*6 There was also a younger Schmidt brother, a minor aged just fifteen. The idea was that he would be ‘persuaded’ by his older sisters to renounce his inheritance in favour of the Bolsheviks.
*7 Lenin frequently quoted a line from Gogol’s The Government Inspector to justify the employment of crooks, rogues, killers and ruthless rascals: ‘A good household makes use even of the garbage.’
20
Geneva – ‘An Awful Hole’
‘Life in exile and squabbling are inseparable. Living in the midst of…these squabbles and scandals, this hell and ugly scum is sickening. To watch it all is sickening, too. Émigré life is now a hundred times worse than it was before 1905.’ Lenin to Gorky, 11 April 1910
‘Lenin cannot tolerate any other person with brains.’
Nikolai Bukharin (1888–1938)
On 3 January 1908 Lenin and Nadya broke their journey from Stockholm to Geneva in Berlin. The plan was to stay just one night, but after they had dinner with Rosa Luxemburg they returned to their hotel ‘feeling horribly ill’. This wasn’t because Lenin and Luxemburg had bitter disagreements at the restaurant – the brilliant German feminist and revolutionary was appalled by his ‘rigid centralism…a socialism that has no positive and creative spirit, but the sterile spirit of the overseer’, she told him. Both Nadya and Lenin had contracted food poisoning from some fish. ‘We both had white foam at the lips and a kind of weakness had seized us,’ Nadya said. ‘A doctor had to be summoned at night…[Volodya] was registered as a Finnish cook and I as an American citizen. Therefore the chambermaid fetched an American doctor. First he examined him and said it was a very serious business. Then he looked at me and said, “Well, you’ll live.” Guessing that something was not quite right he overcharged us outrageously for the visit. We hung about…[in Berlin] for an extra couple of days and then we dragged ourselves on, half ill, to Geneva.’
They found a ‘cold, cheerless’ room in a boarding house and after a day back in Switzerland Lenin told Nadya, ‘I feel like I’ve come back to Geneva to be buried.’ A week later he wrote to Lunacharsky, ‘it is devilishly sad to return to this accursed Geneva, but there’s no other way out’, and the next day in a letter to his sister Maria he complained again. ‘We have been hanging about in this damned Geneva for several days. It is an awful hole, but there’s nothing we can do. We will get used to it.’*1
Nadya said that she had never seen him so depressed. ‘He had become more reserved…more reflective and when interrupted in reveries one seemed to catch a glint of sadness in his eyes. We found it difficult to get accustomed to life again in exile. Vladimir Ilyich spent his days in the library, but in the evenings we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. We did not feel like sitting in that room…we longed to be among people and every evening we would go to the cinema or the theatre, although we rarely stayed to the end but left in the middle of the performance and would go wandering off. During these most difficult times…he sustained himself by dreaming.’1
He was at a low ebb, politically and personally. The crackdown against socialists continued; thousands had been killed, arrested and exiled. Lenin was beginning to realise how deeply the Okhrana had penetrated the revolutionary cells. ‘Work in Russia…has become a spy-infested shambles,’ he said. He had a grudging respect for Stolypin – ‘a very smart politician who understands the need for modern economic development in Russia. He may know how to win…he is winning,’ Lenin said. He thought Stolypin’s ‘carrot and stick’ policy, of brutal repression against dissidents but economic reforms on the land, could ‘transform Russia into a middle-class monarchy and if this continues for long it will force us to renounce any socialist agrarian plans at all…it is clever’.*2
Lenin had a small, loyal following in exile, but the numbers had trickled to very few and he had to start building a new network almost from scratch. Stolypin’s clampdown against opposition had nearly destroyed the revolutionary groups within Russia. At the high point of the 1905 uprising there was a combined membership of an estimated 140,000 – of either the Socialist Revolutionaries, the biggest single group, or the two wings of the Social Democrats; now in 1908 there were less than 7,000. Many had returned to their former lives. Thousands of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks simply gave up political activism because of the continuing bitter split within the RSDLP. ‘These were days we spent more time waiting for letters from home…than reading or writing them,’ Nadya said.2
With Gorky’s help, Lenin managed to find the wherewithal to start another new organ, Proletarii, a lively, well-produced paper which published contributors from all sections of the radical movement. It was respected among émigrés, with a monthly circulation of about 10,000, but had very few readers inside Russia. Press censorship had returned, and though it was slightly less rigorous than before, Bolshevik publications were banned and there was no longer a smuggling operation as there had been for Iskra. ‘Life returned to the way it had been in Geneva,’ Nadya told Lenin’s mother. He went to the library in the morning, produced journalism in the afternoon and conducted Party affairs the rest of the time. He travelled extensively around Western Europe lecturing to socialist groups. But his influence was limited. Lenin as a practical politician and by experience was a cynic. The great paradox is that by nature, as a personality, he was an optimist. It was hope and optimism that drove his belief in revolution. At this point – ‘the worst year in my life,’ he described it later – he admitted for the first time to doubts. ‘Shall I live to see another revolution?’ he asked his sister Maria in some despair.3
—
The feud with Martov and the Mensheviks continued. There were repeated efforts to heal the split, but they never came to anything. Invariably it was Lenin who made sure there would be no reconciliation ‘with those scoundrel Martovites’ or the ‘verminous Mensheviks’. Occasionally Lenin would make a move to reach an accommodation with his opponents, but he was never trusted. As Plekhanov put it, ‘Lenin desires Unity as a man desires unity with a piece of bread: he swallows it.’ At one point the venerable August Bebel, a co-founder of the German Social Democratic Party, who had met Marx and was a good friend of Engels, made an effort to restore diplomatic relations between the two sides. The effort exhausted him. Exasperated, he told Lenin, ‘What can one do? You are children and won’t get anywhere until you grow up.’ Lenin’s reaction was to shrug his shoulders.4
A new split was opening up among Russia’s Marxists, and Lenin, predictably, was the principal figure trying to widen this division too. The issue on the face of it was over an obscure and abstruse aspect of Marxist theory. But to Lenin it was again a personal matter about leadership. The row this time was within his own Bolshevik faction – a groupuscule within the group – but Lenin didn’t mind how small his band of followers was as long as he had some who would do his bidding. He saw a potential rival in Alexander Bogdanov, three years younger than he, tall, burly, ‘a gentle giant with a sweet nature, with a sparklingly original mind’. He had trained as a physician and studied philosophy at Moscow University. He wrote some interesting science fiction. He was drawn to Marxism and joined a radical ‘reading circle’ allied to the RSDLP, which was enough to get him exiled to Siberia for three years. In the Party split of 1903 he joined the Bolsheviks.
Bogdanov started developing new ideas that tried to fuse Marxism with a kind of mystic spiritualism designed to appeal to Christians and other religious people. It regarded manual labour as a religious rite and turned the masses of workers into God-like beings. Lenin thought the theory was utter hocus pocus, ‘dangerous garbage’, and had to be challenged ‘from a philosophical, a Marxist, point of view’. More important, he was spoiling for a fight and Bogdanov had to be seen off as a potential rival for the Bolshevik leadership. Gorky was interested in Bogdanov’s theories and Lunacharsky, whom Lenin liked and valued, had been converted to Bogdanov’s ‘God-building’ notions. In reality Bogdanov was never a serious threat: as a political tactician he was as hopeless, if not more
so, than Martov, and though brilliant in his way he was a dilettante, never plausible as a leader. But Lenin was taking no chances.
Gorky invited Lenin to stay for a few days in April 1908 at his villa on Capri. He told him that Bogdanov, ‘an extremely talented person with a mild character’, would also be there and he wanted the two of them to talk in a relaxed way and discuss their differences. Lenin was reluctant to dispute directly with Bogdanov in front of Gorky and at first he said he did not have the time to go. But when Gorky asked again he grudgingly agreed, though warning his host that ‘listening to that Bogdanovite drivel makes me swear like a fishwife’. Nadya didn’t wish to go and stayed behind in Geneva.5
Gorky and Maria Andreyeva rented the Villa Blaesus, a sprawling mansion high on a cliff on the south of the island with vistas of the Marina on one side and the famous Gardens of Augustus on the other.*3 Lenin was given a luxurious room with a magnificent sea view next to Gorky’s splendid library. The writer told friends later that he was appalled by Lenin’s rudeness to Bogdanov. ‘Vladimir Ilyich stood before me even more firm and more inflexible than he had been at the London Congress…he was rather cold and in a mocking mood, stern in philosophical conversations and altogether on the alert.’ Gorky wanted to help start a school on Capri that taught Bogdanov’s spiritual/Marxist theories.*4 He hoped Lenin would give lectures there and contribute to a book of essays in new interpretations of Marxism that he wanted to get published. Lenin would have nothing to do with this ‘total philosophical rubbish…this religious atheism’. He told Bogdanov and Gorky, ‘Why should we be offered this type of stuff as Marxist philosophy? I’d rather let myself be hanged and quartered than take part in any publication or in any group that preaches this kind of thing.’
Marxism was a ‘materialist’ philosophy and to Lenin religion insulted a rational person’s intelligence. ‘Those who live by the labour of others are taught by religion to practise charity on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters, and selling them at a moderate price to well-being in heaven. Religion is opium for people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of men.’ In a letter to Gorky after his stay on Capri, Lenin wrote: ‘Any religious idea, any idea of any God at all, even any flirtation with a God, is the most inexpressible foulness, a dangerous foulness…Isn’t God-building the worst form of self-humiliation? Everyone who sets about building up a God, or who even tolerates such an activity, humiliates himself in the worst possible way…because he is actually engaged in self-contemplation, self-admiration. From the point of view not of the individual but of society, all God-building is the fond self-deception of the thick-witted, the philistine, the dreamy self-humiliation of the vulgar bourgeois.’6
There was no room for compromise with Bogdanov. On the other hand there was plenty of time for relaxation on Capri. He swam and walked and saw the sights. ‘The Blue Grotto is beautiful,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘though it is “dramatic” in the sense that it could be scenery in a theatre. On the way here I thought about the Volga all the time. The beauty there is of a different kind; it is simpler and dearer to me.’ He played chess with Bogdanov, who once managed to beat him.*5
Lenin showed Gorky the other side of his nature. ‘At the same time there was in Capri another Lenin – a wonderful companion and light-hearted person with a lively and inexhaustible interest in the world around him, and very gentle in his relations with people. He showed a lively interest in everything.’ Most days he was on the island he would go out with the local fishermen. He would quiz them on their lives – how much they were paid, their families, their education, their beliefs. Maria Andreyeva would go with him to the nearby harbour and act as his interpreter. In his way Lenin possessed the common touch and he became friendly with two elderly brothers, Giovanni and Francesco Sparado, who taught him how to fish without a rod, by using his finger and thumb along the line to feel if a fish had taken the bait. ‘Così, drin drin,’ they would say, ‘Like this. Understand?’ When after a few attempts he landed a mullet he laughed and continually used the phrase ‘drin, drin’ for six days. The name seemed to stick and locals on the island referred to him as ‘Signor Drin Drin’.*6
Gorky returned with Lenin to the mainland and together they climbed Vesuvius and visited Pompeii. Despite the author’s efforts, though, he couldn’t persuade Lenin to tone down his invective against Bogdanov. He spent the best part of the next year writing a long book, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, lambasting Bogdanov and mounting a campaign to get him expelled from the Social Democratic Party. For Lenin, Bogdanov’s religious views were heretical – and heresy had to be rooted out among his Bolsheviks.7
* * *
In Geneva, contacts with Bolshevik activists inside Russia were few and far between – a frustration for Lenin and especially for Nadya, who as the official ‘Party Secretary’ was responsible for building up networks of agents communicating with ‘the Bolshevik centre’. It was a thankless task; so many had been arrested and the smuggling routes that had existed between Russia and the West before 1905 were closed down by the Okhrana. They sometimes waited weeks for any signs of clandestine mail. There were plenty of Russians in Swiss exile but few were Bolsheviks, and the hosts were tiring of their noisy, often bibulous and ever-squabbling Russian guests. Once a giant, rough-looking comrade from Georgia, Mikhail Tskhakaya, arrived at Lenin’s home in suburban Geneva dressed in colourful Caucasian costume, complete with elaborate headdress, ‘looking the picture of a brigand’, as the terrified landlady recalled. In several Swiss cities signs appeared in lodging houses reading ‘No Cats. No Dogs. No Russians.’
The émigrés formed tight communities, even though Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and SRs generally kept apart from each other. New arrivals from ‘home’, who had once been welcomed, were now distrusted. Nadya was the first to suspect that the Okhrana was redoubling its efforts to plant double agents inside the revolutionary movements. Two members from St Petersburg, the Komissarovs, made themselves known to her. ‘The first moment, a strange feeling came over me, a kind of acute mistrust. I could not think where this feeling came from and it soon disappeared. Katya Komissarov proved to be a very businesslike assistant, did everything quickly, accurately – and with great secrecy.’ She and her husband helped to smuggle some arms into a Bolshevik cell in the Urals and knew the identities of illegal comrades, supplying them with passports. Soon afterwards the arms were confiscated and all the revolutionaries she had been in contact with were arrested as they tried to cross the frontier into Western Europe. ‘All the groups [inside Russia] were riddled with informers,’ Nadya admitted. ‘There was not a single local organisation into which some provocateur had not crept. Every man regarded his comrade with suspicion, was on guard against those nearest to him, did not trust his neighbour.’*7, 8
Lenin and Nadya did trust two Bolsheviks who had immigrated to the West before 1905 and became Lenin’s most loyal collaborators and friends from this point on – in emigration and after the Revolution, in power. The three of them were called ‘The Troika’ among the other exiles. Grigory Zinoviev was probably the man closest to Lenin for the longest, and his intense, clever and pretty blonde wife Zina Lilina became one of Nadya’s most intimate confidantes. Over the next nine years they were neighbours wherever exile took them, sometimes sharing a house. Born Hirsch Apfelbaum on a small farm in Ukraine, Zinoviev, thirteen years younger than Lenin, was stocky, clean-shaven, short-winded and had a high-pitched voice. He was a supreme sycophant, famously cynical, who did a lot of Lenin’s dirty work for him. The Mensheviks called him ‘Lenin’s arms bearer’, and he didn’t seem to mind being mistrusted and disliked.
Angelica Balabanova, a highly moral comrade admired by Lenin for her ‘innocence’, hated the incessant back-stabbing among the Bolsheviks and described Zinoviev as ‘simply the most despicable human being I ever met. Whenever there was an unfair
factional manoeuvre to be made or a revolutionary reputation to be undermined, Lenin would charge Zinoviev with the task.’ However, he was transformed when he was on a speaking platform, from a lickspittle apparatchik into a highly effective orator – the most compelling speaker, after Lenin, among the Bolshevik leaders before the Revolution. Lenin found him useful and efficient, writing to him as ‘Dear Grigory’ rather than using his second name as with most of his lieutenants. Zinoviev was an Everest of pomposity, lacked any insight or anything amusing to say, but he usually did what he was told. Lenin couldn’t do without him, but found him boring.
Lev Borisovich Kamenev was in many ways the most attractive of the clique around Lenin. By comparison with the others he was decent, and seemed to have a conscience and a good sense of humour. He loathed the bear-baiting that passed for debate within the Social Democrats. Married to Leon Trotsky’s sister Olga, he was heavily built, richly bearded and had an avuncular look, even though he was only twenty-five when the Lenins returned to Geneva in 1908. He could tell a good anecdote, enjoyed gossip and could sometimes make Lenin laugh.*8 They disagreed often, but Lenin liked him – even when the rows became vicious, which they frequently did in later years. Lenin was exasperated by his ‘weakness’, but respected him. He was a Bolshevik by conviction, but lacked the harshness and the ‘killer instinct’ of the ruthless revolutionaries around him. Lunacharsky said that Kamenev ‘was regarded as a comparatively gentle person, in view of his remarkable good nature. This was praise rather than a rebuke, but it is also true that compared to the others…he was apt to waver.’9
Lenin Page 24