– Loll.
– Since we will soon be in Russia, and the great, necessary, smart Parvus will remain here, you can not appear before the border guards in the present form: you will be recognized immediately and may be arrested.
– How many passports do you have for other names? the chief asked.
– It’s not about the passports. I have twenty passports in stock. And five for you, Vladimir Ilyich. You can read Cocococo, and suddenly you find out? So I suggest that you go in this dress, to look like an old woman in a hunched form with a passport in the name of Peskodayki, to appear before the Russians border guard. And before the Swedish ones, too. I need a wig with long white hair, a change of women’s shoes, and it would be nice to knock out one or two teeth and claim that you are my servant.
– What about my beard?” Lenin asked.
– You’ll have to shave it off, put a thick layer of cream on your face, and put lines on your neck and cheeks. All this must be done in the name of the world revolution. The revolution cannot remain without a leader.
Lenin paused, then went into the forecastle and said:
“Comrades, Ganetsky and I are going to a safe house.
“We can’t let you go alone,” Radek yelled.
“You can send comrade Zinoviev or Dzerzhinsky as a guard.
– Dzerzhinsky, Dzerzhinsky, – everyone supported.
“And I want to,” Inessa Armand burst into tears.
Three Jews went to a beauty salon and presented their revolutionary ideas about the appearance of the leader, but the masseurs and hairdressers just shrugged: they say that we have a beauty salon and we can not make a decent person ugly.
“And this is the freak,” ganetsky said, pointing at Lenin and taking out a wad of money. – Make him a real freak, but so that all Russia applauds him.
No sooner said than done. Lenin returned to the forecastle and no one recognized him.
– Have you replaced the leader of the world revolution with an old woman?” We’ll hang you right there. It’s a real Scarecrow. He also has a limp on one leg. And it stinks like hell!
– Tovah … look for it, the job is done great. None of the king’s satraps did not know. Long live the socialist party …evolution!
Friends jumped up from their seats and began to jump, and Sokolnikov, who had not declassified his Jewish name, loosened the belt on his trousers and began to molest the revolutionary Lilina. The revolutionary woman grabbed him by a twig and dragged him into the vestibule. Inessa also approached Lenin, but was stopped.
– Yes, this is same-sex love, this is lesbianism, you can not allow such marital relations, – comrade Nadia could not stand it.
“Comrade Nadia, don’t worry. Before the overthrow of tsarism, the proletarian masses… in short, let them unite. Come On, Inessa. We have a separate room.
The chief and his girlfriend were accompanied by friends with thunderous applause.
23
Lenin, along with a group of associates in the number of 32 people who were hiding like mice in burrows, occupied the car in Stockholm and through Finland, late in the evening, on April 3, arrived in Petrograd. Everyone was trembling like an aspen leaf in bad weather, and above all the leader himself for the fate of the country where they were going to seize power. No country, neither Germany nor the United States, guaranteed complete victory and security. The leader was a spicy look. Long before arriving in the capital of Russia, he did not take off women’s clothing. Inessa laughed at him, as if he were not in a separate compartment of an armored car, but on a battlefield with a superior enemy force. And Lenin perceived this laughter as an evil fate, but puffed up, but would show his colleagues his heroism.
“A kerchief on your forehead, it’s like a bull’s, ha-ha-ha!” cover him up, then take everything off. You are well guarded.
“Where’s the guard, where’s the guard, Kaiser?” Oh, well done, I’ll give him ten marks when the revolution wins in Russia, this stupid country.
“The Kaiser has long since forgotten you. I have a machine gun in the corner ready, covered with my sock.
“Do you think those greedy people will throw me off a train somewhere in the desert, Inessa?” I don’t believe any of them. To nobody.
– Not experience. They are nothing without you. They have no education, no profession, nothing, even watchmen and midwives will not take everyone. So you shouldn’t have put that on.
“But it’s a conspiracy, a conspiracy. The chief has no right to take such risks. You, Inessa, look closely to see if someone is twirling a finger at his temple? In this case, they may decide: why do we need such a brilliant leader? Everything is fine with Lenin: two bags of money in the corner, the agreement with Germany, even on one page, in an inner pocket. Only at my command, only at my request, will the Germans send their soldiers disguised in proletarian leather jackets, or even in the officer’s uniform of the Russian army, to organize a coup in Petrograd. And yet, and yet, better a conspiracy. Even if I remain completely naked, and I am carried wrapped in a sheet from place to place, I will still remain a leader. All the cards of the future revolution are in my hands, like a mouse in a Vice.
This time Inessa shuddered and nodded her head to indicate that she agreed and asked no more questions. She was afraid not only to ask the next question, but also to hear the answer to it, because the answer always made her shiver, as if her lover, when answering, was playing with a small toy filled with explosives, and from which a bird could fly out and break the bones of all revolutionaries, including the leader of the world revolution.
It is better to do something else, for example, to expand the outstanding work of the leader called” What to do?” and pretend to be reading.
As soon as the train stopped at Finlandsky station, two burly Latvians entered the car, took the leader in their arms in female attire, like a rooster with clipped wings, and carried him out of the car and put on their feet at the Finland station. Lenin grunted something and looked around.
But instead, he was simply kidnapped and almost forcibly escorted to the “Tsar’s” room, where he was officially greeted by the Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, N. S. Chkheidze, and the Minister of labor, M. T. Skobelev, both Mensheviks. Lenin’s eyes bulged and he turned away, looking at the ceiling as if nothing that was happening concerned him in the least. He didn’t want to engage in conversation with anyone.
I need an armored car, he demanded. – I must make a historic speech for the proletariat of Russia and the whole world.
“Please,” Chkheidze, the Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, said in a disappointed voice.
The two Latvians picked him up again, and while they were building a rostrum out of rotten planks, he mumbled under his breath, then ran around the corner, doused him with a stream, and fired three more cannonades.
The bleachers, as such, did not work, he was asked to stand on slightly rotten boards, in many places propped up with pegs driven into the ground with sledgehammers. On these boards were two empty barrels upside down. Two more planks were placed on the barrels to form a raised platform called the tribune.
But the little man had to be lifted. Standing again on the boards, and putting the summary again on the boards, perched on barrels, stretched out his hand to the sky and began to deliver his first chaotic speech in Russia.
– Yes ZD… ha … socialist …evolution!!!
Cabs and strollers thought that some madcap woman was making the people laugh. No one could have imagined that there, on this very spot, a monument would be erected,