LENIN
Life and Legacy

DMITRI VOLKOGONOV

Translated and edited by Harold Shukman

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollinsPublishers 1994

Copyright © Dmitri Volkogonov 1994

Translation copyright © Harold Shukman 1994

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Source ISBN: 9780007291649

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2012 ISBN 9780007392674

Version: 2016-03-21

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Map

List of Abbreviations

Chronological Table

Editor’s Preface

Introduction

1 Distant Sources

Genealogy

Vladimir and Alexander

The Forerunners

The Discovery of Marxism

Nadezhda Krupskaya

Inessa Armand

Financial Secrets

2 Master of the Order

Theorist of Revolution

The Phenomenon of Bolshevism

Lenin and the Mensheviks

The Paradox of Plekhanov

The Tragedy of Martov

3 The Scar of October

Democratic February

Parvus, Ganetsky and the ‘German Key’

Lenin and Kerensky

The July Rehearsal

October and the ‘Conspiracy of Equals’

Commissars and the Constituent Assembly

4 Priests of Terror

The Anatomy of Brest-Litovsk

White Raiments

Regicide

Fanya Kaplan’s Shot

The Guillotine of Terror

5 Lenin’s Entourage

The Most Capable Man in the Central Committee

The Man with Unlimited Power

The Bolshevik Tandem

The Party’s Favourite

The Leninist Politburo

6 The One-Dimensional Society

The Deceived Vanguard

Peasant Predators

The Tragedy of the Intelligentsia

Lenin and the Church

The Prophet of Comintern

7 The Mausoleum of Leninism

The Regime and the Illness

The Long Agony

The Mummy and the Embalming of Ideas

The Inheritance and the Heirs

Lenin as History

Postscript: Defeat in Victory

Keep Reading

Index

About the Author

Notes

About the Publisher

Map

Abbreviations

AMB | Archives of the Ministry of Security
AMBRF | Archives of the Ministry of Security of the Russian Federation
APRF | Archives of the President of the Russian Federation
ECCI | Executive Committee of the Communist International
GARF | State Archives of the Russian Federation
GPU | State Political Administration
KGB | Committee of State Security
NKGB | People’s Commissariat of State Security
NKVD | People’s Commissariat of the Interior
OGPU | Combined State Political Administration
PSS | V.I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Complete Works), 5th edition, 55 vols., Moscow, 1970–85
RTsKhIDNI | Russian Centre for the Preservation and Study of Recent Historical Documentation
TsAKGB | Central KGB Archives
TsAMBRF | Central Interior Ministry Archives of the Russian Federation
TsAMO | Central Archives of the Ministry of Defence
TsGALI | Central State Archives of Literature and Art
TsGASA | Central State Archives of the Soviet Army
TsGoA | Central State Special Archive
TsGVIA | Central State Military History Archives
TsIK | Central Executive Committee
TsKhSD | Centre for the Preservation of Contemporary Documentation
VTsIK | All-Russian Central Executive Committee

Chronological Table

Until February 1918 dates in Russia conformed to the Julian or Old Style Calendar, which by the twentieth century was lagging thirteen days behind the Gregorian Western Calendar, or New Style. Thus, the February Revolution of 1917 took place in March according to the Western calendar and the Bolsheviks seized power on 25 October 1917, when in the West the date was 7 November. In the text we have used New Style dates, adding Old Style where any ambiguity might arise. In the following table, all dates are according to New Style.

Editor’s Preface

With the demise of the Soviet Union an era of Russian history was closed. It was an era that began in 1917 with the seizure of power by the Bolshevik Communist Party and ended with the disgrace and eviction of the same Party in August 1991, followed by the formal termination of the Soviet state itself at the end of the same year. From its inception to its end the Soviet state was identified with Lenin, whether alive or dead. Without him, it is generally accepted, there would have been no October revolution. Following the revolution, his name, his image, his words and his philosophy embellished, informed, exhorted and inspired generations of ordinary Soviet citizens, and especially those raised to positions of authority. He was made into an icon, a totem of ideological purity and guidance beyond questioning. All other Party leaders were found to be fallible in due course, many of the 1917 cohort in the great purge of 1936–38, and most famously Stalin in 1956 when Khrushchev debunked his ‘cult of personality’ at the Twentieth Party Congress. But Lenin remained untouched. As more and more topics of Soviet history were re-examined during Gorbachev’s enlightened leadership, and the Bolshevik old guard, exterminated in the 1930s, were rehabilitated, it became obvious that the spotlight must sooner or later fall on the last dark place on the stage – that occupied by Lenin.

A new reading of Lenin was made possible not only because Dmitri Volkogonov was granted access to the archives in the 1980s, but also, indeed chiefly, because Leninism itself had totally collapsed in the former Soviet Union. As the author of this book himself confesses, even after he had spent years collecting the incriminating evidence for his major study of Stalin, mostly written before 1985 and published in 1988, Lenin was the ‘last bastion’ in his mind to fall. Lenin has at last passed into history. No longer is he the prop of a powerful regime, the object of an ideology, or the central myth of a political culture. To engage in debate about Lenin and to assess his actions is no longer to challenge the legitimacy of an existing political system. Like him, it too has become history.

Books about Lenin have been coming out in the West almost from the moment the world first became aware of him in 1917. Even more abundantly, Soviet historians pumped out publications on allegedly every aspect of his life, and eye-witnesses of every degree added their own testimony in books with such titles as ‘They Knew Lenin’, ‘Lenin Knew Them’, ‘They Saw Lenin’, ‘Lenin Saw Them’, and so on, with variations on the theme effected by altering Lenin’s name: ‘They Knew Ilyich’, ‘Ilyich Knew Them’, etc., etc. Yet another book on Vladimir Ilyich Lenin therefore requires a word of justification.

Western books (including two by the undersigned) have largely been based on the published sources, many of them of Soviet origin. On the other hand, Soviet books from the outset have been apologist and ideological in content and purpose. From the end of the 1920s, when Stalin’s authority was complete, Soviet historians (like authors of creative literature, playwrights and film-makers) were strictly forbidden to write ‘objectively’, that is, from any other point of view than that laid down by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Now that the Central Committee has evaporated together with the Party, there are virtually no taboos on historical research left; Russian historians may if they wish differ in their assessment of any events they choose to analyse, but access to a widening pool of hitherto concealed data will at least ensure that their interpretations are based on the full facts. Areas which have been closed to them, and only partially known to Western scholars, and which have now been opened up in this book, include the complete documentation of Lenin’s genealogy, his financial operations – German involvement in the funding of Bolshevik activity during the First World War and Soviet funding of foreign Communist Parties after it – the nature of his friendship with Inessa Armand, and the effects of his illness on his political judgment, to mention a few.

The opening of the Party and other archives of Soviet history has been a gradual and intermittent process. Numerous efforts made to publish inventories and collections of documents have met with varied success, and so far it is fair to say the process is still at an early stage. Although with the failure of the attempted coup in August 1991 the Russian state took over from the Communist Party control of all the archival collections within its boundaries, the new state has barely formulated rules on the release of documents for publication, and the picture remains unclear. Nevertheless, even the minutes of the Politburo for the 1930s have been seen by Western and Russian scholars alike, and much valuable material is now appearing in two new journals devoted to the publication of extracts from the archives, Istoricheskii arkhiv and Istochnik, and a new series of miscellanies called ‘Unknown Russia’ (Neizvestnaya Rossiya), as well as an increasing amount of similar material in journals which have survived from the Soviet era. Subject to the rules and regulations of the Russian Archive Commission (Rosarkhiv), all the documents cited in this book can be seen at the various locations indicated. Documents from the Archives of the President of the Russian Federation (APRF) have been transferred from the Kremlin to the archives of the former Central Committee (RTsKhIDNI) and TsKhSD).

The first researcher to gain access to the most secret archives was Dmitri Volkogonov. As the Director of the Institute of Military History and a serving Colonel-General, he had for years collected material for his biography of Stalin. Its publication in 1988 made him a pariah among his fellow senior officers, whose patience with him finally ran out in June 1991, when the draft of a new history of the Second World War, edited under his aegis, was discussed at his Institute and condemned. Accused of blackening the name of the army, as well as that of the Communist Party and the Soviet state, and personally attacked by Minister of Defence Yazov, Volkogonov resigned. When the attempted coup followed two months later, Volkogonov was the government’s natural choice to supervise the control and declassification of the Party and State archives.

The author’s original Russian version of this book is considerably longer than this English rendition, and the two main principles that I applied in editing it deserve a mention. As a Russian historian suddenly able to write freely about this subject, Volkogonov ranged far beyond the history of his subject, particularly into philosophical reflection and into the backgrounds of topics which, while of special interest to his Russian readers, tended either to be excessively familiar to a Western reader, or to slow down the general chronological drift underlying the shifting narrative. I felt an English reader might become impatient at times for a return to the book’s central theme. My first rule was therefore to try to preserve as much as possible of the material – published as well as unpublished – either emanating from or pertaining to Lenin himself. My second principle was to preserve material demonstrating Volkogonov’s own thesis, namely that Stalin, his system and his successors, all derived directly from Lenin, his theories and practices.

Among the questions Russian historians have yet to confront is that of continuity. For many years, Western scholars have debated the extent to which the Soviet system inherited features of the tsarist empire. Some have argued that strong, centralized government by a self-appointed oligarchy was a Russian tradition, that a passive population, inclined towards collective rather than individualistic action and fed on myths of a special destiny and of rewards to come only in the distant future (if not only after death), was also characteristically Russian. Others, especially those closest in time to the events of 1917, have suggested that the liberal and democratic aspirations of the February 1917 revolution, when Nicholas II abdicated, had viable if shallow roots that would have become strong and stable, but for the intervention of the Bolsheviks.

Whatever their differences of emphasis, all schools, whether Western or Soviet, have agreed that the Bolshevik seizure of power, and the period of turmoil that immediately followed it, diverted the country irredeemably from any previously supposed path of development. The destruction of the liberal political intelligentsia by Lenin meant that the constitutional option was a dead letter; the decimation of the peasants’ political leadership left them exposed to the Bolsheviks’ violent exploitation of their economic potential; heavy-handed Bolshevik management of the trade unions prefigured their reduction to obedient servants of the regime; Lenin’s suppression of the free press set the scene for the censorship of information by the Communist Party that is erroneously taken to be the hallmark of Stalinism; Lenin’s immediate resort to the prison, the concentration camp, exile, the firing squad, hostages and blackmail, and his creation of an entire system of punishment to replace that of the tsars, set the new order on a path of violence and universal suspicion that was to become typical of twentieth-century tyrannies thereafter.

In the view of Dmitri Volkogonov, the question of whether or not Soviet history was a continuation in any sense of Russian history is of less importance than the question of whether Soviet history is itself a continuum. In this book, he shows that between Lenin and Stalin there was neither an ideological discontinuity, nor a difference of method. And, indeed, it is his contention that, while the methods employed by Stalin’s successors were much more moderate, they were just as motivated by the impulses of their legendary founder as their monstrous predecessor had been.

Among writers on the history of the Soviet Union – whether Westerners or Russian émigrés – it was not uncommon to trace events back and to seek a point at which ‘things might have gone differently’. Many have wondered whether, had Lenin not died so early in the life of the regime, the country might have developed along less militaristic and politically sterile lines. Perhaps the New Economic Policy, allowing peasants – more or less – to work for themselves, and permitting a degree of latitude in cultural life, would have continued and led to a more tolerant order of things. In the early years of glasnost this idea was widely debated by Russian as well as Western scholars. Among the latter were many who could not accept that any good could have come from Lenin and his creations, while some still retained a lingering doubt that such an intelligent man as Lenin could possibly have initiated and carried through the inhuman collectivization and the great terror of the 1930s. In Russia, as long as the Soviet state continued to exist, Lenin remained a virtually unblemished icon.

Dmitri Volkogonov has now demolished the icon, and he has firmly committed himself to the view that Russia’s only hope in 1917 lay in the liberal and social democratic coalition that emerged in the February revolution. He has, in other words, concluded that there was no salvation to be found in any of the policies practised by Lenin, and he has taken his account further to show how Lenin’s malign influence was imbibed by all subsequent Soviet leaders. Indeed, the Party leaders, he shows, quoted Lenin and referred to his teaching, not just when mouthing their pious platitudes for the populace, but even when they were closeted in the privacy of the Politburo. Having absorbed a philosophy that had failed almost before it was put into practice, it should have caused little surprise that the practitioners of Leninism in the modern age would ultimately share a similar fate.

Introduction

The massive steel door swung open and I was ushered into a large lobby, from which a similar reinforced door led to the Communist holy of holies, Lenin’s archives. The former Central Committee building on Staraya Square in central Moscow is a vast grey edifice the size of an entire city block. Along its endless corridors are the identical wood-panelled offices where the Party hierarchs once sat, dozens of meeting rooms of all sizes, a great reading room lined with catalogues and indexes to the Party’s meticulously preserved records. And deep in its basement, reminiscent of a nuclear bomb-shelter, on special shelves in special metal boxes, I was shown all the written traces to be found of the man still regarded by some as a genius, by others as the scourge of the century.

Despite the fact that there have been five editions of his collected works in Russian (the fourth of which was translated into many foreign languages), these are Lenin’s unpublished documents, numbering 3724 in all. Another 3000 or so were merely signed by him. Why were they hidden away? Could it be that his halo would have been tarnished by publishing, for instance, his instructions in November 1922 to punish Latvia and Estonia for supporting the Whites by such means as ‘catching them out’ with more and more evidence, by penetrating their borders ‘in hot pursuit’ and ‘then hanging 100–1000 of their officials and rich folk …’?¹ Perhaps such documents were concealed because there was no one left who could explain them. As the Anarchist veteran Prince Kropotkin wrote to Lenin in December 1920, when the Bolsheviks had seized a large group of hostages whom they would ‘destroy mercilessly’ (in the words of Pravda) should an attempt be made on the life of any of the Soviet leaders: ‘Is there none among you to remind his comrades and to persuade them that such measures are a return to the worst times of the Middle Ages and the religious wars, and that they are not worthy of people who have undertaken to create the future society?’² Lenin read the letter and marked it ‘For the archives.’

Of course, our view of Lenin has changed not only because we have found there is more than the stories that inspired us for decades. We began to doubt his infallibility above all because the ‘cause’, which he launched and for which millions paid with their lives, has suffered a major historical defeat. It is hard to write this. As a former Stalinist who has made the painful transition to a total rejection of Bolshevik totalitarianism, I confess that Leninism was the last bastion to fall in my mind. As I saw more and more closed Soviet archives, as well as the large Western collections at Harvard University and the Hoover Institution in California, Lenin’s profile altered in my estimation: gradually the creator and prophet was edged out by the Russian Jacobin. I realised that none of us knew Lenin; he had always stood before us in the death-mask of the earthly god he had never been.

After my books on Stalin and Trotsky,³ I set about the final part of the trilogy with the aim of rethinking Lenin. He had always been multi-faceted, but after his death his image was channelled into the single dimension of a saint, and the more we saw him as such, the more we distanced ourselves from the historical Lenin who was still, I think, the greatest revolutionary of the century.

The intellectual diet of Leninism was as compulsory for every Soviet citizen as the Koran is for an observing Muslim. On 1 January 1990 in the Soviet Union there were more than 653 million copies of Lenin’s writings in 125 languages – perhaps the only area of abundance achieved by Communist effort. Thus were millions of people educated in Soviet dogmatics, and we are still not fully aware how impoverished and absurd our idol-worship will look to the twenty-first century.

To write about Lenin is above all to express one’s view of Leninism. In 1926, two years after Lenin’s death, Stalin produced a collection called The Foundations of Leninism. Leninism, we were told, came down to making possible the revolutionary destruction of the old world and the creation on its ruins of a new and radiant civilization. How? By what means? By means of unlimited dictatorship. It was here that the original sin of Marxism in its Leninist version was committed – not that Marx, to give him his due, was much taken with the idea of dictatorship. Lenin, however, regarded it as Marxism’s chief contribution on the question of the state. In fact, according to him, the dictatorship of the proletariat constituted the basic content of the socialist revolution. His assertion that ‘only by struggle and war’ can the ‘great questions of humanity’ be resolved gave priority to the destructive tendency.⁴

Thus armed, Lenin and his successors assumed that in the name of the happiness of future generations, everything was permitted and moral: the export of revolution, civil war, unbridled violence, social experimentation. The vitality and, let it not be denied, the appeal of much of Leninism derived from the perpetual human longing for the perfect and just world. The Russian revolutionaries, including Lenin, rightly exposed the age-old evils of human existence, the exploitation, inequality, lack of freedom. But having acquired the opportunity to abolish these evils, the Leninists established a new, barely disguised form of exploitation to be carried out by the state. Instead of social and ethnic inequality came bureaucratic inequality; in place of class unfreedom came total unfreedom. The Leninist version of Marxism was made flesh in this vast country, becoming something like a secular religion in the process.

In the last analysis, the Leninist promise of great progress turned into great backwardness. The founders of the Russian Marxist movement, George Plekhanov, Vera Zasulich and Lev Deich, in their ‘Open Letter to the Petrograd Workers’ of 28 October 1917, wrote prophetically that ‘the revolution is the greatest historic disaster, it will provoke a civil war which in the end will force it to retreat far from the conquests of February 1917’.⁵ For that matter, on the eve of the Bolshevik coup of October 1917 other Bolsheviks were not confident of success and were alarmed by Lenin’s radicalism, which with maniacal persistence was pushing the masses towards armed uprising against the Provisional Government. At the Central Committee on 16 October 1917, where the issue of the uprising was discussed, Lenin made a note, which reads: ‘“We dare not win”, that’s the main point of all their speeches.’⁶ A man of enormous will, Lenin succeeded in turning his party in the direction of violence and coercion as a way of dealing with the problems of peace, land and freedom.

Leninism was not restrained by national limits. With the aid of Comintern, established in Moscow in March 1919 and virtually an international section of the Russian Communist Party, he attempted to initiate revolutions wherever the possibility existed, and sometimes where it did not. In July 1920 he cabled Stalin in Kharkov: ‘The situation in Comintern is splendid. Zinoviev, Bukharin and I believe that we ought to encourage revolution in Italy right now. My own opinion is that we need to sovietize Hungary for the purpose, and maybe also Czecho[slovakia] and Romania.’⁷ Emissaries were sent east and west, and on Lenin’s orders the Finance Commissariat made available millions of gold roubles ‘for the needs of the world revolution’.⁸ Meanwhile Soviet citizens were dying in their hundreds of thousands from famine and disease. For Lenin, the revolution was everything, and it could not be achieved without countless victims.

It is impossible to think of Lenin without contemplating his brainchild, his party. Perhaps the idea of the mighty revolutionary organization is central to Leninism, but his accomplishment was not merely that he created a party with a disciplined organization, but that he was rapidly able to erect it into a state system. The Party soon acquired a monopoly of power, of thought and of life itself. It became a Leninist order, in whose name its ‘leaders’ and their ‘comrades-in-arms’ were to rule the country for decades to come. It was an ideal backbone for a totalitarian regime, but as soon as Soviet society began its rapid change in the second half of the 1980s, the Party, like a fish cast onto the bank, began to expire. Its rapid and amazingly painless disintegration after the attempted coup of August 1991 revealed its absolute inability to survive in conditions of an emerging civil society.

If the chief feature of a dictator is unlimited personal power – and Lenin had such power – we ought to see him as a dictator. Yet he was not. Certainly he regarded dictatorship as a positive virtue contributing to the success of the revolution, and certainly he saw the Bolshevik leaders as ‘dictators’ in their allocated areas of responsibility: at the 10 July 1919 session of the Politburo, Alexei Rykov was appointed ‘dictator for military supply’.⁹ Power for Lenin was dictatorship, but he exercised it remotely, through a flexible mechanism of ideological and organizational structures.

Little is known of Lenin’s private life. This is not only because of the Marxist postulate of the primacy of the social above the personal, but also because of the desire of the revolutionary hierarchs to keep the personal lives of their leaders secret from the masses. While every detail of the life of a minor functionary was regarded as essential information, the life of a Politburo member and his family was seen as a state secret. Their salaries, numbers of servants and automobiles, as well as the size of their houses and dachas – all such information was untouchable in ‘special files’. Nobody in Russia ever learnt, for example, what financial support Lenin had received during the years of his voluntary exile in Europe, from 1900 to 1905 and from 1906 to 1917, or who had financed the Party before the revolution, or why Lenin had never worked, in the usual meaning of the word, or how he had travelled through Germany at the height of the war, or whether the Bolsheviks had ever received financial help from Germany, Russia’s enemy, before the revolution. On 21 August 1918 Lenin wrote to his emissary in Sweden, Vatslav Vorovsky: ‘No one asked the Germans for help, but there were negotiations on when and how they, the Germans, would carry out their plan to advance … There was a coincidence of interests. We would have been idiots not to have exploited it.’¹⁰ The new regime’s relations with Germany, after the separate peace of Brest-Litovsk of March 1918, were shrouded in secrecy. In February 1921, Lenin received a cipher from the Soviet legation in Berlin reporting on the results of talks with the Germans, in the course of which agreement had been reached on the rehabilitation of the German war industry, contravening the Versailles prohibition. The German firm Blohm and Voss was ready to build submarines, Albatrosswerke aircraft, and Krupp artillery pieces on Soviet soil. Lenin responded: ‘… I think, yes. Tell them so. Secret.’¹¹

Soviet biographies of Lenin are countless and uniformly eulogistic, singing the praises of his genius, his perfection and his greatness. Within a year of the Bolshevik seizure of power, Grigory Zinoviev virtually mapped out the first official biography and set the tone that would become almost statutory, in a speech in which he employed such terms as ‘the apostle of Communism’ and ‘Leader, by the grace of God’.¹² The published memoirs of Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, who knew him better than anyone, were different, though they too bear the stamp of the era, ‘the midnight of the epoch’. The exception to the rule is perhaps her memoirs about the last period of his life which, like those of his sister, Maria, were never published.

The five editions of Lenin’s collected works vary substantially. The first came out between 1920 and 1926 and numbered twenty volumes. The second and third (which differed only in the quality of their bindings) were published in thirty volumes between 1930 and 1932. The fourth, known as the Stalin Edition and the one translated into foreign languages, including English, came out between 1941 and 1957 in thirty-five volumes. The fifth, described as the Complete Edition and the one to which we refer most often in this book, was published between 1958 and 1965 and benefited to some extent from the somewhat liberal climate of Khrushchev’s early years. It ran to fifty-five volumes, while the sixth, which was in preparation when the August 1991 events occurred, was planned to have at least seventy. Lenin is inexhaustible. The most serious Soviet work on him is a twelve-volume ‘Biographical Chronicle’ which provides not merely the basic contours of the man-god’s life, but also thousands of names and facts. It also contains many cuts, silences and distorted interpretations. The biographies written in the West are immeasurably more useful, although they lack the original source material, especially on the Soviet period.

One of the most interesting published accounts of Lenin was written by Trotsky when Lenin died in 1924.¹³ It formed part of the material he collected for many years for a ‘big book’ on Lenin. In April 1929, exiled in Constantinople, he wrote to Alexandra Ramm, his translator in Berlin: ‘My book Lenin and His Successors cannot appear earlier than two or three months after my autobiography has come out.’ And three months later he wrote that he was writing another book on ‘Lenin (a biography, personal portrait, memoirs and correspondence)’.¹⁴ Five years later Trotsky wrote to his supporter, M. Parizhanin: ‘My work on Lenin has not yet and will not soon move beyond the preparatory stage. I won’t be able to send the first chapters for translation before July.’¹⁵ Lenin dead was no less useful to Trotsky, for personal reasons, than he was to Stalin. Both of them knew more about their patron than anyone else, but the ‘big book on Lenin’, alas, was never completed or published.

Trotsky first met Lenin in 1902, and their relationship went from mutual admiration to deep mutual rejection and back to close alliance. Trotsky could have recalled that, at the time of the 1905 revolution, Lenin in a fit of frustration had called him a balalaika, a poseur, base careerist, rogue, scoundrel, liar, crook, swine, and more. That was Lenin’s style, but it did not prevent him from writing in 1917, ‘Bravo, Comrade Trotsky!’ or from calling him ‘the best Bolshevik’. Trotsky, for his own part, was never short of an insulting epithet to throw back.

Stalin also knew a lot about Lenin, notably from the Soviet rather than the émigré period. The archives show that Stalin received no fewer than 150 personal notes, cables, letters and orders from Lenin. But many of them are fragments of telegram tape, second copies of typescript and other indirect evidence. I have alluded in my book on Stalin to the dubious authenticity of such materials. After becoming supreme dictator, and with the help of his yes-men, Stalin introduced some significant falsifications into the correspondence with Lenin, which had grown rapidly with his appointment to the post of General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1922. After his own authorized biography had appeared, it seems Stalin also planned to bring out a book on Lenin, though he never did.¹⁶

Perhaps it was another leading Bolshevik, Lev Kamenev, who received the most correspondence, 350 letters and memoranda by my reckoning, most of them still unpublished. He was much trusted by Lenin, even on personal matters, for example on Lenin’s relationship with his mistress Inessa Armand at the time he and Lenin were sharing an apartment in Poland. Kamenev’s knowledge of Lenin is important because he was the first editor, with Lenin’s direct participation, of Lenin’s collected works (1920–26). Kamenev, however, wrote little, and left nothing to compare in size with the heritage of his constant friend Zinoviev.

Grigory Yevseyevich Zinoviev and his wife Z.I. Lilina were close family friends of Lenin, and Zinoviev probably received more personal letters from Lenin than any other leader. The new Communist top brass were not modest: once in power, they took up residence in the Kremlin, expropriated palaces and estates, gave cities their names, erected monuments to themselves, surrounded themselves with bodyguards and doctors, and quickly set about publishing their collected works. Zinoviev’s best work on Lenin was possibly his introduction to the study of Leninism, in which he exhorted his readers to ‘study Lenin at first-hand! To know Lenin is to know the road to the victory of the world revolution.’¹⁷ In the early 1930s, when Zinoviev’s days were numbered, he wrote several chapters of a book on Lenin, hoping it would save him. Stalin would not so much as look at what his prisoner had written, for he had long ago decided the fate of Zinoviev, and Kamenev too.

Most of Lenin’s biographers have understandably concentrated on his social and political rôle, but it is also important to balance that against his strictly human, moral and intellectual qualities, and to do so without forgetting the historical context. The historical Lenin was a child of his time: troubled, cruel, expectant, alarming. History neither accuses nor justifies, it is a means to understand, to discern the patterns that characterize a distant age. We say the word ‘Lenin’ and we see in our mind’s eye a man whose high forehead and large bald patch suggest the embodiment of intellect – as well as the commonplace.

Gleb Krzhizhanovsky, an early associate of Lenin’s who held high office in the Soviet government, made an attempt in his book Velikii Lenin to define the essence of Lenin’s genius (to which the book was dedicated), but was more successful in describing his subject’s exterior appearance. It was, he wrote, simple and modest: ‘Short of stature and wearing his usual cloth cap, he could easily have passed unnoticed in any factory district. All one could say of his appearance was that he had a pleasant, swarthy face with a touch of the Asiatic. In a rough country coat he could just as easily have passed in a crowd of Volga peasants.’ Clearly, this description was intended to stress the ‘folksiness’, the ‘depth’, the ‘link with the lower orders’, but Krzhizhanovsky also noticed an important element: Lenin’s eyes, the mirror of the human mind. Those eyes, he wrote, ‘were unusual, piercing, full of inner strength and energy, dark, dark brown …’¹⁸ It was a feature noticed by many, especially by the writer A.I. Kuprin in his graphic description, ‘Instant Photography’. Lenin, he wrote, ‘is short, broad-shouldered and lean. He looks neither repellent, militant nor deep-thinking. He has high cheekbones and slanting eyes … The dome of his forehead is broad and high, though not as exaggerated as it appears in foreshortened photographs … He has traces of hair on his temples, and his beard and moustache still show how much of a fiery redhead he was in his youth. His hands are large and ugly … I couldn’t stop looking at his eyes … they are narrow; besides which he tends to screw them up, no doubt a habit of concealing short sight, and this, and the rapid glances beneath his eyebrows, gives him an occasional squint and perhaps a look of cunning. But what surprised me most was their colour … Last summer in the Paris zoo, seeing the eyes of a lemur, I said to myself in amazement: at last I’ve found the colour of Lenin’s eyes! The only difference being that the lemur’s pupils were bigger and more restless, while Lenin’s were no more than pinpricks from which blue sparks seemed to fly.’¹⁹ The writer Ariadna Tyrkova, who had seen Lenin at close quarters more than once, drew a simpler picture: ‘Lenin was an evil man. And he had the evil eyes of a wolf.’²⁰

A physical detail, while of no decisive significance to Lenin’s political portrait, may nevertheless highlight his main characteristic, namely his powerful mind, a mind that was too often not merely pragmatic, flexible and sophisticated, but also malevolent and perfidious. His radical pragmatism explains the actions he took to bring about the defeat of his own country in the First World War in order to get his party into power. His radicalism compelled him to accept the loss of entire national regions of the former tsarist empire, although when complete disintegration was threatened he cast aside his internationalism and started defending that empire, by then transformed into its Soviet form.

It was power, not love of fatherland, that prompted him to save Russia. He had, after all, shown his contempt – to put it mildly – for Russia and the Russians. Writing in the autumn of 1920 to Jan Berzin, a Central Committee member of Latvian origin, about publishing Communist propaganda, he complained that things were going badly. He advised Berzin to invite two Swiss comrades from Zurich, and to pay them ‘arch-generously’. He went on: ‘Hand out the work to Russian idiots: send the cuttings here, but not occasional issues (as these idiots have been doing until now).’²¹ Without a blush, he could call his fellow-countrymen idiots who could only be trusted to do the simplest tasks, while left-wingers from Zurich had to be paid ‘archgenerously’. This is only a short note, but a very eloquent one, and similar evidence of Lenin’s attitude to Russianness is abundant, though of course well hidden in the archives.

In the middle of 1922 the civil war was over and Russia lay in ruins. It seemed that at last the cruelty would end. Lenin pointed out that ‘although coercion is not our ideal’, the Bolsheviks could not live without it, even where ideas, views and the human spirit are concerned. He recommended the death penalty, commuted in mitigating circumstances to deprivation of liberty or deportation abroad, ‘for propaganda or agitation or belonging to or aiding organizations supporting that part of the international bourgeoisie that does not recognize the … Communist system’.²² This proposal was later incorporated into the infamous Article 58 of the Criminal Code, under which millions constructed and then filled the concentration camps. Lenin is the source of the totalitarian ideology of intolerance. By creating the Cheka, the punitive organ of the dictatorship and his favourite brainchild, Lenin influenced the outlook of the Communists who soon came to believe that the amoral was moral, if it was in the Party’s interest. S.I. Gusev, a member of the Party Central Control Commission, addressing the XIV Congress in December 1925, declared: ‘Lenin once taught us that every member of the Party must be an agent of the Cheka, that is, we must watch and inform … I believe every member of the Party should inform. If we suffer from anything, it is not from denunciation, but from non-denunciation. We might be the best of friends, but once we start to differ in politics, we must not only break off our friendships, we must go further and start informing.’²³ Leninist doctrine had donned the police agent’s cloak.

It is often said that, as he felt death approaching, Lenin was horrified by what he had done and was willing to rethink much. It may be so, but it is impossible to prove. Even had he wanted to change things, which is doubtful, he took his intentions with him to the grave. It is also said that Lenin failed to build ‘true socialism’, even with the aid of the New Economic Policy. But if one looks closely at his understanding of this ‘new policy’, one can clearly discern old Bolshevik features. NEP, as far as Lenin was concerned, was bridled capitalism, and it could be ‘slapped down’ at any time. When reports started coming in about profiteering by traders, the so-called ‘Nepmen’, Lenin reacted quickly: ‘… we need a number of model trials with the harshest sentences. The Justice Commissariat obviously doesn’t understand that the New Economic Policy requires new methods of applying punishment of new harshness.’²⁴

Lenin never concealed his belief that the new world could only be built with the aid of physical violence. In March 1922 he wrote to Kamenev: ‘It is the biggest mistake to think that NEP will put an end to the terror. We shall return to the terror, and to economic terror.’²⁵ And indeed there was to be enough terror of every kind. After many decades we Russians condemned it, refusing for shame to answer the question of who had started it and who had made it into a sacred object of revolutionary method. I do not doubt that Lenin wanted earthly happiness for the people, at least for those he called ‘the proletariat’. But he regarded it as normal to build this ‘happiness’ on blood, coercion and the denial of freedom.

1 Distant Sources

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin did not appear fully fledged on the scene as the leader of the radical wing of Russian social democracy. At the end of the nineteenth century, when he was not quite thirty, he was merely one among many. Julius Martov, who collaborated closely with him in St Petersburg and Western Europe between 1895 and 1903, recalled that Lenin cut a rather different figure then from the one he was to present later on. There was less self-confidence, nor did he show the scorn and contempt which, in Martov’s view, would shape his particular kind of political leadership. But Martov also added significantly: ‘I never saw in him any sign of personal vanity.’¹

Lenin himself was not responsible for the absurdly inflated cult that grew up around his name throughout the Soviet period, although he was not entirely blameless. When in August 1918, for instance, it was decided to erect a monument at the spot in Moscow where an attempt had recently been made on his life, he did not protest, and only a year after the Bolshevik seizure of power he was posing for sculptors. In 1922 monuments were raised to him in his home province of Simbirsk, in Zhitomir and Yaroslavl. He regarded all this as normal: in place of monuments to the tsars, let there be statues of the leaders of the revolution. His purpose was rather to affirm the Bolshevik idea than to glorify personalities. Everyone had to don ideological garb, the uniform of dehumanized personality, and Lenin and Leninism were the main components of the costume. The deification of the cult figure was the work of the system which he had created and by which he was more needed dead than alive.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov began to use the alias and pseudonym ‘Lenin’, probably derived from the River Lena in Siberia, at an early stage. His very first writings, in 1893, appeared, unsigned, in mimeographed form. He first used a signature, ‘V.U.’, at the end of 1893, and then a year later he signed himself ‘K. Tulin’, a name derived from the town of Tula. In 1898 he used the pseudonym ‘Vl. Ilyin’ when reviewing a book on the world market by Parvus (Alexander Helphand), translated from German. In August 1900, in a private letter, he signed himself ‘Petrov’, a name he continued to use in correspondence with other Social Democrats until January 1901, when he signed a letter to Plekhanov with the alias ‘Lenin’. He seems not to have settled into this alias straight away, and still went on using ‘Petrov’ and ‘V.U.’, as well as his proper name, for some time. He also adopted the name ‘Frei’ for part of 1901, and in 1902 ‘Jacob Richter’ vied for a while with ‘Lenin’. But from June of that year, it appears he became comfortable at last with the name by which the world would one day come to know him.

It is difficult to imagine Lenin as young. We are familiar with the photograph of the chubby little boy and high school student with intelligent eyes, yet he seems to have stepped straight from his youth into mature adulthood. Alexander Potresov, another early collaborator, who knew him well at the age of twenty-five, recalled that ‘he was only young according to his identity papers. You would have said he couldn’t be less than forty or thirty-five. The faded skin, complete baldness, apart from a few hairs on his temples, the red beard, the sly, slightly shifty way he would watch you, the older man’s hoarse voice … It wasn’t surprising that he was known in the St Petersburg Union of Struggle as “the old man”.’²

It is worth noting that both Lenin and his father lost their considerable mental powers much earlier than might be thought normal. I am not suggesting a necessary connection, but it is true that both men died of brain disease, his father from a brain haemorrhage at the age of fifty-four, and Lenin from cerebral sclerosis at fifty-three. Lenin always looked much older than his years. His brain was in constant high gear, and he was usually having a ‘row’ with someone, ‘row’ being one of his favourite words. It may not be a sign of his genius, but the fact is that, even when he was relatively young, Lenin always looks like a tired old man. Be that as it may, let us look at his origins, his antecedents and his background.

Genealogy

Simbirsk, where Lenin was born on 22 April 1870, was the small leafy capital of the province of the same name. At the end of 1897 it had a population of 43,000 inhabitants, of whom 8.8 per cent were of gentry (or noble) status, 0.8 per cent clergy families, 3.2 per cent merchants, 57.2 per cent ordinary town-dwellers or lower middle-class, 11 per cent peasants, 17 per cent military and the remaining 2 per cent unclassified. It had two high schools, one each for boys and girls, a cadet school, a religious school and seminary, a trade school, a midwifery school, schools for the Chuvash and Tatar minorities, several parish schools, the Karamzin Library, and the Goncharov Public Library. It had a vodka distillery, a winery, a brewery, a candle factory and flour-mill. There were a number of charitable institutions. Founded on the high side of the middle Volga in 1648 as a defence against nomadic raids, the town was soon transformed into a typical, sleepy, unhurried provincial Russian town.

In time Simbirsk became a Bolshevik shrine, renamed Ulyanovsk. A local historian, Z. Mindubaev, has written that the transformation of the ancient town into a ‘grandiose Leninist altar’ was accompanied by a ‘huge pogrom’ which flattened everything. With astonishing mindlessness, the ‘builders’ tore down ancient churches, cathedrals and monasteries. Even the church where Lenin was baptized was razed, as was a house in which Pushkin had once stayed early in the nineteenth century. The cathedral which had been erected at about the same time in memory of the fallen of Simbirsk in the war of 1812 was cleared in the 1920s to make way for a monument to Lenin. Streets were renamed after Marx and Engels, Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Plekhanov and Bebel. At the height of the famine of 1921, when the Volga region was ravaged, the local authorities allocated funds for a statue of Marx. The cemetery of the Pokrovsky Monastery was bulldozed to make way for a cosy square, leaving only one grave – that of Lenin’s father, Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov, with its cross removed.³

The twelve-volume ‘Biographical Chronicle’ of Lenin’s life, while it attempts (with little success) to catalogue every fact and account for virtually every waking moment of his life, is extremely laconic about his birth and background: ‘April 10 (22 New Style⁴) 1870 Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin) was born. His father, Ilya Nikolaevich, was an inspector and later the director of the province’s schools. He came of poor town-dwellers of Astrakhan. His father had been a serf. Lenin’s mother, Maria Alexandrovna, was the daughter of a doctor, A.D. Blank. The Ulyanov family lived in Simbirsk (still called Ulyanovsk in late 1994), in a wing of Pribylovskaya’s house on Streletsky Street (now Ulyanov Street) No. 17a.’⁵ Other information about the family has to be gleaned in fragments from the twelve volumes, most of which consist of references to Lenin ‘making plans’, or ‘destroying his opponents intellectually’, reading, writing or making a speech. Consisting of several thousand pages, it is a chronicle that presents the portrait of a political robot, not a human being.

Similar information is to be found in the official biography of Lenin, compiled by a brigade of scholars under P.N. Pospelov. All eight editions of this work, beginning with the first in 1960, can be found in any Soviet library, but it is doubtful if any have ever been consulted voluntarily. The people may have resigned themselves to believing assurances that the Party was in the hands of ‘outstanding leaders of the Leninist type’, but they always retained the lingering suspicion that this idea was exaggerated. Most people were therefore rather indifferent to the official image of Lenin. Only a few individuals, perhaps while preparing for an exam or writing a dissertation, were actually required to pore over a volume of Lenin’s works. As for Party leaders themselves, the majority of those I have known never read a word of Lenin beyond the ‘Party minimum’.⁶ What was regarded as the proper Leninist text to read was laid down in directives and confidential letters from the Central Committee. They were all being led by a Lenin they did not know.

In order to establish Lenin’s genealogy, we have to resort to books published in the 1920s, as well as to foreign publications and a range of Russian archives. The large Ulyanov family had many branches. Lenin’s parents married in 1863 in Penza, capital of the province of that name to the west of the lower Volga, where Lenin’s father was working as a teacher of physics and mathematics. After a spell in Nizhni Novgorod, in the centre of European Russia, the family moved to Simbirsk. There is almost nothing in the official biographies about Lenin’s grandparents, especially their ethnic origin, not that this would tell us anything about his intellectual capacities, social position or moral qualities. But there has been a great reluctance to discuss the Ulyanov family tree, no doubt because it was felt that the leader of the Russian revolution must be a Russian.

The Russian Empire, however, was a crucible of the most varied national and racial ingredients, as was to be expected in so vast a territory. I dwell on this aspect of Lenin’s biography because his ethnic background was carefully covered up to make sure that he was seen to have been, if not of ‘proletarian’, at least of ‘poor peasant’ origin. But if the ‘Chronicle’ was able to show – as it does – that his father’s father had been a serf, why was it not possible to reveal the background of his father’s mother, and his mother’s parents?

Lenin’s mother, Maria Alexandrovna, was the fourth daughter of Alexander Dmitrievich Blank, a doctor and a baptized Jew from Zhitomir. He had taken as his patronymic the name of his godfather at his baptism, Dmitri Baranov, dropped his original patronymic of Moishevich, and adopted the Christian name of Alexander in place of his original first name, Srul, the Yiddish form of Israel. According to research done by David Shub and S.M. Ginsburg, Lenin’s grandfather was the son of Moishe Itskovich Blank, a Jewish merchant from Starokonstantinov in the province of Volynia, who was married to a Swedish woman called Anna Karlovna Ostedt.⁷ Shub asks how a Jew could have become a police doctor, and later the owner of an estate. Referring among other things to the archives of the Holy Synod, Shub concluded that conversion to Orthodox Christianity removed many barriers to a career in state service. ‘There were,’ he writes, ‘baptized Jews in the reign of Nicholas I who occupied far higher positions than police doctor … Many such Jews were ennobled and thus achieved all the rights and privileges of that class.’⁸

In St Petersburg, Alexander Blank married Anna Grigorievna Groschopf, the daughter of prosperous Germans. The Blanks were evidently well off, since they were able to make several trips to Europe, notably to take the waters in Karlsbad in the Czech part of Austria-Hungary. Alexander Blank worked in various towns and provincial capitals of the Russian interior, for the most part in the Volga region, as district physician, police doctor and hospital doctor, finally occupying the prestigious post of hospital medical inspector of the state arms factory in Zlatoust, in the province of Chelyabinsk, Western Siberia. In 1847, having attained the civil service rank of State Counsellor, he retired and registered himself as a member of the nobility of Kazan, a major city on the Volga and centre of Tatar culture in the region. There he bought the estate of Kokushkino.⁹ This had been made possible by the large dowry his wife had brought with her. Anna Grigorievna never learned to speak fluent Russian and never abandoned her Lutheran religion. In Kokushkino she would raise five daughters: Anna, Lyubov, Sofia, Maria (Lenin’s mother) and Yekaterina.

Kokushkino was not the ‘smallholding’ of the official biographies, but was rather a small landowner’s estate where, until 1861, Blank owned serfs. This normal feature of the time was something Soviet historians were never allowed to mention. It was a busy, well populated place, and Blank was evidently a strong-willed and rather impulsive man. He was obsessed with the idea that hydrotherapy was a panacea, and wrote a book on it, stating that ‘water inside and out’ could sustain everyone in good health. He used to make his tearful daughters wrap themselves in wet sheets for the night, with the result that they couldn’t wait to grow up and marry to escape their father’s crazy experiments.

Anna Groschopf died young, and after her death her sister, Yekaterina, came to Kokushkino to take on the job of raising the children. She was an educated woman, and it was from her that Lenin’s mother acquired her ability to play the piano, to sing and to speak German, English and French. A frequent visitor to Kokushkino was Karl Groschopf, Yekaterina’s brother and a senior official in the department of foreign trade. His visits would occasion musical evenings, and the Blank girls were much attracted to their educated and exuberant uncle. Life on the estate was very much that of a typical, moderately well-off landowning family, with a strong German cultural tinge, thanks to the Groschopf connection. Unlike his Soviet biographers, Lenin never tried to hide his ‘landowner’ origins; indeed in April 1891 he signed an order inscribing his mother in the gentry register of Simbirsk province.¹⁰ And at the end of his exile in 1900, when he applied to the police department to allow his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, to serve out the remainder of her own term of exile in Pskov, he signed himself ‘hereditary nobleman Vladimir Ulyanov’.¹¹ Lenin’s origins on his mother’s side were far from ‘proletarian’, a fact which underlines the absurdity of the Bolshevik practice of evaluating a person by their social class. This criterion reached grotesque proportions in the 1920s and 1930s, when people even committed suicide on discovering a ‘bourgeois’ or ‘landowner’ skeleton in their past. The Party leaders were, of course, excused as a ‘revolutionary exception’.

Lenin’s paternal lineage was plainly plebeian, and the ‘Biographical Chronicle’ makes much of the fact that his grandfather had been a serf. But this was not actually true. Lenin’s grandfather, Nikolai Vasilievich, was a Russian town-dweller¹² of Astrakhan who earned his living as a tailor. He was the son of a serf, but at an early age had been released to work away from the village, and had never returned home, becoming a town-dweller – as distinct from a peasant, merchant or nobleman – by social status. It was Lenin’s great-grandfather, Vasili Nikitich Ulyanov, who had been a serf.¹³ He had remained single until he turned fifty, and it was only then, having saved up some money, that he married. His bride, who was almost twenty years his junior, was Anna Alexeevna Smirnova, a baptized Kalmyk, whose ethnic origin was responsible for Lenin’s somewhat Asiatic appearance. Five children resulted from this late marriage: Alexander, Vasili, Ilya (Lenin’s father), Maria and Feodosia. Ilya was the youngest child, and was born when his father was already past sixty and his mother was forty-three. His father died in 1836, leaving his wife, the five-year-old Ilya (Alexander had died in infancy), and his two daughters to his seventeen-year-old son, Vasili, to look after.

Vasili rose to the occasion and displayed exemplary enterprise, becoming a salesman for Sapozhnikov Brothers, a large commercial firm in Astrakhan. His willingness to work and his loyalty earned his employers’ trust, and he was able to look after his mother and younger brother, supporting Ilya through his studies at Kazan University until he became a teacher of mathematics, sending him money ‘for settling down’, ‘for the wedding’, ‘for the move’ and so on. Vasili, a bachelor all his life, and a diligent and enthusiastic salesman, may also have sent his cash assets to Ilya shortly before he died at a date historians have been unable to establish.¹⁴

It would not be worth dwelling on the Ulyanov family tree had the official picture not been so obscured by a mass of unnecessary trivia and painted in the colours of ‘class consciousness’, and had so much not been passed over in silence, distorted and blatantly falsified. A brief account, however, may suffice to show that Lenin’s background reflected the face of the entire empire. He had a general idea about his origins, but, although he was Russian by culture and language, his country was not his highest value – not that he particularly felt himself to be a German, a Swede, a Jew or a Kalmyk. He may have described himself as a Russian when filling in forms, but in his outlook he was an internationalist and cosmopolitan, for whom the revolution, power and the Party were to be immeasurably more precious than Russia itself. It is only important to clarify this matter because the Bolsheviks found it necessary to suppress evidence of the perfectly natural mixture of nationalities in Russia in order to present their leader as ethnically ‘pure’.

Lenin’s antecedents were Russian, Kalmyk, Jewish, German and Swedish, and possibly others, symbolizing Russian history, as it were: a Slavic beginning, Asiatic expansion, a Jewish accretion to the national intellect, and German or West European culture. Genetic selection in history is spontaneous and mysterious. But here a digression is called for. When Lenin died, the Central Committee Secretariat commissioned his elder sister, Anna Yelizarova, to collect all the materials she could find and to write a definitive account of the Ulyanovs. Anna, who was one of the founders of the Lenin Institute, set to work, and soon discovered what I also found: namely, that there was a mass of material in the St Petersburg police department archives about her mother’s descent, as well as other materials which M.S. Olminsky, chairman of the Commission for the Study of the History of the Party (Istpart), helped her locate. Some eight years later she had still not divulged her discoveries to anyone. But in 1932, two years before she died, she suddenly revealed her findings to Stalin, and said she wanted to publish them. She knew that her great-grandfather, Moishe Itskovich Blank, had been born in Starokonstantinov, that his two sons, Abel and Srul, had converted to Christianity and changed their names to Dmitri and Alexander, and that in 1820 both had been admitted into the St Petersburg Medical-Surgical Academy, from which they graduated in 1824.¹⁵

In her letter to Stalin, Anna wrote: ‘It’s probably no secret for you that the research on our grandfather shows that he came from a poor Jewish family, that he was, as his baptismal certificate says, the son of “Zhitomir meshchanin Moishe Blank”.’ She went on to suggest that ‘this fact could serve to help combat anti-semitism’. Paradoxically for a Marxist who believed in the primacy of environmental over inherited factors, she also asserted the dubious proposition that Lenin’s Jewish origins ‘are further confirmation of the exceptional abilities of the Semitic tribe, [confirmation] always shared by Ilyich [Lenin] … Ilyich always valued the Jews highly.’¹⁶ Anna’s claim explains, for instance, why Lenin frequently recommended giving foreigners, especially Jews, intellectually demanding tasks, and leaving the elementary work to the ‘Russian fools’.¹⁷ According to General A.A. Yepishev, former chief of the army’s main political directorate, who heard it from Stalin’s personal assistant Poskrebyshev, Anna’s sister Maria handed the letter to Stalin and waited while he read it carefully. His response was categorical and fierce: ‘Absolutely not one word about this letter!’ But a little over a year later, Anna approached Stalin again, asserting that ‘in the Lenin Institute, as well as in the Institute of the Brain … they have long recognized the great gifts of this nation and the extremely beneficial effects of its blood on the progeny of mixed marriages. Ilyich himself rated their revolutionary qualities highly, their “tenacity” in the struggle, as he put it, contrasting it with the more sluggish and unstable character of the Russians. He often pointed out that the great [attributes of] organization and the strength of the revolutionary bodies in the south and west [of Russia] arose precisely from the fact that 50 per cent of their members were of that nationality.’¹⁸ But Stalin, the Russified Georgian, could not allow it to be known that Lenin had Jewish roots, and his strict prohibition remained firmly in place.

In November 1937, the writer Marietta Shaginyan published an article in the Moscow journal Novy mir as the first part of her research into the genealogy of the Ulyanovs. Somehow the article went unnoticed, but in 1938 she published her work as a novel based on fact, entitled The Ulyanov Family, and dealing with the origins of the family up to the birth of Lenin. The reaction was harsh. The book was first read by a small group of senior members of the Soviet Writers’ Union, who condemned it as an ‘ideologically dangerous’ work of’petty bourgeois’ character. A month later, on 9 August 1938, the presidium of the Union convened and passed a resolution which declared that ‘in applying pseudo-scientific research methods to Lenin’s so-called “family tree”, M.S. Shaginyan gives a distorted representation of the national character of Lenin, the greatest proletarian revolutionary, a genius of mankind, who was raised up by the Russian people and who is its national pride’.¹⁹ Those responsible for writing, publishing and distributing the book were dealt with severely. In 1972, all documents on Lenin’s origins, 284 pages in all, were transferred from the various archives which held them to the Central Committee special collections, where they remained.

The German branch of Lenin’s family tree is also interesting. According to Leonhard Haas, the Swiss historian and former director of the Swiss Federal Archives, the Groschopfs, all of whom were wealthy bourgeois, came from northern Germany and could boast several notable personalities throughout German history: Lenin’s great-grandfather, J.G. Groschopf, was a representative of Schade, a German trading company. Other ancestors and descendants of Lenin’s forebears include I. Hoeffer, a well-known theologian; Ernst Curtius, the tutor of Kaiser Friedrich III; and Field Marshal Walter Model, who earned the title of ‘the Führer’s Fireman’ as an audacious commander in the Wehrmacht’s assault on Moscow in 1941.²⁰ The Swedish branch, who were mostly artisans – wigmakers, hatters, tailors – issued from a rich jeweller, one K.F. Estedt, who lived in Uppsala and supplied the court of King Gustavus IV in the late eighteenth century.

Having settled in Simbirsk in 1869, the Ulyanovs lived the life of most civil service families or bourgeoisie of the period. Like most provincial towns at that time, social life in Simbirsk was not especially stimulating. Trade and commerce were the dominant activities, while various educational and cultural establishments provided spiritual and intellectual nourishment. Both Ulyanov parents, however, had high aspirations for their children, and their efforts left their mark. Vladimir, who was born in April 1870, had two brothers and three sisters: Anna (born 1864), Alexander (1866), Olga (1871), Dmitri (1874) and Maria (1878). Another brother, Nikolai, born in 1873, died in infancy, and another sister, also called Olga, died at birth in 1868. (The second Olga died at the age of twenty.) Lenin’s mother did not attend university, but was nevertheless well educated, thanks to the efforts of her aunt, Yekaterina Groschopf. Much has been written about the education of Lenin and his siblings, some of it accurate, but also much that is sugar-coated and exaggerated. Some authors have almost suggested that Lenin’s genius emerged while he was still in nappies. I do not intend to recount the domestic life of the family in detail, but to pick out some salient features that are sometimes missed.

The young Vladimir – invariably known in the family as Volodya – was a gifted and capable child, qualities enhanced by the comfortable, supportive atmosphere of the home, thanks to his father’s successful career. The family lived in a good house, the three eldest children each had a room of their own, there was a cook, a nanny, and servants to deal with the domestic chores. Lenin himself recalled that the family lacked for nothing. An outstanding teacher and advocate of state education, his father rose to become director of the province’s schools in a few years. He was well regarded by the authorities and was awarded several decorations, including the Order of Stanislav, First Class, finally achieving the rank of State Counsellor, corresponding on the Table of Ranks to the title of general. Having become a hereditary noble through his service career, he thus conferred the same privileged status on his family. The Ulyanovs’ life was stable and secure – until, that is, Ilya Nikolaevich died in 1886, and, out of the blue, the eldest son, Alexander, was arrested and hanged in the following year.

Volodya was always top of his class, but he showed none of the ‘revolutionary free-thinking’ described by many of his biographers. It is surely one of the most striking ironies of modern Russian history that the headmaster of his high school should have been Fedor Mikhailovich Kerensky, father of the future ‘hero’ of the February revolution of 1917 who was to be the last obstacle to the Bolshevik seizure of power in October. Kerensky père often publicly expressed his admiration for the ability and diligence shown by Volodya Ulyanov. Volodya, meanwhile, was acquiring a strong intellectual foundation as a result of family support and encouragement from his teachers. He was also acquiring deep self-confidence and a sense of superiority over his peers. He was the family favourite, accustomed to being the centre of attention. Not that he was vain, but neither did he conceal his moral ‘right’ to the primacy he believed was his, and even at that early stage he seems to have shown intolerance of other people’s views. One of Alexander’s school friends, V.V. Vodovozov, recalled that he realised, after visiting the Ulyanovs, that it would he impossible to become a close friend of Vladimir, whom he thought rude in argument, excessively self-confident and self-important, and puffed up by being thought a genius within the family and an infallible authority outside it.²¹

Vladimir and Alexander

Lenin’s intellectual and political self-definition still lay in the future, but one of the most decisive landmarks along the way was the fate of his brother Alexander. The age difference of four years between Alexander and Volodya meant that, as children, the younger boy very much looked up to his elder as a superior being, a hero figure, a rôle which Alexander evidently played with relish. Alexander, moreover, as the eldest child, and perhaps the brightest, also set a pattern of behaviour and activity at home that was bound to encourage his juniors to do their best intellectually: in his teens he edited a family weekly to which everyone was expected to contribute.²² The sudden and traumatic removal of such an admired and loved member of the family was bound to have a powerful effect on the lives of the others.

The execution of Alexander was a tragedy that struck at the entire family. In the young Lenin, it sparked a surge of rebellion, although it was not as literal and direct as post-revolutionary myth would have us believe. It was customary among Soviet historians to quote the words he is reported to have uttered to his sister Maria, then aged all of nine, when news of Alexander’s execution reached the family: ‘No, we will not go that way. That’s not the way.’²³ According to the official accounts, the fate of Lenin’s brother ‘reinforced his revolutionary views’.²⁴ He may well have spoken those words to his little sister, but the fact is that at this age he held no revolutionary views whatsoever, and he could not have distinguished one revolutionary ‘way’ from another.

The death of his father, undoubtedly a major tragedy and economic disaster for the family, has also been depicted in official Soviet literature as an event of ideological significance in the life of the young Lenin. Most writers followed Nadezhda Krupskaya’s clumsy assertion of 1938 that Lenin’s father’s views exerted a revolutionary influence on his children: ‘As a teacher, Ilya Nikolaevich read Dobrolyubov with particular interest. Dobrolyubov conquered the honest heart of Ilya Nikolaevich and defined his work as schools director and as the mentor of his son, Lenin, and his other children, all of whom became revolutionaries.’²⁵ This is far from the truth.

A well educated, cultivated man of his time, Ilya Ulyanov was also deeply pious and rather conservative. His eldest daughter, Anna, recalled that he ‘had never been a revolutionary and wanted to protect the young from that way of thinking. He much admired Alexander II whose reign, especially its first phase, was for him “a bright period”.’²⁶ The 1860s had been a period of ‘great reforms’, when the serfs had been emancipated, a measure of local self-government introduced in the provinces, the judiciary allowed to become a free professional corporation, universities and schools expanded and given greater autonomy: in a word, Russia had been launched on a path of reform in the general direction, if not of liberal democracy, then at least of social modernization. The climate of reform, combined with the government’s fear of going too far, too fast, also gave rise to a revolutionary movement, whose members – mainly students – felt that nothing would change fundamentally for the better unless the whole political structure was demolished, or at least the tsar was removed. To support the reformist trend was to be progressive, to oppose it reactionary, and to dismiss both sides of the argument revolutionary. Ilya Ulyanov definitely belonged to the first category.

Ilya’s youngest daughter, Maria, also attested to his civic loyalty: ‘[He] was not a revolutionary, and we don’t know enough to say what his attitudes were to the revolutionary activities of the young.’²⁷ It would, however, be safe to assume that, as a teacher with a profound sense of vocation, he did much to create a democratic, humane atmosphere in the household. The harmony between husband and wife, their concern for the children, the equality between the siblings, the culture of hard work and diligence, all helped to form an extremely favourable soil for the seeds of free thinking, should they fall there. Ilya Ulyanov, in other words, created the preconditions for his children, above all Alexander and Vladimir, to be receptive to radical ideas. Ilya Ulyanov did not make Lenin a revolutionary; he and his wife merely cultivated in their children the ability to change, to feel the need for change. When Lenin’s father died in January 1886, Vladimir was not yet sixteen.

Even before she had buried her husband, Maria Ulyanov applied for a pension for herself and her children, and a little later asked the Kazan schools district for a special grant. From now on she would live only on her pension and the rent from Kokushkino, of which she was a joint owner. In September 1886 the Simbirsk district court confirmed that Ilya’s estate should pass to Maria and her children.

In April 1887, when Lenin reached the age of seventeen, he registered for military service,²⁸ but as he was now the eldest son and potential breadwinner, he was exempted.²⁹ He was not in fact the family breadwinner. On the contrary, thanks to his mother’s pension, and with her strong encouragement, he pursued his studies.

If it was the family culture that created the preconditions for Lenin to become radically minded, it was the fate of his brother Alexander that provided the catalyst. It is doubtful if Alexander’s tragic end changed Lenin’s revolutionary direction, since there was none to change. Vladimir’s supposed words to his sister on hearing of his brother’s execution also raise a question. ‘No, we will not go that way.’ Why ‘we’? He belonged to no secret society or circle. Perhaps Maria misremembered his words after so many years, or perhaps the heavy weight of Soviet experience suggested the words to her mind. In any case, it is hard, in purely human terms, to believe that Vladimir’s response to the news of his brother’s death would prompt him to pronounce the slogan that would make him forever a ‘proper’ revolutionary.

Alexander was a gifted youth, as the gold medal he attained on graduating from high school indicated. At school he had shown an interest in zoology and acquired three European languages, and at St Petersburg University, which he entered in 1883, he quickly became one of the top students. A month before his father’s premature death he won the University gold medal for work on annelid worms. Nothing indicated that he had been seized by the forces of social protest.

In his first years at university, Alexander was indifferent, if not sceptical, towards the political circles, but he became more involved when friends introduced him to the writings of Marx, Engels and Plekhanov. For them, Marxism emphasized the need for violence to change the existing conditions. One of the more radical members of the group, P. Shevyrev, declared that only by the removal of tyrants could life be reorganized on just principles. At first Alexander, who was wrapped up in his scientific plans and discoveries, merely listened, but gradually he was won over by the apparent logic of his friends’ radicalism, and came to feel it was morally unacceptable to stand aside from ‘the ideas of progress and revolution’, as they put it.

While Alexander was at university his contacts with Vladimir were sporadic, limited to the occasional letter with greetings to all. And when he came home on vacation, there was no particular intimacy between them. They were a close-knit family, but the children tended to pair off, and Vladimir was closest to his sister Olga, though he deferred to Alexander’s intelligence. Anna, the eldest sister, recalled once talking with Alexander after their father had died, and asking him: ‘How do you like our Volodya?’ Her brother replied: ‘He’s obviously very gifted, but we don’t really get on.’ Anna was intrigued, but Alexander refused to explain.³⁰ This may be the only hint in all the apologist literature that relations between the siblings might not have been entirely flawless.

The 1880s in Russia were a time of harsh reaction against the assassination in 1881 of the ‘tsar-liberator’, Alexander II. Students in particular were more closely watched and harassed by the police than ever before, and Alexander’s entry into a group of conspirators who were planning the assassination of Alexander III is commonly explained by the violent dispersal by the police of a student demonstration in memory of the radical thinker Dobrolyubov on 17 November 1886. The arrest and deportation to Siberia of several student friends confronted Alexander with the moral question of how to behave in such circumstances. According to Shevyrev’s view: ‘When the government takes our closest friends by the throat, it is especially immoral to refuse to struggle, and under the present circumstances real struggle with tsarism can only mean terrorism.’ Of this dilemma Nikolai Valentinov, an early Bolshevik who knew Lenin well during the time of his first period abroad, between 1900 and 1905, and a valuable historical source in himself, wrote: ‘Painfully sensitive to suggestions of immorality, Alexander, after agonizing hesitation, began to share these views, and once he did so, he became an advocate of systematic, frightening terrorism, capable of shaking the autocracy.’³¹

The group of conspirators under Shevyrev’s leadership grew. Their watch on the tsar’s route from the palace to St Isaac’s Cathedral began on 26 February 1887, but they were utterly inexperienced, and when on 1 March the police intercepted a letter from one of them, the entire group was arrested. The Ulyanov family was devastated, but placed their hope in the emperor’s clemency. Alexander’s mother rushed to St Petersburg and handed in a letter to Alexander III which said, among other things, that she would purge her son’s heart of its criminal schemes and resurrect the healthy human instincts he had always lived by, if only the tsar would show mercy.

The drama caught the attention of society, and received much publicity. Maria Ulyanova’s entreaties failed, however, not only because of the tsar’s intransigence, but because Alexander refused to ask for clemency. Those who found it possible to do so had their death sentences commuted to hard labour. The trial was very short, lasting only from 15 to 19 April. Five unrepentant comrades were sentenced to hang. Even when Alexander was saying goodbye to his mother there was still the chance of salvation, but he told her in a quiet, firm voice, ‘I cannot do it after everything I said in court. It would be insincere.’ Alexander’s lawyer, Knyazev, was present at this meeting, and after the October revolution he recalled that Alexander had explained: ‘Imagine, Mama, two men facing each other at a duel. One of them has already shot at his opponent, the other has yet to do so, when the one who has shot asks him not to. No, I cannot behave like that!’

Alexander had proved himself to be extraordinarily brave. His last wish was that his mother should bring him a volume of Heine to read. On the morning of 8 May 1887 the prisoners were told they were to be hanged in the courtyard of Shlisselburg Fortress in two hours’ time. This was their last chance to appeal for clemency, but even now these young people, misguided as history may judge them to have been, proved themselves morally worthy of the nation’s memory. They were not fanatics, they believed that their country’s future could only be altered by revolutionary acts against tyrants. Alexander’s group seemed then and seems now naive, but it is impossible not to admire their willingness to sacrifice their lives in the name of freedom.

The day Alexander was hanged, Vladimir was doing his geometry and arithmetic exams, for which he got his usual top marks. The family still believed the widespread rumour that the death sentence would be commuted at the last minute. His mother’s last words to him were, ‘Be brave, be brave.’³² She was in deep mourning for a long time, comforted perhaps by the fact that, as she told her children, before his execution Alexander had bowed before the cross and so would receive God’s forgiveness.

Vladimir Ulyanov was shaken by his brother’s death. Later he would learn that Alexander had had a hand in formulating the programme of the Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) terrorist faction, a document bearing the stamp of Marxist influence, but simplistic and ‘barracks-minded’. Still reeling from the shock of the family tragedy, Vladimir was, however, less concerned with the young terrorists’ ideas than with the stoicism and strength of will they had shown. The sharp turn that now took place in his mind was not about methods of struggle – terror or a mass movement. He still had no views on this issue. But, somewhere in the depths of his mind, the soil was now prepared for the notion that nothing would be achieved on the way to revolution without radicalism, plus the will to succeed, and it was this that became the nucleus of his outlook. His remark ‘We will not go that way’ meant – if he said it – that he realized it was not necessary to be a bomb-thrower oneself, like the unfortunate Alexander, nor was it necessary to man the barricades oneself, or put down rebellion oneself, or go to the front in a civil war oneself. And he never would do any of these things himself. The action of individual units was not important. The main thing was to command huge, virtually unwitting masses. It was a more effective way, if less noble than Alexander’s.

The Forerunners

The list of those who have been proposed as Lenin’s ideological precursors is long, and it starts with the radical nineteenth-century philosopher Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Arrested in 1862 for seditious agitation, Chernyshevsky was to spend the next twenty years in prison and in Siberian exile, where he served seven years of hard labour. Before his deportation from St Petersburg, however, he managed in 1864 to write his novel What is to be Done? and to have it smuggled out and published. It was to inspire an entire generation of Russian youth with ideas of self-emancipation and the duty to bring knowledge to the peasants. Other suggested early sources of Lenin’s revolutionary awakening include various Populist thinkers and Plekhanov’s Marxist ‘Emancipation of Labour’ Group. It is interesting to note what Lenin himself thought of the origins of his political thinking. In an essay on Lenin in 1933, Karl Radek, a brilliant pamphlet-writer and juggler of paradoxes, wrote: ‘When Vladimir Ilyich once saw me looking at a collection of his 1903 articles … his face lit up with a cunning grin and he said with a chuckle, “Interesting to see what fools we were.”’³³

The sources of Lenin’s political outlook were complex, and there can be no argument about the formative effect of his brother’s death, which sent a ray of white light through the prism of his mind, a ray which, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, was refracted by that prism into red.³⁴ The ‘prism’ was in fact a constellation of circumstances. The first of these was the government’s treatment of Vladimir and his family. When Lenin entered Kazan University in 1887, he went with a glowing testimonial from his headmaster in Simbirsk, Fedor Kerensky, who wanted to protect him from adverse association with his brother’s notoriety: ‘Neither in school nor outside did Ulyanov ever give occasion, either by word or deed, to arouse an unfavourable opinion among the school authorities or his teachers.’³⁵ Even when Lenin was expelled from the university in the December of his first year for taking part in a student demonstration, Kerensky, both to defend the young man and to justify his confidence in him, wrote: ‘[Vladimir Ulyanov] might have lost the balance of his mind as a result of the fatal catastrophe that has shattered the unhappy family and, no doubt, has also influenced the impressionable youth disastrously.’³⁶ But on the first occasion when Lenin attended a student meeting, during his first term at the university, he had already been ‘marked’ by the authorities.

The administrator of the Kazan educational region noted that, two days before the demonstration took place, ‘Ulyanov was up to no good: he was spending his time in the smoking-room, chatting and whispering …’ It seems that the ‘demonstration’ amounted to little more than running up and down a corridor,³⁷ but in view of the fact that he was the brother of a condemned ‘state criminal’, Ulyanov was not merely expelled but also sent away from Kazan to the family estate at Kokushkino.

By labelling him as unreliable and suspect, the expulsion effectively excluded the young Lenin from the state educational system altogether. When his mother applied for him to be reinstated at Kazan, the Director of the Police Department in St Petersburg, P.N. Durnovo, noted, ‘We can scarcely do anything for Ulyanov.’³⁸ The Director of the Education Department was more emphatic: ‘Isn’t this the brother of that Ulyanov? He’s also from Simbirsk high school. Yes, it’s clear from the end of the document. He should certainly not be admitted.’³⁹ By thus ostracizing him, the tsarist authorities were steadily narrowing Lenin’s range of choices. His solidarity with his dead brother became more firmly fixed. The letters he wrote, in which he respectfully requested ‘Your Excellency’s permission to enter the Imperial Kazan University’, or had ‘the honour most humbly to request Your Excellency to allow me to go abroad to a foreign university’, and which he signed ‘Nobleman Ulyanov’, were at first unsuccessful.⁴⁰ The spirit of protest grew as the regime rejected him.

Expulsion did not mean Lenin now had to earn his living as a docker or shop assistant, like his grandfather. He was ‘exiled’ to Kokushkino, and the family then moved to their farm at Alakaevka, about thirty miles from Samara. His mother acquired the property of some two hundred acres in early 1889 for the sum of 7500 roubles. Lenin now immersed himself in reading a wide range of Western and Russian social-political literature, including Marx’s Capital. The police kept their eye on him, but he gave them no trouble. Apart from attending an illegal meeting and occasionally seeing some Marxists, it is difficult to find any evidence of the so-called ‘revolutionary period in Samara’. It would be more accurate to describe this time as one of intensive preparation for the examinations to enter St Petersburg University as an external student. By the time he reached the age of twenty-two, Lenin had acquired a first-class diploma from St Petersburg and been accepted as a lawyer’s assistant on the Samara circuit. He was not destined to succeed at this profession and he soon cooled towards the busy life of a defence attorney. The few cases he was given to handle were only petty thefts or property claims, and he accomplished even these with variable success, although he did defend his own interests twice, winning on both occasions. In one case he sued his peasant neighbours for damage to the Ulyanov estate, and, much later, during a period of residence in Paris, he sued a vicomte who ran him over when he was riding his bicycle. His legal career was not something Lenin was ever keen to recall.

Returning to the question of his revolutionary roots, the time at Kokushkino was one of intensive study of the widest range of ideas. In conversation with Valentinov in 1904 in Geneva – one of the many European cities where he spent seventeen years as an émigré, with a brief interval back in Russia during the 1905 revolution – Lenin recalled reading non-stop from early morning until late at night. His favourite author was Chernyshevsky, whose every word published in the journal Sovremennik he read. ‘I became acquainted with the works of Marx, Engels and Plekhanov,’ he stated, ‘but it was only Chernyshevsky who had an overwhelming influence on me, beginning with his novel What is to be Done?. Chernyshevsky’s great service was not only that he showed that every right-thinking and really decent person must be a revolutionary, but something more important: what kind of revolutionary, what his principles ought to be, how he should aim for his goal, what means and methods he should employ to realize it …’⁴¹

Valentinov suggests that it was Chernyshevsky, who had in Lenin’s own words ‘ploughed him over’ before he had read Marx, who made the young man into a revolutionary. It is a view contested by the Menshevik writer Mark Vishnyak, who pointed out that Lenin read Chernyshevsky a month or two after the execution of his brother, and therefore ‘the soil was ready for ploughing over’, and it was the news of that event, Vishnyak claimed, that gave Lenin the charge he had needed, not Chernyshevsky’s ‘talentless and primitive novel’.⁴² These two views boil down to the same conclusion, namely that Chernyshevsky was Lenin’s John the Baptist thanks to the tragedy of Alexander.⁴³ Chernyshevsky, whatever else Lenin took from him, made it possible for the young man to absorb a profound hostility towards liberalism, as one of his earliest works (1894) shows. ‘Who are the “friends of the people” and how do they fight against the social democrats?’ was published (unsigned) in mimeographed form in St Petersburg, and in it Lenin repeatedly cited Chernyshevsky and called his judgments ‘the foresight of genius’, while the ‘loathsome’ compromise of the ‘liberals and landowners’ could only hamper ‘the open struggle of the classes’ in Russia.⁴⁴ He wanted to use Chernyshevsky’s writings in his attacks on the liberal bourgeoisie, particularly in order to expose the existence of ‘an entire chasm’ between the socialists and the democrats.⁴⁵

In effect, Lenin used Chernyshevsky to ‘russify’ Western Marxism, which had too much of the liberal and democratic and too little ‘class war’. The split that was to take place among the Russian social democrats would be precisely over attitudes to democracy, to legal, parliamentary means of struggle, to the place of political parties in a democracy and the strength of liberal persuasion. Lenin’s forebears were, thus, those thinkers who fostered notions which reinforced the coercive, harsh, class elements in Marxism. It would therefore be true to say that Lenin was guided by pragmatic considerations in becoming a revolutionary. While worshipping classical Marxism, he could borrow concepts and ideas, arguments and rebuttals from Chernyshevsky, Peter Tkachev, Sergei Nechaev, Mikhail Bakunin, Carl Clausewitz, Peter Struve, Peter Lavrov and Alexander Herzen. He reinforced his ‘mainline’ Marxism with everything that made that teaching uncompromising, harsh and radical. Recalling the first weeks of the Soviet regime, Krupskaya wrote: ‘Closely studying the experience of the Paris Commune, the first proletarian state in the world, Ilyich remarked on the pernicious effect of the mild attitude of the workers and proletarian masses and the workers’ government towards their manifest enemies. And therefore, when speaking about struggling with enemies, Ilyich always “tightened the screws”, so to speak, fearing the excessive mildness of the masses, as well as his own.’⁴⁶

The presence of Nechaev among the names of Lenin’s sources should give pause. Both Marx and Engels had condemned Nechaev’s doctrine of individual terror – just as Lenin himself would on numerous occasions. But Nechaev was more than an advocate of terror, he was synonymous with conspiratorial politics, entailing secret plans for the overthrow and merciless extermination of hated authorities and governments. In the terminology of the time, such tactics were called Blanquist, after Louis Auguste Blanqui, a radical activist in France during the 1830s and 1840s. While condemning this approach, Lenin would unhesitatingly resort to it at decisive moments. As Plekhanov wrote in 1906: ‘From the very beginning, Lenin was more of a Blanquist than a Marxist. He imported his Blanquist contraband under the flag of the strictest Marxist orthodoxy.’⁴⁷ The Bolshevik Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich recalled Lenin discussing Nechaev, who had been depicted by Dostoevsky in his novel The Possessed, which fictionalized the murder of a student by Nechaev and his ‘Secret Reprisal’ group: ‘Even the revolutionary milieu was hostile to Nechaev, forgetting, Lenin said, “that he had possessed a special talent as an organizer, a conspirator, and a skill which he could wrap up in staggering formulations.”’ He also approvingly quoted Nechaev’s reply to the question of which of the Romanovs should be killed: ‘The entire House of Romanov!’⁴⁸

Vladimir Voitinsky, an economist and active Bolshevik in 1905, recalled discussing Lenin’s abandonment of liberalism in conversations at the time. Lenin used to talk about the need to combat ‘liberal pompous triviality’. ‘Revolution,’ Lenin would say, ‘is a tough business. You can’t make it wearing white gloves and with clean hands … The Party’s not a ladies’ school … a scoundrel might be what we need just because he is a scoundrel.’⁴⁹ Nechaev’s famous dictum, ‘Everything that helps the revolution is moral. Everything that hinders it is immoral and criminal,’ was echoed by Lenin at the III Congress of Communist Youth in 1919 when he said that everything is moral that promotes the victory of Communism. In 1918 he declared to Maria Spiridonova, the doyenne of terrorists and a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, that there was no room for morality in politics, only pragmatism.

Lenin adopted Marxism as a weapon, ‘freeing’ it of its ‘liberal’, ‘democratic’ trivialities, because the steel fist of the proletarian dictatorship had no need of gloves. Following the Bolsheviks’ forcible dispersal of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, Plekhanov, ‘the father of Russian Marxism’, could write in his last article: ‘The tactics of the Bolsheviks are the tactics of Bakunin, and in many cases those of Nechaev, pure and simple.’⁵⁰ The question of who were Lenin’s ideological forebears, therefore, is answered simply: he used anything and anyone if it helped him achieve his aim.

The Discovery of Marxism

There may be many reasons why Lenin became captivated by Marxism. In my opinion, his powerful and already extremely well informed mind was searching for a universal explanation of human existence. In any event, some time on the eve of 1889, when the family was still living in Kazan, he got hold of the first volume of Capital. It must have been a revelation simply in terms of the scale of its grasp, regardless of its rôle in history. Nietzsche once remarked on the ‘attraction of the distance’, and for the young Lenin, with his radical outlook, Capital’s historical distance captured his imagination, seeming to lead to the solution to all of life’s eternal and ‘accursed’ questions of justice, freedom, equality, oppression and exploitation. But who introduced Lenin to Marxism?

At the time he was expelled from university, there was a convinced young Marxist, called Nikolai Fedoseev, living in Kazan. Lenin was to meet him only once, nearly ten years later, when they were both on their way to exile in Siberia. Fedoseev had compiled a reading list for social democrats, and Lenin told Gorky in 1908, when they were together on Capri, that ‘it was the best reference book anyone had yet put together’, and that it had helped him find his way through political literature, opening the path for him to Marxism.⁵¹ Lenin’s first known writing was a piece written in 1893 called ‘New Economic Movements in Peasant Life’, in effect a review of V.E. Postnikov’s book The South Russian Economy.⁵² The article, which was unsigned, read like a schoolboy’s attempt at Marxist analysis. There is little of Lenin’s own ideas in it and it was rejected by the journal, Russkaya mysl’. He had greater success with a second review-article, also written in 1893 and similarly unsigned, called ‘On the So-called Question of Markets’, in which he contrasted Marxist and Populist (Narodnik) ideas on the development of capitalism in Russia, in effect arguing that ‘class’ and impersonal historic need had replaced the ‘critically thinking individual’. This article was also not published, but Lenin read it at a meeting of Marxist students in St Petersburg in the autumn of 1893, and received the praise of the engineering students present.

Lenin soon went beyond the guidelines of Fedoseev’s catalogue, and it is evident from his earliest, as well as his later, works that two main ideas in Marxism dominated his thinking: classes and class struggle, and the dictatorship of the proletariat. No other Marxist theorist took these concepts as far as Lenin, despite the fact that Marx had said very little about the dictatorship. As a social democrat, Lenin did not limit himself to commenting on and recapitulating the interpretations given by Marx and Engels, but formulated his own ‘classical’ definitions. For instance, on rural poverty, he asked, ‘What is the class war?’ and gave the answer, ‘It is the struggle of one part of the people against another, the mass of the rightless, oppressed and toiling against the privileged, oppressing and parasitic, it is the struggle of the workers or proletarians against the owners or the bourgeoisie’.⁵³ Like so many other thinkers and revolutionaries, Lenin would fall into the trap of thinking that it was only necessary to take everything from the ‘haves’ and redistribute it ‘fairly’ and all would be well. It was the eternal mirage. As the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev observed: ‘Many times in history the lower orders have risen up and tried to sweep away all hierarchical and qualitative differences in society and to install mechanical equality … But class is quantity and man is quality. Class warfare, elevated to an “idea”, conceals the qualitative image of man … Thus the idea of class kills the idea of man. This murder is carried out theoretically in Marxism …’⁵⁴

The context in which Lenin acquired his Marxism was the debate with romantic Populism. In one of his early works, ‘What is the Legacy we are Rejecting?’, he rightly criticized N.K. Mikhailovsky, one of the leading exponents of liberal Populism, for the Populist refusal to accept capitalism in Russia and for the Populist idealization of the peasant commune.⁵⁵ One can already detect in this article echoes that will soon become a hallmark of Leninist usage – ‘rubbish’, ‘slander’, ‘trivial trick’ – often as a substitute for real argument. It seems never to have occurred to Lenin to ask himself whether the dictatorship of the proletariat was compatible with the justice Marxism cherished as a fundamental idea. By what right should one class unconditionally command another? Could such a dictatorship achieve priority over the highest value, namely liberty?

Such questions did not trouble the young Lenin. When he accepted Marxism it was finally and irrevocably. He never questioned the socio-political concept of the doctrine, which was based in the last analysis on coercion as the solution to all contradictions in the interests of one class. He was never troubled by the viciousness and narrowness of this way of building the new society. It was not therefore surprising that when he became the ruler of that new society, his main preoccupation was with the punitive organs, the Cheka (the political police) and the State Political Administration, or GPU. Indeed, reading the minutes of Lenin’s Politburo after the seizure of power, it quickly becomes clear that there was scarcely a session that did not review measures for tightening the dictatorship of the proletariat – that is, the dictatorship of the Party – by widening the powers of the punitive bodies, legislating terror, ensuring the immunity of the new caste of ‘untouchables’ and the class ‘purity’ of its members. Thus, on 14 May 1921 the Politburo, with Lenin’s active encouragement, adopted a decision to widen the powers of the Cheka ‘in the use of the highest form of punishment’, i.e. the death penalty;⁵⁶ in January 1922 a further step was taken to strengthen the punitive function of the dictatorship and the guarantee of the ‘class line’ by the creation of the GPU, whose chief task was to struggle against counter-revolution using the widest range of physical and psychological force. And the courts ‘must include people chosen by the Cheka’.⁵⁷

As for the way these bodies were to act, Lenin himself set the style. When a cipher arrived from the Red Army in the Far East in August 1921 announcing the arrest of Baron Ungern von Sternberg, one of the leaders of the White forces in the Trans-Baikal region, Lenin personally raised the question of a trial at the Politburo. Naturally there were no objections, and he merely had to dictate the Politburo resolution as that of the highest Party tribunal: ‘The accusations must be sound, and if the proof is conclusive and beyond doubt, then a public trial should be set, conducted with the greatest despatch, and [Ungern] should be shot.’⁵⁸ So much for a ‘trial’!

Nikolai Fedoseev could never have dreamed that the young man he met briefly in a station waiting-room in Siberia in 1897, as their paths into exile crossed, would turn out to be a major figure in twentieth-century history. The correspondence between the two men leaves no doubt that it was Fedoseev who had, however imperceptibly, given Vladimir Ulyanov another shove in the direction of revolution. When Lenin heard in the summer of 1898 that Fedoseev had killed himself at Verkholensk in Eastern Siberia, he was genuinely saddened. The death of the exile was embellished by romantic tragedy when his fiancée, Maria Gofengauz, living at Archangel in forced settlement, and with whom Lenin was acquainted, also killed herself. Lenin often recalled Fedoseev warmly. Gorky wrote that on one occasion, when Fedoseev was mentioned, Lenin became animated and said excitedly that if he’d lived, ‘he’d no doubt have been a great Bolshevik’.⁵⁹

For Lenin, Marxism meant above all one thing, and that was revolution. It was the revolutionary message of the doctrine that attracted him in the first place. He absorbed its ideas and propositions as a convinced pragmatist, and was less interested in the early humanistic writings of Marx and Engels than he was in those concerned with the class struggle. He plunged into the Marxist world of categories, laws, principles, legends and myths, and regarded Plekhanov with reverence, which may explain why the ideas he drew from Marxism were free of a purely ‘Western’ vision of historical evolution. He was entranced by Plekhanov’s On the Monistic View of History, published under the pseudonym of N. Beltov, a book in which, Potresov wrote, the author ‘brought the ten commandments of Marxism down from Mount Sinai and handed them to the Russian young’, and, as Nicolaevsky echoed, ‘introduced the Russian intelligentsia, above all the students, who were the avant-garde of the revolutionary army at the time, to undiluted revolutionary Marxism’.⁶⁰ Plekhanov wrote that ‘Chernyshevsky never missed an opportunity to mock the Russian liberals and to state in print that … he … had nothing in common with them. Cowardice, short-sightedness, narrow views, inactivity and garrulous boastfulness, these were the distinguishing features he saw in the liberals’. Plekhanov had taken as the epigraph for his book an extract from a letter Chernyshevsky had written to his wife in October 1862 when he was in the Peter-Paul Fortress in St Petersburg: ‘Our life together belongs to history: in hundreds of years from now our names will still be dear to people, and they will remember them with gratitude …’⁶¹ Lenin must have felt an affinity with these words. He was not vain or ambitious, he simply believed in his historic mission. Plekhanov’s works brought Lenin still closer to Chernyshevsky, and finally led him to the social democratic Bible, the works of Marx.

Plekhanov and Lenin would part in due course for reasons usually ascribed to differences over organization. I believe that this was a secondary cause, and that the real reason for their split was over attitudes to liberty. As early as the end of the century, Lenin, like Chernyshevsky before him, was already defining the main enemies of the working class as liberalism and so-called ‘Economism’, a sort of Russian trade unionism which encouraged the workers to organize and fight for a better economic life, while the intelligentsia would struggle for their political and civil rights. In Lenin’s view, and that of his followers, the liberals and ‘Economists’, by leading the workers away from political struggle, were denying them the opportunity to aim for socialist revolution. The Marxism preached by Lenin and the Bolsheviks had no place for liberalism and ‘Economism’, which in fact held the key to democratic change in Russia. To the end of his life, Lenin was therefore sympathetic to the early Plekhanov and openly hostile to the later one, who was to call Lenin’s 1917 policy ‘delirious’. It is interesting to note that when in April 1922 the Politburo discussed the publication of Plekhanov’s works, Lenin insisted that only one volume be compiled, and only of his early, ‘revolutionary’ writings.⁶²

If Lenin was not fond of late Plekhanov, he positively hated the Plekhanov of the revolutionary era. Plekhanov had seen through Lenin, he understood the essence and the danger of his line. In his 1910 article ‘A Comedy of Errors’, published in his Dnevnik sotsial-demokrata, he wrote that ‘only Lenin could have gone so far as “to ask myself in which month we should begin the armed uprising …”’. Lenin’s plans, which boiled down to a seizure of power, Plekhanov called utopian.⁶³ And indeed, as soon as the Bolsheviks had power in their hands, they quickly forgot many of their slogans and promises. Power for Lenin was the goal and the means to bring about his utopian designs.

While absorbing Marxism from the writings of the doctrine’s founders, Lenin also took up ideas from a wide range of thinkers and writers, a fact suggesting perhaps a developed ability to comprehend and, by applying his own ‘ferment’, to absorb, digest and make those ideas his own. He was, however, never able to assimilate the ideas of the liberals, who proclaimed the rule of law, or the ‘Economists’, who wanted the workers to flourish, or the Western democrats, who put parliamentary government above all else. Lenin’s ‘discovery’ of Marxism was thus extremely selective; he saw in it only what he wanted to see. Even Trotsky, who after October 1917 and to the end of his days described himself as a Leninist, criticized Lenin at the turn of the century for his lack of ‘flexibility of thought’, his belittling of the rôle of theory, which could lead to a ‘dictatorship over the proletariat’.⁶⁴

By the turn of the century Lenin had acquired the conviction that, as far as his opponents were concerned, his theoretical position was unassailable, and henceforth he exhibited a rare hostility to everything that would not fit the Procrustean bed of his preconceptions. In a letter to Maxim Gorky in 1908 – the famous writer was a major benefactor of the revolutionary movement and had a close, if complex, relationship with Lenin after 1907 – on the philosophical work of the Bolshevik Alexander Bogdanov, Lenin wrote: ‘After reading it, I got into a rage and became unusually furious: it became clear to me that he has taken an arch-wrong path.’ He went on: ‘I became frenzied with indignation.’ What had made him so angry was that the Bolsheviks might draw their teaching on the dialectic ‘from the putrid well of some French “positivists” or other’.⁶⁵ His Marxism was, however, plainly one-sided, Blanquist, super-revolutionary. Like a man ‘with the truth in his pocket,’ Viktor Chernov, leader of the Socialist Revolutionaries, wrote, ‘he did not value the creative search for truth, he had no respect for the convictions of others, no feeling for the freedom that is integral to any individual spiritual creativity. On the contrary, he was open to the purely Asiatic idea of making the press, speech, the rostrum, even thought itself, the monopoly of a single party which he raised to the rank of a ruling caste.’⁶⁶

Marx and Engels were theorists. Lenin turned their teaching into a catechism of class struggle. As the writer Alexander Kuprin observed: ‘For Lenin, Marx was indisputable. There isn’t a speech in which he does not lean on his Messiah, as on the fixed centre of the universe. But there can be no doubt that if Marx were to look down from where he is on Lenin and his Russian, sectarian, Asiatic Bolshevism, he would repeat his famous remark, “Excuse me, monsieur, but I am no Marxist.”’⁶⁷

Nadezhda Krupskaya

Russian social democrats subordinated the moral side of their political programmes to the practical interests of the moment. Vera Zasulich, a leading member of the Russian social democratic movement, once remarked that Marxism had ‘no official system of morals’.⁶⁸ The proletariat and everyone who called themselves socialists valued above all solidarity and loyalty to the ideal: ‘Whatever serves Communism is moral.’ The Communists – the author of these lines included – saw wisdom of the highest order in this precept, not a fundamentally immoral approach which could be used to justify any crime against humanity along with the most trivial political malpractice. Such justification was made not only in the midnight of the Stalin era, but in the earlier years of the Soviet regime, and the later.

In November 1920, at the height of the civil war in Russia, the head of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, informed Lenin that ‘403 Cossack men and women, aged between fourteen and seventeen, have arrived without documentation in Orel from Grozny to be imprisoned in the concentration camp for rebellion. They cannot be accommodated as Orel is overcrowded.’⁶⁹ Lenin was not moved to halt the crime against ‘men and women aged between fourteen and seventeen’, and merely wrote ‘For the archives’ on the document, thus establishing the tradition that, no matter how callous, cruel and immoral an act of the regime might be, it would be recorded and stored in the archives for a history that would never be written as long as that regime lasted. The doctrine of force as a universal means was sufficient justification for such laconic gestures. From an early stage, Lenin had surrounded himself with people who were receptive to such an approach, energetic, bold and capable people whom he taught to be morally indiscriminate. The domestic Lenin was, however, rather different. Alexander Potresov, who saw him at close quarters between 1895 and 1903, wrote that ‘at home Lenin was a modest, unpretentious, virtuous family man, engaged in a good-natured, sometimes comic, daily war with his mother-in-law, the only person in his immediate environment who could stand up to him’.⁷⁰

Throughout his life, Lenin’s family circle consisted mostly of women: mother, sisters, wife and mother-in-law. In the absence of any children of his own, he himself was the constant object of their care and concern. He differed from his Party comrades in his puritanical restraint, steadiness and constancy, and would have been a model husband, had it not been for the ten-year relationship he began in 1909 with a lively woman revolutionary called Inessa Armand.

In none of the mass of writing about Lenin is there any mention of an affair of the heart in his youth. It appears that his preoccupation with books and revolutionary dreams left no room for the normal feelings that usually occupy the mind of any young man. There is no broken first marriage, no stormy romance, no love at first sight, no unhappy love affair. Yet there was something like an undying love. When he returned to St Petersburg in January 1894, Lenin established contacts, legal and illegal, with the local Marxists. With little to do, he was free to spend time with his new acquaintances. One day in February, at the apartment of an engineer called Klasson, a group of Marxists gathered in the cosy sitting-room, among them two young women, Apollinaria Yakubova and Nadezhda Krupskaya. At first, Lenin spent time with both of them, then he started visiting Nadezhda’s home on the Nevsky Prospekt on a more regular basis. Nadezhda lived with her mother, Yelizaveta Vasilievna, the widow of an army officer whose career had been cut short when he was cashiered for reading Chernyshevsky and Herzen, and who apparently belonged to the revolutionary organization Land and Freedom. He had been dismissed and even put on trial, then after several years of indecision was exonerated, but banned from public service. When he died, the family had moved to St Petersburg, where they lived on his pension. Nadezhda taught at a Sunday evening school for workers.

Her mother made tea while the young people talked about Plekhanov, Potresov, the book the young man – who was already quite bald – was writing, the need to establish contact with European social democrats. We do not know what Yelizaveta thought of her future son-in-law, except that she remained independent of him all her life, and was known to have been openly critical of ‘people who don’t do any real work’.⁷¹ The clever young man kept appearing at the apartment, but he seemed more interested in politics than in Nadezhda.

Lenin was also friends with Apollinaria Yakubova, and sometimes the three of them would go out together. When he was arrested in December 1895 for being part of a Marxist propaganda circle – an almost routine event for men of Lenin’s cast of mind at the time – both young women tried to visit him at the pre-trial prison on Shpalernaya Street. Lenin wrote Nadezhda a coded message, saying they should walk past the prison at 2.15 so that he could catch a glimpse of them through the window.⁷² It is difficult to establish the nature of the relations between these three young people, especially as the almost hundred-year-old ‘conspiracy’ about this area of their lives has destroyed almost any trace.

Apollinaria was a teacher, like Nadezhda, and a Marxist, and Lenin apparently proposed to her, but was rejected in favour of K.M. Takhtarev, the editor of the journal Rabochaya mysl’.⁷³ Also like Nadezhda, she was exiled to Siberia in 1896. She and Lenin maintained a correspondence, notably when Lenin was in Munich after 1900 and she was in London, in which he reminded her of their ‘old friendship’,⁷⁴ and they met several times in London in 1902 and 1903, where he was then living and working on his Party newspaper, Iskra. There is some evidence that, before Lenin became acquainted with Inessa Armand, he had an affair with a Frenchwoman in Paris. When Viktor Tikhomirnov, a researcher from the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, met the ex-Bolshevik émigré G.A. Alexinsky in Paris in 1935 to discuss some Lenin documents, Alexinsky showed him letters of an extremely personal nature that Lenin had written to a woman writer, and which the recipient preferred not to send to Moscow as long as Krupskaya was still alive. She was then living on a Soviet pension which she had been receiving via Dzerzhinsky and later Menzhinsky, successive heads of the Soviet secret police.⁷⁵ The letters remained in Paris and their whereabouts are now unknown.

Exile to remote parts of Siberia was the usual punishment for a wide range of activities regarded as seditious by the government, whether taking part in a Marxist study circle or fomenting a strike and joining a demonstration. After a series of interrogations in prison in the capital, therefore, Lenin was exiled for three years to Siberia under police surveillance in February 1897. He soon began to correspond with Krupskaya. At the same time, his mother launched a campaign of requests to the police on her son’s behalf, starting with an application to allow him to travel at his own expense, because of his poor state of health, followed by one asking them to delay his departure from the capital, then for him to stay in Moscow for a week as she herself was ill, then to extend his stay there, and so on. She also wrote to the governor-general of Eastern Siberia asking him to ‘allocate Krasnoyarsk or one of the southern towns of Yenisei province’ as her son’s place of exile, again because of his poor state of health. Lenin reinforced her efforts on his own behalf, advancing the same reason.⁷⁶ All of their requests, except one, were conceded by the ‘blood-stained tsarist regime’.⁷⁷ Lenin would not be so lenient when he came to power, even where former social democrat comrades were involved. In a note to Stalin dated 17 July 1922, he proposed that a number of them, including Potresov, be expelled from the country forthwith: ‘… several hundred of such gentlemen should be put across the border without mercy … Get the lot of them out of Russia.’⁷⁸ He believed in general that ‘repressions against the Mensheviks should be stepped up and our courts should be told to do this’.⁷⁹

How his attitudes had changed! Exile in Shushenskoe had been little more than an enforced three-year vacation. He had thought it normal to request a nicer place to live ‘in view of my poor health’, nobody made him do any work, he was under no restraints. Many other exiles, Julius Martov, for instance, thought it beneath their dignity as revolutionaries to beg for favours or a nicer place. Lenin, however, for all his ‘poor state of health’, wrote home to the family that ‘apart from hunting and swimming, most of my time is spent on long walks’.⁸⁰ He was also sleeping ‘extraordinarily long’, and although it was ‘impossible to find [domestic] help, and unthinkable in the summer’, he was ‘satisfied with the apartment and the food’, had ‘filled out and got a suntan’, and was living ‘as before, peacefully and unrebellious’. He compared his present abode favourably with Spitz, the Swiss resort where the family was then on holiday.⁸¹

The life of a political exile under the tsar was immeasurably easier than that installed by the Soviet regime, whose prisoners first had to build their own camps and then fill them. The tsar’s exiles – we are not speaking of prisoners, but of those expelled from European Russia and made to remain in a designated place for a period – could pay each other visits in different locations, arrange meetings, write books and political programmes, entertain their relations and even start families. In July 1897, for example, Lenin received an invitation to attend the wedding of his friends V.V. Starkov and A.M. Rozenberg, the sister of the Marxist organizer G.M. Krzhizhanovsky. Perhaps it was such an event that prompted the correspondence between Lenin and Nadezhda Krupskaya, who by then was herself in exile, for the same offence, in Ufa in the southern Urals. In January 1898, Lenin applied to the police department to allow his ‘fiancée’, Krupskaya, to continue her exile in Shushenskoe. Krupskaya recalled that she also requested transfer to Shushenskoe, ‘and for that reason I said I was his “fiancée”’.⁸² While a large number of Nadezhda’s letters to Vladimir seem to have been preserved, his letters to her appear not to have been.

At the beginning of May 1898, after a long journey by rail, boat and horse-drawn transport, Krupskaya arrived in Shushenskoe with her mother, who would accompany the couple wherever fate despatched them. According to Lenin, his future mother-in-law had barely set eyes on him before she exclaimed, ‘They really wanted you well out of the way, didn’t they?’⁸³ He wrote to his mother that Nadezhda had ‘imposed a tragi-comic condition: if we don’t get married right away (!), she’s off back to Ufa. I’m not at all disposed to go along with this, so we’ve already started having “rows” (mostly about applying for the papers without which we can’t get married).’⁸⁴

There were a number of formalities to be observed. Lenin applied to the Minusinsk district prefect and then to higher provincial authorities for the necessary papers, but old Russia had more than its fair share of bureaucracy, and nearly two months passed before the papers arrived. Nadezhda’s mother insisted they have the full religious ceremony, and despite the fact that Lenin was by now twenty-eight and Nadezhda a year older, and that both of them were long-standing atheists, they felt compelled to submit. Lenin invited a few exile-friends to the wedding, and on 10 July 1898 the modest ceremony took place, witnessed by two local peasants called Yermolaev and Zhuravlev. Congratulatory greetings arrived from Apollinaria, who was in exile near Krasnoyarsk. Also, on the very day of the wedding, the couple received a letter from Y. M. Lyakhovsky with the news that Fedoseev had committed suicide in Verkholensk, and had wanted Lenin to know that he had done so not with disappointment, but ‘wholehearted faith in life’.⁸⁵ Another letter arrived soon afterwards with the news that Fedoseev’s fiancée had also killed herself.

The Ulyanovs’ marriage, a union of two mature people, was itself mature, practical, quiet and devoid of either passionate love or emotional upheavals. Unlike her mother, Nadezhda was an obliging, even-tempered and balanced woman. Exceptionally intelligent and hard-working, she at once assumed her rôle as assistant to the man who was working hard, through his writing and contacts, to establish himself as a dominant force in the Russian Marxist revolutionary movement while still in Siberian exile. After the wedding, the couple moved from the house of a certain A.D. Zyryanov to that of a peasant woman called A.P. Petrova. Lenin’s work on his first major book, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, began to make more rapid progress. Between jaunts on the river, hunting and walking in the forest, he consumed a vast amount of economic, philosophical and historical literature, which was sent to order by his mother, Potresov and Pavel Axelrod, a close associate of Plekhanov’s. The first book he read in Shushenskoe was The World Market and the Agricultural Crisis by Alexander Helphand, who wrote under the alias of Parvus, and who would emerge in a far more significant rôle in Lenin’s life in later years.

Nadezhda settled straight away into serving as her husband’s workmate, helping him select material, rewriting passages, listening as he read her some of his chapters, though rarely offering critical comment. They were destined to be childless, though neither apparently ever confided their disappointment to anyone. Perhaps there was a clue in the letter he wrote to his mother from Pskov, having left Shushenskoe and Nadezhda temporarily: ‘Nadya must still rest: the doctor found, as she wrote to me a week ago, that her (woman’s) illness requires sustained treatment and that she must rest for 4–6 weeks (I sent her more money, I got 100 roubles from Vodovozova), as the treatment is going to cost quite a bit.’⁸⁶ Later, when they were abroad, Nadezhda contracted exophthalmic goitre, or Graves’ Disease, and had to undergo surgery. Lenin, again writing to his mother, reported that ‘Nadya was very poorly, very high temperature and delirium, and it gave me quite a scare’.⁸⁷ It is worth noting, perhaps, that between them, all of the Ulyanov siblings produced only two children – Dmitri had a son and a daughter, Olga, who is still alive at the time of writing (1994). Nadezhda says nothing about this in her memoirs, although occasionally she allows the pain of her personal unfulfilment to break through when describing the lives of others. She commented, for instance, that Vera Zasulich, with whom she was extremely close and who lived alone, missed not having a family: ‘She had an enormous need for a family. One had only to see how lovingly she played with Dimka’s fair-haired little boy.’⁸⁸ ‘Dimka’ was Lenin’s brother Dmitri, the sole parent of his generation of Ulyanovs.

Krupskaya’s prominent place in Soviet history is, obviously enough, explained by the fact that she was Lenin’s wife. It might be argued that she also played a part in her own right, as witnessed by the eleven editions of her collected writings on education that were published by 1963. But all of her ideas on Communist education were based on her husband’s comments, and do not merit special attention. Her memoirs, however, do have historical value, especially when she is dealing with Lenin’s last years and his illness. Her notes entitled ‘The last six months of the life of V.I. Lenin’, read together with the memoirs of Lenin’s sister Maria, give the fullest account of that fateful period, and draw aside the veil on many hitherto unknown details, though neither of these women could reveal everything they knew, and their most informative reminiscences remained under lock and key in the Party archives.⁸⁹

The marriage which began without strong love became closer over the years, but Nadezhda was in effect Lenin’s shadow, her life having meaning only because she was linked to him. When they went abroad, she soon adapted to the leisurely pace her husband set, as the letters Lenin wrote to his mother between 1900 and 1914 indicate: ‘I still follow my summer style of life, walking, swimming and doing nothing’; from Finland he wrote: ‘The rest here is wonderful, swimming, walks, no people around, nothing to do. Having no people around and nothing to do is best of all for me’; from France: ‘We’re going to Brittany for a holiday, probably this Saturday’; from Poland to his mother in Vologda: ‘It’s already spring here: the snow’s all gone, it’s very warm, we go without galoshes, the sun’s shining especially bright above Cracow, it’s hard to think that this is “wet” Cracow. Too bad you and Manyasha [Maria] have to live in that miserable dump!’⁹⁰

Inessa Armand

The telegram lay on the desk in front of Lenin, but he seemed unable to grasp its message, and had to read it several times: ‘Top priority. To Lenin, Sovnarkom, Moscow. Unable to save Comrade Inessa Armand sick with cholera STOP She died 24 September [1920] STOP Sending body to Moscow signed Nazarov.’⁹¹ The shock was all the greater because earlier that very day Ordzhonikidze, his emissary in the Caucasus, had told him that Inessa was fine, when Lenin had asked him to see that she and her son were being taken care of. Nor could he forget that it had been at his insistence that she went to the south for a rest. She had wanted to go to France, but he had dissuaded her. It was so absurd, so senseless. Why hadn’t the doctors been able to help? Why cholera? He was shattered. As Alexandra Kollontai, a senior Bolshevik who knew them both well, said later: ‘He could not survive Inessa Armand. The death of Inessa precipitated the illness which was fatal.’⁹²

Lenin had no close friends. It would be hard to find someone, apart from his mother, for whom he showed greater concern than Inessa Armand. In his last letter to her, around the middle of August 1920, he had written:

Dear friend,

I was sad to learn that you [he addressed her formally as Vy] are overtired and not happy with your work and the people around you (or your colleagues at work). Can’t I do something for you, get you into a sanatorium? I’ll do anything with great pleasure. If you go to France I will, of course, help with that, too: I’m a bit concerned, in fact I’m afraid, I’m really afraid you could get into trouble … They’ll arrest you and keep you there a long time … You must be careful. Wouldn’t it be better to go to Norway (where many of them speak Engish), or Holland? Or Germany as a Frenchwoman, a Russian (or a Canadian?). Best not to go to France where they could put you inside for a long time and are not even likely to exchange you for anyone. Better not go to France.

I’ve had a marvellous holiday, got tanned, didn’t read a line or take a single phone call. The hunting used to be good, but it’s been all ruined. I hear your name everywhere: ‘Things were all right with them here,’ and so on. If you don’t fancy a sanatorium, why not go to the South? To Sergo [Ordzhonikidze] in the Caucasus? Sergo will arrange rest, sunshine, interesting work, he can fix it all up. Think about it.

He signed off conventionally as ‘Yours, Lenin’.⁹³

Lenin had been hearing Inessa’s name everywhere because he was close to the Armand family estate in the village of Yeldigino in Moscow province. What there was to hunt in August is unclear.

On the same day he wrote, as head of the Soviet government: [To whom it may concern] ‘I request that you help in every way possible to arrange the best accommodation and treatment for the writer, Comrade Inessa Fedorovna Armand, and her elder son. I request that you give complete trust and all possible assistance to these Party comrades with whom I am personally acquainted.’⁹⁴ He also cabled Ordzhonikidze, asking him to put himself out over Inessa’s safety and accommodation in Kislovodsk, and ordered his secretaries to help see her off to the Caucasus. Although Russia was still enduring the civil war, the Bolshevik leadership were accustomed to frequent holidays. Hence Lenin could insist on the fateful trip.

For a decade, since they had met in Paris in 1909, Inessa Armand had occupied an enormous space in the life of a man whose dedication to the Great Idea left little or no room for anything else. She had succeeded in touching chords hidden deep in his near-puritanical heart. He had felt a constant need to be with her, write to her, talk to her. His wife did not stand in their way. As Alexandra Kollontai recalled in the 1920s, in conversation with her colleague at the Soviet legation in Norway, Marcel Body, Krupskaya was ‘au courant’. She knew how closely ‘Lenin was attached to Inessa and many times expressed the intention of leaving’, but Lenin had persuaded her to stay.⁹⁵

This appears to have been one of those rare triangles in which all three people involved behaved decently. Feelings of attachment and love do not readily lend themselves to rational explanation. If Lenin’s life was filled with the turbulence of politics and revolutionary activity, on the personal level it had been monotonous, flat, boring. Inessa entered his life in emigration like a comet. It is pointless to speculate what it was about her that attracted him. She was extremely beautiful, elegant and full of creative energy, and that was perhaps enough. Also, she was open and passionate about everything she did, whether it was caring for her children or the revolution or the routine Party jobs she was asked to do. She was an exceptional person, emotional, responsive and exciting. For all his old-fashioned views on family life, Lenin was unable to suppress the strong feelings she evoked in him. For the historian, however, it is as difficult to write about feelings as it is to try to convey in words the sound of a symphony.

In her later memoirs, Krupskaya often refers to Inessa, but usually in passing and in another context: ‘Inessa’s entire entourage lived in her house. We lived at the other end of the village and ate with everyone else’; ‘Vladimir Ilyich wrote a speech, Inessa translated it’; ‘all our people in Paris were then feeling strongly drawn to Russia: Inessa, Safarov and others were getting ready to go back’; ‘It was good to be busy in Serenburg. Soon Inessa came to join us’; ‘Our entire life was filled with Party concerns and affairs, more like student life than family life, and we were glad of Inessa.’⁹⁶ To Krupskaya’s credit, having once decided the tone of her relationship with Inessa, as a Party comrade, she never changed it. Inessa’s presence was an inevitability which she accepted with dignity. Occasionally, she abandons her own conventions and writes in greater detail: ‘For hours we would walk along the leaf-strewn forest lanes. Usually we were in a three-some, 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 autumn sunshine.’⁹⁷ It was perhaps during such walks that Inessa would talk about her origins, her parents and the dramas in her life.

She was born, according to the register of the 18th arrondissement, in Paris at 2 p.m. on 8 May 1874 at 63, Rue de la Chapelle, and was named Inessa-Elisabeth. She was the daughter of Theodore Stephan, a French opera singer aged twenty-six, and an English-French mother, Nathalie Wild, aged twenty-four, of no profession. Her parents were not married at the time of her birth,⁹⁸ but they legalized their relationship later at St Mary’s parish church in Stoke Newington, London. Inessa’s father died young, leaving his family of three small daughters penniless. Her mother became a singing teacher in London. The turning point in Inessa’s life was a trip to Moscow in 1879 with her grandmother and aunt, who taught music and French, and who together were capable of giving the girl a good education. The archives tell us little about her life, and the best Russian account so far to emerge is Pavel Podlyashchuk’s Tovarishch Inessa, first published in 1963 and revised with new material in 1987. This has been superseded by Ralph Carter Elwood’s Inessa Armand: Revolutionary and Feminist, published in 1992.

A gifted young woman, fluent in French, Russian and English, and an excellent pianist, Inessa became a governess. She took after her handsome father in looks, attracting the attention of a good many men, and in October 1893, at the age of nineteen, she married Alexander Evgenievich Armand, the son of a wealthy merchant. The wedding took place in the village of Pushkino, outside Moscow, in the presence of members of Moscow’s business élite, to which the Armands themselves belonged.⁹⁹

Everything seemed as it should in a successful, wealthy family. Inessa had a handsome, good husband, children, trips to the South and abroad. In the course of eight years she gave birth to five children, three boys and two girls. Despite her preoccupation with her family, she managed to read a great deal and was drawn to the social and political writings of Lavrov, Mikhailovsky and Rousseau. By the late 1890s she had also become seriously concerned with feminist issues, an interest she retained all her life. To all appearances, she was living in harmony with her husband, when suddenly, on the eve of the 1905 revolution, she left him, taking the children with her. She had been consumed by passion for another man, her husband’s younger brother Vladimir.

Everyone suffered in this great family drama, yet there were apparently no dreadful scenes, mutual recriminations or arm-twisting. Inessa was exercising her commitment to the principle of ‘free love’. Two weeks before she died in 1920 she would confide to her diary: ‘For romantics, love occupies first place in their lives, it comes before everything else.’¹⁰⁰ By this time she had come to see love with different eyes, but she was recalling herself as a younger woman, when her dramatic departure from the marital home shifted her life onto a completely unexpected course.

Her life with the young Vladimir did not last long. Since 1903 she had become involved in illegal propaganda activities on behalf of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in Moscow, and in 1907 she was arrested (for the third time) and exiled to the North above Archangel. Vladimir followed her, but he soon developed tuberculosis and went to Switzerland for treatment. There was, however, no cure to be found, and two weeks after she had fled from exile abroad to join him, at the beginning of 1909, he died.

With the financial help of her ever-tolerant husband, who was also caring for the children, Inessa, now aged thirty-five, enrolled to study economics at the New University in Brussels. In the same year, in Paris, she met Lenin, whose name was well known to her, as a member of the Party since 1903, and thereafter for a decade she occupied a special place in his life, as the voluminous correspondence between them shows. The official version has always insisted that their friendship, although personal, was essentially one of Party comrades, lacking any suggestion of intimacy. Unofficially, it was always believed that Lenin was simply ‘obliged’ to love only Krupskaya, and would never have lowered himself to the rôle of adulterer.*

We have already seen that the Party leadership learned in the 1930s that there was a female acquaintance of Lenin’s in Paris who possessed a number of his intimate letters to her, which she would not consent to have published while Krupskaya was alive. This woman had been receiving a generous pension from the Soviet government, thanks entirely to her earlier friendship with Lenin.

While many of Lenin’s letters to Armand concerning Party matters have been published, those of a more intimate nature appear either to have vanished or to have suffered cuts at the hands of his editors. The following lines were removed from a letter he wrote to her in 1914: ‘Please bring when you come (i.e. bring with you) all our letters (sending them by registered mail is not convenient: a registered letter can easily be opened by friends. And so on … ) Please bring all the letters, come yourself and we’ll talk about it.’¹⁰² In this letter Lenin used the familiar form of address, ty. This period was the peak of their friendship, and it is most likely that he wanted Inessa to bring him the letters so he could destroy them. Inessa’s Western biographer, Carter Elwood, is of the opinion that Lenin may have wanted her to bring the letters because they contained potentially embarrassing comments about fellow Bolsheviks.¹⁰³ Whatever the reason, there can be little doubt that theirs was a uniquely close friendship.

Krupskaya was Lenin’s loyal comrade, his uncomplaining wife and dedicated helper. As well as Graves’ Disease she had a weak heart, which was perhaps one reason why she was childless. The writer Ilya Ehrenburg is reputed to have said: ‘One look at Krupskaya, and you can see that Lenin wasn’t interested in women.’ This was not so. It is quite possible, moreover, that what Ehrenburg found unappealing might have brought Lenin warm comfort. In any event, once Lenin met Inessa, they were virtually inseparable. She followed the Ulyanovs everywhere, always finding lodgings nearby and meeting both Lenin and Krupskaya frequently. She became almost an integral part of their family relations, and, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn has noted perceptively, Krupskaya saw her task as ensuring Lenin’s peace of mind by always giving Inessa a warm and friendly reception.¹⁰⁴

Lenin and Inessa shared a deep feeling. They had their secrets, as Inessa herself wrote from Paris in December 1913 in a letter which, naturally, remained hidden in the archives as utterly unsuitable for the Party’s propaganda purposes. The Ulyanovs had been living in Cracow in Austrian Poland since October, remaining there until May 1914. The letter was a very long one, and we reproduce only extracts from it here. She uses the familiar form throughout:

Saturday morning.

My dear, Here I am in Ville Lumière and my first impression is one of disgust. Everything about the place grates – the grey of the streets, the over-dressed women, the accidentally overheard conversations, even the French language … It was sad that Arosa was so temporary, somehow transitory. Arosa was so close to Cracow, while Paris is, well, so final. We have parted, parted, you and I, my dear! And it is so painful. I know, I just feel that you won’t be coming here. As I gazed at the familiar places, I realised all too clearly, as never before, what a large place you occupied in my life, here in Paris, so that 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, though even then 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 it couldn’t cause pain to anyone. Why did I have to give that up? 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. [Krupskaya]. In one of our last chats she told me I had become dear and close to her only recently … Only at Longjumeau 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 …

In the last part of the letter, marked ‘Sunday evening’, Inessa writes at length about a forthcoming lecture she is to give, and asks:

When you write to me about business matters, give me some indication of what the KZO [the Committee of Russian Social Democratic Party Organizations Abroad] may talk about and what it may not …

Well, my dear, that’s enough for today, I want to send this off. There was no letter from you yesterday! I’m rather afraid my letters are not reaching you – I sent you three letters (this is the fourth) and a telegram. Is it possible you haven’t received them? I get the most unlikely ideas thinking about it. I’ve also written to N.K., to your brother, and to Zina [Zinaida Lilina, the wife of Zinoviev]. Has nobody received anything? I send you a big kiss.

Your Inessa.¹⁰⁵

The tone, eloquence and content of this letter leave little doubt about the nature of Inessa’s feelings. Her remark that she would be satisfied if she could just see Lenin, and that ‘it couldn’t cause pain to anyone’, places a question mark over Lenin’s reasons for leaving Paris in June 1912. Plainly Inessa’s presence in the Ulyanov family orbit had at first met Krupskaya’s natural resistance. The fact that the three-cornered relationship was not a simple one is evidenced by the frequent cuts in the letters made by various Soviet editors, tasked with maintaining Lenin’s purity. Many of these excised parts have simply vanished. Not all of them, however.

Lenin’s letter to Inessa of 13 January 1917, when he was still in Switzerland, was published in volume 49 of the fifth edition of his works. Following the words, ‘Dear friend,’ the following lines were removed: ‘Your latest letters were so full of sadness and evoked such gloomy thoughts in me and aroused such feelings of guilt, that I can’t come to my senses …’¹⁰⁶ The letter goes on in the same vein. Plainly, Lenin the puritan found the bond, which went well beyond platonic friendship, a hard one to bear. For Inessa too, accustomed as she was to yielding completely to her emotions, the secrecy and deceit were unbearable.

There are many such cuts in the ‘complete’ works. A week after the above letter, on 23 January 1917, Lenin wrote again:

Dear friend

… Apparently the lack of reply to several of my latest letters indicates – in connection with something else – a certain changed mood, a decision, your situation. At the end of your last letter a word was repeated twice. I went and checked. Nothing. I don’t know what to think, whether you are offended at something or were too distracted by the move or something else … I’m afraid to ask, as I know you don’t like questions, and so I’ve decided to think that you don’t like being questioned and that’s that. So, I’m sorry for [the questions] and won’t repeat them, of course.¹⁰⁷

This rigmarole could only be understood by the two people concerned, and plainly they had to take Krupskaya’s presence into consideration.

Lenin’s sojourn in Cracow was terminated on 26 July (8 August) 1914 when he was arrested in Nowy Targ on suspicion of spying. The authorities quickly released him, however, when a number of social democrats, notably Victor Alder in Vienna, but also Feliks Kon and Yakov Ganetsky, interceded, explaining that he was a sworn enemy of tsarism, with which Austria was now at war. Lenin’s two weeks in Austrian police custody became in Soviet historiography an act of vast revolutionary importance, for he was alleged to have spent the time ‘reflecting on the tasks and tactics now facing the Bolshevik Party; talking to imprisoned peasants, giving them legal advice on how to expedite their cases, writing requests and statements for them and so on’.¹⁰⁸

The Austrians did not yet realise that Lenin would become their ally. He hated both tsar and Kaiser, but, as he wrote to one of his trusted agents, Alexander Shlyapnikov, in October 1914, ‘tsarism is a hundred times worse than kaiserism’.¹⁰⁹ Yet even what they already knew about him prompted the Austrian authorities to cable the Nowy Targ prosecutor to ‘free Vladimir Ulyanov at once’.¹¹⁰ Within a couple of weeks Lenin and Krupskaya were in Zurich and shortly after in Berne, where Lenin was soon reunited with Inessa. According to the official version, he suggested she give lectures, ‘work to unite the left socialist women of different countries’, helped her prepare a publication for women workers, and even ‘criticized her outline of the brochure’, appointed her to take part in the International Socialist Youth Conference, and gave her a host of Party missions to perform. This version does not, however, report that she was a frequent visitor at the Ulyanovs, that they often went for walks together, that she played the piano for Lenin, and that she joined the couple on holiday in Serenburg.

It was here in Switzerland in March 1915 that Krupskaya’s mother died. As Krupskaya recalled, the old lady had wanted to return to Russia, ‘but we had no one there to look after her’. She had often quarrelled with Lenin, but on the whole they had maintained a civil relationship. ‘We cremated her in Berne,’ Krupskaya wrote. ‘Vladimir Ilyich and I sat in the cemetery and after two hours they brought us a metal jug still warm with her ashes, and showed us where to bury them.’¹¹¹ Yelizaveta Vasilievna nevertheless found her way back to Russia eventually: on 21 February 1969 the Central Committee Secretariat arranged for her ashes to be taken to Leningrad.

After Inessa had left for Paris, she and Lenin conducted a lively correspondence. He signed himself variously as ‘Ivan’, ‘Basil’, or sometimes even ‘Lenin’. Apart from their personal relationship, Lenin had come to rely on her in Party affairs to a considerable extent as well. In January 1917, for some reason, he decided Switzerland was likely to be drawn into the war, in which case, he told her, ‘the French will capture Geneva straight away … Therefore I’m thinking of giving you the Party funds to look after (to carry on you in a bag made for the purpose, as the banks won’t give money out during the war) …’¹¹²

In 1916 and 1917, up to the time Lenin left for Russia, he wrote to Inessa more often than to anyone else. When he heard about the February revolution, it was to her that he wrote first, and she was among those who left Switzerland for Russia, via Germany, in the famous ‘sealed train’. Her children were in Russia, and it was of them she was thinking as the train from Stockholm to Petrograd carried them on the last leg of the journey.

The revolution soon took its toll on Inessa. She had never been able to work at half-steam, and in Petrograd and later in Moscow she held important posts in the Central Committee and the Moscow Provincial Economic Council, and she worked without respite. In 1919 she went to France to negotiate the return of Russian soldiers, and she wrote for the newspapers. Her meetings with Lenin became less frequent; he was at the epicentre of the storm that raged in Russia. Occasionally, however, they managed a telephone conversation. His address book contained her Moscow address, which he visited only two or three times: 3/14 Arbat, apartment 12, corner of Denezhny and Glazovsky Streets, temporary telephone number 31436.¹¹³

Sometimes he rang or sent a note, such as the one he wrote in February 1920: ‘Dear Friend, I wanted to telephone you [the polite form] when I heard you were ill, but the phone doesn’t work. Give me the number and I’ll tell them to repair it.’¹¹⁴ On another occasion he wrote: ‘Please say what’s wrong with you. These are appalling times: there’s typhus, influenza, Spanish ’flu, cholera. I’ve just got up and I’m not going out. Nadia [Krupskaya] has a temperature of 39 and wants to see you. What’s your temperature? Don’t you need some medicine? I beg you to tell me frankly. You must get well!’¹¹⁵ He telephoned the Sovnarkom Secretariat and told them to get a doctor to see Inessa, then wrote again: ‘Has the doctor been, you have to do exactly as he says. The phone’s out of order again. I told them to repair it and I want your daughters to call me and tell me how you are. You must do everything the doctor tells you. (Nadia’s temperature this morning was 37.3, now it’s 38).’ ‘To go out with a temperature of 38 or 39 is sheer madness,’ he wrote. ‘I beg you earnestly not to go out and to tell your daughters from me that I want them to watch you and not to let you out: 1) until your temperature is back to normal, 2) with the doctor’s permission. I want an exact reply on this. (This morning, 16 February, Nadezhda Konstantinovna had a temperature of 39.7, now in the evening it’s 38.2. The doctors were here: it’s quinsy. They’ll cure her. I am completely healthy). Yours, Lenin. Today, the 17th, Nadezhda Konstantinovna’s temperature is already down to 37.3.’¹¹⁶

Volume 48 of the Complete Works contains a letter from Lenin to Inessa from which the following was cut: ‘Never, never have I written that I respect only three women! Never!! I wrote to you [familiar form] that my experience of the most complete friendship and absolute trust was limited to only two or three women. These are completely mutual, completely mutual business relations …’¹¹⁷ It seems certain he had Inessa and Krupskaya in mind. There had been other women, of course, who had left a fleeting trace in his heart: Krupskaya’s friend Yakubova, the pianist Ekaterina K., and the mystery woman in Paris with the pension from the Soviet government. The relations between Lenin, Krupskaya and Inessa were, as we have seen, both of a personal and a practical nature.

The revolution inevitably distanced Inessa from Lenin, although their feelings for each other remained strong. She was worn out by the privation, the burdens and the cheerless struggle. Not that she lost her revolutionary ideals or regretted the past, but at a certain point her strength began to flag. Lenin gave support occasionally, telephoning, writing notes, helping her children, but she felt he was doing so from habit. The Bolshevik leader no longer belonged to himself, or to Krupskaya, still less to her; he was completely possessed by the revolution. Sometimes his concerns were extraordinary, considering his Jacobin priorities: ‘Comrade Inessa, I rang to find out what size of galoshes you take. I hope to get hold of some. Write and tell me how your health is. What’s wrong with you? Has the doctor been?’¹¹⁸ He sent her English newspapers, and several times sent physcians to see her. By 1920, however, Inessa was utterly exhausted. She wrote to Lenin: ‘My dear friend, Things here are just as you saw them and there’s simply no end to the overwork. I’m beginning to give up, I sleep three times more than the others and so on …’¹¹⁹

An invaluable insight into Inessa’s mental state during her ‘restcure’ in the North Caucasus is provided by a diary which she kept in the last month of her life, and which by a miracle survives in the archives. The last, fragmented, hastily pencilled notes tell us more about their relationship than a thousand pages of Lenin’s biography:

1 September 1920. Now I have time, I’m going to write every day, although my head is heavy and I feel as if I’ve turned into a stomach that craves food the whole time … I also feel a wild desire to be alone. It exhausts me even when people around me are speaking, never mind if I have to speak myself. Will this feeling of inner death ever pass? I hardly ever laugh or smile now because I’m prompted to by a feeling of joy, but just because one should smile sometimes. I am also surprised by my present indifference to nature. I used to be so moved by it. And I find I like people much less now. I used to approach everyone with a warm feeling. 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 the work, all the springs of love have dried up in me, all my sympathy for people, which I used to have so much of. I have none left, except for V.I. and my children, and a few personal relations, but only in work. And people can feel this deadness in me, and they pay me back in the same coin of indifference or even antipathy (and people used to love me) … I’m a living corpse, and it’s dreadful!

The devastating sincerity of this self-analysis, this confession, almost suggests Inessa knew she had only three weeks to live. The little diary contains only four more entries. On 3 September she voices her concern for her children:

I’m weak in this respect, not at all like a Roman matron who would readily sacrifice her children in the interests of the republic. I cannot … The war is going to go on for a long time, at some point our foreign comrades will revolt … Our lives at this time are nothing but sacrifice. There is no personal life because our strength is used up all the time for the common cause …

On 9 September she returned to the theme of her first entry:

It seems to me that as I move among people I’m trying not to reveal my secret to them that I am a dead person among the living, a living corpse … My heart remains dead, my soul is silent, and I can’t completely hide my sad secret … As I have no warmth anymore, as I no longer radiate warmth, I can’t give happiness to anyone anymore …

On 11 September, just two weeks before her death, her last diary entry dwells once more on love, her favourite and eternal theme, and shows the influence Lenin had had on her life. They loved each other, but he had managed to persuade her that ‘proletarian interests’ took priority over personal feelings. She wrote:

The importance of love, compared to social life, is becoming altogether small, it cannot be compared to the social cause. True, in my own life love still occupies a big place, it makes me suffer a lot, and takes up a lot of my thoughts. But still not for a minute do I cease to recognize that, however painful for me, love and personal relationships are nothing compared to the needs of the struggle …’¹²⁰

If there were other entries, they were either lost or censored. There is evidence that some pages were torn out of the diary.

It was some time before Inessa’s body could be brought to Moscow, and the archives contain a file of telegrams between the capital and Vladikavkaz. The Central Committee became involved, and Lenin himself demanded that the body be sent to Moscow as soon as possible. There were no suitable goods vans. A death was nothing unusual at that time – people were being buried without coffins. But Moscow was demanding a railcar and a coffin. As long as the local authorities were not threatened with revolutionary justice, they could not find a railcar. Inessa died on 24 September 1920, but her body did not reach Moscow until 11 October.

In a large, ugly lead coffin (not open, as she had been dead for some time), she lay in state in a small hall in the House of Soviets. Only a few people came. Some wreaths had been laid, including one of white hyacinths, with a ribbon inscribed ‘To Comrade Inessa from V.I. Lenin’.¹²¹ At the burial at the Kremlin wall the next day, Lenin was almost unrecognizable. Angelica Balabanova, a Comintern official and seasoned revolutionary, was there: ‘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 the dead comrade.’¹²² Witnesses recalled that he looked as if he might fall. His sad eyes saw nothing, his face was frozen in an expression of permanent grief.

Lenin saw that Inessa was given a proper, if modest, tombstone. Inessa’s family now had no one, and to Lenin’s credit, as long as he was healthy, he (and Krupskaya, when he too was dead) did what he could to get Inessa’s five children back on their feet. In December 1921, for instance, Lenin cabled Theodore Rothstein, a former émigré who had returned to Russia in 1920 after twenty years in England, where he had been involved in forming the Communist Party of Great Britain, and was now a Comintern official: ‘I request that you do something for Varya Armand [Inessa’s youngest daughter] and if necessary send her here, but not alone and with a warm dress …’¹²³

Inessa had died tragically early, but she had been prepared for such an eventuality. In February 1919 she went with a Russian Red Cross delegation to France to work among the remnants of the Russian Expeditionary Corps being held there. She wrote to her elder daughter, known as Little Inessa (Inusya):

Here I am in [Petrograd] … We spent the night here and are now moving on … I’m enclosing a letter for Sasha, another for Fedya [her sons] and a third one for Ilyich. Only you are to know about this last one. Give the first and second ones to them straight away, but keep the third one yourself for the time being. When we get back I’ll tear it up. If something happens to me (not that I think there’s any special danger about this trip, but anything can happen on the journey, so just in case), then you must give the letter personally to VI. II. The way to do it is to go to Pravda where Marya Ilyinichna [Lenin’s sister] works, give her the letter and say that it’s from me and is personal for V.I. Meanwhile, hang onto it … It’s sealed in an envelope.’¹²⁴

Inessa returned to Moscow in May 1919, and the contents of that letter to Lenin has joined the other secrets of their relationship. Whatever they may have been, we can say with certainty that Inessa had been perhaps the brightest ray of sunshine in his life.

Financial Secrets

Some ‘professional revolutionaries’ lived quite well. One would search the Soviet sources in vain for any account of where Lenin and his family found the money to live on after their father died, yet they could travel abroad almost at will, and lived in Germany, Switzerland and France. For seventeen years Lenin lived in the capital cities of Europe and stayed in some of the most congenial resorts. What was the source of the funds that he needed not merely for his activities as leader of the Bolsheviks, but also for ‘doing nothing’?

The Bolsheviks had a rule that only the highest Party authorities should know the details of the Party’s finances; often only the General Secretary himself. Millions of Communists – as they called themselves after October 1917 – dutifully paid their dues without the least notion of where their money was going. Not even the government knew how much was being spent on ostentatious Party occasions such as congresses, support for foreign Communist Parties and illegal groups, and funding Comintern right up to 1943. The Central Committee reviewed the budget for Comintern annually. For instance, on 20 April 1922 the Politburo accepted a forecast budget of 3,150,600 gold roubles for Comintern activities for the year. There was no discussion, despite the fact that other complex matters of state expenditure were on the agenda, such as reparations which Soviet Russia had agreed to pay to Poland under the terms of the Treaty of Riga, and the allocation of gold to the intelligence services for special purposes.¹²⁵ A week later, Zinoviev, as chairman of Comintern, tabled a paper on the budget, and the previous week’s forecast was revised upwards by a further reserve of 400,000 gold roubles as a first instalment. Zinoviev explained that he needed 100,000 gold roubles at once ‘for agitation among the Japanese troops’.¹²⁶ The passion for financial secrecy was, however, born long before, and it extended to the official account of Lenin’s early life as well.

Hired in January 1892 as an assistant to the barrister A.N. Khardin, the young Ulyanov stuck the job for barely eighteen months. He acted as defence counsel in a few cases, mostly of petty theft – personal items from a merchant’s suitcase, bread from a warehouse – in his own words barely enough ‘to cover the selection of court papers’. At the time of the revolution of 1917, Lenin, aged forty-seven, had spent all of two years in paid work. How was the impression formed in the Soviet public mind that, contrary to the ‘materialistic philosophy of history’, questions of Lenin’s everyday life and existence counted for nothing alongside the worldwide issues of the revolution? The first historian to raise the question of Lenin and money was the émigré and former Bolshevik and Menshevik Nikolai Valentinov, who based the various accounts he published, mostly after the Second World War, on first-hand knowledge and scrupulous research.

After the death of Ilya Ulyanov, his widow, as the widow of a State Counsellor and holder of the Order of Stanislav First Class, received a pension of 100 roubles a month. This compares with the eight roubles a month that Lenin received from the state as an exile in Shushenskoe, and that he found adequate for rent, simple food, and laundry.¹²⁷ Could all the Ulyanovs have lived on their mother’s pension, even though it was a good one by contemporary standards, and study, travel, go abroad? She went abroad herself three times, to Switzerland, France and Sweden, on two occasions with her daughter Maria. And Maria in addition went abroad five times, sometimes for lengthy periods. The elder daughter, Anna, also went abroad several times, staying in Germany and France for almost two years. Tickets, hotels, food, purchases and unforeseen expenses on long trips, all took considerable funds, certainly more than the pension would stand. Anna and Maria and Lenin’s wife all testified that they lived on the mother’s pension and on what their father had managed to save in his lifetime. But this does not square with the reality, and Krupskaya herself says so: ‘They are writing about our lives as if we were in penury. It’s not true. We were never in the position of not being able to afford bread. Were there such people among the émigrés? There were some who had had no income for two years and got no money from Russia, and they really starved. We were not like that. We lived simply, that’s the truth.’¹²⁸

Neither in Russia nor abroad did Lenin suffer deprivation. He lived on his mother’s resources, his ‘Party salary’, the donations of various benefactors at various times. Pamphlets and articles printed for illegal distribution inside Russia earned precious little, while the émigré market for such works was scarcely more rewarding. His mother owned part of the estate at Kokushkino which the family had put at the disposal of a certain Anna Alexandrovna Veretennikova, who paid Lenin’s mother her admittedly not very large share of the rent regularly. The sale of the estate helped to fill the family’s coffers. In February 1889 Lenin’s mother acquired a farm at Alakaevka in Samara province. Her agent for the purchase was Mark Yelizarov, Anna’s future husband. For 7500 roubles the family had acquired just over 200 acres, much of it non-arable. The original intention had been to carry on a farming business, with Vladimir in charge, and in fact in their first year they acquired some livestock, and sowed some wheat, buckwheat and sunflowers. But Vladimir soon became bored as ‘farm manager’, and began, in Nikolai Valentinov’s words, ‘to live on the farm like a carefree squire staying at his summer home. He would ensconce himself in the lime-tree avenue and prepare for the state exams at St Petersburg University, study Marxism and write his first work, an article called “New Economic Movements in Peasant Life”.’¹²⁹ The article describes the exploitation of peasants and land, criticizes many of the ills of capitalism in the countryside, such as money-lending, leasehold, the increasing number of ‘kulaks’, or rich peasants. Yet when Lenin was put off by his own experience of farming, the family leased out land to a kulak, one Mr Krushvits, who paid rent to the Ulyanovs for several years, substantially supplementing their income.

There may have been another reason for leasing out the land. The peasants of the region were extremely poor, and those around Alakaevka especially so. Numbering thirty-four households, together they had about 160 acres of arable, roughly the same as the Ulyanovs. Farming in the midst of such appalling poverty may have been felt by the budding Marxist as an uncomfortable moral position, especially as he himself had sued his peasant neighbours for letting their cattle wander onto his crops. None of this prevented the family from summering at Alakaevka every year, reminding Krushvits of his responsibilities, and collecting their rent. Eventually it was decided to sell the farm, and a document composed by Vladimir in his mother’s name shows the sale having been made to S.R. Dannenberg in July 1893.¹³⁰

Maria Alexandrovna had evidently decided it was better to realize her assets and keep the money in the bank, together with what she had been given by her late husband’s brother, and live on the interest. Meanwhile, no one in the family was earning anything. Vladimir soon gave up legal practice, and Anna, Dmitri and Maria were long-term students, and showed no inclination to supplement the family income. As Valentinov wrote: ‘the money deposited in the bank and converted into state bonds, together with the pension, constituted a special “family fund”, which Lenin’s very thrifty mother capably managed over many years. They all dipped into this fund … They certainly were not rich, but over this long period there was enough …’¹³¹ Enough, for instance, for Vladimir to be able to write to his mother from Geneva: ‘I had hoped Manyasha [Maria] would come … but she keeps putting it off. It would be good if she came in the second half of October, as we could pop down to Italy together … Why can’t Mitya [Dmitri] also come here? Yes, invite him, too, we’ll have a great time together.’¹³²

Such a secure material environment must have played a significant part in Lenin’s intellectual development, enabling him to run his own life, decide for himself where to live, where to go, what to do. Had he been the ‘proletarian’ some authors would have liked him to be, his position among the leaders of the Russian social democratic movement would have been immeasurably less important. He would not have had time for self-education, literary work or Party ‘rows’.

After the failure of the 1905 revolution, when revolutionaries – including Lenin – who had returned hopefully from Europe now had to retrace their steps, an important source of support for Lenin and Krupskaya in their various stopping-places was the Party fund, a source that was never revealed in published documents, but whose existence Lenin himself confirmed in a letter to his mother in 1908: ‘I still get the salary I told you about in Stockholm.’¹³³ In fact, references to money abound in Lenin’s voluminous correspondence with his mother and sisters, usually reporting that he had received a draft, or asking for money to be sent urgently, and so on.¹³⁴

Another, and rather more bountiful, source of income was the Party. The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) was set up, rather shakily, at its First Congress in 1898 by a handful of provincial organizers. It was quickly decimated by the police, but its name remained as the banner for whoever was capable of gathering revolutionary-minded workers and intellectuals for the purpose of building a large and powerful revolutionary party. In February 1900, as soon as he had completed his term of exile in Siberia, Lenin departed for Europe, where he launched a newspaper, Iskra (The Spark), and began recruiting his own agents. These he sent back into Russia, both to distribute his message via Iskra and to obtain the allegiance of local forces.

By 1903 it seemed Lenin and his closest comrades had gathered sufficient backing to hold a new Party Congress, called the Second, for the sake of keeping the already well established name. This took place in the summer of 1903 in Brussels, moving to London when the Russian secret police proved too intrusive. Far from consolidating the Party’s forces, however, the Second Congress witnessed their split into Leninists and anti-Leninists, or Bolsheviks (Majorityites) and Mensheviks (Minorityites). These new labels came about as the result of one particular vote which gave Lenin a minuscule majority.

In the period following this fiasco, with the resulting contest for various resources and Party assets such as printing facilities and, especially, money, Lenin had to devote a great deal of attention to establishing his own, Bolshevik, fund. He needed it to maintain his ‘professional revolutionaries’, to conduct meetings and congresses, support his own publishing activities, and finance agitation inside Russia. The ‘professional revolutionaries’ of course knew about this fund, which in the final analysis Lenin personally controlled, since he was the creator of the Bolshevik wing of the Party, as well as its ideologist and chief organizer. For instance, Lev Trotsky, who was then on very bad terms with Lenin, wrote in June 1909 to his brother-in-law Lev Kamenev, who was Lenin’s right-hand man: ‘Dear Lev Borisovich, I have to ask a favour which will give you no pleasure. You must dig up 100 roubles and cable it to me. We’re in a terrible situation which I will not describe: enough to say that we have not paid the grocer for April, May, June …’ Kamenev left it up to Lenin to decide whether or not to provide Trotsky with the money, but there is no indication of the outcome.¹³⁵

At times the Bolsheviks had very considerable funds at their disposal, some of it legitimate in origin, some of it not. Some came from local Party committees in Russia, who in turn gathered it from their members and supporters: on the eve of the 1905 revolution, there were probably 10,000 paid-up members of the Party altogether. In his memoirs, the former Bolshevik A.D. Naglovsky wrote that in the summer of 1905 he was sent by the Kazan committee to Geneva to hand over 20,000 roubles to Lenin and await instructions.¹³⁶ In fact, the origins of such money were tortuous. Lenin himself frankly admitted after the revolution: ‘The old Bolshevik was right when he explained what Bolshevism was to the Cossack who’d asked him if it was true the Bolsheviks stole. “Yes,” he said, “we steal what has already been stolen.”’¹³⁷

At the 4th Congress of the RSDLP in 1906, at which the two factions were meant to have reunited, a fierce struggle took place between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks over whether such ‘expropriations’ in the interests of the revolution should be countenanced. The Bolsheviks proposed that armed raids on banks be allowed. The Mensheviks opposed this vigorously, and succeeded in passing their own resolution. Nevertheless, the robberies continued, with Lenin’s knowledge. Krupskaya, who was well informed on the subject, wrote frankly that ‘the Bolsheviks thought it permissible to seize tsarist treasure and allowed expropriations’.¹³⁸ At the centre of this bandit venture stood the Bolsheviks Iosif Dzhugashvili (Stalin) and Semyon Ter-Petrosyan (Kamo). The operation was run by Leonid Krasin, a highly qualified electrical engineer.

The biggest ‘expropriation’ took place at midday on 26 July 1907 on Yerevan Square in Tiflis (Tbilisi), Georgia. As two carriages carrying banknotes to the bank entered the square, a man in an officer’s uniform jumped out of a phaeton and starting shouting orders. From nowhere, a gang of ‘expropriators’ emerged, throwing bombs and firing shots. Three people fell dead by the carriages, and many more were wounded. Sacks containing 340,000 roubles were rapidly thrown into the phaeton, and in three or four minutes the square was deserted.¹³⁹

The stolen banknotes were of large denominations, and the Bolsheviks were not able to convert them all even by the time of the revolution. Those who attempted to do so, as Krupskaya recalled, were arrested. ‘In Stockholm they picked up Strauyan of the Zurich group, in Munich, Olga Ravich of the Geneva group and Bogdasaryan and Khodzhamiryan who had just left Russia, and Semashko in Geneva. The Swiss burghers were terrified to death. All they could talk about was the Russian expropriators.’¹⁴⁰ The Tiflis operation was the most ambitious of all those carried out by the radical wing of the RSDLP. Other ‘expropriations’ included the seizure of large sums from the steamship Nikolai I in the port of Baku, and the robbery of post offices and railway ticket offices. Officially, the Bolshevik Centre was not involved, but part of the loot was sent by Dzhugashvili and Ter-Petrosyan to the Bolsheviks,¹⁴¹ and Lenin paid small ‘Party salaries’ – sums ranging from 200 to 600 French francs – to the dozen or so members of his inner Party nucleus, the Bolshevik Centre.¹⁴²

There are many unpublished documents in the Lenin archives concerning financial affairs, some of them requiring careful deciphering. One thing is clear enough, however: Bolshevik money was under Lenin’s control. He taught himself to handle money and to keep all kinds of bills and invoices, and detailed lists of his own expenses, often of trivial amounts. There is, for instance, a ‘personal budget’ for 3 July 1901 to 1 March 1902, running to thirteen pages.¹⁴³ Money figures in much of his correspondence with the family. His earnings from the pamphlets and newspaper articles he wrote for the revolutionary press formed a small, if not negligible, part of Lenin’s income, as his literary output was of interest to only a few people. It was his family and Party ‘injections’ taken from the donations of rich sympathizers that supported him.

Formally, Lenin stood aside from the ‘expropriations’, preferring, as in many of his ventures, to remain off-stage. His speeches and editorials, whether published in his own weekly, Proletarii, founded in 1906, or in other revolutionary organs, however, reveal a more ‘balanced’ position on the ‘expropriations’ than a simple prohibition. For instance, six months after the 4th Congress, which had condemned ‘partisan actions’, he wrote: ‘When I see social democrats proudly and smugly declaring, “We are not anarchists, we’re not thieves or robbers, we are above all that, we condemn partisan warfare,” I ask myself if these people realize what they are saying.’¹⁴⁴ He had earlier stated that the combat groups must be free to act, but with ‘the least harm to the personal safety of ordinary citizens and the maximum harm to the personal safety of spies, active Black Hundreds, the authorities, the police, troops, the navy and so on and so forth.¹⁴⁵ The Black Hundreds were ultra-rightist organizations, with such names as the Union of Russian Men, the Russian Monarchist Union, the Society for Active Struggle against Revolution and Anarchy. Rabidly anti-Semitic and anti-Western, they organized virulent press campaigns, as well as violent physical attacks, against the liberal and socialist movements.

In 1911, Kamo (Ter-Petrosyan) was in Lenin’s sitting-room in Paris, eating almonds and recounting the details of his arrest in Berlin in 1907, when the authorities had caught him trying to transport explosives and weapons. He had spent the last four years in prison in Germany, feigning insanity. Krupskaya recalled that ‘Ilyich listened and felt so sorry for this selflessly brave, childishly naive man with such a burning heart, willing to do great deeds … during the civil war Kamo found his niche and again performed miracles of heroism.’¹⁴⁶ Kamo did not know that he and his ilk were merely blind tools of the Bolshevik Centre, needed to acquire money ‘for the revolution’ by whatever means. For the Bolsheviks violence and ‘exes’ were part of a wide range of methods to be used as the need arose. It is likely, however, that the ‘exes’ were one of the main sources of the Party’s pre-revolutionary funds, under the control of Lenin’s trustees Krasin, Bogdanov, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Ganetsky and a few others. This explains how his mother’s ‘injections’ into her son’s personal budget were regularly topped up by his ‘Party salary’, which though not great, was no less than the average wage of a European worker. According to Valentinov, the maximum Party salary for the Bolshevik leaders was fixed at 350 Swiss francs.¹⁴⁷ This was the amount Lenin stated he received every month, while not declining the money his mother went on sending him right up to her death in 1916.

A major source of funding, both to the Party coffers and for Lenin’s personal needs, came from private benefactors. At the turn of the century the Russian social democrats, like the liberals, enjoyed a certain degree of sympathy, not only from sections of the intelligentsia, but also from a number of industrialists, who looked to the revolutionaries for liberation from the conservative attitudes of the autocracy. The relationship sometimes took on bizarre form. The ‘N. Schmidt affair’, for instance, sometimes seemed like a detective story, and even now aspects of it are unclear, as the papers relating to the case were carefully concealed for many years. The official version has always been that the ‘affair’ took place for the good of the Bolshevik cause. In Krupskaya’s words, the funds which came from this source provided a ‘sound material base’.¹⁴⁸

The Schmidt affair began with the millionaire Savva Morozov, the head of a large merchant dynasty in Moscow. His relatives were known as patrons of the arts and social enterprises. One was a celebrated collector of ceramics, while another collected rare Russian and foreign paintings. Both collections ended up as Soviet state property. The Morozovs built hospitals, founded courses to eradicate illiteracy, supported theatres. The well-known newspaper Russkie vedomosti (Russian News) depended on Savva Morozov’s largesse for many years. At the beginning of the century, under the influence of Maxim Gorky, he gave money to publish the social democratic paper Iskra and to help social democratic organizations. His motivation was probably less social than religious or spiritual, expressing a desire to support not only culture but also the oppressed. A somewhat confused individual, his mind haphazard and unstable, he was terrified of going insane, and in Cannes in May 1905, in a moment of deep depression, he killed himself. Through Gorky, he left a large amount in his will to the Bolsheviks – 100,000 roubles, according to some sources.

Savva’s nephew, Nikolai Pavlovich Schmidt, owned a large furniture factory in Moscow, and also supported the social democrats. During the armed uprising in Moscow in December 1905 he was arrested for supporting the ‘insurgents’, and in February 1907, aged twenty-three, he killed himself in prison in suspicious circumstances. It is still unclear why he should have done this, just before he was to be released on his family’s surety. In any event, he left part of his estate to revolutionary causes, although not exclusively to the Bolsheviks. According to the law, his estate should have gone to his two sisters, Yekaterina and the sixteen-year-old Yelizaveta, and a younger brother, but then two of Nikolai’s young Bolshevik acquaintances, Nikolai Andrikanis and Viktor Taratuta, entered the scene.

It seems that these two had been deputed to ensure that Nikolai’s money came to the Bolsheviks. Their assignment was to court, conquer and marry the girls, nothing less. Taratuta, whom Lenin knew well, and his comrade performed their rôles to perfection, and both girls were swept away by the romance of ‘preparing for revolution’ in Russia. Soon, however, Andrikanis began having second thoughts about handing over the inheritance to the Party. Lenin wrote (the text in the archive is in the hand of Inessa Armand) that ‘one of the sisters, Yekaterina Schmidt (married to Mr Andrikanis), questioned giving the money to the Bolsheviks. The conflict was settled by arbitration in Paris in 1908, with the good offices of members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party … The judgment was that the Schmidt money should go to the Bolsheviks.’¹⁴⁹ In 1909 the two newly married couples arrived in Paris.

Andrikanis, however, would only part with a small amount. When it was decided that he should be ‘tried’ by a Party court, he simply left the Party, which had to be content with the crumbs ‘Person X’, as he was codenamed, had deigned to cast its way.¹⁵⁰ In order to act before the funds of the younger sister, Yelizaveta (who was still a minor, and whose financial affairs were in the hands of a trustee), were also cut off, a session of the Bolshevik Centre was held in Paris on 21 February 1909. Zinoviev, who took the minutes, recorded: ‘In January 1908 Yelizaveta X told the Bolshevik Centre … that in carrying out her brother’s will as correctly as possible, she considered herself morally obliged to give the Bolshevik Centre the half-share of her brother’s property that had come to her legally. That half, which she inherited by law, includes eighty-three shares in Company X and about 47,000 roubles of available capital.’ The document is signed by N. Lenin, Grigorii (Zinoviev), Marat (V. Shantser), V. Sergeev (Taratuta), Maximov (A. Bogdanov), Y. Kamenev.¹⁵¹

It was agreed that the money should be transferred after sale of the shares. In November, Taratuta and Yelizaveta came back to Paris and handed Lenin more than a quarter of a million francs. By now the Bolsheviks had received more than half a million francs, as documents written and signed by Lenin indicate: ‘In accordance with the decision and calculations of the executive commission of the Bolshevik Centre (plus the editorial board of Proletarii) of 11 November 1909, I have received from Ye. X. two hundred and seventy thousand nine hundred and eighty four (275,984) francs.’¹⁵² He issued a receipt to Yelizaveta and Taratuta, stating: ‘We, the undersigned, acting in the matter of the money with power of attorney from Comrade Vishnevsky, in concluding the case conducted by the entire Bolshevik Centre, and in taking over the remainder of the money, accept before you the obligation to answer to the Party collegially for the fate of this money. Signed N. Lenin, Gr. Zinoviev.’¹⁵³

This was not the end of the affair. After various vain attempts to reunite the Party, the Mensheviks raised the question of uniting the Party funds. The question was, who was to control the capital, which of course contained more than just the Schmidt inheritance. After long and heated argument, it was agreed in 1910 that the Party’s resources be handed over to three depositors, the well-known German social democrats Clara Zetkin, Karl Kautsky and Franz Mehring, and in due course a substantial part was deposited in a bank under their names. But the reunification turned out to be a fiction, with the Party carrying on its in-fighting as before. The trustees found themselves pressured and accused by both wings of the Party, as only they had the authority to disburse the money. Lenin demanded they hand all the money back to the Bolshevik Centre. Kautsky replied, on 2 October 1911: ‘Comrade Ulyanov, I have received your letter. You will receive a reply once I have consulted Madame Zetkin and Mr Mehring. You probably know that he has retired as a depositor owing to illness. As a result of this, the depositors can take no decision if there is a difference of opinion.’ He added a postscript: ‘My work is suffering from the great waste of time and energy spent on this hopeless matter. Therefore I can no longer continue my functions. With Party greetings, K. Kautsky.’¹⁵⁴

Clara Zetkin tried to break the deadlock by suggesting that all the money be returned as the property of the entire Party. A tug-of-war ensued, involving lawyers, long drawn-out correspondence, and caustic comments addressed to the depositors. In a letter to G.L. Shklovsky on Zetkin’s position, Lenin wrote: ‘“Madame” had lied so much in her reply, that she’s got herself even more confused …’¹⁵⁵ The case went to court, and a typical letter from Krupskaya, written on 23 May 1912 under Lenin’s instructions, to their lawyer, a certain Duclos, reads:

Sir,

My husband, Mr Ulyanov, has left for a few days and has asked me to acquaint you with the enclosed documents. A letter from the three depositors dated 30 June 1911. A memorandum from the manager of the National Bank’s agency in Paris dated 7 July 1911 concerning the despatch of a cheque to Mrs Zetkin for the sum of 24,455 marks and 30 Swedish bonds. A decision of the RSDLP of January 1912 concerning the sum held by Mrs Zetkin.

Signed N. Ulyanova.’¹⁵⁶

Zetkin held her ground, handing out some money for various meetings, and the row only subsided after the First World War had intervened. The money at issue, however, was the smaller part of the Schmidt inheritance, the greater part having remained all the time in the hands of the Bolshevik Centre, i.e. Lenin’s, as the chief controller of the Party’s finances. In August 1909, for instance, he sent an order to the National Discount Bank in Paris to sell stock held in his name and to issue a cheque for 25,000 francs to A.I. Lyubimov, a member of the Bolshevik Centre.¹⁵⁷ Thus, the true ‘depositor’ of the Party funds was Lenin himself, and to a great extent the Bolsheviks in emigration depended financially on him.

The Mensheviks, fully aware of the murky background of the Schmidt affair, tried to depict Taratuta as a ‘Party pimp’ who was securing Lenin’s finances by sleazy methods. When Taratuta complained about attacks on him by Bogdanov – another member of the Bolshevik Centre, but by now Lenin’s rival – Lenin secured a special resolution of the Bolshevik Centre, amounting to a Party indulgence and emphasizing that what had happened ‘in no way evokes the slightest weakening of the trust the Bolshevik Centre has in Comrade Viktor [Taratuta]’.¹⁵⁸ After 1917 Taratuta continued to enjoy Lenin’s trust and confidence.

Lenin had other sources of funds beyond Morozov, Schmidt and Gorky. In 1890, for example, he had met A.I. Yeremasov, a young entrepreneur from Syzran in the province of Simbirsk, who had been involved with local revolutionary circles.¹⁵⁹ At the end of 1904 Lenin asked him to help fund the Bolshevik newspaper Vpered in Paris.¹⁶⁰

There were many others. The relationship between Lenin and Maxim Gorky was a special one. Gorky, who was internationally famous before the revolution, for his play The Lower Depths (1902), his novel The Mother (1906) and his three-part autobiography, gave the Bolsheviks much material help. This did not not prevent him from taking an independent position at critical moments, as the essays he published in 1917–1918 in his own newspaper, Novaya zhizn’ (New Life), show.¹⁶¹ Their correspondence was voluminous, and there is hardly one letter from Lenin in which he does not complain about money. Among other things, he asked Gorky to donate some of his royalties to supporting this or that Bolshevik publication, ‘to help drum up subscriptions’, ‘to find a little cash to expand Pravda’, or nudged him with such hints as, ‘I’m sure you won’t refuse to help Prosveshchenie’, ‘hasn’t “the merchant” started giving yet?’, or ‘Because of the war, I’m in desperate need of a wage and so I would ask you, if it’s possible and won’t put you out too much, to help speed up the publication of the brochure’.¹⁶² While Gorky helped the Bolsheviks with both money and influence, in November 1917 he could still refer to Lenin darkly as ‘not an omnipotent magician, but a cold-blooded trickster who spares neither the honour nor the lives of the proletariat’.¹⁶³

From the little we have so far seen of Lenin’s financial affairs, it is plain that he was not in need, although he was always ready to raise the issue. Biographers have frequently quoted his letter from Zurich to Shlyapnikov in Stockholm in the autumn of 1916, in which he wrote: ‘As for myself, I need a salary. Otherwise we’ll simply perish, I mean it!! The cost of living is diabolical, and we’ve nothing to live on. You’ve got to drag the money by force out of [Gorky] who has two of my brochures (he must pay, now, and a bit more!) … If this doesn’t happen, I swear I won’t make it, and I am really, really serious …’¹⁶⁴

Perhaps the death of Lenin’s mother in July 1916, which had so shaken him, explains the dramatic tone of this letter. He was, after all, still controlling the Party finances, which, though depleted, were accessible to him. Furthermore, before the war broke out Krupskaya had inherited money from an aunt in Novocherkassk, Lenin’s sisters Anna and Maria were still sending occasional remittances, and even when they returned to Russia in April 1917, Lenin and Krupskaya were not without funds. The fact is, Lenin, whether in Russia or abroad, was never short of money. He could decide whether to live in Bern or Zurich, he could travel to London, Berlin or Paris, visit Gorky on Capri, or write to Anna, ‘I’m on holiday in Nice. It’s sheer luxury here: sunny, warm, dry, the southern sea. In a few days I return to Paris’.¹⁶⁵ Doss-houses and attics were not for him. He wrote to Anna in December 1908 on arriving in Paris, ‘We’ve found a good apartment, fashionable and expensive: 840 francs plus about 60 francs tax, and about the same for the concierge per year. Cheap by Moscow prices (4 rooms, kitchen, larder, water, gas), but it’s expensive here.’¹⁶⁶

Lenin was punctilious about keeping accounts and planning his budget. He kept notes of what he had spent on food, train fares, mountain holidays and so on,¹⁶⁷ and carried these slips of paper around with him from country to country, city to city, long after their ‘expiry date’, until he finally ensconced himself in the Kremlin, whereupon he handed them over to the Central Party Archive.

He loved dealing with financial matters. In June 1921 he ordered 1878 boxes of valuable objects to be brought into the Kremlin.¹⁶⁸ Perhaps it made him feel more secure. On 15 October of that year the Politburo ordered that no expenditure of the gold reserve was to take place without its – i.e. Lenin’s – authority.¹⁶⁹ He loved holidays in expensive resorts, and he often went to the theatre and cinema. All this was perfectly natural behaviour, especially for the hereditary nobleman Lenin described himself as,¹⁷⁰ and there was no need for him to make a big secret of it. What remains a mystery, however, is not the financial details of his everyday life, but how he, like his comrades Trotsky and Stalin – none of them ever having worked for a living, and none of them having anything in common with the working class – could think they had the right to determine the fate of a great nation, and to carry out their bloody, monstrous experiment.

* For decades the Party archives also concealed evidence that both Marx and Engels fathered illegitimate children – Marx by his housekeeper Elena Denmuth.¹⁰¹

2 Master of the Order

At the turn of the century, Russia was entering a period of turbulence. Peasants rioted against a system which piled debts on them and taxed their basic necessities excessively; workers went on strike for better conditions and wages and against police harassment; students were demanding autonomy for their universities and civil liberties for everyone; the professional classes – doctors, lawyers, teachers – were becoming increasingly vociferous in their demand for representative government; and the national minorities in the empire’s borderlands were organizing liberation movements. In 1904 the country stumbled into a war against Japan over control of Chinese territory in Manchuria, 6000 miles from European Russia, and by the middle of 1905 Russia’s resources appeared exhausted, and humiliation seemed certain. The whole of 1905 was consumed in strikes and demonstrations, and mutinous action in parts of the army and navy, and by the autumn Tsar Nicholas II was ready to concede reform: the creation of a State Duma, or parliament, and various promises of social legislation.

It was against this background of rising political activity that Lenin emerged from his exile in Siberia and threw himself into reorganizing the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party as a revolutionary body, prepared to overthrow the existing order. To justify the rôle of those who were to do the overthrowing, he created the idea of the ‘professional revolutionary’. In his extended essay What is to be Done?, a title he took from Chernyshevsky, he wrote that an ‘organization of revolutionaries must chiefly and above all include people whose profession is revolutionary activity’,¹ one of his main arguments being that it was ‘far harder to catch a dozen clever people than a hundred fools’. By ‘clever people’ he meant professional revolutionaries.² Published in Stuttgart in 1902,³ What is to be done? was Lenin’s grand plan to create a conspiratorial organization. Advancing the idea of an ‘all-Russian political newspaper’ as the basis for such a party, he envisaged a ‘network of agents’ – or ‘collaborators, if this is a more acceptable term’ – who would provide ‘the greatest certainty of success in the event of a rising’.⁴

He would certainly succeed in building his strictly disciplined organization, but after it had seized power he would find it difficult to discern where the Party ended and the security organs began. In April 1922, for instance, it was the Politburo that gave the state security organ, the GPU, the power to shoot bandit elements on the spot. In May they ordered that Patriarch Tikhon, the head of the Orthodox Church, be put on trial for allegedly obstructing the expropriation of Church property, and in the same month this élite of ‘professional revolutionaries’ sentenced eleven priests to be executed for the same reason. In August 1921 it was Lenin who initiated the creation of a commission to maintain surveillance on incoming foreigners, notably those involved in the American famine relief programme.⁵

The illegal, conspiratorial character of the Party predetermined the mutual penetration, if not fusion, of this ‘social’ organization and the state security organs. The process occurred officially and ‘legally’. One of Lenin’s most trusted agents, Yakov Ganetsky, wrote to Lenin on 10 October 1919 proposing ‘the closest possible ties between the Party organizations and the extraordinary [security] commissions … and to oblige all Party members in responsible posts to report to the … commissions any information they obtain by both private and official means and which might serve to combat counter-revolution and espionage. They should also actively help the … commissions by taking part in solving cases … being present at interrogations and so on.’⁶ Lenin could hardly have made the point clearer, when he stated, ‘A good Communist is a good Chekist [secret policeman] at the same time.’⁷

Theorist of Revolution

As had become their custom, late on the morning of 10 January 1905 Lenin and Krupskaya were making their way to the city library in Geneva, where they were then residing. On the steps they ran into Anatoly Lunacharsky and his wife, who told them the wonderful news that revolution had broken out in St Petersburg. They all ran to Lepeshinsky’s émigré restaurant, where the events were already being discussed excitedly. Lenin proposed a joint meeting with the Mensheviks, on condition that only one speaker from each side take the floor, and two days later the two irreconcilable factions met. Lunacharsky spoke for the Bolsheviks, Fedor Dan for the Mensheviks. But each side was more intent on preventing the other from scoring a success than on discussing realities. When Dan hinted darkly at ‘splitters’, Lenin gave a signal and the Bolsheviks walked out.⁸

Everything Lenin had written until now had been devoted to the problems of preparing for revolution: creating a party, formulating its programme, exposing tsarism. Now it was necessary to write about the revolution itself. Even if it was somewhat embarrassing that the popular workers’ leader Father Gapon, who had built up a large following in St Petersburg, was closer to events than ‘real’ revolutionaries, Lenin was fascinated by the priest, who seemed to have been pushed into the revolution only by the suffering he shared with his flock. Gapon in fact had since 1904 been working in close cooperation with the secret police, whose object had been to divert the workers from revolution by helping them in their struggle for economic gains. Lenin did not believe Gapon was a provocateur and he inscribed his 1905 Geneva pamphlet, ‘Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution’, ‘To Georgy Gapon with respect, from the author’.⁹ In an article in the January issue of Vpered entitled ‘The Priest Gapon’, he wrote: ‘Gapon may be a sincere Christian socialist and perhaps it was precisely Bloody Sunday that pushed him onto a fully revolutionary path.’ He concluded that a cautious attitude was called for.¹⁰ ‘Bloody Sunday’, 22 January 1905, had been the occasion of a huge procession of workers and their families, led by Gapon, towards the Winter Palace, to petition the tsar for help. Troops guarding the approaches to the city centre were ordered to fire into the crowds, after repeated warnings, and some eight hundred were killed and many more wounded. It was an event which not only shocked world opinion, but also triggered the violence and disorder of the rest of the year.

It would appear, from everything that has been written about him by Soviet historians, that there was no field of social life which Lenin did not ‘enrich’, ‘refine’, ‘formulate’ or ‘illuminate’. But let us dwell here only on his theory of socialist revolution, such as it was.

Analysing the entrails of capitalism, Marx had stressed that the coming of proletarian revolution depended wholly on the material conditions of hired labour. For him, revolution was a social fruit that must ripen. While agreeing in principle with this idea, Lenin, believing that only the conscious activity of individuals could guarantee the success of the revolution, shifted the stress onto forcing the process by energizing the masses, by organizations and parties. In principle, he regarded the improvement of the workers’ conditions and the realization of socialist goals by evolutionary, reformist means, as impossible. For him the main thing was to create the institution of control. In January 1917 he wrote that contemporary society was ripe for socialism, ripe for control ‘from a single centre’.¹¹ Reforms, he wrote, were ‘a side effect of the revolutionary class struggle’.¹² Throughout his writings, he speaks of the decisive rôle of the conscious masses, classes, parties, leaders. Circumstances were important only in order to legitimize the settling of these problems by force of will.

Even though the First World War, and Russia’s fortunes in it, dramatically altered the political situation, and led to the downfall of the tsar and the formation of a liberal Provisional Government, Lenin must have known the Mensheviks were right when they said in 1917 that Russia was not ripe for socialist revolution. Yet he was prepared to exploit the opportunity for his own party to seize power in October. The alternative was for the Bolsheviks to occupy the position of an extreme wing with little influence in the forthcoming Constituent Assembly, planned by the Provisional Government and actually convened in January 1918. Lenin therefore leapfrogged the classic Marxist scheme, ignoring ‘objective conditions’, as well as a host of homegrown and European Social Democrats who were committed to a parliamentary process. He was cleverer than they, for he recognized that the war had not only been the chief cause of the February revolution which finished off the Russian Empire, but would also dash the hopes that had been aroused then. He exploited the war by moving it in effect from the trenches of the Eastern front to the Russian plains in the shape of revolution and civil war, and in doing so, he altered the disposition of political forces. It was this strategy that led to the redrawing of the map of the world, brought into being mighty movements in all continents, and held the minds of statesmen in tension and fear as to whether the world revolution would occur.

Like all the Russian leaders, Lenin was hypnotized by the French Revolution. Peppering their articles and speeches with terms like ‘Girondistes’, ‘Jacobins’, ‘commissars’, ‘Convention’, ‘Thermidor’, ‘Vendée’, they were not merely paying homage to the French revolutionaries, but were also emulating them, as they tried to remake history for themselves. In a telegram of 30 August 1918, the day he was nearly assassinated by the Socialist Revolutionary Fanya Kaplan, Lenin told Trotsky in Sviyazhsk to use the most extreme measures against senior commanders who showed lack of strength: ‘They should be told that from now on we are applying the model of the French Revolution and will put on trial and even shoot … the army commander at Kazan and the other top commanders.’¹³ The French revolutionaries applied terror in the name of liberty, of course, whereas Lenin did so in the name of power.

At the height of the First World War, Lenin came to the unexpected conclusion that ‘the victory of socialism is possible first in a few or even one individual capitalist country’.¹⁴ It would have been hard to disagree, had he meant the seizure of power, rather than the victory of socialism. Shortly thereafter, he set forth one of his fundamental theses even more forcefully, namely that ‘socialism cannot conquer simultaneously in all countries’.¹⁵ This, too, would have been a rational assertion, but for the minor matter of what it was he meant by ‘socialism’, and the question of which were the lucky countries that might enter the promised land in splendid isolation. Lenin had the answer: those which were the weakest link in the imperialist system. It was here that the absurdity began. It appears that Germany, Great Britain, the USA and other developed capitalist states had less chance of social and economic advance than, say, Russia. And yet Lenin himself had written that the material base for socialism was already in place in Europe. Despite his attempt to smooth over the inconsistency by asserting that socialism would never arise in Russia without a certain level of capitalist development,¹⁶ his position remained absurd, and had nothing in common with socialism. The possibility of ‘building socialism in one country’ boiled down to the chance of seizing power. It was easier in a country where conditions were ‘ripe’, and where the appropriate ‘organization’ was present, even if the state and the level of democracy were less ready to climb the next step up the pyramid of social progress.

After his return to Russia on 16 April 1917, when he was whipping up a mood of frenzy, harnessing the masses’ impatience, promising peace and land in exchange for support for his party, Lenin bent every effort to turn that party into a combat organization, capable of seizing power. Soon after the February revolution, when all the ‘illegals’ emerged from hiding, he was still declaiming, ‘we will create our own party as before and we will definitely combine our legal and our illegal work’.¹⁷ This had nothing to do with socialism. The society which Lenin and his adherents began to build had to resort to unrestrained violence, in accordance with the leader’s views, in order to survive. As the highest principle of revolutionary development, the dictatorship trampled and subordinated everything to its own will. Having once espoused the idea of socialism in one country, Lenin pushed questions of morality well down the Bolshevik agenda. In May 1919 the Politburo gave routine authorization for a collection of valuable jewellery to be made available to Comintern. The list of this jewellery runs to many pages and is valued in many millions of roubles, with items marked ‘for England’, ‘for Holland’, ‘for France’, and so on.¹⁸ In November 1921 the Politburo unanimously rejected an appeal from a special commission for the improvement of children’s rations.¹⁹ The difficulties faced by the new regime do not justify the refusal to meet this need. While millions were dying of hunger and disease, the Politburo was lavishly disbursing tsarist gold to ignite revolution in other countries.

It is not difficult to find evidence in Lenin’s writings of the idea that the dictatorship of the proletariat is compatible with full democracy, as indeed Soviet propaganda insisted for decades. It is, however, hard to reconcile the idea with the practice, where it is difficult to understand what Lenin meant by democracy. How can the dictatorship of one class – or more accurately one party – be reconciled with the principles of people’s power, liberty and the equality of all citizens? It smacks of social racism. A letter from Lenin to the Bolsheviks in Penza, not far from Simbirsk, written in August 1918, illustrates this point:

Comrades! The kulak uprising in [your] five districts must be crushed without pity. The interests of the whole revolution demand it, for the ‘final and decisive battle’ with the kulaks everywhere is now engaged. An example must be made. 1) Hang (and I mean hang so that the people can see) not less than 100 known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers. 2) Publish their names. 3) Take all their grain away from them. 4) Identify hostages as we described in our telegram yesterday. Do this so that for hundreds of miles around the people can see, tremble, know and cry: they are killing and will go on killing the bloodsucking kulaks. Cable that you have received this and carried out [your instructions].

Yours, Lenin.

P.S. Find tougher people.²⁰

Clearly, not all Bolsheviks were up to the task.

Even after this telegram, Lenin frequently discussed ‘democracy and the dictatorship’. It is, however, unclear what rôle democracy was to play. The document cited above is a total condemnation of Lenin’s ‘theory’ of socialist revolution. What did he mean by ‘100 known kulaks, rich men’? Who were these condemned individuals? Today we know them to have been the hardest-working, most capable of the peasantry. If the circumstances were invoked to justify the crime, then they could be invoked to justify anything at all. In what way were Lenin’s orders to ‘shoot on the spot’, ‘arrest or shoot’, ‘apply extreme revolutionary measures’, etc., preferable to the ‘Cossack whips’ and ‘bloody massacres’ of Nicholas II? Compared to the bestialities of the civil war, the tragedies of tsarist Russia pale into insignificance.

Nor was it the ‘iron logic’ of a revolution that had gone out of his control that forced Lenin to apply these monstrous methods. In an earlier time, from the peacefully ordered world of Geneva in October 1905, he wrote a series of articles for publication in St Petersburg which were in effect instructions for staging an armed uprising. One such, entitled ‘Tasks for the Ranks of a Revolutionary Army’, discusses ‘independent military actions’, as well as ‘managing crowds’. He recommended that ‘units arm themselves as best they can (with rifles, revolvers, bombs, knives, knuckledusters, sticks, paraffin-soaked rags, rope for rope-ladders, spades to dig barricades, gun-cotton, barbed wire, nails (to stop the cavalry) and so on and so forth)’. Places and people, even if unarmed, must be made ready ‘to throw stones down onto the troops and pour boiling water from top storeys, to throw acid over the police and steal government money’. It was, he wrote, of the utmost importance to encourage the ‘murder of spies, policemen, gendarmes, Black Hundredists’, while it would be ‘criminal’ to trust the ‘democrats’, who were only good at running a liberal talk-shop.²¹

Lenin’s ‘theory’ of revolution proposed nothing other than these inhuman terrorist methods. Even when Nicholas II published his Manifesto of October 1905, leading to the creation of the State Duma and possibly opening the way eventually to constitutional monarchy, and offering perhaps the chance of a move towards democracy, Lenin did not alter his position. To the tsar’s proposal to give ‘the population stable foundations of civic freedom on principles of true inviolability of the person, freedom of conscience, speech, assembly and union’, the Bolsheviks responded with a signal for renewed violence. Lenin called for ‘the pursuit of the retreating enemy’, an ‘increase in pressure’, while voicing his confidence that ‘the revolution will finish off the enemy and wipe the throne of the bloody tsar from the face of the earth’.²²

The evolution of the Bolsheviks’ attitude to the Constituent Assembly of 1918 – the first such body to be elected on a fully democratic basis in Russia’s history – demonstrates their extreme pragmatism. As long as it appeared possible to exploit this nationwide institution in their own interests, Lenin had supported the idea of the Assembly. But as soon as the elections produced a Bolshevik minority, he abruptly changed course. An All-Russian Commission had been formed before the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 to manage the election, and when that seizure of power took place the Commission declared it ‘a sad event’ that would ‘bring anarchy and terror’.²³ When the Commission declared that ‘it found it impossible to enter any sort of relations with the Council of People’s Commissars’, i.e. Lenin’s government,²⁴ its members were arrested. On the orders of the Bolshevik leadership they were locked in an empty room in the Tauride Palace for four days without food or bedding, in the hope that they would ‘see sense’ and cancel the election. The election went ahead regardless.

Realizing that the new Assembly, in which they had won only a quarter of the seats, would not bow to them, the Bolsheviks simply dispersed it during the night of 6 January 1918, after its first and only day of existence. Since the overthrow of the tsar in February 1917, the revolutionary bodies, the workers’ strike committees, and the soldier’s and peasants’ representatives had been forming their own councils, or soviets, and through these had been applying pressure on the successor (Provisional) government to bring the war to an end and to introduce radical reforms. After seizing power in their name in October, Lenin declared that ‘the Soviets are incomparably superior to all the parliaments in the world’, and therefore ‘there is no place for the Constituent Assembly’. He added, ‘The people wanted to convene the Constituent Assembly, so we convened it. But the people at once sensed what this notorious assembly represented. So now we have carried out the will of the people.’²⁵ ‘The people’ had been given one day in which to make up their minds. This device, of speaking in the name of the people, would become a firm tradition, whereby every activity was authorized by the mythical ‘will of the people’.

Lenin’s theory of socialist revolution made no room for any representative elected institutions or direct democracy. Instead, he said, the socialist revolution ‘cannot but be accompanied by civil war’.²⁶ Neither he nor any of his accomplices were troubled by the fact that the people had not empowered them to decide its fate. As the Socialist Revolutionary émigré Boris Savinkov wrote in 1921, in a Warsaw publication: ‘The Russian people do not want Lenin, Trotsky and Dzerzhinsky, not merely because the Bolsheviks mobilize them, shoot them, take their grain and are ruining Russia. The Russian people do not want them for the simple reason that … nobody elected them.’²⁷

On the eve of the Bolshevik coup d’état, in August-September 1917, Lenin wrote his famous work State and Revolution, in which he laid out his ideas on the future socialist state. According to Lenin, ‘when everyone has learned to govern and is in practice independently governing social production, independently accounting for and controlling the spongers, the layabouts, crooks and similar “preservers of capitalist traditions”, then to evade this accounting and control will become so unbelievably difficult, such a rare exception, and will be accompanied, no doubt, by such speedy and serious retribution (for the armed workers, the people who live practical lives, are not sentimental intellectuals and will not permit anyone to fool around with them), that the need to observe the simple, basic rules of any human community will soon become a habit’.²⁸ Lenin placed special emphasis on social control, believing that when it ‘became genuinely universal, general, nationwide’, it would be impossible to refuse to serve the state, ‘there would be no place to hide’.²⁹

Lenin apparently never asked himself why, before 1921, the Bolsheviks were incapable of giving the people anything but chaos, civil war, hunger and terror.³⁰ The fact is, the Bolsheviks had achieved their goal: the Party had power. The revolution was for Lenin a social experiment. If it failed in 1905, it would succeed in 1917, and if not, there was always the future. In an article entitled ‘For the Workers’ Attention’, Gorky wrote in November 1917:

Life in all its complexity is unknown to Lenin, he does not know the masses, he hasn’t lived among them, but he found out in books how to raise the masses onto their hind legs, how to enrage the masses’ instincts easily. To the Lenins, the working class is like iron-ore to a metal-worker. Is it possible, given present circumstances, to cast a socialist state out of this ore? Evidently not. But why not try? What does Lenin risk if the experiment fails?³¹

To achieve power, the Bolsheviks became wedded forever to violence, while liberty was buried in the marriage. Lenin’s address ‘To the Citizens of Russia’, following his coup, and his decrees promising peace and land, say nothing about liberty as the main aim of the revolution. They were not the Bill of Rights of the English revolution of 1689, nor the American Declaration of Independence of 1776. The Russian revolution, which formally gave the people peace and land, cunningly replaced the idea of liberty with that of the abolition of the exploitation of man by man. In giving the people the spectre of hope, Lenin had found and trapped man’s most robust and vital element, that of faith. He thus condemned the Russians for decades to contenting themselves with hope alone.

What, if any, was the philosophical foundation of Lenin’s approach? He has, after all, been called the most powerful philosopher of the twentieth century by Soviet scholars (the present author included). Had Lenin not come to power, his Materialism and Empiriocriticism (1908) would have been known only to the narrowest circle of experts on the theory of knowledge, and even they would have found it excessively scholastic: ‘Everything in it “corresponding” to the position of dialectical materialism,’ wrote the Russian émigré philosopher Vasili Zenkovsky, ‘is accepted without qualification, while whatever does not, is discarded for that reason alone.’³² Indeed, Lenin himself wrote in this work: ‘Following the path of Marx’s theory, we shall approach closer and closer to the objective truth (while never achieving it); following any other path we shall come to nothing but confusion and lies.’³³

In other words, only those who employ Marxist methodology are philosophers and scholars. The peremptory nature of his arguments, his hallmark as a politician, organizer and philosopher, puts one mentally on guard. Lenin’s philosophy was designed to separate the ‘pure’ thinkers from the ‘impure’, the materialists from the idealists. His aim was to demonstrate that a school of philosophy which accepted the existence of religion could not be scientific.

Whether or not Lenin’s reasoning is accepted as plausible or implausible, the principle of Party-mindedness, which he proclaimed as necessary for the philosophical study of scientific knowledge, places the reader beyond the pale of science and in the sphere of ideological opposition to Bolshevik values. After the failure of the 1905 revolution, an upsurge of interest in idealist philosophy occurred in Russia, as it did also in Western Europe, for different reasons. Disappointment with socialist, that is materialist, ideas was driving Russian intellectuals towards a spiritual philosophy which emphasised individual self-perfection as the path to social improvement, rather than the other way round, which was the message and purpose of socialism. In an effort to counter this trend, the Bolshevik intellectuals Alexander Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky had become interested in the works of the contemporary Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (the creator of the measurement of the speed of sound) and his mentor, the nineteenth-century Swiss philosopher Richard Avenarius. According to Mach, the attributes of the material world – colour, shape, texture – are conferred on objects by the human mind. In other words, man makes the world as he knows it. The object of this theory was to eliminate the distinction between the spiritual and the physical world, since the world according to Mach is a physical entity given shape by consciousness. Marxist materialism posited the opposite proposition: the physical world, the environment, is what forms and conditions the human mind. Marxists are realists, or materialists, and Machists are idealists.

Bogdanov, a trained biological scientist, took Mach further by asserting that not only the physical world, but society itself, is a product of the human mind, that without the human will to form communal life, society would not have come into being. Society therefore is the expression of consciousness. The object of this line of reasoning was, as has been suggested, to counter the corrosive effect new idealist thinking was having on socialist life in Russia, by showing that Marxist philosophy was sufficiently flexible to absorb such an apparently idealistic notion.

At around this time, 1906 to 1909, Lenin was engaged in complicated relations with Bogdanov and other intellectuals associated with his Bolshevik organization. Partly in competition for intellectual leadership, partly in order to keep control of the organization and its finances, Lenin chose to make an assault on Bogdanov and his allies, by challenging their orthodoxy as Marxists. In order to do so, he read exhaustively in philosophical literature.³⁴ Having accepted Marx’s social-political and philosophical teaching without qualification, Lenin confined himself to nothing more than commenting on it. No social-political theory can be universal, yet that is what Lenin made of Marxism. As for such new idealists as Berdyaev and his fellow thinkers, Lenin’s hostility in the end saved their lives: when in March 1922 he read a collection of articles by Berdyaev, Fedor Stepun, Frank and others, entitled Oswald Spengler and the Decline of Europe, Lenin wrote to N.P. Gorbunov, general administrator of the Council of People’s Deputies (Sovnarkom), describing the book as ‘White Guardist’ and ordering Gorbunov ‘to speak to the Deputy Head of the GPU, I.S. Unshlikht, about it …’³⁵ Philosophers were not yet being shot for ‘White Guardist’ views, but were merely deported from the country.

The philosophical side of Lenin’s mind was strong on conviction, but dogmatic. He was absolutely certain that ‘Marx’s philosophy is consummate philosophical materialism’,³⁶ and the only true theory. In one of his last works, criticizing the Menshevik Sukhanov, he wrote: ‘You say that to create socialism one must have civilized behaviour. Fine. But why couldn’t we create the prerequisites for civilized behaviour from the start, by expelling the landowners and expelling the capitalists, and then start the movement to socialism? Where have you ever read that such changes in the usual historical order are not acceptable or impossible?’³⁷ In other words, if the Marxist books have not prohibited it, any ‘historical order’ is permissible.

The aesthetic side of Lenin’s mind was less despotic, perhaps because art was less closely associated with politics than law and philosophy, or perhaps because he did not feel as confident in this sphere. Berdyaev may have exaggerated in calling Lenin backward and primitive in art, but only slightly. His taste was extremely conservative, while his range of knowledge of literature was more extensive. He cited and used Chernyshevsky more than any other writer – more than 300 times in his collected works, indeed – but he also quoted from a range of nineteenth-century Russian writers whose interests and themes tended towards the social and political. He wrote an article on Tolstoy, but he cited Dostoevsky only twice in all of his works.³⁸ Preferring the classics to contemporary writing, he nevertheless much admired Gorky’s novel The Mother, which dealt with social and political problems on an accessible artistic level.

His earlier friendship with Lenin did not prevent Gorky from attacking the Bolsheviks fiercely in 1917 and 1918 in his Petrograd newspaper Novaya zhizn’. Under the heading ‘Untimely Thoughts’, he managed to publish forty-eight of these articles before the paper was closed down on Lenin’s orders in July 1918. Soon after the Bolshevik coup, on 7 (20) November 1917, Gorky had written: ‘Lenin and his comrades-in-arms think they can commit any crime, like the massacre at Petrograd, the storming of Moscow, abolition of freedom of speech, the senseless arrests – all the abominations that used to be committed by Plehve and Stolypin.* This is where today’s leader is taking the proletariat, and it should be understood that Lenin is not an omnipotent magician, but a cold-blooded trickster who spares neither the honour nor the lives of the proletariat.’³⁹

Needless to say, these and many other articles which Gorky wrote at the time were not included in the thirty-volume edition of his works. Soon, however, Gorky altered his tone, aware that the regime was enduring and that he could not manage without its help and that of Lenin. In April 1919 he called on Lenin to ask him to release the Left SR N.A. Shklovskaya, secretary of the poet Alexander Blok. She was set free six months later. In September 1920 he asked Lenin to allow the publisher Z.I. Grzhebin to emigrate. Given Lenin’s personal magnetism, these visits had an effect, and soon Gorky was virtually tamed.

While Lenin himself approached art and literature as a consumer, as Party leader he saw in them a powerful instrument of political influence. It was perhaps for this reason that he was so hostile to Futurism and the other modernist trends in art. And no doubt when he urged the closure of the opera and ballet it was because he thought they were ‘court arts remote from the people’, and he could not see how singers and dancers might inspire the detachments that were carrying out food requisitioning. For him, the chief purpose of art was in developing ‘the best models, traditions, results of existing culture from the point of view of the world outlook of Marxism and the conditions of proletarian life in the epoch of the dictatorship’.⁴⁰

Many biographers and people who met Lenin attest to the enormous ‘physical force’ of his mind. Perhaps this was because he usually crushed his opponent in argument with his absolute refusal to compromise; perhaps it was the uncompromising convictions themselves, the one-dimensional, virtually fanatical conviction. In any event, many people began to stress the force of Lenin’s mind, and to relate it to the shape of his head. Lunacharsky, for instance, remarked that ‘the structure of his skull is truly striking. One has to study him for a little while to appreciate its physical power, the contours of the colossal dome of his forehead and to sense something I can only describe as a physical emanation of light from its surface.’⁴¹ No one is able to confirm whether light really did emanate from Lenin’s forehead. Instead, we must make do with the five editions of his collected works, the forty volumes of the Lenin miscellanies, thousands of unpublished documents, thousands of works of hagiography and a handful of dispassionate, honest books about him. We do, however, have his plans and blueprints, and above all his actions, to judge him by.

The Phenomenon of Bolshevism

Every Soviet schoolboy knew the story of the Second Party Congress of 1903 and the difference between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks: Lenin and his ‘rock-hard’ followers ‘saw the Party as a combat organization, every member of which had to be a selfless fighter, prepared for everyday pedestrian tasks as well as to fight with a gun in his hand’, while Martov, ‘supported by all the wavering and opportunistic elements, wanted to turn the Party into an assembly room’. ‘With such a party,’ Lenin’s official biography informed us, ‘the workers would never have been victorious and taken power into their hands.’⁴² If a student should add that Plekhanov, though wavering and indecisive, sided with Lenin, he would earn an extra mark. Such a student would not, however, be told that it was in fact Martov’s more loosely defined formula for membership that was passed by the Congress, nor that it was only because Lenin obtained a majority in elections to the Party central organs that he could call his group the Majorityites, or Bolsheviks, while the ‘opportunists’ naturally became the Minorityites, or Mensheviks.

This laundered version migrated from book to book and became a fixed dogma in the public mind. In the years following October 1917, the term Menshevik became synonymous with opportunist, bourgeois conciliator, White Guard ally, foreign spy, enemy of the people. Naturally, this fundamentally affected attitudes towards the Mensheviks. When the Politburo discussed ‘the Menshevik question’ on 5 January 1922, it instructed Iosif Unshlikht, deputy chairman of the Cheka, to find two or three provincial towns, ‘not excluding those on a railway’, where Mensheviks could be settled. He was further told not to obstruct Mensheviks who wanted to leave the country, and that where a subsidy for fares was needed, he should apply to the Politburo.⁴³ The days of mass execution had yet to come.

By concentrating on the organizational factor as the wall dividing the two wings of the Party, aspects of far greater significance were pushed into the background. In fact the true line dividing Bolsheviks and Mensheviks was not the issue of organization. The only true social democrats were the Mensheviks: they recognized democracy, parliament and political pluralism as values that could avert violence as a means of achieving social development. Democracy for them was a permanent value, not a political front. The Bolsheviks, by contrast, became increasingly convinced of the value of violence. And when they came to power, they believed they had conquered not only the bourgeoisie, but also their former Party comrades, the Mensheviks. ‘October,’ Stalin declared, ‘means the ideological victory of Communism over social democracy, of Marxism over reformism.’

Why did the Bolsheviks win? What was the appeal of their programme? Why did they survive, when it became clear they represented only the interests of the ‘professional revolutionaries’? The answers to these questions will lead to an understanding of the phenomenon of Bolshevism itself.

The First World War provided the key. The news that war had broken out at first caused shock among the Russian émigrés, followed by intellectual confusion, and finally the rapid growth of a defencist mood. A volunteer movement also sprang up as soon as war was declared. Many Russian émigrés in Paris, among them about a thousand Social Democrats, including Bolsheviks,⁴⁴ were seized by patriotic fervour and rushed to join the French army. Most were drafted into the Foreign Legion, or languished in difficult circumstances because the French government did not know how to deal with them.⁴⁵

On the other hand, a large group of Social Democratic internationalists, from both wings of the Party, soon emerged and began agitating against the imperialist war altogether. Prominent among them was Julius Martov, then living in Paris and editing a newspaper called Nashe slovo (Our Word). He called for the unification of all progressive forces in the struggle against the militarism of the imperialist powers and for an end to the war without reparations or annexations.⁴⁶

The orthodox Bolsheviks took up a different position. When Lenin heard on 5 August 1914 that the German Social Democrats in the Reichstag had voted for the war budget, he declared, ‘From this day I am no longer a Social Democrat, I am a Communist.’⁴⁷ The Bolsheviks would not formally change the name of the Party until their Seventh Congress in March 1918, when they became the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik). In 1914, however, Lenin was dissociating himself from the mainstream of European socialism, which in practical terms had suspended its political programme until the war was over, and was giving notice that he was bent on revolution, now more than ever. He did not, however, decline the help of the Austrian Social Democrat leader, Victor Adler, to get out of Austrian Galicia, where he had lived since 1912, in order to be physically closer to events in Russia, and to make his way to Switzerland, where he launched into a spate of writing. His first significant response to the war was a manifesto entitled ‘The Tasks of the Revolutionary Social Democrats in the European War’. In it he penned the phrase that was to become sacrosanct in Soviet historiography: ‘From the point of view 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 and its troops, which are oppressing Poland, the Ukraine and many other peoples of Russia.’⁴⁸ He went further in November 1914 when he wrote, ‘Turning the present imperialist war into civil war is the only proper proletarian slogan.’⁴⁹

He was calling for the defeat of his own country, and for making an already hideous war into something even worse: a nightmare civil war. With the seizure of power in mind, this may have been a logical position to take, but from the moral point of view it was deeply cynical. Desiring the defeat of the Russian army was one thing from the safety of Berne; it was quite another for those lying in the blood-soaked mud of the trenches on the Eastern front. What Lenin wanted was to turn the whole of Russia into a theatre of war. No one took any notice of his call, no one wanted to think about civil war, and in any case nobody then believed in the socialist revolution. True, Martov had warned at the outbreak of war that out of factional fanaticism Lenin wanted ‘to warm his hands by the fire that has been lit on the world arena’.⁵⁰ But no one had taken heed.

In a letter of 17 October 1914 to one of his most trusted agents, Alexander Shlyapnikov, then in Sweden, Lenin wrote: ‘… the least evil now and at once would be the defeat of tsarism in the war. For tsarism is a hundred times worse than kaiserism … The entire essence of our work (persistent, systematic, maybe of long duration) must be in the direction of turning the national war into a civil war. When this will happen is another question, it isn’t clear yet. We have to let the moment ripen and “force it to ripen” systematically … We can neither “promise” civil war nor “decree” it, but we are duty bound to work – for as long as it takes – in this direction.’⁵¹ Articles embodying this message began appearing in the émigré press over Lenin’s signature. Despite his sideswipes at ‘imperialist Germany’, there were those in Berlin who realized that they had a new ally living in Switzerland. Seeing that there was no realistic way by which to seize power, Lenin took the side of Russia’s enemy, while clothing himself in the garb of internationalism.

When the Russian people had been driven to the limit by the war, and state power in effect lay on the streets of the capital, the Bolsheviks obtained power with remarkable ease, in exchange for the promise of peace. Lenin’s call to civil war was forgotten, but having gained power, he felt he had to go further; socialism seemed so close. If yesterday’s men could be swept away, one could go on with the great experiment unhampered. Having given the people peace (however unreal and shortlived) and land (which would soon be taken back when Russia’s peasants were turned into twentieth-century serfs), Lenin also took back the liberty, such as it was, that he had promised.

The Bolsheviks survived because of their leader and because of their commitment to unbridled force. Lenin was the ideal leader in the situation. As Potresov was to write in 1937:

Neither Plekhanov nor Martov, nor anyone else, possessed the secret of Lenin’s hypnotic power over people, or rather his dominance over them. They respected Plekhanov, they loved Martov, but unswervingly they followed only Lenin as the sole undisputed leader. Lenin represented that rare phenomenon in Russia, a man with an iron will, indomitable energy, who poured fanatical faith into the movement and the cause, and had no less faith in himself … Behind these great qualities, however, there lurked great deficiencies, negative qualities, more appropriate perhaps in a medieval or Asiatic conqueror.⁵²

What Lenin thought of Potresov he revealed in a letter to Gorky: ‘Such a swine, that Potresov!’⁵³ Potresov had once been a close comrade of Lenin’s, and Lenin always kept his most savage invective for those who had deserted him.

In 1921 the Socialist Revolutionaries illegally published a pamphlet, at a time when it was just still possible to do so in Moscow. Entitled ‘What Have the Bolsheviks Given the People?’, it pointed out that the new masters had not fulfilled a single promise of their programme. Instead of peace, the country had been plunged into a bloody civil war lasting three years, and had lost some thirteen million people through the fighting, disease, terror or emigration. Famine raged, and the peasants were not sowing because they knew their grain would be confiscated. Industry lay in ruins. Russia had been cut off from the rest of the world and was shunned by almost everyone. A one-party dictatorship had been installed. The Cheka was a state within a state. The Constituent Assembly had been dispersed. The regime was conducting a war with its own people.⁵⁴

One reason the Bolsheviks were able to survive was that their leader was himself capable of setting an example of merciless terror. For instance, in the autumn of 1920 he wrote to Krestinsky, a secretary of the Central Committee: ‘I suggest a commission be formed at once (one can do it secretly to start with) to work out extreme measures (in the way Larin proposed. Larin is right.) What about you plus Larin plus Vladimirsky (Dzerzhinsky) plus Rykov?* The preparation of terror in secret is necessary and urgent.’⁵⁵ What need had the country of a regime that sought to achieve its aims by means of terror as state policy? Force was the style of the Bolsheviks and their leader. The paradox of Bolshevism – the Majorityites – was that theirs was a dictatorship of the minority, a fact observed by Martov in 1919 when writing a book on the intellectual and psychological origins of Bolshevism, which was published before completion by Fedor Dan in Berlin in 1923.

In 1923 Martov, who was terminally ill, wrote that Lenin had promised to bring in immediately all the measures detailed by Marx and Engels, namely election and recall of the government, workers’ pay to be the norm, everyone to carry out the functions of control and supervision, so that none would become bureaucrats. ‘Reality has harshly dashed all these hopes,’ he wrote. ‘The Soviet state has revealed a tendency towards the extreme strengthening of state centralism, the maximum development of hierarchical and coercive principles in the community, and the growth and super-abundance of all the special organs of state repression.’⁵⁶

The slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’ had been replaced by ‘All Power to the Bolshevik Party’, while the Politburo possessed powers beyond those of any emperor. In 1919, it ordered that hostages should be shot if there were any more incidents of bombs being thrown at the civilian population;⁵⁷ that anyone failing to hand in weapons within an allotted period should be severely punished, even executed.⁵⁸ In April 1920 Lenin and Stalin (as People’s Commissar for Nationalities) signed a cable to their emissary in the Caucasus, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, forbidding self-determination for Georgia.⁵⁹ Lenin also ordered the arrest of the delegates at an All-Russian Zionist conference being held in Moscow, as well as the publication of compromising material on them.⁶⁰ The list is endless. It is noteworthy that the Politburo, which at times had up to forty items on its agenda, rarely dealt with strictly Party affairs. The Party had become a state organ.

The system created by Lenin in turn soon created a new type of man in whom, in Berdyaev’s words, the motives of strength and power displaced those of love of truth and compassion.

This new man, perfectly suited to Lenin’s plan, became the material of the Party organization and took over the vast country. Alien to Russian culture, their fathers and grandfathers had been illiterate and devoid of all culture, living solely by faith. The people had sensed the injustice of the old order but had borne their suffering meekly and humbly … But the time came when they could take no more … Their mildness and humility became savagery and fury. Lenin could not have carried out his plan of revolution and seizure of power without this revolt in the soul of the people.⁶¹

Lenin’s political approach was the negation of traditional democratic institutions, such as parliament, the resort to purely revolutionary methods, the idolizing of force. Combined with a powerful mind, strong will and the conviction that he was right, it was an approach that exerted a powerful attraction on those who believed in the possibility of making a leap from the kingdom of want into the kingdom of liberty. In 1904, in ‘Forward or backward?’, replying to Lenin’s ‘One Step Forward, Two Steps Back’, Martov wrote:

Reading these lines, breathing as they do a petty, at times senseless personal malice, amazing narcissism, blind, deaf, unfeeling fury, endless repetition of the same old meaningless ‘fighting’ and ‘scathing’ little words, one becomes convinced that this is a man who is fatally compelled to slide further down the slope onto which he stepped ‘spontaneously’ and which will take him straight to the full political corruption and shattering of social democracy.⁶²

The Party went on splitting itself, expelling ‘factions’, ‘deviations’ and ‘platforms’, incapable because of its fanaticism of seeing these as differences of opinion rather than obsessions, as creative endeavours rather than fossilized dogma. The splits continued until, by the beginning of the 1930s, all that was left was a Stalinist monolith that was utterly incapable of changing. The situation could only lead to disaster.

Lenin and the Mensheviks

When the Third Party Congress opened in London in April 1905, with Lenin as its chairman, he paid particular attention to questions of combat: he believed that tsarism was ‘rotten through’ and that it must be helped to crash to the ground. He made a long speech about armed uprising, tabled a motion on the issue, and tried to convince the delegates that a revolution was a real possibility.⁶³ Throughout this time, he kept up his criticism of the Mensheviks. When they called for active exploitation of a proposed assembly, Lenin insisted on a boycott, since in his view any parliament was nothing more than a ‘bourgeois stable’. When he read Martov’s article ‘The Russian Proletariat and the Duma’, published in the Vienna paper Rabochaya gazeta, he became enraged at his former comrade’s call to the Social Democrats to take part in elections to the tsarist parliament, and gave his reply in an article entitled ‘At the Tail of the Monarchist Bourgeoisie or at the Head of the Revolutionary Proletariat and Peasantry?’⁶⁴ The very notion of achieving socialist, democratic and progressive goals by means of reforms, parliament and legal social struggle was blasphemy. Lenin could not see the colossal possibilities of parliamentary activity. His speeches breathe hatred for the liberals and reformists, among whom the most dangerous in his view were of course the Mensheviks.

Lenin’s reaction to the October Manifesto, like that of Soviet historians thereafter, was that it was merely a tactical manoeuvre by the tsar and the bourgeoisie, engineered by the tsar’s brilliant prime minister, Count Witte. According to eye-witnesses, the tsar realized that in signing the document he was taking a step towards constitutional, parliamentary monarchy. The autocracy had retreated and given a chance for democratic development. Had the Social Democrats – not only Lenin – not at once labelled the Manifesto a ‘deception’, and had they instead fought to make it a reality, history might have been different. Instead, the Manifesto was interpreted as a sign of weakness, and Lenin prepared to return to Russia to help bury the autocracy. He was convinced the moment was approaching. His articles now bore such titles as ‘The Approach of the Dénouement’, ‘On the New Constitutional Manifesto of Nicholas the Last’, ‘The Dying Autocracy and the New Organs of People’s Power’.

The differences with the Mensheviks were temporarily pushed to one side. They, meanwhile, like all the liberals, were having second thoughts about changing the existing political structure by force. Even relatively conservative, intelligent politicians like Witte were saying, ‘Russia has outgrown her existing structure. She is striving for a legal structure based on civil liberty.’ Witte proposed that the tsar ‘abolish repressive measures against actions which do not threaten society and the state’.⁶⁵

The government’s concessions were, however, dismissed, tension rose, and the Bolsheviks forced events by exploiting the workers’ discontent. Lenin’s espousal of widespread violence and terror, however, pushed the Mensheviks further away from the idea of Party reunification. In September 1908, Martov wrote in exasperation to his friend and Menshevik comrade Pavel Axelrod: ‘I confess that more and more I think that even nominal involvement with this bandit gang is a mistake.’⁶⁶ They were both unwilling to make peace with sectarianism and conspiratorial methods. While keener on reunification than the Bolsheviks, they also wanted to retain democratic principles within the Party. As for Plekhanov, he had long decided that true reunification was impossible. In his view, Lenin regarded reunification as his faction swallowing up and subordinating all the other elements of Russian social democracy, and thus depriving the Russian revolutionaries of any democratic basis. Plekhanov pointed out that instead of underlining the common features shared by the two wings (which both had their roots in the labour movement), Lenin emphasized their differences, and was an incorrigible sectarian.⁶⁷

As the culmination of the Russian drama of 1917 approached, with defeats at the war front, hunger and chaos, the Bolsheviks concentrated all their energy on preparing the armed uprising. The Mensheviks meanwhile focused on peace and liberty, the Constituent Assembly and a new constitution, a strategy Lenin regarded as treacherous, for it weakened the revolutionaries’ chances of a victorious uprising. In the final analysis, the difference between the two factions boiled down to the Bolsheviks’ wanting socialism on the basis of a dictatorship, and the Mensheviks’ wanting it on the basis of democracy. In Fedor Dan’s words: ‘Menshevism stood for turning the struggle for “bourgeois” political democracy and its preservation into its first priority; while Bolshevism put the “building of socialism” at the top of its agenda, throwing overboard and attacking the very idea of a “routine democracy”.’⁶⁸

Dan, who outlived Lenin by nearly a quarter of a century and who knew him well, spent a good part of his life as the political and ideological leader of Menshevism, together with Martov, who died in 1923. Repeatedly arrested and exiled by the tsarist regime, he exerted great energy to preserve the democratic ideals of the RSDLP. His star reached its zenith in June 1917 when he co-chaired the Executive Committee of the All-Russian Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies (Ispolkom) with N.S. Chkheidze, was chief editor of Izvestiya, and with I.G. Tsereteli and A.R. Gots was one of the spokesmen of the democratic wing of Russian social democracy. Symbolically, it was Dan who opened the Second Congress of Soviets on 25 October (7 November) 1917, and when the Bolsheviks and Left Socialist Revolutionaries voted approval of the seizure of power that had just taken place, Dan protested by leaving the Congress together with the other Mensheviks.

For the next three years, the Menshevik leadership represented the democratic opposition, within the legal means permitted. Lenin, meanwhile, missed no opportunity to launch insulting attacks on his former comrades. Nevertheless, until 1920 the Mensheviks led a more or less legal existence, even if the term ‘Social Democrat’ became a dirty word. Then the Politburo launched open persecution, beginning with ‘semi-harsh’ measures. On 22 June 1922 it was decided that the political activity of ‘these accomplices of the bourgeoisie’ must be ‘curtailed’, and that this should be achieved for the time being by exile: ‘All People’s Commissars should be informed that Mensheviks, at present employed in commissariats and capable of playing any political role, should not be kept in Moscow, but dispersed in the provinces, in each case after enquiries have been made at the Cheka and Orgburo.’⁶⁹ At the same time, Mensheviks were being arrested throughout the country. Protests and appeals for release were sent to Lenin and the Politburo. On 14 October 1922, for instance, the Politburo unanimously voted against an appeal for the release of a group of Mensheviks.⁷⁰ The arrests continued.

Lenin was especially interested in Martov’s activities. In July 1919, in an article entitled ‘Everyone into the Struggle with [White General] Denikin!’, he wrote: ‘Martov and Co. think themselves “above” both warring sides [in the civil war], think themselves able to create a “third side”. This desire, even if sincere, is still an illusion of the petty bourgeois democrat who even now, seventy years after 1848, hasn’t learnt the alphabet, namely, that in a capitalist milieu there can only be the dictatorship of the bourgeosie, for the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot coexist with any third option. It seems Martov and Co. will die with this illusion.’⁷¹ When Martov and Dan were elected with other Mensheviks to the Moscow City Soviet in 1918, Lenin wrote on Kamenev’s report: ‘I think you should “tire them out” with practical tasks: Dan for sanitary work, Martov can look after canteens.’⁷² When, in the same year, Martov submitted the manuscript of his memoirs for publication through Gorky – there was still some latitude in such matters – Lenin had it censored.⁷³ Martov was under constant threat of arrest, but Lenin, perhaps because of their earlier friendship, held back. At the first sign that Martov wanted to go abroad, however, permission was granted, thus releasing Lenin from the dilemma, and enabling him to say ‘We willingly let Martov go.’⁷⁴

There had never been close relations between Dan and Lenin, and Dan was arrested in February 1921, and held in the Petropavlovsk Fortress in Petrograd (as St Petersburg had been called since 1914) for nearly a year. He was no stranger there, having ‘sat’ (i.e. been imprisoned) in 1896 before being exiled under the tsar. He was now accused of instigating the anti-Bolshevik uprising of soldiers and sailors on the fortress island of Kronstadt in the Baltic, once the spearhead of Bolshevik support, and faced possible execution. Instead he was sentenced to internal exile, in the words of the special Politburo resolution, ‘to some distant non-proletarian district where he can work in his speciality’.⁷⁵ Dan began a hunger strike, demanding the right to go abroad, and since the inflexibility of the Stalin era had yet to come, the request was granted.

Any real or imagined threat which arose in those years was invariably attributed to some ‘counter-revolutionary activity of the Mensheviks’, thus ensuring harsher treatment for them as a whole. On 28 November 1921, for instance, Trotsky reported to the Politburo that he had information about a counter-revolutionary coup being prepared in Moscow and Petrograd. It was headed by Mensheviks, SRs and ‘surviving bourgeoisie’. Trotsky was immediately appointed ‘Chairman of the Moscow Defence Committee’, and it was decided that ‘Mensheviks should not be released, and the Central Committee should be told to intensify arrests of Mensheviks and SRs’.⁷⁶ Whenever the Politburo returned to the subject of the Mensheviks its position hardened. On 2 February 1922 Stalin reported on imprisoned Mensheviks, as a result of which the Politburo issued a special order to the GPU, the successor to the Cheka, ‘to transfer to special places of imprisonment the most active and important of the leaders of anti-Soviet parties. Mensheviks, SRs and Anarchists at present held by the Cheka should continue to be kept in imprisonment.’⁷⁷

The Mensheviks tried appealing to Social Democrats in the West. The Cheka intercepted one such letter to the International Berne Conference and reported it to Lenin. He read it, and underlined the words: ‘the prisons are overflowing, the workers are shooting each other, many of our Social Democrat comrades have been shot’.⁷⁸ The Mensheviks’ Central Bureau also wrote to Lenin, asking for the ‘honest legalization’ of their party, but Lenin’s only response was to consign their appeal ‘to the archives’.⁷⁹ All that was left for the Mensheviks was to try, even from afar, to save something of the values of the revolution of February 1917 through their journal Sotsialisticheskii vestnik (Socialist Messenger), published first in Berlin, then in Paris and, when the war came, in New York, where it closed in 1965, as there were no more old Mensheviks left to run it.

The Bolsheviks meanwhile tightened the screws. It was not only the Menshevik leaders who were being imprisoned and exiled; rank and file members of the Party, most of them of the intelligentsia, were suffering various punishments and persecution. The radical wing of the revolution was finishing off the democratic wing. Not that the Mensheviks were blameless. They had not done well in the election to the Constituent Assembly, they had failed to rally significant numbers of liberal forces, and they had failed to get across the ideas they had advocated for decades. Theirs was a sad fate. With the help of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, Russian Social Democracy died both inside and outside the country quietly and unnoticed. Some of the Social Democrats, it is true, changed direction under the impact of international events. For instance, in 1936, in Paris, Dan recognized the Soviet Union as the main bulwark against fascism. He published Novyi mir (New World), and then after escaping in March 1940 to New York, aged seventy, he retired as chairman of the Foreign Delegation and as editor of Sotsialisticheskii vestnik and launched Novyi put’ (New Way). His break with Menshevism was complete by 1943. In Novyi put’ he as it were rehabilitated Stalin. In his last book, The Origins of Bolshevism, published in 1946, the old adversary of totalitarianism suddenly saw something positive in the forced collectivization of agriculture, and found himself unable fully to condemn the show trials of the 1930s, or the Hitler – Stalin Pact of 1939. He even stated that ‘the internal organic democratization of the Soviet system was not curtailed at its emergence’.⁸⁰ Dan’s capitulation was complete.

Thus ended the Bolshevik – Menshevik struggle. The Mensheviks had seen democracy as an end, the Bolsheviks merely as a means. The Bolsheviks wanted to create a mighty, enclosed party, while the Mensheviks had wanted a party or association of liberally thinking people who rejected coercion.

The Paradox of Plekhanov

Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov was the acknowledged ‘father of Russian Marxism’. Like Lenin, he was of gentry origin. Born in 1856 in Gudalovka, Tambov province, his father was an army captain who insisted his son follow in his footsteps, and Georgy duly entered military school in Voronezh. Soon after receiving his cadet badge, however, he left to become a student at the St Petersburg Mining Institute, from which he was expelled two years later, in 1877, for taking part in a student demonstration.⁸¹ He never lost his military bearing, however, and it was perhaps this that led Lenin to say of him in 1904: ‘Plekhanov is a man of colossal stature who makes you want to shrivel up,’ adding in typical caustic fashion, ‘still, I think he’s a corpse already, and I’m alive.’⁸² A Populist in the 1870s, Plekhanov left Russia in 1879, and by 1883 was a convinced Marxist. Thereafter he devoted himself to formulating doctrine for the Party and programmes for the future of Russia. When Lenin first met him in 1895, the effect of the older man was inspirational. Their next meeting in 1900, however, revealed that leadership ambitions had developed in both men which augured ill for their future collaboration, and when the Party split in 1903, Plekhanov joined the Mensheviks. The mutual hostility between the two men was reinforced by the diametrically opposed positions they took on the war, Lenin as a defeatist, Plekhanov as a defencist.

Plekhanov was abroad, in Switzerland, for thirty-seven years from 1879. He returned at last to Petrograd on 31 March 1917. This was two weeks before Lenin arrived, and is explained by the fact that the Allies were happy to facilitate the return of so ardent an advocate of the war effort. Plekhanov, who was suffering a serious chest condition and resting in the comparatively mild climate of San Remo when Nicholas II was overthrown, was eager to get back to Russia and to show his support for the revolution. He travelled through France to England and from there, on a French passport, was transported via the North Sea to Russia. Despite his warm reception, within a year he would be virtually running away from the revolution he had preached and waited for all his life. In an article, ‘On Lenin’s Theses and Why Delirium can be Interesting at the Time’, published in the late summer of 1917, Plekhanov wrote that Lenin’s call for fraternization with the Germans, for the overthrow of the Provisional Government and the seizure of power, would be seen by the workers for what they were, namely ‘an insane and extremely dangerous attempt to sow anarchic chaos in the Russian land.’⁸³ His words fell on deaf ears. After the October seizure of power, with Vera Zasulich and Lev Deich he wrote an ‘Open Letter to the Petrograd Workers’, declaring that those who had seized power were pushing the Russian people ‘onto the path of the greatest historical calamity’, and that this step would ‘provoke a civil war which in the end would force them to retreat far from the positions accomplished in February and March’.⁸⁴ Next day, a unit of soldiers and sailors burst into the apartment where Plekhanov was living with his wife, Rozalia Markovna. Pressing a revolver into his chest, one of the sailors demanded, ‘Hand over your weapons freely. If we find any, we’ll shoot you on the spot.’ ‘You’re likely to do that, even if you don’t find any,’ Plekhanov responded calmly. ‘But I don’t have any.’ The search did not end in immediate tragedy, but Plekhanov had to go into hiding, first in a clinic in Petrograd, then in Finland, at Pitkejarvi, near Terioki, where he died on 30 May 1918.

Lenin’s relations with Plekhanov went through a full cycle, from deep regard – ‘for twenty years, from 1883 to 1903, he gave the masses superb writings’ – to complete ostracism – ‘brand the chauvinist Plekhanov’. In fact, Marxism in Russia was raised on Plekhanov’s articles. No one, including Lenin, had noticed that Plekhanov, for all his orthodoxy, did not include in his vision of Marxism the distorted features which pepper Lenin’s writings. Plekhanov did not point out the ‘counter-revolutionary essence’ of the liberals, he did not reject parliamentarism, he accepted with reservations the idea of ‘proletarian hegemony’, and he accorded an enormous rôle to the intelligentsia in social movements. All this was later condemned as opportunism, liberal bootlicking, chauvinism, and so on. His particular sin was not merely ‘to accommodate himself to Menshevism and liberalism’, but to interpret the essence of class war in an ‘opportunistic fashion’.

Indeed, in the introduction to his unfinished work ‘The History of Russian Social Thought’, Plekhanov had written: ‘The development of any given society, divided into classes, is determined by the development of those classes and their mutual relations, that is, first, their mutual struggle where the internal social structure is concerned, and secondly, their more or less friendly collaboration when the defence of the country from outside attack is concerned.’⁸⁵ He suggested that class relations of this type were especially characteristic of Russia, and that this had left an indelible imprint on Russian history. This view may have prompted his ‘defencist outlook’, but despite being labelled a ‘defencist’ and ‘social patriot’ by the Bolsheviks, he retained his views on the war until the end of his life. To Lenin’s call for Russian soldiers to fraternize with Germans, because Russia was conducting a predatory war, he responded ironically: ‘forgive us, good Teutons, for the fact that our predatory intentions made you declare war on us; made you occupy a large slice of our territory; made you treat our prisoners with arrogant bestiality; made you seize Belgium and turn that once flourishing country into a bloodbath; made you ruin many French provinces, and so on and so forth. It’s all our fault! Our terrible fault!’⁸⁶

When he returned to Russia after more than thirty years of exile abroad, Plekhanov soon realized that being a Marxist theorist was not the same thing as being a revolutionary politician. He came out strongly against the idea of socialist revolution, accusing Lenin of forcing events for which Russia was not prepared,⁸⁷ and was firmly convinced that Russia was not ready for ‘anything but a bourgeois revolution’.⁸⁸ He was not understood. Was this the chief paradox of Plekhanov? All his life he had written about the class struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the leading rôle of the working class in restructuring society, and socialist revolution, as the goals of Marxist teaching. Yet when his own country raised its foot to cross the threshold of that revolution he staked all his authority on open protest. Perhaps this was not the real paradox. Plekhanov was too orthodox to depart from classical Marxist blueprints and to assent to leapfrogging stages. He regarded such an approach as ‘Leninist delirium’.

Plekhanov in a sense reflected the drama of the Russian nobility and intelligentsia. Realizing that only gradual change would put Russia on the path of genuine progress, one part of this social élite believed that such changes could be achieved by revolutionary methods, while another believed in the path of accommodation, adaptation and appropriate reordering of the existing system. It is therefore not surprising that Plekhanov, a noble from Tambov province, whose mother was related to Belinsky, the famous radical philosopher of the 1840s, should have a brother, Grigory, who was a police superintendent. When the then Bolshevik Nikolai Valentinov asked Grigory if the statues of Catherine the Great would be pulled down when the revolution came, the police superintendent replied, ‘What rubbish! When the revolution comes? There isn’t going to be one. There can’t be one in Russia. We’re not in France.’⁸⁹ Georgy saw things differently, although for him the revolution, which was inevitable, must be the bourgeois one, which would last a long time. On the eve of the October revolution in 1917 he had the political courage to proclaim loudly that the coming regime must not be based on the narrow foundations of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but ‘must be based on a coalition of all the vital forces in the country’. In a series of articles published in August and September in the newspaper Yedinstvo (Unity), he declared that a coalition would represent a consensus of the nation. ‘If you don’t want consensus, go with Lenin. If you decide not to go with Lenin, enter the consensus.’

In his desperate efforts to prevent the dictatorship of the ‘professional revolutionaries’, Plekhanov consciously went about his own political self-destruction: ‘Are the interests of the workers always and in every respect opposed to the interests of the capitalists? In economic history has there never been a time when these interests coincided? Partial coincidence generates cooperation in certain areas. Socialist and non-socialist elements can realize this limited agreement in social reforms.’⁹⁰ All this was complete heresy to Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

In effect, Plekhanov’s last articles, on the eve of the October coup, represent a new conception of socialism. Having for decades defended the class approach of the dictatorship of the proletariat at congresses of the Second International, he was now revising many of his previous principles. He had become not only a ‘defencist’, but also a ‘reformist’, terms of Leninist abuse which were equalled in derisiveness only by that of ‘plekhanovist’. In March 1920, when Lenin was informed that a revolutionary tribunal in Kiev had sentenced one I. Kiselev to death and that he was appealing to Lenin for help, Lenin wrote to Krestinsky, the local Bolshevik in charge: ‘The sentence of death on Kiselev is a very urgent matter. I used to see him in 1910–14 in Zurich, where he was a plekhanovist [Lenin’s emphasis] and was accused of several vile things (I never knew the details). I caught a glimpse of him here in Moscow in 1918 or 1919. He was working on Izvestiya and told me he was becoming a Bolshevik. I don’t know the facts.’ In the end Lenin left it to Dzerzhinsky to telephone Krestinsky and decide the issue. Dzerzhinsky replied with a note for the file: ‘I’m against interfering.’⁹¹

Coming face to face with Russian reality, Plekhanov must have shuddered; after all, he himself had penned the clause on the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Party programme, and he had uttered the famous maxim ‘The good of the revolution is the highest law’, in effect opening the sluice gates of unmitigated violence. Nor could he live down the fact that at the beginning of the century he had said that if after the revolution the parliament turned out ‘bad’, it could be dispersed ‘not after two years, but after two weeks’. In essence, it was Plekhanov’s formula that the Bolsheviks applied when they dispersed the Constituent Assembly in January 1918.

Valentinov recalled that when Plekhanov came to Moscow, he went on an excursion to the Sparrow Hills outside the city with a small group of friends. The photographs taken of him with Vera Zasulich are both beautiful and sad. Valentinov recalled that Plekhanov was moved and, taking Zasulich’s hand, recalled a moment in the lives of two other revolutionaries: ‘Vera Ivanovna, ninety years ago virtually on this spot Herzen and Ogarev took their oath. Nearly forty years ago, in another place, we also swore an oath that for us the good of the people would be the highest law all our lives, do you remember? We are obviously going downhill now. The time is coming soon when someone will say of us, that’s the end. It’ll probably come sooner than we think. While we are still breathing, let us look each other in the eyes and ask: did we carry out our oath? I think we did, honestly. Didn’t we, Vera Ivanovna, carry it out honestly?’⁹² Eight months later Plekhanov died, and shortly thereafter, so did Zasulich.

At a meeting of the Politburo in July 1921, Public Health Commissar Nikolai Semashko raised the question of erecting a monument to Plekhanov in Petrograd. The Politburo’s response was both neutral and positive, leaving it to Semashko to discuss the matter with the Petrograd Soviet, since it was in a sense also a municipal matter.⁹³ Then the question arose of help for Plekhanov’s family, which was living in straitened circumstances abroad. On 18 November 1921 Lenin proposed that ‘a small sum’ of 10,000 Swiss francs be given to the family as a one-off payment. At the same time it was decided without explanation that the much larger sum of 5000 gold roubles be paid to the family of Karl Liebknecht, the German Social Democrat assassinated in Germany in 1919.⁹⁴ Perhaps it was because Liebknecht’s widow Sofia, a Russian by birth, had been more insistent in her appeals to Lenin. She had written that her ‘father had had an estate at Rostov on Don, including three houses and shares worth about 3 million roubles. I should have had about 600,000 roubles, but the house was nationalized. Give me about 1,200,000 marks for myself and my children. I must free myself of material dependence … I’m choking with cares … Give us security once and for all with this round sum, I beg you! Oh, free me from dependency, let me breathe freely. But don’t give me half, only the whole sum.’ After agreeing to 5000 roubles in gold, Lenin wrote on the file: ‘Secret, for the archives.’⁹⁵ In fact, Zinoviev had already sent Sofia Liebknecht a box of stolen gems worth 6600 Dutch guilders and 20,000 German marks.

Nikolai Potresov, who had been close to Plekhanov for much of their lives as revolutionaries, marked the tenth anniversary of Plekhnov’s death with an essay. It seemed, he wrote, that Plekhanov had gone home only ‘to see with his own eyes Russia being chained up again. And with what chains! Forged by the proletariat! And by whom? By his former pupils! It is hard to imagine a worse punishment … like King Lear, he was thrown out and betrayed by his own children.’⁹⁶ Rather than as the Master of the Order, or as the leader of the Party that he had created with Lenin, Plekhanov entered history as the prophet of the Bolshevik disaster.

The Tragedy of Martov

It was common for Russian revolutionaries to adopt aliases and pseudonyms, often choosing them randomly or perhaps for dramatic effect. ‘Lenin’, as has been noted, probably derived from the River Lena in Siberia; Iosif Dzhugashvili, a Georgian, adopted ‘Stalin’, which suggested a man of steel; Lev Bronshtein chose ‘Trotsky’ because it was the name of one of his prison warders. Often a new name was a matter of simple security, to obtain a new passport, to evade capture or to throw the police off the scent. Aliases were particularly prevalent among revolutionaries of Jewish origin, since a Russian name might provide a more effective disguise. Thus it was that Julius Osipovich Tsederbaum was to become known as ‘Yuli Martov’.

Martov died in Berlin in 1923, but his political death came on the night of 25 October 1917, during the Second Congress of Soviets. The Soviets were perceived as non-Party bodies, general assemblies of socialist opinion where deputies from workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ committees gathered to formulate their resolutions calling on the Provisional Government to leave the war, to delay sending troops to the front, and similar demands, including of course to hand over power. In the course of 1917, however, as war-weariness grew and the Bolshevik message generated a greater response, the Soviets remained non-partisan in name only: in effect, they became almost wholly Bolshevik bodies, especially in Petrograd and Moscow.

When the Second Congress of Soviets met, the Provisional Government under Kerensky had just been overthrown by the Bolsheviks, though they had ostensibly acted in the name of the Soviets. Any hope that the Congress would produce a solution to the crisis, preferably by forming a broad socialist coalition government, was dashed before a word was spoken. The composition of the Congress was probably a fair reflection of the situation in the country at large: of 650 delegates, about three hundred were Bolsheviks, while another eighty or ninety were Left Socialist Revolutionaries. The other Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks amounted to about eighty each, and the remaining hundred were either unaccounted for or were genuinely non-partisan.

Fedor Dan opened the meeting, and the Bolsheviks and Left Socialist Revolutionaries – a splinter from the main Party and more in harmony with the Bolsheviks – took up their places on the platform in proportion to the number of their delegates. The Mensheviks refused to occupy the four places allotted to them, in protest against the Bolshevik seizure of power that had taken place the previous night. Martov called out that it was a time for common sense to prevail, for the coup to be repudiated and for talks to take place to form a coalition government. It looked as if the Congress might swing his way, but then Trotsky made a speech which saved Lenin’s line, and the delegates swung sharply to the left. His voice hoarse from a cold and from his incessant smoking, Martov’s nerve snapped and he declared: ‘We’re leaving!’ His supporters shouted and stamped their feet in the face of their defeat. It was not the Bolsheviks who had snuffed out Martov’s candle: it was his own decision to leave the Congress.

There had never been a place for Martov in the order created by Lenin at the beginning of the century. Lenin personified the leadership of an iron vangard; Martov was a Russian Don Quixote who expected a following not of Party troops but of an amorphous association. Lenin had proved the better leader, always with his eye on the political goal, while Martov, a naive romantic, had been sustained by the idea of injecting democratic values into the socialist programme.

Widely regarded as one of the most intelligent, and most approachable, of the best-known members of the RSDLP, Martov was born in 1873 into a middle-class Russian Jewish family in Constantinople, where his father was engaged in commerce and acting as the Turkish correspondent for two leading St Petersburg journals. His mother was Viennese, and the atmosphere in the Tsederbaum household was one of liberal enlightenment and tolerance. In 1877 the family moved back to Odessa.

The early 1880s in Russia was a time of mounting hostility to all things foreign, as the assassination of Alexander II in March 1881 had prompted the widespread belief that Russia’s new social evil was of foreign, Western origin. As a child Martov witnessed the atmosphere of hatred against the Jews when a pogrom was unleashed in Odessa, and however wholeheartedly he was to become a part of the Russian revolutionary movement, he never lost the sense that he had come from, and would remain part of, an oppressed and despised minority. The family moved to St Petersburg in 1882, and in 1889, when he was sixteen, Julius entered high school, where he formed strong bonds of friendship with the sons of the intelligentsia he found there.⁹⁷

He was already a committed Populist when he was admitted to St Petersburg University in 1891, and he was soon arrested for voicing seditious ideas. Released after several months, he was expelled from the university, and in 1893 was rearrested and sentenced to two years’ exile from St Petersburg and any other university city. He spent 1893–95 in Vilna (Vilnius), which was both the centre of traditional East European Jewish culture and a hotbed of working-class organization. Martov arrived just at the moment when the leaders of Jewish workers’ groups were changing their tactics from intensive teaching circles to mass agitation. That is, instead of raising the general educational level of a few workers, who then tended to want to enter the ranks of the intelligentsia themselves, or to exploit their new-found culture to acquire professional qualifications, the idea was to gather large numbers of workers at secret meeting places and to convey one or two simple ideas, such as the injustice of low wages or poor conditions, and thus hope to ‘agitate’ them sufficiently to take strike action or to demonstrate for better conditions.

The new approach was highly successful, and when Martov returned to the capital in 1895, he spread these ideas. With Lenin, whom he met at that time, he formed the Union for the Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class, but in 1896, like his new comrade, he was arrested and exiled to Siberia. Released in 1900, he went abroad and collaborated with Lenin, Potresov, Plekhanov and Axelrod on their new newspaper, Iskra. Until 1903 it seemed Martov and Lenin were the perfect team. They each brought to the partnership experience in the organization of illegal groups and the formulation of ideas for wide consumption which, together with Plekhanov’s more sophisticated writing, created a newspaper that many workers, intellectuals and local organizers were eager to read, risking arrest and Siberian exile for the privilege. What Martov did not know, however, was that during these years of preparation Lenin had been encouraging his agents to use any means necessary to detach local social democratic committees from their existing loyalties, and to make them acknowledge Iskra as the sole ideological and organizational centre of Party activity. Martov naturally wanted Iskra to prosper, but he conceived of the forthcoming Second Party Congress as an opportunity to bind all of the existing social democratic elements into a single, broad-based party. It was only in the course of the Congress itself that he realised that Lenin’s idea was to exclude from the Party all but those elements which acknowledged the editors of Iskra as the leadership.

At the Second Congress, which took place in Brussels and London in the summer of 1903, it appeared that Martov’s prospects were bright. After Plekhanov, he emerged as the most significant delegate, although Lenin’s voice became more confident as he gained supporters. Millions of Soviet citizens, schooled in a history smoothed beyond recognition, believed that the split in 1903 into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks was over the organizational question – or, more precisely, point one of the Party Statutes on membership. Schoolmasters, professors and army commissars all parroted, ‘Lenin wanted to create a party-citadel, a party-fighting unit. Martov preferred to create an amorphous, diffuse formation which could never have achieved Communist aims.’ Ironically, the last point was undoubtedly true. As for the ‘party-citadel’, that was not Lenin’s aim. The real issue was whether the Party was to be an order or a democratic body. Lenin was proposing that a member would support the Party by material means as well as by ‘personal participation in one of the Party organizations’. Martov’s formula was less rigorous: apart from material support, a member was obliged to give the Party ‘regular personal support under the guidance of one of its organizations’. According to Stalin’s Short Course on the history of the Party, Martov wanted to ‘open the door wide to unstable non-proletarian elements … These people would not be part of the organization, nor be subject to Party discipline or carry out Party tasks, nor face the associated dangers. Yet Martov … was proposing to recognize such people as Party members.’⁹⁸ Stalin perhaps also believed it was an ‘organizational question’. Political ‘softness’, for Martov, meant not only a readiness to compromise, it also signified understanding the need for a union with high morality. And it was this, not the organizational question, that separated him from Lenin forever: the conflict was dominated by moral rather than political imperatives.

Martov, who had previously been in step with Lenin and had voted with him on all the points of the programme, suddenly ‘rebelled’ during the twenty-second session, not only over the membership issue, but on almost everything else. His rebellion was to last for the rest of his life. Although Lenin’s proposal received twenty-three votes to Martov’s twenty-eight, Lenin dominated in all further contests.

As we have seen, Martov virtually began his political life as an activist among the Jewish Social Democrats who were to found the Jewish Workers’ Union (known by its Yiddish name as the Bund) in 1897. In terms of scale alone, the Bund was to become an impressive social force. In 1904 it could count more than 20,000 members, or more than twice the number in the ‘Russian’ Party organizations.⁹⁹ For Martov in the early 1890s, the Jewish organizations had seemed the most important force for attaining civil equality for the Jews.¹⁰⁰ By the time of the Second Congress, however, he had become strongly opposed to what he now saw as Jewish separatism. The Bund, however, supported Martov at the Congress against Lenin until the majority of the delegates voted against giving it the status of sole representative of the Jewish workers in the RSDLP. Together with the delegates of Workers’ Cause, another dissident group, the five Bundists walked out, leaving Martov’s side a true minority.

In his relations with the young Vladimir Ulyanov, Martov had begun to observe certain features which in the end would make the chasm between them unbridgeable. He mentioned this in his ‘Notes of a Social Democrat’, which was published in Berlin, remarking that Lenin ‘did not yet have, or had in lesser measure, the confidence in his own strength – never mind in his historical calling – that was to emerge so clearly in his mature years … He was then twenty-five or twenty-six years old … and he was not yet full of the scorn and distrust of people which, I believe, is what made him into a certain type of leader.’¹⁰¹

In practice, until the revolution of 1917, Lenin strove for his main idea of creating a monolithic, centralized party. He never doubted that he would indeed come to power, and what would follow. The Party-order would already be in existence. It would not evaporate. Was this not a threat to the future? He did not think so, and anyone who did was worthy only to join Martov. All those in favour of an iron guard, and willing to fight and smash, were welcome in his party; those who were not could go to Martov’s ‘flabby monster’.¹⁰²

Lenin went on disputing with Martov right up to October 1917, if a constant stream of abuse can be called disputing. Martov was intransigent. Inclined by nature to compromise, he felt no urge for conciliation. He had long ago come to believe that the socialism Lenin wanted had nothing in common with justice, or moral principles, or the humane origins of socialist thinking. Knowing he had already lost, he summed up the ‘interim’ accounts of 1917 in horror. He wrote to a friend, N.S. Kristi:

It is not merely the deep belief that it is senselessly utopian to try to plant socialism in an economically and culturally backward country, but also my organic inability to accept the Arakcheev-style [barracks] concept of socialism and the Pugachev-style [violent] notion of class struggle which are being generated by the very fact that they are trying to plant a European ideal in Asiatic soil. The resulting bouquet is hard to take. For me, socialism was never the denial of individual freedom and individualism, but on the contrary, their highest embodiment, and the principle of collectivism I always saw as opposed to ‘the herd instinct’ and levelling … What is happening here is the flourishing of a ‘trench – barracks’ variety of quasi-socialism, based on the ‘simplification’ of everything … ¹⁰³

Martov’s internationalist wartime position of ‘revolutionary defencism’ contrasted markedly with Lenin’s defeatism and Plekhanov’s patriotism, and was perhaps a truer and more noble one to take. The outbreak of war found Martov in Paris. In his small newspaper, Golos (The Voice), and later in Nashe slovo (Our Word), his constant cry was ‘Long live peace! Enough blood! Enough senseless slaughter!’ He maintained this position after returning to Petrograd in May 1917, arguing against defeatism and against turning the war into a civil war, but also against chauvinism, and so he was often under attack from both sides. I.G. Tsereteli, a Social Democrat who played a leading rôle in 1917, recalled Martov saying in the summer of that year: ‘Lenin is not interested in questions of war and peace. The only thing that interests him is the revolution, and the only real revolution for him is the one in which the Bolsheviks have seized power.’ Martov wondered what Lenin would do if the democrats, i.e. the Provisional Government, managed to make peace: ‘He would no doubt change his tactics and preach to the masses that all the post-war misfortunes were due to the criminal democrats because they ended the war too soon and didn’t have the courage to carry it on to the final destruction of German imperialism.’¹⁰⁴

In June 1918 the Executive Committee of Soviets (VTsIK) voted to expel the Right SRs and Mensheviks. When they were asked to leave the meeting, Martov leapt up and began shouting curses at the ‘dictators’, ‘bonapartists’, ‘usurpers’, ‘putschists’, all the while struggling unsuccessfully to get his coat on. Lenin stood, white-faced, watching in silence. A Left SR sitting next to Martov began laughing and poking his finger at Martov, who, coughing and shouting, managed at last to get his coat on and leave, turning as he did so to hurl at his mirthful tormentor: ‘You may laugh now, young man, but give it three months and you’ll be following us.’¹⁰⁵

Martov nevertheless remained an orthodox Marxist all his life. He believed that the socialist revolution could be an innovative and refreshing act of creativity, but he could not accept the Leninist monopoly and the Bolsheviks’ reliance on coercion and terror. In defeat, he naively believed that the revolution could be clean and moral and bright. When Red and White Terror clashed to produce a monstrous wave of violence, Martov wrote a pamphlet called ‘Down with the Death Penalty’. In it, he stated:

As soon as the Bolsheviks came to power, having announced the end of the death penalty, from the very first day they started killing prisoners taken in battle during the civil war, as all savages do. To kill enemies who have surrendered in battle on the promise that their lives will be spared … The death penalty has been abolished, but in every town and district various extraordinary commissions and military – revolutionary committees have sentenced hundreds and hundreds of people to be shot … This bloody debauchery is being carried out in the name of socialism, in the name of the teaching which proclaimed the brotherhood of people labouring for the highest goal of humanity … A party of death penalties is as much an enemy of the working class as a party of pogroms.¹⁰⁶

As if to prove Martov right, in November 1923, after his death, the Politburo reviewed the ‘Turkestan question’. Central Committee member Jan Rudzutak, a Latvian, reported that Basmachi (anti-Bolshevik forces) chieftains had been invited to talks with the local Soviet authorities. They had been promised their lives were not in danger, and that a special conference would find ways of settling the conflict peacefully. One hundred and eighty-three chieftains had turned up. They were arrested at once, and 151 of them were sentenced to be shot. The first on the list had already been executed when Moscow intervened. The Politburo regarded the action as ‘inopportune’, nothing worse.¹⁰⁷

If Martov’s arguments were moral, Lenin’s were purely pragmatic. On 31 January 1922 he wrote to Unshlikht: ‘I cannot possibly attend the Politburo. I’m feeling worse. But I don’t think there’s any need for me. It’s only a matter of purely technical measures to help our judges intensify (and speed up) repression against the Mensheviks …’¹⁰⁸ Martov had no hope of influencing the Bolshevik leadership towards humanizing their policies. If his political death was noisy, his physical death was quiet and sad, like a guttering candle. Seriously ill, in the autumn of 1920 he was allowed by the Politburo to leave for Germany, where he founded Sotsialisticheskii vestnik. In his last article, he foresaw that the Bolsheviks would leave the scene and be replaced in Russia by a ‘democratic regime ruled by law’. He died of tuberculosis on 24 April 1923, not yet aged fifty. Perhaps it was as much the collapse of all his ideas as his constant smoking that killed him off.¹⁰⁹

People like Martov wanted the course of revolution to be like a river, peaceful, smooth and broad, while Lenin’s followers saw it as a waterfall, cascading from on high. The party Lenin created soon became an order, after October 1917 a state order. Not a monastic or chivalrous order, but an ideological one, and until his death nobody had the slightest doubt that Lenin had the absolute right to be the master of this order. He had not, however, taken account of the fact that a party such as his could survive only within a totalitarian system, a fact demonstrated by the events of August 1991.

* Vyacheslav Plehve, Nicholas II’s Interior Minister, was assassinated in 1904. Peter Stolypin was the Prime Minister from 1906 until he was assassinated – in the tsar’s presence – in 1911.

* Larin, whose real name was Mikhail Lurie, was a top official in the economic apparatus. Alexei Rykov was in charge of the Council for the National Economy.

3 The Scar of October

On the evening of 1 August 1914, Germany declared war on Russia. When mobilization was declared, the whole nation rallied to the tsar. Plekhanov expressed a strong desire to defend the fatherland, and even Trotsky, who was not a defencist, wrote in the Paris newspaper Nashe slovo (Our Word) (formerly Golos, The Voice) that to preach the defeat of tsarist Russia made no sense, since that would mean advocating the victory of reactionary Germany. Only Lenin sensed intuitively the improbable, fantastic chance of achieving his hopes.

As patriotism sank in the mud and blood of the trenches, and hopes for victory faded, Lenin grew confident that neither Tsar Nicholas nor Kaiser Wilhelm would emerge from the war without a revolution. The intelligentsia, both in Russia and Germany, cursed the war and called for peace. But while each side hoped that its own army would not be defeated, only Lenin saw the war as an indispensable ally.

Unlike the peasant in his soldier’s cloak, enduring gas attacks, or the prisoner of war in Saxony, or the impoverished family in the city, Lenin observed the war from the Russian émigré’s grand circle, at first in Poronino and Vienna, and then in the neutral comfort of Berne and Zurich. How did the leader of the future Russian revolution fill the time during its prologue? Did he prepare himself for the rôle he was to play? Was he confident of the outcome? Until the February revolution, he led the quiet life of a man used to living far from home and not very much concerned with domestic cares. Life for Lenin in those years meant writing hundreds of letters to a relatively limited circle of people, among them his close Bolshevik associates Alexander Shlyapnikov, Alexandra Kollontai, Karl Radek, Grigory Pyatakov, S. Ravich, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, and his friend and benefactor Maxim Gorky. A large part of his correspondence was with Inessa Armand, he being in Zurich, she in Clarens on Lake Geneva near Montreux. It was an emotionally charged exchange between two very close people who, though they discussed revolutionary matters, tried to give each other something more than routine reports, more than confirmation of the posting of books or organizing links between Russia and Scandinavia.

Lenin spent a lot of time studying the works of Hegel, Aristotle and Lassalle, as well as Napoleon and Clausewitz, he read Victor Hugo’s poetry and occasionally took Krupskaya to the local theatre. They were able to relax at a moderately priced spa in the mountain resort of Flums in St Gallen. When he was not writing letters, resting, holding meetings, travelling or rowing with his opponents, Lenin wrote articles, pamphlets and more substantial works such as ‘Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism’. Since the post from Russia was slow, he got his news from The Times, Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Le Temps, and he gained the growing impression that an earthquake was approaching in Russia. The nation’s weariness of the hardships imposed by the war and constant defeats was reaching a critical point, although what lay beyond even Lenin did not suspect.

In early January 1917 he gave a lecture at the People’s House in Zurich on the twelfth anniversary of the 1905 revolution. The audience, mostly students, was sparse, and the lecture was boring, prolonged and largely descriptive. Lenin emphasized the fact that in 1905 the scale of civil unrest had been insufficient to topple the autocracy: ‘The peasants burned up to 2000 estates and divided the livestock among themselves … Unfortunately, this was only one-fifteenth of what they ought to have destroyed … They did not act with sufficient aggression, and that is one of the main causes for the failure of the revolution.’ He rushed on speedily through his notes, expressing the view that 1905 would remain ‘the prologue to the approaching European revolution’. He did not mention Russia as the scene of imminent rebellion, and also declared that the revolution would not come soon, concluding: ‘We old folks may not live to see the decisive battles of the coming revolution.’¹

Democratic February

The two chief causes of the February revolution were the unsuccessful progress of the war and the weakness of the regime. Ostensibly, the Russian state collapsed suddenly, but its foundations had been eroded long before. As for the war, despite strategic failures, Russia’s position was not hopeless. The front had been stabilized far from the Russian capital and other vital centres. A breakthrough by General Brusilov in the summer of 1916 had given the people hope in the possibility of an honourable outcome. Far-sighted politicians saw that Germany could not win, especially as the United States seemed likely to enter the war on the Allied side.

To be sure, Social Democratic agitation had its effect on the war-weary army, and the Germans managed to get Bolshevik-style propaganda into the Russian trenches, which would help the Kaiser rather than Russia. President of the Duma Rodzianko wrote in his memoirs that ‘the symptoms of the army’s disintegration could be felt already in the second year of the war … Reinforcements from reserve battalions were arriving at the front with a quarter of the men having deserted … Sometimes, echelons bound for the front would halt because they had nothing left but officers and subalterns. Everyone else had scattered.’² Socialist agitation among the peasants who were unwilling to fight was extremely effective, and the Bolsheviks were making their own independent contribution to the disintegration of the Russian army. On the whole, however, Russia had not yet exhausted her material and human resources on a war that came to seem increasingly just as the German occupation of her territory endured, especially since it was Germany that had started the war.

But the regime proved incapable of governing in a critical situation. Nicholas II’s decision on 6 August 1915 to assume the post of Supreme Commander did not help. Almost the entire cabinet of ministers had protested that the tsar’s decision could threaten both him and the monarchy.³ Nicholas was adamant, however, and departed for Staff Headquarters, leaving the capital to the hostile and venal groupings that had formed in his own entourage. In a country accustomed to one-man rule, the ‘domestic peace’ proclaimed by the Duma when war broke out soon evaporated.

Events in the capital developed their own momentum. On 27 February (12 March New Style) 1917, crowds broke into the Tauride Palace, where a Provisional Committee of the Duma was meeting. By the evening of the same day another claimant to power had emerged, namely the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, hastily convened by the Party organizations. Paul Milyukov, the leader of the Constitutional Democrats, and soon to become Foreign Minister in the post-tsarist government, later wrote: ‘The soldiers appeared last, but they were the masters of the moment, even if they did not realize it themselves.’ They did not behave like conquerors, but rather like men fearful of the consequences of having disobeyed orders and killed their commanding officers. ‘They were even less sure than we that the revolution had succeeded. They wanted recognition and protection.’⁴

In the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a ‘long fatigue’ began which finally knocked away the foundations of the state, social stability and national unity. The main question was who would exploit the new situation. The dominant thought in the public mind was that only drastic measures of a revolutionary character could provide an outcome. Some figures close to the tsar believed that the situation had arisen out of weakness on the part of the regime. Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich had written bitterly to the tsar less than one month before his abdication: ‘We are present at the unprecedented spectacle of a revolution from above, not from below.’⁵

Isolated in Zurich, Lenin had no feel for the nuances of the situation, and when on 2 (15) March he heard that the revolution had succeeded, he was amazed. He first heard of it from Moisei Bronsky, a quiet, retiring Polish Social Democrat from Lodz. Bronsky did not know much himself, except that telegrams had come from Russia. With Bronsky, Lenin wandered all around Zurich trying to find out something more definite, but all they heard was that there’d been a revolution in Petrograd, the ministers had been arrested and crowds were packing the streets. Lenin returned home in a state of excitement: he must do something. Pacing restlessly up and down, he exclaimed to Krupskaya, who was sitting quietly in her old armchair: ‘It’s staggering! Such a surprise! Just imagine! We must get home, but how? It’s so incredibly unexpected! Amazing!’ When he had calmed down somewhat, he wrote his first letter after hearing the news. It was to Inessa Armand, telling her what he had heard and describing the general state of agitation in Zurich. ‘If the Germans aren’t lying, it has happened. Russia must have been on the brink of revolution for the last few days. I’m so excited I cannot possibly go to Scandinavia!!’⁶ Having only two months earlier predicted a long wait for such events, Lenin was now possessed of perfect hindsight, and like so many politicians, felt no need to recall what he had recently asserted.

He cabled Zinoviev in Berne suggesting he come to Zurich immediately, and simultaneously wrote to his most trusted agent, Yakov Ganetsky: ‘We must at all costs get back to Russia and the only possible plan is as follows: find a Swede who looks like me. But as I can’t speak Swedish he’ll have to be deaf and dumb. I’m sending my photo, in any case.’⁷ It was an order almost as tall as starting the world revolution, and was soon dropped in favour of a more practical one.

Meanwhile, the news from Petrograd was more and more staggering. The tsar had abdicated on 2 (15 New Style) March 1917, and so had his brother Michael, having first called on the people to submit to the Provisional Government, which had been ‘initiated by the State Duma and invested with full powers’ until a Constituent Assembly could be convened to determine the nature of government according to the will of the people.⁸ When Lenin read the list of names in the Provisional Government, he remarked sarcastically, ‘the bourgeoisie has managed to get its arse onto ministerial seats’. He had no doubt that these liberals were not one whit better than the tsar, and he regarded their adherence to democratic ideals as nothing better than an attempt ‘to make fools of the people’. In his first ‘letter from afar’ Lenin, accurately from the Bolshevik point of view, caught the flavour of the moment: apart from the Provisional Government there had emerged another ‘plaything’ of the regime, the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, headed by N.S. Chkheidze, A.F. Kerensky and M.I. Skobelev. Only two Bolsheviks, Shlyapnikov and P.A. Zalutsky, were members of its executive committee. Lenin, however, saw in the existence of the two centres of power a unique opportunity for the Bolsheviks. In his view the Soviet was the prototype of the future dictatorship of the proletariat, while the Provisional Government, which might have introduced the principles of bourgeois democratic popular power, he saw as nothing other than the target of his frenzied attacks.

Less than a week after it had been formed, and without the slightest idea of what was happening in Petrograd and Russia, Lenin pronounced: ‘The government of Octobrists and Kadets, of the Guchkovs and Milyukovs … cannot give the people peace, bread or liberty.’⁹ The Octobrists had taken their name from the tsar’s October 1905 Manifesto, and had been the political party most committed to attempting reform within the limits permitted by the tsar, rather than in constant opposition. The Kadets, that is the KDs, or Constitutional Democrats, were a fairly broad coalition of liberals, ranging from former Marxist revolutionaries to moderate reformers, who had spearheaded the criticism of the tsar’s handling of the war effort and were effectively the dominant successors to the old regime. To attack the Provisional Government would undermine the possibility of a peaceful alternative to further revolution. It was therefore consistent for Lenin to tell the Bolsheviks, as they departed for Russia: ‘Our tactics are complete distrust, no support for the new government; we especially suspect Kerensky; we arm the proletariat as the only guarantee; we call for immediate elections to the Petrograd city council; we make no friendships with other parties.’¹⁰ It was a typical reaction: mentally Lenin had applauded the revolution, as his letter to Inessa Armand had shown, but power was in the hands of the bourgeoisie, and there were moderate socialists – Mensheviks – heading the soviets. None of this suited Lenin, who had shown he was incapable of compromise with such people. The only way forward was to arm the proletariat. Since the Bolsheviks had played no noticeable part in the February revolution, he had to change the scenario.

Before leaving Zurich, on 27 March Lenin made a speech in which he declared, with evident satisfaction, that ‘the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war in Russia has begun’.¹¹ The February revolution was merely the first stage. ‘The unique historical situation of the present moment is as a moment of transition from the first stage of the revolution to the second, from the uprising against tsarism to the uprising against the bourgeoisie …’¹² He ended his speech by declaring, ‘Long live the revolution! Long live the world proletarian revolution that has begun!’

In his first ‘letter from afar’ Lenin had described the present moment in Russian political life as ‘a bloodstained bundle’. But it was the Provisional Government that believed, rightly as it turned out, that remaining loyal to the Allies, rather than consciously assisting in the defeat of its own army, would cause less loss of Russian life. It would be hard to find a precedent in history when a political party, for the sake of gaining power, worked as consistently and as zealously for the defeat of its own country as the Bolsheviks were to do. It was, however, an essential link in the chain: the collapse of the state through military defeat would be followed by the seizure of power. The democratic forces of February were not capable of withstanding such a plan.

More surprising than Lenin’s cynicism and anti-patriotism was the fact that he gained enough supporters to achieve his plan in so short a time. Whether he dreamed up the idea of a separate peace with Germany in Zurich, or whether he was entirely preoccupied with the question of getting back to Russia, or whether uppermost in his mind was how to exploit the ardent desire for peace of millions of people, it is not possible to say. With the imagination of the creative writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn has suggested, probably rightly, that all these thoughts were jumbled together in Lenin’s mind in the days following February and before his return to Russia in April.¹³ During that time, most politicians in Russia felt that February had opened up a great new chapter in their history, a chapter of democracy. Lenin, however, was convinced that if the country remained at that stage, he and his party would at best occupy an insignificant place among the opposition in the forthcoming Constituent Assembly. All the shrill revolutionary speeches of his followers would be seen as nothing but the sort of extreme leftism to which Western parliaments had become blithely accustomed. If the February revolution were to stick to the aims proclaimed by its leaders, there would be an opening for Lenin’s old rivals, the Mensheviks, and that was unacceptable to him. He must get to Russia. Having invented and nurtured a tribe of ‘professional revolutionaries’, he now intended to make use of them. The chance might not come again, and he was already forty-seven.

Parvus, Ganetsky and the ‘German Key’

Lenin wrote urgently to his most trusted agent, Yakov Ganetsky in Stockholm, to find a way for him out of his Swiss blind alley. He asked Robert Grimm, a Swiss socialist, to test the possibility of travelling through Germany, but there was no rapid response there. Ganetsky, meanwhile, expeditious and resourceful as always, sent five hundred roubles for the journey,¹⁴ but there was still no plan, and Lenin began to wonder if he had missed the train of history. He wrote to Inessa: ‘It looks as if we won’t get to Russia! England won’t let us. [The idea of] going through Germany isn’t working.’¹⁵ It is possible that the journey might indeed not have taken place at all, since Lenin was frankly afraid of either being arrested in England or sunk by a German U-boat. Perhaps, had he remained in Switzerland writing his ‘letters from afar’, the October revolution would never have happened. Trotsky was to write that without Lenin, October was inconceivable.

Besides the Bolsheviks, however, the German High Command was also interested in getting Lenin back to Russia. For some time they had not only been watching the Bolsheviks with interest, they had also been giving them substantial financial help through various front-men. German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg had been encouraged to do so both by the General Staff and some German Social Democrats, but in particular by Alexander Helphand, then the publisher of Die Glocke. In conversation with the German ambassador in Copenhagen, Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau, Helphand insisted that there was danger in a separate peace with Russia, for the tsar would survive to stamp out the revolution. Only a German victory was acceptable. Helphand did not know that Lenin would soon state publicly that he had always been opposed to a separate Russo – German peace. In an article entitled ‘Where is the Regime and Where is the Revolution?’, published in July 1917 in Listok Pravdy, Lenin stated categorically that he had ‘always and unconditionally repudiated separate peace with Germany in the most decisive and irrevocable way!!’¹⁶ As we have seen, Lenin wanted the defeat of Russia and a civil war. It was a position the German High Command found deeply sympathetic, for their own ‘defeatists’ were hardly to be heard. As First Quartermaster General Erich von Ludendorff, the ‘military brain of the German nation’, was to write of this episode: ‘In helping Lenin to travel to Russia, our government accepted a special responsibility. The enterprise was justified from a military point of view. We had to bring Russia down.’¹⁷ The Bolshevik revolution, when it came, would offer Germany a unique opportunity to win the war. Ludendorff would declare frankly that the Soviet government ‘exists thanks to us’. It is worth noting that in May 1920, when the Politburo discussed the publication in Russian of Ludendorff’s memoirs, it was unanimously decided that ‘only those sections dealing with the Brest negotiations should be translated and published’.¹⁸ Being in power, the Bolsheviks were not especially afraid of exposure, but it would nonetheless be embarrassing. Having secured the defeat of Russia, they had not only served their own interests, but also those of German militarism.

The ‘German factor’ in the Russian revolution has been extensively treated, especially in non-Soviet literature. The Russian Marxists preferred to say nothing, following Lenin’s request (which curiously was not published immediately) ‘again and again to all honest citizens not to believe the dirty slander and dark rumours’.¹⁹ The Bolsheviks never attempted to disprove the accusation that they had made a deal with the Germans to ‘bring Russia down’. While the financial connections had evidently been indirect, it was impossible to deny the call for Russia’s defeat. It was best either to say nothing, or simply ‘Don’t believe the slanderers.’

The question that remains to be answered is whether there was a Bolshevik – German understanding on ‘peace propaganda’, as the Germans preferred to refer to this touchy question. Did the Bolsheviks receive German money for the revolution? The historian S.P. Melgunov claimed that one should look for the ‘German golden key in the pocket of Parvus [Helphand], who was connected both to the socialist world and the [German] foreign ministry and representatives of the German General Staff’, and that this explained the extraordinarily rapid success of Lenin’s propaganda.²⁰ The matter is one of the many secrets surrounding the revolution, and although I have examined a vast number of hitherto inaccessible documents, it is still far from clear. Much was decided within a small circle of Bolsheviks by word of mouth, many documents were destroyed after the revolution, and Lenin was very good at keeping secrets.

In order to lift the veil further, we must concentrate on two figures. The first is Alexander Lazarevich Helphand (also known as Parvus and Alexander Moskovich). The second, who is even more obscure, is Yakov Stanislavovich Fürstenberg (also known as Ganetsky, Hanecki, Borel, Hendriczek, Frantiszek, Nikolai, Marian Keller, Kuba … ). In 1917 these two shadowy figures played the rôle of unseen levers. They did not agitate the masses: their rôle was to help Lenin and his group secure the funds needed to do so.

Helphand was born three years before Lenin to a Jewish artisan in Berezicho in the province of Minsk. He went to school in Odessa and university in Berne, where he obtained a doctorate in philosophy. In the West he made the acquaintance of such grandees of the revolutionary movement as Plekhanov, Axelrod, Zasulich, Zetkin, Kautsky and Adler, and he met Lenin and Krupskaya before the 1905 revolution. He acquired a reputation for great erudition, a paradoxical turn of mind, radical judgments and bold predictions. In a series of articles published in 1904 under the title ‘War and the Revolution’, he forecast Russia’s defeat at the hands of Japan, which duly came to pass the following year, and, as an inevitable consequence, a revolutionary conflagration at home. Lenin had long kept an eye on Parvus, but always kept his distance. He might have been thinking of Parvus (or perhaps himself?) when he said to Gorky: ‘the clever Russian is almost always a Jew or has Jewish blood in him.’²¹ Kautsky introduced Parvus to journalism, a profession at which he excelled.²² Trotsky was captivated by him, and fascinated by his theory of ‘permanent revolution’. After leaving Russia, Parvus joined the German Social Democrats and for a long time edited the Dresden paper Arbeiter Zeitung.

Like Trotsky, Parvus played a prominent part in the 1905 revolution – unlike Lenin, who was little more than an extra. Both Trotsky and Parvus were arrested in St Petersburg and exiled, separately, to Siberia, whence they both escaped, first to St Petersburg and then abroad. Despite his talent as a writer, Parvus left only a small literary record, including a book of recollections of his spell in the Peter-Paul Fortress after the defeat of the 1905 revolution. Most of his time was taken up with his favourite occupation, commerce, in which he did extremely well. He was Gorky’s literary agent, and also represented his financial interests in Germany, where at one time his play Lower Depths was playing to full houses. According to Gorky, Parvus took his agreed twenty per cent of the profits for himself, dividing the rest one quarter to Gorky and three quarters to the German Social Democratic Party. Parvus amassed some 100,000 marks, but instead of sending Gorky his money, he wrote to him frankly admitting that he had spent it on a trip to Italy with a female companion. Gorky, who thought ‘it must have been a very pleasant holiday’ to have consumed only his quarter of the earnings, complained to the Central Committee of the German Social Democratic Party. A Party court made up of Kautsky, Bebel and Zetkin condemned Parvus morally, and he left Germany for Constantinople. There he became an advisor to the Young Turk movement, and carried on highly successful commerce between Turkey and Germany.²³

When the war began, Parvus, now a rich man, became consumed by the idea of helping Germany by bringing about revolution in Russia, although there was more to his idea than this. In January 1915, Parvus explained his plan to Wangenheim, the German ambassador in Constantinople: ‘The interests of the German government are identical with those of the Russian revolutionaries. The Russian Democrats can only achieve their aim by the total destruction of Tsarism. On the other hand, Germany would not be completely successful if it were not possible to kindle a major revolution in Russia. However, there would still be a danger to Germany from Russia, even after the war, if the Russian empire were divided into a number of separate parts.’²⁴ Here lay the essence of the German interest in the revolution, and its coincidence with Lenin’s desire for revolution via the defeat of Russia. While it is clear that the plan existed and that the Germans were interested in it, it is not clear quite how the German government intended to carry it out, or how the Bolsheviks would achieve their part of it without losing face.

Western historians have asserted that Lenin met Parvus in Zurich or Berne in May 1915. David Shub claims that ‘at first Lenin listened attentively to Parvus’s plan, but gave him no definite reply. To maintain contact with him, however, he sent Ganetsky-Fürstenberg to Copenhagen with orders to work in Parvus’s Institute and to keep him systematically informed about Parvus’s activities.’²⁵ The official Soviet chronicle of Lenin’s activities in May 1915 states that he ordered from Berne Library a guide-book of resorts and The Influence of High-Mountain Climate and Mountain Excursions on Man, but says nothing about a meeting with Parvus. For his part, however, Parvus described their meeting in detail in a pamphlet entitled, ‘In the Struggle for the Truth’, confirming that it took place in Zurich. Shub asserts, on the basis of Parvus’s own testimony and other documents, that Parvus arrived in Switzerland in the company of Yekaterina Groman and took up residence in the most luxurious hotel. Through Groman, Parvus distributed largesse among needy Russian émigrés. One day in May he unexpectedly entered a restaurant where émigrés ate, and went straight to a table where Lenin, Krupskaya, Inessa Armand and Kasparov, another close friend, were sitting. After brief conversation, Lenin and Krupskaya accompanied Parvus to their apartment, where they talked until evening.

Parvus wrote of this meeting: ‘I told Lenin my views on the social-revolutionary consequences of the war and also drew his attention to the fact that, as long as the war was going on, there would be no revolution in Germany: revolution was possible only in Russia which would blow up as a result of a German victory.’ The meeting was confirmed by the Bolshevik, Arthur Zifeldt, who saw Lenin and Parvus leaving the restaurant together.²⁶

Parvus made it known that he was setting up a new institute in Copenhagen to study the causes and effects of the war, and he succeeded in recruiting a number of Russian Social Democrats, among them some Mensheviks and some Bolsheviks, including, most notably, Yakov Ganetsky, Lenin’s most trusted agent.²⁷ Parvus had frequent meetings with another of Lenin’s close associates, Karl Radek, who in 1924 wrote a sketch of him, based on personal recollections. Radek quoted Parvus saying of himself: ‘I’m Midas in reverse: whenever I touch gold it turns into garbage.’ Twenty years after the events, in an article entitled ‘Parvus-Lenin-Ganetsky’, Kerensky wrote: ‘The Provisional Government firmly established that Ganetsky’s “financial affairs” with Parvus were continued in Petrograd by the Bank of Siberia, where in the name of a relative of Ganetsky called Madame Sumenson, and also the not unknown Kozlovsky, very large sums came from Berlin via the New Bank in Stockholm through the mediation of the same Ganetsky.’ Kerensky could rightly claim that the first historical research into Bolshevik-German links was carried out by his government.

Materials in the Special Archive frequently record that in 1916 a special section was created in Berlin under the name ‘Stockholm’, headed by a certain Trautmann, who maintained contact with Parvus and Radek through Ganetsky. The archives also hold the addresses in Copenhagen where Parvus and Ganetsky lived not far from each other.²⁸

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.