1 V. Vodovozov, 'Moe znakoms tvo s Leninym', Na chuzoi storone, vol. XII (Prague, 192 5), pp. 176 – 177. Vodovozov knew Lenin person ally in 1891 – 92, but was writing more than 30 years after the event in an e´migre´ journal. A heavily edited versi on of Vodovozov's account of Lenin's attitude to the famine and the anti -famine NGO was included in the bookl et published by the Marx – Engels – Lenin Institute, Lenin v Samare 1889 – 1893 (Moscow, 1933), pp. 98 – 101. The edit or argued (pp. 98 – 99) that Vodovozov's account had 'a particularly tendentious character' and was quite misleading. According to the editor, Lenin did not oppose bourgeois-liberal elements feeding the hungry, organising public works etc., but did oppose seeing these activities as suitable for political exiles and revolutionary youth, as a contribution to the revolu tion and the overthrow of the....autocracy. Lenin, according to the editor, saw these activities as a distraction from the revolution and advantageous for the ruling class since they lessened peasant dissatisfaction and despair. However, even this publication agrees that Lenin though t that feedi ng the starving was not appropriate for him and his comrades and was politically harmful. According to Belyakov, who did not know Lenin personally and was writing in a Soviet book in the Khrushchev era, it was not the famine which Lenin regarded as progressive but the consequences of the famine. 'Vladimir Il'ich had the bravery to declare that the consequences of the famine [of 1891 – 92]—the growth of an industrial proletariat, this gravedigger of the bourgeois system—were progressive, because they facilitated Russian indus try and brought us to our final goal, to socialism via capitalism.. . The famine, in destroying the peasant economy, simultaneously destroys faith not only in the Tsar but also in God and in time without doubt pushes the peasants on the path of revolution and makes the victory of the revolution easier'. (A. Belyakov, Yunost' vozhdya (Moscow, 1960), pp. 78 – 79). The relevance of Lenin's position in 1891 in understanding the position of the Soviet leadership in 1932– 33 was long ago argued by Conquest; see R. Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow (London, 1986), p. 234.
