Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  Their ‘honeymoon’ was spent translating the Webbs’ History of Trade Unionism into Russian in the mornings, working on Vladimir Ilyich’s book in the afternoons, and on improving their German. It does not sound exactly romantic – and to several people their marriage seemed ‘strange’, held together, as one long-time comrade observed, ‘not by love, affection or companionship but by commitment to the cause’. But it was obviously far more than that. They were an undemonstrative couple, though that means nothing. He never spoke about their marriage. Nadya published a volume of memoirs, a heavily doctored ‘Stalinist’ record written in the late 1920s and for the most part dry and turgid – though there are some surprisingly lyrical passages – in which she refers to her husband coldly and distantly as ‘Ilyich’ and their ascetic lives as filled only with duty and work. Her letters and shared confidences with friends tell a different story. She said many years later of their early life together in exile: ‘We were young then, we were just married, we were deeply in love with each other. We were newlyweds, you know, and brought beauty to this exile. If I did not write about this in my memoirs, that does not mean that there was neither poetry nor youthful passion in our life.’9

  Nadya wrote affectionate letters to Vladimir’s family, even to Anna Ulyanova, with whom she never got on entirely well – she had heard rumours of Anna’s ‘herring’ comment. She added long, gushing postscripts to his letters home. And they found plenty of time for each other between their work together. ‘He asks me to wake him at eight in the morning or at half past seven, but my efforts are usually fruitless; he gives a couple of grunts, pulls the clothes over his head and goes to sleep again,’ she remarked to his sisters. Her letters are light-hearted, cheerful and affectionate. Later she recalled their exile in Siberia as one of the happiest periods of her life.

  He was the dominant figure in the relationship, but he loved her in his way. She did endless chores for him, from making fair copies of his manuscripts to tidying up and cleaning their homes. She was seldom demanding – probably one of the secrets of their companionable life together. But she could answer back and tease him, in particular about his abilities as a hunter. Time and again she wrote to his mother and sisters that he would go out for hours, dressed in leather and breeches and hunter’s jacket, and return empty-handed. Once they went out for a walk from their hut. He had taken his gun but said, ‘You know, if I come across anything I shan’t shoot it, because I didn’t bring a bag and it would be difficult to carry.’ But when ‘he sighted a hare he would let go at it…though he missed, because…he is apt to get too excited’. On another occasion, when he saw a flock of partridge by the roadside ‘he groaned with pleasure, took aim and fired…but the bird simply walked away without even bothering to fly’.

  She is surprised at his enthusiasm for embarking on a fishing trip and then dropping the subject later after he returned ‘without so much even as a tiddler’. ‘At first Volodya announced that he did not know how to gather mushrooms and did not like it, but now you cannot drag him out of the forest. He has real “mushroom fever”. Next year we intend to have a vegetable garden and Volodya has already agreed to dig the seedbeds.’ She told his mother that he had been delegated to buy material for a blouse for a neighbour’s young daughter and instead of asking about the size asked, ‘how many pounds?’.

  They settled into a comfortable familiarity and an easy life in exile. They even managed to entertain. The Christmas after their wedding they expected a party of visitors. ‘Almost the whole district was in town, so we saw the new year in very pleasantly at a big party…the main thing was the splendid mood. We mulled some wine; when it was ready we put the hands of the clock at “12” and we saw the old year out in proper style; everybody sang whatever they could and some fine toasts were pronounced – “To Mothers”, “To all our friends” etc. and danced to the guitar…It was a real holiday. Volodya battled on the chessboard. Then we went skating.’

  Twenty minutes from the cottage there was a spot she called ‘the enchanted kingdom’ where there was the best view of the mountains, and in the frost ‘every little fish and pebble can be seen quite distinctly under the ice’. At the end of March 1899 both of them wrote a joint letter to Maria: ‘Spring is in the air. The ice on the river is covered with water all the time and sparrows in the willow trees are chirping furiously; the bullocks low as they pass up and down the street and the landlady’s hen under the stove clucks so loudly in the morning that she wakes everybody up.’

  The Ulyanov family exerted gentle pressure on Nadya to produce an heir. But eight months after the wedding she wrote to Maria Alexandrovna: ‘As far as my health is concerned I am quite well, but regarding the arrival of a “little bird” – there the situation is unfortunately bad. No little bird wants to come.’10

  * * *

  Vladimir’s exile ended on 29 January 1900. But one condition of his release was that he could not live in any major city or a university town in which he might corrupt students with revolutionary ideas. He chose to settle, at least to begin with, in Pskov, 140 kilometres south-west of St Petersburg, where he could easily communicate with comrades in the capital. Nadya still had six months of her term of exile to serve and was required to stay in Ufa, a small town in western Siberia, for the duration. ‘It was a great pity to have to part just as real work was commencing. But it did not even enter Vladimir Ilyich’s head to remain in Ufa when there was a possibility of getting nearer to St Petersburg,’ she wrote ruefully. She understood how to manage her expectations.

  They left Shushenskoye on 10 February by sleigh, having packed books weighing 175 kilos into trunks. It took three weeks to get to Ufa, where he left Nadya and her mother, promising to return in June if the authorities would allow him.

  Typically, he broke the rules of his ‘parole’ within a few days. While he was in Siberia, in the Byelorussian city of Minsk between 1 and 3 March 1898 the biggest step in the revolutionary struggle for decades had been taken – without him. The Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party was formed as the first avowedly Marxist political party in Russia. Despite endless fissiparous splits, changed names and various manifestations, this would become the Communist Party that took power in Russia and ruled the Soviet Union for seventy years. Though Vladimir was not there in person, the Party would to a large extent be formed in his image.

  The idea was to unite the various groups of Marxist revolutionaries into one organisation, including for the first time the Union of the Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class in Russia with the Emancipation of Labour group connected with Plekhanov, Axelrod, Vera Zasulich and other exiles in Europe. Various shades of Marxist opinion were represented, but the principal aim of overthrowing the Romanovs and creating a socialist republic was agreed. It had a disastrous beginning. The Party was penetrated top to bottom by the secret police, who knew everything about the organisation. The launch meeting was attended by nine people; all but one was arrested within a few weeks. The second Congress, scheduled to be held in Smolensk the next year, never happened because most of the delegates were arrested on their way to it. Yet the RSDLP (as it is known in English) survived and became the most influential of all the revolutionary parties in Russia, mainly thanks to the organisational flair and tactical genius of Vladimir Ulyanov.

  Though he was supposed to remain in Pskov and was closely watched by the Okhrana, he managed to give his police minders the slip several times to attend meetings. He visited Moscow to see his mother and sisters. In May he wrote to the Interior Minister requesting ‘most humbly as nobleman by birth VI Ulyanov’ for permission to visit his wife in Ufa. When he was refused, he went anyway. Nadya had written several times with complaints that she was unwell. He sent her money for treatment and in mid-June, heavily disguised, he travelled to see her. She never spoke about the gynaecological problem from which she suffered in 1900 that might have been the reason they never had children, and Vladimir made only one reference to it. ‘Nadya must still rest,’ he tol
d his mother. ‘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…[gave] her more money, as the necessary treatment will be quite expensive.’

  But his luck ran out. He and an RSDLP comrade were on a train to St Petersburg – which he was specifically banned from entering – when he grew suspicious that he was being followed. They got off the train at Tsarskoe Selo, where Tsar Nicholas had his primary residence for most of the year, and took a local commuter train to the capital late that evening. First thing the next morning Vladimir was arrested in possession of two suitcases filled with subversive Party literature. ‘How foolish of you to change trains there of all places,’ said the Okhrana officer who picked him up. ‘You must know that at Tsarskoe there is an agent behind every bush.’11

  He pleaded innocence, but was held for a week before being released. Around 1,500 rubles that he was intending to pass on to the local Party as much-needed funds was confiscated. However, he was free. Vladimir was one of the main leaders of the new Party and, like the group in Switzerland led by Plekhanov, he was convinced that the most important thing it needed was a newspaper to popularise its message – ‘a central organ that would be the party’, as he put it – and present an authoritative political line.

  But with the Okhrana constantly on his tail, and with double agents throughout Russia, a journal could not be produced at home. He begged the Interior Minister, again as ‘a hereditary noble’, for permission to leave Russia for Germany. At the end of July 1900 he was allowed to go – on the basis, the secret police argued, that he would be less trouble outside the country than at home. Nadya would join him abroad when her term of exile ended and she was in better health. He had decided on the name of the new paper, with its echo of the Decembrists: Iskra (Spark). It would be more than five years before he saw Russia again.

  *1 Russia had been exiling political prisoners since the sixteenth century, in increasingly remote parts of the empire as its boundaries expanded. Serious offenders were sent to the hard-labour camps dotted around eastern Siberia – like Nerchinsk, where Chernyshevsky had been despatched, Omsk, where Dostoyevsky had been interned, and Sakhalin Island, off Russia’s Pacific coast. The less serious ‘politicals’ like Vladimir were sentenced by Administrative Order and required to live in a designated place under surveillance. In 1897 there were around 300,000 exiles scattered across Siberia, roughly 5 per cent of its total population.

  *2 In Krasnoyarsk he had free room and board with Claudia Gavrilovna Popova, a wealthy local landowner who had sympathy with radical causes and over the years had helped hundreds of political prisoners with accommodation and food. Many recorded how kind and friendly she had been. When famine struck in 1921, under the Soviet regime, she was in her seventies. She was branded a bourgeois ‘enemy of the people’. With all her money gone, she was living on handouts. When older residents petitioned the local Soviet to help her – on the basis that she had not hesitated to help victims of Tsarist repression – they turned down the request to give her extra food rations. She starved to death.

  *3 Yudin sold his collection to the US Library of Congress in 1906 for US$150,000 – a fortune at the time. It remains the core of the Library’s Russian Collection.

  *4 Invariably Jewish revolutionaries were sent to the harshest, most miserable places and many suffered from terrible neglect. Several died of disease. There were appalling tragedies among the exiled. Nikolai Fedoseyev, who founded the radical group in Kazan which Vladimir belonged to, a highly talented writer and thinker with whom he was to correspond regularly, was sent to Verkhoyansk, a ghastly hole in the Arctic far east. He drowned himself in 1898, aged twenty-seven, after a jealous fellow exile wrongly accused him of being an Okhrana double agent. Vladimir had met his lover, Maria Gofengauz, a few times. While on her way to join him in Siberia, hearing of his suicide, she killed herself – ‘how terrible is this tragic story,’ Vladimir said when he heard. A good friend of his, Anatoly Vaneyev, was exiled to the remote village of Turukhansk, on the edge of the Arctic Circle, where he died of pleurisy and cholera in 1899. Vladimir had repeatedly but vainly pleaded with the authorities to move him somewhere less harsh where he could receive better treatment.

  *5 Lenin’s letters from Siberia make strange reading. They might be the letters of an indolent country squire of outdoor tastes but gentle epicurean philosophy which forbade him to take such tastes too seriously. He seemed genuinely to enjoy this quiet life, in a way he never would in his long exile abroad.

  *6 They developed genuine affection for each other, though she often disagreed with him and stood up to him. He was not above telling terrible mother-in-law ‘jokes’– one of the few kinds of jokes he told, apart from the irony he adopted so frequently. He replied to the question, ‘What should be the correct punishment for bigamy?’ with the not-so-hilarious answer, ‘Two mothers-in-law.’ He used to repeat it regularly to Elizaveta Vasilyevna without embarrassment and amid laughter from both. She grew to respect him and they rubbed along well during years of living together in exile. Though he hated smoking he would go out to buy her cigarettes when she needed them. And sometimes he let her beat him at cards. ‘How can a brilliant man like you keep losing to an old woman like me,’ she would tell him.

  *7 Russian radicals, with their disdain for bourgeois ritual, would invariably wear their rings only for the ceremony itself and get rid of them afterwards. But Nadya kept hers, without wearing it. Not long before she died she donated it to the Central Lenin Museum in Moscow, which with typical Stalinist lack of sentiment would not display it, even in the ‘Krupskaya room’ of their collection. Nobody seems to know what Lenin did with his ring, but it has never been located.

  11

  Lenin Is Born

  ‘The best, the most thoughtful and cultured…[Russian] people of the late nineteenth century did not live in the present, which was abhorrent to them, but in the future, or the past.’

  Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948)

  The first time Vladimir Ulyanov used the name under which he would become famous was in January 1901 in a letter to Georgy Plekhanov. During his life he adopted more than a hundred pseudonyms, some of them just once or twice. It is unclear why Lenin was the name that stuck, but he soon began to favour it, though he used a few others off and on for a short while afterwards. He wrote his first book under the name N. Ilyin and a long list of articles under seemingly random initials or partial names – K. Tulin, Karpov, L. Ul, Petrov, F. Pu, Staryk, K. T. S., Pinyuchev. He had fake passports under several aliases, among them Wilhelm Frei, Jakob Richter, Dr Jordan Jourdanov and Willem Meyer. Originally the adoption of so many pseudonyms was for reasons of security, as a way to confuse the secret police.

  But the Okhrana was never put off the scent for long, and often the subterfuge caused as many problems to his own comrades as it did to the ‘enemy’.*1 Hiding identities, creating codes and code-names and maintaining strict security was of course important in any conspiratorial network – and Lenin’s claim to leadership was based as much on his organisational acumen as a plotter as on his ability to inspire as speaker or with his pen. But Lenin was a highly secretive man who enjoyed the cloak-and-dagger element of the revolutionary underground. It became a habit he was unable to break, though he seldom tried very hard. Secrecy was a way of life.

  —

  Lenin never explained where the name came from, and even Nadya admitted that she had no idea of its origin. It has always been assumed that it was somehow linked with the River Lena in Siberia, but nobody can be entirely sure. If he was looking for a riverine reference the more obvious choice might well have been the Volga, where he was born and which he loved from childhood. But some years earlier Plekhanov had already taken the alias Volgin. Still, one could speculate how different history might have been if the Russian Revolution had been led by a man named Vladimir Volgin, who inspired a creed called Marxism-Volginism. From the end of 1901 he was widely
known throughout the revolutionary movement – and the espionage agencies of Europe – as Lenin, or commonly by his patronym, Ilyich, as a mark of respect.

  Typically, Lenin’s first letters under his new name were filled with abuse against the bourgeois and the ‘liberals’ who believe that ‘Revolutions can be made by people who wear kid gloves’. Objectively, he argued, the liberals were on the side of the autocracy. Plekhanov was incensed by the younger man’s undiplomatic intemperance. ‘You turn your behind to the liberals,’ he replied. ‘But we [meaning the older generation of radicals] turn our face. You must tone down your remarks. There is no call now for abusing the liberals in general. This is not tactful. We must appeal from the bad to the good liberal, whatever doubts about the existence of such people there may be…Those whom you contemptuously refer to as liberals, property speculators etc., don’t deserve to be called such. Liberalism in itself deserves respect. We must regard liberals as possible allies, but your language…is not at all that of an ally. Tone it down, my dear fellow!’ He replied that he didn’t want liberals in the Party giving the Revolution tacit support: ‘The Party isn’t a ladies’ finishing school. Revolution is a messy business.’ These were some of the first words he wrote under the pen name Lenin.1

  * * *

  Lenin settled in Munich. He took two rooms at a lodging house in the working-class suburb of Schwabing and began to make arrangements for Nadya and her mother to join him. Very few letters between Lenin and Nadya have survived, and he seldom wrote emotionally about his inner life. But in one letter dating from this period of separation, after telling her how much he missed her, he says how lonely he is and ‘in the general turmoil here I live quite well, even too much so, and in spite of special, extraordinary measures for defence against the turmoil! I might almost say that I live in loneliness and on turmoil nonetheless. I dare say that in my novel situation turmoil is inevitable, unavoidable, and it would be a sin not to murmur thanks to God that I am not as nervous…[as other exiled revolutionaries]…There is much that is good along with this turmoil.’2