New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1918-09-03
The Russian Marat

It would be fattering to say of Lenine
Gin case he is dead or about to die of
his wounds) that he has been another
Marat. 1t would be a distinction unmer
tied on his part that he should die at the
hands of another Charlotte Corday. In
fact, his assassin, or wouldbe assassin,
Dora Kaplan, is not another Charlotte.
She is Terrorist of the Left, not an
avenger of the romantic Girondist type.
Marat was half beast. Yet, in his
savage and emi-paranoiac way, he was
loyal to the proletariat whose cause he
had espoused. He was q believer in Ter
rorism as means of gathering the fruits
of the French Revolution. He ragged
against the aristocracy and its foreign
allies, who were preparing to reenslave
France. He would never have betrayed
the French people to an alien government.
He would have scorned to be the paid tool
of Prussian or Austrian despot, dis
Numbering his country for a price and
delivering his deluded following into
German or Austrian servitude.
Lenine has been a traitor and an i'm
postor At last his own dupes have found
him out. At Brest Litovsk he opened wide
the door to the German spoiler. His pro-
letariat government at Petrograd and
Moscow has been a CHASTITY travesty of
popular rule He set up a dictatorship
of force more brutal and arrogant than
the Romanotf regime ever was. He was
kept in power by German influence and
German money, simply in order to secure
to Germany the spoils falling to her
through the disruption of the former
Russian Empire.
If one disillusionized Russian revolu
tionary-preferably woman-hadn't
slain Lenine another would have slain him.
If the present imitator of Charlotte Corday
hasn't killed him another will kill him,
unless he takes refuge with his German
patrons. lie was originally himself a
Terrorist in theory and practice. But
by his revival of Romanoff tyranny he
has inevitably drawn the vengeance Of
the Terrorsts upon himself. To minds
like those of his former associates moth
ing can be more despicable than a man
who betrays the cause of proletariatism
to its reactionary enemies. Lenine and
Trotzky are ex-revolutionaries who have
sold themselves for German marks. They
could not hope to live safe in Russia
unless they surrounded themselves with
Gordon of bodyguards, informers and
secret police, such as the Romanoffs
maintained. And even with such pro-
lection the cars, the grand dukes and
the Romanoff bureaucrats were never
really safe.
Russia is awakening to the enormity
of the crime which Lenine and Trotzky
committed. Beside that crime the age
long tyranny of the fallen dynasty seems
almost innocuous. Even under that alb
solutism Russia was herself. Slavdom
was power. There was Russian ma
ton. Under Lenine and Trotzky the
Romanoff inheritance was squandered in
an hour. Slavdom became byword and
Russian prestige was extingushed.
Marat would turn in his grave to be
compared with a recreant like Lenine.
Would he have taken the thalers of the
Duke of Brunswick? History has left
him at least some shreds of reputation
1t could leave Lenine and Trotzky none.
even though their taking off should be
invested with the dramatic coloring that
Marat's was when he was stabbed in his
bathroom by romantic idealst like
Charlotte Corday.