XII. WORLD REVOLUTION

At the Hotel Lux in Moscow, in the winter of 1922, there is a moody night watchman, water damage and room for the most important communists in the world. On 4 November, the IV World Congress of the Communist Inter-national will be opened by a speech from the absent Vladimir Ilich Lenin. The Soviet power is celebrating the first five years of its existence, the supreme comrade explains to the IV World Congress of the Comintern, the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. It is more stable than ever. The Civil War is over. The first economic successes have been recorded. It is the greatest honour for Soviet Russia to help the workers of the world in their fight to overthrow capitalism. Victory will be ours.

 

Long live the Communist International!

 

Gramsci beats his hands together mechanically, they feel numb, he looks around the room and is surprised to find that he is still functioning in the row together with all the others clapping and glowing. The red of the flag pulses before his eyes, Terracini is trying to whisper something but he can’t hear it. The next comrade in a rotten suit steps up, unbuttons his jacket. Giulia’s laughter. She is a hundred kilometres away, I’d like to write you thousands of things, Giulia, but it’s not possible, a few of them you can possibly divine.

But no! Giulia isn’t missing a thing here. Gramsci tries to concentrate on the speech, his comrade up on the podium is like a marionette, his sentences swish arduously and unclearly out over the hall. ‘Everything is there and possible,’ the speaker, ‘we only have to grab it, form it, we cannot allow ourselves to become weak in that very moment in which a new reality, a new world, is being born.’ He swings his hand in order to draw an image of a world in the air for his listeners.

Giulia’s face. Gramsci cannot remember it exactly, has even forgotten some of the most important features: the transition of the bridge of her nose, the height of her forehead, her proportions when he looks at her close up, how her profile appears to everyone else.

What he remembers: how big her eyes are when she wants to convince him of something and how she draws the lids tight when she’s trying to find a way to express herself. The height of her forehead, a hand’s width, when he checks to see if she has a fever or not, and the curve of his fingers when he runs his hand through her hair. He could gaze at her forehead for an entire afternoon. The slight wrinkles, not yet buried deep in the skin but above it, like soft caresses. The inlets of her temples. The muscles playing beneath. He knows the colour of her tongue and the form of her lips when she speaks, and as long as she speaks—and later too, much much later—her voice ignites a fragile euphoria in him.

He must lean against someone and that happens to be Umberto Terracini who does not understand what’s wrong with the man he has known for so long! Terrifyingly independent, a sharp thinker, amusing, charming and bound to nothing and no one, that was Gramsci. But just what in the world was this little heap next to him now, sunk against his shoulder?

Later, at dinner, Gramsci seems tired, ill and worried about what’s happening in Italy. Following the march on Rome, Mussolini was arranging his empire. Communists were being assaulted, taken away, arrested, beaten to death. The Revolution that was right there did indeed come. Just from the wrong side.

‘We have to get back with the socialists, alone against the fascists we are too weak,’ he says to Grigory Zinoviev who nods and sticks a dripping pelmini into his mouth.

‘Explain that to Amadeo. For him the socialists are no better than the fascists.’

‘If we believe that socio-fascism is our enemy, then we are blind to that which will really kill us. We must fight against fascism. Against pure fascism. Against Mussolini’s troops. Why can’t you all understand that?’

‘We’re living on a volcano,’ he explains to Terracini who is fanning himself with a napkin.

‘The socialists are breaking our backs,’ he counters.

‘The socialists, at most, are hurting our pride.’

‘Revolution in Hungary, Estonia, Ukraine. In Germany, Italy, France and England, do you all still believe that?’ he asks Amadeo Bordiga. ‘The World Revolution will not advance all that quickly from here. That’s nothing more than a head game birthed in the halls of the Comintern, in the rooms of the Hotel Lux, over the map lying next to Lenin’s sickbed.’

‘If we buckle, then it won’t succeed,’ Amadeo replies. ‘No, it won’t. But if we remain steadfast, Antonio, the state will hollow out the fascists, just you wait, the Revolution will be inescapable. And you want to deal with the socialists now? Bravo, dear friend, then you are prohibiting everything yourself.’

‘You’re still trying to compare Italy with Russia. Give it a rest. Here all it took was taking over the switchboards of the state. Russia was a dying, feudalistic empire. Freeing a country from tsarism is completely different from toppling a bourgeois society. The bourgeoisie doesn’t control the instruments of power but thinking itself. That’s the difference, Bordiga, accept it. Even if we had the communists in the Quirinal, they still wouldn’t have won over the people, not by a long shot. They’ll continue to play cards on monstrously large oak tables, curse the heat in August and not change a thing about the domination of the bourgeoisie—which, outside the ministerial bureaus, continues to exist in people’s heads—while sealing deals with Mussolini and celebrating the Assumption on Ferragosto at their summer homes. At this moment, we cannot fight for the dictatorship of the working class,’ Gramsci says, ‘we have to do it for democracy.’

‘The socialists, Antonio, are in the same boat as the bourgeoisie,’ Bordiga counters. ‘If there’s anything red about them, it’s their lifejackets. That’s how cowardly they are. At the first hint of high waves, they’ll negotiate with anyone offering them a safe ship. With them, you’re just inviting the enemy into your own home.’ And with that Bordiga slips off to get some fresh air.

Comrade Rákosi, an idiot without an ounce of political understanding, sidles up to them. Gramsci should become chair of the PCI, he explains, laughing behind an outstretched hand, he should depose Bordiga. In any event, people wanted Bordiga out of the Comintern, he talks Gramsci into believing.

‘What rubbish, and dangerous on top of it! Bordiga will step down and trigger a crisis within the Party. And what will Avanti! do? It’ll whip up any and every difference of opinion and the Party will split apart once and for all.’

 

On 13 November, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin approaches the podium of the IV Congress of the Comintern. His appearance is greeted by thunderous applause, the comrades stand up and sing the Internationale. This is the final struggle / Let us group together. Lenin himself hears but little, he doesn’t look good and will not live to see any more struggles. His face is pale, his skin like paper, he looks as if he wanted to lend the decay of the class system and reactionary, petty bourgeois corruption a physical manifestation. Not disgust, but weakness; not shame, but frailty.

He is to speak about perspectives of the world revolution, but the topic is too broad, too large to tackle in one speech, the highest comrade decides and talks instead about the mistakes of the last few years, of the hasty outlines of the new economic policy that were to be the darkest hours for Soviet Russia and that almost meant the end of the victory of the revolutionaries. The workers were unhappy, the peasants rebelled, the famine remained. A crisis that almost destroyed the newly created organism. Our enemies will use these weaknesses and shatter and smash the masses, those who had simply hoped for a better tomorrow. Now barricades must be erected for the economy. State capitalism is a small, necessary place of retreat on the path to socialism.

‘I think we can say that Russian roubles are famous,’ Lenin explains, ‘if only for the reason that their number now in circulation exceeds a quadrillion.’ Laughter in the hall. ‘That is something! It is an astronomical figure. I am sure that not everyone here knows what this figure signifies.’ Laughter. ‘But we do not think that the figure is so very important even from the point of view of economic science, for the noughts can always be crossed out.’ Laughter.

But that’s not only something to laugh about, Gramsci thinks, and once again feels the cold in his head. Why wasn’t there anyone here to rub a hand across his back, to support him?

‘That is why I think,’ the head comrade explains, ‘that the outlook for the world revolution—a subject which I must touch on briefly—is favourable. And given a certain definite condition, I think it will be even better.’

We cannot allow ourselves to believe in a kind of determinism, Gramsci thinks. When we cannot negotiate with history, we will become apathetic slaves.

‘The most important thing in the period we are now entering is to study,’ Lenin says. ‘We are studying in the general sense. They, however, must study in the special sense, in order that they may really understand the organization, structure, method and content of revolutionary work. If they do that, I am sure the prospects of the world revolution will be not only good but excellent.’

Deafening applause.

 

That night, Gramsci lies awake in bed. Lenin’s words echo through the darkness. The outlook for the world revolution. Not only good. But excellent. Excellent. Excellent. He sees Lenin’s elongated chin, Chicherin’s big, round, Chechen eyes, Eugenia with a flagstaff affixed to her shoulder, a red flag fluttering, then a shot, smelling like blood and rust, comes out of the rod and melts. ‘The organization!’ Lenin cries. ‘Construction!’ ‘Method!’ His fist hisses through the air. A small, red bullet bounces over the wall, hits the earth and splits apart like a raw egg. Letters flow out and spread across the ground.

Sleep, Gramsci thinks. Please let me sleep. He is emotionally exhausted, thoughts continue to rush through his head, and then this emptiness, this continual loss of memory. The six months in Silver Wood have not helped him to get well, all of Reverend’s pieces of advice have simply kept him from getting worse. And now he is lying here and cannot find a way to fall asleep, a building without any doors or windows. So much fatigue in his eyes, behind his forehead, so much wakefulness around him. So many thoughts. The same thoughts over and over again. Cold at his back. The mattress doesn’t feel right, too soft and too hard at the same time. He tosses and turns. Outside, exuberant strangers are jeering. Young people. People in love. People swaying hand-in-hand across Moscow’s cobblestones. Soldiers who just a few months before had crudely raped emaciated farm girls but now held dignified ones in their arms, carefully helping the latter up the stairs into bourgeois homes where all signs of former rule have been torn down: wallpaper, curtains, bookshelves.

Gramsci feels the emptiness in his back. There is nothing there. There is no one to lay their arms across his shoulders, run their fingers along his coracoid, and since learning it could be different, he cannot handle it. Perhaps it was only a moment, long gone, but he will not be able to fall asleep if no one is there and no one comes and lies down next to him and all the noise is pushing through the glass, the jeering of the love-struck soldiers, the war is over, the war was victorious, the war had destroyed their lives, and twists and turns in Gramsci’s head.

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‘It is simply the following, Giulia,’ he writes the next morning. ‘I am exhausted. The days and hours and speeches are wearing me down. I cannot think clearly. When you are away, I come apart like a rotten mushroom. If I wanted to put it coarsely: You are not good for me. A man cannot be everything in life: a happy man and a driven one. A love-struck idiot and a clever revolutionary. Can you understand that?’

He must get away from her, she isn’t good for him, she isn’t good for his work, and what’s more important: his work or Giulia? The world or the head of a pin? The prospects for world revolution will be excellent. Study. Giulia is pushing all of that away from him. Because she has to be everything, because she cannot handle simply being a part to join up with all the others. Giulia is everywhere, she is sitting between the lines he writes, she is sitting in the papers he reads and barely does he move to take hold of her, she turns away and is gone. In the end, what is he getting done between so much of Giulia, between so little of her? His thoughts had been clear, his theses brilliant, but now he is stumbling about like a three-legged dog in the bushes. It is madness, the past number of weeks have completely wiped him out. He has no longer been able to think, to sleep, to push forward what should have been pushed forward. He has simply staggered between his slight happiness, his slight unhappiness. But we cannot be everything, Giulia my child. There are more important things. There is the Party, there is work. We cannot forget the world around us.

He takes a deep breath. He thinks he is taking a deep breath. That’s right, he has a duty, by now this is his life. And Giulia does not fit. He looks out onto the snow-dusted street before the Hotel Lux, he thinks about Lenin’s speech and his thoughts are once again as cool as winter air. Then he takes the letter and burns it over the ashtray.