Red Alert Project
Utopia & Dystopia
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Foreword: different translations are hereby provided, each one by a different author, a different cultural environment, a different historical period. Layout and spacing match the original printout, explanatory notes have been also preserved. Some chapters have been heavily modified/censored/integrated by the author during the translation process. Please always refer to the russian original version, in case.

0 / I.1 / I.2 / I.3 / I.4 / I.5 / I.6 / I.7 / I.8 / II.1 / II.2 / II.3 / II.4 / II.5 / II.6 / II.7 / II.8 / II.9 / II.10 / III.1 / III.2 / III.3 / III.4 / III.5

[Русский]

[English] - [Български] - [Italiano]

ВЛАДИМИР ИЛЬИЧ ЛЕНИН
Владимир Владимирович Маяковский

Российской Коммунистической Партии посвящаю

VLADIMIR ILYICH LENIN
Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky

To the Russian Communist Party I dedicate this poem

Время -
       начинаю
              про Ленина рассказ.
Но не потому,
             что горя
                     нету более,
время
     потому,
            что резкая тоска
стала ясною
           осознанною болью.
Время,
      снова
           ленинские лозунги развихрь.
Нам ли
      растекаться
                 слёзной лужею, -
Ленин
     и теперь
             живее всех живых.
Наше знанье -
             сила
                 и оружие.

The time has come.
                  I begin
                         the story of Lenin.
Not
   because the grief
                    is on the wane,
but because
           the shock of the first moment
has become
          a clear-cut,
                      weighed and fathomed pain.
Time,
     speed on,
              spread Lenin's slogans in your whirl!
Not for us
          to drown in tears,
                            whatever happens.
There's no one
              more alive
                        than Lenin in the world,
our strength,
             our wisdom,
                        surest of our weapons.

EXPLANATORY NOTES

[1] Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky - then People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, staunch follower of Lenin.
[2] The House of Unions - historical public building in the centre of Moscow where Lenin lay in state in January 1924.
[3] Bromley's and Goujon's - foreign-owned engineering works in old Russia; after the revolution they were nationalised, renamed and considerably expanded.
[4] Yeliseyev - big food-dealer with huge shops in Russia's principal cities.
[5] Ivanovo-Voznesensk - big textile centre, scene of mass strikes and revolutionary upheavals for many years.
[6] Stepan Razin - leader of a peasant uprising in the 17th century.
[7] The French Prime Minister Thiers and General Galliffet headed the operations against the Paris Commune of 1871.
[8] Pere Lachaise - Paris cemetery where Communards were shot and buried.
[9] Name of earliest Marxist workers' organisation in Russia, embryo of the Communist Party.
[10] Vladimirka - highway by which political convicts were driven from Moscow to Siberia.
[11] S.R.s - Socialist-Revolutionaiy Party, a petty-bourgeois organisation preaching individual terror; after the October Revolution it degenerated into a gang of plotters opposing Soviet power.
[12] Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) - name used from 1918 to 1925.
[13] On January 9, 1905, the gendarmes, killing hundreds, scattered a peaceful manifestation carrying a petition to the tsar. The priest Gapon, its leader, had organised a whole system of police-sponsored workers' circles, spreading the belief that the tsar was unaware of their miserable conditions.
[14] Mukden, Tsushima - sites of land and naval battles in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), where tsarism sustained military defeat from the Japanese; one of the main events that set off the revolution of 1905, disclosing the decay of the regime.
[15] Presnya - industrial district in Moscow where the street-fighting began in 1905.
[16] On October 17, 1905, the tsar issued a manifesto promising certain civil rights - a subterfuge aimed at allaying popular indignation.
[17] Admiral Dubasov - governor-general of St. Petersburg, headed operations against the insurgent workers.
[18] Cheka - Extraordinary Commission headed by Dzerzhinsky, crushed counter-revolutionary plots in the first years of Soviet power.
[19] Some of the intellectuals earlier supporting the revolutionary cause lost heart after the defeat of the revolution and abandoned the militant principles of the movement, indulging in "God-seeking", i. e., religious mysticism.
[20] Georgi Plekhanov - prominent Marxist scholar and theoretician, who in 1905 drifted to the right and broke with Lenin.
[21] Poltava (Ukraine, 1709) and Plevna (Bulgaria, 1877) - cities near which big historic battles were won by Russian forces.
[22] The international socialist conference held in Zimmerwald (Switzerland, 1915) took a resolute stand against the imperialist war.
[23] Hohenzollern - dynastic name of German Kaiser Wilhelm II.
[24] Nevsky Prospekt - central thoroughfare of Petrograd.
[25] Dardanelsky, nee Milyukov - one of the leaders of the Russian counter-revolutionary forces, during World War I advocated war until victory and annexation of the Dardanelles straits.
[26] Prince Mikhail - brother of Nicholas II, made claims to the throne immediately after the tsars abdication.
[27] Kerensky, A. F. - Socialist-Revolutionary; from July 1917 headed the bourgeois Provisional Government. In August 1917 Premier Kerensky ordered Lenin's arrest, secretly planning his murder.
[28] Boris Savinkov - one of the leaders of the S.R. Party; after the revolution headed several counter-revolutionary plots.
[29] Mensheviks - opportunist minority in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. The Tell-Tale Cat - folklore cat that could speak and tell stories.
[30] Liteiny Prospekt - one of Petrograd's main streets.
[31] Kshesinskaya - prima ballerina of the Mariinsky Theatre, the tsar's favourite, whose palace, a present from the tsar, was taken over by the revolutionary masses.
[32] On July 3-4, 1917, Petrograd workers, soldiers and sailors held a peaceful demonstration demanding complete transfer of power to the Soviets. It was dispersed by gunfire at the orders of the Provisional Government.
[33] Zinoviev, G. Y. - joined the Russian Social-Democratic movement in 1901. After the Second Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. (1903) Zinoviev joined the Bolsheviks. After the Revolution, one of the organisers of the anti-Party Trotsky-Zinoviev bloc.
[34] Smolny - historic building accommodating the Petrograd Soviet: headquarters of the October uprising.
[35] Trotsky, L. D. - headed the Centrist trend in Russian Social-Democracy. On the eve of the October Revolution joined the Bolshevik Party. After the October Revolution headed the opposition elements fighting against the general Party line, against the Leninist programme of socialist construction. In 1927 Trotsky was expelled from the Party and deprived of Soviet citizenship for anti-Soviet activities.
[36] Aurora - famous battleship whose salvo signalled the beginning of the revolution.
[37] Dukhomn and Kornilov - white generals, Guchkov - Minister in the bourgeois Provisional Government; leaders of the planned coup aimed at preventing the imminent revolution.
[38] Decrees on Peace and Land and Decision on the Formation of a Workers' and Peasants' Government - the first to be issued by the revolutionary authorities.
[39] The young Soviet Government was forced to sign the inequitable Brest Treaty with the Germans, which lasted only until November 1918, when the revolution in Germany overthrew the Kaiser.
[40] posters with hydras - cartoons of the civil war depicted imperialism as a many-headed monster out to devour the Soviet Republic.
[41][42][43] General Denikin headed the first whiteguard onslaught from the South; soon after his defeat, Baron Wrangel entered the Ukrainian steppes from the Crimea. Admiral Kolchak led the white armies based in Siberia. With equipment and financial backing from abroad, they successively and simultaneously attempted to smother the Soviet Republic, the results of which are known.
[44] Allusion to an attempt on Lenin's life by the S.R. terrorist Kaplan who chose the moment when Lenin was leaving a workers' rally at the Michelson engineering works in Moscow, August 1918.
[45] NEP - abbreviation for the New Economic Policy proclaimed by Lenin, envisaging temporary permission of free private commerce, purposed to help the economy recuperate; the key positions in the economy being retained by the proletarian state.
[46] Mamontov - whiteguard general, notorious for brutality.
[47] Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin - one of the oldest followers of Lenin; Chairman of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee and later of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.
[48] Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya - Lenin's wife, staunch Bolshevik.
[49] Spasskaya - Kremlin clock-tower.
[50] Muralov, N. I. - then commander of the Moscow Military District.

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0 / I.1 / I.2 / I.3 / I.4 / I.5 / I.6 / I.7 / I.8 / II.1 / II.2 / II.3 / II.4 / II.5 / II.6 / II.7 / II.8 / II.9 / II.10 / III.1 / III.2 / III.3 / III.4 / III.5

[Русский]

[English] - [Български] - [Italiano]

ВЛАДИМИР ИЛЬИЧ ЛЕНИНВладимир Владимирович Маяковский

Российской Коммунистической Партии посвящаю

VLADIMIR ILYICH LENINVladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky

To the Russian Communist Party I dedicate this poem

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Red Alert Project
Utopia & Dystopia
* * Back * *

ВЛАДИМИР ИЛЬИЧ ЛЕНИН
Владимир Владимирович Маяковский

VLADIMIR ILYICH LENIN
Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky