Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  After six months they moved to more modest accommodation of the kind they were used to: two rooms and a kitchen/dining room on the second floor of a classic Paris apartment building, in a quiet street off the Boulevard Montparnasse. It was sparsely furnished but scrupulously clean and well ordered, and as usual they lived in simple bourgeois style, set apart from the other émigrés. Ilya Ehrenburg, then a young student but a skilled reporter who would become one of the best-known journalists in the Soviet Union, ‘was struck by how neat everything was in the apartment. The books were ordered in the shelves. Lenin’s desk was tidy.’ His lodgings were not like those of the other exile Russian revolutionaries he had seen, and nor was Lenin himself, who was usually neatly dressed. ‘He wore a dark suit with a stiff white collar. And looked very respectable.’ Madame Rue, the concierge, said – not entirely perceptively – that they ‘must have led bleak lives. Imagine…they did not have any human weaknesses. Monsieur Ulyanov neither drank nor smoked. He went out to the library or to a meeting and that was all.’6

  Lenin seldom moved in the bohemian world of 1900s Paris, where artists like Chagall, Juan Gris, Diego Rivera, Vlaminck, Soutine, Modigliani*3 and Léger all worked in a golden period for painting – and drank at the Café Rotonde, near St Germain des Prés. Once he played chess with the French poet and artist Guillaume Apollinaire.

  On the whole he found it difficult to get down to serious literary work in Paris; he wrote no important book there, and though he churned out journalism at his usual furious rate, little of it was memorable. He hated the Bibliothèque Nationale – ‘inferior in every way to the British Museum…now that is a wonderful institution, the best library in the world to work in’. By contrast, the Paris library closed for two hours at lunchtime; the staff were ‘rude and unhelpful’ and the books he had asked for took an age to arrive from the stacks. ‘He complained about the Bibliothèque all the time,’ said Nadya.

  Both of them developed a great interest in that very French hobby of the time, cycling. Lenin was obsessed with cleaning the bikes and making sure they were well oiled, the tyres pumped full of air, and they would take off regularly to the Paris bois, to Fontainebleau, St Germain-en-Laye and, Nadya’s favourite, the Forêt de Meudon. Lenin would sometimes go much further, getting up at the crack of dawn and returning late at night, having cycled for seventy or so kilometres.

  He was in a state of fury when one afternoon he found his precious bicycle – bought for him by his mother – had been stolen. He used to leave it in the basement of a building near the library and paid the concierge ten centimes a day. When he discovered it had disappeared she shrugged her shoulders and said he had been paying to leave the bicycle there, not for her to watch out for it. ‘He railed against the library, against concierges – against Paris.’*4

  The endless ‘fetid squabbling’, he said, was ‘unbearable’ – though he was one of the most determined and loudest squabblers of them all. ‘Life was full of turmoil in Paris…Our people, Party members, would sit in cafés until late at night…drinking,’ Nadya said. ‘The conflict within the Bolshevik faction was nerve-wracking…Often V. I. used to come home very late, fired up…Once after a heated debate late at night I hardly recognised him when he returned. His face was drawn and he could hardly speak.’ Anna Ulyanova visited from Russia six months after they arrived in Paris and said her brother ‘was grey in colour, and looked drawn and gaunt’. He was suffering from crippling headaches and insomnia.7

  Fearing, again, that he might be on the edge of collapse, Nadya took him away for a long break. For nearly six weeks they went to a comfortable pension in the small village of Bombon, in the Seine-et-Marne area, seventy kilometres south-east of Paris. ‘He didn’t work at all, and we tried hard to refrain from talking about Party matters,’ Nadya told his mother. ‘We went for walks every day and…went cycling in the Clarmont Forest close by.’ They relaxed in a way they seldom did – they were brought breakfast in bed each morning by a young girl who remembered him years later ‘as that very polite, very kind Russian gentleman who taught me how to ride a bicycle’. He wrote to Zinoviev that ‘after three weeks I am beginning to come round’.*5

  Lenin’s holidays were vital to his health and the balance of his mind. Occasionally a few people in his circle raised their eyebrows when he was hors de combat for so long, but he gave a logical and sensible defence of them – naturally with a political twist. And he criticised other Party members for not taking enough rest and recuperation when they were needed. ‘Revolutionaries must be strong and remain healthy,’ he said. A revolutionary’s health ‘is official, public property…To go on being ill and undermining your working capacity is something quite intolerable in every respect.’

  Apart from his own, the one person’s health he was deeply concerned about was his mother’s. By the summer of 1910 he hadn’t seen her for nearly five years and she was now seventy-five. He heard from his sisters that Maria Alexandrovna was looking old and feeling weak. She was reluctant to leave Russia, but he eventually persuaded her to go on a family holiday he organised in Stockholm. Typically, when she first saw him she was worried about how thin he looked, not her own ailments. He broke the holiday for one evening when he made a speech to Swedish socialists. It was the first time she had seen him appear in public. ‘He spoke well, so impressively and skilfully…but why does he exert himself so much, why does he speak so loudly? That is harmful. He is not looking after himself.’ She gave him a plaid blanket for the winter which he used regularly.*6

  When she returned home Lenin accompanied her to the quay, but he couldn’t board the Russian steamer – he might have been arrested. ‘This was the last time he saw his mother and he had a premonition of that as his eyes followed the departing ship,’ said Nadya. His sister Maria recalled, ‘I shall never forget the expression on his face as he stood there looking at Mother. How much pain there was on his face.’8

  —

  On one of his bicycle rides outside Paris in early 1911 Lenin passed through Longjumeau, in the Yvette Valley, eighteen kilometres from the city. On the edge of the village he spotted an abandoned workshop and some outhouses, which he realised would be the perfect home for a project he had been planning for some time: he wanted to open a school for working-class Party members from inside Russia, whom he could train in the theory of Marxism and the practice of conspiracy. After their education he would send them back home as the vanguard of the movement to mount the insurrection which would spark revolution throughout the world. He rented the buildings immediately, hired contractors to turn them into usable lecture rooms, set up the curriculum, selected eighteen young activists as the first students to make their way secretly to France – and he chose a loyal, reliable and efficient Bolshevik to launch the school and run it. He appointed Inessa.

  The school was conceived as Lenin’s answer to the summer courses Gorky had started in Capri run by Bogdanov, who, at Lenin’s instigation, had been expelled from the Party at the end of 1909. Inessa put her heart and soul into making it a success. The school opened in spring 1911 and Lenin gave the first lecture – on the Communist Manifesto. He gave thirty others over the next couple of months, on economics, organising a political party, and the theory of socialism. Inessa administered the school and lectured on economics and feminism; Zinoviev and Kamenev occasionally gave lessons on culture. Nadya was a regular lecturer on running an illegal newspaper and organising a network of clandestine agents. As the weather improved Lenin ‘does his work out in the open, he rides his bicycle a great deal, he goes bathing and is altogether pleased with country life’, Nadya wrote to his mother. ‘He is extremely fond of excursions that begin at six or seven in the morning until late at night.’

  The best evidence is that it was around the time the school opened that Lenin and Inessa became lovers. In a frank letter to him later – she was the only woman outside his family with whom he corresponded using the intimate address ty – she says again that at first, ‘I was terribly scared to see yo
u’. But she goes on: ‘The desire to see you was there but it seemed better to drop dead on the spot than to come into your presence; and when, for some reason, you popped into NK’s [Nadya’s] room I instantly lost control and behaved like a fool. Only in Longjumeau…(and later) did I get used to you. I so much loved not only to listen to you but also to look at you as you spoke. First, your face is so lively…and second, it was convenient to watch because you didn’t notice at the time. I loved you but I wasn’t “in love”…But then I did fall in love with you.’

  There was nothing bohemian about the affair; it was all very discreet. The senior Bolsheviks around Lenin in Paris knew about it, but it was very seldom gossiped about.*7 Predictably, the Okhrana and the French police were well aware of the relationship. Both report several times about her – using her alias ‘Popoff, Sophie’ – clearly as ‘la maîtresse de Lénine’. One says she had been sent to Paris ‘par son amant, Lénine’. This would not have been to embarrass Lenin; at that time it would have been assumed that a revolutionary leader living in Paris probably had a lover. It was just routine intelligence work.9

  Nadya certainly knew, as did her mother. Elizaveta Krupskaya noticed how ‘animated Lenin was when he was talking with Inessa and she didn’t like it’. This was a time when Nadya was writing her gloomiest letters home to Lenin’s family. She didn’t mention Inessa and didn’t sound jealous, only desperately sad. ‘I’m in a state of utter melancholy…time now seems just to be frittered away,’ she wrote to Maria Alexandrovna. Explaining a delay in writing to her sister-in-law Maria, she finally told her: ‘I was in no fit state to write…we are just jogging along.’

  At no point did she behave like a betrayed wife or show her true feelings. According to Alexandra Kollontai, who was in a position to know, Nadya was definitely au courant with what was happening. She told a close comrade later, after the Revolution when she was appointed Soviet Ambassador to Norway, that ‘Nadya offered to leave him and let him go off with Inessa, but he told her to stay.’10

  Perhaps Lenin simply wanted to have his cake and eat it. Inessa didn’t seem to mind a conventional ménage à trois, which, she told him, ‘would not cause pain to anyone’. Or perhaps he realised that, however exciting and passionate their love affair may have been, Inessa was altogether ‘higher-maintenance’ than Nadya. She was more emotionally demanding, manipulative, and had five children who came first for her. Besides, as he saw, the two women in his life were genuinely becoming good friends. ‘Life always seemed more cheerful when Inessa was around, more cosy, gayer,’ Nadya said. ‘There was so much that was good in Paris in my relations with Nadya,’ Inessa told Lenin. ‘I became close to her.’ She even managed to charm Nadya’s sometimes stern and irascible mother. ‘Inessa spent a long time talking to her; they would often chat and smoke together…Mother became closely attached to her.’11

  Very few people seemed to have a bad word to say against Inessa in the pre-Revolution years. ‘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,’ said Grigory Kotov, a Russian émigré in Paris. ‘She was…the kind of person…[who was] ready to share with her comrades her last crust,’ said another. Angelica Balabanova was almost alone in detesting her as ‘the perfect – almost passive – executrix of Lenin’s orders…she was so saturated with the master’s authority and infallibility that the possibility of any divergence was inconceivable to her. She was the prototype…Bolshevik of rigid, unconditional obedience…I didn’t warm to Inessa. She was pedantic, one hundred per cent a Bolshevik…in the way she thought and spoke. She spoke a number of languages fluently, and in all of them repeated Lenin verbatim.’

  Nadya was patient and determined to make the best of it. She may have been jealous, but she saw her main task as Lenin’s helpmate, ensuring his peace of mind. If that meant giving Inessa warmth and friendship, it probably seemed like another sacrifice she was prepared to make for the Revolution.12

  *1 Lenin asked her to translate into French the speech he made at the funeral of Paul Lafargue and his wife, in 1911, which he considered highly important – Laura Lafargue was Marx’s daughter.

  *2 After the Revolution, some émigré White officers forged a cache of letters which suggested that this fleeting tendresse was a torrid affair, but it was an amateurish hoax. Another fiction was the claim – again from White sources in the early 1920s – that while in exile in Paris Lenin frequented a brothel, where he was a loudmouth drunk who talked about women. A Russian émigré painter apparently used to accompany the Bolshevik leader, ‘and we shared our women…Lenin was very gay and very good-natured but in matters of love he was absolutely voracious.’ This has the ring of absolute untruth. Even in the unlikely event that he had visited such an establishment, he would surely have been careful never to have been found out.

  *3 Although he did meet Modigliani once. The artist set fire to a paper Lenin was reading – accidentally or not is unclear – and Lenin had to put out the flame. The artists who occasionally went to hear him speak regarded him as a ‘cranky extremist’ according to the English landscape painter and later famous war artist Christopher Nevinson.

  *4 He bought a replacement bicycle but that, too, came to an unfortunate end. Lenin had become fascinated by airplanes: Louis Blériot’s first crossing of the English Channel was in 1909, seven months or so after he arrived in Paris. He regularly went to see air displays, a big popular attraction at the time. He was cycling back from a display at Juvisy-sur-Orge, twenty kilometres from Paris, when a car collided with his bike, just outside the airfield. He was barely injured – just a few cuts and bruises – but his cycle was a write-off. ‘People were very kind and helped me take the number and volunteered as witnesses,’ he told his sister Maria. ‘I have found out who the owner of the car is (he is a viscount, devil take him!) and now I have taken him to court.’ Lenin won the case and got enough compensation to buy a replacement bicycle.

  *5 The one thing Nadya had against this holiday was the other people at the pension, with whom they shared a table d’hôte dinner. She could be a terrific Bolshevik snob and she thought them ‘so bourgeois…They were all mediocre characters, though very good at talking about their own comforts. Of course such a large dose of mediocrity was rather boring. It was a good thing that we were able to keep aloof from them and live according to our own lights.’

  *6 The plaid blanket was on his bed when he died, and it was in his coffin with him.

  *7 Many people have speculated that the rival to Inessa in the ‘most glamorous woman Bolshevik’ stakes, Alexandra Kollontai, based her story A Great Love (published first in 1923 when Lenin but not Inessa was still alive) on this romance. It’s about a Russian revolutionary (Senya) who wears a cloth cap and has a sick wife (Aniuta) who has a love affair with a beautiful and wealthy fellow revolutionary (Natasha) who happens to be a very good linguist. But equally the story could have been autobiographical. Kollontai was herself a rich revolutionary, fluent in several languages, who had numerous love affairs with other revolutionaries.

  22

  Betrayals

  ‘That man…he fooled us all for years. I never saw through that scoundrel. What a swine!’

  Lenin to Zinoviev, 1917

  Lenin’s ability to tack and weave politically, to change direction when he thought it opportune, was a constant source of surprise to Bolsheviks who were less tactically flexible than he. He was a fanatic, an ideologue, but in pursuit of power he was a pragmatist – ‘theory is vital in our work, but it is not Holy Writ’, he told his supporters, most of whom believed that is exactly what Marxist theory was supposed to be. ‘A Marxist must recognise living life and take notice of reality…not cling to the theory. Theory is grey, but green is the eternal tree of life.’ When circumstances changed, Lenin changed.

  Despite the assassination of Stolypin in September 1911, the regime believed that
its brutal crackdown on dissent had defeated the revolutionaries.*1 Scores of thousands had been jailed or executed and now there was a modest effort by the government to make some gestures at reform. In moves reminiscent of Charles I’s conflicts with Parliament before the Civil War in seventeenth-century England, the Tsar had prorogued two Dumas which he thought challenged his royal prerogatives. He established a third with tight voting restrictions that guaranteed a conservative, pro-monarchy majority.

  Lenin had boycotted the Dumas since 1905 and insisted the Bolsheviks should have nothing to do with them. He attacked Social Democrats, mainly Mensheviks, who wanted to compromise with the Tsar’s parliamentary reforms as naïve. Making deals with ‘bourgeois democrats’ and ‘soft liberals’ was a treacherous road for revolutionaries, he argued. Then in May 1912 he changed his mind, put up Bolsheviks for seats in the forthcoming Fourth Duma elections and wrote several articles in favour of parliaments in general and Nicholas II’s Duma system in particular. In Nevskaya Zvezda (The New Star), a legal paper in Russia, he contradicted the line he had taken for years: ‘Where representative institutions don’t exist, there is much more deception [Lenin’s italics], political lying and fraudulent trickery of all kinds…the greater the degree of political liberty in a country and the more stable and democratic its representative institutions, the easier it is for the mass of the people to find its bearings in the fight between the parties and to learn politics.’ A short while later he declared that ‘not a single socialist renounces democracy…unless he decides that questions of political freedom are of no consequence, in which case he ceases to be a socialist…Whoever wants to approach socialism by any other path than that of political democracy will inevitably arrive at absurd and reactionary conclusions both economic and political.’1