När Lenin kommer på tal brukar många — t.ex. Richard Gellately i boken Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe — framhäva hans känslokyla och grymhet. Människors lidande och död verkade inte ha bekymrat denne revolutionär särskilt mycket. Jag blev därför lite förbluffad då jag läste den slovenske filosofen Slavoj Žižeks utvärdering:

Lenin’s slanderers like to evoke his famous paranoiac reaction at listening to Beethoven’s appasionata (he first started to cry, then claimed that a revolutionary cannot afford to let himself go to such sentiments, because they make him too weak, wanting to pat the enemies instead of mercilessly fighting them) as the proof of his cold self-control and cruelty – however, even at its own terms, is this accident effectively an argument AGAINST Lenin? Does it not rather bear witness to an extreme sensitivity for music that needs to be kept in check in order to continue the political struggle? Who of today’s cynical politicians still displays even a trace of such a sensitivity? Is not Lenin here at the very opposite of the high-ranked Nazis who, without any difficulty, combined such a sensitivity with the extreme cruelty in taking political decisions (suffice it to recall Heydrich, the holocaust architect, who, after a hard day’s work, always found time to play with his comrades Beethoven’s string quartets) – is not the proof of Lenin’s humanity that, in contrast to this supreme barbarism, which resides in the very unproblematic unity of high culture and political barbarism, he was still extremely sensitive to the irreducible antagonism between art in power struggle?

Nej, jag tycker inte det. Trots allt strävade han efter att förtrycka denna sin känslighet; vidare är frågan i vilken mån känslighet och öppenhet för ömhet och värme på ett område indikerar något om en person på andra områden.