23
A Love Triangle – Two into Three Will Go
‘Vladimir Ilyich could never have loved a woman with whose opinions he totally disagreed and who was not a comrade in his work.’
Nadezhda Krupskaya, Memoirs (1930)
‘I am an invalid and tire very easily,’ Nadya wrote to Lenin’s mother on 3 May 1913 from Kraków. Ten days later Lenin told Maria Alexandrovna that he was ‘seriously worried about N’s health…she is getting no better’. She was suffering from heart palpitations, she had fainting spells, her neck bulged, her eyes swelled and she had crippling headaches. She could walk no further than a few hundred metres before she was exhausted. She looked in her sixties, not forty-four. Lenin consulted several ‘comrade doctors’, Bolshevik émigrés in Poland, but none was sure what was wrong with her beyond diagnosing an endocrine problem of some kind. His brother Dmitry, a physician with a practice in Crimea, consulted the latest medical research in Europe. Diagnosing from a distance, he assured Lenin that whatever was wrong, an operation would be unnecessary and might make her condition worse – a great relief to Nadya, who was terrified of surgery.*1
Finally Lenin took her to see one of the top neurologists in Poland, Dr Jan Landau, from the University of Kraków. ‘It has been discovered that I have thyroid trouble,’ she wrote to her sister-in-law Maria. ‘The doctor has frightened me and every day I go to the clinic for electrical treatment [a form of electroconvulsive therapy]. That takes three hours and afterwards I wander about half the day like a lunatic. They feed me bromides, which make me very sick.’1
The treatment wasn’t working and Lenin looked about for other cures. His Polish friend Bagoczki, a neurologist, recommended that Nadya should see a Swiss surgeon and endocrinologist, Professor Theodor Kocher, who had won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1909 for pioneering work on the pathology, physiology and treatment of the thyroid gland. Bagoczki advised that the professor would probably suggest surgery, but Nadya didn’t want an operation so they decided that some peace and quiet during the summer would help. They went to the Tatra Mountains and rented a large bungalow with a pretty terrace in the tiny hamlet of Biały Dunajec, near the village of Poronin, 700 metres above sea level. The house was surrounded by a forest, the foothills of mountains and a stream; ‘the air is wonderful and the view of the mountains beautiful,’ Nadya said. Lenin also loved ‘our rural life. We get up early and go to bed at almost the same time as the cocks and hens,’ he told his mother. ‘Poronin is almost Russian: thatched roofs and poverty, the women and children barefoot. The men go around wearing the “gurali” costume [a traditional Polish folk dress]: white cloth trousers and white cloth half cloaks, half jackets.’
It was a country idyll, but Nadya’s health was getting no better; her heart palpitations and dizzy spells were becoming more frequent. Lenin finally persuaded her to see Professor Kocher at his clinic in Berne. He diagnosed Graves’ Disease, also known as Basedow’s Disease or toxic goitre, and recommended an operation to cut out half of Nadya’s thyroid gland. It was new, highly complex and potentially dangerous surgery, but Kocher had performed over two thousand similar operations. She conquered her terror and agreed to go through with the procedure.2
Kocher’s fees were extremely high but Lenin had no qualms about consulting the best available doctors, for himself and for Nadya, whatever the cost. With his mother ailing, for once he didn’t want to bother her for help in paying the professor’s bill, though he was comfortable about asking the Party for the money. He thought it was entirely reasonable that the Bolsheviks should look after vital assets such as important Party workers like Nadya. He wrote to the editors of Pravda, asking them for a contribution towards the operation. ‘I beg you not to be late,’ he wrote on 10 June. The paper agreed to help, though the money took time to come through. A few days later he wrote again with more urgency: ‘My wife is going to have an operation. The money is badly needed.’
Lenin and Nadya arrived in Berne on 12 June. But Kocher was a bit of a diva and in such high demand that he had a full waiting list. When they were told that they would have to be patient, wait their turn, and hang around in Berne at considerable expense, Lenin was furious. ‘There was a great row with Kocher – a capricious character,’ he wrote to Kamenev. ‘He’s a celebrity and likes to be begged.’3
There were several delays over the following weeks, but the operation went ahead on 10 July. Three days later Lenin wrote to his mother: ‘At last they operated on Nadya on Wednesday. The operation evidently went off successfully, for yesterday [Friday] she already looked fairly well and she began to drink and eat with pleasure. The operation was apparently rather difficult. For about three hours they tortured her without an anaesthetic, but she bore it heroically. On Thursday she was very ill – high temperature and delirium – and I was thoroughly frightened. Yesterday, however, things were obviously better.’*2
Nadya stayed in hospital to convalesce for a fortnight after the operation. Lenin took the opportunity, in between caring for his wife, to perform some political tasks. ‘While I was in hospital,’ she said laconically, ‘Vladimir Ilyich lectured in Geneva, Lausanne, Zurich and Berne on the problems of national minorities.’4
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Lenin was not a man with a highly developed conscience. But just before moving to Kraków he ended the physical side of his affair with Inessa – or at least he tried to. They went for a few days to Arcachon, in south-west France, and he told her that he couldn’t continue hurting Nadya. Inessa was angry and unhappy and said that she didn’t think their relationship ‘was causing hurt to anyone else’, but Lenin insisted that he was finding ‘managing’ the affair too difficult. The evidence from her letters suggests, though, that it continued, on and off, for some years.
His relationship with Inessa was central to Lenin’s emotional life, and highly important to him professionally. From 1912 onwards he wrote to her frequently; discounting brief postcards, of which there are many, around 150 letters survive. It is certain that he wrote several more which have disappeared or were destroyed. At one point in 1914 Lenin asked her to return all his letters to her: ‘Sending them by registered mail is not convenient; a registered letter can easily be opened by friends…and so on…Please bring all the letters, come yourself, and we will talk about it.’*3 Their letters mix the personal and the political, moving from one to the other almost seamlessly, and show how intimate was their bond. They also reveal a tempestuous relationship in which the lovers clearly had flaming rows. Inessa was passionate, but could be demanding and difficult. It is easy to see why Lenin fell for her – and why he didn’t want to live with her.
Inessa and her five children followed them to Kraków within six months, taking an apartment in the same street. The three of them spent a lot of time together – ‘V. I. would write a speech and make it in front of us, Inessa would transcribe it,’ Nadya wrote to Maria Ulyanova. She said elsewhere: ‘For hours we would walk along the leaf-strewn forest lanes. Usually we were in a threesome, V. I., Inessa and I…sometimes we would sit on a sunny slope covered with shrubs. He would sketch outlines of his speeches, getting the text right, while I learned Italian…Inessa would be sewing a skirt or enjoying the warmth of the sun.’ Inessa played the piano well, and despite Lenin’s claim that he couldn’t listen to too much Beethoven because ‘it makes you go too soft’, she often played him the Appassionata Sonata.5
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Lenin and Nadya became close to Inessa’s children, particularly the younger ones. Nadya grew to love Inessa’s two daughters, Inna and Varvara, and the affection was returned. Whether it was an unnamed gynaecological condition that arose after her Siberian exile, which required two months’ treatment, or her thyroid problems which had probably existed undiagnosed for years, Nadya had no children with Lenin. She rarely mentioned any disappointment, but every now and then a hint of regret would appear. She wrote sometimes about the pain of other women who were childless. She might well have been thinking of herself when she s
aid of her great friend, the perennially single Vera Zasulich that she ‘had an enormous need for a family. One had only to see how lovingly she played with Dimka’s [Lenin’s younger brother Dmitry] fair-haired little boy.’
Lenin liked children too, up to a point. He was fond of the Zinovievs’ son Stepan, born in 1909. In Kraków Lenin often carried him around on his shoulders and played with him affectionately, even wrestling with the boy on the floor. ‘Sometimes, Vladimir Ilyich and Styopka knocked everything about in the room,’ his mother Zina Lilina wrote later. ‘When it became very noisy I would try to stop them, but he insisted “don’t interfere, we’re playing”.’ Once, as they were walking along a street in Kraków, he sighed, looked sad and told Zina, ‘It’s a pity we haven’t got a Styopka like that.’*4, 6
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Separating Inessa and Lenin’s personal relationship from the political was never easy. The two were bound up together. He trusted her implicitly to perform tasks large and small that he would not have given to anyone else. Lenin had such self-belief that he rarely thought anybody could perform better than him at anything that required political judgement and skill. But he acknowledged once that Inessa did. He persuaded her to represent him at a conference in Brussels that required considerable tact and nous. Famous figures in international socialism would be there like Karl Kautsky, Martov, Rosa Luxemburg and Plekhanov; she was reluctant, and apprehensive, about appearing as Vladimir Ilyich’s voice. Eventually, after he practically begged her to go, she relented and, from many accounts, she performed remarkably, always keeping her temper and remaining diplomatic. He wrote to her afterwards: ‘You have rendered a very great service to our Party. I am especially thankful because you replaced me…you handled the thing much better than I could have done…I would probably have gone up in the air, would have called them scoundrels. And that’s what they were trying to provoke. You carried it off calmly. I greet you a thousand times.’7
After three months in Kraków Lenin sent her on a dangerous and foolhardy mission back to Russia, where she was a wanted woman. Her task was to make contact with a Bolshevik cell in St Petersburg which Lenin hadn’t heard from in a long time. She went disguised as an old peasant woman with false ID in the name Fransiska Yankevich. From the moment she crossed the border into Russia the Okhrana followed her. She found the comrades she was told to look for. But the whole St Petersburg Party was so compromised by double agents that she was betrayed, arrested and jailed.
Her husband got her out of prison. He paid her bail of 5,500 rubles and helped her escape back to Poland. She left her youngest children with him in Moscow, and from September 1913 took a room in the Kamenevs’ home, close to Lenin’s, returning to the familiar routine in the ménage. ‘Our entire Kraków group were drawn close to Inessa…we lived together in a small and friendly circle.’
Out of the blue, in December she surprised everybody and suddenly left Kraków and returned to Paris. It is unclear exactly why, though it seems likely that after another short trip away together in Switzerland Lenin again decided to end the affair. Perhaps he felt guilty about Nadya, who was still recovering from her operation. Inessa was deeply hurt and depressed. Soon after she reached Paris she wrote to him, making no effort to hide her feelings or the nature of their relationship.
‘Sunday morning…
My dear,
Here I am in Ville Lumière and my first impression is one of disgust. Everything about the place grates – the grey of the streets, the overdressed women, the accidentally overheard conversations, even the French language…It was sad that Arosa was so temporary, somehow transitory. Arosa was so close to Kraków, while Paris is, well, so final.*5 We have parted, parted, you and I, my dear! And it is so painful. I know, I just feel you won’t be coming here. As I gazed at the familiar places I realised all too clearly, as never before, what a large place you occupied in my life, here in Paris, so that all our activity here is tied by a thousand threads to the thought of you. I wasn’t at all in love with you then, though even then I did love you. Even now I would manage without the kisses, if only I could see you, to talk with you occasionally would be such a joy – and it couldn’t cause pain to anyone. Why did I have to give that up? You ask me if I am angry that it was you who “carried out” the separation. No, I don’t think you did it for yourself. There was much that was good in Paris in my relations with NK [Nadya Konstantinovna]. In one of our last conversations she told me I had become dear and close to her only recently.’
She dates the rest of the letter Sunday evening and most of it is about Party affairs and politics:
‘When you write to me about business matters, give me some indication of what the KZO [the Committee of Russian Social Democrats Abroad] may talk about and what they may not.
‘Well, my dear, that’s enough for today. I want to send this off. There was no letter from you yesterday! I’m rather afraid my letters are not reaching you – I sent three letters (this is the fourth) and a telegram. Is it possible you haven’t received them? I get the most unlikely ideas thinking about it. I’ve also written to NK, to your brother and to Zina [Lilina, Zinoviev’s wife]. Has nobody received anything? I send you a big kiss.
Your Inessa.’8
He wrote to her making it equally clear how important to him their affair was – and what she meant to him: ‘Dear friend…Your latest letters were so full of sadness and evoked such gloomy thoughts in me and aroused such feelings of guilt, that I can’t come to my senses.’
*1 Lenin often criticised ‘comrade doctors’ and generally advised his friends, including many Bolshevik activists, not to trust them. When he heard that Gorky was being treated for an illness by an erstwhile Party member, he wrote suggesting – not in jest – that he should consult someone else. ‘The news that a Bolshevik is treating you, by a new method, even if he is only a former Bolshevik, upsets me…God save you from doctor comrades in general and doctor Bolsheviks in particular. But really in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred doctor comrades are asses…I assure you, except in trivial cases, one should be treated only by men of first-class reputation.’
*2 In the long term, though, the surgery was only a partial success. The immediate symptoms disappeared for a while after Lenin and Nadya returned to Poland following the operation. But they would recur throughout her life, sometimes causing her acute pain and discomfort.
*3 Almost all the correspondence was censored by the Soviet authorities after Lenin died. Apart from a very few letters that were entirely mundane about trivial Bolshevik Party affairs, none appeared until after the collapse of the USSR in 1991, and many turned up only some years after that. It seems likely that Lenin destroyed some of the letters she returned, but nobody knows for sure.
*4 Later Lenin was close to his sister Anna and Mark Elizarov’s adopted son Gora – a child prodigy whom the couple had heard about in 1911 when they were living in Saratov. His real name was Georgy Lozgachev, and aged just six he had taught himself to read Russian, and from bibles, Church Slavonic and a smattering of Hebrew. Anna Ulyanova and her husband offered to adopt him and give him a better education and his natural parents agreed. Lenin in his last years grew to love him. Other accounts differ about Lenin’s fondness for children, though. Panteleimon Lepeshinsky, who knew him well from exile in Siberia and émigré life in Geneva, recalled that Lenin had found it deeply annoying to look after his young daughter, Olga, ‘because she teased him about being bald’.
*5 Arosa, a Swiss Alpine resort, is where it seems Inessa and Lenin spent a few days in autumn 1913. It is clear that they were both in Switzerland at the same time, though it is not entirely established that they were together. The best evidence suggests they were.
24
Catastrophe – The World at War
‘A war between Austria and Russia would be a very useful thing for the Revolution, but it is not likely that Franz Josef and Nikolasha will give us that pleasure.’
Lenin to Gorky, 25 January 1913
‘Tsari
sm is a hundred times worse than Kaiserism…From the point of view of the working class and the toiling masses of Russia, the lesser evil would be the defeat of the Tsarist monarchy and its army.’
Lenin to Alexander Shlyapnikov, 17 October 1914
Lenin had been predicting a world war between the major powers for a dozen years after 1900. ‘War is coming…waged for the division of colonies, a struggle for markets and for the freedom to loot foreign territories. Thieves will fall out.’ Five years before the war began he said, ‘war is inevitable. The capitalist world has reached a stage of putrefaction. People are already beginning to poison themselves with the drugs of nationalism and chauvinism. I think we shall soon see a general European war…and the working class will not be able to find the strength to avert the carnage…they are not sufficiently organised or class-conscious to do so…and in a war it is the workers who will suffer terribly. But it is the workers’ enemies who will weaken each other. The workers will pay a heavy price, but in the end they will gain.’1
As the years went on he changed his mind and ruled out an imminent conflict – though he wasn’t alone there: very few people at the time saw the war coming. Lenin thought the great powers could avoid a war in the short to medium term. In November 1912 he wrote to his mother and his sister Maria: ‘There is much talk about war here as you can see from the papers. If war does break out, I shall probably have to go to Vienna, or perhaps the town where we last met [a coded meaning, he was referring to Stockholm], but I do not believe there will be a war.’ A month later he told Gorky: ‘There will probably not be a war and we shall stay here for the time being, taking advantage of the Poles’ desperate hatred of Tsarism.’ He was confident in his judgement, as always. If he thought war was imminent between Austria and Russia he wouldn’t have stayed in Galicia, where he was bound to be considered a citizen of an enemy nation when fighting broke out. Clearly he had thought of moving from Austrian Poland to Scandinavia; but he reckoned the Swedes or the Danes might have been pressured to extradite him to Russia. It was a serious miscalculation to stay in Poronin, which soon led to personal and political problems. First, he was arrested, jailed and for a short period genuinely believed he might be lynched as a spy. Second, when the opportunity came to return to Russia, the only way he could get there was to seek help from Germany, opening himself up to treason charges.2
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