While everyone is debating politics, Lenin, like Hitler, meticulously plans how to actually seize power, which, as Solzhenitsyn’s vast canvas makes clear, is, as they say, lying in the streets waiting to be picked up (as it was in Weimar Berlin). Indeed, in chaotic, disorderly, vulnerable moments, the politicians and the intelligentsia can be paralyzed by the singular and fanatical people who have true focus, relying on faltering institutions to stop or slow them.
