War Lord's Grief

Came the news that War Lord Trotzky, who is convalescing at Tiflis in Georgia (extreme southwest Russia), only recently received the news of Nikolai Lenin's death (TiME, Jan. 28). Said he:

"Lenin is here no longer, Lenin is here no longer.

"The mysterious forces that regulate the functioning of the blood vessels have smashed this life to pieces. . . .

"How many among them would not have hesitated to shed the last drop of their own blood ... in order to revive the functioning of his blood vessels!...

"And Lenin is here no longer.

"Is it believable ? Is it imaginable ? Is it comprehensible?

"The working people of the world will not be able to grasp it. ... For more than ten months the second onslaught of the illness continued. ... As the physicians bitterly remarked, the blood vessels were playing with our Lenin all the time. . . .

"And Ilich is here no longer. The party is orphaned. The working class is orphaned. . . . How shall we go forward now? Shall we find the way? Shall we not go wrong? For, comrades, Lenin is no longer with us.

"Lenin is here no longer. . . .

"Our hearts are so stricken by boundless grief, just because we all had the good fortune to be contemporaries of Lenin. . . . Our party is the collective leader of the workers. In each of us lives a little bit of Lenin.

"How are we to go ahead? With the lantern of Leninism in our hands! Shall we find the right road ? Through our collective thought we shall find it.

"Tomorrow and the day after, for weeks and months, we shall ask ourselves if it is really true that Lenin is no longer among us. ... For even then will his death appear to us as an unbelievable, impossible, monstrous, arbitrary act of nature.

"So let the pain that we now feel be felt in our hearts every time we remember that Lenin is no longer among us. Let it be an admonition, a warning, a call that means this to every one of us:

"Comrades, brothers, Lenin is no longer among us. Farewell, Ilich! Farewell, leader!"