Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

Lenin was a hard taskmaster. He was angry if the decoders, even Nadya, made mistakes. Lydia Dan, one of the assistants at Iskra in the early days, said the whole deciphering process was ‘a hazardous business because of Lenin’s moods. He absolutely could not tolerate a bad decoding…Nor could he accept slow work or delays.’

  Lenin and his wife did most of the hard graft. But Iskra would not have possessed half the influence that it acquired on the radical Left if it had not been for Yuli Martov. Lenin was the brain of the paper, Martov its heart. The two could not have been more different, but for several years Martov was the closest male friend Lenin had. In their early thirties it seemed as though they had such a strong bond that nothing could divide them. For the last two decades of their lives the bitter enmity between them was one of the main causes of the irreconcilable split within the Russian revolutionary Left.

  Julius Osipovich Tsederbaum – he was known by the sobriquet Martov as early as his days at the Gimnasium – was the most attractive of all the leading Russian radicals. He was born in 1873, into a middle-class Jewish family in Constantinople. His father was a commodities trader and the Turkey correspondent for two leading St Petersburg newspapers. His mother was a polished Viennese woman of the solid middle class; the atmosphere in the family was liberal, artistic, enlightened and sophisticated. They moved back to Odessa when Martov was four.

  Martov, a short, stocky figure who always wore a thick bushy beard and pince-nez, was radicalised early. He abandoned the moderate liberalism of his parents and converted to Marxism in his teens. By the time he was eighteen he had already served a short prison term for distributing banned literature and was barred from going to university, but permitted to live in St Petersburg. Then, aged twenty, he was jailed again and prohibited from St Petersburg or any other university city where he might subvert young people.

  He and Lenin first met in 1894; ‘they just talked all evening, all night without sleeping and all the next day without a break’, Martov’s sister Lydia recalled. They were co-founders of the Union of the Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class and were both exiled to Siberia at around the same time, though for unconnected offences. While Lenin served out his term in the ‘Siberian Italy’ of Shushenskoye, Martov, like most of the Jewish ‘politicals’, was given a far tougher time. He endured three years in the freezing north of Turukhansk, where conditions were appalling. His health suffered and he showed the first signs of the TB that would kill him before he reached fifty. Lenin appealed to the authorities to transfer him somewhere less harsh, but was ignored.*8

  Martov was chaotic where Lenin was controlled, a bohemian where Lenin’s habits were distinctly bourgeois, and highly eccentric where Lenin was conventional. Martov was exuberant and warm, a highly popular figure with a mournful look which belied his mostly cheerful demeanour. ‘He was by predilection a haunter of cafés, indifferent to comfort, perpetually arguing and gossiping,’ said Potresov. He had a sparkling wit and an infectious sense of fun. Yet in many ways he was a more orthodox Marxist than Lenin, as strict in the interpretation of the prophet Marx’s teachings and just as careful to guard against heretical beliefs that would water down the theory. ‘He was the most intelligent man I ever met,’ said Nikolai Sukhanov, the great chronicler of the Russian Revolution and a supporter of Martov. ‘But he was woefully weak in action.’ Another admirer described Martov as ‘the Hamlet of the Russian Revolution’.

  In the early days of Iskra they seemed like the perfect team. Martov fizzed with ideas about articles for the paper and would commission them, leaving Lenin to edit them and turn the pieces into usable copy. In the first year of Iskra’s existence Martov wrote more articles than Lenin. He was an original writer in his way, more imaginative and ‘literary’ than Lenin, but far less focused and compelling than Vladimir Ilyich when he was on form.

  Earlier than most people, Martov began to see Lenin’s intolerant arrogance as dangerous. Even when they were personally close he had doubts about his style and domineering personality. ‘Vladimir Ilyich did not yet have, or had in a lesser measure, the confidence in his own strength – never mind in his historical calling – that was to emerge so strongly in his mature years…He was then in his [early twenties]…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.’ Lenin, he added, had ‘no talent for friendship; he uses people too much’.

  During his two years in Munich Lenin was establishing his status, as another Iskra editor, Potresov, put it: ‘Plekhanov was esteemed, Martov was loved, but only Lenin was followed unquestioningly, as the undisputed leader. For only Lenin embodied…a personage of iron will, indomitable energy, combining a fanatical faith in the movement, in the cause, with as great a faith in himself. Louis XIV could say “I am the State”; so Lenin without unnecessary words invariably felt that he was the Party, that he was the will of the movement concentrated into one person. And he acted accordingly.’10

  *1 In Russian law – under the Tsars, later under the Communists and indeed in a modified way in the post-Soviet era – everyone who arrived in a new town or city, even for a few days, was required to register with the police. It was relatively easy for people to assume a variety of false names. It often took time, but invariably the Okhrana would cotton on to what was happening. Not before the new arrival had probably left town, though. And all the spies’ work did little good to protect the regime in the long run.

  *2 The Decembrists declared that ‘A Spark will start a big blaze’ – the slogan on Iskra’s masthead.

  *3 Kalmykova’s introduction to Lenin was made by Pyotr Struve, once a socialist collaborator but soon to begin a move from the radical Left towards the liberal centre. She was Struve’s mistress, twenty years older than he, and in polite society referred to him as ‘my adopted son’ – not that anyone believed her. Like most people at one point or another Kalmykova would fall out with Lenin over politics, especially during the long-running Bolshevik/Menshevik split that was soon to engulf the revolutionary movement. She went into voluntary exile for many years but returned to Russia after 1917 and tried to rebuild their friendship, at least with Nadya. She exchanged a few cool-ish and formal letters with Lenin after the Revolution. But they never met again. Nadya on occasion understood how to use delicious irony: ‘In 1922 Vladimir Ilyich had written Alexandra Mikhailovna a few lines of fervent greeting such as only he could write.’

  *4 Morozov (1862–1905) was a ruthless businessman, a generous patron of the arts – he had a large collection of French Impressionist paintings – and a major philanthropist. He gave to hospitals and to schools which taught literacy to peasants and workers. He was a substantial donor to theatres, but the playwright Chekhov, who benefited from the oligarch’s largesse, was no fan. When rumours began appearing that Morozov was backing Lenin financially he commented, ‘Savva…he scurries before the Revolution like a devil before the dawn.’ Morozov was prone to deep depressions. He shot himself at his villa on the Côte d’Azur in 1905.

  *5 Not long after this incident Vera Zasulich told Lenin that ‘Georgy [Plekhanov] is a greyhound. He shakes and shakes the adversary and lets him go; but you are a bulldog, you have a deadly bite.’ Lenin went around telling the story and repeating the phrase ‘deadly bite’, obviously relishing it. Zasulich had not meant it kindly. She grew to loathe Lenin and could not bear to be in a room with him. On the other hand Lydia Dan, Yuli Martov’s sister, who equally detested Lenin, described Plekhanov as ‘a great man with an enormous number of petty traits’.

  *6 He was married to Karin Strindberg, daughter of the Swedish playwright, and he developed wide contacts throughout the socialist parties in Scandinavia.

  *7 Everything had a supposedly secret code-name in the revolutionary underground. The press in Tiflis was called ‘Lidia’ and continued operating for the next four years – an invaluable tool within the Iskra organisation.

  *8 Adolescent though it may have been, while in London in 1902 witn
esses say they saw Lenin and Martov ‘drink Brudershaft’ together, a German custom adopted by middle-class Russians: two men stand side by side, link arms, kiss cheeks, address each other as ‘brother’ and as ‘thou’, the Russian ‘ty’.

  12

  Underground Lives

  ‘In an autocratic state, the more we confine the membership of the Party organisation…to people who are professionally engaged in revolutionary activity and who have been professionally trained in the art of combating the political police, the more difficult it will be to wipe us out.’

  Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, 1902

  Lenin was frequently accused of physical cowardice, even by some of his loyal supporters. While he was safe in Western Europe, avoiding arrest and taking few risks with his own security, his underground co-conspirators and Iskra agents inside Russia were in constant danger. He felt no qualms about sending them on perilous missions, and when reproached he argued with calm logic that it was one thing ‘for the rank and file…it is quite another – and a senseless thing – for the leader to run unnecessary risks’. When a long-standing comrade, Mikhail Silvin, told him that some revolutionary foot soldiers inside Russia were questioning his personal bravery, Lenin answered calmly, ‘To allow oneself to be jailed…or sent to Siberian exile once is permissible; to do so for a second time would be stupid.’1

  By the beginning of 1902 there were around a thousand ‘professional revolutionaries’ inside Russia acting as Iskra agents or engaged in other work for the RSDLP – and probably twice as many in other radical organisations or terrorist cells. They lived a hand-to-mouth existence as ‘illegals’ on fake identity documents, depending on the kindness of strangers and the goodwill often of people who didn’t entirely agree with their aims or their ideology, but loathed the Tsarist regime even more than the idea of revolution. They moved from safe house to safe house, acquiring an instinct for knowing when they were followed. They adopted a bewildering set of code-names and aliases, the tradecraft of konspiratsiya, a word that in Russian means ‘secrecy’ rather than the English ‘conspiracy’. Lenin’s instructions to Party activists to maintain secrecy at all times were well known to all his operatives. ‘When you are taken up with secret, conspiratorial matters, you must not speak with those with whom you normally converse, nor about the things you normally talk about, but only with those you need to talk to and only about things you need to talk about.’ Those who broke the rules were invariably frozen out of the Party.

  There was something comic and amateurish about the secret knocks, the disguises, the passwords and the elaborate code-names activists gave themselves – especially when one knows that the Okhrana were seldom fooled for long and had planted agents at the heart of the conspiracy. Lenin’s code-name was invariably ‘Starik’ (the ‘Old Man’); Nadya had others besides ‘Fish’ – she was Sablina, N. Sharko, Katya and sometimes Minoga or Maria. One of Lenin’s good friends, Panteleimon Lepeshinsky, who had been in Siberian exile with him, had the aliases Lapot, Bychkov and a numerical code, 2a3b; Leonid Krasin, an engineer who would become head of the Party’s ‘technical committee’ – in charge, among other things, of the vital printing presses – was ‘The Horse’, Vinter or Johanson. The Moscow Party chief and invaluably hard-working Nikolai Bauman was ‘The Rook’, ‘The Tree’, or Victor. The password used by the St Petersburg activist Cecilia Bobrovskaya to introduce herself to other revolutionaries was, ‘We are the swallows of the coming spring.’

  But there was nothing comic about the dangers the conspirators faced. Making revolution was a serious business. The shared risks the activists took, the passionate commitment they showed to their beliefs, forged intimate bonds of comradeship. As an ardent young Party member in St Petersburg put it: ‘The constant danger of arrest, the secrecy of our meetings and the awareness that I was no longer just a grain of sand, no longer just another one of the workers, but a member of an organisation that was dangerous and threatening to the government, and to the rich – all this was new and exciting.’2

  Life underground was intense. Elena Stasova, a clever activist who ran the most successful of all the revolutionary cells in St Petersburg and would later become one of Lenin’s chief aides, was a skilled organiser and highly practical young woman. She explained what the revolutionary movement meant to her in emotional terms that would strike a powerful chord with her comrades. Stasova came from a wealthy background and a loving family. Her parents allowed her to use their country estate as a safe house for activists and a storage place for underground literature. She held illegal meetings where money was raised for Iskra at the Stasovas’ spacious apartment in a fashionable district of St Petersburg. When Elena was arrested her parents stood bail for her. But for her and many other eager young women and men, the Party ‘was our family’ and dedication to the cause came before everything else, friends, parents, love. ‘My life is in this, in this and only in this,’ she wrote from prison after she was arrested. ‘No other work can give me the strength to live. Without this work of mine I cannot live. This is the flesh of my flesh…’3

  Lenin’s sisters were often in trouble with the police. Anna had been arrested in St Petersburg in 1887, at the same time as her brother Alexander. She had not been involved in any way with the plot to kill the Tsar, but she was confined to the estate at Kokushkino for many months. As soon as she was free to travel again she went straight back into underground work, distributing illegal literature and organising clandestine meetings. Maria was picked up by the Okhrana in Moscow in 1899 and spent seven months in solitary confinement before serving a three-year sentence of exile in Samara. Immediately the term ended, she returned to revolutionary work as an agent for Lenin, coding letters from Russia to the Iskra board in Europe.

  Arrests were common, as were dramatic and lucky escapes involving adventure and derring-do. None more so than the extraordinary display of cool by Lydia Gobi, daughter of the respected Professor of Botany at St Petersburg University. Gobi was a convinced Marxist who seemed more of a socialite than a socialist. Tall, elegant, well dressed, aristocratic-looking, a noted beauty, she was one of Lenin’s best agents in the Russian capital and a regular courier of banned literature and secret messages throughout Russia. On a mission from the St Petersburg Party cell to Kiev she took what she thought were the correct precautions and believed she wasn’t being followed to her secret meeting. Her Kiev contact handed her documents to take back to St Petersburg, when she realised she was being tailed first by one, then two and finally three Okhrana spooks who made no effort to hide the fact that they were following her. They almost reached her, near a cliff edge overlooking the River Dnieper. She looked down below, saw trees and undergrowth and, remarkably collected and brave, she wrapped the thick fur cloak she was wearing around herself, climbed onto the ledge of the cliff and allowed herself to fall. The undergrowth softened her descent and to her amazement she landed safely, uninjured, among onlookers. Totally calm, she picked herself up, apologised politely for surprising them, walked to the railway station and took the first train out of Kiev.4

  * * *

  Nadya, equally safe in Western Europe, handled day-to-day contact with the underground in Russia. She operated under the strict orders of Lenin – ‘the centre’, as he called wherever he was located – but she was responsible for deciphering secret letters, keeping tabs on the well-being of the Party foot soldiers inside Russia and more complex tradecraft such as developing new codes. By 1902 she ‘ran’ a hundred or so agents and Lenin trusted her implicitly to relay all the important information to him. ‘She was at the heart of all the organisational activity,’ one of the Iskra editors recalled later. ‘It was to her that newly arrived comrades from “home” reported first; she briefed those that were leaving and sent them on their way; she established the clandestine connections and she was the one who deciphered most of the secret messages. Nearly always her room held that faint smell of paper warmed over a flame.’

  The Okhrana, though, was invariably one st
ep ahead. It had scores of officials intercepting letters and telegrams to and from Russian exiles abroad through its Department of Posts and Telegraphs – known as the Chernyi Kabinet, the Black Cabinet. Surveillance of mail going in and out of the main post offices of all the major cities in Russia, as well as Warsaw, Helsingfors and Tiflis, was highly efficient. The codes Lenin’s agents used lacked sophistication and were invariably straightforward to break. Concealed messages inside books worked for a few weeks and occasionally months, but rarely much longer. Nadya would choose a book and in a secret letter tell agents to refer to a specific chapter, paragraph, line and letter in a word, in order to read the coded message. She picked at one point her favourite Nekrasov poems, a biography of Spinoza and the animal fables of Ivan Krylov. The police knew that when an agent referred to an ‘illness’ it meant an ‘arrest’, a ‘hospital’ really meant ‘prison’ and an ‘epidemic’ was a warning that there had been a spate of arrests at a specific location.

  From the safety of Munich – and later London, Geneva or Paris – Lenin was naturally aware of the risks his agents in Russia were taking and the sacrifices they made. But he was often frustrated with them, impatient if they were not delivering what he expected and downright rude about their efforts. Nadya would frequently have to tone down his furious complaints about ‘incompetent’ or ‘dim-witted’ underlings. He was in a rage, as he wrote to one comrade, that ‘in nine cases out of ten all plans end in smoke…and the agent muddles along just anyhow. Believe me, I am literally losing all faith in…[smuggling] routes, plans etc. made here because I know beforehand that nothing will come of it all. It is we who have to make frantic efforts doing jobs here for lack of suitable people. In order to appoint agents, to look after them, to guide them, it is necessary to be everywhere, to rush about and see them on the job. That requires a team of practical organisers and leaders but we haven’t got any, at least very few to speak of. That’s the whole trouble. Looking at our practical mismanagement is often so infuriating that it robs one of the capacity for work. The consolation is that the cause is vital and despite the chaos is growing.’5