Lenin’s milieu in November 1916 is an émigré world of Russian revolutionaries in Zurich and Geneva: a world brilliantly depicted by Joseph Conrad in his 1911 novel Under Western Eyes. Conrad’s characters resemble, as one critic observed, “apes of a sinister jungle,” in which Conrad announces that “the spirit of Russia is the spirit of cynicism…. For that is the mark of Russian autocracy and of Russian revolt,” so that revolutions begin with idealism and end with fanaticism.[21]
