid of a fierce pursuit of power on Lenin's part, rather than his primary motivation.