    5

    at

    meme.  Lenin, like Marx, spent seventeen years sitting in libraries,

    poring over the records of the Paris Commune and researching the

    techniques of street fighting.  He was an exile from his mother-country,

    forced to while away the hours between articles and books with a

    handful of other radical Russians whose extremist views had also

    gotten them tossed out of the land of their birth.

    Lenin frequently took time out from his research and writing to

    lecture at meetings and issue orders to underground cells back in the

    motherland.  But even these efforts, ironically, underscored his

    isolation.  At times, Lenin's communication  with his co-conspirators

    back home was so tenuous that, as Harrison Salisbury puts it, "He was

    almost completely cut off from Russia."7

    Lenin attempted to spread the idea of which he was the

    incubator through a series of newspapers--one of those singularly

    useful devices with which a meme reaches out and acquires power

    over new minds.  But the circulation of those papers was abysmal.  For

    example,  during the First World War, Lenin put out Sotsial-Demokrat.

    Only five or six copies of the debut issue straggled into Russia.  Later,

    things got better.  Lenin managed to have twenty copies smuggled in a

    pair of shoes. 8

    Then a curious accident occurred.  In 1905, Tsar Nicholas went to

    war with Japan--a nation that had just climbed out of feudal

    backwardness and built its first modern military machine.  Astonishing

    as it seems, the tsar lost nearly his entire Baltic fleet to the post-feudal

    upstarts.9  A moment of defeat is a great time for an ambitious idea to

    seize the minds that are fleeing from the precepts of a luckless leader.

    The result was a revolution.  Angry crowds rampaged in the streets of

    Petrograd calling for the tsar's befuddled head.

    But Marx's fragile idea was trapped, unable to seize the

    opportunity.  Why?  Lenin and his friends were too busy squabbling to

    join the revolution, much less lead it.  Fortunately for the meme lodged

    in their minds, fate would give the quarrelers a second chance.  After

      first, seemed pretty wretched prospects for the multiplication of a

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