Disappointed Rebel

MY LIFE As A REBEL--Angelica Balabanoff--Harper ($3.75).

Thirty-four years ago, an ardent young Russian girl named Angelica Balabanoff spoke at a Socialist meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland. It was no new experience for her. She had left her comfortable, stuffy, middle-class home at 17; studied at Brussels, Berlin, Rome; joined the Italian Socialist Party; edited a women's paper. As a speaker she had been cheered by radicals and chased by reactionaries until she lost all self-consciousness on the platform. But during her speech at Lausanne, she was distracted by the most wretched-looking human being who had ever appeared in her audiences--an agitated, unkempt, timid man with bitter eyes and a large jaw, who twisted his hat nervously. Angelica was so disturbed that after the meeting she spoke to him. He was sick, starving, and had fled Italy to escape military service. Angelica volunteered to help him, asked his name. "Benito Mussolini." he replied.

Mussolini was only one Socialist who disappointed Angelica in the course of her long revolutionary life, but none of the others--Trotsky, Stalin, Zinoviev. the Russian Revolutionist Georgy Plekhanov, Karl Radek--renounced his beliefs so completely. Nor did Angelica work so closely with the others as with Mussolini in the days when the future dictator was editor of the Italian Socialist Party's central newspaper. Her picture of him-- brooding, explosive, egocentric, enigmatic, alternately violent and timid--is the most interesting part of My Life as a Rebel, which is a long (324 pages) record of defeats and betrayals, written with a quiet stoicism unique in angry revolutionary literature.

Although Angelica Balabanoff tells many a damaging story about famed revolutionists, harshly criticizes the Soviet Union, her book gives no comfort to conservatives. At Lenin's insistence she became first secretary of the Third International. But intrigues, double-dealing -- principally by Zinoviev -- and unscrupulous measures taken to discredit opponents soon disillusioned her. No hero-worshiper, she considers Lenin chiefly responsible for the weaknesses of the modern revolutionary movement, says she often remonstrated with him about ruthless Bolshevik tactics. Closing one eye, he would stare at her "with an expression which was more sad than sardonic" and ask, "Comrade Angelica, what use can life make of you?" like a father addressing a naive child.

Lenin, she says, could control Zinoviev, Radek, Trotsky, but she insists that he disliked Zinoviev, despised cynical Radek, whom she calls a vulgar politician, and distrusted Trotsky's ambition. As for Stalin, she says he was so little known in 1919 that nobody had any attitude toward him. Her version of Bolshevik history is that Lenin employed Zinoviev to split the labor movement of other countries by all manner of intrigue, that such methods became habitual, were employed by Trotsky as much as by Stalin, led to recent Russian trials. Although Angelica Balabanoff has not lost her faith in Socialism, believes that "the international labor movement can be built again," her disappointments make a melancholy record.

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