Leon Trotsky, who became famous as a sparkling speechmaker, agreed that at first he wasn’t impressed by a Ulyanov ‘performance’ – but the longer he saw and listened, the more powerful the effect became. ‘I see in front of me a solidly built man, a sturdy, supple figure of medium height. I hear an even-flowing, smooth voice with…rolling “r”s, speaking fast, almost without pauses and, at the beginning, without any particular intonation. He bends his upper body, sticks his fingers into the armholes of his waistcoat. These gestures at once swing out head and elbows. The head does not seem large…but what seems enormous is the forehead. He moves his arms about, neither nervously nor in an exaggerated manner. His hand is broad, with short fingers, “plebeian”, strong. The speaker deals with the objections of his opponents…before he analyses a hostile idea he gives you to understand that it is without foundation, superficial, wrong. He pulls his arm out of his waistcoat, throws his body gently backwards…shrugs his thick-set shoulders either with irony or despair and stretches his arms expressively, spreading his palms and fingers. Condemnation, or derision or humiliation of the opponent always comes before refutation of his idea…Then begins the logical offensive. The left hand moves again towards the armhole of the waistcoat, or, more often, the trouser pocket…He is not out to deliver an oration, but to guide towards a conclusion; he explains, he convinces; he shames an audience; he jokes with it, tries convincing again and expounds an idea…There is no brilliant, crowning finale. There is no rhetorical winding up. He finishes a sentence and – full stop. Sometimes the final sentence is simply “This is all I wanted to tell you.” Such an ending accords well with his whole character, but does not seem to dampen his listeners’ enthusiasm.’5
Yet it was his aggression and menace in debate that most struck his friends and foes. One of his intimates for many years was the highly sophisticated, clever and witty Yuli Martov, to whom for a while he was probably closer than any other man – they addressed each other as ‘ty’ rather than ‘vy’, very rare for Vladimir. They fell out spectacularly over politics and became bitter enemies. In 1917, shortly before the Bolshevik Revolution, Martov was asked whether, even as an acknowledged atheist, he thought there might after all be life after death. ‘Oh I hope not. In my opinion one earthly existence is more than enough; do you think it would be fun to continue arguing with Lenin even after death and in the hereafter listening to his gutter abuse?’6
9
Foreign Parts
‘I felt then that I had met the future chief of the Russian Revolution. He was not only an educated Marxist – of these there were many – but he knew what he wanted to do and how it is necessary to do it. He smelled of the Russian land.’
Pavel Axelrod in Zurich, 1895
Vladimir spent nearly half of his adult life outside Russia, though he didn’t leave his homeland until he was twenty-five. His first visit abroad was a revolutionary ‘grand tour’, when he was asked by St Petersburg Marxists to make contact with the Emancipation of Labour group of radical exiles in Western Europe, including all the big names of the Russian dissident movement who had fled from the Tsarist regime. He left at the end of April 1895 for a four-month trip around Austria, Switzerland, France and Germany. He was supposed to have departed earlier in the year, but his journey was delayed after he came down with the first of the various illnesses that would periodically afflict him over the years. He suffered a serious bout of pneumonia that kept him in bed for weeks, but when he recovered he was keen to go on ‘an important mission for the Revolution’.1
Among the first to know Vladimir was going – around the same time as his mother and sisters were informed – was the Okhrana, whose spies had been following him for months. Secret intelligence officials in St Petersburg wrote about him to their most senior agent outside Russia, Pyotr Rachkovsky, head of the Okhrana department in Paris responsible for keeping an eye on Russian political exiles in Europe. Rachkovsky would come to know a lot about him over the coming years. ‘According to the information available to the Police Department, the above mentioned Ulyanov occupies himself with Social Democratic propaganda among Petersburg workers,’ the report on him sent to Paris said. ‘The objective of his visit is to find ways of bringing into the empire revolutionary literature as well as to establish contact between revolutionary circles and emigrants abroad.’ He had two false-bottomed and doublelined suitcases specially made for his journey in which he planned to smuggle back the illegal literature.
One thing he immediately discovered on his travels was that while he thought he was good at languages, in fact he wasn’t. He had swotted up on German and English and had acquired a smattering of French from books, but he had barely conversed with anyone in any of them. Later he learned to be relatively fluent in three foreign languages, but when he left Russia for the first time he was shocked by how little he knew, particularly of German, in which he had prided himself. ‘I do not understand even the simplest words – their pronunciation is unusual and they talk so fast,’ he wrote to his mother soon after stepping off a train in Austria. ‘I ask the guard on the train a question, he answers and I don’t understand him. He repeats the answer louder. I still don’t understand so he gets angry and walks away…In spite of this disgraceful fiasco, I am not discouraged and continue distorting the German language with some zeal.’2
His second big discovery was the magnificence of the Alps – and this was love at first sight. Mountains invariably had a calming influence on him and in the coming years, as Nadya said, ‘Ilyich was always happiest, most relaxed when he had mountains close to him.’ From the first moment he saw one of the high Alps as his train steamed into the Austrian Tyrol he was captivated – ‘I was almost speechless.’ He immediately wrote to his mother, ‘the scenery here is wonderful, extraordinary. I am enjoying it all the time. The Alps began immediately after the little German station I wrote to you from, then came the lakes and I could hardly tear myself away from the window of the railway carriage.’ Most forms of mountain activity fascinated him, though he never learned to ski. One of the reasons he would spend so many of his exile years in Switzerland was to be close to his beloved Alps.3
—
At the end of May in the mountain village of Les Ormonts, near Les Diablerets, Vladimir had his first encounter with the most famous of all the Russian Marxists (until he could lay claim to that mantle himself). Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov, fourteen years his senior, was a venerated figure in the revolutionary movement, ‘the Moses of Marxism, who brought the Ten Commandments of Socialism down from…[the Alpine] Mount Sinai and handed them to the youth of Russia’, as Alexander Potresov put it. He was a giant of a man, nearly two metres tall, lean and always elegantly dressed, invariably in a frock coat. He wore a black pointed beard and sweeping moustaches. He had been an officer cadet in his youth and still had a military bearing. ‘He’s a man of colossal stature, who makes you want to shrivel up,’ Vladimir said of him. Over the years they would have tempestuous quarrels which split the Russian revolutionary movement, but when they first met, according to a witness, Vladimir was almost tongue-tied. ‘He was overawed in the presence of the great theoretician, the doyen of Russian Marxism.’ Plekhanov, known as a prickly, vain and arrogant man, was condescending, ‘but looked not without warm sympathy at the able’ young man.4
Plekhanov was of noble birth*1 and after graduating from the military academy at Voronezh he studied at the Mining Institute in St Petersburg, until he was expelled in 1877 for taking part in a demonstration. Two years later, with the Okhrana on his tail, he fled Russia and had been living in exile in Switzerland ever since. His sharp and witty pamphlet Our Differences, written in 1885, was circulated underground and did more than anything else to popularise Marxism in Russian revolutionary circles. Vladimir called it ‘a truly inspirational work’ which converted many young people from Populism to Marxism, Nadya Krupskaya among them. His later book, written under the pseudonym Beltov, On the Development of the Monist View of History, passed the T
sarist censors on the same basis as Marx’s Capital did: it was thought nobody would read a work with such a crushingly dull title and which seemed so esoteric. But the censors were wrong. It made his reputation as the theorist of Russian socialist philosophy and had a profound influence as a clearly written and straightforward primer on Marx’s view that revolution was ‘inevitable’ as a result of the economic and social forces that drove history.
Vladimir was content that his meeting with the great man was successful: he left Switzerland with letters of introduction from Plekhanov to other leading figures of the socialist movement in Europe. But the seeds of their future disagreements were sown at this visit. Plekhanov saw the vigorous Vladimir, who was becoming so well known inside Russian radical circles, as a threat – particularly after his best friend and closest associate, Pavel Axelrod, another big name in the older generation of exiled radicials, was writing letters in glowing praise of the young visitor. Axelrod invited Vladimir to spend a week at his house near Zurich and was enthused by the younger man’s writing and eloquent skill in argument. He told Plekhanov that the coming young man ‘has the temperament of a fighting flame’.5
In Paris Vladimir visited the Folies Bergère, then a decadent fin de siècle night club full of scantily clad dancing girls. But the high point was meeting Paul Lafargue, who could remember first-hand the Paris Commune of 1870. The Frenchman, married to Marx’s daughter Laura, was a member of the Commune’s leadership and Vladimir was ‘filled with excitement’ listening to Lafargue’s stories. He would often refer to the Commune later as one of the most significant moments of modern European history – as the first attempt, however brief, at a Communist revolution. It lasted less than ten weeks before it was violently suppressed by an unholy alliance of the French Right and the Germans. Vladimir often said later that he was determined not to repeat the Commune’s mistakes.
He was charmed by Paris, even though he told his mother that ‘servants are very expensive…and have to be well fed’. Paris, he wrote, ‘makes a very pleasant impression…broad, light streets, many boulevards and lots of greenery. The people are quite unrestrained in their manners – at first it comes as rather a surprise after one has been accustomed to the sedateness and primness of St Petersburg.’ But for much of his grand tour, from the end of June 1895 onwards, he was ill with severe stomach cramps and suffering from the ‘nervous exhaustion’ that plagued him constantly throughout his life. The main symptoms were insomnia and crippling headaches. He went for a rest cure at a spa near Zurich, paid for by his mother. ‘I have decided to take advantage of the place and get down seriously to the treatment of the problem,’ he wrote to her. ‘I have been at the spa several days already and don’t feel too bad…But I have already exceeded…[my budget] so would ask you, Mother dearest, for another 100 rubles or so.’ By the end of August, he was begging for funds again: ‘Mamoushka darling, can you send another 50 or 100 rubles?’6
* * *
Vladimir arrived back in Russia on 19 September 1895. He took various precautions, or so he had thought, on returning. He had told few people the exact date he would be arriving and he felt sure he wasn’t being followed. The false-bottomed and double-lined suitcases he travelled with were now stuffed with illegal literature. When the police tapped the top of one of them he said his ‘heart rapped at the throat’; nevertheless they let him and his luggage through. But the secret police kept him under close surveillance from the moment he re-entered Russia.
Vladimir was a highly secretive man and he grew to delight in the ‘conspiratorial’ hide and seek of the clandestine revolutionary life, the disguises and the moving to safe houses through alleyways and tunnels. It added a frisson of excitement to writing articles and researching in libraries.
He believed he was good at the underground life. He read up on creating codes, and how to devise false trails for the Okhrana to follow. He worked at learning conspiratorial tradecraft. Back in St Petersburg, he began to see a great deal of Nadya and she, too, under his tutelage, studied clandestine methods of communicating with other revolutionary groups. Later, she claimed that the group Vladimir led in St Petersburg was the best equipped of all the underground cells in Russia. ‘Vladimir Ilyich knew all the through courtyards and was a skilled hand at giving police spies the slip. He taught us how to write in books with invisible ink, or by the dot method; how to mark secret signs, and thought out all manner of aliases. His letters were full of advice about the intricacies of underground work. He would advise about the best way of fixing paste to secrete material in the binding of books.’
He was keen to give others tradecraft advice. He wrote to Axelrod shortly after his return home from Switzerland about the best way to make invisible ink. ‘It is essential to use liquid paste; not more than a teaspoonful of starch to a glass of water (and moreover, potato flour, not the ordinary flour, which is too strong). The ordinary (good) paste is only necessary for the top sheet and for coloured paper, because the paper holds well together under a press, even with the thinnest of pastes. It is a suitable method, and ought to be used.’7
But in truth he and his revolutionaries were amateurs compared to the Okhrana, who knew where he was most of the time, what he was writing, at which meeting he was speaking. Vladimir’s big problem was not that he failed to understand the correct consistency of liquid pastes, but that, surprisingly, he was too trusting. He did not believe all the warnings he was given that he was surrounded by police informers. This was a weakness that would be repeated time and again over the next two decades. In many ways he was a good judge of character. But all too often he seemed unable to doubt the honesty of anyone whose credentials he had once accepted as a true revolutionary devoted to the cause. Several times it led him to the brink of disaster.
In the late autumn of 1895, Vladimir was one of the co-founders, among a dozen others, of the Union of the Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class, the first officially Marxist revolutionary organisation in Russia (but, specifically, not a ‘party’) which would be loosely linked to Plekhanov’s exile group. One of the other founder members, a St Petersburg dentist, was an Okhrana agent so the secret police knew almost everything about the group from the beginning, including its plans at the end of December to launch a paper, Rabochee Delo (The Workers’ Cause).
On the night of 8 December the police raided. Vladimir was preparing copy for the first number of the publication, which included, among other ‘subversive’ literature, two articles by himself, ‘To the Working Men and Women of the Thornton Factory’ (who were threatening a strike) and ‘What Are Our Masters Thinking Now?’
They swooped at a time when the paper was about to go to press and members of the editorial board were all together. Vladimir was arrested with the incriminating articles in his possession. Accompanied by two blue-uniformed policemen, he was taken by carriage, the windows curtained from public gaze, to St Petersburg’s House of Preliminary Detention, where a suspect could be held for anything up to two years before a sentence was imposed – without a trial.
*1 The great revolutionary Plekhanov would speak with deep nostalgia until the end of his life of his large and rich family estate at Gudalovka in Tambov Province, south-western Russia, where he was brought up. Though he returned to Russia in 1917 he was an ill man and never managed to visit the estate before he died the following year. He asked his wife Rosalia Bograd to visit it for him after his death.
10
Prison and Siberia
‘No one knows the kind of government he is living under who has never been in jail.’
Lev Tolstoy (1828–1910)
Arrest gave Vladimir the credentials required for a revolutionary. He had written pamphlets, agitated, spoken at meetings and was the brother of a notorious ‘terrorist’ executed by the regime. But for social cachet a true Russian revolutionary needed time in jail and exile in the Siberian wastes to be taken seriously. It was one of the tests of commitment to the cause.
He was interrogated f
our times during his imprisonment in Cell 193 in the House of Preliminary Detention from December 1895 to February 1897. At no point was he physically mistreated in any way or put under any serious psychological pressure. The questioning seemed merely routine – ‘a game of cat and mouse’, as other detainees described the procedure.
His first formal interrogation a few days after his arrest was conducted by the prison adjutant, Alexei Dobrovolsky, and Lieutenant-Colonel Vyacheslav Klykov of the Okhrana’s Special Branch. When asked if he was a member of any political party, the lawyer in him answered very precisely. ‘I do not acknowledge myself guilty of belonging to the party of social democrats, or to any political party…I do not know anything about the existence at the present time of any anti-government party,’ he told them in his first statement and repeatedly afterwards. This was strictly true. At that point a Social Democratic Party had not been formed, though he wanted to create one and talked about launching one.
He was not allowed legal representation at any time and throughout the entire process he denied all the sedition charges against him. His mother and sister Anna persuaded his notional employer, Mikhail Volkenstein, to intervene on his behalf. The experienced and respected lawyer offered to stand substantial surety for Vladimir, but he was refused bail.1
He was interrogated three more times by Colonel Klykov in similar relaxed fashion. He gave nothing away. He kept himself physically and mentally fit and stayed in good humour. As he joked in letters home, ‘I’m in a better position than other citizens in the Russian empire: at least I can’t be arrested.’ The Tsarist penal regime was far more benign for political prisoners than it would be in later years under the Soviets, when torture and summary execution were the norm.
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