Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  He wrote something similar to his mother, telling her his quarters were comfortable – near a park with greenery, good connections by tram to the centre of town and close to a public swimming pool, where he went every day. But in the winter of 1900–01 he described his melancholy. ‘It is unpleasant without snow. I get sick of the slush; it is boring and I remember with pleasure our real Russian winter – the sledges and the clear frosty air. I am spending my first winter abroad, though it doesn’t seem like winter to me. I cannot say I am pleased, though occasionally there are some fine days like those we have in a fine autumn. My life goes on as usual and fairly lonely…and unfortunately pretty senseless. I hope to begin my studies more systematically, but somehow I cannot manage it. Probably it will be better when the spring comes and I shall then get into my stride. Having wondered about Russia and Europe, after sitting in Shushenskoye, I long for some peaceful book work and only the strangeness of living abroad prevents me from settling down to it properly.’3

  The couple were reunited in mid-April amid farce. In an effort to confuse the secret police, they ended up confusing each other. Nadya was travelling on a fake Bulgarian passport in the name Frau Maritzen. Originally she was supposed to meet Lenin in Prague. She was told that a comrade would greet her at the train station, but nobody turned up. She made her way to the address he had given her. The man she met there was not Lenin but a Czech called Herr Modraczek who had no idea why she was there. He suggested that perhaps she might meet a Herr Rittmeyer in Munich, who could explain.

  She took the next train to Munich. ‘Wise by experience, I left my luggage at the station,’ she recalled. She took a tram to Schwabing, but when she reached the address she had been directed to in Prague it turned out to be a beer hall. ‘I approached the fat little German behind the bar and timidly asked for Herr Rittmeyer with a feeling that something was wrong – again. “That’s me,” said the publican. “No, it’s my husband,” I muttered. And there we stood staring at each other like a couple of idiots. At last, Rittmeyer’s wife came in and, glancing at me, said, “Ah…that must be Herr Meyer’s wife. He is expecting her from Siberia. I’ll take you to him.” ’

  When she finally saw Lenin the meeting was not exactly sentimental or passionate. ‘Pfui…Damn you. Couldn’t you have written to tell me where you were?’ However unharmonious the reunion, this was when their real revolutionary work together would begin.4

  —

  The Spark very nearly failed to ignite. Lenin had a bold vision for Iskra.*2 His plan was that it would unite Russia’s disparate, loosely organised and independent Marxist ‘circles’ and ‘study groups’ into a vigorous and fast-growing Social Democratic Labour Party, built around the paper. Its band of ‘secret agents’ – Lenin’s term, deliberately chosen as a counter to the Okhrana’s spooks with whom they would be ‘engaged in hostilities’ – would smuggle the publication into Russia, across frontiers. Its writers and correspondents would be a close-knit band of professional conspirators, travelling around factories and workers’ communities. Their duty: acquiring influence among the proletariat and binding them to the labour movement and the entire revolutionary opposition. They would provide ‘socialist consciousness’ to every strike and small-scale battle, linking it to a ‘broader struggle’. They would teach workers to look beyond the parochial to the nationwide and international and raise the workers’ vision beyond their immediate concerns. Iskra, as Lenin put it, ‘will be the collective agitator and collective organiser…an enormous pair of bellows that would blow every spark of class struggle and popular indignation into a general conflagration’. Its editors would be the leaders of the Party, the General Staff and officer corps; the ‘agents’ its foot soldiers. The Party would lead the workers’ struggle – and ultimately all other oppressed and exploited people throughout Russia and the world – to lay siege to the autocracy, storm the bastions of privilege everywhere, and go on to victory.5

  The money to launch the paper came principally from Alexandra Kalmykova, the wife of a senior civil servant and a woman of considerable wealth in her own right. She provided 1,600 rubles with which Lenin left Russia, and soon gave him another substantial sum she had managed to raise among her friends. Eighteen months later she donated a further 2,000 rubles of her own. She had been an acquaintance of Nadya’s, if not a close friend, and like her had taught Sunday school classes for workers near the Nevsky Gate area. She had plenty of money and a high social position, but, ‘despised the upper-class circle’ in which her riches and rank entitled her to hobnob.

  She opened a successful bookshop and publishing house in a fashionable area of St Petersburg, selling cheap editions of popular books. Everyone went there – the middle-class establishment in the front of the shop and the radicals at the rear, where samizdat material was distributed. Kalmykova’s respectability and connections protected her – up to a point. She surreptitiously sold banned radical literature and was crucial to Lenin’s underground movement, gaining the not exactly original code-name ‘Auntie’. Her generous fund to launch and support the newspaper acquired a code-name of its own: ‘the bucket’.*3

  When, a short while later, the paper, and the Party, ran into money troubles they were bailed out by a generous subsidy from the textile magnate Savva Morozov, a friend of Gorky, who gave Lenin 2,000 rubles a month. Morozov was hardly a revolutionary socialist, but he was a shrewd businessman who was convinced the Romanov monarchy was doomed – and he knew how to hedge his bets. As he told Leonid Krasin, one of Lenin’s staunchest lieutenants, ‘these days it is necessary to be friends with one’s enemies’.*4

  The main obstacle to launching Iskra was neither financial nor political. It was personal. It was important to get Plekhanov on board. He was still by far the best-known Russian radical, and an influential figure on the Left internationally. He assumed that as the older, more famous man he would be the leader of the Iskra group, essentially the ‘Party’ chief, its guiding spirit and principal strategist. ‘But Lenin had other ideas,’ as Alexander Potresov, one of the co-founders of the paper, remembers. He had thought Plekhanov would be a figurehead and not involve himself in Iskra’s day-to-day affairs, leaving him to run the paper – and the Party organisation.

  The clash between them was over trivial matters, but highly dramatic. The first hint was when Lenin wrote an editorial ‘mission statement’ for the launch issue of the paper. Plekhanov told him high-handedly that it was a poor effort. He did not object to any of the arguments, but simply said it wasn’t well written and was ‘too pedestrian in tone’. Lenin was deeply hurt when Plekhanov wrote to him and said, ‘This is not “written”, as the French say. It is not a literary work. This does not look like anything.’ Plekhanov took it away and said he would work on the article to ‘elevate the tone’, but returned it a few days later almost unaltered. Lenin was indignant. ‘My infatuation with Plekhanov disappeared as if by magic and I felt offended and embittered to an unbelievable degree. Never, never in my life had I regarded any other man with such sincere respect and veneration, never had I stood before any man so humbly and never before had I been so brutally kicked…there could be no doubt that this man was bad, yes bad, inspired by petty motives of personal vanity and conceit – an insincere man.’

  Lenin travelled back and forth between Munich and Plekhanov’s home on the shores of Lake Geneva in a series of meetings to patch things up. After one bitter exchange Lenin, who was with another of the younger revolutionaries, Potresov, was unable to hold back his fury. ‘Had we not felt such love [for Plekhanov], had we behaved towards him in a more circumspect manner, we would not have experienced such a crushing comedown, such a spiritual cold shower…This was a most severe, an injuriously harsh lesson. The discovery struck us like a thunderbolt because up to that moment both of us had been enamoured of Plekhanov, and, as we do with our beloved, we forgave him everything, closed our eyes to his shortcomings…Our indignation knew no bounds. Our ideal was destroyed. Two young comrades “courted” an o
lder comrade because of their great love for him and, all of a sudden, he injects into this love an atmosphere of intrigue and makes them feel not like younger brothers, but like idiots who are being led about by the nose, like pawns that can be moved with impunity, like ineffectual careerists who must be cowed and quashed. And the enamoured youth receives a bitter lesson from the object of his love: to regard all persons without “sentimentality”, to keep a stone in his sling…Blinded by love, we had actually behaved like slaves.’6

  When Plekhanov threatened to leave the editorial board, Lenin and his handful of backers agreed to allow the older man two votes – which they regretted almost at once, when they realised he would use every opportunity to override their wishes. At one point Lenin, exasperated, threatened to break off relations after Plekhanov criticised another piece he submitted on ‘The Agrarian Programme of Social Democracy’. ‘I received the article with your comments,’ he wrote back. ‘You have a fine conception of tact with regard to your colleagues on the editorial board. You do not restrain yourself in the least in choosing the most contemptuous expressions…I would like to know what you would say if I answered your article in the same way? If you are aiming to make our mutual work impossible – then the way you have chosen will very speedily accomplish your aim. As for our personal, apart from our working relations, you have finally spoiled them – or, more exactly, you have brought about their complete cessation.’ Again the row was smoothed over, but the fractious environment took its toll.*5

  Lenin scored one significant victory, though. Initially it was assumed by Plekhanov and others that the paper would be produced from Switzerland, so he could keep close control over it. But it was hard to find a Swiss printer who would be prepared to risk publishing it. Germany had more advanced, sophisticated presses, a large socialist movement, and far more efficient communications with the rest of Europe. So it was agreed to publish Iskra from Germany, even though the editorial board consisted of Plekhanov and Axelrod in Switzerland, Zasulich in London and Lenin in Munich. He found a printer with an underground press near his rooms in Schwabing. It had a sophisticated, built-in self-destruct mechanism so that if the police raided the premises – always a possibility throughout Lenin’s time in Germany – the type and the ‘form’ on which a page was printed would be broken up and the illegality of the content hidden.

  The first issue was published on 11 December 1900 and included three pieces by Lenin. The most significant one sketched out a programme for the Party and how it should be run. It contained the essence of what would be called Leninism and the principal tactics he and his Bolsheviks would use to build support and seize power. He told workers: ‘Do not merely organise yourselves into mutual aid societies, strike funds and workers’ circles. Organise yourselves for a close struggle against autocratic government and against the whole of capitalist society. Without such an organisation the proletariat is not capable of rising to a conscious class struggle…Without such an organisation the workers’ movement is condemned to impotence. The working class needs a socialist vanguard of people who shall devote to the revolution not only their spare evenings, but the whole of their lives.’7

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  Publishing the paper and handling frayed egos was difficult enough. But distributing the publication inside Russia was a huge problem, if vital to Lenin’s strategy for revolution and power in the Party. Iskra had to be smuggled into the country via a variety of routes, and getting copies past the customs and the secret police was an elaborate and risky game of cat and mouse.

  Lenin relied to a large extent on professional smugglers, who collected bundles of copies in a number of ‘safe houses’ from one warehouse in Berlin. They were usually taken across the Russian border with other contraband goods, often in double-bottomed suitcases. A Russian contact would pick up the bundles and deliver them to an agent, who would then pass them to another Social Democrat from another town or province for local distribution. Iskra was always handed over in person, never through the post. Once in the hands of local organisations it was distributed by Party activists, pasted on walls, smuggled into factories and army barracks and on several occasions – at great risk – dropped from theatre galleries onto the audiences below.

  Occasionally ordinary travellers would agree to take small consignments of the paper. The strangest, most roundabout routes were developed in haphazard ways. Once a ship’s cook took delivery of copies at Marseille and travelled to the small Georgian port of Batoum. There he dumped them in the sea in waterproof packages which were fished out by local Social Democrats and taken hundreds of miles to Baku and Odessa. Other packages arrived from places as far apart as Toulon, Alexandria and Tabriz in northern Iran. One regular route was to send packages through the northern tip of Norway near the Arctic Circle, wrapped in greaseproof paper inside boxes of salted fish. Often the material was intercepted by the Russian authorities, was lost en route, or the carrier was a double agent who informed on others. One package remained unclaimed in a Stockholm warehouse for decades. Lenin estimated that only about 10 per cent of the deliveries eventually got through – just enough to make the whole enterprise worthwhile, he said.8

  Lenin took few risks personally. The German police kept an eye on him, as did Okhrana agents in Europe. But they left him and his operation in Munich alone. His agents in Russia were often in danger. Dozens were arrested, jailed and exiled to Siberia. The Iskra smugglers were a varied bunch. One trusted comrade, Vladimir Smirnov, who would later become a leading official in the Soviet regime,*6 organised a clandestine route through Sweden and Finland using his mother, Virginiya, as one of his couriers. She often travelled into St Petersburg from her home in Helsingfors (now the Finnish capital Helsinki) with copies of the paper and highly secret lists of coded addresses of Iskra subscribers under her knitting. Nobody suspected her or thought to stop ‘a kindly old lady who looked like a children’s nanny’. The highly popular Finnish opera singer Aino Ackté was an RSDLP sympathiser and a Finnish nationalist who smuggled material for the Party in her luggage when she returned from Western tours.

  It is true that the penal regime in Tsarist Russia was not as harsh as the Bolshevik system would be, and the Okhrana less bloodthirsty than Lenin’s Cheka. But we are dealing with degrees here, not categories. Thousands of ‘subversives’ died of disease, neglect and starvation in Siberian exile and jail for the ‘crime’ of reading or publishing banned literature, which often included nothing more radical than articles proposing mildly liberal democratic reforms in Russia that were common elsewhere in Europe. Many were executed, without a trial of any kind. In particular, the secret police were always on the lookout for illegal printing presses, which were closely guarded secrets that very few activists knew about. ‘Copies’ of Iskra could be reproduced on them, along with other material the Okhrana thought dangerous. In September 1901 a young Georgian revolutionary, Lado Ketskhoveli, acquired a sophisticated (and expensive) rotary press in Tiflis. He was arrested and the secret police tortured him mercilessly for several days to find out where the machine was located. But he wouldn’t tell them. He was shot in his prison cell.*7, 9

  * * *

  The paper was aimed mainly at already converted Marxists who were reasonably well informed politically – educated workers, ideally, as Lenin saw it. There were some theoretical pieces for the intellectual readership, but it contained plenty of straightforward propaganda and news about strikes and political unrest which would not appear in any other publications. It grew popular outside Marxist circles; its influence far outweighed its meagre circulation. There were never enough copies to go around. For Lenin the important thing was for workers to know about Iskra. He was always encouraged when he heard that educated workers were reading from the paper to other less literate co-workers, and one group would pass their copy on to another until the worn copies fell apart.

  Lenin – and later Nadya, when she reached Munich and was appointed secretary of the Iskra group – did most of the organisational leg
work to produce the paper. He worried about every detail, from the type size of the print – he lectured contributors and other editors on why the font had to be a style that permitted maximum words on the page, however it looked – to the editorial line ‘we must take to ensure the Party is organized with one voice’.

  Lenin was growing increasingly dictatorial and impatient with those who disagreed with him. But he had a way of charming writers: flattery invariably did the trick, as it has always done with journalists. ‘Of course he would suggest “improvements” in the work of other writers,’ said Nadya. ‘But he was discreet and tactful in a way that authors hardly noticed they were being corrected.’ When he suggested a piece to a writer, he found a way to make it seem like the idea came from the other author, not from himself, even when in the finished article ‘he had actually used Ilyich’s words and turns of phrase’. Technically, he was a first-rate journalist and on occasion could be an inspired editor.

  Lenin’s taste for routine and order imposed itself on the rest of the staff. He spent his mornings at the library. Work on Iskra began immediately after lunch, when someone would fetch the post. As editor-in-chief, Lenin was allowed to read all the correspondence first and he was irritated when anyone tried to read it over his shoulder, or wandered over to a café with one of the newspapers. Nadya’s job was to ‘iron’ the mail and look for coded messages written in milk or lemon juice or invisible ink. It was from these that he obtained news of what was going on within the Party in Russia.