Vladimir told his mother a few weeks after his arrest, ‘my health is satisfactory. I can drink the mineral water here. It is brought in to me from a pharmacy the day I order it.’ He devised a routine to get himself through imprisonment. Later, when his sister Maria and brother-in-law Mark Elizarov were arrested as subversives in February 1901, he explained his rigorous method in his usual prescriptive and bossy style. ‘I particularly recommended translations to Mark, both ways, first to do a written translation from the foreign language into Russian, then from Russian back into the foreign language. My own experience taught me that this is the most rational way of learning a language. On the physical side I have strongly recommended to him…to do gymnastics every day, and to rub yourself down with a wet towel. In solitary confinement this is absolutely essential…I also advise you to arrange your work on the books you have in such a way as to vary it. I remember well that a change of reading or work – from translation to reading, from gymnastics to writing, from serious reading to fiction – helps a great deal. After dinner, for recreation in the evenings, I read fiction regularly, and never enjoyed it anywhere as much as I did in prison. The main thing is never to forget the obligatory daily gymnastics. Force yourself to go through several dozen movements of all kinds. This is very important.’
He described his exercise regime and its benefits in more detail to his mother. ‘They loosened my joints so that I used to get warm even on the coldest days when my cell was icy-cold, and afterwards one sleeps much better. I can recommend this, as well as a fairly easy exercise (though a ridiculous one): fifty prostrations. It is exactly what I made myself do – and I was not in the least perturbed that the warder, on peeping through the little window, would wonder in amazement why this man had suddenly grown so pious when he had not once asked to visit the prison church. But…[a prisoner] must not do less than fifty prostrations, without stopping, and touch the floor each time without bending the knees – write and tell Mark this.’2
While in jail he began writing his first full-scale book, The Development of Capitalism in Russia. ‘I sleep about nine hours a day and see various chapters of my future book in my sleep…if I had been in prison longer, I would have finished it there.’ The book would be highly important because it enhanced his reputation as a radical theorist, and argued the contentious point that Russia was already well on the road to becoming an advanced industrialised country – an essential step, according to Marx, from which a proletarian revolution could triumph.
Visitors to the jail brought him money and food, clean linen and more comforts than were needed. ‘Someone, for instance, brought me a frock coat, waistcoat and travelling rug,’ he wrote to his mother. ‘They were all immediately sent to the store room as superfluous.’ His mother and Anna moved to St Petersburg from Moscow to be nearer him for visits. They sent food that accorded with the recommended diet for his delicate stomach. And after the prison doctor told him he would benefit from regular bowel clearances, they sent him an enema tube.
He asked Nadya and Apollinaria to walk together to a spot on a street corner where he could catch a glimpse of them from the prison yard. Nadya turned up at the appointed time and place as requested. Yakubova didn’t show.3
Prisoners were allowed regular mail. Security was so lax that they easily managed to continue their conspiratorial activities inside. There was a well-established code that would let Vladimir know if a clandestine message had arrived for him in invisible ink. At 6 p.m. they brought in hot water for tea and the warders led the ordinary criminals out to the church. By this time the ‘politicals’ would have torn the letters into long strips. Then they would make their tea, and as soon as the warders departed they began to drop the strips into their mugs. Thus the letters would be ‘developed’. In jail it was difficult to treat the letters under a flame, as was the customary method. It was Vladimir’s idea to experiment with hot water. ‘In order not to be discovered while writing with milk, we made little “ink pots” out of bread. These we popped into the mouth immediately we heard a rattle at the grating.’ Once in a postscript to a letter to Nadya he wrote: ‘Today I have eaten six ink pots.’4
On Wednesdays and Saturdays his sister Anna brought him books from the Library of Academic Sciences, from St Petersburg University and the Free Economic Society. Visitors were never interrogated. They could leave mail or packages at any time during the day until 5 p.m. The parcels were subjected to a cursory inspection by the Supreme Court Prosecutor or his representative, not just a prison guard. The next day they were in his cell. ‘When in the corridors of the prison…one could hear the warders dragging heavy cases full of books, one knew that this load was meant for Vladimir Ilyich’s cell,’ one fellow inmate, Gleb Krzhizhanovsky, recalled.
He received a parcel twice a week throughout 1896. Almost every batch of books contained at least one volume with a letter hidden in the spine of its binding, or written in invisible ink between the lines of one of its pages, or coded by tiny markings between the lines of covering letters. The two-way traffic enabled him to keep in touch with his organisation, write strike leaflets and articles and communicate with other comrades in and out of jail.5
* * *
On 29 January 1897, after fourteen months in jail in St Petersburg, Vladimir was sentenced to three years’ ‘administrative exile’ in Siberia, though at first the place where he would be sent was not decided. There was no trial and no appeal. At his mother’s request he was allowed to travel at his own expense and not under police surveillance, which would make the long journey far more comfortable. He was released from jail on 13 February and permitted to stay in St Petersburg for four days before moving on. Typically, he filled those days at meetings with other revolutionaries.*1
The first part of the journey took eleven weeks. Again he was given privileged treatment. After his mother pleaded with the authorities he was allowed to stay for a few days in Moscow to see his family. He overstayed by two days, and on 6 March he left Moscow, accompanied by his mother, his sister Anna and Mark Elizarov. His relatives left him the next day at Tula Station, returning to Moscow.
‘I have left my nerves behind me,’ he told his mother, but the journey was boring. ‘The country is covered by the West Siberian Railway and I have just travelled throughout its entire length [around 1,400 kilometres]…it is astonishingly monotonous – bare, bleak steppe. No sign of life, no towns, very rarely a village or a patch of forest, and for the rest, all steppe. Snow and sky and nothing else for the whole three days.’6
In Krasnoyarsk, the end of the line, he had to wait while the authorities told him where he was to serve his exile.*2 But that was no hardship. He spent entire days in the Yudin Library, a huge collection owned by a wealthy vodka distiller and famous bibliophile. Gennady Vassilyevich Yudin, one of whose friends knew Anna Ulyanova, would give some selected prisoners on their way to exile the run of his house and the 80,000 volumes in his library.*3 The collection held complete sets of several periodicals dating back to the eighteenth century, which Lenin found useful for his The Development of Capitalism in Russia.
After five weeks, most of them spent from dawn to dusk among Yudin’s books, Vladimir was told where he would serve out his exile: the small town of Shushenskoye on the River Yenisei. The news could hardly have been better: among political prisoners it was known as the ‘Italy of Siberia’, in the south-west of the vast region, where conditions were relatively mild. Still, it took eight days on the river steamer as far as the nearest big town, Minusinsk, and then a day’s journey by horse and cart. He was assigned a small peasant’s hut, surrounded by a vast steppe, some woods and a swamp. In the far distance, on a clear day, he could just about make out the snow-capped hills of the Sainskaya range.
He wrote to his mother soon after arriving that it was a fairly pleasant spot and gave the village a pet name. ‘Shu-shu-shu is not a bad village. True, it lies in a fairly bare place, but there is a wood not far away, although much of it has been cut down. There is no way
of getting to the Yenisei, but the River Shush flows close by the village and there is also a fairly big tributary of the Yenisei not far away…and there I shall be able to bathe. The village is surrounded by dung, which the people here do not cart to the fields but dump outside so that when you leave you have to pass through it. On the horizon lie the Sayan hills or their offshoots. Some of them are all white and the snow on them hardly ever melts, so that there is even something artistic about them…you can see them when they are not hidden by clouds in the same way that you can see Mont Blanc from Geneva…it was not in vain that I composed a poem in Krasnoyarsk: “In Shusha, at the foot of Sayan”…unfortunately I have not composed more than the first line.’
Conditions were not as bad as those faced later by dissidents in the Soviet Gulag. Vladimir was even allowed to own a shotgun, a Belgian two-bore, which his brother Dmitry sent, along with plenty of cartridges. Within a month he was suggesting, not entirely in jest, that Dmitry visit him. ‘We can go shooting together – if only Siberia can manage to make a sportsman out of me.’
But the Tsarist system of Siberian exile was not a holiday camp. Over the years, scores of thousands died of exhaustion in the work camps or starved to death. Prisoners were routinely beaten with the knout – a sort of cat o’ nine tails which tore the flesh of a victim’s back or thighs. In 1892, five years before Lenin was exiled, the ‘Khanov Affair’ received sensational coverage in The Times of London and the New York Times, which reported (accurately, as it turned out after an investigation) that gangmaster Vladimir Khanov and the overseers of convict roadbuilders on Sakhalin Island starved the inmates into cannibalism.
Perhaps the cruellest of all Tsarist punishments was reserved for wives of political prisoners, many of whom were exiled to Siberia simply for being married to a so-called subversive. The Stalinist brutality in later years, when the family of a dissident was punished along with the offender, had a Russian antecedent.*4
Within a month Lenin was settling down to regular hunting. He told his mother that the shooting was not bad. ‘Yesterday I travelled about 12 versts to shoot duck and snipe. There is a lot of game, but without a dog the shooting is difficult, especially for such a poor shot as I. There were even wild goats, and in the mountains and in the taiga (30–40 versts from here, where the local peasants sometimes go shooting) there are squirrel, sable bear and deer.’ For company he acquired a hunting dog, an Irish setter, Zhenka. He fished, he swam, he walked, in winter he skated. He played chess by correspondence with good players across the Russian empire and beyond.
The Okhrana intercepted his mail frequently, but nearly always allowed it to go through – even his correspondence with revolutionaries in Russia and exiles abroad. His frustration was not the surveillance. Mail arrived regularly but very slowly, particularly in winter. ‘I received a pile of letters today from every corner of Russia and Siberia and therefore felt in a holiday mood all day,’ he wrote to his mother after being without post for weeks.
He sent a barrage of requests – or rather demands – to his mother and sisters and was petulant if they were not met quickly enough. His relatives were used to the irritable tone of his complaints: ‘It’s a pity the books were sent so late’…‘you write that you will send them in a day or two’…‘when will these things arrive? Probably not before the end of summer…’. There were constant appeals for additional clothes, cartridges for his guns and books, some kid gloves, ‘my mackintosh cape which would be essential here’, and some smooth black tulle for a mosquito net.*5
But there was hard work too. He was near to finishing his first book and got a surprisingly lucrative publishing deal for a translation into Russian of Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s classic of Fabian Socialism, The History of Trade Unionism. His day, carefully planned to the last minute, consisted of long hours of solid work alternating with regular periods of rest, Krzhizhanovsky, in exile with him, recalled. ‘In the mornings he experienced quite an extraordinary abundance of vitality and energy and he was ready for a bout of wrestling…and I would fall in with his mood and give him the satisfaction of pitting my strength against his. Then, after a brisk walk, we would begin our work. Special hours were set aside for writing, for the collection of statistical material, for reading philosophical and economic literature and for relaxation, when we read novels. We did receive newspapers but, of course, with a great delay and in sizeable batches. But Vladimir Ilyich devised a means of reading them in a systematic manner; he arranged them in such a way that he read one issue a day, taking into consideration the overall delay. This arrangement made him feel that he received the paper regularly, daily, though somewhat late. Whenever I tried to upset this order and maliciously picked out and read aloud news from a subsequent issue, he blocked his ears.’
On the whole he lived well in Siberia and often told his mother how fit and healthy he was. He received a basic allowance from the state which was enough to live on with reasonable comfort. He was given eight rubles a month, which does not sound much but was twice the wage of an average St Petersburg worker and more than three times the sum he paid the peasant girl he employed to clean and cook for him.
He suffered periods of melancholy and acute boredom – ‘Inwardly day differs from day only because today you are reading one book, tomorrow you will be reading another; today you take a walk to the right of the village, tomorrow to the left; today you write one article, tomorrow another,’ he wrote to his mother. He told his sister Maria, ‘At the beginning of my term…I decided never to touch a map either of European Russia or even the whole of Russia. It would mean too much bitterness, as I looked at all those various black spots where I could not go.’7
* * *
He proposed to Nadya by letter written in invisible ink. For many ardent young revolutionaries this may have seemed like the ultimate romantic gesture. But the reason was more prosaic and practical. When he wrote – between his release from jail and departure for Siberia – Nadya was herself in prison. She had been arrested for passing illegal literature and money to striking factory workers in St Petersburg and was also facing Siberian exile for three years. At first Vladimir didn’t want the authorities to know his plan was for them to spend the exile years in Siberia. She accepted, also by clandestine note which he had to ‘develop by dipping the note in warm water’, in an offhand way that belied her strong feelings.
Nadya would be allowed to join him only if she was a ‘recognised fiancée’. There were months of haggling with the authorities before they allowed her to go. The government held a high moral view of marriage and there had been a few cases of fictitious fianceés sent to radical exiles, which offended the delicate sensibilities of the Tsarist police. Vladimir’s soon-to-be mother-in-law was equally determined to ensure the engagement was above board. Elizaveta Vasilyevna barely knew him – and what she knew she didn’t altogether like. She was a devout Christian and he was, very publicly, an atheist; he was a revolutionary Marxist and she had no fixed views on politics. In her eyes, he might have the same sort of ‘advanced’ views on marriage as he seemed to hold on all other institutions in Christian civilisation. She wanted to make sure the marriage took place, so she travelled to Siberia with Nadya, ostensibly to attend the wedding. But for most of the next seventeen years Elizaveta Vasilyevna lived with them amicably. They grew fond of each other and she learned to respect him, if not all of his views.*6
Via his own mother, he sent a stream of demands for items they should bring with them – piles of books, a supply of clothes including moleskin trousers for hunting and a straw hat – ‘After all, it’s a Paris hat, devil take it.’ When Nadya and her mother arrived on 6 May 1898, delayed several days because the water level on one stretch of the river was too low for their steamer, he was not there to greet them. He was out hunting and did not return for a few hours. The first thing Elizaveta Vasilyevna said to him was, ‘Gracious, how you have spread. You look almost fat.’ He told his mother, ‘I found Nadezhda…looking not at all well. She will have
to look after her health a little better here.’ Often her eyes appeared to be bulging – hence the frequent ‘fish’ remarks about her appearance, a first symptom of the thyroid complaint, later diagnosed as Graves’ Disease, from which she would suffer throughout her life.8
The wedding had to be in church or another religious institution, the only form of ceremony recognised as legal in Russia. It was delayed by a few days because the local priest, Father Orest, was a stickler for proper ritual, so bride and groom both needed rings. Vladimir had not bought rings and there were no jewellery shops in the middle of Siberian nowhere. Luckily another revolutionary exile in Shushenskoye, the Finnish nationalist Oskar Engberg, had been an apprentice in the jewellery trade before his arrest, and fashioned two rings from copper kopeck coins.*7
* * *
The wedding eventually took place at the Peter and Paul Church in Shushenskoye on 10 July 1898. There is no record of it – either because the Soviets later wanted to hush up the fact that it was an Orthodox ceremony – a slightly inconvenient truth about the Bolshevik founder – or, perhaps more likely, because many Russian church records were destroyed or went missing in the 1920s and 1930s. Neither husband nor wife ever tried to hide the circumstances of their wedding.
The newlyweds left separately and took different routes to their cottage ‘so as not to attract attention’, as Nadya said, though this seems an odd explanation. There was a small celebration afterwards at the Ulyanovs’ home at which, equally oddly for Russia at the time, nothing stronger than tea was served.
Their relationship has perplexed biographers, of both the Left and the Right, many of whom have tried to present it as a utilitarian arrangement of convenience, a mariage blanc. Yet it is clear they shared a bed as well as a devotion to the Revolution.
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