When Washington D. Vanderlip made his way to the nascent Soviet Union to secure mining rights in Siberia he wrote of his meeting with the nation’s first dictator, Vladimir Lenin, and revealed a Lenin that was seldom seen in print.
“On his desk was a copy of the New York Times, well-thumbed. ‘Do you really read it?’ I asked. ‘I read the New York Times, the Chicago American and the Los Angeles Times regularly,’ he said.’Through the New York Times I keep track of the atrocities, the assassinations and the new revolutions in Russia. Otherwise I wouldn’t know where to find them. The Chicago American tells me what is going on the in Middle West. And the Los Angeles Times – oh, by the way, wasn’t the office of that newspaper wrecked by dynamite some years before the European war? By friends of the McNamara brothers, labor agitators? His pronunciation of the Irish name was correct, and so were his facts. I told him so. ‘And that paper is owned by one of the members of your syndicate, is it not?’ I assented, and Lenin chuckled. ‘Well, now – that is amusing. I find your Mr. Chandler very refreshing. He writes that I am the bloodiest assassin the world has ever seen! Now I wonder’ – his head went on his hand and an impish look appeared in his eyes, as if he saw a joke a long way off – ‘I wonder if, when this mess is all cleaned up and I visit Los Angeles on a trip I want to take around the world – I wonder if you couldn’t arrange luncheon for me with Mr. Chandler? And – I say, would you invite Charlie Chaplin? I’ve always wanted to meet Charlie Chaplin. Doesn’t he too live in Los Angeles?'”
More about Lenin can be read here…
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