What’s there to tell you about our life and existence? Nothing special. All of us – that is myself, Nadya and the son-in-law are in good health and up to our eyes in work.
After Siberia, Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov’s road to Revolution led not through St Petersburg or Pskov but through Zurich, Munich and London. He was a marked man in Russia who knew that the Ministry of the Interior was keeping the Union of Struggle’s past leaders under surveillance and that their letters through the regular post were likely to be opened. Ulyanov applied again for permission to go abroad. The ministry obviously decided that he would be less trouble abroad and on 5 May gave him the coveted passport.1 He left Russia in the second week of July, his aim being to join Plekhanov in Zurich.
Beforehand the police had allowed him to visit Nadya in Ufa. Maria Alexandrovna and his sister Anna accompanied him by train and steamer from Moscow, and it was on this trip that Anna and Volodya had a detailed discussion about their family ancestry, particularly about the fact that the Blanks of earlier generations had been Jews. Quite when Volodya became acquainted with his genealogy is unclear. Probably he already knew of the ‘Tatar’ elements – as Anna referred to them2 – on their father’s side. But, if it really was not until 1897 that Anna found out about the Jewish elements on their mother’s side, it is quite possible that Volodya, who had been in Siberia since that same year, was informed in the course of the steamer journey to Ufa. The true date of his acquaintance with the information may never be known; but about his attitude to the family’s ancestry there is no serious doubt. Volodya held the Jews in high esteem and told Anna so. He could think of no finer comrade than Martov. He was sure too that the reason why the southern regions of the Russian Empire experienced more revolutionary activity than Moscow was the presence of a large Jewish population.3 Perhaps it was also on this occasion that he chastised the ‘flabby and lax Russian character’ and declared an ethnic mixture to be a distinct asset for a society.4
In Ufa, Maria Alexandrovna and Anna Ilinichna, escorted by Volodya, met Nadya’s mother for the first time at the flat they occupied on the corner of Prison Street and Police Street. Volodya quipped that this was a suitable location for Nadya. The families did not get on as well as Nadya had hoped. Afterwards Nadya regretted that her in-laws had not stayed longer. She blamed herself for being distracted by her own work in Ufa: she had to take on some tutoring in order to pay the living expenses of herself and her mother – and also she went on writing articles on educational theory for journals.5
By then Volodya’s mind was focussed upon arrangements to become a political emigrant and it mattered little to him what tensions existed between his wife and his mother and sister. His only worries were of a practical kind. Accompanying his mother back to Podolsk, he needed to satisfy himself that her affairs were in order. She had been ill while he was in Siberia and had recently been plagued by ‘nerves’. The sight of her lively, brilliant son cheered her up. In Podolsk he had a wonderful time, going out walking and taking a swim in Pakhra Lake. The long sweep of the fields, the birchwoods and the mushrooms made it a place as beautiful as anywhere he had lived. But he had made his choice, and anyway could not have stayed in Podolsk even if he had wanted; and rather than go back to Pskov, which the official authorities had agreed could be his place of residence, he bought an international rail ticket and boarded a train from Moscow to Smolensk. He looked up the local Marxists along the route before moving on to Warsaw in ‘Russian’ Poland. At each stop on the way the Okhrana watched him without his knowledge.6 The various revolutionary groups in the Russian Empire consistently underestimated the efficiency of official surveillance. Vladimir Ulyanov was not inhibited. He wanted, and would make sure he got, revolutionary action.
He was welcomed by the Liberation of Labour Group in Switzerland. On arriving at Hofbahnplatz in Zurich, he met up with Pavel Axelrod. They enjoyed each other’s company. But Ulyanov noticed a sticking point whenever he discussed the scheme he had brought out of Russia for a Marxist newspaper. Plekhanov’s Liberation of Labour Group had done magnificently, thought Ulyanov, in producing books and pamphlets. But something more was required if the Romanov monarchy was to be overthrown. A newspaper had to be started and a political party had to be formed. Steps in this direction had been taken in Minsk in March 1898, when nine Marxist activists met at what they styled the First Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. Its Manifesto, which had been commissioned from none other than Pëtr Struve, envisaged that a revolution would be led against the Romanov monarchy by the working class and would result in the establishment of a democratic republic. Yet all but one of the Congress participants were arrested within a few weeks. A functioning party had yet to be created.
The First Congress had adhered broadly to the line prescribed for Russian Marxists by Plekhanov. But Marxism in the Russian Empire was extraordinarily variegated. There was no guarantee that Plekhanov, despite his eminence among Marxists, would dominate discussions of policy if and when a Second Congress were to be held. Some Russian Marxists, for example, wanted the immediate resumption of a terrorist campaign. Others wanted Marxists to encourage workers to concentrate on non-political campaigns inside trade unions. Still others wanted the middle class and not the workers to carry out the anti-tsarist revolution in Russia. Russian Marxism had always been in flux. In Ulyanov’s urgent opinion, this was a good reason for setting up a newspaper with speed. A newspaper could be used to co-ordinate the convocation of a Second Congress and guarantee the triumph of the Plekhanovite line in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party that had yet to be created.
Fresh impetus to this project was given by the emergence around the turn of the century of serious rival political groupings. Through the 1890s the Marxists had been pre-eminent in political and economic debate among critics of the Romanov monarchy. The surviving adherents of People’s Freedom ideas were huddled ineffectually in the kind of little circles such as Vladimir Ulyanov had belonged to in Kazan and Samara. They did not have much influence on wider public discussion. Moreover, liberals had next to no formal organisations even though they had opportunities to get themselves published in journals. But the Marxist hegemony was being undermined. Viktor Chernov founded the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries in 1901, which resuscitated the old agrarian-socialist premise that the future socialist society would most effectively be built if it drew upon the co-operative, egalitarian practices of the peasantry. Even Russia’s liberals, while not yet forming a political party, held meetings to propagate their ideas and it would not be long before Pëtr Struve moved across to them and helped to set up the Liberation organisation which was subsequently the basis for the Party of Constitutional Democrats.
Ulyanov argued that time was not on the side of the Marxists and that a properly funded party newspaper was direly needed. It was an obvious case to make, but Lenin saw the urgent need to expound it. Here he could rely upon his new friend Alexander Potresov, who had contacted Alexandra Kalmykova in St Petersburg. Kalmykova was the bookseller who had supplied Ulyanov with his books in Siberia. She did not drive a hard commercial bargain with revolutionary activists, and once Potresov had told her of Ulyanov’s plan for a Marxist newspaper, she readily agreed to subsidise its early issues. Meanwhile Ulyanov had thought seriously about other practicalities. The newspaper had to be based in a city with a set of alternative routes of rapid communication with the main industrial centres in the Russian Empire. Switzerland was too distant. A better bet would be Munich in southern Germany. There should be an editorial board. Ulyanov and his young friends Alexander Potresov and Yuli Martov would have to sit on it. So, too, would the veteran leaders Georgi Plekhanov, Pavel Axelrod and Vera Zasulich.
Plekhanov saw snags in this. Axelrod was not the best of writers or editors; he had his work cut out staying alive as an émigré and together with his wife had set up a little business making kefir (which is a Russian sort of buttermilk). But Axelrod respected Ulyanov’s talent. So did Zasulich. Despite her renowned pugnacity – she had shot the St Petersburg Governor-General F. F. Trepov in 1878 – she was a sweet-minded person, and behaved maternally towards the younger generation of Marxists. Even Plekhanov in his calmer moments admitted that the plan for a Marxist newspaper made a lot of sense. But, if there was to be a newspaper, Plekhanov wished to dominate it. He sensed that Vladimir Ulyanov was a leader on the rise who might soon challenge his supremacy among the Marxist émigrés.
Axelrod had warned Ulyanov to deal tactfully with Plekhanov, and initially Ulyanov complied. He felt a passionate attachment to Plekhanov from whom, he knew, he had obtained so much. When Nadezhda Konstantinovna discussed ‘love’ in her husband’s life, she referred as much to an intellectual partnership as to a broader relationship between a man and a woman.7 But Plekhanov’s ill-disguised demand for a personal despotism was insufferable. For a time Ulyanov and Potresov thought of giving up and returning to Russia to take their chances in clandestine Marxist organisations. Plekhanov had treated them as careerists. Zasulich proposed a compromise whereby Plekhanov would have two votes in any disagreement on the editorial board. Ulyanov and Potresov acceded to this.8 Going home by ferry across the lake, they recognised that they had surrendered for no good reason. In their heart of hearts they – Ulyanov, Martov and Potresov – had expected to be the real editors while Plekhanov and his participants were meant to be mere associates. Ulyanov admitted this in the aide-mémoire he wrote down on notepaper acquired from Steindl’s Wiener-Grand-Cafe.9 So in fact the invitation to Plekhanov had not been a genuine offer of equal collaboration. Ulyanov and the recently arrived émigrés were his rivals and they knew this.10
And so Potresov and Ulyanov decided to locate the newspaper in Munich. Potresov was disgusted at being treated as a ‘careerist’. Ulyanov felt the same:11
I supported these accusations in their entirety. At a stroke it also removed my feeling of ‘being in love’ with Plekhanov, and I resented and was embittered to an incredible extent. Never, never in my life have I related to a particular person with such genuine respect and reverence, vénération; I have behaved before no one with such ‘meekness’ – and never have I felt such a crude kick from behind.
They felt humiliated. Plekhanov had treated them not just as ‘careerists’ but as ‘children’, as ‘pawns’ in a chess-game, ‘silly scoundrels’ and ‘slaves’. The object of his devotion had abused his ‘love’. Ulyanov’s found the whole saga ‘an unworthy thing’.
He confided this to Axelrod (who ‘half sympathised’ with him) and to Zasulich (whose distress made others think she might commit suicide); and for so prim a man this recounting of his feelings – feelings that were not merely political but deeply emotional with a quasi-sexual undertone – was extraordinary. There is nothing like it in anything else that has come down to us. Not even his surviving love letters to Inessa Armand are so unrestrained. The fact that an encounter with Plekhanov had produced this reaction shows that his life’s compass was orientated upon the world of intellectual ideas and revolutionary advance. He could hardly believe that he had fallen out with one of his two living idols. (The other such idol was Kautsky; Lenin did not fall out with him till 1914.) His lengthy account had an unstated subtext: Lenin privately still wondered whether he himself had been the culprit; he did not yet have the full measure of his mature self-confidence. This is why his written version of events continually referred to the similar emotions felt independently by Potresov. Surely, he tried to convince himself, the fault must have been Plekhanov’s if Potresov felt the same way.
Ulyanov was not blameless. Reading between the lines of his account, we can detect that he assumed that the younger generation would run the newspaper. Plekhanov was arrogant and vain, but he had some reason to feel that Ulyanov was likely to try to supplant him as the leader of Russian Marxism. Not being introspective, Ulyanov probably had this expressly in his own mind. But his behaviour told the real story. Anyway he learned what he wanted from his experience. The idol had turned out to be the embodiment of insincerity, deviousness and intrigue. Plekhanov had to be rejected as an unchallengeable mentor. Never again would Ulyanov enter a political relationship with unguarded feelings. In a reference to the Bible’s story of David and Goliath he wrote down his bitter conclusion: ‘And love-inspired youth receives from the object of its love the bitter commandment: it is essential to relate to everyone “without sentimentality”, it is essential to keep a stone in one’s sling.’12
On this disillusioned basis he was willing to go back and treat with Plekhanov on 15 August. Plekhanov again tried to conquer Ulyanov by an hysterical display. At the peak of his performance he shrieked that he was going to retire altogether from public life. Ulyanov and Potresov listened impassively; they had a deal to offer Plekhanov, and he would have to hear them out eventually. When he did, his confidence drained into the sand. The deal was soon done on the terms demanded by Ulyanov and Potresov. Their proposal was for the six prospective editors to publish a collection of their articles as a means of discovering whether they could work together. Only then would they proceed to found the newspaper. Plekhanov agreed. Pitched battle was avoided, and Ulyanov and Potresov had won their war. On 15 August 1900 they left Zurich for Munich.
The trip took several days because they needed to go first to Nuremberg and negotiate with acquaintances in the German Social-Democratic Party. A friendly publishing house had to be found with printers who were literate in the Russian language. A distribution network had to be set up. The financial support promised from Alexandra Kalmykova through the services of Struve had to be secured. At last Ulyanov could concentrate on this great project. He had planned something that would have a practical effect beyond anything dreamed of by the St Petersburg Union of Struggle. The idea had been his, and his too was the responsibility for making it work.
He was also on his own in another way. Correspondence with his family, which had not previously required many precautions, had to be conducted on the premise that any letter might be intercepted at the Russian border. This had not mattered when he had been abroad in 1895. It did in 1900, when he was setting up a newspaper that would have links with clandestine political groups in the Russian Empire. When he wrote from Munich to his mother, he put his address down as Paris and he asked her to send her letters to Herr Franz Modrácêk at ‘Smêcky, Prague, Austria [sic]’.13 He assured her that he had enough bed linen and even enough money. He promised to ‘set about taking his waters so as to cure himself in a more correct manner’.14 The stomach problem had recurred, and he had not been drinking the mineral water prescribed for him. His letters were full of such details. He told Maria Alexandrovna that he had not reached a high enough standard in oral German, and that he swapped conversation lessons with a resident Czech to improve things.15 For the purposes of conspiracy he also pretended to have moved to Prague: although Franz Modrácêk was not a fictional character, he certainly lived in Munich.16
What did Maria Alexandrovna think about this? She may simply have been relieved that her son was out of the reach of the Okhrana. He was not the most assiduous correspondent, but he did keep in touch. He liked to know what his sisters and brother were doing and to give them advice. The Ulyanovs gave each other advice on each other’s lives and problems17 – and Vladimir was more forthright than the rest of them. Yet he was not homesick, even though he lived a ‘pretty solitary’ existence in the absence of Nadya.18
Munich, to be sure, was not Russia; he could not get used to a winter without deep snow and the temperature reminded him of ‘some tawdry autumn’.19 But otherwise he was contented. The new newspaper – to be called Iskra (‘The Spark’) was efficiently typeset, copy-edited and proofread. In late December the first issue of the journal was printed. (The first printers were based in Leipzig 270 miles away in northern Germany.20 So much for the need to have everyone in Munich for reasons of geo-communications!) The style was scholastically Marxist. Readers had not only to be highly literate but also to have a sound knowledge of international contemporary socialist debates. Only a few hundred copies were published and it would take weeks to transport them by various couriers across the German, Austrian and Turkish frontiers. There would only be a dozen issues in 1901. The targeted readership was revolutionary activists who already professed Marxism, and Iskra in truth was less a newspaper than a journal in newspaper-form that was designed to act in lieu of a party central committee. But a start had been made. The next step was to consolidate Iskra and employ it as an organ of propaganda for the holding of a Second Party Congress. Despite the gruelling technical demands of editorial work, Ulyanov addressed this larger task. To his mind there first and foremost had to be a common understanding as to how the party ought to be organised, and he threw himself into composing a booklet on the subject.
On 1 April 1901 his wife Nadya arrived from Russia. By the time they met, she was not best pleased. Although she had sent him a note about her travel plan, he was not at the Munich Hofbahnhof to greet her. After waiting around for a bit, she took a horse cab to the premises of Herr Franz Modrácêk. Unfortunately Modrácêk proved to be a Czech with a frail grasp of German. Only after lengthy conversation did she extract sufficient sense from him to discover that her husband was using the alias of a Herr Rittmeyer. She returned to the station to put her baggage in storage and then take a tram to the address, which turned out to be a beer cellar. When she asked in the cellar for Herr Rittmeyer, the owner replied: ‘That’s me!’ Nadya, by now pretty depressed, exclaimed: ‘No, that’s my husband!’ Rittmeyer’s wife heard the remark and intervened: ‘Ah, this must be Herr Meyer’s wife. He’s expecting his wife from Siberia.’
Frau Rittmeyer took Nadya to the room of ‘Herr Meyer’ and left the couple to themselves. Nadya did not hold herself back: ‘Bah! Damn it: could you not write and tell me where you were?’ Defensively Vladimir explained that he had sent several letters and that they must have been intercepted. Marital peace was resumed. Nadya settled into a role of organising Iskra’s correspondence; no doubt her own recent experience convinced Lenin that he needed an expert in these matters. In May 1901, furthermore, Nadya’s mother followed her to Germany. This relieved Nadya of much of the burden of housework (and her mother also helped with the preparation of coded letters).21 Not that Lenin was useless in domestic tasks. He dusted his books. He sewed loose buttons back on to his clothes. He polished his shoes. He dabbed stains off his suit with petroleum. He maintained his bicycle as if it were a ‘surgical instrument’.22 But these were tasks relating to personal neatness. The women, as was normal in those days, did everything else around the house. Not even revolutionaries such as Lenin saw anything unfair about the division of functions; and Nadya, while advocating feminism, did not let it impinge on her marriage.
Yet the two of them also had a lot of fun. They went to the theatre and to musical concerts in Munich and wherever else they were staying. They read Russian literature. They also went to concerts. Lenin was a passionate admirer of Richard Wagner (who was an Ulyanov family favourite). He went to hear renditions of his operas as an active listener; he could not bear to sit passively and let the music wash through him: sometimes the effort disturbed him emotionally to such an extent that he walked out after the first act.23 The romantic component of his cultural and intellectual personality – a component he tried to hide underneath an exterior of scientific pretension – was revealed on such occasions. But even among Bolsheviks there were few who witnessed this.
During the working day, Ulyanov got on with writing his booklet. The title he chose for it, What Is to Be Done?, was plucked from Chernyshevski’s novel of the same name. Just as Chernyshevski had described how revolutionary activists could form a revolutionary communal group in the 1860s, Ulyanov intended to sketch the way to organise a clandestine political party in the unpropitious environment of tsarism after the turn of the century. For publishers he turned to J. H. W. Dietz of Stuttgart. The booklet would be sold for one Russian ruble or two German marks. In order to confuse any Okhrana agents the author’s name would appear not as Vladimir Ulyanov or even Vladimir Ilin but as N. Lenin. He had recently used this pseudonym in letters to Plekhanov, and it was natural that he should use it again. In Munich at the time he was living in a comfortable flat on Siegfriedstrasse in the middle-class Schwabing district under the alias of a Bulgarian lawyer Iordan K. Iordanov. What’s in a name? Much pseudo-psychological speculation has been focussed on Ulyanov’s choice of ‘Lenin’ as a pseudonym. Was he inspired by the Siberian river Lena? Or was Lena the name of an early girlfriend? Or was it that the Slavonic etymological root of Lenin implies laziness and that Vladimir Ulyanov, like a medieval monk in a hairshirt, wanted to remind himself constantly that effort was needed?
At such speculation we can only chuckle and move on. Certainly Vladimir Ulyanov would have been amused. The point is this: Russian revolutionaries used dozens of pseudonyms. What they became known as to the historians depended on many factors. It especially mattered what pseudonym they were using when a major event in their career occurred. Vladimir Ulyanov did not enter the history books for living quietly as Iordan K. Iordanov in Schwabing, or else we should be talking about Marxism–Iordanovism and not Marxism–Leninism.
Nor indeed did he achieve fame as V. Ilin, author of The Development of Capitalism in Russia; the few reviews were depressingly flat and negative. He did not accept this with equanimity. One critic was the populist writer M. Engelgardt.24 The probable reason why Ulyanov did not issue a retort against Engelgardt was simply that he was not a Marxist and Ulyanov did not want to waste his time on him. Less easy to ignore was the review by fellow Marxist Pavel Skvortsov, whom he had got to know in Nizhni Novgorod in 1893. Skvortsov picked apart the book’s analysis, especially its fundamental premise that the various sectors of the Imperial economy fitted harmoniously together and that economic crises would not take place.25 There was something in this criticism. Ulyanov had been so keen to demonstrate the real and potential achievements of Russian capitalist development that he paid little attention to the various obstacles. In other works, of course, he had been only too happy to point to the susceptibility of all capitalist economies, including the one that was developing in Russia, to recurrent crisis. He therefore demanded and received the right of reply,26 but neither his book nor his defence of it succeeded in catching the imagination of the reading public. Even most Marxists failed to give it much attention.
And so it was What Is to Be Done? that thrust Vladimir Ulyanov before the attention of the Marxists of the Russian Empire. He had signed the booklet as N. Lenin and it was as Lenin that everyone mainly knew him from then on. (Not that he stopped inventing and using pseudonyms through to 1917.) What Is to Be Done? in the most direct sense made Lenin’s name. It did so not because it was a major piece of innovative political theory but rather because it caused huge controversy among its restricted sphere of readers. In Ulyanov’s opinion, it was merely a statement of ‘orthodox Marxism’ on questions of party organisation. He was not wholly straightforward about this. When writing What Is to Be Done?, he was in a febrile mood; this was always a sign that he was risking a challenge to strongly entrenched convention. Ulyanov meant to annoy, excite and instigate. But he was not wholly conscious of his purposes. He was therefore caught unawares by the scale of the controversy he stirred up, and the very fact that this controversy led eventually to a communist party and to the October 1917 Revolution means that the booklet has become a twentieth-century political classic.
Ulyanov (or Lenin as we may now call him) offered several obvious postulates about internal party organisation. He wanted a clandestine party. But how could it be otherwise if the Okhrana was to be kept at bay? He wanted a disciplined and centralised party. But how else could any party survive in the Russia of the Romanovs? He wanted a party united on fundamental ideology and strategy. But how could it be otherwise when each party had to demarcate itself from the other parties then emerging? True, these postulates were not universal among Russian Marxists. The so-called ‘Economists’ among them did not even warm to the project to form a party and to induce the working class to lead the Revolution against the Romanovs. But most Marxists were already in favour of the postulates. If a party was thought necessary, practically everyone agreed that it ought to operate clandestinely and to recognise the need for discipline, centralism and ideological unity. Lenin sprinkled his chapters with citations from Marx, Engels and Kautsky and argued that his recommendations for the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, while taking account of political conditions in the Russian Empire, still lay within the bounds of conventional European Marxism.
So why did the booklet stir up such a storm? One reason was the very preoccupation that Lenin had with ‘the organisational question’. For many Marxists it was unpleasantly reminiscent of the traditions of the Russian agrarian socialists of the 1860s and 1870s, who had been obsessed with matters of internal discipline and control – and little good it had done them. Indeed, the failure of those agrarian socialists had supplied a negative example which in the 1880s and 1890s had turned a lot of revolutionary sympathisers towards the kind of Marxism advocated by Plekhanov. Marxists were suspicious of Lenin’s insistence on reopening discussion on ‘the organisational question’.
Lenin had compounded their worries by several of his obiter dicta. For a start he had used the title of a novel by agrarian socialist Nikolai Chernyshevski. Then in the text he proceeded to commend the organisational techniques developed by the Land and Freedom Party founded in 1876. He praised the terrorist leaders of Land and Freedom: P. A. Alexeev, I. N. Myshkin, S. N. Khalturin and A. I. Zhelyabov. Lenin adduced Pëtr Tkachëv too in language of approval, declaring that ‘the attempt to seize power as prepared by Tkachëv’s sermon and realised by means of a “terrifying”, truly terrifying terror was magnificent’.27 It made matters worse for Lenin’s reputation that the remark about Tkachëv came in a section of the booklet where he was arguing against the Marxist L. Nadezhdin, who wanted to resume a campaign of assassinations of individual tsarist functionaries. Lenin contrasted Nadezhdin unfavourably with Tkachëv and glorified the ‘mass terror’ advocated by Tkachëv to inaugurate a revolutionary state. For Iskra’s opponents this was yet another indication that the malignant traditions of the mid-nineteenth century had leached back unnoticed into the body of Russian Marxism. Lenin appeared to them an agrarian-socialist terrorist in Marxist disguise.
Nor did they like the resonance of his remarks about the desirable organisational form of the party. His emphasis on the need for konspirativnost seemed to hint not only at clandestine, ‘underground’ political activity but at outright conspiracies. Marxists conventionally supposed that revolutions happened through class struggle and mass movements, and yet Lenin apparently wished to revert to a clique of highly secretive plotters. This clique, they concluded, would be subjected to a demeaning, ultra-centralist discipline. The booklet’s first chapter was a sustained attack on ‘freedom of criticism’ in the party. Lenin made no secret of the fact that he was not an absolute democrat. The priority was for discipline and unity – and for this purpose he later explained, in his version of the Party Rules, that all who were unwilling to operate actively under the direction of one of the party’s officially recognised organisations should have membership denied them.
To the charge that he was little different from the agrarian-socialist terrorists, Lenin had a number of answers. He argued that in Russia’s political circumstances it would be suicidal for the party to make a fetish of elections and public discussion. This was not a matter of smuggling non-Marxist contraband into the party. It was simply practical sense. His second point was that he approved of the internal democracy of the German Social-Democratic Party, and when Russia had a freer political environment it was to be expected – at least he implied this – that Russian Marxists would copy their procedures. Nor could anyone deny that Lenin in other aspects of his thought was opposed to agrarian-socialist ideas. He scoffed at notions of building a socialist society upon the model of the peasant commune. He ridiculed the possibility that capitalist economic development was avoidable. He sneered at the moralising of agrarian-socialist figures such as Nikolai Mikhailovski and praised the ‘scientific’ way of thinking about society practised by Marx and Engels. And Lenin emphasised that the working class should be the vanguard of the revolutionary offensive against the Romanov monarchy. Without the willingness of the industrial workers to take to the streets, he stated, the revolutionary movement could not be successful.
This defence of What Is to Be Done? diminished the concerns of some of his Iskra associates, including Plekhanov, about its contents. And there have been attempts by historians to assert that Lenin was as orthodox a Marxist as it was possible to find. Such was the line taken by Soviet scholars, but it has also attracted influential support from writers abroad.28 Yet the whole case is flawed. Marxism did not have a definable orthodoxy. Marx was too elusive a writer to have left a clear-cut legacy behind him. His followers struggled for recognition as authentic interpreters of his ‘doctrines’, and among them was Lenin. He had assumed that he could openly use certain Russian agrarian-socialist ideas and practices in adapting Marxism to the specific circumstances of the Russian Empire. But when the controversy over What Is to Be Done? blew up he stopped acknowledging this debt in public. He needed to exercise caution if he was to assert his ‘orthodox’ credentials – and he particularly needed to be careful if ever he was to come forward with further controversial proposals for the party.
In any case not all Iskra’s admirers worried about such niceties. Many of them felt that the brouhaha had unfairly detracted attention from Lenin’s practical impetus and revolutionary commitment. Some of his phrases were especially attractive. For example, he declared: ‘Give us an organisation of revolutionaries, and we’ll turn all Russia upside down!’ On and on he went. He cheered and cajoled his fellow activists. He managed to let them know that, whatever difficulties they might be experiencing, he understood them – and yet he also expected them to produce wonderful results. ‘Miracles’, he asserted, were within the range of attainment of Russia’s Marxists. Too much rationality was no great thing: ‘We’ve got to dream!’
This was a language of exhortation that no Marxist before him in the Russian Empire had spoken. It came forth not from a great stylist and his language was never to become mellifluous. But this did not matter to him or his followers. His angular grammar and syntax made activists feel that he was akin to them. For them, his abrasive rhetoric was the manifestation of a necessary, down-to-earth belligerence. Fine words and elegant arguments were hardly the most important requirements for the overthrow of the Romanov monarchy. Lenin and his followers wanted policy to be based on sound intellectual ground; but, while intellect was important to them, action – uncompromising revolutionary action – was of equal significance. And Lenin’s crude verbal formulation rather appealed to them. If he called democratic procedures a ‘harmful toy’, so what? He had worked in clandestine political organisations in the Russian Empire and he knew what he was about. If his polemical approach involved the unfair presentation of arguments put forward by his more moderate opponents, what did this matter? Lenin could touch the parts of their ideology, propaganda and especially their hopes and fears that no other leading Marxist had yet reached.
The magnificence of the booklet, for readers who were not hostile to him, was his hymn to leadership. What Is to Be Done? is widely misunderstood as having offered a detailed practical blueprint of techniques for running a clandestine political party. Far from it: there is scarcely any practical advice from beginning to end (and even in his follow-up work, ‘Letter to a Comrade about our Organisational Tasks’, the level of detail is surprisingly low). But he had tapped a deeper need among many of those Marxists working away in the Russian Empire with his insistence that the great duty in politics was to lead the way. The central party leaders should lead the local groups. The local groups should lead the working class. The working class should lead the other discontented and oppressed groups in Imperial society. If all this could be achieved, nothing could save the Romanov monarchy. No wonder Lenin’s booklet had so formative an influence on the contours of Leninism and outlasted the peculiar environment of its writing in 1901–2. It was a work of its time, but its fundamental assumptions and attitudes had an impact upon the decisions taken by the Russian Communist Party in that very different time after the October Revolution of 1917.
What Is to Be Done? was written between April 1901 and February 1902 and published by Dietz in March. Lenin was usually rapid in composing his works; not often did it take him so many months to write fifty thousand words. He knew the controversial nature of his work. He kept clear of Martov, his closest friend, while he was composing it. Lenin’s sense of urgency was readily observable. He could hardly have a conversation without tightening his fists as he gripped his waistcoat. His associates picked up the mannerism and adopted it as their own.29
Increasingly he was attracting not so much associates as followers. He took counsel with them individually. Indeed there were the beginnings of competition for his attention among them, and Nadezhda Konstantinovna prevented him from being bothered by people he did not want to see. Lenin wished to keep his discussions confidential. When pressed to reveal whom he had been talking to and how he had gained some piece of information, he had a fixed response: ‘Who did I hear this news from? A swallow brought it to me on its tail!’30 These followers had to put up with a certain elusiveness on Lenin’s part. At any time they might turn up at his flat and be told that he was not at home even when he really was. Usually he was merely talking to someone else. Nadezhda Konstantinovna was adept at mollifying the feelings of disappointed visitors by stressing that ‘Vladimir Ilich very much wishes you well.’31 Lenin had a busy life and expected his followers to respect his need to curtail their access to them. He was friendly, but only up to a point. He was not like the rest of the émigrés. He was not the sort of fellow whom his comrades slapped on the shoulder in friendship: he always kept a distance between himself and his followers.32
Another reason for his slowness in finishing What Is to Be Done? was his involvement in other political tasks. He was helping to edit Iskra; he was also engaged in co-writing a draft party programme in readiness for the Second Party Congress. The work was time-consuming and irksome. Once he had made peace with Plekhanov in 1900, he encouraged him to write a draft programme, but Plekhanov kept on demurring. Lenin was frustrated. He himself had drafted such a document in Shushenskoe, and every Iskra follower desired the newspaper to adopt a draft of some kind since there was bound to be a debate on the matter at the forthcoming Congress. But Plekhanov concentrated his energy on works aimed at refuting the economic and philosophical opinions of Struve, who was moving away from Marxism to liberalism. There was no clearer proof of Plekhanov’s incapacity, concluded Lenin, to lead the party. But still it had to be Plekhanov, the founder of Russian Marxism, who made the first main draft and thereby gave it his seal of legitimacy.
Worn down by Lenin, Plekhanov turned up with his attempt on New Year’s Day 1900. The six editors of Iskra agreed to give themselves a week to study it and propose modifications. They would convene in Lenin’s Schwabing apartment. Plekhanov was getting agitated not merely because he had to travel from Switzerland but also, surely, because he saw that the moment was approaching when he would be made to pay for his haughty treatment of his juniors. If so, he was right. Ulyanov had spent days finding holes to pick in Plekhanov’s draft. Plekhanov had implied that the working class constituted the majority of the Imperial population. Plekhanov’s language was weak: he said ‘discontent’ when he could have said ‘indignation’. This just would not do, and Lenin sent Plekhanov back to Switzerland with the task of doing better next time. The teacher–pupil relationship was being tilted in the opposite direction.33 By agreement they went on amending the draft by post. Lenin wrote out material of his own, making himself responsible for new sections on industrial workers and the agrarian question. Between Munich and Geneva they fired angry letters at each other like bullets.
The whole business took a lot out of Lenin. He had reproved Plekhanov for producing a mere declaration of principles and not the programme suitable for a fighting political party.34 Plekhanov got his own back when Lenin put forward his own amendments and additions. Lenin objected to ‘the deliberately offensive tone of the comments’:35
The author of the comments reminds me of a coach-driver who thinks that good driving requires the more frequent and robust jerking at the horses’ reins. I, of course, am no more than ‘a horse’, just one of several horses being handled by driver Plekhanov; but it can happen that even the most heavily bridled horse can throw an excessively zealous driver.
But the destination was eventually reached. On 1 June 1902 Iskra was at last able to print the agreed draft Party Programme in issue no. 21.
Several of Lenin’s demands were incorporated in the draft. The most decisive was his insistence that direct mention should be made of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’. This term, invented by Marx, referred to the beginning of the second stage of the forthcoming revolutionary process. The first stage would be the overthrow of the Romanov monarchy and the inception of a ‘bourgeois-democratic republic’. The workers would play the leading role at this stage but would not benefit from the capitalist economy, which would concurrently be strengthened. The second stage would involve the seizure of power by the ‘proletariat’ – and this would inaugurate the socialist order in Russia. Following Marx, Plekhanov had included the term in his earliest draft, but because of a misunderstanding with Lenin, he had then excised it. Lenin belligerently demanded its reinstatement, Plekhanov acceded; this was one of his rival’s demands that he could willingly accept. Both agreed that when the time came to establish socialism there should be no guaranteed civic rights for the old ruling classes. Subsequent events were to show that Lenin’s concept of dictatorship was considerably more violent and arbitrary than Plekhanov could imagine in 1902. But for a while they had agreement – or thought they had.
Other changes were also significant. Lenin got Plekhanov to state, against his better judgement, that capitalism was ‘already the dominant mode of production in the Russian Imperial economy’.36 This was a minor concession in words; but the practical implication was that Lenin, by urging that Russia had an advanced capitalist economy, was opening the door to a faster possible movement towards socialism than others such as Plekhanov would approve. Lenin was to use this recognition for precisely that purpose in 1917. Ideology counts.
Nor was this the sole example of a significant insertion by Lenin. Another was his proposal that the party should campaign for the restoration of the land lost from the peasantry’s cultivation through the 1861 Emancipation Edict. This was to occur as soon as the Romanov monarchy was overthrown. He was not calling for all the land to go to the peasants, only the lost parts, amounting to 4 per cent of what they had had before being emancipated. Lenin’s purpose was to increase the party’s attractiveness to the peasantry. He could not, according to conventional Marxist wisdom, propose to turn over all the land to the peasants, whose agricultural methods were thought too backward. Consequently he wanted to offer them a titbit that would draw them to the side of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. He was laughed at for this. Chernov’s Party of Socialist Revolutionaries wanted all the land to be expropriated from traditional gentry and the not-so-traditional farmers. Marxists could hardly compete with the Socialist Revolutionaries. But Lenin wished to lay down at least a bid for peasant support. He was an improviser; he worked by instinct as well as by doctrine. His agrarian project was unconvincing in its own terms, but his intuitive searching was understandable. He wanted the party, when finally it came into existence, to take account of the fact that 85 per cent of subjects of the Russian Empire were peasants.
He suffered a hailstorm of abuse for this manoeuvre. Why, he was asked, was Lenin the doctrinaire so facile about the agrarian question? And how many peasants, knowing that Chernov’s Party of Socialist Revolutionaries wanted all the land to revert to them, would opt for Lenin’s promise of the cut-off strips? At the same time was not Lenin’s wish to indulge peasant opinion yet another sign that the man was not really a Marxist but essentially an agrarian socialist? Thus it came about that, as the Iskra group prepared the ground for the Second Party Congress, it was not Plekhanov but Lenin who attracted most of the attention. In the small world of organised Russian Marxism he became the figure whom everyone either loved or detested. He left hardly anyone neutral towards him.
His manipulation of the arrangements for the Congress intensified this dual attitude. Iskra ‘agents’ – he liked to use this word – were not known for their fairness in handling the selection of delegates to the Congress; his sister Maria, his brother Dmitri and his old friend Gleb Krzhizhanovski were among them: Lenin liked to use activists of proven personal loyalty.37 In trying to ensure that the Iskra group’s projects dominated the proceedings, he strove to keep the number of non-supporters of the newspapers to a minimum. As agents travelled back to Russia, furthermore, they carried What Is to Be Done? and the draft Party Programme. This activity reinforced the impression that the Iskra group were worthy party leaders. Plekhanov, Lenin and Martov – whatever their weaknesses as known to their close associates – seemed to be in a class of their own. Their agents were ruthless organisers, but all of them were willing to lay down their liberty in the defence of the and its campaign to win over the working ‘masses’ to the cause of Marxism and social revolution. Many of them already looked upon Lenin as their leader. With him, they thought, the spark would light the fire.
Lenin and his friends on the editorial board were becoming anxious about the attentions of the Bavarian police and decided to transfer Iskra’s base from Munich. They needed a place where no one would worry about foreign Marxists. The obvious alternative was Switzerland, but the altercations with Plekhanov were fresh in everyone’s mind and the younger editors searched out other options. The decision was taken to try out things in London. The Metropolitan Police were famously unbothered about revolutionaries, even about the few British ones who came to their attention. The postal network was efficient and the cultural facilities – libraries, museums and art galleries – were as good as in any other European city.
And so Lenin and Nadezhda Konstantinovna packed up and left Munich, and, after brief stays in Cologne and Liège, arrived by ferry and train at London’s Victoria Station in April 1902. According to a prepared plan, they took a hansom cab to the St Pancras district where a set of rooms had been rented for them by the Russian emigrant and Iskra supporter Nikolai Alexeev. The apartment was at 30 Holford Square to the south of Pentonville Road. Martov, Potresov and Zasulich meanwhile took up the occupancy of rooms across the Gray’s Inn Road in Sidmouth Street. Alexeev himself lived down the hill from Holford Square in Frederick Street. All were within a few hundred yards of each other. It was a convenient arrangement since Alexeev had negotiated for Iskra to use the flat-bed printing machine of the Twentieth Century Press in 37a Clerkenwell Green at the end of Farringdon Road. Near by, too, was the British Museum on Great Russell Street. Lenin’s British contacts provided him with a letter of recommendation from I. H. Mitchell, Secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions, which enabled him to register as a reader under the alias of Dr Jacob Richter. On most working days he popped into the Sidmouth Street flat to conduct any necessary business with Martov and then proceeded to the British Museum to conduct his researches beneath the vast glass dome of the Reading Room at desk L13. Whenever publishing day was approaching, he would also visit the printing facilities on Clerkenwell Green.
Lenin’s political activity lay within the Georgian-terraced triangle of Holford Square, Great Russell Street and Clerkenwell Green. He and his fellow editors were satisfied with their environment; they had moved to England not to work with the British labour movement but to concentrate on their own propaganda. For this purpose the St Pancras and Bloomsbury areas were ideal. Lenin grew to like London, ranking it alongside Geneva as his favourite European city. (By contrast, he thought Moscow ‘a foul’ place.)1 In London he was safe from the Okhrana. He had ready access to great libraries, to a reliable printing press and to an efficient communications network. And he could also enjoy his leisure time. Lenin and Nadya visited Hyde Park Corner on Sunday mornings to listen to the open-air speakers. They also amused themselves by jumping on board buses to view the outer districts from the top deck and admire the greenery.
But not everything was to Lenin’s liking. He was affronted by the ménage at Sidmouth Street, which he disparaged as a ‘commune’. This was a revealing use of language. Lenin the Marxist – a believer in the desirability and inevitability of a communist society – was repelled by the idea of a collectivist style of life. ‘Commune’ was a dirty word for him; he preferred the lexicon of order, neatness and obedience. The Bohemian manners of his fellow Iskra editors, he thought, displayed the worst features of the east European intelligentsia:2
Above all, he loved order, which always reigned in his office and his room – and these were in sharp contrast to Martov’s room, for example. There was always the most chaotic disorder at Martov’s: cigarette ends and ash lay all over the place and sugar was mixed up with tobacco so that visitors whom Martov served with tea were squeamish about taking the sugar. It was the same situation in Vera Zasulich’s room.
Loose practices of this sort were prohibited up the hill at 30 Holford Square. Lenin did not exactly ban cigarettes from the premises, but if visitors lit up he frowned meaningfully and opened the windows regardless of the day’s weather. Snow was no deterrent to him.
While Lenin sat in judgement on Martov and Zasulich, his own lifestyle was put under question by his landlady in Holford Square. The redoubtable Mrs Yeo expected him to conform to local custom by putting up curtains, and remonstrated with ‘Dr and Mrs Richter’ until they complied.3 Vladimir and Nadya were not amused. They already felt miffed at the need to go down to the cellar to fetch coal for the fire and water for cooking.4 They disliked English food. Oxtail stew, that culinary delight, so disgusted Lenin that he put his diet into the hands of Nadya – by her own admission, not the best of cooks – and her mother. English stew, English cakes and English deep-fried fish were not the only things to annoy them. Visiting the Seven Sisters Church seven miles north-east of Holford Square, they found English socialists praying to the Lord. Lenin considered that genuine socialism absolutely had to involve atheism. When he became a Marxist, Lenin felt that he had chosen the path of Science and Progress and that Christian socialism was a contradiction in terms. He could hardly find a good word to say about the socialists of England – or indeed about the English in general.
He found an Englishman called Mr Henry Rayment to help him master the country’s language. Despite having translated a book by the Webbs, Lenin had not acquired written or oral fluency in English – and he found Londoners harder to follow than resident Irishmen.5 (There is an unconfirmed suggestion that Lenin spoke with an Irish accent.) In Rayment’s company, he attended political meetings in the East End, where they came across Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. When Rayment was disconcerted by their exotic habits, Lenin thought that his language tutor’s surprise was yet further proof that the English were a ‘closed-in people’.6 Possibly his contact with the East End’s Russian Jews, many of whom were open to ideas of international socialism, restored his faith in ‘European socialist revolution’; and in March 1902 he gave a speech to the Jewish Branch of the Social-Democratic Federation in the New Alexandra Hall.7
Yet in his own way he was just as ‘closed-in’.8 He built a little Russia around himself in St Pancras and Bloomsbury. Early one morning in autumn 1902 there was a knock on his door in Holford Square. The visitor was Lev Trotski, who had escaped from Siberia and wanted to join the Iskra editors in England. Trotski would become as famous as Lenin would in the October 1917 Revolution, but had yet to establish himself as a Marxist leader. He was dying to meet Lenin, but Lenin was still in bed and, being a creature of fixed habits, refused to come into the sitting room until he had finished his ablutions and got himself prepared for the day. It was Nadezhda Konstantinovna who had to pay off the Cockney cab driver and make Trotski a cup of coffee – and not the tea that Mrs Yeo, the English traditionalist, would have prepared for a guest.9 Lenin got up at his usual hour and introduced himself. He and Trotski quickly became friends and Lenin spent time taking him around the tourist spots. The two became so close that Lenin proposed to appoint Trotski, who had literary gifts, as the seventh member of the Iskra editorial board. Plekhanov objected to this. In his eyes, Trotski’s was ‘Lenin’s disciple’ and his co-optation to the board would be tantamount to allocating an additional voting place to Lenin.10
Bad temper returned to the Iskra board meetings as the Second Party Congress drew nearer. In April 1903 it had been decided to shift Iskra’s base from London to Geneva; this meant that Lenin and Plekhanov were seeing each other again. The move was initiated by Martov, who recognised the damage being done by the distance at which Plekhanov had been held. Martov believed that Geneva would offer an opportunity to resume a more comradely approach to affairs.11
Lenin alone voted against the move. He reminded them that Plekhanov had always caused trouble and that this was why Iskra had had to be established outside Switzerland. But nobody would listen, perhaps because the kettle was calling the pot black. Lenin was in despair. ‘The Devil knows’, he exclaimed to Nadya, ‘that nobody has the courage to contradict Plekhanov.’12 His ‘nerves’ started playing him up once more as the arrangements were finalised for the transfer. Then physical symptoms appeared in the form of inflamed chest and spinal nerve-ends; he fell into a fever. Nadya consulted a medical textbook and decided that he must have sciatica. Then she consulted fellow Russian Marxist and St Pancras resident K. M. Takhtarëv, who had trained for some years as a doctor. Takhtarëv agreed with the diagnosis and Nadya bought some iodine and applied it to her husband’s body. The diagnosis was completely wrong and the iodine plunged Lenin into ‘tormenting pain’. In later years it was officially claimed that Lenin could not afford the guinea fee for a consultation with an English doctor.13 But he never stinted in payment for medical attention. The likeliest explanation is that Lenin and his wife were panicking and did not have the presence of mind to question Takhtarëv’s competence.
In late April 1903 they left London for Switzerland, where Lenin had to lie in bed for a further fortnight. By then a correct diagnosis had been obtained. Lenin was suffering from ‘holy fire’, also known as St Anthony’s fire or erysipelas. ‘Holy fire’ is a severe contagious infection of the skin and its underlying tissue, and can prove fatal. Nowadays it is curable by antibiotics. But doctors at the turn of the century could only advise their patients to rest for several weeks until the disease disappeared. This was what happened to Lenin.14
Meanwhile Plekhanov and Lenin had to find ways of working together. The Congress arrangements had been in the hands of Lenin and the various Iskra agents travelling to and from Russia, and one of the things that Lenin hated about leaving London was the resumed oversight over his own activity. An Organisational Committee for the Congress had been set up in March 1902. It was this committee that gave rulings about which bodies in the Russian Empire and in Europe had the right to send delegates to the Congress. Lenin had already been busy marshalling opinion in the Organisational Committee to secure a preponderance of Iskra supporters at the Congress. Plekhanov examined his activity at close range. Fortunately, however, he concluded that Lenin had done a good job for Iskra. Plekhanov and Lenin concurred on the need to curb any influence that might be wielded at the Congress by either the large Jewish Bund (which disliked the idea of a highly centralised party) or the Geneva newspaper Worker’s Cause (which did not approve of intellectuals deciding everything in the name of the working class). Lenin was ruthless in discovering pretexts to give Congress places to Iskra’s supporters while limiting those given to its opponents. Steadily Plekhanov gave Lenin the freedom of operation he wanted.
Lenin’s methods can be savoured in a letter to an Iskra agent:15
I’m really, really delighted to know that you’ve moved the matter of the Organisational Committee quickly forward and have composed it with a membership of six… Take a stricter approach with the Bund! Abroad write as strictly as possible, too (to the Bund and to ‘Worker’s Cause’), reducing the function of the foreign operation to such a minimum as will mean that it can in no way have any significance. The technical side of the Congress you surely can leave to special delegates on your behalf or to your own special agents: don’t entrust this task to anyone else and don’t forget that the average émigré membership is hopeless at conspiracy.
Here was a consummate manipulator passing on the tricks of the trade to his apprentice.
The venue chosen for the Congress was the Belgian capital Brussels. Before going there, Lenin took a holiday in Brittany with his mother and his sister Anna. Oddly he did not take Nadezhda Konstantinovna with him. Quite why she stayed in London is unclear. She had made an effort with his family despite the frostiness of Anna Ilinichna in particular. Probably she had too many practical arrangements to make before the Congress met; her time was consumed by the daily arrival of letters from the Russian Empire that needed decoding. Lenin’s mother, however, did not think this an adequate explanation and referred to the ‘various pretexts’ proposed by her daughter-in-law.16 His family retained its frostiness towards his wife and he declined to take sides. As usual he was doing what he wanted to do. On this occasion it suited him to see his mother in Brittany, and he did not mind abandoning his wife in London. By his actions he was making it clear that, if she wanted to live with him, she had to cope with his relatives even when they were not being especially nice to her. He was the dominant partner in the marriage and knew that Nadezhda Krupskaya would continue to fulfil her political duties despite such behaviour on his part.
Lenin anyway wished to see his mother. He filled his letters to her with advice about trains, hotels and luggage, and told her how much he missed his native region: ‘It would be good to be on the Volga in the summer. How splendidly we travelled along it with you and Anyuta [Anna] in the spring of 1900! Well, if I can’t come to the Volga, the Volga folk have to come here. And there are good places here, albeit of a different kind.’ Lenin genuinely loved his mother. But in going to Brittany he was also trying to escape the disputes in the party that were wrecking his nerves.17 He confessed as much to the unsympathetic Plekhanov. He badly needed a break before the expected rigours of the Congress.
From Brittany, Lenin went by train directly to Belgium (where he was joined by Nadezhda Konstantinovna). Switzerland was thought unsuitable because the large Marxist émigré colony did not want to draw the attention of the official authorities upon itself. Apartments were found in Brussels where the delegates could stay for what were likely to be lengthy proceedings. The Congress began on 17 July. Yet the Organisational Committee immediately had trouble from the Belgian police after the Okhrana in St Petersburg passed on information about the violent revolutionary purposes of several of the participants. Hurriedly the Congress transferred itself across the English Channel back to London. There the local personal contacts of the Iskra board helped in the search for new premises. When the Congress was reopened five days later on 29 July, the delegates met in the unlikely surroundings of the Brotherhood Church, a Congregationalist chapel run by a committed socialist – the Rev. F. R. Swann – on Southgate Road in north London.18 Lenin had to conquer his distaste at socialists holding their gatherings on a Christian site. In any case the delegates remained edgy about security and adjourned some of the remaining sessions to the English Club on Charlotte Street.
Angry speeches beset the Congress. Lenin’s manipulations were picked out for censure, and Plekhanov was asked by the delegate Vladimir Akimov to disown him. But Plekhanov refused. ‘Napoleon’, he declared, ‘had a passion for making his marshals divorce their wives; some gave in to him in the matter even though they loved their wives. Comrade Akimov resembles Napoleon in this respect: he desires at any price to divorce me from Lenin.’19 Just as Lenin had once professed that he had been in love with Plekhanov, so Plekhanov now suggested that a kind of marriage existed between them. Both were expressing themselves in innocence of the oeuvre of Sigmund Freud. Unconsciously they were giving a signal of the phenomena that, for most of the time, brought out the greatest passion in them. They lived for their ideas and their political fulfilment.
Plekhanov, of course, had been disingenuous about his commitment to the ‘marriage’. Before the Congress he had been regularly infuriated by his young consort. But the Congress was not alerted to this, and the record of the Congress organisers – Lenin included – was approved. The proceedings continued to be highly disputatious. Except to aficionados the details were arcane in the extreme. Lenin was not alone in picking apart every practical question as if it were a bomb of great doctrinal significance waiting to explode. Nothing was too trivial for Marxists to examine from the standpoint of its philosophical principles. But the Devil really was in the detail. Even the apparently mundane matter of the position of the Jewish Bund within the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party was dynamite. One reason for this was obvious. The Bund’s delegates represented thousands of members in the western borderlands and no region of the Russian Empire could match this. The Bund contended that the allocation of only five places out of forty-three at the Congress was grossly unfair. But the other delegates turned the argument down flat. The Bund then demanded broad autonomy for itself in the party as a whole. But this, too, was controversial. The Bund recruited members on a specifically ethnic basis, and the Congress did not wish to make an exception for any particular ethnic group.
The second reason was that several of the Iskra group had a Jewish background: Axelrod, Martov and Trotski. Lenin’s Jewish great-grandfather, old Moshko Blank, had lived in the region where the Bund was now active. Axelrod and the others had turned against everything Jewish. They had become Marxists to escape their religious and ethnic origins and disliked the whole idea of Jewish Marxists such as those of the Bund giving priority to work exclusively among Jews. The Bundists for their part sniffed a degree of anti-semitism at the Congress, and they thought the renegade Jews to be the worst offenders. But the Bund was on a hiding to nothing and its organisational demands were supported by no delegates but its own.
There followed a discussion of the Party Programme. Lenin was to the fore, and to general surprise – but they didn’t know him yet – he showed finesse in winning the doubters to his side. He made an admission of his polemical excesses. Referring to his booklet, What Is to Be Done?, he stated: ‘Nowadays all of us know that the “Economists” bent the stick in one direction. To straighten the stick it had to be bent in the opposite direction, and this is what I did.’ This was not quite an apology, but it was not the unmitigated arrogance that Iskra’s critics had been led to anticipate. Everything went sweetly for Lenin and Plekhanov: the draft Party Programme with its emphasis on ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ was accepted. The main disagreement was over Lenin’s ideas on the agrarian question. But the Iskra group held firm and the draft was ratified. It must have been tempting for Plekhanov to let Lenin be defeated on those clauses in the Party Programme that had previously divided them. But a deal was a deal. If the Congress was to be controlled, the Iskra group had to stick together. For most of the sessions it did precisely that.
One difficulty was caused by the Party Rules. Rival proposals were put forward by fellow Iskra editors, Lenin and Martov. Martov had bridled at Lenin’s imperiousness in Munich, London and Geneva. For his own self-respect he had to face up to him at the Congress. Martov wanted a set of Party Rules to restrain the ruthlessness of Lenin and his like.
The specific rule that brought things to a head related to the qualifications for party membership. The verbal distinctions between Lenin and Martov were microscopic. Lenin wanted a party member to be someone ‘who recognises the Party Programme and supports it by material means and by personal participation in one of the party’s organisations’. For Martov, this was authoritarian excess. Gentler qualifications were needed, and Martov suggested that a party member should be someone ‘who recognises the Party Programme and supports it by material means and by regular personal assistance under the direction of one of the party’s organisations’.20 Martov’s phrase about operating ‘under direction’ was by most criteria more bossy than Lenin’s original. But the subtleties of language were of no concern to Martov and Lenin, and historians have wasted their ink on the semantic contrast. What mattered for both of them was the essence of the matter. Martov wanted a party with members who had scope to express themselves independently of the central leadership; for Lenin, the need was for leadership, leadership and more leadership – and everything else, at least for the present, was to be subordinate to this need.
Lenin was defeated, by twenty-eight votes to twenty-two. He was disconcerted, but he recovered. Combativeness was second nature to him and his section of the Iskra group. They revelled in being described as the ‘hards’. The barracking of their opponents at the Congress was becoming normal, and some of them took their machismo still further. Alexander Shotman threatened to beat up a fellow ‘hard’ who had defected to Martov’s section. Lenin pulled back Shotman and told him that only ‘fools use fists in a polemic’.21 Nevertheless the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party had acquired a gangsterish aspect. To one of his supporters around this time Lenin put the matter bluntly, although he had his usual difficulty in enunciating his consonants: ‘Politiggs is a diggty business!’ Dirty or not, politics was his profession and he was adept at it already.
Lenin was admired by his fellow ‘hards’ for the very unpleasantness and harshness of his behaviour at the Congress. Yet the internal division of the Iskra group threw its plans for the future leadership of the party into disarray. Already Lenin had an agenda of his own, and he had revealed it confidentially to Martov. Lenin’s scheme had been to reduce the board of Iskra, which was to become the official central party newspaper, from six members to three. The casualties of the change would be Axelrod, Potresov and Zasulich. Such a manoeuvre, as Martov must have foreseen, would give him and Lenin the whip hand over Plekhanov in any board dispute. But the sight of Lenin behaving with such belligerence at the Congress shook Martov’s faith in him. The snag was that Martov, who was always a defective tactician, had left it too late. Lenin had taken the precaution of assuring Plekhanov that the reason for dropping the others was their scant usefulness in the past. When the Congress discussed the central party bodies, Lenin had his allies lined up to denounce Martov as a hypocrite for trying to carp at his proposals: ‘He knew! He didn’t protest!’22
Martov had misplayed his hand. By the time all this was being discussed, the composition of the Congress had undergone alteration. The five Bundists and the ‘Economists’ had walked out in protest. These delegates, if they had remained, would have supported Martov against Lenin. If Lenin had been in such a situation, he would have struck a deal to keep potential supporters in the hall. Martov was not so sly. Lenin could argue his case in a Congress whose political balance had been tipped in his favour. The sheep was left in an unguarded fold and the wolf was at the gate.
Next the ‘hards’ pushed to realise concepts of centralism, discipline and activism. At the apex of the party there was to be a party council. The Council would control a three-person Iskra board and a three-person central committee. The vote on this structure and its personal composition resulted in victory for Lenin and Plekhanov. Acting together, they would run the party; and neither of them worried that the cost of their triumph had been the exodus of the Jewish Bund as well as other groupings. For this reason Lenin redesignated his ‘hards’ as the ‘majoritarians’ (bol’sheviki or Bolsheviks). Always he was a step ahead of his adversaries. When there was a crucial political matter in dispute, he was everyone’s superior in tactical and linguistic inventiveness. He had lost to Martov on the Party Rules: in such a situation, if he had been Martov, he would have dreamed up a triumphal name for his supporters. Martov passed up the chance. Worse than this followed. Martov proceeded to accept the Leninists’ self-description as Bolsheviks and to call his own group the ‘minoritarians’ (men’sheviki or Mensheviks). When the Congress filled the places on the Central Committee and the Iskra board, Martov’s tactical ineptitude became manifest.
The majority was now held by the supporters of Lenin and Plekhanov. The Central Committee was initially composed of Gleb Krzhizhanovski, V. A. Noskov and F. V. Lengnik; the Iskra board kept only Lenin, Plekhanov and Martov from its previous composition. The ostensible result was the definitive creation of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party with a fixed Party Programme and Party Rules.
Yet this situation did not long prevail. Plekhanov, reverting to his previous suspicion of Lenin, came to regret that he had supported him at the Congress. The Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, whose creation he had dreamed about for two decades, was being born as Siamese twins who needed to be divided. His depression – one might say, post-natal depression – was such that he confessed to suicidal thoughts. He and Lenin had not stopped arguing since Lenin had come abroad in 1900, and Plekhanov was pushed over the brink at the assembly of the Foreign League of Russian Revolutionary Social-Democracy in Geneva in October 1903. The League had been recognised by the Congress as the official co-ordinating body of all the dozens of émigré party members in Switzerland, France and England. Its sessions in Geneva were the first occasion for the emigrants to draw breath after the schism at the Congress. Martov seized the bull by the horns by making a personal attack on Lenin. In the course of a lengthy speech he revealed that Lenin was disingenuous in forming an alliance with Plekhanov. Before the Congress, Lenin had said to Martov: ‘Don’t you see that, if you and I stick together, we’ll keep Plekhanov permanently in a minority and there’ll be nothing he’ll be able to do about it?’
Lenin made for the door, slamming it after him. Plekhanov, who had been listening impassively, announced he was willing to step down from Iskra in order to put an end to factional strife. Lenin felt so disarmed that he sent in his own resignation from Iskra and the Party Council. Lenin, the party’s king in the making, banished himself from court. His Bolsheviks became the minority. He had forgotten to ‘keep a stone in his sling’. For the first and last time he had retired from a position of strength. He soon repented his action, and remorse turned to anger as Plekhanov increasingly sided with Martov and the Mensheviks.23
Yet there was still a stone left at the bottom of the sling. Lenin worked feverishly to inform the Iskra agents about how, in his opinion, he had been tricked into defeat. He wrote his one-sided history of the internal party dispute and published it in May 1904 in the booklet One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. His old companion in the St Petersburg Union of Struggle and in Siberian exile, Gleb Krzhizhanovski, was a member of the newly elected Central Committee. When Krzhizhanovski arrived from Russia in November 1903, Lenin made the simple request that he should co-opt him to membership of the Central Committee. Krzhizhanovski was delighted to agree. Neither he nor Lenin nor any of their close comrades had any time for democratic procedures. If Lenin had been cheated, the swindle had to be turned on its head. Lenin had got his second wind. From this time onwards he turned his cantankerous, dishonest methods into a political art. He never ceased to be interested in perfecting it. Having walked out directly from the Party Council, he would insist on re-entering it as one of the Central Committee’s representatives.
He wrote up his self-defence in obsessive detail in One Step Forward. His gimnazia training as a collator of data came in handy; so too did his lawyer’s understanding of the opportunities offered by the Party Rules. He did not care a fig for democracy, but he was determined to show how his adversaries had infringed democratic procedures. Once he felt wronged, he assembled every available argument that he had been done down. Lenin, the critic of moral sensitivity in economic and social analysis, put his own sense of moral outrage on display.
Nevertheless his style in politics placed him under intense strain and, with the opening of the archives on his medical condition, we can now see just how near he came to collapse. As he insisted to friends, he was not ‘a machine’.24 Already in spring 1903 he had suffered from St Anthony’s fire and, although his mental tensions had not produced the illness, they did not help him to recover very quickly. As Nadezhda Konstantinovna witnessed, his ‘nerves’ had been tightened to snapping point before the Second Party Congress. Afterwards they finally burst and Lenin had terrible nights with insomnia and terrible days with migraine. The Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party’s man of iron sometimes returned home to 10 Chemin du Foyer in Geneva, after a day’s work at the Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire or the Société de Lecture, in a state of collapse. If his recurrent ill health had started to affect him only in 1903–4, there might be reason to think that the party’s factional troubles had caused them. But the medical problems had been evident for years. The sole difference was that they were more acute and more frequent than previously. Lenin was determined to sort things out and consulted the latest textbooks. He also sought out the best Swiss doctors. His stomach problem was investigated by a leading specialist and he received a prescription that was somewhat effective, at least for a while.25
He later told his sister Maria Ilinichna that he lost the prescription.26 This is a curious thing for so meticulous a person. Perhaps he did not want to worry Maria about his general condition, especially if he had told the specialist about his other physical malaises – insomnia, migraine and tiredness – and about his father’s death through a heart attack brought on by cerebral arteriosclerosis. Lenin came out of the consultation a very concerned man. The specialist had told him that his stomach was not the main problem. When Lenin asked him to explain, the answer was curt: ‘It’s the brain.’27 Lenin told no one what the specialist meant. But medical wisdom at that time is likely to have put forward two diagnoses: one would be that Lenin was suffering from ‘neurasthenia’; the other that he had inherited the physical characteristics which had killed his father.
Neurasthenia had been a fashionable diagnosis since the late nineteenth century for patients complaining of headaches, ulcers, insomnia and tiredness. These symptoms, it was thought, stemmed from the hectic pace of contemporary urban society. Their radical cause was thought to be an exhaustion of the nervous system. The conventional remedy, ever since neurasthenia had been ‘invented’ as an illness, was complete withdrawal from heavy mental work. This was believed to be still more important than the adoption of a particular diet. In later life, too, some of his doctors diagnosed Lenin as suffering from neurasthenia, and always they asked him to slow down his schedule of political commitment. Few specialists nowadays would accept that a specific illness of neurasthenia exists or that Lenin’s various symptoms resulted from a problem with his central nervous system. But neurasthenia was in fashion at the turn of the century, and Lenin appeared to fit the paradigm of the textbooks. But, even if his specialist had ignored this possibility and instead suggested that Lenin had a cerebrovascular weakness, the treatment regime would have been the same: the permanent, drastic lowering of his workload.
Unfortunately it would have driven him to distraction to decrease his involvement in public affairs. Politics was his life. He acceded to the desirability of taking lengthy holidays, but this called for no change in lifestyle since he had been accustomed to spending the summer in Kokushkino. Otherwise he made no serious adjustment to the way he lived his life. He was the despair of his doctors.
A connection apparently existed between periods of political controversy and bouts of stomach illness, insomnia and headache. But what was the nature of the connection? His health made him agitated; his politics made him agitated. His political style and his medical condition worsened each other. The situation was exacerbated by his growing conviction that he was a man of destiny. The Revolution had to be made fast and deep and Lenin aimed to be its leader. He thought that he was the person who had been called to indoctrinate and guide the anti-tsarist political movement. After his spat with Plekhanov, he regarded no Russian Marxist as being his equal in intellectual and political potential. All this added to his inner tension. He had not yet got used to being isolated and the fact that a friend like Gleb Krzhizhanovski had turned his back on him in 1904 depressed him. If he had not had an unshakeable belief in the righteousness of his cause, he might even have cracked in the early years of emigration while establishing himself in the party leadership. He ‘knew’ he was correct and he would not back down in the face of criticism.
Even his self-belief might not have been enough for him to survive, however, if he had not been able to rely on his family, whose support for him was constant. His mother, sisters and brother gave him the impression that he could do no wrong, and it was rare for Nadezhda Konstantinovna to contradict him in the course of their long marriage. He had a secure framework of daily life. Most of his years as an emigrant were spent in places he found congenial. Paris, where he lived in 1908–12, was the exception; he never took to the French capital. Munich, London and Geneva were the cities that he loved to stay in.
Lenin lived life on his own terms. The golden boy at home and in the gimnazia retained this status in adulthood. His bookishness; his demands on the attention of others; his regimen of regular exercise; his willingness to give advice on subjects from politics through philosophy to medical care: these features were treated as evidence of his genius. Lenin insisted on absolute silence when he was working, and such was his intolerance of distraction that he would not let even himself emit a noise while he worked. Nadezhda Konstantinovna records that he used to move about his study on tiptoe in case he interrupted his train of thought: the cat, when left on its own, was a mouse.28 Lenin just had to have everything in order – whether it was the array of pencils on his desk or the political and economic policies of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party – before he could feel at ease. There was no one else to whom he answered. This may seem strange for a politician who referred to Marx and Engels as figures of authority, but the paradox is only apparent: Lenin felt that only he could read their works aright, even though he did not say or write this expressly until the Great War.
The family took part in politics on his side. As soon as Nadezhda Konstantinovna proved an efficient organiser, Lenin delegated crucial tasks of party correspondence to her. His blood relatives were also important. Dmitri Ilich Ulyanov had been working as an agent of Iskra in 1900–2 and was a delegate to the Second Party Congress. Anna Ilinichna carried messages between Europe and Russia; and both she and her younger sister Maria did the same in later years. The version of Marxism favoured by Anna, Dmitri and Maria was a reflection of his. All of them were arrested together with Dmitri’s wife Antonina in January 1904;29 and when any of them got into trouble with the Russian Ministry of the Interior, their mother uncomplainingly accompanied them into administrative exile.
The emotional and political assistance that Lenin received from his relatives during his personal isolation in 1903–4 was of crucial importance. He never doubted the rightness of his cause. But his touch as a campaigner was still being brought to maturity, and his ‘nerves’ were a chronic irritation. If he had not been able to retreat into this milieu of encouragement, his career would not have prospered quite as it did. To men such as Nikolai Valentinov it did not matter whether Lenin’s behaviour in internal party disputes had been fair by the Party Rules. Valentinov looked up to him as an active, irrepressible leader. He and others liked Lenin’s punchy phrases about turning Russia upside down. They had no worry about his agrarian-socialist affinities. They knew that he admired the notorious Pëtr Tkachëv’s journal Alarm and the proclamations of the still more notorious Sergei Nechaev (whose complicity in murder had caused the Swiss authorities to make a legal exception in 1872 and extradite him to St Petersburg). Lenin recommended his associates to read these materials and learn lessons from them.30 Practically every early Russian Marxist had admired the older generation of agrarian socialists to some degree. They had also had much respect for the Jacobins in the French Revolution. Indeed all the younger members of the Iskra editorial board had once approved of terrorism.
What is more, Lenin’s Marxist admirers could not fail to appreciate his devotion to making a revolution and his practicality as a party chief. And he was a chief with the common touch. When Valentinov arrived penniless in Geneva, Lenin helped him with his part-time job as a barrow-pusher. Valentinov got a commission, but could not fulfil it by himself. Lenin leaned a shoulder to the barrow – and Valentinov never forgot the favour. Nor did other Marxists who arrived from the Russian Empire. Very often it was Lenin who, acting on information coming through to Nadezhda Konstantinovna, met them off the train in Geneva. Lenin took the trouble to interview them, acquainting himself with their personal circumstances and the political situation at home. Lenin had been brought up surrounded by books in large, easeful households, but he was also growing ‘outwards’ as a person and was not too haughty to carry out laborious tasks. Overt pride had been anathematised in the Ulyanov family and, when things needed to be done, they had to be done without fuss. Lenin had not been brought up to manual labour. But he had been educated by his parents to do whatever needed to be done in pursuit of any great cause. For his father, the cause had been Enlightenment, for Lenin it was Revolution, and Enlightenment through Revolution.
Lenin had fewer adherents than he had expected after his victory at the Second Party Congress. When the emigrants of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party split into two factions, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, the activists in the Russian Empire were horrified by the news: few committees and groups were willing to take the road towards schism. The theory of Marxism as expounded by Marx and Engels was that a single class – the proletariat – would undertake the task of introducing communism. It stupefied Russian Marxists that the Marxist movement should be split into two separate organisations. Only a few groups – such as the far-left Marxists in St Petersburg – went along with Lenin’s divisive methods and policies.
He had even forfeited the sympathy of old friends. He had always been thought unusually hot-headed, but now several associates felt that he had lost all sense of proportion. Among them was Gleb Krzhizhanovski, who hated the prolonged factional struggle. Days after co-opting Lenin to the Central Committee, Krzhizhanovski tried against Lenin’s wishes to reconcile the two factions. He offered to withdraw Lenin’s supporter L. Galperin from the Party Council and to co-opt some of Martov’s Mensheviks to the Central Committee. Lenin was furious, but Krzhizhanovski put it to him bluntly: how could he conceivably be right to hold out for unconditional factional triumph when practically everyone, including his own supporters, thought him incorrect? Krzhizhan-ovski had said everything short of calling him egocentric and irreconcilable – and Krzhizhanovski continued to bristle with indignation about the conversation after the October 1917 Revolution.31 Ceaseless imprecations were made against Lenin. Krzhizhanovski and Noskov were losing patience, and in February 1904 wrote to him formally in the Central Committee’s name: ‘We implore the Old Man to drop his quarrel and start working. We await leaflets, pamphlets and all kinds of advice – which is the best way of calming the nerves and responding to slander.’32
These two sentences show how the relationship between Lenin and his notional equals on the Central Committee had evolved. He was the Old Man, the senior organiser. He was the vital provider of advice. He was the peerless writer–activist. And he had to be treated tactfully: he could not be instructed but only implored: his position of superiority was beyond dispute. But this did not prevent the Central Committee members from drawing his attention to his excessive absorption in questions of internal party authority at the expense of carrying out his vital roles on the party’s behalf. Lenin was taking things too personally, and they were not surprised to hear that he was suffering again from bad ‘nerves’. According to Krzhizhanovski and Noskov, the solution to the party’s problems lay in Lenin agreeing to take himself in hand.
But Lenin pitifully reminded the Central Committee that he was ‘not a machine’ and could not forget the insults from Plekhanov and Martov.33 Yet the Central Committee showed him no sympathy. Although all its eight members were Bolsheviks by spring 1904, only a couple of these stood by Lenin. The rest of the Central Committee felt that the best place for Lenin was not Switzerland but Russia, where they themselves were operating. In May 1904, Noskov arrived in Geneva and, speaking on the Central Committee’s behalf, ordered Lenin to submit to party discipline. Noskov particularly forbade him to campaign for the convocation of a Third Party Congress. The Central Committee wanted to mend the party split and a Congress, if held in the near future, would only deepen animosities. Noskov aimed to halt publication of the savage anti-Menshevik tract One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. But he did not quite have the confidence to carry out his mandate. A compromise was reached allowing the tract to be published and recognising Lenin and Noskov as joint representatives of the Central Committee abroad. Lenin in person had proved a tough negotiator. In formal terms Noskov had surrendered and Lenin was able to go on as before.
This took a great deal out of Lenin. He found it demeaning to have to deal with Noskov; the fact that Noskov thought he was doing the party a favour only made the situation more difficult. Lenin had convinced himself that the entire revolutionary cause was being mis-handled:34
The party in reality had been torn apart, the rule-book had been turned into paper rubbish, the organisation had been spat upon. Only naive bumpkins can yet fail to see this. But to whomever has grasped this it must be clear that the pressure exerted by the Martovites needs to be answered with real pressure (and not with tawdry whimpering about peace and so on). And the application of pressure requires the use of all forces.
From this analysis he would not budge. His willpower was extraordinary, and he deployed it to surmount his own intellectual doubts (few as they were) and the political criticisms of others (which were plentiful).
In the first half of June 1904 Lenin and Nadya decided to take a rest from the internal party warfare. Months earlier he had been cycling in Geneva and had run into the back of a tramcar. He badly gashed his face and for weeks had to walk around with it bandaged up. His other ailments of stomach and head were also intensifying, and the after-effects of the St Anthony’s fire lingered. He very badly needed a holiday. And so he and Nadya gave up their rented Geneva quarters and headed for the mountains with rucksacks on their backs and a copy of the Switzerland Baedeker in hand. They took with them Maria Essen, one of only two Central Committee members still supporting Lenin. The Bolshevik threesome swore to avoid talking about politics ‘so far as was possible’. It was the perfect trip for them. Switzerland was well organised for mountain walkers. The Hotelkeepers’ Association had developed a system whereby a visitor could send a telegram in advance to book a room for the next night, and the Baedeker stated that a really bad hotel or inn was ‘rarely met with’. The telegraph network was the densest in the world. Thus the three of them would be able to have plenty of restorative exercise while being certain that their food and shelter would be of good quality.
First they headed by steamboat for Montreux and visited the castle of Chillon. They did a lot of walking. Lenin’s zeal to push himself to his limits was focussed, for just a while, upon recreation; and he encouraged his companions – his wife and Maria Essen – to keep up with him as they scrambled along the mountain trails. In late July they settled for a while in a pension by the Lac de Bré. It was a very long vacation.
Not until 2 September did they return to Geneva.35 There they rented an apartment a few days later at 91 Rue de Carouge. This was a street of tall, plain tenement buildings with shops and cafés on the ground floor and layers of private residences above them; and it lay at the heart of the area favoured by the city’s political emigrants. The streets around the Rue de Carouge were a little, middle-class Russia. For Lenin it was like coming home. He had returned refreshed for the fray after the longest holiday of his adult life. Without it, quite possibly he would have had a nervous collapse. Only this explains the risk he now took with his political position. He had gone away in the knowledge that Noskov, in his absence, might undermine him further in the Central Committee. He had taken the precaution of transferring his own powers to trusted friends; but none of these had his talent to resist the irresistible. Noskov, moreover, regarded his agreement with Lenin with regret. In July 1904, he got to work in Russia and, by a mixture of persuasion and co-optation, converted the Central Committee to his policy of reuniting the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. A declaration was drawn up to this effect, and Lenin was reprimanded for failing to supply a stream of pamphlets. The Bolshevik-led Central Committee confronted the Bolshevik leader.
When informed of this, Lenin – his physical and mental well-being restored – called a meeting of his few remaining émigré supporters and arranged for them to travel round Russia and put together a so-called Bureau of Committees of the Majority with the purpose of convoking a Third Party Congress. Finance became available through the efforts of the brilliant young Marxist writer Alexander Bogdanov. To put it gently, Lenin was not always very charming towards Bogdanov. If Bogdanov omitted to write a letter on time, Lenin felt free to curse him for his ‘swinishness’. But Lenin kept himself in check, or just about. He could see that a friendly relationship with Bogdanov was necessary if he was to have access to the money and personal support he would need in order to reassert himself. Together with Bogdanov and Anatoli Lunacharski, therefore, he arranged to publish a rival newspaper to Iskra. Its name would be Vperëd (‘Forward’). The first issue appeared on 22 December 1904. To Noskov’s consternation, furthermore, Lenin’s section of the Bolsheviks were able to recruit many adherents in the Russian Empire. There were plenty of Marxists who had read What Is To be Done? and were still keen to back Lenin as potential party leader.
Thus the civil war in the party raged on. Lenin had put together a parallel organisation which would act as his fighting force against the Mensheviks and indeed against any Bolsheviks who opposed him on the battlefield. It was in this mood that the émigré leadership of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party greeted the New Year in 1905.
There are not always extraordinary people around to take advantage of an extraordinary political situation. Many observers had long predicted a revolutionary crisis in the Russian Empire. Clandestine parties were working for a change of regime and all of them hated the Romanovs; and Lenin had plenty of reason in both ideology and family history to want to overturn the Romanov dynasty.
Huge resentments existed in Imperial society. The Okhrana patrolled the trouble with the limited financial and human resources available to it; the Russian Empire was indeed a police-state in the making. But it was not a state that found it easy to keep its people in check. Poor harvests in the new century had made the peasants restive. The workers as ever resented the absence of organisations through which they might represent their case to employers. Several national groups, especially the Poles, had underground organisations looking for a chance to confront the Russian Imperial government. And a whole range of clandestine political groupings were operating. Not only the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party but also the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries were working to undermine the regime. The Socialist Revolutionaries managed to assassinate the Minister of the Interior, V. K. Pleve, in summer 1904. Even the liberals were becoming active. A Union of Liberation had been formed under the leadership of Pëtr Struve, who by then had broken with Marxism; its main mode of challenge was to hold public banquets and to facilitate the delivery of speeches that obliquely attacked the monarchy. Emperor Nicholas II, who had acceded to the Imperial throne in 1894, was under assault from virtually all sides.
What made matters worse was the fact that Russia unwisely went to war with Japan in 1904 in pursuance of its interests in the Pacific region. Large land forces were sent along the Trans-Siberian Railway, and the Baltic Sea fleet had to circumnavigate the globe to take on the Japanese navy. Through the later months of the year there were reports of a gathering catastrophe. Troops were penned into Port Arthur in the Far East. Supplies were scarce, discipline poor and political and military leadership execrable. Meanwhile the Baltic Sea fleet crossing the North Sea had opened fire on an English trawler, mistaking it for a Japanese warship and nearly starting a war with the United Kingdom. Disaster and farce were blended in equal proportions. The Emperor and his court were declining into universal public disrepute.
But then on 9 January 1905 a peaceful procession of men, women and children took place in St Petersburg. Its destination was the Winter Palace of the tsars and its object was to present a petition to Nicholas II for the granting of universal civil rights, including a degree of democratic political representation. It was a Sunday. The marchers were dressed in their best clothes. The mood was firm but jovial. At the head of the procession walked an Orthodox Church priest, Father Georgi Gapon. The petition-campaign had been organised by him through the Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers of the City of St Petersburg; his idea on that fateful Sunday was to present a set of loyally phrased requests to the Emperor Nicholas II in person. The Assembly was a trade union operated under the strict supervision of the Ministry of the Interior in a scheme begun in the Russian Empire at the instigation of Moscow police chief Sergei Zubatov. Gapon acted as intermediary, but increasingly he took the workers’ side against the authorities.
As they drew near to the Winter Palace, the marchers were ordered to disperse but they ignored the instruction and walked on. The troops in front of the building, in the Emperor’s absence, were beginning to panic and their commanding officers decided to fire upon the crowd. Scores of innocent demonstrators were killed. Instead of suppression, the result was mayhem. Everywhere in Russia there were strikes and demonstrations, and everywhere the blame was put upon the dynasty.
The news of the Russian revolutionary crisis reached Geneva within twenty-four hours of ‘Bloody Sunday’. Among the first Bolsheviks in the city to read the papers were Anatoli Lunacharski and his wife, who hurried to Lenin’s apartment on Rue David Dufour on 10 January. There was jubilation despite the information that innocent people had been shot outside the Winter Palace. The point for Lenin was that tsarism stood on the edge of a precipice; the throne of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great was beginning to totter. Together the Lenins and the Lunacharskis walked over to the café run by Panteleimon and Olga Lepeshinski at 93 Rue de Carouge. This was the main social centre for Russian Marxists, a place where they could eat cheaply and talk about politics and party organisation for as long as they liked. The Lepeshinskis were Marxist veterans who ran their business without expectation of great profit. They offered a service as much as a commercial operation. The tables were always cluttered with coffee cups, porridge bowls and plates of stuffed-cabbage pastries and salami, and there were always several groups of revolutionaries chatting to each other. On that particular day, however, the café had become packed very quickly. The emigrants scented the possibility of Revolution.
But what was to be done? Indeed what were the emigrants, who depended on Swiss journalists for information on Russia, in any position to do? They had been caught out by the events in St Petersburg and could not easily gauge how best to proceed. Nearly all of them decided to wait on events. Rather than return immediately to Russia, they tried to plan strategy for their followers. Without direct experience of the fast-changing circumstances in St Petersburg, they analysed and predicted things in the light of their previous doctrinal ruminations. They were unembarrassed by this. The working assumption of these revolutionary intellectuals was that their previous doctrines would supply the backbone of practical strategy for their followers in the Russian Empire.
Certainly Lenin took time to recognise the need for a fundamental strategic reconsideration. His initial reaction to ‘Bloody Sunday’ was to affirm again and again that the priority for Bolsheviks was to maintain a separate organisational identity from the Mensheviks. In December 1904 he had ranted to every member of the Bureau of Committees of the Majority that reconciliation with the present editorial board of Iskra was impossible – and he railed that fellow Bolshevik Noskov had tricked him while he and Nadya had been on holiday. Indeed he had done what any contemporary gentleman, be he a squire or an army officer, would have done in such circumstances: he formally cut off all personal relations with Noskov.1 The problem was that the Central Committee, including some of Lenin’s close supporters, did not accept his judgement and calmly made arrangements for a Third Party Congress that would bring Bolsheviks and Mensheviks back together. Surely, thought Lenin, ‘Bloody Sunday’ would put an end to such stupidity and Bolsheviks would recognise their duty to stand up for Bolshevism as the only genuine revolutionary trend? But even his friend Sergei Gusev, a Central Committee member, turned against him. Lenin raged at all of them by letter. They were ‘wretched formalists’. He didn’t care if they all went over to Martov. They were a disgrace to Bolshevism! No compromise!
Nadezhda Konstantinovna had to encode such correspondence, and perhaps it was she who pointed out the counter-productive effects of Lenin’s tone. Or maybe Lenin came to his senses by himself and saw that, if he ditched his Bolsheviks, no revolutionary group would be left to him. His only supporters, unless he could hold on to Sergei Gusev and other such comrades, would be his wife, his brother and his two sisters; and even Lenin knew that the Ulyanovs, however pertinacious they proved, were too few to turn Russia upside down.
Even so, he continued to claim that a permanent split with the Mensheviks was crucial:2
Either by truly iron discipline we’ll bind together all who wanted to wage war, and through this small but strong party smash the crumbling monster of the new Iskra and its ill-assorted elements; or else we’ll demonstrate by our behaviour that we deserve to perish as contemptible formalists.
This was still offensive but not to the point that Bolshevik leaders would seriously take umbrage. More likely was that they marvelled at the surreal inappropriateness of his words. At a time when hundreds of thousands of Russians and Japanese were dying in the conflict in the Far East, Lenin talked blithely about ‘war’ in the party. They must surely have thought him outrageous in describing the Mensheviks, a tiny and committed group, as monstrous. They might also have been perplexed by his insisting that revolutionary duty demanded that they support the Japanese cause politically. This was an early version of the stand he was to take in the Great War; for Lenin, any foreign power attacking Russia deserved the support of Russian Marxists (and he habitually portrayed such a power as being less reactionary than the tsarist state). Anything to pull down the Romanovs! And was it not odd that, when every other Marxist was putting his mind to overturning the Romanov dynasty, Lenin thought that the most urgent task was the closure of Iskra in far-off Switzerland? What could anyone think about his behaviour but that he had finally gone somewhat mad? Perhaps they began to wonder whether they had made a mistake when they had taken his side against Martov in 1903.
And so the Central Committee, led by Bolsheviks, went ahead with a unifying Party Congress. Invitations were carried to practically all the important committees in the Russian Empire. The venue was to be London, and Lenin in high dudgeon got Nadya to buy tickets for the rail trip on the overnight train across France from Geneva. Days later, after arriving at Charing Cross Station, they took up lodgings at 16 Percy Circus in St Pancras. The Congress was to be held in April, and Lenin’s anger steadily dissipated. Plekhanov, Martov and other Iskra leaders were refusing to come to London at all. They argued with some justification that the Central Committee had not been even-handed in its scrutiny of the validity of delegates’ mandates and called upon Mensheviks to attend their own gathering in Geneva. Consequently, for most purposes, the so-called Third Party Congress in London was a Bolshevik Congress even though the Central Committee had managed to tempt at least a handful of Mensheviks to come to London and participate. Lenin, did he but know it, was a lucky man; he was like a man rescued from a chronic disease by a brilliant but invisible physician. He had wanted a Bolshevik Congress. A Bolshevik Congress was what he got. And he no longer felt the need to go around Bloomsbury in a foul temper about the Iskra group.
Instead he had the chance to explain his ideas on strategy to activists who had come over from Russia and to learn directly what was going on in St Petersburg and the provinces. Here he came into his own. One of his strengths was his ability to set down his thoughts clearly and pungently, at least to people who shared most of his basic assumptions. Few Bolsheviks had this talent to his extent; perhaps only his rival Bolshevik leader Alexander Bogdanov was in the same class as an expositor. Lenin loved Congresses. He liked to meet delegates. He liked the chance to exchange ideas with the working-class delegates. Along with Nikolai Alexeev, he assisted delegates with addresses of cheap temporary lodgings and with tips on English pronunciation.3 (The fact that, to the British ear, he enunciated his rs like a Frenchman did not deter him.) And of an evening he would walk along with delegates to the little German pub at the top of Gray’s Inn Road to have a beer and talk over the proceedings – and several of them were to recall how much inspiration Lenin drew in this period from the ideas of the Russian nineteenth-century agrarian-socialist terrorists and from the terrorist practice of the Jacobins in the French Revolution in 1792–4.
An affordable hall was found for the Congress, which began on 12 April 1905; the desire for secrecy was such that we still do not know the hall’s name. Lenin, whose reputation among Bolsheviks in Russia and abroad had been in tatters in the previous months, suddenly reasserted his dominance. He chaired most of the sessions and manipulated the agenda for his own purposes. At last endeavouring to specify how to make Revolution, he presented a set of slogans that electrified the audience: ‘armed insurrection’, ‘a provisional revolutionary government’, ‘mass terror’, ‘the expropriation of gentry land’.4 Each slogan secured rapturous assent. The proceedings were not published at the time; otherwise, probably, he would not have spoken so enthusiastically about dictatorship and terror. But among his own Bolsheviks he felt no inhibition, and it is striking how his audience found nothing objectionable in his remarks. Bolsheviks were a ruthless bunch. They expected to make a revolution and to have to fight against counter-revolutionary forces, and did not see why they should eschew the violent methods developed by Robespierre and his confederates in the French Revolution. Bolsheviks were hard-headed and confident. If they played their anticipated vital role in overthrowing the Russian Imperial government, they assumed, they would be indispensable to the task of securing the political and economic gains; their aim had to be to join the subsequent revolutionary administration. Lenin had ventilated ideas that had expressed their innermost inclinations.
But not everyone could understand how the new slogans fitted the earlier common understandings of Russian Marxism. Some asked how a Marxist party could aspire to join a government whose purpose was to consolidate a capitalist economy. And if the landed nobility was to be expropriated, where should the agrarian reform stop? Delegate M. K. Vladimirov enquired whether the party should stop short of specifically socialist measures – such as the introduction of collective farms. Lenin was unruffled. He came back instantly with his injunction: ‘Never stop!’5
When the Mensheviks heard of Lenin’s contributions, they declared him a proven renegade from Marxism. He admired Tkachëv and praised terror. He wanted to give the entire land to the peasantry. Violence and dictatorship fixated him. Lenin tried to prevent the criticisms getting out of hand by writing yet another booklet, Two Tactics of Russian Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, which he was still writing during the Congress. Its purpose was not only to justify his new radical slogans but also to drum some organisational sense into fellow Bolsheviks. He noted, for example, that they were slow in Russia to found trade unions and other organisations for the working class. Lenin was furious with them, urging an end to the preoccupation with clandestine methods of running the party. He tried to make them a bit less ‘Leninist’! Now, to general amazement, he aimed to form a large, open-entrance party. For him, no somersault was involved here. What Is to Be Done? was a tract for its time and situation; its universal theme was the need for leadership but it offered no permanent detailed prescription for the modalities of party organisation. Now, said Lenin, there was a real revolutionary opportunity – and the party had to change the way it operated. Otherwise the Revolution would leave the party far behind.
Lenin was not changing his assumptions, just his practical proposals in the light of the changed political situation. A revolutionary opportunity existed and the party absolutely had to exploit it. The Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party had been created precisely for this purpose. He was readying his party – or rather his section of it – to recognise and exploit this opportunity. He was a pressure-cooker on the stove waiting to blow off its lid.
His campaign shows both how much and how little he had come along the road towards becoming a leader of Revolution. The Congress understood his defects. This was why, against his objections, it decided to limit the emigrants’ influence upon the party. In particular, the Central Committee and the central party newspaper, now to be known as Proletari, were to be switched to the Russian Empire. Lenin was being put on notice that if he wished to lead the Bolsheviks he would have to operate not in Geneva but in St Petersburg. For over six months he had ignored this warning. Nothing – not even a decision by Congress – would induce him to return to Russia until his freedom from arrest seemed secure. Thus Lenin was a theorist and rhetorician of Revolution more than a leader. He retained his wholly unrealistic belief that he could direct Bolshevik activity in Russia by means of letters sent from the Switzerland. He failed to comprehend the volcanic unpredictability of the forces that were being released. He had read about the French Revolution, about the Revolutions of 1848 and about the Paris Commune of 1871. But what he had learned from his books had been about the ‘class interests’ of the contending political forces. Like Marx, he had striven to focus on the internal logic of developments. But at the same time he had overlooked the chaos of each of those great historical events as experienced by the people who took part in them.
Yet Lenin was not complacent. In Geneva he sensed the need to acquire a more lively sense of what was happening in St Petersburg even though he refused to go there. Weeks after ‘Bloody Sunday’ he met the fleeing Father Gapon. Other Marxists were cold-shouldering the Russian Orthodox priest, but Lenin talked with him at length. They even exchanged copies of books they had written; this was not Lenin’s usual reaction unless he was impressed with someone. From the beginning there was a rapport between the two men.
And so Lenin welcomed him to the Rue de Carouge. As they discussed current developments, peasants’ son Gapon – charismatic, gruff, bearded and hostile to both the Emperor and the Orthodox Church hierarchy – captivated him as someone who had a deep understanding of the feelings of ordinary Russians.6 The fact that Gapon was neither a theorist nor a party member was all to the good; he knew things that were elusive to emigrants. A former tsarist loyalist, Gapon had turned to Revolution only after the massacre outside the Winter Palace. He could speak about haymaking, slums and Sunday schools – all subjects in which Lenin’s knowledge was deficient. Lenin was also intrigued by Gapon’s slogan ‘All the Land to the People’. Obviously this went far beyond Lenin’s demand that the cut-off strips should be restored to the peasants. But Gapon insisted that his own radicalism was justified. God alone, said the priest, was the land’s sole owner and peasants should be helped to rent it. Needless to add, Lenin rejected the proposal in its religious encasement.7 But Lenin drew inspiration from it in political terms. Lenin was even more impressed when Gapon showed him his open letter to Russia’s socialist parties, calling on them to come to an agreement and prepare the armed overthrow of tsarism. Here was a man of the cloth who understood the practical tasks of the Revolution. Lenin the militant atheist referred approvingly to Gapon’s proposal in the Bolshevik newspaper Vperëd.8
Lenin was developing as a politician. He was a Marxist, albeit a Marxist who had been inspired by earlier generations of Russian socialist thinkers. He was a scholar-revolutionary with a deep commitment to the perfectibility of mankind inherited from Enlightenment philosophy. But he was also increasingly capable of assimilating ideas from other sources. Although he expressed himself in the lexicon of Marxism, he needed to go outside the Marxist fraternity for help to think through his strategy.
His policies, despite pointing away from conventional Marxist policies, held to the axiom that the great march to socialism would occur in two distinct stages: first a ‘bourgeois-democratic’ revolution and then a socialist one. But there were also distinct oddities in his argument. Two Tactics of Russian Social-Democracy, for example, insisted that liberals and other middle-class parties were incapable of being trusted even to bring about that first revolution. Even stranger was the project for a ‘provisional revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’. Lenin announced that such a dictatorship would exercise a powerful appeal to the lower social classes. But the Mensheviks retorted that Lenin had thrown out the two-stages concept. They rightly suggested that, if the dictatorship was going to be enormously popular, the bourgeoisie would never be able to supplant it. They also challenged Lenin’s case that a dictatorial regime was the most effective way to introduce universal civic rights and a market economy. His whole project was a contradictory mishmash. Yet Lenin did not deign to respond to these attacks; he had convinced his Bolshevik followers and was unwilling to expose the flaws in his case in a general public debate. This also carried the advantage of allowing him to go on believing that he had stayed within the perimeter of conventional Marxism.
In fact Lenin was tempted to expound a one-stage strategy and drafted an article called ‘Picture of the Provisional Revolutionary Government’ in which he sketched ideas for ‘a revolution uninterrupted’. But then he had second thoughts and withheld his piece from the press. Not all Marxists were worried about flouting convention. Inspired by the ideas of unconventional Marxist Alexander Helphand-Parvus, Trotski proposed unequivocally that the socialist parties should seize power, establish a ‘workers’ government’ and not open themselves to replacement by liberals. Trotski wanted not just to preach but also to practise revolutionary leadership. Returning to Russia in summer, he joined the striking workers of St Petersburg.
Across the summer the troubles of the Imperial government became acute. The news from the Far East was terrible. Russian land forces had been overwhelmed at the battle of Mukden in February, and the navy, having circumnavigated the globe, was annihilated at Tsushima in May. Count Witte, brought out of retirement by the Emperor, managed to negotiate surprisingly gentle terms of peace from the Japanese, but the sense of national humiliation was widespread. So too was the spirit of revolt. In city after city there were industrial strikes and in May there was a novel phenomenon: the soviet. The word, meaning council in Russian, came to stand for an elected body of the lower social classes that assumed the power of local government. It happened first in Ivanovo-Voznesensk but quickly spread elsewhere. Workers without much prior deliberation had set up embryonic alternative administrations. Trotski became Deputy Chairman of the Petersburg Soviet in September. The clandestine political parties came into the open, and even the liberals formed a political party at last: the Party of Constitutional Democrats (or Kadets). Unions proliferated. Censorship almost collapsed. The police were too timid to intervene. Peasants began to take timber from the landlords’ woods and to pasture their cattle on gentry land. Poles and Georgians made their countries ungovernable from the Russian capital. Tsarism was in mortal danger.
This entire crisis occurred in Lenin’s absence. Other Bolsheviks nagged him about this and in September he was firmly requested by his comrade Alexander Bogdanov to return home immediately. Bogdanov was also an intellectual; he too was a prolific author and a theorist. But he was also restless for action. Indeed it was Lenin’s plea for action in What Is to Be Done? that had turned Bogdanov into a Bolshevik. He simply could not understand why Lenin would not take the risk of going back to Russia, and he told him this in plain language. But still Lenin would not budge. He had never gambled with his personal safety or engaged in mere revolutionary gestures. His activity in emigration with its intellectual debates, its publications and its library research continued to fulfil him. No one meeting him on the Rue de Carouge would suspect that this neatly dressed, scholarly type intended, as a basic purpose in his life, to transform the politics and society of the world. He believed that revolutionary leaders were meant to supply doctrinal guidance and practical policies, and to keep themselves free from arrest. He therefore had no trouble in brushing Alexander Bogdanov’s complaint aside.
What changed his stance was the news from St Petersburg that the regime was at last making serious reforms. On 17 October 1905 Emperor Nicholas II issued a Manifesto, promising to realise universal civil rights as well as convoke a State Duma. Immediately Lenin felt reassured. The Okhrana, he thought, would no longer be hunting for him on the streets. Or at least he could hope so. In the first week of November he boarded the train in Geneva and began the journey that led him across Germany. Nadezhda Konstantinovna’s preparations were meticulous. From Germany she and Lenin crossed to the Swedish capital Stockholm, where Bolshevik associates had false papers ready for them. Ferry tickets had been bought for both of them and they took the steamer from Stockholm across the Baltic to Helsinki. For the first time in five years Lenin set his feet on ground ruled by the Russian Emperor. Leaving Helsinki, Lenin and Nadya took another train to St Petersburg. It was a journey of 280 miles and they crossed the Russo-Finnish administrative border at Beloostrov. When they alighted at the Finland Station on 8 November, they were discreetly met by the Bolshevik Nikolai Burënin, who showed them to the first of several apartments where they were to stay over the next few weeks.9
Initially Lenin and Nadezhda Konstantinovna registered legally as residents; they expected to operate in the open. But they dropped this delusion the very next day when the Okhrana surrounded the area with agents who had no talent for disguising themselves. From then onwards they were looked after by fellow Bolsheviks in a succession of safe-houses. Nevertheless Lenin was confident enough to visit his mother and his sister Anna, who were living at the little village and railway-stop of Sablino outside St Petersburg. He also kept up regular contacts with Bolsheviks who were working in the soviets, trade unions and other organisations. All the while he was gulping down impressions about Russia in revolution. But most of his working time was spent in his traditional fashion. He wrote newspaper articles and booklets and sat through the endless discussions of party committees. Occasionally, moreover, he gave speeches to party congresses, conferences and other such gatherings. From November 1905 through to summer 1906 he resided in St Petersburg with the odd visit to Finland, to Moscow and – in April 1906 – to Stockholm for the Fourth Party Congress. His purpose as ever was to guide and control his Bolshevik faction and maximise its influence in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. He was not, and did not aim to be, the tribune of the people.
Not for him, then, the delivery of fiery speeches to public meetings in the fashion that was making Trotski famous. He attempted only one such oration in 1905–6. This was to an all-party meeting in May 1906 in the People’s House. It was a testing experience for him. He was unusually nervous before getting up on to the platform and being introduced to the audience as ‘comrade Karpov’. He need not have worried. Once he was on the platform, he handled the situation well. Screwing up his eyes and grasping the lapel of his jacket, he leaned forward and fixed his gaze on the audience. Then he rapped out his slogans. Everyone went away impressed with his utmost belief that these slogans were the sole means to accelerate progress to socialism in Russia. Slowly Lenin was acquiring the skills of twentieth-century open politics.
The comparison with Trotski is not wholly fair. The rise and fall of the Petersburg Soviet, where Trotski made his declamations, had largely happened before Lenin’s arrival. Thereafter all revolutionary politicians, not just Lenin, concentrated on sorting out the affairs of their respective parties. This was a mammoth task for Lenin because his Bolsheviks continued to despise the soviets and to exaggerate the advantages of political conspiracy. Lenin argued that the time was overdue for Bolsheviks to form a mass party, to participate in the various other public organisations and to organise Revolution. When his recommendations were accepted but only with reluctance, he responded by suggesting the need for the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party to be infused with young blood. Lenin cared little whether the recruits were already Marxists. The priority was to attract radical, working-class activists, activists who raged to be active. And Lenin wanted them to have complete freedom to express their impatience; indeed he tried to strengthen their impatience. Industrial workers inside and outside the party, he declared, should take the Revolution into their own hands. They should not be restrained by their parties. The working class should act as the vanguard of all the forces hostile to the Russian Imperial state.
He was apt to get carried away about such matters. Repeatedly he had deplored the failure of the 1871 Paris Commune to resort to repression; in 1905, however, he not only confirmed his commitment to violent methods but gave them a specificity that was more bloodthirsty than anyone thought imaginable. He displayed a virtual lust for violence. While he personally had no ambition to kill or to maim or even to witness any butchery, he took a cruel delight in recommending such mayhem.
This delight was intense shortly before his return to Russia. Thus he wrote the following summons to members of the Combat Committee attached to the Bolshevik Central Committee: ‘Here what is needed is frenzied energy upon energy. I see with horror, for God’s sake with real horror, that there has been talk about bombs for more than a year and yet not a single bomb has been made!’ Lenin’s solution was to give arms to detachments of workers and students and let them get on with revolutionary activity regardless of whether they belonged to the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. The detachments should kill spies, blow up police stations, rob banks and confiscate the resources they need for an armed insurrection.10 His imagination ran wild. When it came to street conflicts, he suggested, the detachments should pull up paving stones or prepare hot kettles and run to the tops of buildings in order to attack troops sent against them. Another proposal was to keep a store of acid to hurl at policemen.11 These tactics were not only alarming but also impractical. If used, they would have stiffened the will of troops and policemen to suppress rebellion. Lenin was expressing a rage deep inside himself. He himself did not have to handle bombs, kettles and acids. But unconsciously he got satisfaction from putting his thoughts about them on paper.
He did not worry that others might be appalled by his approach:
Of course, any extreme is bad; everything good and useful taken to an extreme can become and even, beyond a certain limit, cannot help but become a harmful evil. Uncoordinated, unplanned petty terror, when taken to an extreme, can only disintegrate forces and waste them. This is true, and naturally cannot be forgotten. But on the other hand it absolutely mustn’t be forgotten that the slogan of insurrection has already been given, the insurrection has already been started.
The breakdown in logic here was significant. Having begun with a justification for not going to an ‘extreme’, Lenin ended abruptly with an assertion that the armed uprising was under way.
Within a month, however, he had calmed down. His Bolshevik associates in Moscow were acting with precisely the zeal he had wanted. And yet the Moscow Rising, which they had organised together with the other political parties in the City Soviet, was a disaster. The fighting commenced in mid-December 1905. It was concentrated in the Presnya industrial district and the valour of the rebels was beyond dispute. But they were no match for the same troops who had recently closed down the Petersburg Soviet in the Technological Institute. The Rising was ruthlessly put down. Over-optimistic attempts at insurrection, concluded Lenin, should no longer be indulged. He also wished to persuade the Bolsheviks to take full advantage of the Emperor’s October Manifesto. Elections were to take place in early 1906 for an elected, representative assembly: the State Duma. There were severe limits upon the new Russian parliamentarianism. In particular, the Emperor retained the right to disperse the Duma and to rule by decree. But Lenin argued that the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party should put up its own candidates and use the Duma as an opportunity for the dissemination of party propaganda.
This was a battle he could not win. In mid-December 1905 he was defeated at the Bolshevik Conference held in the Finnish town of Tampere, three hundred miles north-west of St Petersburg. But he persisted with his strategic shift even though it broke sharply with everything he had been saying since the Second Party Congress in 1903. He even condoned reconciliation with the Mensheviks. For two years it had been an article of his crusading faith that Menshevism was a heresy, a set of organisational and strategic proposals that flew in the face of Marxist principles. When his followers had queried his hostility to compromise, he had shown them his utter contempt. In Lenin’s eyes, the ‘Conciliator Bolsheviks’ had been hardly better than the Mensheviks.
And yet now Lenin wished to reunify with the Mensheviks. His calculations were not difficult to decipher: he could not control Bolshevik policy. To balance the zealots in his own faction, he therefore needed Mensheviks, most of whom wanted the party to participate in the soviets and to campaign in the State Duma elections. He contemplated this despite the chasm that separated him from Menshevism. Lenin stood for a ‘provisional revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’, for a class alliance of workers and peasants, for the repudiation of the middle classes and for mass terror. The Mensheviks by contrast urged that the ‘bourgeois-democratic’ revolution should be led by the middle classes and that this revolution should immediately implement universal civil rights. It would take all his charm and persuasiveness to bring the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks back together. But Lenin always had abundant self-belief. Without expressly announcing his change of stance, he did all he could to enable the two factions to join each other at the Fourth Party Congress. His highest immediate priority was to get the Congress to sanction participation in the legal political activities that the Imperial government had been compelled to concede. For Lenin, a sinuous manoeuvrer, this was not a tall order.
The Congress was arranged for Stockholm. As the Congress delegates set off across the Baltic Sea to the Swedish capital in April, Lenin opened negotiations with Menshevik leaders. The Mensheviks had a slight majority over the Bolsheviks among the Congress delegates and would undoubtedly win the main debates. This had the effect of freeing Lenin to say what he wanted about a wide range of policies, including those which were diametrically opposed to Menshevism. Lenin enjoyed being aggressive. Refining his project for expropriation of the landed gentry in favour of the peasantry, he called for ‘land nationalisation’ by the ‘provisional revolutionary dictatorship’. The Mensheviks too had widened their demands on the agrarian question and called for ‘land municipalisation’; they contended they would thereby avoid the centralised bureaucracy that Lenin’s scheme would involve. Lenin had casually assumed that it would be a simple administrative task for the revolutionary regime to ensure that the peasants, who would gain use of the land at a very low rent, would adopt efficient farming techniques. But both the Mensheviks and many of Lenin’s critics among the Bolsheviks replied that this would be a task of gigantic complexity. In truth Lenin woefully underestimated the dangers of bureaucratic degeneration.
Lenin was defeated on agrarian policy at the Congress and his other initiatives also met with reverses. The Mensheviks brought up the very embarrassing matter of the Bolshevik factional leadership’s complicity in the organisation of bank robberies in the Russian Empire. This was a growing scandal in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. For Mensheviks, such robberies were an intolerable method of financing the party and Lenin’s secret sanction for them was a disgrace. Plekhanov added his weight to the criticism, repeating that Lenin’s strategy of Revolution – especially his wish for a class alliance with the peasantry – was reminiscent of the Russian agrarian socialists. It was an uncomfortable moment for Lenin. His self-control was strained to the limit because the Bolshevik factional leadership had simultaneously invited him, the advocate of participation in Duma elections, to put the case for boycotting them. He phrased his speech on the subject with uncharacteristic vagueness, which was the most he could do to signal his disquiet with the policy of the Bolshevik faction. But when at the end of the Congress the Mensheviks unexpectedly tabled a proposal to enter the electoral campaign still in progress in one region of the Russian Empire, namely the Caucasus, he broke cover and voted against most of his fellow Bolsheviks. The Menshevik proposal was accepted. At least on this matter he had obtained a degree of pleasure.
The new Central Committee of the reunited party included seven Mensheviks and only three Bolsheviks. Lenin was not among them. He was being warned by fellow Bolshevik delegates that his ideas were not to their liking: his policies on the Duma and on land nationalisation were especially unappealing to them. As a consequence his mood had darkened by the time he took the ferry back from Stockholm. His nerves were frayed.
But the mood quickly lightened. The Bolshevik faction aimed to keep its organisational apparatus separate from the rest of the party and established a secret Bolshevik Centre. Lenin was readmitted to the leadership alongside Bogdanov and Leonid Krasin. From this position he would be able to undo those decisions at the Congress which he did not like, and on this he had Bogdanov’s warm collaboration. The two of them got on better than for years and decided that they and their wives should set up house together. They feared the attentions of the Okhrana as the Imperial regime sought to assert control. Their enquiries led them to Vaasa, a large two-storey dacha at Kuokkala in the Grand Duchy of Finland. Kuokkala lies less than forty miles from St Petersburg; it was only five miles from the existing Russo-Finnish administrative border at Beloostrov and had a station on the railway between St Petersburg and Helsinki. Lenin and his friends were opting for safety. Finland was not as secure as Switzerland but had limited self-government even under the tsars. Its border was not just of a formal significance. Travellers had to show their passports and allow the police to inspect their baggage. The Finns had their own currency and postage stamps and were so different from the Russians that they forbade people from buying alcohol on public premises unless it was accompanied by a meal. Finnish ports received ferries regularly from Hull, Lübeck, Stettin and Stockholm; it was possible, in an emergency, to leave for central and western Europe without going back to Russia.
Thus Finland, which had been subjected to Russian Imperial control since 1809, was almost a foreign country without quite being abroad – and the Finnish socialists so detested tsarism that they were willing to lend a hand to almost any of its victims. It was there that the Bolshevik Centre decided to set up its base. Lenin, Nadya, Bogdanov and his wife Natalya would be able to get on with their writing, their organising and their observation of politics from a safe distance. Shortly before he left for Finland, Lenin visited the Sablino dacha rented by his mother. From 20 August 1906 he was at Kuokkala and there he stayed until late November 1907. Otherwise he ventured forth only briefly for important conferences and congresses. He attended meetings in the Finnish towns of Tampere, Terijoki and Viipuri; he also travelled to the Fifth Party Congress in London and to the Congress of the Socialist International in Stuttgart. But he did not venture back into Russia. Little did he know that he would not see St Petersburg again for nearly a decade.
From beginning to end the Fifth Party Congress was disrupted by rows. Lenin no longer had need of decent relations with the Mensheviks since they had already fulfilled the function of helping him to get the Bolsheviks to put up candidates in the State Duma elections. He repaid them by stating, before the Congress opened in April 1907, that they had prostituted their Marxist principles. They came back at him with denunciations of insincerity. He had talked in favour of the party’s reunification but had created a separate Bolshevik Centre and kept funds out of the hands of the Mensheviks. Disputes exploded throughout the Congress between the two factions: about the peasantry, about Russian liberalism and even about philosophy. But Lenin had a successful Congress. He was assisted by the fact that the various Marxist parties of the borderlands of the Russian Empire attended. The Poles led by Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches had considerable significance and were inclined to favour Lenin’s strategic judgement that the party ought to prefer the other socialist parties, including those of the peasantry, to the Kadets as allies. Menshevism was thwarted. So too were the Bolsheviks such as Bogdanov who continued to resent participation in the State Duma. By parleying with Latvians and Lithuanians as well as Poles, Lenin was able to secure several positions that were to stand him in good stead in future years.
Even so, he was not elected to the Central Committee. On several counts he had been criticised by the Congress. The question of Bolshevik complicity in armed robberies came up again. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were condemned for their ‘anarchist tendencies’, and it was stated that no further bank raids should take place. But by then Lenin did not care. He was no longer as interested in manoeuvring between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks as in securing hegemony over the Bolshevik faction. And he looked forward to the Stuttgart Congress of the Second Socialist International in good spirits. His delight was unbounded when, partly as a result of his efforts, the International toughened its declaration of hostility to militarism and imperialism with the support of the German Social-Democratic Party. When Rosa Luxemburg advised him that the German Social-Democratic Party would be less committed in practice to anti-militarism and anti-imperialism than he believed, Lenin dismissed her as an obsessive factionalist. He was to regret this in 1914.
The fifteen months in the rambling wooden rooms of Vaasa were a period of crisis for Russian revolutionaries. Lenin watched the situation from afar as tsarism tightened its grip. To his chagrin, the First State Duma elections were ignored by the Bolsheviks. Nevertheless the peasants voted for candidates who stood for the transfer of agricultural land to the peasantry. The liberals, led by the Kadets, continued to object to the limitations placed by the Basic Law upon the powers of the Duma. The First State Duma had turned out to be a hotbed of opposition to the Romanov monarchy. By then Nicholas II judged that he had the better of the new political parties; he dispersed the Duma and called fresh elections. The Kadets decamped to Viipuri in Finland and called upon Russians to withhold taxes and conscripts until such time as the Imperial government showed respect for the elected representatives of the people.
Yet the Second Duma too produced an assembly that refused to do a deal with the Emperor. Nicholas II for his part never had respect for the liberals again; he had some lingering hopes for the conservative party of Alexander Guchkov and the so-called Octobrists, who had always wanted to make the limited constitutional reforms work as well as they could, but he soon distrusted Guchkov as well. The man he most relied upon was his Minister of the Interior, Pëtr Stolypin, who used the noose to suppress rural rebellion. Stolypin’s ‘necktie’, as it became known, reduced the countryside to quiescence. Order returned to town and village. Stolypin knew that state coercion would not save the dynasty, and he introduced a series of measures to conserve the tsarist state. Becoming Chairman of the Council of Ministers, he was determined to refashion the Duma by redrawing the electoral law and giving greater parliamentary weight to the gentry. He also began to introduce an agrarian reform aimed at a phasing out of the village land commune and its replacement by a large class of sturdy, independent farmers. For Lenin, this was proof that the Imperial regime was incapable of coming to terms with contemporary capitalism. Stolypin’s measures in the countryside were taking the ‘Prussian path’ instead of the ‘American’ one. What he meant by this was that the gentry landlords remained in positions of authority and dominated the countryside as they did in Prussia. The chance to open up agriculture to those who simply wanted to farm the land – as had happened in the American West in the nineteenth century – had been lost. Now only Revolution could modernise the Russian economy.
Lenin discussed all this with his fellow lodger in Vaasa. Bogdanov was easily the most brilliant intellectual force inside Bolshevism. He was the only thinker in the faction whose mental capacities outmatched Lenin’s. Bogdanov had never taken to the authoritarianism embodied in Lenin’s ideas. At Vaasa they talked a lot. They could hardly avoid each other: Bogdanov lived on the top floor and passed by the Ulyanovs’ quarters every time he went out into the garden. Increasingly they found themselves at odds about political theory, culture and philosophy. And they disputed immediate policy: Lenin wanted participation in Duma elections, Bogdanov vehemently opposed this. From having been boon comrades in the struggle against the Mensheviks, they became rivals for the leadership of Bolshevism.
Lenin hoped to go on sheltering in the Grand Duchy of Finland. Although he thought that the political ‘reaction’ would endure several years, he did not intend to move from Kuokkala.1 But the situation was becoming volatile. Pëtr Stolypin, Chairman of the Council of Ministers, carried out a constitutional coup on behalf of Nicholas II in June 1907. This involved the disbandment of the Second Duma and the introduction of new electoral rules so as to produce a Third Duma, later in the year, with more places and greater influence for the landed gentry. Meanwhile the Okhrana redoubled its efforts to catch the revolutionary leaders. Far too many Bolshevik activists had taken a trip to Kuokkala for the Imperial police to be unaware of the general whereabouts of the Bolshevik Centre.
One day in late November a message came to the Centre’s members that policemen were searching the vicinity. Immediately Lenin packed and headed in the direction of Helsinki, 240 miles away. His attitude was that the commander had to survive even if the officers were captured. Dutifully Nadya remained behind at the dacha with Alexander and Natalya Bogdanov and Iosif Dubrovinski. They spent their time preparing to move the Bolshevik Centre abroad and burned those party files that could not be transported. Nadya, worrying that the police might be suspicious of the fresh pile of ash, organised its hurried burial. Other files were passed for safe-keeping to Finnish Marxists. Then the dacha’s owner rushed round to alert the tenants to the imminence of a police search. In fact the Okhrana was preoccupied by its hunt for a group of Socialist-Revolutionary terrorists and was unaware of the identity of the Vaasa tenants. But the Kuokkala tenants feared the worst. Meanwhile Lenin went to ground at the village of Olgbu outside Helsinki. Party organisers had arranged for him to be given a room at the back of a house belonging to two Finnish sisters, where he settled down to write articles on the agrarian question. Some days later he was joined there by Nadya. By then it was clear that they had to move abroad if they were to avoid arrest.2
The Bolshevik Centre decided to make for Switzerland; but this was easier said than done. A permanent system of contact with Russia had to be put in place. Nadya was entrusted with such pieces of party business, and she returned to St Petersburg to make the final agreements with activists. Lenin waited in Olgbu as she went about her tasks. Nadya was under great pressure. In particular, she had to secure the efficient transfer of Proletari, the main newspaper published by the Bolsheviks, from Finland to Switzerland; she also had to visit her sick mother Yelizaveta Vasilevna, who at that time was refusing to re-emigrate with her daughter and son-in-law.3
Lenin had faith in her abilities and feared for his personal security. In her absence in St Petersburg, he decided to re-emigrate and left instructions as to how she could catch him up in Stockholm. Nadya accepted her abandonment with stoicism. Little did she imagine that Lenin, through his insistence on a rapid escape, was putting himself in great danger. The plan was for him to take the ferry from Turku to Stockholm. An ice-cutting ferry steamship plied this route, but Okhrana agents were known to keep watch at the Helsinki rail station and the Turku ferry terminal. Police on the boarding stage were looking out for fleeing Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. The advice to Lenin from Finnish comrades was that he should avoid Turku and travel to the second stage of the ferry’s journey at Nauvo Island twenty miles to the south-west in the Gulf of Bothnia.4 Lenin complied. From Turku he set off by carriage and then made his way by boat to Kuustö Island. Secrecy remained essential and he moved from shelter to shelter by night. From Kuustö he was accompanied not only by a local co-op chairman but also by a friendly Finnish police officer to Lille Meljo Island. This was the penultimate section of the trip. From Lille Meljo he intended to reach Nauvo, where he would board the Stockholm ferry on 12 December.
The problem was that Lenin would have to go on foot to Nauvo Island and the Finnish comrades for some reason had failed to explain that the ice was not reliably continuous. Indeed the ‘walk’ to Nauvo would necessitate a lot of leaping across the small gaps between ice floes. Nor had Lenin, usually a cautious man, bargained for the fact that his guides across the ice from Lille Meljo to Nauvo would be a pair of local peasants not noted for their sobriety. On the appointed day, as the three walkers set out from Lille Meljo to Nauvo, Lenin was the only one who was not the worse for drink. Midway across the ice, there was a heaving and cracking of the surface, and only by means of a last, desperate lunge did Lenin manage to clamber up on to a solid glacial fragment. ‘Ach,’ he thought, ‘what a stupid way to perish!’5 Death by drowning, for most people, would be tragic and not merely stupid. Only someone who had a glorious future in mind for himself could see the threat as something frivolous.
Napoleon’s main demand of his marshals was that they should be lucky – and Lenin was extremely lucky in 1907. He boarded the ferry as planned on Nauvo Island and next day arrived in Sweden. Not long afterwards he was joined by Nadya, who by then had cleared up the Bolshevik faction’s business. From there they travelled first to Berlin and then to Geneva. Lenin and Nadya had been suffering from influenza, and Lenin wrote to the writer Maxim Gorki with an oblique request to be invited to stay with him on the island of Capri off the Italian coast near Naples.6 The wish for physical rest was not his sole concern. The return to Geneva, where once he had confidently plotted Revolution in Russia, was too much for him. He groaned to Nadya: ‘I’ve got the feeling that I’ve come here to lie in my grave.’7 He was speaking from the heart: Lenin the revolutionary optimist felt defeated. Would he ever, he must have wondered, get another chance to play a leading role in his native land? Since leaving Switzerland in late 1905 he had spent more time in Finland than in Russia; and in the short time he spent in St Petersburg he had often been in hiding. How was he ever to lead his country to Revolution? To a friend he blurted out his confession: ‘I know Russia so little. Simbirsk, Kazan, Petersburg and that’s about it.’8
This pool of self-awareness quickly evaporated. Within weeks Lenin was again laying down the policies for Bolsheviks as if his alone was the analysis of Russian state and society that counted. In emigration he revised little in his strategic planning. His conclusion about the revolution of 1905–6 was that the Bolsheviks had had the correct policies. Quite why the Revolution had not succeeded, he did not explain. Lenin stuck to his certainties. The Bolsheviks needed to keep the faith so that they might be ready to improve their political performance for that inevitable future occasion when a revolutionary situation recurred in Russia.
For a few months Lenin and Nadya stayed in Geneva, first at 17 Rue des Deux Ponts and then at 61 Rue des Maraîchers. Gradually their health improved and their spirits rose. But Bogdanov and the other Bolshevik leaders found Switzerland uncongenial. Lenin disagreed, but he was in no position to prevent the Bolshevik Centre’s decision to decamp to Paris. Dolefully he and Nadya paid their Swiss landlord and journeyed to France in December 1908. Arriving in Paris, Lenin, Nadya and her mother Yelizaveta Vasilevna were joined by Lenin’s sister Maria Ilinichna. The four of them lived together with a fair degree of harmony. It is true that Yelizaveta Vasilevna, while respecting the ‘scientific work of Nadya and the son-in-law’,9 told Lenin what she thought of him, and that she was not always complimentary. Lenin responded in kind. He declared, for example, that the worst punishment for a bigamist was that he acquired two mothers-in-law.10 Yet any tiffs were short lived. Yelizaveta Vasilevna and Vladimir Ilich respected each other and a certain rueful fondness existed between them. One Sunday when she was feeling particularly fed up, Lenin discovered that she had nothing to smoke and went out to buy her a packet of cigarettes despite his aversion to tobacco smoke.11
For a while the women did the housework without a maid. Lenin as a Central Committee member had a regular income from the party and derived money from his book royalties; and the Bolsheviks had their own separate fund built up from the armed robberies and from legacies. Yekaterina Vasilevna, too, contributed a little to the finances of the ménage. But, hard though they tried, they could not persuade any Frenchwoman to work for them because Russians had the reputation of being demanding and undependable employers. When Mark Yelizarov, Anna Ilinichna’s husband and Lenin’s brother-in-law, visited them after a trip to Japan, he criticised them for doing their own cooking and cleaning; he also could not stand Nadya’s cooking. A bluff, straightforward man, he announced that they simply had to get hold of a maid. Usually his wife Anna objected to his habit of saying the first thing that came into his head.12 But not on this occasion: she had always been tactless in respect of Nadya and did not mind Mark’s snipe at her. Anyway the Ulyanovs accepted his advice and made another attempt to secure domestic assistance. This time they overcame the local Russophobia; the new housekeeper moved in and Nadezhda Konstantinovna’s siege on the stomachs of the Ulyanovs was lifted.13
Lenin stayed out of any quibbling of this sort. He himself did no cooking in the normal run of things and took no interest in the quality of his food beyond asking whether the ingredients conformed to his medical regimen. Nadya noted, with unintended humour, that ‘he pretty submissively ate everything given to him’.14 This compliance, so rare in Lenin the politician, induced the women in his life to go on ‘mothering’ him. Boyishly he would ask them: ‘Am I allowed to eat this?’ Indeed, several other of his habits were also endearing to them. Yelizaveta Vasilevna was impressed that, each day before starting to write, he took out a duster and buffed up his desk.15
Not that he ceased being the family’s dominant figure. Lenin had for years been a cycling enthusiast, and from Geneva he had frequently taken Nadezhda Konstantinovna and Maria Ilinichna on mountain rides at weekends. Lenin was the fittest of the three. If the women flagged, he would ride in turn alongside each of them and cajole them to keep going. Cycling in the Alps was a growing pastime for tourists, especially the British, Germans and French. His Baedeker for Switzerland noted that the Germans and French took things easy when the gradient became steep and that the custom was to hire a horse, tether the bicycles behind and ride gently uphill by means of equine power. The British would have nothing to do with this namby-pamby method, and it would seem that Lenin, usually a Germanophile, sided with the British on this. Holidays were not holidays for him unless he could push himself hard. Better still if he could push others too, as Nadezhda Konstantinovna and Maria Ilinichna ruefully noted. At night in the village pensions, too, he was still in charge. He refused to let Maria leave anything on her plate, explaining that if she did not eat the entirety of the supper, the innkeeper would halve the portions next evening without reducing the fee.16
Lenin hated to be done down in the slightest way and bicycles were a matter of persistent concern. When they lived in Paris, he rode daily to the Bibliothèque Nationale. He disliked this library because of the lengthy time he had to wait for the books he ordered, and he was irked further by the need to pay the concierge ten centimes for parking his bike outside. But one day something still worse happened when his beloved bike – that ‘surgical instrument’ of his – was stolen. When Lenin remonstrated with the concierge, however, she boldly retorted that his ten centimes covered only the permission to park and did not constitute a guarantee of security.17
For once, Lenin had met his match and did not get his money back. On another occasion his protest was more successful. Not long after he had bought a new bike, a nasty incident occurred. In December 1909, while returning from an aeroplane show a dozen miles from central Paris at Juvisy-sur-Orge, he was knocked from the saddle by a motor car and badly bruised. The bike lay in a mangled mess by the roadside. Fortunately there were witnesses and Lenin sought redress through a lawyer. In this he showed the same persistence that he had shown in Syzran in 1892 when prosecuting Arefev the merchant. Marxist zeal also came into play when Lenin found out that the Parisian motorist was a viscount. Lenin, himself a hereditary nobleman, showed no sense of class solidarity and sued for financial compensation.18
Lenin had never taken to Paris and went around describing it as ‘a foul hole’.19 Politics were part of the reason. During his French sojourn he was annoyed with the Mensheviks. He was annoyed, too, with anti-Duma Bolsheviks such as Bogdanov. Indeed, he was equally annoyed with those Bolsheviks who, despite agreeing with Lenin about Bogdanov, did not show the degree of annoyance that Lenin required of true Bolsheviks. About the other parties Lenin cared hardly at all, and when he met up with Socialist-Revolutionaries in the Parisian cafés frequented by the Russian revolutionary émigré ‘community’, he could be quite affable. Nevertheless his jokes took a combative form, as Viktor Chernov recalled:20
I said to him: ‘Vladimir Ilich, if you come to power, you’ll start hanging the Mensheviks the very next day.’ And he glanced at me and said: ‘It will be after we’ve hanged the last Socialist-Revolutionary that the first Menshevik will get hanged by us.’ Then he frowned and gave a laugh.
Quite apart from his gallows humour, Lenin was exhibiting an unceasing obsession with factional disputes inside the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. Bolsheviks had entered the Third State Duma and Lenin did not need Martov and Dan to help him to compel the Bolshevik faction to put up candidates in the Duma elections. Thus the need to keep the Mensheviks sweet had passed. Without delay Lenin resumed polemics against Menshevism, and his jokes reflected this.
Lenin’s struggle against Bogdanov was even fiercer. The detestation of the Duma among Bogdanov and his sympathisers retained the capacity to destabilise Bolshevik factional policy. Some went so far as to advocate that Bolshevik elected deputies should immediately be withdrawn from the Third State Duma. Others, and Bogdanov was one of these, wished to deliver an ultimatum to the deputies to withdraw on pain of expulsion from the faction. The first group were called the Otzovists (‘Recallists’), the second the Ultimatumists. Both groups also argued that the party should concentrate on preparing for and organising armed insurrection. For Lenin, they were living in a mental pressure chamber that had rendered them incapable of appreciating current political realities.
Lenin also brought up disagreements of an even more fundamental nature. Whereas Bogdanov gave priority to encouraging the working class to undertake its cultural self-development, Lenin stressed the guiding role of intellectuals. Admittedly Lenin did not insist that the intelligentsia should come from a middle-class background. But Bogdanov remained appalled by the Leninist idea that socialism had to be introduced to the workers by intellectuals; indeed he stipulated that the general culture of society had to be transformed so that socialist ideas might mature. The dominant present-day culture, according to Bogdanov, was ‘bourgeois’ since it was focussed upon individualism, authoritarian commands, formality, hypocrisy. A new culture – a ‘proletarian culture’ – had to be introduced, and Bogdanov suggested that it would be beyond the capacity of intellectuals to invent it because they themselves were the product of the culture of the bourgeoisie. All this and more infuriated Lenin. Bogdanov even suggested that Lenin’s notions about absolute truth, about eternal categories of thought and about the demonstrable reality of the external world were old-fashioned poppycock. Lenin, unlike Bogdanov, refused to involve himself in the broad philosophical debates in Europe of the time. Bogdanov had read Immanuel Kant and neo-Kantians such as Richard Avenarius and Ernst Mach. He admired but refused to idolise Marx. At the Vaasa dacha he had been writing a book, Empiriomonism, which recapitulated his exploratory ideas. He simply fizzed with intellectual vitality. Lenin thought the time had come to mount a frontal attack on him and his world-view.
Lenin had nothing to lose. The anti-Leninist Bolsheviks were highly influential inside the Bolshevik faction at home and abroad; they may even have been a majority. Equally pertinent was Lenin’s recognition that there was little immediate chance of another revolutionary crisis in the Russian Empire. It therefore felt opportune to resume the old schismatic tactics. If the second period of emigration was to be made endurable, Lenin believed, he had to recruit and mobilise a reliable Bolshevik faction in the image of himself.
Thus when Maxim Gorki had invited Bogdanov and Lenin together to his villa on Capri, Lenin at first refused, even though he had asked to come and stay. Lenin eventually went in April 1908 and suppressed his feelings to the extent that he played chess with his old partner in chess and politics. A degree of joviality was obtained. The problem was that Lenin’s competitive side got the better of him; Gorki was astounded at how angry and ‘childish’ he became when he lost a game.21 This happened even when Lenin and Bogdanov were avoiding conversations about politics. Only when he went fishing did Lenin relax. The local fishermen took him and Gorki out in their boats and taught them how to use a line without a rod. The trick was to wrap the end of the line over the forefinger of one hand and wait for the vibration signalling that a fish was biting. The fishermen told him what it would sound like: ‘Così: drin, drin. Capisce?’ Their Italian charm captivated Lenin, and as soon as he got a nibble, he cried out: ‘Drin, drin!’ Afterwards the fishermen called him Signor Drin-Drin – the only one of his nicknames not chosen with the Revolution in mind. They missed him when he left the island, asking Gorki: ‘How is Drin-Drin getting on? The tsar hasn’t caught him yet?’22
Lenin had stayed just for a week. He did not understand much Italian, far less could he make sense of the thick Neapolitan dialect. He had been a busy visitor, managing to squeeze into it a walk up Mount Vesuvius on the mainland as well as a visit to the museums of Naples. But he felt restored by his trip. He had loved the villa, the azure sea, the freshly caught fish, the operatic ballads, the generous, lively inhabitants. The trip to the Italian south had raised his spirits; he was ready again for the political fray.
Taking the ferry over to Naples, Lenin made the long ride north by train through Rome back across the Alps to Switzerland. His mind was made up: once he had reached Geneva, he would break definitively with Alexander Bogdanov and his sympathisers and open a campaign to rid the Bolshevik faction of them. It was a fast-changing situation. Bogdanov was nowhere near as obsessed as Lenin with the minutiae of political organisation. He was tired out by the endless scheming that engaged the leading Bolsheviks; he dearly wanted to have more time for his writing. In short, Bogdanov had had enough of Lenin and, after their Capri meeting, he resigned from the editorial board of the Bolshevik newspaper Proletari rather than put up with personal vilification. But because Bogdanov retained his place in the Bolshevik Centre it was by no means clear that Lenin would succeed in holding Bolsheviks as a faction to the line of supporting participation in the State Duma and legal public organisations in Russia. Gorki went on trying to convince himself and his friends that Lenin would not take his disagreement with Bogdanov to the point of splitting the Bolshevik faction.23 But Gorki was wrong: Lenin was firmly resolved upon a break with Bogdanov.
What made this feasible was that Lenin’s group had recently attained a degree of financial independence from Bogdanov. It had come about in a most peculiar way. A young revolutionary sympathiser N. P. Shmidt, nephew of the wealthy Moscow industrialist Savva Morozov, had died suddenly in 1907, and his will left many hundreds of thousands of rubles to his two sisters. Lenin helped to devise a scheme to lay his hands on this legacy by contriving to get two Leninist Bolsheviks, V. K. Taratuta and A. M. Andrikanis, to woo the sisters, marry them and obtain funds for the faction. This was a morally shabby scheme. But for Lenin the criterion was whether a particular action aided the Revolution, and the emotional deception of two heiresses fell well within the zone of acceptability. It had been a theme of Lenin’s since adolescence that ‘sentimentality’ had no place in politics. Now he refined this point in a paradoxical fashion by exploiting sentiment for political gain.
Lenin confessed to friends that he would not have had the nerve to carry out the scheme himself. He had been brought up to behave well in personal relations, and everything about the scheme was distasteful to him. But he also had a weakness for rough working-class Bolsheviks like Taratuta, whose bravado appealed to him: ‘He’s good inasmuch as he’ll stop at nothing. Here, tell me directly, could you go after a rich merchant lady for her money? No. And I wouldn’t either, I couldn’t conquer myself. But Viktor [Taratuta] could… That’s what makes him an irreplaceable person.’24 Amazingly the scheme worked. Taratuta and Andrikanis were two highly disingenuous charmers, and they managed to entice the Shmidt sisters into marriage with them. The problem for Lenin was that he depended on the Bolshevik suitors sticking to their factional obligations. After the dual weddings he waited nervously to see what would happen. In fact Andrikanis double-crossed him and apparently not even Taratuta handed over everything as agreed. But a substantial sum eventually came his way and placed him in a position of financial independence from the Bolshevik Centre. At last he did not depend on Bogdanov and his friends.
First, in February 1909, he broke off personal relations with Bogdanov. Lenin had done this once before, in 1904, when he felt traduced by V. A. Noskov; and he persuaded himself that Bogdanov had also put himself beyond the pale. By June 1909 the scene was set for a final confrontation at the Proletari editorial board meeting held in Paris’s Caput café and attended by members of the Bolshevik Centre. Lenin had prepared carefully, and a majority of the participants were willing to support him. Bogdanov’s policies were criticised; he was declared, by virtue of his ‘deviations from the path of revolutionary Marxism’, to have automatically broken away from the Bolsheviks.
Lenin challenged Bogdanov even on philosophical ground. For Lenin, like all Marxists, believed that a political and economic vision needed to be directed through a sound epistemological prism. Lenin used the opportunity of his trip to London for the duration of May 1908 to complete his researches on his book Materialism and Empiriocriticism. Based at 21 Tavistock Place in Bloomsbury, he lived close by the British Museum, which he visited daily.25 Quickly – too quickly – he read the major texts of the philosophers admired by Bogdanov. The book was produced in fast order, and Lenin intended it as a weapon in the struggle for supremacy in the Bolshevik faction. Its chapters became a philosophical bible for official Soviet intellectuals after 1917 even though much private derision was showered on it. The intrinsic ideological reasons why Lenin was angry enough to write it are clear. He was a grandson of the European Enlightenment. He believed in the kind of science advocated by philosophers in the eighteenth century. For him, there were such things as absolute truth and the independent reality of the external world. Persons who dissented from this, even if they claimed to be Marxists, belonged to the ‘camp’ of political reaction.
Bogdanov, in his eyes, was a dangerous relativist. Bogdanov believed in nothing. Bogdanov could not see that some things had been discovered and proved once and for all; indeed Bogdanov did not believe that ‘seeing’ was a reliable mode of cognition at all. Lenin had a profound faith in Marx, in the eighteenth-century ideals of the natural sciences, in the capacity of the human mind to register a wholly accurate picture of the universe around itself. He thought of the mind as a camera and of the camera as an infallible guide to cognition. By repudiating this way of understanding the world, Bogdanov was siding with priests and mystics. Lenin accused Bogdanov not only of having given up on Marxism but also of having given up on the Russian labour movement and on genuinely practicable revolutionary ideas.
Although the timing of the attack was politically motivated, Lenin truly considered Bogdanov had abandoned key precepts of Marxism. But there has to be a question about the substratum of his assumptions. Lenin was saying that epistemology begat social analysis which begat economics which begat political strategy. Thus Bogdanov, being wrong about epistemology, was bound to be wrong about politics. Lenin liked to give the impression that his own thought by contrast followed a logical pattern. But he protested too much. When we consider his several abrupt shifts in policy in the course of his career, the suspicion surely arises that he needed to entertain this image of his thought in order to gratify his part-political, part-instinctive desire to do whatever would put him and his faction into a position of power in Russia. The protestations of ideological purity were but a mask; and when he donned the mask and looked in the mirror, he was not necessarily aware that his face was occluded from view. This was a source of strength for him as a politician; too much self-awareness would have turned him into a self-questioning politician like Martov or Chernov. Lenin wanted to conquer, and he let nothing complicate his quest for victory.
From 1908 he had nothing good to say about Bogdanov. The help he had received from him in 1904, when Lenin’s fortunes were frail, receded into oblivion. The comradeship of the Lenins and Bogdanovs in Kuokkala in 1906–7 faded from his memory. Expecting the same forgetfulness to be shown by his associates, he took it amiss that his sister Anna thought that Materialism and Empiriocriticism overdid the polemical crudity.26 He would have been even angrier if he had known that his sisters Anna and Maria were reading and enjoying Bogdanov’s novel Engineer Menni.27
Lenin had concentrated his energy on attacking Bogdanov and assumed that any concession to his factional enemies would dissipate his effectiveness. This was a militancy he practised throughout his career. Every time he split his party or faction, Lenin believed he was ridding himself of unreliable elements and consolidating the core of the Bolshevik organisation under his control. He was unwise in this because each split left him with supporters who objected to aspects of his policies, and a smaller organisation did not result in a more cohesive compound. Indeed this was the case at the very same meeting at which he defeated Bogdanov. The Bolshevik Centre, while agreeing with Lenin on the need to reject Bogdanov, insisted against Lenin’s wishes on seeking to found a legal large-circulation newspaper in St Petersburg. It even contemplated closing down the émigré weekly Proletari, and although Lenin managed to avoid this, he had to agree to its being published only on a monthly basis. Worse for Lenin was the Bolshevik Centre’s desire to negotiate with Trotski in Vienna with the idea of offering Bolshevik collaboration and funds for the running of Trotski’s popular newspaper Pravda.
What Lenin had not bargained for was that, in getting rid of Bogdanov and the anti-Duma Bolsheviks, he was tipping the balance of opinion inside the Bolshevik faction in favour of those who sought to co-operate with the Mensheviks. Prominent among them was the otherwise inconsequential figure of A. I. Lyubimov. The Bolshevik Centre rubbed home its message by choosing Lyubimov as its secretary. Yet Lenin refused to listen; instead he threw himself into a hysterical, vain effort to get Lyubimov to toughen the Bolshevik Centre’s terms for collaboration with Trotski. Lenin’s family life did not lighten his mood. For once, it was he who had to look after his relatives rather than they who had to tend to him. Maria Ilinichna had fallen ill first with typhus and then with appendicitis, and Lenin had to play an active part in securing proper treatment for her. (Always his adoring and overawed sister, she appreciated his endeavours on her behalf.)28 But he had been driving himself too hard on too many fronts. After the Bolshevik Centre meeting he could take it no longer, and, together with Nadya, her mother and Maria, he moved off to the village of Bombon in Seine-et-Marne. Meekly he agreed to terms that, for him, were stiff indeed: he was to avoid talking and writing about politics.29
He did not keep his word and nobody seriously expected him to. Among his supporters there were still those who queried why one man could so easily reduce the party to a shambles. The Menshevik Fëdor Dan had often heard the question. His answer was straightforward: ‘Oh, it’s because there’s no such person who is so preoccupied twenty-four hours a day with revolution, who thinks no other thoughts except those about revolution and who even dreams in his sleep about revolution. So just you try and cope with him!’30 Dan had put it in a nutshell. Lenin was difficult because he was a factionalist and he was a factionalist because he thought only his ideas would genuinely advance the cause of the Revolution.
It was Bolsheviks and their sympathisers, however, who criticised him most severely. They could no longer give him the benefit of the doubt. Gorki could not abide his ‘hooligan tone’. When Materialism and Empiriocriticism appeared under the imprint of St Petersburg publishers L. Krumbyugel, he read only a few pages before throwing the book across the room:31
All these people shouting to all and sundry – ‘I’m a Marxist’ and ‘I’m a proletarian’ – and then immediately sitting on the heads of their neighbours and barking in their face – are repugnant to me like all philistines; each of them is for me ‘misanthrope entertaining his own fantasy’ as [the short-story writer] Leskov called them. A person is rubbish if a vivid consciousness of his linkage with people isn’t beating inside him and if he’s willing to sacrifice comradely feeling on the altar of his vanity.
Lenin is like that in his book. His dispute about ‘truth’ is conducted not so that truth might be victorious but so as to prove: ‘I’m a Marxist! The world’s best Marxist is me!’
These were words that would have wounded Lenin if Gorki had said them openly rather than expressed them in a private letter to the Bogdanovs. Whereas the Mensheviks accused Lenin of megalomania, Gorki – a Bolshevik sympathiser – suggested that his was a personality driven by vainglory.
Lenin’s fortunes went on dipping. On their return from Seine-et-Marne, after a five-week sojourn, he and Nadya took a flat in the quiet Rue Marie-Rose. Lenin was immediately angered by the news that other Bolshevik Centre members had gone beyond their overtures to Trotski and were contacting Martov. Even his closest associate Grigori Zinoviev refrained from supporting him.
In a rage Lenin withdrew from the editorial board of the Central Committee’s newspaper Social-Democrat. His political obsessiveness usually permitted him to recognise the advantages of emotional restraint, but not always. Lenin sometimes failed to hold the lid on himself and, in these instances, no one else could press it down either. No sooner had he resigned than he regretted his action, and on calm reflection he withdrew his resignation. But then in January 1910 came the long-awaited Central Committee plenum in Paris. This was a real ordeal. The united Central Committee, which included more Bolsheviks than Mensheviks, ordered the Bolshevik Centre to be closed down and the Bolshevik factional monthly Proletari to cease publication. It demanded a switch of the central party leadership’s centre of gravity from Paris to Russia. A Russian Board was created and given the right to act in the Central Committee’s name. The Shmidt monies, obtained by the Bolsheviks without any Menshevik assistance, were to be handed over to the Central Committee and to a group of trustees consisting of the German Marxists Karl Kautsky, Franz Mehring and Clara Zetkin. The defeat of Bogdanov in June 1909 had been undone on a broader level by the Central Committee plenum.
Yet Lenin had recovered his grip; by 1910 he was his ebullient old self. The Marxist leaders in the Russian Empire who criticised him and other émigrés were themselves in disarray. The Okhrana was breaking the local committees with ease. Some Marxists, most of them Mensheviks, were so dispirited that they campaigned for the party to be disbanded and for activists to operate entirely in the legal workers’ movement. These ‘Liquidators’ as Lenin dubbed them were not a majority of the party, but their existence allowed the Bolsheviks to claim that only they could keep up the spirit of Revolution. The Bolshevik leftists, whether they were Recallists or Ultimatumists, had a diminishing appeal to politically inclined factory workers. Lenin sensed that his time might soon come around again.
In an emotional sense his second chance had already arrived. His marriage to Nadya had never involved deep romantic feelings on his part, or indeed hers, and there must have been occasions when other Bolshevik women had a strong appeal for him. Over the years, too, the Graves’s disease had taken its toll on Nadya’s looks. Poor woman! Her eyes protruded and her neck bulged as it tightened its grip. Her weight increased and she had heart palpitations, and both she and Lenin had given up thinking that they would be able to have children. One of the widespread features of Graves’s disease is the infrequency of menstrual periods for female sufferers. Whether this was a problem for Nadezhda Krupskaya is unclear, but it is a distinct possibility. Lenin sympathised and urged her to undergo a surgical operation to try and eliminate the condition. But she refused, no doubt being aware that the operation was neither guaranteed to succeed nor even very safe. She was no longer the vigorous young woman that Lenin had married. She had become dowdy and at forty-one years, in 1910, she looked her age. She had never been vivacious but now she was ponderous and ailing.
Until then, apparently, Lenin resisted sexual temptation. This restraint, if indeed it had been holding since his marriage in Siberia, seems to have broken down in Paris when he became acquainted with Inessa Armand. Everyone knew her simply as Inessa. She was a widow. Her father had been French, her mother English. Inessa had lived in Russia as a child; on growing up, she married Alexander Armand, in whose parents’ family she was training to become a domestic tutor. She had five children, but her marriage became a sham after she started sleeping with her brother-in-law Vladimir Armand. This liaison, however, was short lived: Vladimir died of tuberculosis in 1909. Inessa then moved to western Europe with three of her children (and her husband Alexander continued to support her there financially). She had already been involved in revolutionary activity and been exiled by the Ministry of the Interior to Archangel in the Russian far north, and in Paris she aligned herself with the Bolshevik faction in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. Her fluency in Russian, French and English ensured her a warm welcome.
Inessa Armand was a fine-looking woman in her mid-thirties with long, wavy auburn hair. The pictures in the archives show that she had a beautiful face. When reproduced in Soviet history books, they never did her justice32 – and the thought occurs that the authorities, wishing to downplay speculation about a relationship between her and Lenin, tried to make her seem visually less appealing than she was. She had high, well-defined cheekbones. Her nose was slightly curved and her nostrils were wonderfully flared; her upper lip was slightly protrusive. Her teeth were white and even. She had lustrous, dark eyebrows. And she had kept her figure after having her children. In pictures taken with them as adolescents she looks more like an elder sister than a mother; her appearance was such that the Okhrana agents underestimated her age by several years. Inessa was also vivacious. She liked to ride sidesaddle when she could, and to play Beethoven on the piano. She adored her children, but did not let them get in the way of her wish to enjoy herself. In particular, she had an uninhibited attitude to extramarital relationships.
The relationship between Lenin and Inessa Armand began slowly, and the passion originated on her side. She later wrote eloquently about this to him:33
At that time I was terribly scared of you. The desire existed to see you, but it seemed better to drop dead on the spot than to come into your presence; and when for some reason you popped into N. K. [Krupskaya]’s room, I instantly lost control and behaved like a fool. Only in Longjumeau and in the following autumn in connection with translations and so on did I somewhat get used to you. I so much loved not only to listen to you but also to look at you as you spoke. Firstly, your face is so enlivened and, secondly, it was convenient to watch because you didn’t notice at that time.
In the same letter she added: ‘At that time I definitely wasn’t in love with you, but even then I loved you very much.’34 Soon she fell in love with him. No letter survives to demonstrate that he in his turn fell equally for her, and this has led some writers to conclude that there was no affair.35 But Lenin’s epistolary silence is not surprising. In mid-1914, when the relationship had waned, he asked her to return the correspondence he had sent her;36 it is difficult to imagine that his purpose was other than to destroy the evidence of what had taken place between them.
The associates and acquaintances of the Bolshevik leader took it for granted that the two were having an affair in 1910–12. When the French Marxist Charles Rappoport came upon them talking in a café on the Avenue d’Orléans, he reported that Lenin ‘could not take his Mongolian eyes off this little Frenchwoman’.37 A hint was dropped also by Lidia Fotieva, one of Lenin’s secretaries after the October Revolution, who recalled from her own visits to Lenin’s apartment that Nadya no longer slept in the marital bedroom but in the bedroom of her mother.38 In September 1911, Inessa moved into the Rue Marie-Rose and lived next door to the Lenins at no. 2.
Admittedly, the evidence is circumstantial. But the intensity of the letters they subsequently sent each other makes it unlikely that Lenin was just flirting with Inessa; the probability is that they had had an extramarital affair. A reciprocal passion had obviously existed even if Lenin, unlike Inessa, did not explicitly refer to it in the correspondence. What, though, was the attraction between the two of them? For Lenin, it was probably crucial that Inessa was someone who, as she confided to her last diary, thought that life ought to be lived in the service of some great cause. The Bolshevik vision of revolutionary strategy was exactly such a cause for her. And, of course, she was lively, beautiful and ‘cultured’ in the broadest sense. No wonder Lenin took to her. She in turn left a record as to why she was attracted by him. She adored his lively eyes, his self-belief and his intimidating presence. Even his initial unawareness of her intense interest in him had an appeal to her, but she found him irresistibly fascinating, and she absolutely had to have him.
For a time she surely succeeded. The victim of this process was Nadya, who had dedicated her life to Lenin’s career since their marriage in 1898. She was an enduring soul. Yet she understandably drew the line at participating in a permanent ménage à trois. The detail of their disagreement was carried to their deaths with them, and rumours sprang up to fill the void. It is said that Nadya wanted to walk out and leave the lovers to their relationship. Lenin was aghast that his marriage might end. A sense of indebtedness to Nadya may have influenced him, and he perhaps also was sorry for her difficulties with Graves’s disease. Possibly, too, his happiness depended on having Inessa without losing Nadya. In Nadya he had a personal secretary and household organiser. Inessa would never be as competent as Nadya at this dual role. She might not even agree to fulfil it at all. And so, according to the rumours, Lenin urged Nadya to change her mind: ‘Stay!’39 And Nadya did as requested, but only after being assured that his passion for Inessa did not exclude Nadezhda from his affections.
Nadya and Inessa felt no hostility for each other, and worked together in the party school a dozen miles to the south of Paris at Longjumeau in late 1911 where the Ulyanovs rented an apartment at 140 La Grande Rue.40 Furthermore, it was a lasting sadness to both Lenin and Nadya that their marriage had produced no children. The presence of Inessa’s offspring in the neighbouring house on Rue Marie-Rose brought delight to the Ulyanov couple, who acted like uncle and aunt to the youngsters not only in Paris but years later in Moscow.
In other ways, too, Lenin enjoyed life to the full. He had been accustomed as an emigrant to swapping apartments pretty frequently as well as moving from country to country. But in the three years after escaping from Finland at the end of 1907 he was a political gypsy, travelling across the middle of Europe from top to bottom giving talks and attending meetings – and, of course, having holidays. Among the major European cities he visited were Berlin, Bern, Brussels, Copenhagen, Geneva, Leipzig, Liège, Lucerne, London, Naples, Nice, Paris, Stuttgart and Zurich. He had plenty of time for relaxation, too, in Breton villages and on Capri. He was learning the knack of balancing his political preoccupation with enjoying a more private lifestyle. He derived great pleasure in August 1910 when he arranged to meet his mother in Stockholm and live together with her for a fortnight (and he cherished the Swedish chequered blanket she bought for him there). The party school he established at Longjumeau also lightened his spirits. He relished the opportunity to give lectures and see the keen Russian working-class pupils whom he could turn into Bolsheviks.
He never eliminated his tendency to fret. There was plenty to push him over the edge: the Shmidt legacy, the bicycle accident and the (not very) philosophical polemic with Bogdanov. But he managed to keep calmer than was usual for him. He travelled, he wrote, he studied, he biked, he listened to music, and especially he enjoyed the company of Inessa Armand.
And he could see a way out of the organisational impasse that had cornered him inside his faction. The Central Committee of the entire Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party met in Paris on 28 May 1911. Lenin attended with some trepidation: he could not expect to exercise any kind of control over its proceedings while Menshevik-conciliating Bolsheviks like A. I. Lyubimov held authority. But the Paris decisions played into his hands. Three bodies were created: the Foreign Organisational Commission, the Russian Organisational Commission and the Technical Commission. The first two were instructed to convoke a party conference. The Mensheviks were reluctant to take part even before Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Lenin’s supporter in the Russian Organisational Commission, presented an ultimatum to the Foreign Organisational Commission to submit itself to the Russian Organisational Commission. At this Leo Jogiches, the Polish representative from the Central Committee, gave up on the party and withdrew. This gave Ordzhonikidze and Lenin a wonderful opportunity. A Bolshevik gathering took place in Paris in December 1911 masquerading as a meeting of representatives of the entire party. The participants, led by Lenin, decided to replace the Foreign Organisational Commission with a Committee of the Foreign Organisation and to empower this new body to hold a party conference.
This émigré flurry taxed the understanding of all but the most obsessive factionalists. What really mattered were not the organisational changes in themselves. No one but a Lenin loyalist could say that he had acted within the spirit of the regulatory framework. But he had got his way. Against every expectation he had suddenly leaped from a lowly position where he was little more than the controversial leader of a sub-faction in the party to a new peak: he was about to hold a party conference at which he would be able to declare that his sub-faction was equivalent to the party as a whole. Then, he anticipated, it would not count for much that other factions continued to exist. Lenin would have the aura of constitutional legitimacy. He would be able to select a new Central Committee and the editorial board of a new party newspaper. Bolshevism would at last become a party. The three years of the second emigration had started in humiliation and were about to culminate in success. Only a factional recidivist such as Lenin could delude himself with such optimism.
Most of the great social theorists in the nineteenth century – Herbert Spencer, Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – were inheritors of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Their understanding of human culture, organisation and behaviour was linked to assumptions about the basic rationality and predictability of people. But they had not had everything their way. Thomas Carlyle had proposed that most people in most societies were capable of rational, purposeful activity only when guided by charismatic leaders. The theologian Søren Kierkegaard and the novelist Fëdor Dostoevski pointed to dark recesses in the motivations of human conduct. By the end of the nineteenth century, Sigmund Freud and other psychologists proposed that the mind has a subconscious capacity inducing people to do things which they do not deliberately contrive. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche rejected the Enlightenment’s commitment to Progress. Like Carlyle, he contended that problems of the human condition could be alleviated, if it was at all possible, only when great men lead their societies and offer themselves as heroic models. Other thinkers, too, highlighted the virtues of individual leadership in counteracting the less attractive features of contemporary industrial society. Among them were the outstanding social theorists Max Weber, Robert Michels, Gaetano Mosca and Gustave Le Bon.
But were their ideas a source for Lenin’s kind of politics? Certainly What Is to Be Done? picked out the crucial role of leadership and Lenin behaved as if the revolutionary cause would be ruined unless he was in charge. He passionately believed his own guidance of the party and the party’s guidance of ‘the masses’ to be indispensable if the Russian labour movement was to adopt the correct political ideas. Lenin gave the impression of sensing a special destiny for himself; Grigori Zinoviev confided that Lenin felt ‘he had been “called”’.1
There is little direct evidence that Lenin paid attention to those contemporary intellectual trends. He hated the way other Marxists such as Alexander Bogdanov, Nikolai Bukharin and Anatoli Lunacharski took up ideas from the fashionable books on philosophy, culture, sociology and economics regardless of whether the contents were congruent with Marxism. Lenin had formed his world-view in the final two decades of the nineteenth century, and no thinker emerged after 1900 whom he admired. He was comfortable about his own fundamental assumptions and did not itch to re-examine them. He had yet to settle his practical policies, and went on changing them nearly until the day he died. But he had a settled intellectual physiognomy. Carlyle, Freud, Kierkegaard, Le Bon, Michels, Nietzsche and Weber were ignored, totally or very nearly, in his works (although he was to keep Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra in his Kremlin book cabinet).2 His preoccupation was to widen and deepen his knowledge of Marx, Engels, Plekhanov and Kautsky. Equipped with references to the works of these admired figures, Lenin could contrive to appear orthodox even while asserting the most unorthodox analysis. He was a brilliant, ruthless disputant, and could always find some justification in the Marxist classics – classics that were far from being homogeneous – for the policies of his party. Lenin believed in leadership and was pleased when he was exercising it; and engagement with the general intellectual problems posed by the critics of Marxism would only have distracted him.
But the very fact that he stressed his claim to Marxist orthodoxy gives rise to the suspicion that he lived a secret intellectual life. About his admiration for the Russian agrarian-socialist terrorists there can be no doubt, even though, after the uproar over What Is to Be Done?, he had ceased to mention this in public. But was this secretiveness confined to his fondness for these Russian terrorists?
The answer, probably, is no. After 1917 he was to refer admiringly in correspondence to Machiavelli; the Florentine writer’s justification of the uses of brutality in governance especially appealed to him. Then there was the little bronze statue that he was to keep on his desk in the Kremlin. This was a representation of a monkey examining a human skull and was an obvious sign of Lenin’s fascination with the ideas of Charles Darwin.3 Nothing is more implausible than the notion that when Lenin entered a library he examined only the works of Marxism and economic statistics. In the Great War we know for certain that he picked up and devoured the German philosopher Hegel and the German military theorist Clausewitz – and it can be shown that they left an imprint on his thought. He also returned to his Classical authors, especially Aristotle. From his notebooks we can see that Hegel, Clausewitz and Aristotle helped him to sharpen his interpretation of Marxism and his strategy for Revolution. Perhaps Machiavelli and Darwin did the same for him. Darwin in particular was popular among Marxists, and it would be astonishing if Lenin was unfamiliar with his argument about ‘the survival of the fittest’. Both Machiavelli and Darwin would anyway have been congenial to him, who had detested ‘sentimentality’ in politics and who relished struggle almost as a way of life. If anyone ever was, Lenin was a fighter by nature.
Outside his family no one got close to him without eventually querying his combative style. But for a while he kept the admiration of the Bolshevik organisers of the next Party Conference. Chief among these was Sergo Ordzhonikidze, who was in charge of the arrangements for the next Party Conference. Ordzhonikidze was a fiery, hard-drinking and industrious Georgian devoted to the cause of Revolution; he despised what he saw as the half-heartedness of the Menshevik revolutionary strategy. No intellectual, he was impatient about establishing clandestine party groups in Russia, overturning tsarism and making the advance towards a socialist society. Lenin was Ordzhonikidze’s hero and Lenin for his part welcomed his admirer as precisely the kind of practical, ruthless organiser that the Bolsheviks needed.
Journeying out from Russia to make contact with the Bolshevik emigrants, Ordzhonikidze agreed with Lenin that something ought to be done to pull the faction together. They proposed to hold a party conference for this purpose. But for a location they decided to avoid cities such as Paris and Geneva where the Russian Marxists lived in colonies. Instead they would seek to hold it in Prague, capital of the Bohemian lands in the east of the Habsburg Empire. The choice was a cunning one. Prague was an awkward destination for travellers from both Russia and France. It was also a place without a colony of Russian Marxists. At the same time it was a place where the police could be relied upon to leave the delegates alone; indeed the Habsburg Empire welcomed almost every kind of revolutionary who wanted to strike tsarism down. Furthermore, the Czech Marxists would definitely give assistance to any conference organised by their Russian comrades. Lenin and Ordzhonikidze would be able to exploit this situation to the advantage of the Bolshevik faction. The few delegates who might arrive in Prague would, with hardly an exception, be Bolsheviks. The proceedings would be secret and would be dominated by Lenin and Ordzhonikidze, who could argue that the Bolsheviks had been the largest of the factions at the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party and therefore had the right to guide party policies with the minimum of concessions to Menshevism.
This calculation proved correct as the Conference delegates assembled in Prague, were greeted warmly by the Czech socialist leadership and were put up in houses around the centre. Proceedings were held in the centre of city. The venue was the Workers’ House in the middle of Hybernska Street, which stretches from the medieval Powder Tower down to a railway station. The Workers’ House, owned by the Czech Social-Democratic Party, was a three-storey building with a large internal courtyard; originally it had been the Kinsky Palace.
Lenin and his comrades made their arrangements for the Conference undisturbed. Although they had sent invitations to a few Mensheviks who sided with Plekhanov, they avoided contact with those other Mensheviks – the great majority of them – who refused to break off relations with the so-called Liquidators. Trotski was infuriated by this and organised a rival party conference in Vienna, and practically all Mensheviks felt that Trotski’s was the meeting that they should attend. The result was that the Prague Conference had only eighteen participants and sixteen of them were Bolsheviks. On reaching Prague, some of these were offended by the discovery that other factions had no representation, and tried to rectify the imbalance by sending out last-minute invitations of their own. Ordzhonikidze saw nothing wrong with their initiative; presumably he calculated that the opponents of the Bolsheviks would be unable reach the Conference in time and in a number sufficient to gain a majority. But Lenin would take no chances and threatened to walk out if the invitations were accepted. This was stupidly excessive even for Lenin. Ordzhonikidze already thought that the fractiousness of ‘the damned emigration’ was ruining the party. Now he discovered that Lenin was the worst offender and joined the other Bolshevik delegates in criticising him personally.
There had been no Bolshevik gathering where Lenin was given so hard a time. The delegates were perplexed by a basic question: if Leninist Bolsheviks agreed with Mensheviks about the importance of legal political activity, why was Lenin still using a megaphone to announce the iniquity of Martov and his fellow Mensheviks? Lenin ducked the question. In truth there was no intellectually respectable answer available.
The Prague Conference at any rate went ahead without additional arrivals and claimed the right to elect a new Central Committee and ordain policies for the entire party. To this large extent Lenin got exactly what he had been after. The new Central Committee was a Bolshevik Central Committee, with the exception of the Menshevik David Shvartsman. As Lenin wished, the Conference also approved the party’s enhanced commitment to taking part in the State Duma and other Russian legal organisations. But Lenin lost a lot of the personal authority he had held. Ordzhonikidze and others wanted power to belong to the leading activists operating in Russia and not in the emigration. This was to be achieved firstly by withdrawing the official recognition of the Committee of the Foreign Organisation as the Central Committee’s adjunct abroad – and it had been through the Committee of the Foreign Organisation, with Inessa Armand as its secretary, that Lenin had exerted heavy influence over both his fellow emigrants and the party as a whole. Secondly, the Conference ruled that the Central Committee’s seven members would include only two émigrés: Lenin and Zinoviev. The centre of gravity in the leadership was about to be shifted away from émigré factional disputes to organisation and propaganda in the Russian Empire.
Yet Ordzhonikidze could not know of other forces at work that would undermine any decisions taken by the Bolsheviks in Prague. The Okhrana saw Lenin as a brilliant potential executor of the task demanded by the Emperor: the disintegration of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. The enhancement of Lenin’s career was the Okhrana’s confidential priority.
The instruments lay easily to hand after the Prague Conference. One of the members of the new Central Committee was the St Petersburg trade union organiser Roman Malinovski. Malinovski was a Bolshevik of working-class origin and was a spell-binding speaker in front of a crowd; he was one of the candidates successfully put up for election to the Fourth State Duma later in 1912. And he was highly regarded by Lenin. The problem was that, unbeknown to Lenin, Malinovski had fallen on hard times and had secretly become a paid agent of the Okhrana. His main task was to remove any obstacles to the schismatic measures proposed by Lenin. Malinovski’s authority among Bolsheviks in Russia rose as the Okhrana arrested the other members of the Central Committee when they returned to Russia. With each arrest, Lenin’s position was likewise enhanced. Co-optation of new members gave him a chance to choose activists whom he had reason to trust. He had not been cowed by Ordzhonikidze at the Conference, and had even managed a laugh when the emigrants’ contribution to the party had been disparaged. ‘I have no fear’. he declared, ‘of factional struggle being condemned.’ He had suffered and surmounted greater setbacks in the past.
Leaving Prague for Paris, Lenin continued his tirades. He had no intention of abiding by the letter or spirit of Ordzhonikidze’s reform of the Bolshevik leadership. Soon, he thought, political life would go on as before, and he wrote to his mother that he was staying put in Paris. Lenin would not be ruled by Conference; he would work to set himself up more solidly as the faction’s dominant figure.
Inside the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party he already had a substantial reputation; indeed he was its most notorious figure. The leaderships of the other Russian political parties, too, were aware of his ideas and activity. All the socialist emigrants were acquainted with him in the Russian colonies of Zurich, Geneva and Paris. German and Polish Marxist leaders were painfully conscious of what he got up to. For them, Lenin was the single greatest obstacle to unity among Russian Marxists. His general significance was also recognised in the form of fifteen biographical entries on him in various Russian encyclopaedias by the time he returned to Russia in 1917.4 But this fame was restricted to a tiny world and certainly did not extend to much of the serious reading public in his country. One of Lenin’s followers in St Petersburg, Mikhail Kedrov, valiantly tried to put out a three-volume edition of his collected works, but collected only two hundred subscriptions. Kedrov had a print-run of three thousand but managed to sell only half of the copies by 1912. Disappointed, he sold the remainder as waste paper.5
This is important information that is overlooked by the dozens of scholars who have seen his volumes, examined his ‘texts’ and concluded that Lenin attracted widespread notice in the Russian Empire before the Great War. Most subjects of Nicholas II knew nothing about Lenin. He had made only a little headway since he started to come to public notice in St Petersburg with his writings in the late 1890s. His name, physical appearance and policies were obscure. His writings were little discussed – and were thought unintelligible or excessively intemperate by those who bought his books.
Lenin kept faith in himself because he saw nothing to shake his assumptions. The Russian Empire and the rest of Europe, he thought, were on the brink of Revolution. Another assumption was that social classes, even if they were quiescent for lengthy periods, could quickly rise to the tasks of carrying out Revolution. A third was that it did not matter how small the party of Revolution was before it seized power. The most important thing in Lenin’s eyes was to have a party, however minuscule, of indoctrinated revolutionaries who could spread the word. A fourth assumption was not stated expressly, but indisputably he believed that the cleanest test of a revolutionary was simply whether he or she stuck by Lenin in factional disputes. He was fixed in his ways. He also knew that even the most anti-emigrant Bolsheviks recognised his individual talent and accepted that the emigrants gave continuity to the party despite the Okhrana’s efforts. Emigrants had the intellectual sweep and could write and organise. They maintained the party records; they constituted the party’s collective memory. Despite the exposure of his faults in Prague, few Bolsheviks seriously wanted rid of Lenin.
In spring 1912 he wrote to his mother:6
We’re planning to go off for the summer to Fontenay, outside Paris, and are thinking about a complete move there for the entire year. It’s expensive in Paris: the price for the apartment has been raised, and anyway it will definitely be healthier and quieter in the outskirts. In the next few days I’ll undertake a trip and do a search.
Lenin never wrote about politics to his mother. But in a separate letter to Anna Ilinichna, who was staying with her in Saratov, he noted how much criticism had been aimed at the Conference organisers by the other ‘groups and sub-groups’ in the party. Even fist-fights, he added, had taken place. But by and large he was pleased with the Russian revolutionary scene in France.7
Yet the move to Fontenay was not realised. The main reason was that the Bolshevik Central Committee, despite its depletion by arrests, was carrying out the plan to focus its energies on work in the Russian Empire. An early objective was to found a legal newspaper in St Petersburg. Since 1906 it had been lawful for political parties to operate in Russia and run their own press; the Basic Law, much as it was manipulated by Nicholas II, was never repealed. Of course, the Okhrana closed down newspapers when editors strayed beyond the fixed limits of public expression. It was not allowed, for example, to call for the downfall of the Romanov dynasty or to recommend ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’. But within the limits it was possible to print much that was subversive of the government and its policies. And so revolutionary groups such as the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were able to conduct propaganda in the open. Lenin had campaigned for Bolsheviks to stand in the Duma elections but had been reluctant to advocate the foundation of a legal daily newspaper. Although he did not explain this, he surely disliked any Bolshevik editor other than himself controlling what appeared in the press under the faction’s imprimatur. Yet the new Central Committee had made up its mind and Lenin had to deal with this reality.
On 22 April 1912 the first issue of Pravda appeared. Lenin knew that if he stayed in France he would lose all influence over the Bolsheviks in Russia. If he himself moved back clandestinely to St Petersburg, however, he would eventually be arrested. Sensibly he decided to move as near to the Russian Empire as he could without actually crossing the frontier. Nadezhda Konstantinovna made enquiries about the Austrian-ruled part of Poland, Galicia. The replies were positive. The choice fell upon Kraków. Tensions between the governments in Vienna and St Petersburg meant that Lenin would be safe from extradition. Kraków had 150,000 inhabitants, and of these it is reckoned that as many as 12,000 were political refugees from the Russian Empire. Nearly all the refugees were Polish, but Russians too were among them. The Union of Assistance for Political Prisoners, founded in Kraków, gave material help to new arrivals. Lenin and his associates would also be well placed for communications with St Petersburg. A rail route ran from the Russian capital through to Warsaw and from Warsaw there was a regular service to Kraków. Postal communications were quick. Lenin would be able to provide a foreign base for the Central Committee, receiving visitors and mail from St Petersburg. He had not wanted this transfer but could foresee some practical advantages.
Lenin, Nadya, her mother, Zinoviev, his wife Zinaida Lilina and their little boy Stepan travelled together. Leaving Paris on 4 June, they arrived in Kraków after stopping in Leipzig for a few days. There was no attempt at secretiveness. Lenin’s stay at the Hotel Victoria was announced in the local newspaper Czas; and when Inessa wrote from Paris, she openly addressed her postcards to the Ulyanovs.8 The only difficulty was contact with local socialists. Sergei Bagotski, who belonged to the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, had arranged to meet them on a particular bench in the leafy Planty promenade outside the Jagellonian University’s main building. There were many such benches; the promenade stretched for miles and the Jagellonian University had not one but several principal buildings. In fact Lenin and Nadezhda Konstantinovna sat themselves down punctually on the correct bench and Bagotski was there too. But they failed to recognise each other, and they sat for half an hour before Nadya importuned her neighbour by asking whether his name was Bagotski.9
Had Nadya, perhaps, been even more assertive just a few weeks earlier? There have been suggestions that the move from Paris occurred at her insistence in order to break Lenin’s contact with Inessa. This is scarcely credible. Otherwise it is hard to explain why in summer 1912 Nadya considered sending her own mother to Arcachon, the little holiday resort on the Atlantic coast ten miles south-west of Bordeaux which was favoured by Russian revolutionary emigrants, even though Inessa was likely to be there. Probably there were political reasons why neither Lenin nor Inessa wanted to stay in Paris. The focal point of the Central Committee’s activity had been moved to the Russian Empire at the behest of the Party Conference. Lenin had to have closer contact with St Petersburg and Inessa’s role as secretary to the Committee of the Foreign Organisation was redundant after the abolition of the Committee itself. Inessa and Lenin continued to see each other, moreover, after he moved the main Bolshevik foreign base to Kraków; indeed she stayed with Lenin and Nadya in Kraków before slipping over the frontier to conduct clandestine revolutionary work in Russia in July 1912.
But undoubtedly the close relationship between Inessa and Lenin collapsed around this time. It is clear that it was Lenin who decided to end the relationship and that Inessa was exceedingly distraught. She implored Lenin to reconsider. She told him that the relationship was harming no one; presumably by this she meant Nadya. She was entranced with him and remained so until her death in 1920. But Lenin stayed firm. Things could not go on as before. Even if the rumours about Nadya’s ultimatum are untrue, Lenin must have wondered whether the current emotional complication was permanently sustainable; and after so many years living and working with Nadya, he probably felt that he could humiliate her no longer. Just possibly, and here we are guessing, he may have judged that only one of his two potential partners was a dependable political assistant. Nadya was solid, reliable and hardworking; she had proved her worth. And so the temptation of Inessa had to be rejected and all her pleadings ignored.
The change of location must have helped a bit: Lenin greatly enjoyed Kraków. Although it was only the provincial capital of Galicia in the east of the Hapsburg Empire, its history as the royal seat of Poland until 1597 impressed every visitor. Kraków is situated by the river Vistula. Rising high above the river is the Royal Castle, which contains the sarcophagi of the Polish kings and queens. Latin Christianity had been brought to the region by missionaries such as St Adalbert, whose little church stands on the edge of the Market Square at the centre of the city. The Market Square’s dominant feature is the Cloth Hall with its long, double line of archways. Grain, garments and cattle were the primary objects of commerce for the region around Kraków; but there was also a religious and intellectual effervescence. Also on the Market Square is St Mary’s Church with its magnificent altarpiece by the painter Veit Stoss. Every hour a bugler leans out of the bell-tower and blows a musical phrase to commemorate the unfortunate bugler who was hit by an enemy archer when trying to warn the city of the sudden arrival of the Mongol Horde in 1241. To the north of the square – and very important for Lenin – was the Jagellonian University. Founded in 1364, it was the alma mater of Copernicus. The university had a decent reading room and the cafés and cultural societies near by were lively centres of intellectual discussion.
By summer 1912 they had found an apartment at 218 Zwierzyniecka Street down the hill and across the river Vistula from the centre of Kraków. One of the helpful Polish comrades, Jakub Hanecki, lived along the road. The house was on the outskirts and Lenin could take walks in the neighbouring fields and hills and go swimming in the Vistula. In the first winter he bought a pair of skates and started skimming around as he had done in his youth in Simbirsk. He frequently also took the train from Kraków to the nearby Tatra Mountains and went scrambling up the rock faces with Sergei Bagotski.
Culture and recreation were not the sole attraction of Kraków: Lenin also liked the way it reminded him of home. The peasants who swarmed into the city on market days were recognisable types. And the large Jewish quarter, Kazimierz, could just as easily have been a shetl in the western region of the Russian Empire, as he indicated to his mother:10
I must also give you my new address exactly. This summer I’ve travelled a very long way from Paris, to Kraków. Almost Russia! The Jews here are like the Russians and the Russian frontier is eight versts [five miles] away (it’s two hours by train from Granica, nine hours from Warsaw); there are bent-nosed women in colourful dresses – it’s just like Russia!
Nadya did the shopping in Kazimierz because the Jewish butchers’ meat was half the price of their Polish rivals’. She took time to get accustomed to the need to haggle. When she was being overcharged, she had to walk away and wait until the trader called her back. She was also taken aback by the response to her request for meat fillets: ‘The Lord God made the cow with bones, so how can I sell meat without bones.’11
Lenin did not bother to learn Polish; in emergencies he relied upon gestures and simple Russian phrases. When he spoke to Polish socialists, he used German as the common language. He could find most of the books he needed in the Jagellonian University reading room and correspondence with Russia was easily handled. The flat on Zwierzyniecka Street was just a few minutes by foot from the post office and half an hour from the main railway station. If he felt that he needed to send a particularly secret message to St Petersburg, he could usually arrange for it to be posted across the Russian Imperial border in Lublin. Peasants living within a zone of ten miles on either side of the border could freely travel backwards and forwards so long as they had an identity document, and the Bolsheviks employed individuals to carry the mail for them in this way.12
Not that Lenin and his friends were the most acute threat to the tsarist monarchy posed from Kraków. The fact that Roman Malinovski was a leading member of the Bolshevik Central Committee meant that the Okhrana knew its most intimate secrets. Subterfuge with coded messages, invisible ink or even the post office in Lublin could not prevent Lenin’s plans from being known. Lenin was unaware of this. But he was also a realist about émigré politics in Kraków. Much the greatest menace to tsarism came not from Russians but from Poles. Jósef Piłsudski’s Left Polish Socialist Party had a substantial presence in the city. His members aimed at the restoration of an independent Polish state. Obviously this objective would have meant the loss to Austria Hungary of its Polish lands, but Viennese confidence at the time was so high that the destabilisation of ‘Russian’ Poland was thought desirable. Piłsudski was accorded immense freedom of action. More or less openly he armed and trained troops in the fields outside Kraków for eventual use against the forces of the Russian Empire. Such was Piłsudski’s hatred of the Romanov monarchy that he was willing to assist virtually any other enemy of tsarism. Thus his men helped with the dispatch of messages to Russia on behalf of the Bolsheviks.
Meanwhile Lenin and Nadya frequently received visitors from Russia and put them up for the night in their flat. They greeted not only Pravda editorial staff but also the six Bolshevik members of the Fourth State Duma, who took their seats in November 1912. Lenin gave advice on political manoeuvres, on the editorial line and on the contents of Duma speeches. By the end of the year he, Zinoviev and Malinovski were the only three of the Central Committee members elected at the Prague Conference who remained at liberty. Their authority rose accordingly and some of the resentment of Lenin’s factionalist excesses faded.
So what else did he get up to in these years? One of his regrets was that, although he lived close to the Russian Imperial frontier, he was unable to see any of his relatives. His mother was in fading health and was preoccupied by the twists and turns in the life of her eldest daughter Anna. In 1911 Anna Ilinichna and her husband Mark Yelizarov were staying in Saratov in the Volga region and had read in the papers about Georgi Lozgachëv, a ‘child prodigy’ living in the same town who had precociously taught himself to read Russian and was presently trying to master Church-Slavonic and Hebrew.13 Freckle-faced Georgi, aged six, was from a poor family and there was little prospect that he would receive a decent formal education. When Anna and Mark offered to adopt him, his parents agreed. Georgi (or Gora, as everyone knew him) and his Uncle Volodya were to become chums in 1917. But it was Maria Ilinichna rather than Volodya with whom Anna discussed the desirability of the adoption.14 In truth he might have tried to dissuade her from adopting Gora Lozgachev. For within months she was arrested for revolutionary activity and kept in Saratov Prison. Meanwhile Maria Ilinichna had qualified as a domestic teacher of French, which was her latest attempt to establish herself in a professional career. Dmitri Ilich was working as a doctor in Crimea and enduring the gradual breakdown of his marriage to Antonina. All these dramas were happening not so very distant from Kraków, but Lenin had no influence over them.
In fact Lenin and Nadya shared Anna Ilinichna’s wish for children. Like many childless couples, they made a fuss of their friends’ children. In Kraków they liked to entertain Stepan Zinoviev (or Stepa, as he was nicknamed) after Lenin had finished work for the day. The two of them ran about the house, clambering over furniture and crawling under the beds. When Stepa’s father or mother complained about the noise, Lenin would have none of it: ‘Stop interfering: we’re playing!’ On another occasion he confided to the Zinovievs: ‘Eh, it’s a pity that we don’t have such a Stepa.’
But of course Lenin did not let emotional disappointments get in the way of his politics. As soon as he reached Kraków, he strove to assert control over the Bolshevik faction in Russia. Central Committee meetings were held in Galicia; they occurred seven times between November 1912 and the end of 1913.15 There were also consultations with the editorial board of Pravda and with the Bolshevik deputies to the State Duma. But he was now under greater supervision. The Central Committee after the Prague Conference divided its membership between a Russian Bureau and a Foreign Bureau. Lenin and Zinoviev constituted the entirety of the Foreign Bureau, and Nadezhda Konstantinovna served as its secretary. But the Foreign Bureau was not allowed to take over the Central Committee simply by way of regular contact by post and through personal trips from the Russian Empire. Lenin had to behave himself. Policy had to be formulated with the consent of Russian Bureau members. He also had to obtain the consent of the Bolshevik Duma deputies if he was to get them to do what he wanted done in the Duma and outside. Their public prominence in Russian politics outside the party made them an invaluable asset.
Lenin wanted the six Bolshevik deputies to form a Duma fraction separate from the seven Menshevik deputies. Yet although he saw them from time to time in Kraków, this was not the same as collaborating with them on a daily basis and understanding their problems. Iosif Stalin – a talented Bolshevik organiser from Georgia – was not a man known for his patience, but even he urged that Lenin should ease off and try to win the Bolshevik deputies to his ‘hard policy’ by steady persuasion.16 Initially just one Bolshevik deputy took Lenin’s side and this was Malinovski the Okhrana agent. The Pravda editorial board, too, angered Lenin by turning down forty-seven of the 331 articles he submitted to the newspaper before the outbreak of the Great War.17 He wrote as follows to the editors in St Petersburg: ‘Why did you spike my article on the Italian Congress? It would generally do no damage to give notification about unaccepted articles. This is not at all an excessive request. To write “for the wastepaper basket”, i.e. to write articles that are rejected, is very disagreeable.’ As a young activist in St Petersburg in the mid-1890s Lenin had written some excellent short pieces useful for Marxist propaganda in the factories. But in later years he had ignored the regular requests to write such pieces again. He insisted on writing the lengthy ‘theoretical’ articles and booklets that maintained the polemics with the other fractions of the party; and, to be fair to him, he composed articles for Pravda and speeches for the Duma deputies. But he did not like other people setting his work-agenda for him.
Lenin would have had a harder time if the Okhrana had not been efficient in arresting so many awkward Central Committee members and Pravda editors. One such editor was Iosif Stalin. After the Prague Conference, Stalin had been co-opted to the Central Committee and in autumn 1912 was appointed as Pravda’s chief editor. Lenin had referred to him as ‘the marvellous Georgian’. But, like other leading Bolsheviks, Stalin disliked the harsh and repetitious baiting of the Mensheviks demanded by Lenin for Pravda. Quickly the Okhrana seized Stalin. Then in May 1913, after Stalin’s successor Yakov Sverdlov was also arrested, Miron Chernomazov took over. Chernomazov acted as an obedient Leninist. The reason for this, however, was that Chernomazov was an Okhrana agent and the Okhrana wished Pravda to become more violent in its editorials so that the authorities would have the necessary pretext to close the newspaper down. The result was the recurrent disruption of Pravda’s publication. Lenin, of course, did not know about the Okhrana’s role. The signs were there if only he had been alert, and no doubt he was disabled by not being able to see Chernomazov at work in St Petersburg. Even so, he had been remarkably naive.
Lenin gained the internal factional policy he craved, but at the price of workers in St Petersburg not being able to read the newspaper regularly. Things were not much better in the State Duma. In November 1913 the Bolshevik deputies at last submitted to Lenin’s arguments in favour of breaking up the joint Bolshevik–Menshevik Duma fraction. They came over to his side mainly because the labour movement was becoming more militant, and yet the Menshevik newspaper Luch was remarkably reticent in its support of strikes. But the split in the Duma had the consequence of involving the Bolshevik deputies in factional disputes that baffled ordinary workers – and to this extent Lenin was responsible for the Bolsheviks in Russia failing to make the fullest political gain from the situation in the factories. He was too much the factional conspirator, too little the national leader.
Furthermore, he had not abandoned all of his obsessions when he left Paris. He went on pestering the three German trustees of the Shmidt legacy – Karl Kautsky, Franz Mehring and Clara Zetkin – for the transfer of all the moneys to the Central Committee. Kautsky was exasperated by the whole business. Lenin’s intransigence fitted the nineteenth-century stereotype of Russian socialists spending all their time wrangling. It was poppycock for Lenin to claim that the Central Committee was the unchallengeable embodiment of the leadership of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party; and Kautsky and Mehring, after trying to get the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks to compromise with each other, washed their hands of the business. Pleading ill health, they resigned their trusteeship. Thereafter the third trustee Clara Zetkin was given no peace. Lenin wrote a formal letter indicating that unless she restored the monies, she would be subjected to legal proceedings. Having taken expert advice from the Swiss advocate Karl Zraggen, he came to a deal with French socialist activist and Court of Appeal advocate Georges Ducos de la Haille whereby Ducos de la Haille would be paid 5,000 francs if he could conclude the case quickly and satisfactorily for the Bolsheviks.18
But Monsieur Ducos de la Haille could not work miracles and so Lenin turned to a German advocate, Alfred Kahn. It was all getting out of hand; and Kautsky decided in December 1913 that the International Socialist Bureau in Brussels should take an interest in the extraordinary bitterness of factional conflict in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. Kautsky wanted not only financial but also political disputes to be considered. All this sent Lenin into a frenzy. Any such discussion in the International Socialist Bureau might lead to the loss of the Shmidt monies and to a campaign by European socialists, encouraged by the International Socialist Bureau, for Russian Marxists to reunify their party. Lenin could only play for time. He agreed to Bolshevik participation in a meeting of all the factions in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party with the objective of a ‘mutual exchange of opinions’.
The person he selected to represent the Bolsheviks in Brussels was none other than Inessa Armand. Inessa had left Kraków in July 1912 to carry out party activity in the Russian Empire. But she was arrested by the Okhrana, and developed tuberculosis after some months in prison. Released on bail, she made a dash to the frontier in August 1913 and looked up Lenin in Galicia.19 By then he was no longer in Kraków. He and Nadya had moved sixty miles southwards to Biały Dunajec on the railway that winds its way towards the winter sports resort Zakopane. Lenin and Nadya rented a large wooden country-house there because Nadya had been advised that her health would benefit from the fresh air of the countryside. They were anyway fed up with urban life and Lenin in particular looked forward to going climbing. Communication with Russia was not going to be drastically slower in Biały Dunajec. The post train from Kraków stopped twice a day at the nearby village of Poronin and usually a letter took only two days to arrive from St Petersburg; and Lenin positively enjoyed walking or cycling to pick up their letters from Poronin. The Lenins signed for an occupancy through to early October, when they returned to Kraków for the winter. They had had so pleasant a time that they repeated the experience in 1914 and took an apartment in Poronin itself.
Biały Dunajec and Poronin lay in a peaceful area and a very exotic one after the years spent in Switzerland, Italy and France. The residents were not like the Poles of Kraków. Most of them were so-called Guraly. The men wore black, flat-rimmed hats, white shirts and beige trousers. The women had long dresses of the brightest colours. They had dark complexions and a fierce demeanour when approached by strangers. The style of agriculture had been the same for centuries. They kept cows and, in the less hilly areas, grew rye. Their houses had thick, wooden walls. There was no factory for miles, and such handicrafts as existed were devoted to domestic use. Further up the road lay Zakopane, where the thousands of holidaymakers and TB patients who made their way there were providing employment for a number of villagers. There was a growing commercial demand for wooden carvings and lace; the recent completion of the Kraków–Zakopane railway began the process of eroding the area’s isolation – a process that was noticeably incomplete at the end of the twentieth century. ‘It’s a wonderful spot here,’ Lenin wrote to his sister Maria. ‘The air is excellent, at a height of around 700 metres.’20
Nadya did not immediately take to the area. She found it distasteful to have to bargain with the landlady over the rent. Then they employed a maid who turned out to be incompetent and not very bright. There was also much more rain than in Kraków. The worst thing of all was the decline in her physical condition: the problem with her thyroid gland had led to heart palpitations. Indeed Poronin and the surrounding mountains may have contributed to this. Although she benefited from the wonderfully clean air, Biały Dunajec was so high above sea level that the low atmospheric pressure was bound to affect her weak heart. Evidently the medical advice they had been receiving was not of the best. Anyway, Lenin became convinced that Nadya could not go on as before. In his opinion, she needed to undergo a surgical operation on her goitre, and after a lot of persuasion he obtained her consent to this. In June 1913, he accompanied her to Bern in Switzerland to seek treatment from Professor Theodor Kocher.
Nadya had previously objected to surgery on the reasonable ground that one in five patients died under the knife from that specific operation. Lenin, however, discovered Kocher, who was the world’s leading researcher and practitioner in the field of thyroid treatment and had reduced the mortality rate to one in two hundred. Then in his early seventies, he was famous around the world after being awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1909. His innovative method was to remove a particular portion of the gland; by 1913 he had performed over five thousand excisions and had effected a complete or partial cure of the condition in many cases. Nowadays doctors would administer effective drugs to such patients, but before the Great War Kocher’s method was the best technique available. Unfortunately he was also expensive. Lenin wrote to the Pravda editorial board requesting a subsidy, but there is no record of his having received one. He had arranged the trip regardless; Lenin and Nadya lived modestly in most ways, but never stinted in expenditure on holidays, books or health-care. The money could always be found, even though Lenin habitually pleaded poverty in negotiations inside the party.
In order to reach Bern the Lenins took the train from Kraków from east to west across the empire of the Habsburgs. This was a trip of over seven hundred miles and Vladimir Ilich was angry that Kocher declined to treat his wife immediately. A dispute took place, but Kocher would not yield and Nadya had to wait her turn. She was not looking forward to the operation since Kocher performed it without anaesthetic and was not the most communicative of doctors. But Nadya was stoical. The decision had been taken to have the operation and she had to hope for the best. Lenin was fearful about her prospects, but somehow he managed to keep this from her; he commented that Kocher might have a ‘capricious’ personality but was ‘a wonderful surgeon’. The operation went ahead and, although Nadya ran a high fever, she recovered quickly and there were grounds for thinking that Kocher had cured her. Lenin dutifully spent several days visiting her, but his patience was running out. Kocher gave instructions that Nadya should go off for a fortnight’s recuperation in the nearby Alps. The Lenins rejected this advice, and as soon as she was judged fit for the journey Vladimir Ilich brought his wife back from Switzerland.
On their return, Nadya got on better with Inessa than she had in Paris. The two women together accompanied Lenin on his walks and fellow Bolsheviks referred to the threesome as ‘the hikers’ party’. An alternative soubriquet was ‘the anti-cinema-ists’ party’. This was a reference to Lenin’s disapproval of the passion of his comrades Kamenev and Zinoviev for going to the cinema and avoiding physical exertion. Since Kamenev and Zinoviev were of Jewish parentage, Lenin jokingly adjusted the name to ‘the anti-semitic party’. (This banter, by the way, indicates what little mind Lenin usually gave to the Jewish ingredient in his own ancestry.) Inessa had lively cultural interests and encouraged Lenin and Nadya to attend Beethoven piano concerts. For Lenin, Beethoven was a treat, for Nadya less so. But this did not matter. The three of them enjoyed their discussions with each other. Lenin read voraciously in the Russian literary classics; a dog-eared copy of Tolstoi’s War and Peace was especially well thumbed. The only snag was that the local bookshops were poorly stocked with Russian books. But this was a quibble. Generally Lenin and his friends were content with the diversions available in Galicia.
But by November Inessa had gone. In a poignant letter from Paris she wrote to him:21
You and I have split up, we’ve split up, my dear one! I know it, I feel it: you’ll never come here! Looking at the very familiar places, I clearly recognised – as I never did before – what a large place you occupied in my life here in Paris, so that almost all activity here in Paris was tied up by a thousand threads to thoughts of you. At that time I definitely wasn’t in love with you but even then I loved you very much. At the moment I could manage without the kisses: just to see you and to talk with you sometimes would be a pleasure – and this could do no one any harm. What was the reason for depriving me of that? You ask whether I’m angry with you for ‘carrying through’ the break. No, I think that you didn’t do it for your own sake.
These words must surely have referred to an affair of some kind and to Inessa’s judgement that he had finished with her because of his concern for the feelings of Nadya. This was the letter of a rejected lover who believed that her man still felt more deeply for her than for his wife.
Inessa was getting desperate. Playing her last card, she stressed that she cherished Nadya. Her implicit plea to Lenin was that the three of them could live without discomfort or guilt. He turned her down, and in subsequent letters Inessa became more combative towards him as he persisted in staying away from her. In one letter he had remarked that he was on close terms of friendship and respect with very few women. Inessa’s reply accused him of arrogance, alleging that he had stated that only two or three women in his life deserved his respect.
In July 1914, Lenin retorted that she had misconstrued what he had written:
Never, never have I written that I value only three women. Never!!! What I wrote was that my unconditional friendship, absolute respect and trust are dedicated to only two or three women. This is a completely different, utterly and completely different thing.
I hope that we’ll see each other here after the Congress and talk about this.
He was walking a tightrope. He wanted to stay on friendly terms with Inessa and to persuade her that he had behaved properly by her. But this was not all. Lenin also wished to continue to deploy Inessa on important party missions. He had to strike a balance between the emotional and political considerations. While indicating that he had not condescended to her at the end of their affair, Lenin aimed to use her as a subordinate in politics. Having secured her assent to represent the Bolsheviks at the ‘mutual exchange of opinions’ meeting of Russian Marxist factions in Brussels, he deluged her with advice on how to handle the occasion.
A complex of dilemmas faced him in his political life. As Lenin was negotiating with Inessa about the Brussels meeting, he learned that the Bolshevik Duma deputies had fallen into disarray. Roman Malinovski was the cause of it all. In summer 1914 he had cracked under the pressure of his dual allegiance to Bolshevism and the Okhrana, and secretly fled St Petersburg. A few days later he turned up in Galicia. By this time there was public speculation in Russia that Malinovski was a police agent. This would have been an embarrassment at any time for the Bolsheviks. But Lenin, who was only beginning to stabilise his private life and was preoccupied with the financial and political developments in the International Socialist Bureau, reeled from this latest blow.
Malinovski belonged to both the Duma and to the Bolshevik Central Committee; he was the most famous Bolshevik active in the Russian Empire. Malinovski and Lenin had been hand in glove. Lenin’s enemies had always said that he was much too complacent about the kind of people he surrounded himself with. There had been several notorious examples. Taratuta and Andrikanis had deceived young women into marriage for the faction’s pecuniary gain; Kamo had robbed banks for the faction. Lenin had defended them all from criticism, as well he might since he had instigated their shady activity. His criterion of approval was whether or not a person adhered to current Bolshevik policies. He scoffed at anti-Bolsheviks who were horrified by his refusal to assess the moral character of members of his faction. He had often been warned about Malinovski. But he took no precautions. To Lenin, Malinovski appeared to behave exactly as a Lenin-style Bolshevik should. And he was a better organiser and speaker than all the other Duma deputies put together. He could talk the language of ordinary Russian workers. Why, then, distrust him? Weren’t the faction’s enemies just out to cause mischief for Bolshevism?
Even so, Lenin felt obliged to put together a Central Committee commission of enquiry. Although Lenin and Zinoviev were the dominant figures on it, they themselves were subject to scrutiny. In judging Malinovski, they were judging themselves and their past behaviour. In the nature of such situations it was difficult to be sure about the evidence, and Malinovski was adept at turning any evidence inside out. Lenin anyway sympathised with Malinovski, even though the other Bolshevik deputies to the Duma remonstrated that Lenin was treating him far too softly. In a similar unofficial trial in 1906, the Socialist-Revolutionaries had decided that Father Georgi Gapon was a police agent and had hanged him. But Lenin and Zinoviev gave Malinovski the benefit of the doubt. No charge against him could be totally proved and, they concluded, he had to be considered an innocent man.
While this confidential commission was sitting in June, Lenin was losing any vestigial sense of proportion. His distraction from Russian revolutionary possibilities was total. His political intuition – sharp as a razor in 1917 – was extremely blunt in mid-1914. He had no excuse. Living in Habsburg Poland he was in daily receipt of the Russian news. Through June and July there were strikes in St Petersburg against the government as well as against factory owners. Barricades were briefly put up in industrial quarters. There seemed a strong possibility that the Romanov monarchy was about to face a test equal to its experiences in 1905–6. But no guidance was forthcoming from Lenin in Galicia. Nor did he give much attention to the gathering diplomatic crisis among the European great powers that was about to engulf the continent in the catastrophic Great War. Lenin had other things on his mind: Brussels, Kautsky, the Shmidt legacy, Inessa and Malinovski. His priority at the time was to score points in discussions with other leading socialists in the parties of Russia and the rest of Europe. Real war, real famine, real impoverishment were not things of his direct experience – and until he was thrust into daily Russian politics in 1917, he failed to rise to the level of the kind of politician that he aspired to be.
Then it happened: in August 1914 Germany declared war on Russia. This came at the end of weeks of diplomatic threats in Europe following the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo. On 23 July the Habsburg government in Vienna had delivered an ultimatum whose terms were so humiliating as to make it politically impossible for Serbia to comply. When the Russian Imperial government declared support for Serbia, the German government stated that, unless the Russians stood down their forces, Germany would go to war against Russia on the Austrian side. But Russia would not budge. It had endured a series of disputes with Germany and Austria–Hungary in the past half-decade, and Nicholas II’s sense of dynastic and imperial honour induced him to conclude that the time had come to make a stand. Within days, Britain and France announced that they would fight alongside Russia. These three powerful states formed a coalition against three other such states – Germany, Austria–Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. The Great War was under way. Diplomats were staggered by the speed with which international relations had spun out of their expert hands.
In every country, including Russia, several political parties and newspapers were ready to condemn their government for any sign of weakness against the national enemies. Yet most rulers were untroubled by this and in the early stages of the diplomatic crisis had expected that a general military conflict would be avoided. This hope was wrecked in August. Two great coalitions were ranged against each other. Austria–Hungary and Germany faced enemies on two fronts. In the west there were the combined forces of France and Britain, in the east there was Russia.
Lenin’s inattention to the intensifying crisis is unmistakable. His understanding of politics outside his party had always been of a very general kind. He had always disdained to scrutinise the twists and turns of Russian Imperial government policy; in the same fashion he took little interest in international diplomacy’s vicissitudes in summer 1914. His Marxist approach accustomed him to concentrate on the economic and political foundations of regimes, and as a result he had simply become complacent about the personal security he enjoyed in the Habsburg Empire. He was not the only person in Europe to be taken by surprise. But this is the best that may be said of him. Really it did not require much foresight to guess that any war between Russia and Austria would place him in jeopardy. Living in Galicia, he might well be arrested as a Russian agent at the outset of hostilities; and if the Russian Imperial forces were to occupy the region, he would certainly be treated as a traitor.
He saw his mistake when it was already too late. As Russia started to mobilise, the Habsburg police initiated enquiries about foreign residents. Lenin was living only a few miles from the Russian border and had visited the frontier posts. He had written frequently to St Petersburg and opened his home to Russian politicians. He had roamed the mountains near Zakopane and had quizzed the inhabitants of the area about rent-levels, climate, ethnic variety and the best routes from one village to another. He possessed a Browning pistol. Lenin lacked only a swarthy countenance and a black cape to complete the caricature of a Russian spy.
War hysteria affected every Polish city and village, and the Catholic priests in Galicia were preaching that resident Russians were at work poisoning the wells. The fact that Lenin had hitherto been an honoured anti-tsarist emigrant made no difference. The maid employed by Lenin and Nadezhda Konstantinovna invented stories about them which she told to peasant women in Biały Dunajec. It all could easily have ended in violence, perhaps a lynching. Nadezhda Konstantinovna sensibly bribed the maid by paying her off and giving her a free one-way rail ticket to Kraków.1 Yet the local hostility to Russian emigrants was unabated. Things would have been easier for Lenin if he had stayed in Kraków, where the police were more sophisticated than in Biały Dunajec. The problem facing the officer who arrived in the village from Nowy Targ on 7 August (NS) was that he knew that he would be reprimanded if he failed to arrest someone who subsequently proved to be the agent of the Romanovs. A display of bureaucratic zeal was predictable and the officer was bound to see everything in the worst possible light.
A brief search confirmed the officer’s expectations. Among Lenin’s possessions he found extensive notes on contemporary agriculture, including statistical tables. The officer deduced that such material was a coded message for the suspect’s espionage superiors in St Petersburg. The discovery of the Browning pistol further incriminated Lenin. Even the pot of glue was thought peculiar. To the officer it seemed likely that the pot was a bomb. Retrospectively – but only retrospectively – the situation had its amusing side. At the time Lenin and Nadezhda Konstantinovna were scared that the man’s nerves might get the better of him.
In the end it was agreed by the three of them that only Lenin needed to be subjected to further interrogation. Polish courtesy towards women saved Nadezhda Konstantinovna (even though she, a promoter of female emancipation, asked for no favours). The officer planned to take Lenin back to Nowy Targ, nine miles away, but relented after Lenin gave his solemn word that he would not abscond. Lenin would take the train to Nowy Targ next day. As soon as the officer had departed, Lenin hurried to Poronin to look up Sergei Bagotski and Jakub Hanecki, who volunteered to obtain affidavits from fellow Marxists elsewhere in Austria–Hungary to the effect that he was not a spy.2 Meanwhile Lenin sent a telegram asking the Kraków Director of Police to confirm to the Nowy Targ authorities that he had been living in Galicia as a political emigrant, and the Director quickly did as requested. Then Lenin returned to make the final arrangements in Biały Dunajec. By a stroke of luck a Bolshevik, a certain V. A. Tikhomirnov, had just arrived in the village. Lenin offered him accommodation in return for Tikhomirnov giving manly protection to Nadezhda Konstantinovna and her mother.3
On 8 August he went to Nowy Targ, where he was put in prison. While he was being held in cell no. 5, his friends outside were working hard on his behalf. Bagotski and Hanecki were not alone. By some oversight, Grigori Zinoviev had been left alone by the police. This left him free to cycle around the whole area campaigning for Lenin’s release. Sigmund Marek, a Marxist, quickly wrote to the authorities on behalf of Lenin. Telegrams were dispatched by Nadezhda Konstantinovna. Viktor Adler in Vienna and Herman Diamand in Lwów rapidly responded as requested.4 ‘Are you sure’, an Austrian minister asked Adler, ‘that Ulyanov is an enemy of the tsarist government?’ Adler replied: ‘Oh yes, a more sworn enemy than your Excellency!’5 Hanecki and Nadezhda Konstantinovna visited the prisoner regularly in Nowy Targ to cheer him up. They need not have worried unduly. Lenin busied himself talking to fellow prisoners – most of whom were being held for acts of petty criminality – and used his legal training to assist them in preparing their defences. He was a popular figure despite his slender grasp of Polish, being known in the prison as a ‘real bull of a fellow’.
On 19 August Lenin was released and allowed to return to Biały Dunajec. By then it was urgent for him and his associates to leave Galicia. Russian Imperial armies were advancing fast and there was a possibility that Galicia would be occupied. In such a contingency the mercy shown by the Austrians to the leader of Bolshevism would not be repeated. Lenin and Nadezhda Konstantinovna determined to make for neutral Switzerland and they wrote to fellow Marxist Herman Greulich asking him to support their application to resettle there. On 26 August, accompanied by the Zinovievs, they left for Kraków. Permission was obtained for their further trip to Vienna, where Viktor Adler helped them get the necessary documentation for the journey to Switzerland on 3 September (NS).
There had been quite an influx of Russian revolutionaries from the belligerent countries. Lenin wrote to Vladimir Karpinski in September:
It’s said that a new French emigration has now set off for Geneva from Paris, Brussels, etc. Isn’t there an extraordinary price inflation, especially for apartments? And so we’ll have to set ourselves up temporarily: is it possible to find rented rooms (two small ones) on a monthly basis, with use of the kitchen?
Bolshevik associates lent a hand and the Lenins occupied an apartment at 11a Donnerbühlweg in Bern. By then he was extremely angry. Before leaving Galicia he had read in the newspapers that the German Social-Democratic Party’s representatives in the Reichstag had voted war credits to the German government. Lenin was astounded and appalled. To Bagotski he had exclaimed: ‘This is the end of the Second International.’ He was referring to the failure of the German Social-Democratic Party to stick by the resolution of the Stuttgart Congress of the Second Socialist International that socialist parties should do all in their power to prevent their governments from waging war in Europe or elsewhere. Militarism and imperialism had been condemned by the Congress. At the time Lenin had had to exert pressure upon the German Marxists to accede to the resolution during the Congress; but he had never imagined that they would renege on it. Now the German Social-Democratic Party, the most authoritative party of the Second International, had done precisely that.
Lenin’s mood was choleric not least because he had shared the almost universal respect in which the German Social-Democratic Party was held by European Marxists. For all his pride in Russia and in Bolshevism, he had expected ‘the socialist revolution’ in Europe to be led not by Russians like himself but by Germans. He had esteemed Karl Kautsky despite the financial altercations he had had with him. And yet Kautsky, the arbiter of Marxist orthodoxy for Vladimir Lenin, had refused to break with the German Social-Democratic Party over the vote on war credits. For Lenin, this was tantamount to supporting militarism and imperialism. Kautsky had therefore to be denounced.
The wartime phenomenon of socialist parties supporting their governments became the norm. Across Germany, Austria, France and the United Kingdom the majority of them took the line that national independence was under threat. Only a few parties held to the Socialist International’s policy of active opposition to war, and Russian parties were prominent among them. Not that all their leaders refused to back the Russian war effort. Several prominent Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries regarded Germany as being bent upon an imperialist aggression that required them to support their Imperial forces even though they detested the Romanov monarchy. Most notably Georgi Plekhanov dropped his struggle against the government and called on patriotic Russian socialists to follow his example. Hundreds of political emigrants in Paris volunteered to fight in the armies of the Allies, and others moved to France to join them. But most of the Bolshevik, Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary leaders stuck to anti-war positions of one sort or another. Some were pacifists. Others did not reject war as such but wished to end this military conflict by means of pressure exerted by socialists of all belligerent countries – and many of these, including the Menshevik Yuli Martov, felt that in Russia’s case this would still have to involve the wartime overthrow of the Romanovs.
Lenin’s position was at the extremity of Russian Marxism. Before reaching Switzerland he had drafted a brief article, ‘The Tasks of Revolutionary Social-Democracy in the European War’. He agreed with Martov that the military conflict in Europe was ‘bourgeois, imperialist, dynastic’, and both he and Martov contended that the German Social-Democratic Party had behaved disgustingly. But Lenin had a preoccupation of his own: ‘From the viewpoint of the working class and the toiling masses of all the peoples of Russia, the lesser evil would be the defeat of the tsarist monarchy.’6 Martov condemned the ‘imperialist’ governments indiscriminately. For Lenin, this was not enough. However conditionally, he wanted Marxists to welcome German success at war with Russia. This was extraordinary for a man who was under no intellectual compulsion to prefer one set of ‘imperialists’ over another.
His language was intemperate. In a notorious phrase he referred to the Russian Imperial armies as ‘Black Hundred gangs’. The Black Hundreds were groups of reactionary thugs who organised pogroms of Jews in the Russian Empire before the war. Now Lenin was casually describing the workers and peasants conscripted into the armed forces as anti-semites. Bolshevism’s strategy of revolution, as formulated by Lenin since 1905, called for a ‘class alliance’ of the working class and the peasantry. Yet from wartime Switzerland he was dismissing both groups in blistering terms. He did not get away with this in meetings he held with fellow Bolshevik emigrants. The first occurred in woods outside Bern so as to avoid giving annoyance to the Swiss authorities, who wanted to keep the country distant from the politics of the war. One of the Bolshevik State Duma deputies, F. N. Samoilov, was present; and when he went back to Russia, he carried with him news of the Bolshevik discussion. Lenin then travelled to address other Bolshevik groups in Geneva and Zurich. When Karpinski encountered him, a row ensued about the contents and language of ‘The Tasks of Revolutionary Social-Democracy in the European War’.
Lenin had to back down, at least a little. He continued to express a preference for Russia to be defeated, but concurrently he insisted that socialists of other countries should likewise campaign for their own respective governments to lose the war. Thereby he displayed a negligible understanding of how wars are fought. Despite claiming to be putting forward ‘scientific’, ‘practical’ policies, he never explained how it would be possible for all the belligerent states simultaneously to go down to defeat. Unconsciously he had omitted to remove the national ingredient of his recommendations. He had always asserted that his ideas had a European nucleus, but he had always been a very Russian European. Whatever was happening in Europe, he wanted Nicholas II and his regime to be trampled down.
Instead he concentrated on urging that the onset of war in Europe had brought the era of European socialist revolution nearer. He had always taken a European perspective on revolutionary strategy. While being bitterly disappointed with the German Social-Democratic Party since August 1914, he did not lose faith in the imminence of capitalism’s demise. The duty of socialist parties was to rally support among the working class for revolutionary political struggle. The fact that most socialist leaders in most countries had ceased to oppose ‘chauvinism’ was neither here nor there: Lenin contended that the conditions were ripe for workers to be turned towards revolution by even quite small groups of determined, experienced revolutionaries such as the Bolsheviks. The European socialist revolution could therefore be brought about in wartime. He introduced a new slogan: European Civil War! Lenin proposed – again without elaborating his idea in any detail – that the urgent assignment was to turn the ‘imperialist war’ into a ‘civil war’ across the continent. The working classes of all European countries should unite in the fight against the concert of the continent’s middle classes. Class struggle, not peace among the classes, was what was needed in that time of war.
His confidence proceeded from calculations he had expressed in a letter to Maxim Gorki in 1913: ‘War between Austria and Russia would be a very useful thing for the revolution (in the whole of eastern Europe), but it’s scarcely likely that Franz Joseph [the Hapsburg Emperor] and Nikolasha [Lenin’s nickname for the Russian Emperor] would grant us this pleasure.’7 The governments of the European great powers had done the improbable: Lenin’s joy was unbounded.
His indifference to the scale of the human suffering was colossal. In this he was not totally unusual; one of the reasons why the war took so long to evoke popular resentment in the combatant counties was that there was little knowledge of conditions on the western and eastern fronts. Not only the generals of both the Allies and the Central Powers but also most ordinary people were unaware that so much carnage was occurring in the name of national defence. Lenin, too, was not closely acquainted with the military situation. But being in neutral Switzerland, where newspaper reports were freer than elsewhere in Europe, he surely understood that this was a war grossly more destructive than others in recent European history. On the trip from Biały Dunajec he had witnessed the Kraków hospitals crammed with soldier casualties. But he did not refer to the subject. Such commentary would have seemed unnecessarily sentimental to him. Nevertheless it is striking that when he talked about ‘war’, ‘struggle’ and ‘conflict’ he was usually referring to factional campaign inside his party rather than to the Great War. Internal Marxist politics remained his obsession.
It is not as if he had no access to writings by fellow Marxists who emphasised the ghastliness of conditions on the two fronts. Many such as Martov and Axelrod understood that the war was like industrialised slaughter and that the moral and political imperative of socialism was to stop it. But Lenin had been unmoved by the Volga famine of 1891–2. He had cared little when the number of casualties had soared in the Russo-Japanese War in 1904–5. Eventually he met a couple of Russian soldiers in Switzerland who told him of their experiences; and he resumed contact by letter with Roman Malinovski after his capture as a soldier in the Russian Imperial armies by the Germans. He had the information. But he ignored it: he was impervious to the wreckage of lives at the front and at home that was being reported.
Lenin maintained this frigidity throughout the Great War; he hated letting what he called ‘sentimentality’ interfere with his political judgement. But this does not mean that he was happy with himself in broader ways. His internal life was frenetic as never before – and he had never been known as a calm fellow. He found it increasingly difficult to stay tranquil when challenged on the logic and practicality of his opinions. He was nervous and bad-tempered days before he was scheduled to give speeches to meetings that would be attended by people who were not Bolsheviks, and was not much more comfortable among members of the Bolshevik faction. The violence of his language shocked even his sister Anna: ‘I’m being terrorised by you: I have a fear of making any incautious sort of expression.’8 Alexander Shlyapnikov, the leader of the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee, told everyone in the faction that Lenin’s treatment of Bolshevik colleagues had gone beyond acceptable bounds.9 Anna Ulyanova agreed. This served only to infuriate Lenin, who brutally retorted that ‘she had never made sense in politics’.10 Anna, usually her brother’s admirer, drew the obvious conclusion that he was no longer entirely in control of himself. Lenin was becoming a little unhinged.
The years of traipsing from one European city to another were taking their toll. After years of declining health, Nadya’s mother died in Bern in March 1915. She had inherited a large sum of money on the death of her sister, and – as Nadya noted – had thereby become a ‘capitalist’.11 Yelizaveta Vasilevna had been one of the few people who had been willing to speak frankly to her son-in-law. But they had got along pretty well and naturally Nadya was stricken with grief.
But what was wearing down Lenin to an even greater extent was the ceaseless writing and organising against every Marxist leader on the face of the continent:12
This, then, is my destiny. One fighting campaign after another – against political imbecilities, vulgarities, opportunism, etc. This has been going on since 1893. And this is the reason for the hatred shown by the philistines. Ah well, I still wouldn’t swap this destiny for ‘peace’ with the philistines.
It was a revealing comment. (Significantly, he made it in a private letter to Inessa, the person before whom he had the habit of trying to justify himself.) Even iron Vladimir was capable of self-pity. But this extraordinary outburst must not overshadow the other important aspect: namely that, however much he felt sorry for himself, he still believed he was right in his struggle against what he saw – without a glimmer of doubt – as idiotic, vulgar and opportunist opponents. Yet photographs of him in the Great War show a man who looked older than his age. His haggard features and uncharacteristically puffed-out physique were signs of the turmoil within him. Lenin, the indefatigable pre-war factionalist, was becoming an exhausted force.
But that sense of his correctness saw him through. The moods of depression, bad as they were, were turned inside out as soon as he pondered the political ideas of his rivals; immediately he again became confident and militant. Lenin never questioned his own judgement or motives. He had ascertained the proper revolutionary line for the war. It was the only proper line, and that – in his estimation – ought to be the end of the matter: Marxists of Russia and the rest of Europe were at best misguided if they refused to follow his lead.
Apart from politics, his emotions were engaged only with the few people who were close to him. One was his mother. Her health had been poor for years, and he had been solicitous about her in letters both to her and to his sisters and brother. Her support for his career had been unfailing even though she did not display sympathy with his politics. For her, he and her other children were simply that: her children. Maria Alexandrovna believed they could do no wrong. When they ran into trouble with the authorities, she took their part and, whenever possible, went to live with them in exile. She would have done this for Vladimir if he had let her, but he wanted his freedom. He declined to enable her to accompany him into Siberia in 1897 and to attend his marriage in the following year, and there was never any question of her joining him in emigration. She had enjoyed taking a holiday with him in Brittany in 1903 and journeying across the Baltic to see him in Stockholm in 1910. Unlike his sister Maria, she had not ‘shrieked with pleasure’ on seeing him at last, but she loved him. Her way of showing this was to buy him a blanket and to urge him to eat more: he was much too thin for her liking.13
The warmth between mother and son lasted through to her death at the age of eighty-one in July 1916. When he wrote to Inessa Armand in July 1914 about the ‘two or three women’ to whom he was dedicated, Maria Alexandrovna must have been one of those he had in mind. Naturally the news of her death made him distraught. Yet the Ulyanovs were reluctant to display emotions about personal matters and there is no record that Vladimir was any different on this occasion. But his mother was one of the props he used to cope with all the pressures on him. He could not even attend her funeral. Instead it was her son-in-law Mark Yelizarov and family friend Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich who carried her coffin to her grave in the Lutheran Cemetery in the Volkovo Cemetery in St Petersburg.
In the same years he was also trying to deal with the emotional debris of his relationship with Inessa Armand. Letters continued to pass between them and she helped the Lenins with the arrangements for their trip from Galicia. In the course of the war she had moved from Paris to Switzerland, eventually settling in Les Avants in the mountains above Montreux. Soon, at Lenin’s insistence, she herself shifted house to Bern to be near him. The threesome of previous years – Lenin, Nadya and Inessa – resumed their habit of going for long walks in the countryside together. In Nadya’s recollection, they each had an idiosyncratic way of passing the time when they sat down. While Lenin buffed up the language of his speeches, Nadya taught herself Italian and Inessa did some sewing and read works on feminism.14 Inessa’s mind was exercised in particular by the question of women’s rights. In January 1915 she went off by herself to the mountains, and jotted down the outline of a booklet which she sent to Lenin. Only one aspect prompted a reaction. This was Inessa’s demand for ‘freedom of love’. Lenin sputtered back that such a demand was not a ‘proletarian’ but a ‘bourgeois’ one. He called on her to take note of ‘the objective logic of class relations in matters of love’, and then he signed off in his improbable English: ‘Friendly shake hands!’15
Lenin’s comment took some beating for sheer pomposity. Inessa sensed that the subtext of his criticism was his hostility to the idea that women should be given carte blanche to have affairs any time they wanted. She threw his words back at him, denying any such purpose and claiming that he was confusing ‘freedom of love’ with ‘freedom of adultery’. This stung Lenin into retorting: ‘And so it turns out that I am doing the identifying and that you are setting about scattering and destroying me.’16 It served him right. Lenin had been tactless in his first letter about her draft, and now she was paying him back. Surely she was also avenging herself for his decision to break off their relationship in mid-1912.
But he put up a fight. Inessa had written that ‘even a fleeting passion’ was ‘more poetic and cleaner’ than ‘kisses without love’ between man and wife. Lenin had a biting reply:17
Kisses without love between vulgar spouses are filthy. I agree. These need to be contrasted… with what?… It would seem: kisses with love. But you contrast ‘a fleeting (why a fleeting?) passion (why not love?) – and it comes out logically as if kisses without love (fleeting) are contrasted to marital kisses without love… This is odd.
It would have been odd if indeed Inessa had written about ‘freedom of love’ within the narrow framework of debate described by Lenin. By then, however, Lenin was out to defend himself not only in terms of social principles but also out of loyalty to Nadya. Implicitly he was denying that his marriage had anything ‘filthy’ about it. Nadya and he meant something to each other even though the marriage had gone through rough patches. In arguing against casual sexual pairings, moreover, Lenin was getting a bit of his own back. Inessa had not been known to deprive herself of intimate male companionship in her earlier life. By contrast Lenin was suggesting that a durable commitment was required.
He mastered his feelings to such an extent that he increased the amount of purely practical advice and instruction he felt able to give to Inessa. He no longer addressed her familiarly as ty but more formally as vy. He told her to get a house nearer to other faction members and to stop being such a recluse. It was almost a parental interest that he took in her condition. What, however, should we make of this? Inessa was still in love with him. But we can only guess at his feeling for her. A residue of their relationship must have lingered with him. Otherwise it is hard to understand his pained attempt to justify himself to her and to persuade her that his ideas were believable and honourable. But he also worked to keep her in his faction. In wartime, he was concentrating again on politics. He even wrote dreamily to Inessa herself about how he felt that he was ‘in love’ with Karl Marx. What more could he have done to shake her off emotionally?
Meanwhile he went on trying to win the support of the Bolshevik faction. His two policies on the preferability of Russia’s military defeat and on the need for ‘European Civil War’ lost him plenty of friends abroad. Only Nadezhda Konstantinovna and a few other Bolsheviks, including Zinoviev, stood by him; no one else among the émigrés felt really convinced by him. Often there were scandalous outbursts when he spoke in Swiss cities. On one occasion he took the opportunity to make an attack on Plekhanov in Lausanne in October 1914 by hiding his face at the back of the hall during Plekhanov’s address and then making a blistering attack on him as a ‘chauvinist’ who had parted for ever with Marxism.18 Many of Lenin’s associates were too much in awe of him to reject him entirely. But he was certainly short of friends. What irked him was his negligible influence in the Russian Empire. Galicia had offered him the regular conduit of letters and personal visits, and meetings of central party bodies were frequent. Nothing like this happened in Bern. The average letter took several weeks. The eastern front in the Great War cut a line along the north–south axis of the continent. In order to keep the faction abroad in contact with the faction in Russia, a tenuous linkage across Germany and Scandinavia was arranged – and Lenin had to give encouragement to all Bolsheviks so that they might go on working for the revolution.
Bolshevism was not exactly flourishing back in the Russian Empire. One of the reasons for this was that the Okhrana no longer protected leading Bolsheviks from arrest. Bolsheviks were the most bitter enemies not only of the Romanov dynasty but even of the state as a whole. The round-ups of Bolsheviks through the war was relentless. It was also effective. First of all the Bolshevik Duma deputies and their advisers were put on trial. Among the advisers was Lev Kamenev, who angered Lenin by disowning the policy of ‘defeatism’ he had prescribed. Then there were the recurrent arrests of Bolshevik committees and groups in Petrograd (as the capital was renamed because St Petersburg sounded too German) and the provinces. There was the complete prohibition of legal Bolshevik newspapers; difficulties existed for Bolsheviks in getting their articles published in journals and magazines even when oblique critical language was employed. Strikes broke out in large industrial cities in late 1915, but the Okhrana quickly repressed the trouble and pulled a further cohort of Bolshevik activists into prison before dispatching them to Siberia. The Russian Bureau re-established itself in September 1915 under Alexander Shlyapnikov; the other members were G. I. Osipov, E. A. Dunaev and Anna Ulyanova: none of them had previous experience of factional leadership.
There was only one positive side for Lenin in this crumbling of the faction in Russia: he and Zinoviev were left to develop their ideas and pursue their activity unhindered by fellow leaders in the Russian Empire. They revived the émigré central factional newspaper Social-Democrat and could print their own articles without referring to others. Social-Democrat could then be carried by courier for dissemination in Russia. A journal of Marxist theory was also set up in conjunction with a group of young Russian writers led by Nikolai Bukharin and Georgi Pyatakov at Baugy-sur-Clarens in the suburbs of Montreux in Switzerland.
Yet these successes meant little in the face of further setbacks experienced by Lenin. Not only did the post take weeks between Russia and Switzerland, but also Lenin had fewer contacts in Russia than at any time since he had first become an emigrant in 1900. The confidential political address-book maintained by Nadezhda Konstantinovna contained only twenty-six persons who lived not in emigration but in the Russian Empire, and sixteen of these were no longer active by the end of 1916. The Okhrana had success in trimming back the already slim size of the faction. Of the ten addresses that remained operational through the war, only three were outside Petrograd, Moscow and Siberian exile.19 Nadezhda Konstantinovna was getting desperate. ‘We need direct relations’, she wrote, ‘with other towns.’20 But she was crying into the wind. Most of the correspondence – indeed virtually all of it – had to be passed through the conduit of Shlyapnikov and Anna Ulyanova if it was to reach the rest of the disparate faction; and Shlyapnikov had to keep travelling to Alexandra Kollontai in Oslo in order to pick up what Lenin had written. It was a frail apparatus with which to try to make revolution in Russia.
In January 1917, Lenin gave his most pessimistic speech ever to a meeting of young Swiss socialists at the Volkshaus in Zurich:1
We, the old people, perhaps won’t survive until the decisive battles of this forthcoming revolution. But it occurs to me that it’s with a large amount of confidence that I can articulate the hope that the young people who work so wonderfully in the socialist movement of Switzerland and the entire world will have the happiness of not only fighting but also of winning victory in the forthcoming proletarian revolution.
Since the 1890s his premise had been that socialist revolution across Europe was imminent. Now he was saying he might not live to witness it.
Whenever he had got moody before the Great War, he had been worrying not about European socialist revolution but about internal factional politics. This he confided in a letter to Inessa Armand:
Oh, how those ‘little matters of business’ are mere fakes of the real business, surrogates of the business, a real obstacle to the business in the way that I see the fuss, the trouble, the little matters – and how I’m tied up with them inextricably and forever!! That’s a sign more [sic. This sentence and the next one were written by Lenin in English] that I am lazy and tired and in a poor humour. Generally I like my profession and yet often I almost hate it.
Lenin did not bother about the criticisms aimed at him by persons who were not Marxists, but he was depressed by the wartime disputes among Bolsheviks. He became so edgy that he did not trust himself to speak in public. After New Year 1917 he wrote privately: ‘I wouldn’t want to travel to Geneva: (1) I’m not well; my nerves are no good. I’m scared of giving lectures; (2) I’m booked here for 22 January, and I’ve got to prepare for a speech in German. For this reason I don’t promise to come.’2
Nor was Lenin living in his customary comfort. His mother’s death on 14 July 1916 terminated the pension she shared with her children whenever they fell on hard times. The Bolshevik factional treasury had also fallen away. The Bolsheviks were no longer operating openly in Russia and Pravda had been closed down by the Imperial government. The number of active Bolshevik adherents had collapsed. Most of them anyway no longer shared Lenin’s opinions. Anna Ilinichna, working for the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee, did what she could and asked him for a statement of his basic monthly requirements.3 But the money coming from Petrograd was never going to be enough; other sources of income had to be found. Lenin and Nadya tried to obtain commissions as freelance authors; the snag was that they wrote in Russian and had to find their publishers in distant, wartime Russia. Yet Nadya devised a project for a Pedagogical Encyclopaedia whose potential readership would not be confined to Marxist activists. Lenin, too, sought to write little pieces for money. It was a difficult task for both of them.
They economised by starting to eat horsemeat rather than beef and chicken. They bought no new clothes even though Lenin, a stickler for looking tidy, began to seem rather grubby in his old suit and walking boots. In February 1916 they moved to cheaper lodgings at Spiegelgasse no. 14 in Zurich, where the cobbler Titus Kammerer sublet rooms to them.4 Spiegelgasse was a neat, leafy street; it had been there, at no. 12, that the German dramatist Georg Büchner wrote his play Woyzeck eighty years before. But Lenin and Nadya felt rather sorry for themselves. Next door to the house lay the shop of Herr Ruff, a butcher who made his own sausages.5 Lenin, who avoided oily products because of his delicate stomach, was disgusted by the smell and dropped his ritual of aerating a room even in cold weather. The windows were kept constantly closed.6
Yet the Ulyanovs enjoyed the acquaintance of fellow inhabitants of the building. Among them were a German conscript’s family, an Italian man and a couple of Austrian actors with a beautiful ginger kitten. Kammerer’s wife Luisa captivated Lenin, who admired and shared her belief that soldiers should turn their rifles against their own governments. Luisa also taught Nadya some of the tricks needed to buy food cheaply and cook it quickly. Nadya rather overdid things by going out and buying meat on one of the two days per week when the Swiss government had appealed to citizens not to buy meat because of wartime shortages in supply. Whether Nadya made a mistake or had flouted the regulations is uncertain, but on returning from the shops she asked Frau Kammerer how on earth the federal authorities of Switzerland could ensure that its proclamation would be obeyed. Did it send investigators round to people’s homes? Frau Kammerer laughed, saying that only the middle class would refuse to show a sense of civic responsibility. The working class, she exclaimed, were very different. Then she added, to ease Nadya’s conscience, that the proclamation ‘didn’t apply to for-eigners’.7
Lenin admired the Kammerers as exemplary proletarians, ignoring the fact that they were not workers but a ‘petit-bourgeois’ couple who ran a shop and sublet apartments. Really they were little capitalists and Lenin was seeing and hearing what he wanted. Having found a family who shared many of his political assumptions, he persuaded himself that they belonged to a social class of which he approved: the proletariat. The Kammerers’ respect for the public good encouraged him in his basic assumptions. Lenin in 1917 was to stress the need for the state and the workers to ‘check and supervise’ the fulfilment of revolutionary objectives. The ideas for the October Revolution came from many sources. Marx supplied many of them in his voluminous writings. Frau Luisa Kammerer was unknowingly reinforcing one or two others.
Thus Lenin felt sustained in his Marxist faith. Through Marx and Engels he ‘knew’ that the future would bring about a final and wonderful stage in world history. His life had purpose. Lenin clung to a rock of attitudes and assumptions, and on it he was able to construct almost any notions about politics and economics he wanted. Overtly he claimed that Marxism had a readily identifiable logic that permitted the development of one single policy for any given situation. But this was pretence. What he really assumed by this was that his own version of Marxism was the sole authentic one. He held to this assumption even though his version of Marxism and, to an even greater extent, his practical policies changed a great deal over his long career. His faith had survived many years of emigration. Only a few of the Marxists of the 1880s were still alive and active by the Great War. Lenin was one of them, and such was his inner confidence that he felt no pressure to question the way he operated as a politician. And so whenever the current situation looked bleak – in the faction, in the international socialist movement, in the family, in his marriage, even in his physical and mental well-being – he could do something about it. He could look forward to the radiant future.
History, he trusted, was on his side. Or rather he thought that he was on the side of History. Lenin’s bouts of depression were serious but temporary. That a European socialist revolution would eventually occur, with or without him, he had not the slightest doubt. Despite the concerns expressed in his address to the Swiss young socialists, he more usually believed that it would not take long for this revolution to break out. For most of the war, he had gone round predicting a general revolutionary explosion. This indeed was the bone of contention between him and so many socialist writers. Kautsky, Martov and others refused to accept that he had proved his case that Europe’s working classes could easily be brought into revolutionary activity against their national governments. Nor did they believe it sensible to concentrate on splitting the socialist movement in each country. How, they asked, could socialists lead a united European working class if they were themselves divided? Lenin’s other critics, notably Plekhanov, went further and suggested that most German workers were so patriotic that they would drop lip-service to the ‘internationalist’ principles of the Second International in the event of Germany’s military defeat of Russia.
To those few persons who followed Lenin’s professional activities, then, he seemed a cantankerous, somewhat unhinged utopian. But this did not trouble him. He continued to declare that the Romanov monarchy was a likely casualty of the war. He repeated that Nicholas II had done the Bolsheviks a favour by engaging in armed conflict with Germany. Revolution in Russia was on the immediate agenda. Indeed Lenin argued that the overthrow of tsarism was not merely desirable for its own sake but was one of the prerequisites for revolution in the rest of Europe. Tsarism, according to Lenin, was ‘1,000 times worse than [German] Kaiserism’.8 The regime in Petrograd was allegedly so powerful and reactionary that its removal was crucial for socialists to be able to make revolutions elsewhere in Europe. Lenin put it as follows: ‘The bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia is now already not merely a prologue but an inalienable, integral part of the socialist revolution in the West.’9
During the wartime years, moreover, Lenin dabbled with strategic ideas to compress the schedule of Revolution. He had last done this in 1905, and now again he pondered whether the Bolsheviks were right to accept the idea that socialism in any country had to be introduced in two stages. Contemporary conventional Marxism held that there would first occur a ‘bourgeois-democratic revolution’ which would consolidate democracy and capitalism and that only subsequently would there take place a socialist revolution putting the working class into power. Lenin came back to this in the Great War and urged left-wing Marxists to abandon ‘the theory of stages’.10 Thus he was showing a willingness to consider the possibility of making a socialist revolution without the need for an intermediate bourgeois-democratic revolution. His own version of the two-stage revolutionary process in any case had always been controversial. In particular, the proposal for a ‘provisional revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ had seemed to most people – apart from fellow Bolsheviks – a scheme for instant socialism. In 1916 his sense of urgency about strategy and schedule returned to him: no chance should be lost by Marxists to seize and keep power in Petrograd.
Lenin’s impatience was sharpened by his perception of the alternative scenarios. On the one hand, he did not think it unfeasible that Russia might defeat Germany; on the other hand, he did not discount the possibility that Nicholas II, if his armies continued to be defeated, would sign a separate peace on the eastern front with Germany and Austria–Hungary. If Nicholas proved too inflexible, furthermore, he might be pushed aside by the anti-socialist parties in the State Duma. According to Lenin, this might happen in several ways. Perhaps the moderate conservative groups led by Alexander Guchkov and the liberals under Pavel Milyukov might form a political coalition and somehow force Nicholas II to give way to them. Another option might be that Milyukov would ally with the right-wing Social-Revolutionary Alexander Kerenski. Lenin urged that all such scenarios could and should be pre-empted by revolutionary action led by Bolsheviks.
But what would his socialist government look like? Lenin addressed this question in notebooks he started to fill in 1916. He did not do this on his own. The small group of leading young Bolsheviks based in Baugy-sur-Clarens in Switzerland had ideas on this and were equally impatient to make a revolution. Nikolai Bukharin, in particular, did not think that the administrative and coercive agencies of advanced capitalist states should simply be taken over and reformed by socialists. Instead he argued that the entire capitalist state ought to be destroyed. In justification, he pointed to the extraordinary growth of state power within the advanced capitalist countries. Such states had developed unprecedentedly efficient and ruthless methods of political, social and economic control. They had even proved capable of suborning their respective socialist parties and using them to maintain the loyalty of the working class. Consequently it would be naive for Marxists to leave intact the existing state institutions – the civil service, the army and the economic regulatory bodies – once they had overturned the ancien régime. Bukharin asserted that this was the fundamental mistake of Karl Kautsky. Socialism had to build a revolutionary state anew.
At first Lenin attacked Bukharin’s thought as anarchistic. The older man resented the intrusion of the bright younger writer into his domain of Marxist theory. But Lenin steadily changed his stance. Bukharin had identified a principal difficulty that would be encountered in the establishment of a socialist administration; he had also very commendably exposed a further weakness in Kautsky’s thought. What Bukharin had failed to do was to explain how a socialist administration might ever be established. Lenin turned this over in his mind and came to the conclusion that the Russian workers’ movement of 1905 provided the solution. In his notebooks he explored the idea that the workers’ soviets could be the instrument for introducing socialism. Helped along by Bukharin, Lenin had arrived at a position that would have a decisive impact on later events. The seeds of strategy for the October Revolution of 1917 were germinating in Switzerland even before the Romanov monarchy’s downfall. As yet Lenin was not quite sure of himself. He needed time to elaborate his notions, but he was committed to them in their outline form.
Neither Lenin nor Bukharin was the first Bolshevik to try to work out in detail how the ‘bourgeois state’ could most effectively be eradicated. Before the Great War his rival Alexander Bogdanov had argued that the prerequisite for the introduction of socialism was the development of a wholly ‘proletarian culture’. ‘Bourgeois culture’ had to be eliminated because of its adherence to concepts of individualism, absoluteness and authoritarianism. Bogdanov felt that no socialist revolution could succeed unless a cultural as well as a political and economic transformation accompanied it.
Even in 1916 Lenin declined to go this far, and the reasons for his reluctance tell us a lot about his kind of socialism. He continued to believe that there was such a thing as an absolute truth and that such truth was discoverable by the individual intellectual acting in adherence to Marx’s doctrines. The contrast with Bogdanov could not have been greater. Bogdanov wanted to encourage the workers to dispense with supervision by middle-class intellectuals and to formulate their own collectivist culture and explore new forms of social experience. Lenin concurred that there was a need for cultural development among the working class. But the need, he argued, was of a restricted nature. Workers needed to be taught to be literate, numerate and punctilious. Lenin thought that Bogdanov was just a dreamer and that the working class, in order to carry through a revolution, needed to have the technical accomplishments which ‘bourgeois culture’ alone could provide. Thus the ‘bourgeois state’ but not ‘bourgeois culture’ had to be extirpated. Consequently no rapprochement was feasible. As always, Lenin had his own agenda. He thought politically. The soviets, he surmised, would offer the means whereby the socialist revolution would be prevented from taking the path of compromise and betrayal already followed by Europe’s greatest Marxist party, the German Social-Democratic Party.
He trusted as strongly as ever in the correctness of Marxism, in the vanguard party, in the predictability of ‘historical development’, in the virtues of urbanism and industrialism, in capitalism’s inevitable collapse, in class struggle, in the imminence of the European socialist revolution. And about the need for dictatorship he also did not waver. He did not mind being the solitary factional fighter: he preferred this to any option that would involve him in compromising deeply felt convictions. He stuck to his polemical style unrepentantly. Again and again he claimed that he was merely defending and elaborating the precepts of Marxist orthodoxy.
Yet he recognised that Kautsky had shared several precepts of this orthodoxy. Kautsky had been among his heroes. There must therefore have been something wrong, thought Lenin, about the way Kautsky had arrived at the precepts. Lenin set himself the task of examining the roots of Kautsky’s Marxism. By digging down in this way, he was inevitably engaged not only in looking at Kautskyanism but also in self-investigation. He did not say this openly. Indeed he did not say this to anyone at all. He confided his researches to his notebooks; and although he tried to produce a philosophical article on the subject, he did not have the time to finish it before events in Russia called him away from Switzerland in 1917. But he read avidly in the Bern Public Library and quickly came to a startling conclusion, which he put as follows in his notebooks:11
Aphorism: It is impossible to obtain a complete understanding of Marx’s Das Kapital and especially its first chapter without first having made a thorough study and acquired an understanding of the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently not one Marxist in the past half-century has completely understood Marx.
Lenin was monumentally pleased with himself. He felt that he had done something that had foiled all other successors of Marx and Engels. Implicitly he set himself up as the only true expounder of the Marxist tradition. From Marx and Engels a straight genealogical line could now be drawn to Lenin.
Lenin belonged to a community of socialist intellectuals in which it was thought very bad form to make personal boasts: he therefore did not use the aphorism in public. But he meant it seriously nonetheless. He had come to his revised understanding of Marxism by means of intensive philosophical study. He picked up particular texts by Marx and Engels, especially Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach. But he also took up an examination of Hegel, who had had an impact upon the formation of the ideology of Marx and Engels. Hegel’s vast History of Philosophy was the object of his detailed attention. Feuerbach, too, attracted his scrutiny.
Nor did he stop at that. He went, too, to the works of Aristotle. For the first time since adolescence he took an opportunity to search out some significance in the Classical heritage he had learned in the Simbirsk gimnazia. Until then he had confined himself to proverbs and phrases he remembered from his youth. In the Great War, Lenin wanted to draw intellectual sustenance of a more substantial kind from ancient Greek philosophy. Marxist scholars had always known in principle of Hegel’s influence on Marx, and Hegel openly alluded to Aristotle as his own precursor in many fundamental aspects of epistemology and ontology. This was enough for Lenin to go back and explore Aristotle’s work. He had to do this from scratch since Aristotle had not been an author on the gimnazia curriculum. Perhaps if Lenin had known more about Marx’s other intellectual influences (which was not possible for anyone in the early years of the century), he would probably have been drawn to the works of the pre-Socratic philosophers. Marx had written a brilliant dissertation on one of them, Heraclitus, when he was a postgraduate. But Lenin anyway found plenty of things of interest in Aristotle.
This was not an endeavour lightly undertaken. The dense German prose of Hegel’s History of Philosophy involved labour enough, but Aristotle’s Metaphysics were even more onerous as Lenin had not kept up his Greek since the gimnazia, and he made use of a parallel-text edition in German and Greek. His school training had given him an ability to understand any text very quickly. Although he could speak German and French (and English rather less satisfactorily), he read things much more fluently. He had few rivals in picking up books and filleting their contents for quick information.
In returning to the Classics, Lenin was looking for justification as a Marxist theorist. More generally – and less consciously – he sought to examine and shore up his own intellectual foundations. He had been brought up not only as a Russian but also as a European. He was the child of parents and teachers who believed in Science, Enlightenment and Progress. Within that cultural milieu it had been customary to trace a line of human achievement back to the great writers of Athens and Rome. The Classics were at the origins of European civilisation and were a resource of invaluable intellectual refreshment. His Marxism discouraged him from using terms such as civilisation positively except in unguarded moments; for Marx had taught that all ‘civilised’ societies in history had been characterised by exploitation and oppression. But under the surface of his ideology Lenin was a typical late-nineteenth-century middle-class European. The good life was a European one. Civilisation was European. The rest of the world, like the USA in the recent past, had to be Europeanised. When he wanted to refer in shorthand to people who had yet to attain a reasonably high level of culture, he referred breezily to ‘Hottentots’. Lenin was not devoid of the prejudices of a privileged, educated member of an imperial nation.
So what did he discover in Aristotle? The unfinished language of Lenin’s notebooks conveys his excitement. Essentially he was dropping large parts of the epistemology of his 1908 book, Materialism and Empiriocriticism. He was not frank about this. When he criticised past Marxist expositions, his targets were Kautsky and other leading Marxists, not himself. In fact his own theory of knowledge had been cruder than any offered by any leading Marxist theorist; Materialism and Empiriocriticism had suggested that the human mind was akin to a camera and that ‘external reality’ was always accurately registered and reproduced by the mind’s camera-like processes. Not so in the notebooks written in the Great War:12
Cognition is nature’s reflection by man. But it’s not a simple and not an unmediated, complete reflection but the process of a series of abstractions, of the formation or construction of concepts, laws, etc.; and these concepts, laws, etc. (thought, science = ‘the logical idea’) also comprehend in a conditional, approximate fashion the universal pattern of an eternally moving and developing nature.
This statement would have been unimaginable in any of Lenin’s writings before 1914.
What had happened was that he had at last found a rationale for the risky, exploratory approach to politics for which he was well known. Earlier he had claimed that his policies were based on predetermined scientific principles. Now he asserted that ‘practice’ was the only true test of whether any policy was the right one. Flexibility was essential. Ideas had to be ‘hewn, chopped, supple, mobile, relative, reciprocally linked, united in opposites in order to embrace the world’. This, he held, was the truth available from the philosophy of Aristotle, Hegel and Marx. Nothing was permanent or absolutely definite; everything was interactive: it was in the nature of material and social relationships that factors clashed with each other and – by virtue of this ‘dialectical’ process – produced complex, changeable results. Politics required experimentation and Marxists should accept that they would involve ‘leaps’, ‘breaks’ and ‘interruptions of gradualness’. All this, for Lenin, was a philosophical antidote to Kautsky.
The pleasure he took in this particular result gives a hint that Lenin had not been studying epistemology and ontology with anything like an open mind. His research in the Bern Public Library had not been undertaken out of simple intellectual inquisitiveness; he was devouring Hegel, Feuerbach and Aristotle with a specific end in view. If his research had corroborated Kautsky’s position, he would simply have looked to other authors for support. Lenin, as had been obvious since his economic works of the 1890s, was a reader with a political mission. Another point deserves emphasis. This is that Lenin did not manage to arrive remotely near to a coherent philosophical standpoint. His notebooks were full of contradictions. While asserting the ‘conditional, approximate’ nature of cognition, he still believed in the attainability of absolute truth and in the independent existence of the external world. The notebooks were the part-time jottings of a man who would not have passed a first-year philosophy examination. They were muddled. They were also ungenerous: Lenin did not have it within him to acknowledge that essentially he had reversed his position in regard to several basic criticisms he had made of Bogdanov in 1908. Admission of error was something he did only very rarely.
Yet he had readied himself intellectually for the kind of revolutionary process that occurred in 1917. Even in 1905 he had altered policy at his whim. But now he had a rationale. He had justification, as he saw it, for splitting with any Marxist in Europe who irked him. This became evident when far-left socialists opposing their respective governments in the war began to co-ordinate their activity. Lenin wanted such co-ordination. But he was not the leading light of such efforts. This indeed was part of the problem: the Swiss socialist Robert Grimm and the Italian Odino Morgari had campaigned for some time to organise an international meeting of socialists who wished to end the war. Yuli Martov, too, had played a prominent role. All were appalled at the way their fellow socialists had given up campaigning against governments for the duration of the war. The point, they argued, was to stop the fighting. They attributed the war’s outbreak to a variety of causes. Personal, dynastic, diplomatic, economic and imperial factors were adduced in their many pamphlets on the subject; and not a few of the pamphleteers were simply pacifists. Lenin, advocate of ‘European Civil War’, stuck out like a sore thumb.
But at least they agreed that neither military coalition was blameless. Everyone contacted by Grimm believed that the Allies and the Central Powers were as bad as each other. The solution, they argued, had to be based on internationalist principles. Military victory for either the Allies or the Central Powers would involve annexations and indemnities. It would be the triumph of one imperialism over another. It would be no peace worthy of the word. Lenin could therefore accept Grimm’s invitation to join him in the Swiss village of Zimmerwald for a conference of anti-war left-wing socialists from the combatant countries in Europe.
He worked hard to develop the arguments to strengthen his political case. This led him to conduct research on the global capitalist economy; his notebooks contained references to 148 books and 232 articles. Already Lenin had endorsed a book by Bukharin on the same topic, but he wanted to put things his own way. Privately he thought Bukharin to have exaggerated the smoothness of present economic developments. Lenin considered it wholly wrong to predict that capitalism would eventually form a ‘world economic trust’. Bukharin, he thought, had forgotten the Marxist axiom that capitalist economies were inherently unstable and incapable of harmonious co-operation with each other. The result was a book, Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which he asked his sister Anna to get published legally in Petrograd. Anna duly complied, and secured a contract for him. But she sensibly noted that Lenin had filled his draft with bilious remarks about Kautsky. On her own initiative she excised them in order to render the book more appealing to the publishers. Lenin had either to accept her action or forgo the contract. For once, albeit with bad grace, he backed down – and publication was scheduled for 1917: only the outbreak of the February Revolution meant that it failed to appear under tsarism.
There was already a large Marxist literature on imperialism. Karl Radek, Rosa Luxemburg, I. I. Skvortsov-Stepanov, Nikolai Bukharin and Karl Kautsky himself had worked upon the ideas of Rudolph Hilferding. All agreed that capitalism had entered a mature period of dominance by ‘finance capital’ and that national economies were being thrust by the very nature of capitalism into economic rivalries that made them seek external markets, grab colonies and fight other imperial powers for theirs. Lenin, too, was influenced by this literature. He was also impressed, like Hilferding, by the efficiency of the German war economy. The wartime regulatory framework for production and consumption was ironically known as Kriegsozialismus (‘War Socialism’), which Hilferding thought could be turned to good account by the socialists. The high level of co-ordination within the capitalist economy, he argued, provided one of the preconditions for a total social revolution. But Lenin disagreed utterly with Hilferding beyond this point. Whereas Hilferding felt that violent revolution could and should be avoided, Lenin was unable to see any other way of making a revolution. ‘It is necessary for us ourselves’, he wrote, ‘to seize power in the first instance, and not chatter in vain about “power”.’13
Hilferding and Kautsky had put forward the possibility that capitalist countries might eventually resolve their political disputes in such a fashion as to be able to exploit their colonies in common. Lenin was aghast. To advocate such a plan was to accept that capitalism could endlessly survive. Lenin by contrast urged that the various empires could not help but clash with each other. He described a hierarchy of imperialisms in order of economic progressiveness. The USA was at the top. Germany and Japan came next, followed by Britain and France. Portugal was last of the imperial powers, being only marginally ahead of Russia. This world of imperialisms would not settle down at the end of the Great War. According to Lenin, either there would be socialist Revolution or else there would be recurrent wars until such time as Revolution took place. Lenin was out to show that any dreams of softening the conflict of world capitalism were illusory. Only Revolution would do.
And so to the international socialist movement organised by Morgari and Grimm and attended by Lenin. Two little Alpine conferences were held. The first took place in the holiday village of Zimmerwald, up the mountains behind Bern, in September 1915; the second occurred in Kiental in the same vicinity in April 1916. Both conferences were sparsely attended. Trotski remarked that half a century after the foundation of Marx’s First Socialist International it was still possible for all of Europe’s internationalists to be accommodated in four charabancs.14
Whereas everyone else regretted the paucity of delegates, Lenin was delighted. He knew that the smaller the number was, the greater would be the proportion of those who advocated policies near to his own. Still, however, he was angry. He raged at the invitations sent to Karl Kautsky and Hugo Haase, who refused to break openly with the German Social-Democratic Party, and was even more annoyed when Haase promised to come. At first Lenin let Zinoviev conduct negotiations with like-minded delegates from other countries. But he did not fully trust even Zinoviev and took to discussing matters directly with Karl Radek, the Polish Jew who had once held membership of the German Social-Democratic Party. Radek was not easy to cajole. Lenin had to drop his formula that socialists should campaign for the military defeat of their national governments. He was also compelled to stop demanding a complete break with the official socialist parties that had voted war credits for their governments. Radek’s more judicious line prevailed. He knew Lenin’s history, and resolved that the Zimmerwald Conference would not be turned into an assembly of polemical doctrinairism. Nevertheless the group of delegates put together by Radek and Lenin never amounted to more than eight, including both Radek and Lenin.
Having made his compromise with Radek, Lenin decided to be a good fellow and not rock the boat (or rather the charabanc). Only once did he cause trouble. This was when Georg Lebedour objected to Radek’s call for street demonstrations. Lenin exclaimed: ‘The German movement is faced with a decision. If we are indeed on the threshold of a revolutionary epoch in which the masses will go over to revolutionary struggle, we must also make mention of the means necessary for this struggle.’15 These were words of a believer and a logician. The Zimmerwald Conference was being asked to spell out the things that many delegates who were anxious about the reception that might await them back home aimed to obfuscate. Yet the leftist speakers got some of what they wanted. The Conference declared the Great War to have been caused and prolonged by ‘imperialist’ rivalries. It castigated the socialist parties that had voted war credits (without naming them directly). The Conference agreed that military hostilities could be ended only by engagement in ‘irreconcilable proletarian class struggle’.16
But it was the convenors of the Conference, especially Robert Grimm, who gained most satisfaction from Zimmerwald. They had good reason. In December 1915 Hugo Haase, having returned from Switzerland, led a faction of German social-democratic deputies in the Reichstag in open criticism of war credits. Haase and Kautsky called for socialists everywhere to put all pressure on their government to compose a ‘peace without annexations’. Here was proof, argued Grimm against Lenin, that persuasion could have a positive effect. He looked forward to enhancing this atmosphere at the next Conference, to be held in Kiental from 26 April 1916.
Grimm, however, was disappointed. The Kiental Conference, attended by forty delegates, was noisy and bad-tempered from the start. The mandates of some delegates were challenged. Delegations fell into internal altercations. Several invited delegates found reason not to come; in particular, Haase and Kautsky took exception to the fact that the Zimmerwald Conference had set up an International Socialist Commission. For them, this was an infringement of the rights of the International Socialist Bureau; and they held to this opinion even though the International Socialist Bureau had barely operated in wartime. Of course, Lenin was delighted by their absence, having convinced himself that Kautsky was the incarnation of political betrayal. Kautsky, he asserted, was a Mädchen für Alle – a political prostitute who would go to bed with virtually anyone in public life if he could avoid a clash with the German government. Having come to this conclusion in August 1914, Lenin would not budge. It had become an indissoluble ingredient not only in his politics but also in his emotional life that Kautsky was a renegade. The last thing Lenin wanted was for Kautsky to have a chance to resume his doctrinal sway over European Marxism.
At Kiental, Lenin shone no more brightly than at Zimmerwald. The difficulty was that the far-left delegates (who now called themselves the Zimmerwald Left) were few and all of them suspicious of Lenin. Nonetheless he had some grounds for cheer. The Kiental Conference condemned pacifism even though many delegates wanted an end to the war at any price; it also called for ‘vigorous action directed at the capitalist class’s overthrow’. This was close to Lenin’s idea that revolution was the way to end the war, and at the end of the proceedings he was happier than he had thought he would be.
He was lucky that the German Marxists whom he criticised for indulging their government did not know that he had some unusual contacts of his own with the same government. At first this had taken the form of sending political literature to Bolsheviks in German POW camps. Chief among these was none other than Roman Malinovski, who had enlisted in the Russian Imperial forces and had been taken captive. Lenin, who still refused to believe that Malinovski had worked for the Okhrana, spread Bolshevik propaganda among Russian POWs through lectures given by Malinovski.17 The German high command facilitated this since Lenin advocated Russia’s defeat. Baron Gisbert von Romberg, the German minister in Bern, had been made aware of Lenin’s activities through an Estonian nationalist, Alexander Keskuela, who also sought the overthrow of the Romanovs. Another adviser to the Germans was Alexander Helphand-Parvus, who had influenced the thinking of Lev Trotski in 1905. Parvus was a harsh left-wing critic of the German Social-Democratic Party; he was also a wealthy businessman whose murky deals in Scandinavia, the Balkans and Turkey had involved errands on behalf of the German government. One of Lenin’s associates, Jakub Hanecki, was an employee of Parvus in Stockholm. Although Lenin’s direct meetings with Keskuela and Parvus were rare, there is strong circumstantial evidence that the Germans made finance available to the Bolsheviks as a result.
Thus Lenin was trying to foment the ‘European socialist revolution’ with a secret financial allowance from people he publicly denounced as German imperialists. The relationship was perfectly logical for him. His aim was to bring about capitalism’s overthrow and the sole criterion for any action was whether it would strengthen the cause of Revolution. The spreading of Bolshevik ideas in Russia and in German POW camps fell into this category. The only snag was that his machinations had to be kept strictly confidential. Indeed any breach of secrecy would have finished him off politically just months before the February 1917 Revolution – and twentieth-century history would have been very different.
Through the rest of 1916 and the beginning of the following year he repeated his song that Revolution was ‘ripe’. It was ‘imminent’; it was ‘growing’. Time was on the side of those who held to ‘orthodox’ Marxist precepts and put them into practice by subverting capitalist governments. Lenin did not think that ‘European socialist revolution’, whenever it occurred, would happen overnight. He stressed that there might be countries whose capitalists would fend off the revolutionary assault. There might be a Second World War and even a Third. This was an unusual idea among his far-left socialists; indeed there was no one else in European politics who expressed it. But Lenin, despite being a firebrand, took Revolution very seriously. He felt in his bones that he lived in a revolutionary epoch. Epochs could be very lengthy. Epochs could involve a tangled sequence of events. Epochs could include setbacks as well as advances. Lenin was preparing himself for the long struggle. He knew that the future, both for him and for his party, would require adaptability, perceptiveness and endurance. Above all, endurance. But about the correctness of his fundamental strategy Lenin had not the slightest doubt.
His firmness of purpose was surprising to acquaintances who did not know his granite-like character. As the year 1916 drew to a close, Lenin was forty-six. He was a man of intellectual and practical talent, and yet he had never had the impact on his country’s affairs that his talent could have facilitated. He was a leading Russian Marxist and was known in the Second Socialist International in Europe as well as in the Okhrana offices in Petrograd. He had written books and pamphlets and was a prolific journalist; Russian encyclopaedias contained brief entries on him. But his followers in the Russian Empire were a dwindling group in the Great War. Even his sister Anna questioned his political judgement. His contact with Bolsheviks in the Russian local committees was getting ever more slender; and the man who had preached Revolution to Marxists at home and abroad was reduced to seeking consolation in Hegel and Aristotle. There was hardly a Russian worker outside the narrow confines of the party who even knew his name. For such a man to emerge as the ruler of Russia the situation had to undergo fundamental change. He needed not only his firmness of purpose and his talent but also an access of good fortune. And this is precisely what occurred in the following year.