Lenin was by no means given the most luxurious of the dachas. Other senior magnates were allotted finer and bigger ones. Trotsky for a while had one of the grandest houses in the region, Arkhangelskay, once owned by Princess Yusupov. Stalin’s formerly belonged to an oil millionaire.
Within a few months of the Revolution Gorky was writing to his wife that ‘only the commissars lead a pleasant life these days. They steal as much as they can from the ordinary people in order to pay for their courtesans and their unsocialist luxuries.’ Lenin didn’t have either, but he knew that many of his leading comrades did. Complaints were frequently made by the old-school Bolsheviks, the true believers in a Party whose ranks were increasingly filled with careerists.
A comrade whom Lenin had known for many years wrote to him from Tula in early 1919 with an ‘it wasn’t like that in my day’ message: ‘We have cut ourselves off from the masses and made it difficult to attract them. The old comradely spirit in the Party has died completely. It has been replaced by a new one-man rule in which the Party boss runs everything. Bribe-taking has become universal; without it our Communist comrades would simply not survive.’ Lenin ignored several similar warnings.
Joffe – one of the uncorrupted officials – returned from Berlin to a job in the Foreign Commissariat and was shocked. He wrote to his great friend Trotsky, ‘there is enormous inequality and one’s material position largely depends on one’s post in the Party; you’ll agree this is a dangerous situation. I have been told, for example, that…Old Bolsheviks are terrified of being kicked out mainly because they would lose their right to reside in the National Hotel and other privileges connected with this. The old Party spirit has disappeared, the spirit of revolutionary selflessness and comradely devotion.’ He coined a new word for the careerist breed of new Communists, which Trotsky would steal and later use often: ‘radishes – Red on the outside, White inside’.5
—
Lenin’s private office was as unshowy, spartan almost, as his living quarters a little way along the corridor in the Kremlin’s main government building. It was a smallish room of no more than eighteen square metres with a worn brown carpet and a potted plant in one corner. It was simply furnished. Every item – left by the Tsar – was functional, except an old clock which fell behind between three and fifteen minutes a day. Constant repairs did not help, yet Lenin insisted it stay: ‘another clock would be no different’, he said, mysteriously. ‘It was the kind of room that might belong to the headmaster of a provincial school,’ said one regular visitor.
Lenin allowed no curtains in his office and the blinds were never lowered. His secretary Lidia Fotieva, thirty-six when the government moved to Moscow, said, ‘it was as though he felt cramped and stifled in a room cut off from the outside world by lowered blinds’. The temperature had to be kept at 14 degrees Celsius exactly, ‘and if it was raised as much as one degree he could not bear it’.*2
He had three telephones on his desk. The pens and pencils were neatly ordered and sharpened to a stiletto point. There was an inkstand with two small hanging lamps. Pride of place on the desk was a strange statue of an ape sitting on a pile of books staring at an oversized human skull, representing Darwin’s theory of evolution.
There were no personal photographs or pictures of family. On the wall opposite his desk hung a large picture of Marx. Next to it on the left was a map of Russia and to the left of that a bronze plaque of Stepan Khalturin, a revolutionary who was executed in 1881 for assassinating a Tsarist general, Fyodor Strelnikov. Lenin said he wasn’t commemorating the deed but the ‘sheer courage of the young man’. There was a portrait of Chernyshevsky on one wall. He had long hated smoking, but after the attempt on his life he banned it anywhere near him. There was a large ‘No Smoking’ sign in his office and the adjoining conference room.
Lenin disliked soft, padded chairs. He sat at his desk on a plain wooden chair with a wicker seat and back. There was a chandelier lamp from the ceiling and he never left the office without switching off the light. Every day he tore a page from a wall calendar. In one corner of the office there was a small table laden with maps and atlases, which he enjoyed studying. There were around 2,000 books and dictionaries in several bookcases of his office; he told his secretaries to guard against books being appropriated by visitors. In some volumes he wrote ‘Lenin’s copy’. Fotieva once said that ‘in general, Vladimir Ilyich liked customary, unchanging surroundings. It was as though in this quiet of the room and of things that were always the same and always in the same places he found rest from the rich, varied events of his life.’ In other words, which an ultra-loyal and long-standing Bolshevik would never have used, he was deeply conservative, fussy and extremely difficult to work for.
Lenin still adopted many secretive, conspiratorial ways of old. He frequently sent letters and messages to people in Moscow by bicycle courier and told a secretary not to despatch the packet without finding out if the recipient would be there to receive it. ‘Seal the letter in an envelope and if necessary sew it and seal it with wax…Be sure to write “To Be Opened By Nobody Else” and warn the messenger that the addressee must sign a receipt.’ The receipt had to be shown to Lenin. Once one of his letters was delayed and he sent an angry note to Gorbunov, the Executive Secretary of the Sovnarkom: ‘Yesterday I discovered that an urgent document I gave Fotieva was forwarded “ordinary” and was several hours late; had I not intervened again it would have been delayed for days. If it happens again I shall resort to severe punishment and dismissals.’ On several occasions he threatened to ‘arrest on the spot’ assistants who didn’t live up to his perfectionist standards.
On the other hand Fotieva said that most of the time he was kind in personal matters and good-humoured: ‘I think it can be said he worked jovially…with a great deal of laughter.’ This was something often said about Lenin, which is not always easy to square with his demanding, difficult, domineering and ruthless persona. His sense of irony was acute, often at the expense of someone else. But some of his stern critics noted a broader sense of humour, even occasional silliness. Gorky often remarked that ‘Lenin loved to laugh…and when he laughed it was with his whole body. On occasions he was overcome with laughter and would laugh sometimes until he cried. He could give to his short characteristic exclamation “hm, hm” an infinite number of modifications, from biting sarcasm to noncommittal doubt. Often in his hm, hm one caught the sound of the keen humour which a sharp-sighted man experiences who sees clearly through the stupidities of life.’
Sometimes he could do things which surprised his closest aides, as Fotieva recalled. ‘Once, after a delegation from Bokhara in Central Asia had left at an hour when he usually went home for dinner, the door between his office and the conference room was locked on the inside. Assuming that it had been locked by a Cheka employee who guarded another door, and concerned because Lenin had left instructions for us to carry out, we banged desperately on the door. After several minutes it was opened by a smiling Vladimir Ilyich. He was dressed in Bokharan national costume which the delegation had just given him and he had taken it into his head to try it on.’ Sadly no picture of this exists.6
—
Lenin’s petulant rages over minor matters became more pronounced after the failed attempt on his life. Nadya was around less often to tame the furies, and few people were strong enough to stand up to him the more powerful he became. He could sometimes lose all perspective and waste time on trivia when Russia and his regime were facing great crises.
In the summer of 1918 he became obsessed with removing Tsarist statues and busts in public places and replacing them with figures from the Enlightenment and socialism – Danton, Darwin, Engels, Herzen and many more. In July 1918, while the battle for grain was raging and on the day he gave instructions to proceed with the murder of the Tsar and his family, he sent a note to Anatoly Lunacharsky in the middle of a Sovnarkom meeting asking if he had recently spoken with Vasily Vinogradov, the official responsible as head of the Statues Commiss
ion. ‘Not yet,’ replied Lunacharsky.
A note came back: ‘When are you going [to Petrograd, to discuss various issues]…the day, the hour?’
‘Tomorrow at midnight.’
‘Telephone Vinogradov and give him an immediate appointment.’
Then, also at the meeting, he wrote a note to Fotieva telling her to call Vinogradov to make an appointment for Lunacharsky. This was happening during a discussion about the Russian food crisis. He wouldn’t let the matter drop.
Three weeks later there were more notes on the subject to the Commissar for Enlightenment. ‘There’s still no outdoor bust of Marx anywhere. I am astonished and outraged that this has not been done. I am reprimanding you and scold you for this criminal negligence. I demand the names of those others responsible so that they can be put on trial. Shame on the saboteurs and loafers.’
His temper could be phenomenal and out of all proportion. In the autumn of 1918 a lift in the Kremlin was out of action for three days. He might have got an assistant to ring up a maintenance team to ask what was going on. But Lenin sent an extraordinary note in his own hand to the commandant of the Kremlin: ‘This is the height of disgrace. There are people suffering from heart disease for whom climbing the stairs is harmful and dangerous. I have pointed out a thousand times that this lift must be kept in order and that one person should be responsible for it. I strongly reprimand you and charge you to establish the identity of those guilty of not giving due warning…[that the lift wouldn’t work].*3 Let me have a list of the people responsible for the lift once again and the penalties imposed on them.’
He wasted his time on tasks he might have expected others to perform, as Trotsky noted. ‘Lenin’s way of dealing personally with many things cost a great expenditure of energy. Often he would write letters himself, address the envelopes by hand and stick them down.’
Lenin’s preferred method for dealing with many administrative problems was to threaten to ‘line up and shoot’ someone. But few threats were quite as absurd and disproportionate as this, even if it was mostly a petulant outburst. When Stalin was in Tsaritsyn organising revolutionary justice against the kulaks there were problems with his field telephone. Lenin cabled him: ‘Threaten to shoot the idiot who is in charge of telecommunications and does not know how to give you a better amplifier and how to get a decent working telephone connection.’
—
Lenin was taking almost no exercise, he was eating badly, he was working under extreme pressure around the clock and he had been very nearly killed. When, in the past, the ‘rages’ came upon him or when he suffered from headaches and insomnia, Nadya’s answer was to drag him away on holiday. It was no longer so easy. He could go to Gorki for a few days but work weighed heavily there too ‘and he couldn’t rest properly’, she said. Occasionally, though, he could get away for a day or two to hunt.
One of his regular companions was Nikolai Krylenko, a Justice Commissariat official who would later become Chief Prosecutor of the Soviet Union and make rousing performances at Stalinist show trials.*4 On one of their first outings, near Smolensk in autumn 1918, ‘we chased white partridge and black grouse’, Lenin wrote to his sister Anna. ‘The best thing about it was that for two whole days there wasn’t a single telephone call…not a single message, not a single question for me to answer.’
They hunted fox – an altogether different sport in Russia than in Britain, or many other countries. In Russia the fox is shot. The idea is to force the animal into a circle from which there is only one exit, where the hunter is waiting. ‘The fox came straight at Lenin, who at first did not spot him because the animal’s red coat was covered with snow from the spruce trees,’ Krylenko recalled. ‘When he did see the fox he was transfixed…stared and stared and didn’t shoot…the fox just stood there, still, for a moment before heading off like lightning. “Why didn’t you shoot?” I asked. “Well…he was so beautiful and pretty,” he replied.’
Sometimes he would hunt just for a Sunday, with Jan Rudzutak, a Latvian bodyguard who later rose to the Soviet Politburo under Stalin. Rudzutak would wake Lenin, ‘who was already in his felt boots, a black horse leather jacket and leather trousers, with a packet of sandwiches and a small tin box filled with pieces of sugar for tea’. Once, after an entirely unsuccessful day’s sport – more often than not his bag was still empty; power had not made him a better shot – their sleigh broke down forty kilometres from Moscow. They had to walk two and a half kilometres to the nearest railway station, an exhausting journey through snowdrifts.
A hunting trip with Krylenko in late 1919 gave him a health warning. Following another unsuccessful day’s sport, they journeyed twenty-five kilometres in a peasant car and stayed two nights in a hayloft. He allowed nobody to serve him tea or food and got it all himself – ‘he never complained, though he was clearly fatigued’. The next morning he complained of a bad headache and a few hours later, after wading through a swamp, he slumped down on a tree stump and was unable to move. He said he had ‘pins and needles’.7
—
Occasionally Lenin and Nadya went to the theatre in Moscow, but more often than not they left after the first act. ‘We went a few times to the Moscow Art Theatre,’ said Nadya. ‘Once we saw…a play about a riverboat disaster on the Mississippi and Ilyich for once liked it immensely…We wanted to go to the theatre the next night and they were playing Gorky’s The Lower Depths. It irritated him…After that we gave up going for a while…the last time we went we saw Dickens’s The Cricket on the Hearth… he was already bored halfway through the first act. Dickens’s middle-class sentimentality got on his nerves and he walked out in the middle of the next act.’
On the whole Lenin’s taste in literature, and all art, was highly conservative and utilitarian. He had read for pleasure in adolescence and early adulthood, but rarely after that. For a well-educated, intellectually sophisticated and intelligent man of that era he was surprisingly poorly read – certainly compared to, say, the omnivorous readers Stalin, Trotsky, Bukharin and Lunacharsky among his Bolshevik clique. He knew little about painting or any of the visual arts. He enjoyed music – particularly Beethoven’s piano sonatas and, surprisingly, Wagner – but he seldom listened in case, as he had told Gorky, it would make him go ‘soft’.
Lunacharsky described his tastes euphemistically as ‘orthodox’. In many ways Lenin was a philistine. ‘Throughout his life he had little time to devote to any systematic study of art and always considered himself ignorant on these matters. Since he hated all dilettantism, which was alien to his nature, he disliked to express himself on the subject of the arts. Nonetheless he had very definite tastes: he liked Russian classics, realism in literature and painting.’
Lenin was bewildered by most modern art and literature and was appalled by the idea that the search for the new should destroy the old. He once told Clara Zetkin ‘that it took courage for me to admit I am a barbarian in these matters because I neither understand nor enjoy the work of Futurists, Imagists, Cubists, Formalists – and other ists’.
Typically, he had decided opinions, and like most dogmatic people was not much interested in finding out about the things he didn’t understand. His curiosity about the arts stopped when he was around twenty-five. His first great love was Turgenev. Lenin carried around a volume of his collected works wherever he was in exile and reread him time and again. He enjoyed the poems of Nekrasov, who wrote beautifully about nature, if at times the work was dripping with sentimentality, as Lenin occasionally admitted.8
Usually he judged writers less on artistic merit than on their politics.*5 Lenin acknowledged that Tolstoy was a ‘giant’ but he loathed the Tolstoyan world view, with its mysticism and pacifism. ‘The contradictions in Tolstoy…are glaring. On the one hand, we have the great artist, the genius who has not only drawn incomparable pictures of Russian life but has made first-class contributions to world literature. On the other hand, we have the landlord obsessed with Christ. On the one hand, the remarkably powerful, forthri
ght and sincere protest against social falsehood and hypocrisy; on the other the jaded, hysterical sniveller called the Russian intellectual, who publicly beats his breast and wails, “I am a bad, wicked man, but I am practising moral self-perfection; I don’t eat meat any more, I now eat rice cutlets.” On the one hand, his merciless criticism of capitalist exploitation. On the other, the crackpot preaching of submission…Tolstoy could not possibly understand either the working-class movement and its role in the struggle for socialism, or the Russian Revolution.’*6
He hated Dostoyevsky as ‘grossly, dangerously reactionary’ and ‘totally vile’, though he admitted his genius and ‘vivid images of reality’. Once he described The House of the Dead as ‘an unsurpassed achievement because it so remarkably describes not only a Siberian penal colony, but also the whole Russian people living under the Tsars’.
Lenin loathed most contemporary Russian writing. He was contemptuous of Alexander Blok, whose long poem The Twelve published in the spring of 1918, compared Lenin (not unfavourably) with Jesus and the Bolsheviks with the Apostles.*7 But Lenin reserved special contempt for the Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose work became hugely popular in the early Soviet years, much of it – though by no means all – in praise of Lenin and the Communists.
He reacted with fury when he heard that the State Publishing House was printing 5,000 copies of Mayakovsky’s 150,000,000 and Lunacharsky was supporting its publication. ‘Aren’t you ashamed about voting for this?’ he wrote to Lunacharsky. ‘It is nonsense, stupidity, double-eyed pretentious rubbish and affectation. I believe such things should be published one time out of ten, and not more than 1,500 copies for libraries and cranks. You should be flogged for your Futurism.’ Lunacharsky wrote back saying he didn’t like the poem himself but other influential critics did, ‘and when Mayakovsky reads in public he is a great success among workers’.
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