Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  Unfortunately for Lenin and Nadya, they trusted another member of their close circle, a physician named Yakov Zhitomirsky, who had been in high positions within the Party for years. Lenin had relied on him as a ‘man of confidence’ who could be used for delicate tasks. He had put him on the arrangements committee of the Brussels conference in 1903, where the Bolshevik/Menshevik split began to surface. Zhitomirsky was also an Okhrana agent – known as Harting to the police in Germany, where he was a wanted man for an alleged attempted bombing in Berlin. He moved to France, where he became a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur. He had been handed a 500-ruble note by Lenin – foolishly as it turned out – and he told the Okhrana that Kamo had led the bank raid in Tiflis. It was Zhitomirsky’s tip-off that led to Kamo’s arrest.

  Now Zhitomirsky, the Russians’ top agent in Switzerland, was influential in persuading Lenin to leave Geneva and move to Paris: ‘in a large city there will be less spying and you’ll be less of a target’, he told the Bolshevik leader. According to Nadya, ‘the argument was convincing to Ilyich’, though he must have known that the Okhrana had a big presence in France. On 14 December 1908 they left Geneva for Paris. ‘We hope that a large city will cheer us up a little,’ he told his mother the day before he left. ‘We are sick of sitting in this provincial backwater. Life is so dull in this petit-bourgeois town.’

  Zhitomirsky informed the Okhrana Paris office exactly when Lenin would be arriving in the French capital and where he would be staying.10

  *1 However, years later, after the Revolution, he told an audience in St Petersburg that ‘of all the places I have been in my wanderings, for convenience I would select London and Geneva as the best places to be’.

  *2 Many historians have believed the same thing: that given time Stolypin’s reforms would have worked and turned Russia into a modern bourgeois state, avoiding bloody revolution. He proposed to modernise local government and the police, improve schooling for the poor and repeal discriminatory laws against Jews and other minorities. But it is a ‘counterfactual’ hypothesis and seems very unlikely. The most important part of his programme was land reform, but most peasants resented the new land ownership regulations which benefited only the better-off farmers. The majority boycotted his agrarian policy to introduce small privately owned plots of land to replace the ‘communes’ – a system of joint land ownership that had existed for centuries. The Tsar and his royal court of arch-reactionaries grew to hate Stolypin and withdrew their support for him. Stolypin’s policies were visibly failing and his relationship with the Tsar had broken down well before he was assassinated.

  *3 The beautiful villa, relatively newly built, was owned by the Capresan Settanni family, but Gorky lived there for most of the period between mid-1906 and the end of 1909. It was later owned by the Krupp family, the German steel magnates who helped to finance the Nazi Party.

  *4 Known as Machism, after the Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach who first suggested some of the ideas in the 1890s, later adapted by Bogdanov.

  *5 Gorky said that he took the loss badly and was in a foul mood afterwards. But this is the only record of Lenin being a bad loser at chess. Others said he was a perfect gentleman at the board, win or lose, and he was always happy to talk in a friendly way afterwards about the game. On this occasion it might have been more about the opponent against whom he lost.

  *6 Giovanni Sparado long remembered Lenin – ‘only a good man could laugh like that’, he used to tell Gorky. For some years he would ask any Russians whether they knew what happened to Signor Drin Drin. ‘You know…Signor Lenin. Has the Tsar caught up with him?’

  *7 The Okhrana scored major successes against the revolutionary groups, but many observers thought the agency was highly overrated, not least by itself. The British secret agent Robert Bruce Lockhart, who worked with the Okhrana closely a few years later when he was Britain’s top-ranking agent in Russia, said: ‘I refuse to believe either in its efficiency or its honesty. The “dreaded” Okhrana…was a myth fearful more by its name than by its omniscience. It was an organisation run by bunglers and clever crooks, and in it the bunglers outnumber the brains by nine to one.’

  *8 But not his brother-in-law. Trotsky couldn’t bear Kamenev, despite the family relationship, and the feeling was mutual. Trotsky thought Kamenev weak and woolly.

  21

  Inessa – Lenin in Love

  ‘I can see her now coming out of Lenin’s apartment. She seemed to be an inexhaustible spring of life. She was the fiery flame of revolution – and the red feather in her hat was like the tongue of that flame.’

  Grigory Kotov

  She was by far the most glamorous of all the Russian émigrés in the radical circles of Paris. A sophisticated, chic thirty-five-year-old with a slim figure, chestnut hair and bright-green eyes, she was exuberant, highly intelligent, witty and invariably wore a smile on her face. Inessa Armand was altogether different, more striking and vibrant, more overtly sexy, than the run-of-the-mill Olgas and Tatianas who frequented the Bolshevik cafés and bistros of the Avenue d’Orléans. Even her French-sounding name had a hint of the exotic. She could talk as easily about the latest couture fashions as she did about Marx’s theory of surplus value – and fluently, in four languages. She dressed elegantly, always with a Parisian hat, and played the piano beautifully. She cut a dash like no other among the comrades of the Left Bank; Party members described her as ‘ever cheerful’ and spoke of her ‘happy dynamism’. Nadya said that when she arrived ‘all of us became very attached to Inessa…she always appeared to be in good spirits…she seemed to radiate warmth’. Another observed that ‘Inessa by her own admission did everything in life with passion – revolutionary politics and romance.’1

  She first met Lenin towards the end of May 1909 at the Café aux Manilleurs on the Avenue d’Orléans in the quartier around Montparnasse where the leftists in Paris congregated. She had gone to a socialist meeting with an old émigré friend, Elena Stasova, and heard him speak for the first time. She knew him by reputation and had read his books. She had joined the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP. She admired him as an intellectual and was enthused by his talk that evening, but he didn’t initially attract her as a man. ‘I loved you but I wasn’t “in love” with you then…I was a little in awe of you,’ she admitted to him later. She said she was surprised by his odd manner of meeting people, caused by his short-sightedness, when he would look eyeball to eyeball with an interlocutor and then screw up one of his eyes into a squint. Their relationship took time to develop.

  It was more than eighteen months before a love affair started, though they saw each other often at Paris cafés and Party meetings. Over that period she had become an ardent Bolshevik – none would be more loyal to him over the next decade – and he had begun to entrust her with increasingly important political work. She interpreted for him in French, a language in which he was never comfortable, and sometimes in English. Quickly he could see she was intelligent enough, and agile enough in debate, to represent him at a series of meetings in France and elsewhere in Europe. He made her head of the Bolsheviks’ International Bureau. She was the Bolshevik representative to the French Socialist Party, a big responsibility at the time, as so many Russian Party members were living in France.*1 Inessa had an incisive mind, she was beautiful, she was exciting, she was an experienced woman of the world who had few bourgeois hang-ups about female sexuality – and Lenin was smitten. Charles Rappaport, an English socialist living in Paris who saw them together frequently in Paris cafés, said that Lenin ‘with his little Mongol eyes was mesmerised by Inessa…he couldn’t stop looking at her’.2

  There had barely been a hint of scandal surrounding Lenin and other women before he fell for Inessa. When he returned to Russia after the 1905 Revolution he occasionally met up with Elizabeth de K, a young, blonde society hostess with moderate leftist views who had allowed him to use her large apartment in St Petersburg for clandestine meetings. Sometimes when the meetings were over he would
stay to talk; once she played the piano for him – his favourite piece, Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata. But they were never lovers, as she repeatedly stressed. Lenin tried to convert her to Marxism but failed, and after that he seemed to lose interest in her. ‘There were days when I wasn’t sure whether he was a man or machine,’ she told an acquaintance later.*2, 3

  —

  By contrast with Inessa, the years had not been kind to Lenin’s forty-year-old wife. She looked much older than her age. Lydia Dan, Martov’s engaging sister who loathed Lenin but was fond of Nadya, said that even if she had been no great beauty ‘her plainness was illuminated by her charm…her good nature’. Now she was frumpy and had let herself go. She had put on a lot of weight and she showed other disturbing symptoms of the thyroid complaint she had been suffering from for some years, which would soon be diagnosed as Graves’ Disease: her eyes bulged and her neck swelled. But she had made no effort with her appearance, either because she thought it was too bourgeois a thing to concern herself with or because she was in such low spirits. ‘The Paris years’, she said later, ‘were the most trying of our time in exile.’

  She always wore the same black dress in winter and a lighter one in summer; the only concession she made to fashion was occasionally to change the trimming on her hat, another long-time friend, Clara Zetkin, recalled. ‘She looked like a tired-out wife of a worker forever worrying whether she would manage to get everything done that she had intended.’ The Okhrana agent who kept a watch on her in Paris was perhaps a shade harsh, but fairly objective when in one of his reports he described her as ‘only around forty but with medium-brown hair, stoops, grey eyes, small nose, thin lips. Dressed always slovenly.’4

  Throughout their marriage there were periods when Nadya and Lenin shared a bed, and others when they slept separately. During a large part of their Paris years, as friends such as the ever-loyal Bolshevik Lidia Fotieva, who later became Lenin’s secretary in the Kremlin, said, Nadya was sleeping in her mother’s room. In September 1911, a few months after Lenin and Inessa became lovers, Inessa moved into an apartment a few doors along the street from them in the Rue Marie-Rose.

  —

  Elisabeth Inès Armand was born on 8 May 1874, though over the years a few other dates were given by her or her family and comrades to confuse police and immigration authorities in various European countries. She was born in Paris, but barely lived there until she returned as a Bolshevik activist in her thirties.

  Her mother, Nathalie Wild, was partly English, partly Scottish, partly French and partly Russian. She made a modest living as an actress and a singing teacher in Lyon and later in Paris. Inessa’s father was Théodore Pécheux d’Herbenville, a moderately successful French opera singer who often worked under the stage name Théodore Stephane. The couple married soon after Inessa was born, so technically Inessa had been illegitimate; they split up when Inessa was five and her father died soon afterwards.

  Nathalie was left with three young daughters to look after – Inessa was the middle of the trio – and they were almost penniless. To ease the financial burden, when Inessa was six her mother’s sister Sophie took her to live with her in Russia – the French quarter of Moscow was thriving at that time. Her aunt became a music tutor to the Armand family of rich Franco-Russian textile manufacturers, who employed more than 1,200 workers at a factory in Moscow. Inessa spent a great deal of time with the Armand children at their estate near the village of Pushkino, thirty kilometres north-east of the city.

  The eldest Armand son, Alexander Evgenevich, five years older than Inessa, fell in love with her and when she was nineteen they married, at a big society wedding attended by the Moscow business elite. Inessa settled down to what appeared to be a normal, privileged upper-middle-class life. Alexander was a thoroughly decent man of liberal views, generous, a loving husband. She gave birth to four children, two boys and two girls, in eight years. She seemed content, but something was missing in her life, she told friends. She needed a cause to strive for and something to believe in. She began a course of serious reading: the classics of philosophy, history and political economy, unusual subjects for a well-to-do woman of her environment and upbringing.

  She became a convinced, passionate feminist. She joined the Moscow Society for Improving the Lot of Women, which among other good works tried to rehabilitate prostitutes. Inessa at this stage was a great admirer of Tolstoy. One of the other members of her group had the idea of writing to the esteemed writer and asking what he thought could be done about the social problem of prostitution, which was destroying the lives of so many Russian women. He had expertise in this area: as a young man he had been a famously enthusiastic customer of courtesans – and, just as famously afterwards, he had ‘reformed’ and become a moral arbiter of the nation’s conscience. He replied: ‘Nothing will come of your work. It was thus before Moses, it was thus after Moses. Thus it was, thus it will be.’ Inessa was disgusted and gave up on Tolstoy. She became interested in socialism. Lenin’s bulky and prolix The Development of Capitalism in Russia was on her reading list and she said later that it was one of the books that converted her to Marxism.

  —

  Her internal life was going through a revolution too. If she seemed to be living in harmony with her husband, she had started a love affair with another man – Alexander’s younger brother Vladimir. He was just seventeen, newly enrolled as a student at Moscow University; she was twenty-eight, the mother of four young children. In 1903 she left her husband for her brother-in-law, taking the children with her.

  Alexander continued to maintain Inessa and the children generously. He supported her various causes, bailed her out when she was in trouble with the police and jailed; twice in the future he would help her to escape from prison and exile. He looked after the children when she was unable to and he always kept a home open for her in Pushkino, and a flat in Moscow. He was always a friend, the most tolerant of husbands and a compassionate father. He later took a mistress himself, but admitted that he had always been in love with Inessa, however erratic her behaviour appeared to be. He was never a revolutionary, though he never complained about Inessa’s political life and understood her total commitment to the cause.

  The lovers left Russia for a tour of Italy, France and Switzerland – paid for by Alexander – where she became pregnant with Vladimir’s child. Back in Russia she bore a son, André, and grew even more active in politics. Alexander had managed to keep the secret police off her trail, with a mixture of persuasion and bribery. But eventually the Okhrana caught up with her. She was arrested for running a library of illegal books. Despite being a mother of five young children, including a baby, she was jailed in a notoriously harsh prison and then sentenced to exile in the frozen north, at a godforsaken place near Archangel.

  Vladimir, who was also deeply implicated in subversive politics, followed her, but he became seriously ill with tuberculosis. He went to the South of France for treatment. However he was too far gone with the disease and there was no cure to be found. At the beginning of 1909 she escaped from exile, hid briefly in St Petersburg, and with her husband’s help managed, after a dramatic journey across frozen lakes in Finland, to reach Vladimir in Nice. Two weeks after the lovers were reunited, he died in her arms.

  Heartbroken and unable to return to Russia, she sent for her children to join her. She enrolled at the New University in Brussels, which had started teaching one of the most highly regarded economics courses in Europe, though she managed to do most of her reading and written work in Paris. She completed a three-year course in eighteen months and qualified with merit. She settled into the émigré underground world, in her case quite comfortably on her husband’s money, started making a new life for herself, and found a new love – Lenin.5

  —

  Lenin said that ‘most of the émigrés went to seed as soon as they arrived in Paris. Only the strongest survived. The rest were destroyed by petty feuds, domestic quarrels, poverty – and alcohol.’ Lenin survived, but h
e never liked Paris, despite the presence in his life there of Inessa. He had wanted to get out of the ‘backwater’ of Geneva and looked forward to living in a big city. But typically, as soon as he got to one he began complaining. ‘God, Paris is a rotten hole,’ he told his sister Anna after a few days in France – the word ‘hole’ being one of his favourite terms of abuse about a place; at various times in his voluminous letters he calls Paris, Geneva, London, Berlin, Zurich, Berne and Moscow ‘a hole’. He wrote to his mother after a few weeks, ‘I can’t understand what on earth made us go to Paris. I have still not been able to adapt myself.’

  For a start it was then one of the most expensive cities in Europe. The cost of living was far higher than in Switzerland, which at that time, with no banking industry and no manufacturing base, was a poor country, cheap to live in. At first Lenin and Nadya moved into the most extravagant and ornate apartment that they ever took during their marriage – four big rooms in an elegant building next to the Parc Montsouris. There was a room each for Nadya’s mother and for his sister Maria, who lived with them for a few months. By Lenin and Nadya’s standards it was luxurious. There were gilt mirrors above marble mantelpieces, chandeliers, parquet floors. Nadya loathed it and felt uncomfortable. ‘He…[Volodya] took only a very remote part in the efforts we were making to fix up our new quarters,’ she told his mother. ‘He had more important things to do. The contempt with which the concierge looked upon our white deal table, common chairs and stools was worth seeing. In our “parlour” we had only a couple of chairs and a small table. It was not at all cosy.’

  Prices were exorbitant, she said. A visitor from Russia who arrived for tea asked her what the cost of goose and veal was in the city, and her reply was not in her usual mild manner. ‘During our time in Paris, we didn’t eat either. Had he interested himself in the price of horsemeat and lettuce I could have helped him.’ Maria Alexandrovna sent food parcels from Russia, along with money, to tide them over. They received delicacies that reminded them of home, including his favourite fish: smoked sturgeon fillets, Russian salmon, caviar. He thanked her profusely. ‘We are greatly enjoying these little dainties and thinking of the Volga as we eat them.’