Lenin
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Acknowledgements
I owe a major debt to the late, great Robert Conquest – always a source of encouragement – whose death in 2015, as I was halfway through researching this book, was such a blow to numerous historians of a later generation whom he inspired.
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It is a measure of the tragedy that has befallen modern Russia that very few of the considerable number of people in Moscow and St Petersburg who helped me in this project wish their names to appear here. If I could write an ‘anti-acknowledgement’ it would be to the organs of state that the Russia of 2017 is building. Nevertheless, I owe an enormous and special debt to three people – they know who they are – who were invaluable research assistants and trawled through various archives for me and helped with advice and specialist knowledge about the early Bolsheviks. In Russia I am indebted to Pavel Gemenalov, Anna Nemtsova, Ilya Rhyzhkov, Nadezhda Semyenova, the staff at the Russian Presidential Archive (APRF) and of the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI) and Mikhail Rossokowksi, who kindly showed me around the Kremlin rooms occupied by Lenin. Many thanks to the staff at the Lenin Mausoleum, who gave me a private tour, and, some years ago, to the Gorbachev Foundation.
The Hoover Institution’s Russia collection of material from the nineteenth century onwards – but particularly the Soviet years – has been invaluable, as always. I wish to thank the amazing staff at the London Library, where I wrote a large amount of this book (the back row of the art room is an inspiring place) and at the Bodleian Library. I am grateful to the staff at Wilton Park and at Chatham House.
Wonderfully generous friends have given me hugely appreciated emotional and practical support. Victoria Hislop organised a ‘writers’ retreat’ at her beautiful house on Crete which was marvellous for getting work completed – and for companionship. Annalena McAfee and Ian McEwan let me stay at their peaceful rural home when I was going through a difficult writing time. My thanks for seeing me through it.
I am grateful to ideas, advice and encouragement to a great many people: Richard Addis, Nina Adler, Anne Applebaum, Csaba Békés, Katalin Bogyay, Peta Brod, Archie Brown, Richard Burge, Sir Bryan Cartledge, Minderat Chauduri, Rollo Collins (for invaluable research on the First World War), Paul and Wendy Diggory, Hugo and Mark Dixon, Iain Fergusun, Helen and Lindsay Forbes, Danuta Galecka, Charles Gati, Miklós Haraszti, Oleg Khlevniuk, Barbara Kiss, Karsten Krenz, Ashkold Krushelnycky, Adam LeBor, Ben Lewis, Keith Lowe, Anne McElvoy, Boris Marelic, Annabel and Sasha Markova, Rebecca Mead, Giles Milton, Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, Giuliana Nedelskaya, Christian Osterman, George Prochnik, Aram Radmoksi, László Rajk, Anna Reid, Andrew Roberts, Katya Rossokowski, Günter Schabowski (before his death in 2016), Dr Simon Sebag Montefiore, Amanda Sebestyen, Damien Sharkov, Krassen Stanchev, Joanna Stein, George Szirtes, Stefan Tafrov, Vladimir Tismaneanu and John Walko.
Two books by scholars whose work has been inspirational and vastly helpful were Robert Service’s Lenin: A Biography – a superb achievement – and Orlando Figes’s A People’s Tragedy. I have drawn ideas and knowledge from both.
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I have been fortunate in so many things during my writing career. One above all is to have Georgina Capel as my agent. Her calm and unshakeable optimism are infectious.
This is a return to Weidenfeld and Nicolson as my publisher after a brief gap – and I am immensely glad I am back. Many thanks for the energy and enthusiasm of my editor, Alan Samson, and the super-efficiency of my assistant editor Lucinda McNeile, who have been working to the toughest of deadlines. Linden Lawson, the copy-editor, worked beyond the call of duty in a contest with time to bring the book out at speed. A great thank you to Bea Hemming, the editor who originally commissioned the book, saw it through the initial stages and had faith in it throughout.
None of my books would have been written without the constant support and loving encouragement of Jessica Pulay. She has always been a practical help with her sound judgment and clarity of thought and an inspiration for me to try harder and think deeper. It is impossible adequately to acknowledge all that I owe to her.
As a baby, Vladimir Ulyanov was ‘top-heavy’ – his head seemed too big for his body, according to his sister Anna. And ‘he was very noisy, a great bawler’. Credit 1
The nest of gentlefolk: the Ulyanov family in 1879. Standing, from left to right: Olga, Alexander, and Anna. Seated, from left to right: Maria Alexandrovna (with Maria on her lap), Dmitry, Ilya Nikolayevich, and Vladimir. Credit 2
Alexander ‘Sasha’ Ulyanov, a brilliant natural sciences student, a few months before he was hanged at age twenty-one. Credit 3
Lenin’s older sister, Anna Ilyinichna, in her early twenties. She wrote an Ulyanov family history in the 1930s that Stalin censored. Credit 4
His sister, Maria. Maria and Anna were active revolutionaries who were repeatedly jailed and exiled and who made big sacrifices for Lenin’s career. Credit 5
Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya (Nadya), age twenty-one, three years before she met her future husband, Vladimir. ‘He could never have loved a woman whose opinions he totally disagreed with and who was not a comrade in his work.’ Credit 6
The police ‘mugshot’ of Vladimir Ulyanov taken when he was arrested for the first time in 1895. Credit 7
Julius Martov (Yuliy Osipovich Tsederbaum), Lenin’s closest male friend for many years until the two became bitter enemies and political opponents. Credit 8
Leon Trotsky around the time he and Lenin first met in 1902, when his affectionate conspiratorial pseudon
ym was ‘Pen’. Credit 9
Nadya, age twenty-six. Credit 10
Inessa Armand, Lenin’s mistress. ‘She seemed to be an inexhaustible spring of life…the fiery flame of revolution,’ according to one of her comrades. Credit 11
Grigory Zinoviev (Hirsch Apfelbaum), Lenin’s most loyal sidekick and lickspittle in their exile years. Later, after the Revolution, he became head of the Communist International. Credit 12
Lev Kamenev (Leon Rozenfeld) spent many years in European exile with Lenin.
Lenin was contemptuous about his ‘weakness’ but enjoyed his jokes and gossip. Credit 13
A young Joseph Stalin – ‘the wonderful Georgian’, as Lenin once described him – around 1907, when he organised a great bank robbery in Tiflis to finance the Bolshevik Party. Credit 14
Lenin in hiding in Finland, three weeks before the October Revolution, disguised as a Finnish worker, the only extant picture of him as an adult without his trademark beard. Credit 15
Lenin in Red Square addressing the soldiers and Communist Party activists on the first anniversary of the October Revolution, 1918. Credit 16
Felix Dzerzhinsky (centre), head of the Cheka, ‘the sword and shield’ of the Communist Party. ‘Iron Felix’, fanatical, ruthless, ice-cold and ascetic, was the most hated and feared man in Russia after 1917. Credit 17
For the last nine months of his life, Lenin could hardly speak more than a handful of words or walk, and was confined to a wheelchair most of the time. His decline was kept a strict state secret for months. Credit 18
The Afterlife. While Lenin lay in state, his successors, against his family’s wishes, made the decision to embalm his body – ‘for ever if we can,’ said Dzerzhinsky – and place him on public display. He still draws huge crowds every year. Credit 19
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