Lenin
Page 19
The vicious mud-slinging continued after the 1903 Congress and became established practice within the Party. For Lenin, the Martovites were quite simply ‘traitors’, or often more colloquially ‘cunts’. The Mensheviks were vilified as ‘disorganisers’, ‘opportunists’, ‘Girondists’, ‘reformists’. The Mensheviks accused Lenin of being a ‘Robespierre’, a ‘Jacobin’, a ‘terrorist’, a ‘despot’ and – a very bad thing to be in the Marxist lexicon – a ‘bureaucrat’, or a ‘formalist’. Martov wrote a scathing piece in Iskra headlined ‘In Lieu of a Funeral Oration’, calling Lenin ‘a political corpse’. Elsewhere he said of something Lenin had written that ‘reading his lines, breathing as they do a petty, at times senseless personal malice, amazing narcissism, blind and deaf unfeeling…endless repetition of the same old “fighting” and “scathing” little words, one becomes convinced that this is a man who is fatally condemned to slide further down the slope…which will take him straight to full political corruption and the shattering of Social Democracy’.
Both sides used satire and lampoon. The Mensheviks drew up a mock constitution of the All Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, point one of which read: ‘The Party is divided into those who sit and those who are sat upon.’ Lepeshinsky, an amateur but talented cartoonist, produced the tale ‘How the mice buried the tomcat’. Plekhanov was the ‘all-wise rat’ and Martov and Axelrod were the mice. The rows became deeply personal and often involved scandalous stories about sex and money. Rumours spread about Nikolai Bauman, who was ‘cruel to mistresses’ and beat them up with uncontrolled violence, it was said. Martyn Liadov, a fervent Bolshevik, was alleged to have spent a small fortune of Party funds in a luxurious brothel. Lenin used any dirty trick he could: he tried to win over Fyodor Dan by offering to show him a secret dossier said to contain salacious rumours about the private lives of prominent Mensheviks. The ruse failed.7
Lenin lost many comrades he thought he could rely on, and talented people he had admired. He parted ways with Trotsky after the 1903 Congress and they spent the next thirteen years insulting each other. Lenin invariably referred to ‘the Judas Trotsky’, ‘that rascal’, ‘sordid careerist’ or ‘swine resounding in hollow phrases and bombast’. He wrote to one supporter after a clash: ‘That’s Trotsky for you! Always the same evasive cheat, posing as a leftist but helping the Right while he can.’ Trotsky responded in kind. He told a Menshevik friend nearly a decade after the split, ‘the rotten squabble, systematically inflamed by that master of such affairs, Lenin, that exploiter of any backwardness in the Russian labour movement…The entire Leninist edifice is built on lies and falsification and carries within it the poisonous source of its own disintegration.’ Lenin, he said, ‘is simply unscrupulous through and through’. His most cutting comment, as it proved to be so prophetic, was ‘when Lenin talks about the dictatorship of the proletariat…he means the dictatorship over the proletariat’.
The feud reached absurd levels. Most of the leading personalities from both sides of the divide lived cheek by jowl together in Geneva, then a small city of no more than 75,000 people. If a member of one faction saw an erstwhile comrade from the other faction, the course laid down by Lenin was to cross the road to avoid each other: ‘when you see a stinking heap in your path, you don’t have to touch it to know what it is. Your nose tells you it’s shit and you pass by,’ he said. The rival camps ate their sausages and drank coffee in separate rooms at the Café Landolt.
The dispute took a toll on Lenin. ‘Often his talk on our walk consisted of vicious and abusive invective,’ Valentinov said. ‘When he talked about the Mensheviks, Lenin could hardly control himself. He would suddenly stop in the middle of the pavement, stick his fingers into the holes of his waistcoat (even when he was wearing an overcoat), lean back and then jump forward, letting fly at his enemies. He cared nothing for the fact that passers-by stared with some amazement at his gesticulations. These tirades of his, which were delivered with such passion…must undoubtedly have worn him out and used up a great deal of his reserves of energy…His frenzied state of rage and extreme nervous tension would be followed by exhaustion, decline of energy, listlessness and depression.’
When Lenin at this time referred to the ‘enemy’, he didn’t mean the Tsar or the autocratic regime. He meant his old ‘friend’ and comrade Martov and the Mensheviks.8
*1 Another regular of the Landolt at this time was Benito Mussolini, who was a student in Geneva. The Russian émigrés, he wrote later in a newspaper article, formed ‘a strange, eccentric, fantastic group of nihilists and bohemians…the last word in feverish modernity…their lives were orgies of strong talk and weak tea’.
16
Peaks and Troughs
‘I don’t want people with indeterminate views and shilly-shallyers. Better a small fish than a big beetle. Better two or three energetic and completely devoted men than a dozen dawdlers.’
Lenin to Nadya, 1904
Back in Switzerland, Lenin sought some calm and solace in the way he habitually did. He headed for the mountains. ‘Nadya and I had a wonderful outing,’ he wrote to his mother soon after returning from London. ‘Down below in Geneva it was all mist and gloom but up in the mountains [about 1,200 metres] above sea level there was glorious sunshine…snow. And at the foot of the mountain – la mer du brouillard, a veritable sea of mist and clouds, concealing everything but the peak jutting up through it, and only the highest at that. Even little Salève (nearly 1,000 metres) was wrapped in mist.’
A few days later he was walking along the long chalk ridge of the Salève again, with Nadya, at one of his favourite times, to see the dawn rise. On this occasion, amid the beauty of nature which calmed his spirit, he made a political point. ‘We happened to walk up with two workers, but lost sight of them when we got to the top…On the way down we met them again and said to them “the sunrise was very beautiful, wasn’t it?” Their answer was “Unfortunately, we didn’t see anything. We worked all day yesterday and we were still so very tired that we sat down for a little while, waiting for the sun to rise, but fell asleep.” ’1
It was Lenin who without a doubt had caused the split in the Revolutionary Party – and his opponents were conspiring to make him pay the price. Plekhanov had supported him in the London Congress, but almost immediately regretted it. He turned against him and made sure that Lenin was voted off the editorial board of Iskra, the position that had been his power base. Lenin resigned from all the organising committees of the RSDLP and was almost entirely isolated. Far fewer supporters stuck with him than he had anticipated. He lost friends, though he didn’t seem to care. He shrugged when Potresov, whom he had known well from his days in St Petersburg’s radical salons in the early 1890s, broke with him, saying he ‘could find no middle ground with Lenin. Everything boiled down to extremes – you’re either with him or against him. He simplifies the human condition with a monolithic one-note nature.’ Gleb Krzhizhanovsky desperately tried to engineer a reconciliation, but Lenin wouldn’t hear of it. He told Lenin the split was ‘futile’ and asked him how he could insist that he was right when all the other Party leaders and senior comrades had deserted him. ‘We implore the old man to drop his quarrel and start working for the good of the Party. We await leaflets from him, pamphlets and all kinds of advice.’ What they got instead was an angry, bitter and inward-looking justification for all his actions – a polemic called One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, a classic of ‘Leninist’ belligerence and abuse at perceived enemies. ‘Only naïve bumpkins can fail to see that the case of the Martovites needs to be answered with maximum pressure,’ Lenin said.2
His self-belief and confidence were unshakeable. Splitting the Party and splitting again, going into a political wilderness, would seem a hopeless route to take for a tiny group with little popular support. But in the long term – and Lenin was always looking at the bigger picture and the longer term – the tactic paid off. In his calculation, it did not matter so much how many supporters he had. The important
thing was to have a group of people, a Party, loyal to him, of disciplined and dedicated supporters who would spread the true word. ‘I don’t want people with indeterminate views and shilly-shallyers. Better a small fish than a big beetle. Better two or three energetic and completely devoted men than a dozen dawdlers,’ he told Nadya. Those few who followed him ‘hero-worshipped him in a cloying kind of way,’ commented one of them who later defected from Lenin’s camp, ‘never doubting him. It didn’t seem healthy.’*1
* * *
Lenin’s ‘rages’, the frantic pace and intensity with which he worked and regular political crises took their toll on his health. Throughout his life, when he was stressed he suffered from crippling headaches, stomach cramps and insomnia, which left him prostrate with nervous exhaustion.*2 He was on the edge of a breakdown, as Nadya knew: ‘his eyes were heavy and dead-looking and his eyelids were swollen from lack of sleep…Sometimes when he was working from home he would move about on tiptoe in case he was disturbed by his own thoughts.’ His health was made worse when in March 1904 he cycled into the back of a tramcar and suffered painful cuts to his face and bruises on his arms and legs. He walked around Geneva with bandages around his cheeks. His mother and sisters were worried about him and wrote regularly to Nadya about their concerns. He needed a holiday to restore his health and mental balance – and so did Nadya. ‘At the end of June Vladimir Ilyich and I put on our rucksacks and headed, without any plan, to the mountains for a month.’ They agreed not to talk about work or politics for the duration: ‘Work is not a bear and we will escape to the woods,’ he told her.
After a week she wrote to Maria Alexandrovna: ‘We have left our work and worries behind in Geneva…we sleep ten hours a day and go swimming and walking. Volodya doesn’t even read the newspapers properly. We took a minimum of books with us, and even those we are sending back to Geneva tomorrow, unread, while we go for a walking tour of the mountains…to Interlaken and then Lucerne…Already in a week we have recovered considerably and have begun to look healthy again…We have been under such strain that we cannot be blamed for taking a month’s holiday.’*3, 3
For the first part of the holiday they were accompanied by Maria Essen, a young Bolshevik activist and one of only two members of the RSDLP Central Committee to back Lenin in the Party split. She was also a distant cousin of Lenin’s mother from her Scandinavian roots. ‘When walking, Lenin never seemed to get tired,’ she recalled later.*4 ‘I was preparing to return to Russia and as a farewell treat we decided that the three of us, Vladimir Ilyich, Nadezhda Konstantinovna and I, should go into the mountains. We took a steamer to Montreux. We visited the sombre Château of Chillon and Bonivard’s cell, so beautifully described by Byron. We saw the stone to which Bonivard was chained…As we emerged from the dark vaults we were instantly dazzled by the bright sunshine and the overpowering scenery…We decided to climb to one of the peaks.’ (It was the Rochers de Naye, too arduous a climb for Nadya, who stayed behind at the nearby hotel.)
‘At first the climb was easy and pleasant, but the higher we went the harder it became. We left the path and climbed straight up the slope. With each step the climb became more difficult. Vladimir Ilyich strode briskly and confidently, chuckling at my efforts to keep up with him. After a while I was climbing on all fours, clutching at the snow, which melted in my hands, but still managing to keep up with [him]…At last we reached the top. A limitless panorama stretched below, an indescribable display of colours. Before us lay…all types of vegetation; next to us the brightness of the snow; a little lower the rich alpine meadows…I felt in the mood for some high literature and was about to start reciting from Shakespeare or Byron when I looked at Vladimir Ilyich. He was sitting down, deep in thought. Suddenly, he burst out, “Hm, a fine mess the Mensheviks are making for us.” When we started on our walk we agreed not to talk about the Mensheviks “so as not to spoil the landscape” and as long as he was walking, he was full of fun and the joys of life, having obviously put out of his mind all thoughts of Mensheviks, or Bundists. But he had only to sit down for a minute and his mind reverted to its usual train of thought.’
After Essen left them – she was arrested a few days after she arrived in Russia – Lenin and Nadya continued their holiday around the Bernese Oberland. ‘We always selected the wildest paths and got away from the heart of the mountains, far away from other human beings. We tramped for a month; each day we never knew where we would be on the morrow. By the evening we were always so tired that we sank into bed and fell asleep instantaneously…We had very little money with us, and existed mostly on eggs, cheese and the like, washed down with wine or spring water. We rarely sat down to a proper dinner. At one little inn, run by a Social Democrat, a worker advised us: “Don’t dine with the tourists, but with the coachmen, chauffeurs and workmen. You will find it twice as cheap and twice as filling.” So we took his advice.’ Lenin was regularly sending cheerful letters back to his mother and Maria – ‘greetings from the tramps’, he wrote from Kandersteg, near Frutigen.
They ended their break at the Lac de Bret in early September. They had walked more than 400 kilometres and neither felt any guilt about taking such a long vacation. As always the fresh air and the mountains had restored his health and revived his spirit. ‘It was as though the mountain streams had washed away all the cobwebs of petty intrigues,’ wrote Nadya.4
*1 Anatoly Lunacharsky was a devout Bolshevik who venerated Lenin but could on occasion see some of his hero’s faults. He said that at this time in Geneva Lenin ‘worked mostly with his pen…It seemed to me that Lenin was not the genuine revolutionary leader I had thought him to be. It began to seem as though émigré life had somewhat diminished him, that the inner Party struggle against the Mensheviks had for him pushed into the background the mighty struggle against the monarchy and that he was more a journalist than a genuine leader.’
*2 He clearly suffered from hypertension, as his father had done: he was a stroke waiting to happen, as the arteriosclerosis in his brain established later. Around this time he visited a doctor for stomach trouble who told him that his real health problem was not in his bowels, ‘it’s the brain’ – an accurate diagnosis no other specialist made until near the end of his life. The doctor suggested that his hectic life and schedule would prove very bad for him. It seems he did not mention this to anyone, not even Nadya.
*3 Holidays were a big feature of Lenin’s life. A few days in the mountains or by the sea invariably restored him, however exhausted and strained he was. Two years earlier he had had a three-week break with his mother and sister Maria at Loguivy on the Brittany coast, without Nadya. He had made all the arrangements and planned everything in advance, down to the train station at which they should leave their luggage. ‘It would be good to be on the Volga in the summer,’ he wrote to Maria Alexandrovna. ‘Well, if I can’t come to the Volga, the Volga folk can come here. There are good places here, albeit of a different kind.’
*4 Despite all his symptoms of an unwell man, Lenin seemed on the face of it extremely fit. He swam, skated and took regular exercise. ‘He told me that every morning he stripped and did various gymnastic exercises for at least ten minutes,’ Valentinov recalled. ‘These included, first of all, circular movements with the arms, squatting and forward bends, with straight knees to touch the floor.’ Valentinov told Lenin that he never visited the doctor and couldn’t afford it. ‘Lenin looked at me with disgust – I cannot find a better word – as one might look at a dirty or smelly person. “This really shows a lack of culture,” he told me. “It is real backwoods behaviour. You must value and take care of your health. It is always a blessing to be physically strong and healthy, to have powers of endurance – but for the revolutionary it is a duty.”’
17
An Autocracy Without an Autocrat
‘What will happen to me and all of Russia? I am not prepared to be a Tsar. I never wanted to become one. I know nothing of the business of ruling. I don’t know how to carry out the duties.’
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Nicholas II to his cousin Sergius on the day of his accession to the throne, 19 October 1894
The first, the original ‘Communist joke’ – a genre of dark humour that became famous in the Soviet-dominated world – was the comment from a Bolshevik commissar in 1918 suggesting that Tsar Nicholas should have been given the highest Soviet honour, the Red Banner, for his ‘services to the Revolution’.
The Tsar did as much as anyone, including Lenin, to bring about the destruction of the Romanov dynasty and to ensure the Communist takeover in Russia. He never gave a thought to the laws of unintended consequences. At a time when Russia needed wise and imaginative leadership, it was landed with a ruler totally unequipped for the role. It is no exaggeration to say that every major decision Nicholas II took was wrong – from his choice of wife, Alexandra, who compounded his own misjudgements, to his disastrous decisions on war and peace.
He never questioned his rigid belief in the principle of autocracy. In January 1895, a few weeks after he became Tsar, he told a gathering of provincial nobles that any hopes of liberalisation politically were ‘senseless dreams’ and that he had sworn it as his duty ‘to maintain…autocracy as firmly and unflinchingly as it was preserved by my unforgettable dead father’. He wanted to be an autocrat but didn’t look or sound like one, and he lacked the personality, the intelligence and the strength of will to be one. He might have been a successful ceremonial monarch. His manners were impeccable, he spoke platitudes elegantly and he looked handsome in a uniform. But that is not how the Romanovs reigned. Though it was once calculated that by blood he was only 1/128th Russian (and the rest mainly German), by attitude and frame of mind, according to one of his longest-serving ministers, ‘Our Tsar is an Oriental, one hundred per cent Byzantine.’ He had a medieval belief in his divine right to rule, but no understanding of the nature of power.