Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  Schmidt was arrested at the end of 1905 for ‘giving aid to insurgents’ from his factory. He was kept without sleep for eight days, faced prolonged interrogation and threatened with summary execution. He confessed to all sorts of revolutionary activities he had nothing to do with, was thrown into a cell in Moscow’s gruesome Butyrka Prison and was regularly beaten by guards. His family complained about his treatment but they were ignored. On 12 February 1907 he wrote to one of his sisters that he had suffered ‘a terrible night and I fear for the next one’. The next day he was found dead. He had two wounds on his neck, cuts to his hands and severe bruises on his face. The prison authorities insisted that he had committed suicide by cutting his throat with glass after he broke the windows of his cell. But his family were convinced he was murdered. Whatever happened, the circumstances of his death at the age of twenty-three were suspicious.

  When Lenin heard the young man had died, he saw an opportunity. He knew Schmidt had two younger sisters, Ekaterina, aged nineteen, and Elizaveta, seventeen, who had also shown an interest in revolutionary politics. They were now heiresses – and a highly attractive ‘catch’ for a gold digger with ruthless motives. Lenin recruited two handsome young Party activists to seduce and marry the girls who, swept away by romance and the excitement of helping the Revolution, would give their fortune to the Bolsheviks.

  To begin with the plan went well. Ekaterina Schmidt fell in love with the dashing and smooth-talking Nikolai Andrikanis; the younger sister, Elizaveta, was swept off her feet by the good-looking but domineering and sinister bully Viktor Taratuta.*6 There was a dual marriage in Moscow with a guest list that included high society and the radical elite. But then a problem occurred: the course of true love did not run smoothly.

  Andrikanis and his bride had second thoughts about handing over the money to Lenin. They gave a small amount to the Party but decamped to Paris and later the South of France, taking the funds with them. Lenin fulminated against this ‘great betrayal’, but there was little that he could do.

  Taratuta fulfilled his mission. Even though Elizaveta was not yet of age and the arrangement was not strictly legal, she agreed to give her share of the inheritance to the Social Democrats. Later, in Paris, the couple handed over a fortune directly to Lenin, who signed a receipt and copied a legal statement – ‘I have received from Ekaterina Schmidt two hundred and seventy thousand nine hundred and eighty-four Francs’, a sum that in 2016 would have been worth around US$2 million.

  Nadya was appalled by the scheme and disgusted by Taratuta, who she said made her flesh crawl. Lenin, as usual, simply saw the affair in utilitarian terms. He told comrades that personally the whole idea revolted him and he wouldn’t have had the nerve to go through with it himself – though conscience didn’t prevent him hatching the plan in the first place. He admired the ‘bravado and chutzpah’ of Taratuta. ‘He’s good in as much as he will stop at nothing,’ Lenin confessed to one long-standing comrade. ‘Tell me, could you go after a rich merchant lady for her money? No. I wouldn’t either. I couldn’t conquer myself. But Viktor [Taratuta] could…That’s what makes him an irreplaceable person.’ Later, referring to Taratuta, he said ‘a scoundrel might be what we need, just because he is a scoundrel’.*7, 3

  This was not the end of the Schmidt inheritance saga. Martov and the Mensheviks claimed a share of the fortune – justifiably, as the money was given to the Social Democratic Party, not just the Bolsheviks, and the Party was still technically one united structure. ‘Why should we be cheated by Lenin the pimp and his accomplice Taratuta?’ one of their leaders demanded. Lenin tried to keep all the money for the Bolsheviks and the row became increasingly bitter – but, in the dispute that was tearing the RSDLP apart, at least this was now something solid and substantial to quarrel about, rather than mere personal spite. Eventually Lenin agreed to let a group of three worthies, leading names from the German Social Democratic Party, arbitrate: the celebrated Marxist thinkers Karl Kautsky and Fritz Mehring and the political organiser Clara Zetkin. Lenin was ordered to hand over the money to the triumvirate, though he had taken the precaution of keeping a sizeable amount for the Bolsheviks’ sole use.

  For years afterwards, in his usual relentless, exhausting way, Lenin pestered the trustees to release more funds to him, writing endless letters and at one point hiring an expensive Paris lawyer. Exasperated, Kautsky couldn’t stand the squabbling and quit as a trustee. ‘My work is suffering from the great waste of time and energy spent on this hopeless matter,’ he told Lenin. The row was never satisfactorily settled. The war intervened, when the money couldn’t be disbursed, and after the Revolution the funds were no longer so necessary.4

  Making revolution was an expensive business and while in exile Lenin always needed money. He controlled the Bolsheviks’ finances personally and, secretive as ever, he told nobody exactly how it was spent, not even Nadya. He pored over accounts with immense care and itemised all expenditure in obsessive detail down to the last kopeck. In Switzerland, for example, he paid Party ‘salaries’ of between 200 and 600 francs a month to about a dozen members of the Bolshevik leadership, his inner circle, depending on their personal circumstances. They were not extravagant amounts but useful to ensure that families could survive. He took 350 francs a month for himself – roughly the amount, he said, of a skilled worker in Western Europe. This was topped up by regular subventions from his mother, who was also helping his sister Maria and, until he could stand on his own feet as a doctor, his younger brother Dmitry. Lenin was never rich and he did not live ostentatiously. Nor was he poor. He earned very little from his journalistic and literary efforts. But somehow he always found enough money to travel when he wanted to – on regular holidays and working trips, lecturing, researching, and attending socialist meetings throughout Europe. Now, coming up to the age of forty, he was still regularly sent money by his mother. Many émigrés lived in dire poverty. But as Nadya told her secretary towards the end of her life, they were not among them. ‘They are writing about our lives now as though we were in penury. It’s not true. We were never in a position of not being able to afford bread…there were some émigrés who had no income for two or three years and got no money from Russia. They really starved. But we were not like that. We lived simply, that’s the truth.’5

  * * *

  Lenin returned to Finland from the London Congress in early June 1907 in a state of nervous exhaustion, suffering from blinding headaches, debilitating insomnia and irritability. The ‘rages’ came upon him regularly and apparently from nowhere. ‘The tremendous expenditure of energy demanded by every campaign that Lenin undertook, driving himself and relentlessly urging others onwards, wore him out and drained his strength,’ one comrade in his clique said. ‘The engine of his will refused to work beyond a certain stage of frenzied tension…Following an attack of his rage his energy would begin to ebb, and a reaction set in: dullness, loss of strength and fatigue which laid him out. He could neither eat nor sleep. Headaches tormented him. His face became sallow, the light died in his eyes…In such a state he was unrecognisable…Then, what was most important, not to have to see anyone, not to talk to anyone.’ Gorky saw him in one of these fits of distemper and was frightened for him –‘he looked awful…even his tongue seemed to have turned grey.’

  Nadya recognised the symptoms and she knew the remedy. She took him somewhere quiet and remote, to Styrs Udde (Stirsudden) by the Gulf of Finland. ‘Here there is a pine forest, the sea, magnificent weather, in short everything is excellent,’ she wrote to Lenin’s mother on 28 June. ‘We are bathing, cycling, Volodya plays chess, fetches water, at one time we had a craze for the English game of Donkey [a card game]. We have all put on so much weight that it’s not decent to show ourselves in public,’ she wrote a few days later. Lenin spent hours simply looking out over the water towards a distant lighthouse, doing nothing. ‘He kept dropping off to sleep all the time. When he got to the woods he would sit down under a fir tree and fall asleep at once. The children from
the neighbouring cottage called him “sleepy head”.’ He told his mother and sister Maria: ‘The rest I am getting is marvellous, the best I have had in years. No people, nothing to do. No people and nothing to do is the best thing for me.’6

  Soon, however, he was on the road again, as the Bolshevik representative at the Congress of the Socialist International – an organisation originally founded by Marx – held in Stuttgart at the beginning of August. One of Lenin’s great skills, as Martov noted, was ‘packing Congresses’ – lobbying for votes, collecting together a caucus, elaborately planning how a debate was to be conducted, making behind-the-scenes deals. Martov, contemptuous of these political realities, meant his comment as a criticism and he used the phrase derisively. But it showed why Lenin succeeded and Martov and the Mensheviks failed. Lenin didn’t only use vulgar invective or bully opponents into submission by insults. He could glad-hand other delegates, take an interest in their lives and, when he needed to, could listen: ‘he could inspire followers with the personal touch’. He was pragmatic at times and could change tactics 180 degrees when it suited his case – the political arts which Martov and other leading Mensheviks regarded as beneath them, but which were so essential for a practical leader. Above all his logic was persuasive and ‘everyone was impressed by his obvious brainpower’. Even Martov’s sister Lydia Dan, a committed Menshevik who grew to despise Lenin’s politics, saw how skilful he was. ‘Lenin knew, he was convinced that he knew, the truth and that this gave him the right not only to win you over but to make you act as he wished, not because he was doing it for himself, but because he knew what was needed. Lenin had this ability to win over and command.’7

  Lenin regarded the Stuttgart Congress as crucial because, he believed, it would establish a clear socialist line towards the war between the European powers that he was convinced would soon come and which would be, as Marx prophesied, ‘the final crisis of capitalism’. Lenin was one of the principal movers behind the famous ‘War resolution’ in Stuttgart: ‘If war threatens to break out, it is the duty of the working class and its representatives to make every effort to prevent it. Should war come, notwithstanding these efforts, it is the duty of the workers and their representatives to intervene to bring about a speedy end to the war and to take advantage of the economic and social crisis, to hasten the transformation of the capitalist society into a socialist one.’ All the main leftist parties supported it, including the biggest and most influential by far – as large in terms of membership as all the other socialist parties in Europe put together – the SDLP in Germany. The same resolution was confirmed twice between 1907 and 1914, with the German socialists’ support. Lenin was sure that if war began, the socialists would do all they could to persuade the masses – the men who would do the fighting – to refuse to take part.

  Two famous German women revolutionaries saw Lenin in action in Stuttgart. Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg were fascinated and discussed his personality and his hold over the Bolsheviks at length. Zetkin recalled their conversation a year or so later. ‘Rosa…who possessed an artist’s eye for character, pointed him out to me with the remark: “Take a look at him. That is Lenin. Look at the self-willed, stubborn head. A real Russian peasant’s head with a few faintly Asiatic lines. That man will try to overturn mountains. Perhaps he will be crushed by them. But he will never yield.” ’8

  * * *

  Back in Finland, ‘reaction was tightening its grip – and looked as if it would drag on for years’, said Nadya. The Second Duma was dissolved, which showed the regime’s true commitment to parliamentary reforms. There was a fresh wave of detentions and executions and a warrant was issued for Lenin’s arrest. ‘Vladimir Ulyanov, alias Lenin…a writer on economic subjects…is the most dangerous and capable of all the revolutionary leaders,’ the Okhrana’s wanted poster declared. Technically Finland was an autonomous part of the Russian empire and dissidents had been considered safe there. But no longer. Lenin and Nadya began looking for a way back to Geneva.

  Nadya and her mother could travel easily by train and boat from Helsingfors. Elizaveta Krupskaya was reluctant to go, but she was becoming increasingly frail and Nadya said, ‘we couldn’t leave her with no idea of who would look after her’. It was altogether harder for a man on the run like Lenin to escape. The two women went in comfort to Stockholm. At the beginning of December 1907 Lenin hid underground, shaved off his trademark beard and took on another false identity – Professor Müller, a German geologist studying limestone deposits in south-west Finland. He planned to meet them in Sweden later – but he was about to make the most physically hazardous journey of his life, through snow-covered forests and across frozen lakes, with the Okhrana on his tail.

  The Bolsheviks had an established escape route from Helsingfors run by a Finnish party cell organised by the one-time head of the Iskra smuggling operation in Scandinavia, Vladimir Smirnov. It involved an elaborate series of trains to the port of Åbo, the former capital of Finland, and from there by steamship across the Baltic to Sweden. But the police knew about the route, were keeping close watch on it specifically for Lenin and very nearly caught up with him on a train as it approached Åbo. At one point he had to jump off the moving carriage, throwing his suitcase before him, and hope that a snowdrift would break his fall. He was lucky – because he found deep snow, and because the two Okhrana agents wouldn’t risk their lives by following him. He had the address of Party contacts in Åbo and trudged for ten kilometres along an icy country road to reach the city. He arrived, freezing and hungry, at the home of local businessman Walter Borg, a Bolshevik loyalist. ‘Lenin could barely feel his feet so we had to take his boots off for him.’ Borg’s wife Ida gave him hot milk and cognac and had to rub spirit into his hands and feet to get the circulation going.9

  The Okhrana was keeping an eye on the port, so a new plan was formed to take a boat from Nagu (Nauvo), one of the outlying islands along the Gulf of Finland, where there was a regular steamer ferry to Stockholm. But avoiding the secret police tail involved travelling by horse-drawn cart and by foot thirty kilometres through treacherous terrain in temperatures of around 10 degrees below zero Celsius. ‘No matter, I’ve walked further distances and in bad conditions in Siberia,’ he told Party workers who warned him of the dangers of the journey. He was more concerned with the condition of his guides, a local farmer and a sailor from a village near Åbo: it was Christmas time and they were drinking large quantities of local home-brewed grog. Lenin was worried that they didn’t look entirely sober. The last three kilometres were by foot across a frozen sound where the locals told Lenin he had to be extra-vigilant. But for Lenin there was no turning back. It was just after dawn on Christmas Day 1907 and a biting wind was blowing when he stepped on the ice. Legend in Finland for many years to come had it that one of the guides, the sailor Gustav Wallstens, saw Lenin cross himself and mutter a prayer before he did, though the Bolshevik leader never admitted to it. At one point as they neared the other side of the sound Lenin felt his feet give way and he feared he would slip into the sea. Wallstens reached out his hand and pulled Lenin to safety, but it was a close-run thing. He told Nadya the next day when they were reunited in Stockholm that he was convinced that he had met his end, drowned in the Finnish water. ‘What a stupid way to have to die.’10

  *1 Lenin was concerned that everything should be ‘just so’ for Gorky in London. He had booked a suite for the writer and Maria Andreyeva at the Imperial Hotel in Bloomsbury. When they checked in Lenin went up to the bedroom, inspected it carefully and found that the sheets were damp. He instructed the hotel management to place the sheets near the gas heater. ‘These will have to be aired and dried. We can’t have you cold and coughing.’

  *2 The police kept a close eye on the comings and goings of the delegates. There were several bobbies standing guard outside each day and plain-clothes detectives were watching from nearby streets. At one point the anarchist Prince Kropotkin, invited as an observer by the Bolshevik leadership, recognised Edwin
Woodhall, a detective who over the years of his exile in London had been detailed to follow him. They had become friendly and the Prince introduced the policeman to Lenin. ‘This is the Bolshevik leader, the man they have all come to meet.’

  *3 Lenin organised more enjoyable social encounters away from the Congress. He took delegates to some of his old haunts: Speakers’ Corner, where the Russians were amazed that people in London could get up and say in public more or less whatever they wanted; Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery and the British Museum, where he showed them the Elgin Marbles – ‘Look at them…of course the museum is a hoard of colossal wealth plundered by Britain.’

  *4 And it was – after the Revolution. Fels died in 1914, but in early 1918 Krasin went to London as Lenin’s representative and among other duties he returned the £1,700, with ten years’ interest, to Fels’s heirs.

  *5 Kamo, a Georgian like Stalin, was a highly colourful figure who frequently appeared even in staid Swiss towns wearing full Circassian costume and brandishing hand guns and sabres. Oddly, Nadya’s mother – hardly a bloodthirsty radical – grew fond of him. He used to tell her stories of his dramatic escapades in the Caucasus while he was cleaning his revolvers. He was arrested in Berlin trying to cash one of the large banknotes from the robbery. He avoided prosecution by feigning insanity. He escaped from a mental hospital, returned to Russia, but was arrested again and sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment. Released from jail after the Bolshevik Revolution, he ran a bandit gang in the Civil War against the Whites, but was later given relatively minor jobs in Georgia. Lenin thought he was too unstable for any senior position in the Party or state. He died in a mysterious motor accident in 1922; the suspicion was that Stalin had him killed.