Sex Lives of the Great Dictators

2. TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE BED

Vladimir Ilyich Ulynov — better known as Lenin — was a bit of a ladies” man, but he was only attracted to women who were involved in the revolutionary struggle. His first lover was Nadezhda Konstantina Krupskaya. She was a year older than him and already a committed Marxist. When as a young girl she read the first volume of Das Kapital, she said she heard “the knell of capital sound — the expropriators are expropriated” and her “heart beat so that it could be heard”. Obviously, she was a romantic.

Nadya was dark-haired and attractive, and she was impressed by the ardour of the young Lenin’s revolutionary zeal. They would walk along the banks of the Neva and he would talk about the overthrow of capitalism and avenging his brother who had been hanged for attempting to assassinate the Tsar.

Lenin, however, also had eyes for one of Nadya’s friends, the quick-witted and adventurous Apollinaria Yakubova. Lenin proposed to Apollinaria just before he was arrested for subversion. From his prison cell, he wrote to Apollinaria and Nadya, asking them to stand on Shpalernaya Street outside the prison, where he might be able to catch a glimpse of them from a window. Apollinaria did not come and Nadya took up the vigil alone. Lenin took this to mean that his proposal had been rejected.

Apollinaria and Nadya were arrested too. They were exiled to Siberia but, just a few months into her sentence, Apollinaria was rescued by a young law professor named Takhterev. They fled to London where Lenin met them during his stay there in 1902. Apollinaria helped Lenin and Nadya find rooms at 30 Holford Square, off Grays Inn Road.

After a short jail sentence, Lenin was also exiled to Siberia. By that time, he was engaged to Nadya and asked the authorities if they could be together during their exile. The authorities agreed on condition they got married. Lenin’s sister Anna was less than thrilled. “Nadya,” she wrote, “looks like a herring.”

Although Nadya had been pretty when she was younger, by the time she married Lenin, she was plain and looked older than her years. The writer Ilya Ehrenburg said unkindly: “One look at Krupskaya, and you can see that Lenin wasn’t interested in women.” She suffered from Graves disease, which meant they could not have children. He was no picture either. Nadya’s first words to her fiance, when she eventually arrived in his Siberian village, were: “My, you’ve grown awfully fat.” That night they stayed up drinking with the locals and it was nearly dawn before they went to bed.

Whatever chance they had of wedded bliss was shattered when Nadya’s mother turned up. A deeply religious woman with a tart tongue, she and Lenin constantly quarrelled.

Lenin developed a taste for upper-class women. In 1905, when he was living in St Petersburg under an assumed name to protect himself from arrest, he met a divorcee known simply as Elizabeth de K. She was aristocratic and independently wealthy, with a refined taste for the arts, literature and gracious living.

They met in the Restaurant Tartar, where Lenin was dining with his friend Mikhail Rumyantsev. She was dining alone and Lenin could not keep his eyes off her. Rumyantsev, knowing her slightly, went over and invited her to join them.

“You will meet a very interesting man,” Rumyantsev told her. “He is very famous, but you musn’t ask too many details.”

Amused and interested, she came to their table where Mikhail introduced one “William Frey”. She asked if he was English.

“No, I’m not exactly English,” he said.

They had a pleasant conversation for about an hour. She was conscious that there was an air of danger about him, but she had no idea that he was the N. Lenin who wrote the inflammatory articles in Novaya Zhizn that everybody was talking about.

A week later she was visiting the offices of Novaya Zhizn when she bumped into the mysterious “Englishman” again.

“I’m glad to see you,” he said. “I was worried about you. You don’t come to the Restaurant Tartar any more.”

She realized that, in a subtle way, he was inviting her to dinner there again, but she did not know him well enough to accept. She had to find out more. She sought out Rumyantsev and asked him about “William Frey”.

“You don’t understand,” said Rumyantsev. “My friend Frey is certainly interested in women — but chiefly from a collective, social and political point of view. I doubt very much whether he has any interest in women as individuals. Allow me to add that, after our dinner the other evening, he asked me to vouch for you. He is suspicious of new acquaintances. He is afraid of informers. I had to tell him who you are.”

Elizabeth realized that the mysterious Mr Frey was a dangerous revolutionary. But she had to see him again. Rumyantsev arranged a small dinner party. In the course of the conversation, the question of holding secret meetings in her apartment was raised. Her flat was in a fashionable district and visitors could slip in and out without being seen. The police were unlikely to suspect that revolutionaries were gathering there.

Elizabeth agreed to let them use her flat twice a week. She would send the maid away and prepare a samovar. Lenin would arrive first and give her the password of the day. She would let the other visitors in, once they had given the password. While the discussion was under way, she would retire to her bedroom. Some nights though, Lenin was the only one who turned up.

Their affair was passionate, but they clashed from the beginning. Elizabeth was a woman of broad cultural interests. Lenin cared for nothing except politics. However, she did try to move some way towards him. In June 1906, she attended a secret meeting in a field outside St Petersburg. When Lenin appeared, the crowd went wild. He exalted them to rebel immediately and they set off marching into the city with Vladimir Ilyich at their head.

On their way down Pulostrovsky Prospect, the Cossacks rode the march down, slashing at the crowd with whips. Lenin threw himself in a ditch. He seemed pleased with the outcome, but Elizabeth realized that he was in imminent danger of arrest for inciting a rebellion. She asked him whether he was prepared to put himself totally in her hands and obey her implicitly. He said he was. She led him across the fields and down a series of overgrown pathways to an outlying village, then took him back to the centre of St Petersburg by streetcar.

He was equally protective towards her. Once, when they were alone together in her apartment, a blazing cinder from the samovar fell on her dress, setting it on fire. Lenin hurled himself on her, smothering the flame. When he got up, she noticed he was trembling and as cold as ice. He turned and ran from the house. It was then that she knew he was in love with her.

She followed him when he went to live in Stockholm. Even in Sweden, he was afraid of the secret police. He lived the life of a conspirator — there were secret signs, passwords, meetings in out-of-the-way places.

One day, he phoned and told her to meet him at a certain arcade, but if other Russians were there, she was to pretend not to recognize him. When she arrived, she saw two Georgians hammering away at one of the vending machines. When Lenin turned up, the Georgians shouted, “Comrade Ilyich, help us with this damn bourgeois machine. We wanted ham sandwiches and all it gives us is pastry.”

The Father of the Revolution then proceeded to use all his dialectical skills to get them their sandwiches, while Elizabeth pointedly looked the other way. Lenin was delighted with her, even though there was no real danger.

“Do you know who those two Georgians were?” he said later. “They are our delegates from the Caucasus. Splendid boys, but absolute savages.”

Between his wife and party congresses, Lenin had little time to spare for Elizabeth. Sometimes, on Sundays, he would hire a little rowing boat and take her out on the lake. The passion continued though. When she returned to St Petersburg, she got a wild and urgent letter from him.

“Write to me at once,” he wrote, “and tell me precisely where and how we can meet, otherwise there will be delays and misunderstandings.”

Elizabeth did not like the tone of this letter and decided to break off the affair. But two years later, she was in Geneva when she read in the newspaper that he was giving a speech in Paris. On an impulse, she took a train there. During the intermission, she went to see him in a small room behind the platform. He was surrounded by admirers and she could not get near him. Eventually he spotted her. He looked startled, then his eyes widened.

“What on earth are you doing here?” he asked.

“I came to hear you,” she said, “and I have a commission to give to you from a certain person.”

She handed him an envelope. In it were the address and phone number of the place where she was staying.

The next morning, she waited by the phone. It never rang. Instead, Lenin came round in person and they threw themselves into each other’s arms.

The affair resumed, but without the intensity they had known before. Altogether they met and wrote, on and off, for nine years. Some of his early letters were passionate. The later ones read like a lecture on Marxist dialectics. In the end, they found that they simply lived in different worlds. Though a champion of women’s rights, Lenin said that he had never met a woman who had read Das Kapital right the way through, could understand a railway timetable or play chess. He gave her a chess set and asked her to prove him wrong.

In response, she sent him a postcard of the Mona Lisa to study it and tell her his reactions. He wrote back: “I can make nothing of your Mona Lisa. Neither the face nor the dress tell me anything at all. I believe there is an opera of the same name, and a book by d’Annunzio. I simply don’t understand anything about this thing you have sent me.”

The final falling out was over the question of liberty. Elizabeth questioned his belief in rock-solid Marxist dialectics. Surely, she said, there must be a place for personal liberty.

“The people have no need for liberty,” he said. “Liberty is one of the forms of the bourgeois dictatorship. In a state worthy of the name there is no liberty. The people want to exercise power, but what on earth would they do if it were given to them?”

This was 1914 and Lenin was already a dictator in the making.

During the time he was still seeing Elizabeth de K, Lenin met the great love of his life, another wealthy divorcee named Elisabeth d’Herbenville Armand. A French woman by birth, she was the daughter of a music hall comedian. When her father died, she went to stay with her grandmother and aunt who were teachers in Moscow. Elisabeth was eighteen and she soon attracted the attention of twenty-year-old Alexander Armand, the second son of a wealthy textile manufacturer. They married, settled down on a nearby estate and had five children. She was happy and life gave her everything she wanted — except for danger and excitement.

Suddenly, she left her husband and moved in with his younger brother, Vladimir. In the name of free love, they had a passionate affair but this did not really satisfy her either, so she went to live with feminist Ellen Key in Stockholm. Soon she was bored with feminism, but at Ellen Key’s she read Lenin’s essays which promised the challenge and excitement of direct action and she became a Bolshevik.

Returning to Russia to take part in the 1905 revolution, she took the nom de revolution Inessa and was arrested within a couple of days. After nine months in prison, she was released, but continued to work as a courier for the Bolsheviks. She was arrested again, this time for the serious charge of suborning the armed forces. Her husband put up the bail, but she continued her subversive work and was arrested a third time. This time she was exiled to Archangel, where the harsh northern winter finished off all but the strongest of political prisoners.

Her brother-in-law Vladimir Armand was still besotted with her and followed her there. He developed tuberculosis and died. She escaped and, with two of her children, fled to France, where she was already something of a legend.

In Paris, Lenin welcomed her with open arms. She was a revolutionary heroine. He had been following her exploits and he arranged for her to live in an apartment next door to the one he lived in with Nadya.

Inessa was thirty. She had enormous eyes, a wide sensitive mouth, finely modelled features and an unruly mass of chestnut hair. She was quick and intelligent. Just having her around inspired the other exiles and she was often seen with Lenin in the cafes on the Avenue d’Orleans.

She was popular, though Angelica Balabanoff -the Bolshevik agitator who went on to become Mussolini’s lover — did not like her. Perhaps she was jealous.

“I did not warm to her,” Balabanoff said. “She was pedantic, a one hundred per cent Bolshevik in the way she dressed, always in the same severe style, in the way she thought and spoke. She spoke a number of languages fluently, and in all of them repeated Lenin verbatim.”

Up until this time, Lenin had been seen as a puritan. Now his fellow revolutionaries saw him addressing an attractive young woman with the familiarity used by educated Russians among intimates. Normally, Lenin only used by with his mother, his two sisters and his wife.

Lenin and Inessa shared a love of Beethoven and a similar interpretation of Marx; and they had both modelled themselves on characters from a novel by Chernyshevsky called What is to be Done — the hero and the heroine, naturally. Soon they began acting out the parts Chernyshevsky had written for them.

Nadya had no objection to Lenin’s relationship with Inessa. Indeed, she oiled the wheels. That summer, Nadya went on holiday with her mother to Pornic, a village near St Nazaire, leaving the two lovers together in Paris.

There is evidence that Lenin had an affair with a French woman before Inessa turned up in Paris. He wrote a series of letters of an extremely intimate nature to a woman writer. When they surfaced after Lenin’s death, she agreed not to have them published while Nadya was still alive and received a handsome pension from the Soviet government in return.

Perhaps Nadya tolerated his affair with Inessa because she preferred him to see someone who could at least speak Russian and was devoted to the cause. Nadya certainly liked Inessa. She enjoyed being with her and loved the two children she had brought to Paris with her. Nadya wrote openly that “the house grew brighter when Inessa entered it”. Lenin certainly did nothing to hide the direction in which his passion lay. However, the Revolution had to come first.

Lenin and Inessa were separated in 1914, when he went with Nadya to Cracow on revolutionary business. Inessa missed him terribly.

“We have parted, you and I, my dear! And it is so painful,” she wrote from Paris. “As I gaze at the familiar places, I realize all too clearly, as never before, what a large place you occupied in my life, here in Paris. All our activity here is tied by a thousand threads to the thought of you. I wasn’t at all in love with you then, even though I did love you. Even now I would manage without the kisses, if only I could see you. To talk with you occasionally would be such a joy — and couldn’t cause pain to anyone. Why did I have to give that up?”

Her letters also speak eloquently of the stresses and strains between the three of them.

“You ask me if I’m angry that it was you who “carried out” the separation. No, I don’t think you did it for yourself. There was much that was good in Paris in my relations with N.K. [Nadya]. In one of our last chats she told me I had become dear and close to her only recently …only at Longjumeau [their revolutionary summer school] and then last autumn over the translations and so on. I have become rather accustomed to you. I so loved not just listening to you, but looking at you as you spoke. First of all, your face is so animated, and secondly it was easy for me to look at you because you didn’t notice.”

The separation did not last long though and, after eight months apart, they settled together in Galicia. Initially, it did not work out and Nadya decided to leave, so that he could marry Inessa. But Lenin would have none of it. He depended on Nadya too much for his revolutionary work. On the other hand, he needed Inessa too, for other reasons. So the menage a trois continued; and there were happy times.

“For hours we would walk along the leaf-strewn forest lanes,” Nadya recalled. “Usually we were in a threesome, Vladimir Ilyich and Inessa and I… Sometimes we would sit on a sunny slope, covered with shrubs. Ilyich would sketch outlines of his speeches, getting the text right, while I learned Italian… Inessa would be sewing a skirt and enjoying the warmth of the sunshine.”

For years, the three of them travelled and plotted and politicked together. They travelled back to Russia in March 1917 in the famous sealed train. Also on board was Angelica Balabanoff.

It was Lenin, Nadya and Inessa that planned the October Revolution. They formed the inner circle which took over the government, created the Soviet Union, ran the world’s first Communist state and lived together in the Kremlin until Inessa’s death from typhus in October 1920.

Two weeks before she died, Inessa wrote in her diary: “For romantics, love occupies the first place in their lives, it comes before everything else.” She was a romantic.

Even as the illness took its toll, she remained devoted to Lenin. In a last scribbled note, she wrote: “Now I’m indifferent to everyone. The main thing is I’m bored with almost everyone. I only have warm feelings left for the children and V.I. In all other respects, it’s as if my heart has died. As if, having given up all my strength, all my passion to V.I. and work, all the springs of love have dried up in me.”

Inessa was laid in state in the House of the Soviets and buried in the Kremlin wall. The message on one wreath read simply: “To Comrade Inessa from V.I. Lenin.”

Lenin himself was shattered. Angelica Balabanoff, now a Comintern official, wrote: “Not only his face but his whole body expressed so much sorrow that I dared not greet him, not even with the slightest gesture. It was clear that he wanted to be alone with his grief. He seemed to have shrunk: his cap almost covered his face, his eyes seemed drowned in tears held back with effort. As our circle moved, following the movement of the people, he too moved, without offering resistance, as if he were grateful for being brought nearer to his dead comrade.”

After her death, Lenin and Nadya looked after Inessa’s five children. But Lenin never really got over his grief. Without his great love, his health and his political star went into decline. He died of a stroke in January 1924. Nadya survived for another fifteen years, living in their apartment in the Kremlin until her death at the age of seventy in 1939.