PART TWO
LENIN AND THE PARTY
What’s there to tell you about our life and existence? Nothing special. All of us – that is myself, Nadya and the son-in-law are in good health and up to our eyes in work.
Yekaterina Vasilevna Krupskaya
8. AN ORGANISATION OF REVOLUTIONARIES
1900–1902
After Siberia, Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov’s road to Revolution led not through St Petersburg or Pskov but through Zurich, Munich and London. He was a marked man in Russia who knew that the Ministry of the Interior was keeping the Union of Struggle’s past leaders under surveillance and that their letters through the regular post were likely to be opened. Ulyanov applied again for permission to go abroad. The ministry obviously decided that he would be less trouble abroad and on 5 May gave him the coveted passport.1 He left Russia in the second week of July, his aim being to join Plekhanov in Zurich.
Beforehand the police had allowed him to visit Nadya in Ufa. Maria Alexandrovna and his sister Anna accompanied him by train and steamer from Moscow, and it was on this trip that Anna and Volodya had a detailed discussion about their family ancestry, particularly about the fact that the Blanks of earlier generations had been Jews. Quite when Volodya became acquainted with his genealogy is unclear. Probably he already knew of the ‘Tatar’ elements – as Anna referred to them2 – on their father’s side. But, if it really was not until 1897 that Anna found out about the Jewish elements on their mother’s side, it is quite possible that Volodya, who had been in Siberia since that same year, was informed in the course of the steamer journey to Ufa. The true date of his acquaintance with the information may never be known; but about his attitude to the family’s ancestry there is no serious doubt. Volodya held the Jews in high esteem and told Anna so. He could think of no finer comrade than Martov. He was sure too that the reason why the southern regions of the Russian Empire experienced more revolutionary activity than Moscow was the presence of a large Jewish population.3 Perhaps it was also on this occasion that he chastised the ‘flabby and lax Russian character’ and declared an ethnic mixture to be a distinct asset for a society.4
In Ufa, Maria Alexandrovna and Anna Ilinichna, escorted by Volodya, met Nadya’s mother for the first time at the flat they occupied on the corner of Prison Street and Police Street. Volodya quipped that this was a suitable location for Nadya. The families did not get on as well as Nadya had hoped. Afterwards Nadya regretted that her in-laws had not stayed longer. She blamed herself for being distracted by her own work in Ufa: she had to take on some tutoring in order to pay the living expenses of herself and her mother – and also she went on writing articles on educational theory for journals.5
By then Volodya’s mind was focussed upon arrangements to become a political emigrant and it mattered little to him what tensions existed between his wife and his mother and sister. His only worries were of a practical kind. Accompanying his mother back to Podolsk, he needed to satisfy himself that her affairs were in order. She had been ill while he was in Siberia and had recently been plagued by ‘nerves’. The sight of her lively, brilliant son cheered her up. In Podolsk he had a wonderful time, going out walking and taking a swim in Pakhra Lake. The long sweep of the fields, the birchwoods and the mushrooms made it a place as beautiful as anywhere he had lived. But he had made his choice, and anyway could not have stayed in Podolsk even if he had wanted; and rather than go back to Pskov, which the official authorities had agreed could be his place of residence, he bought an international rail ticket and boarded a train from Moscow to Smolensk. He looked up the local Marxists along the route before moving on to Warsaw in ‘Russian’ Poland. At each stop on the way the Okhrana watched him without his knowledge.6 The various revolutionary groups in the Russian Empire consistently underestimated the efficiency of official surveillance. Vladimir Ulyanov was not inhibited. He wanted, and would make sure he got, revolutionary action.
He was welcomed by the Liberation of Labour Group in Switzerland. On arriving at Hofbahnplatz in Zurich, he met up with Pavel Axelrod. They enjoyed each other’s company. But Ulyanov noticed a sticking point whenever he discussed the scheme he had brought out of Russia for a Marxist newspaper. Plekhanov’s Liberation of Labour Group had done magnificently, thought Ulyanov, in producing books and pamphlets. But something more was required if the Romanov monarchy was to be overthrown. A newspaper had to be started and a political party had to be formed. Steps in this direction had been taken in Minsk in March 1898, when nine Marxist activists met at what they styled the First Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. Its Manifesto, which had been commissioned from none other than Pëtr Struve, envisaged that a revolution would be led against the Romanov monarchy by the working class and would result in the establishment of a democratic republic. Yet all but one of the Congress participants were arrested within a few weeks. A functioning party had yet to be created.
The First Congress had adhered broadly to the line prescribed for Russian Marxists by Plekhanov. But Marxism in the Russian Empire was extraordinarily variegated. There was no guarantee that Plekhanov, despite his eminence among Marxists, would dominate discussions of policy if and when a Second Congress were to be held. Some Russian Marxists, for example, wanted the immediate resumption of a terrorist campaign. Others wanted Marxists to encourage workers to concentrate on non-political campaigns inside trade unions. Still others wanted the middle class and not the workers to carry out the anti-tsarist revolution in Russia. Russian Marxism had always been in flux. In Ulyanov’s urgent opinion, this was a good reason for setting up a newspaper with speed. A newspaper could be used to co-ordinate the convocation of a Second Congress and guarantee the triumph of the Plekhanovite line in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party that had yet to be created.
Fresh impetus to this project was given by the emergence around the turn of the century of serious rival political groupings. Through the 1890s the Marxists had been pre-eminent in political and economic debate among critics of the Romanov monarchy. The surviving adherents of People’s Freedom ideas were huddled ineffectually in the kind of little circles such as Vladimir Ulyanov had belonged to in Kazan and Samara. They did not have much influence on wider public discussion. Moreover, liberals had next to no formal organisations even though they had opportunities to get themselves published in journals. But the Marxist hegemony was being undermined. Viktor Chernov founded the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries in 1901, which resuscitated the old agrarian-socialist premise that the future socialist society would most effectively be built if it drew upon the co-operative, egalitarian practices of the peasantry. Even Russia’s liberals, while not yet forming a political party, held meetings to propagate their ideas and it would not be long before Pëtr Struve moved across to them and helped to set up the Liberation organisation which was subsequently the basis for the Party of Constitutional Democrats.
Ulyanov argued that time was not on the side of the Marxists and that a properly funded party newspaper was direly needed. It was an obvious case to make, but Lenin saw the urgent need to expound it. Here he could rely upon his new friend Alexander Potresov, who had contacted Alexandra Kalmykova in St Petersburg. Kalmykova was the bookseller who had supplied Ulyanov with his books in Siberia. She did not drive a hard commercial bargain with revolutionary activists, and once Potresov had told her of Ulyanov’s plan for a Marxist newspaper, she readily agreed to subsidise its early issues. Meanwhile Ulyanov had thought seriously about other practicalities. The newspaper had to be based in a city with a set of alternative routes of rapid communication with the main industrial centres in the Russian Empire. Switzerland was too distant. A better bet would be Munich in southern Germany. There should be an editorial board. Ulyanov and his young friends Alexander Potresov and Yuli Martov would have to sit on it. So, too, would the veteran leaders Georgi Plekhanov, Pavel Axelrod and Vera Zasulich.
Plekhanov saw snags in this. Axelrod was not the best of writers or editors; he had his work cut out
staying alive as an émigré and together with his wife had set up a little business making kefir (which is a Russian sort of buttermilk). But Axelrod respected Ulyanov’s talent. So did Zasulich. Despite her renowned pugnacity – she had shot the St Petersburg Governor-General F. F. Trepov in 1878 – she was a sweet-minded person, and behaved maternally towards the younger generation of Marxists. Even Plekhanov in his calmer moments admitted that the plan for a Marxist newspaper made a lot of sense. But, if there was to be a newspaper, Plekhanov wished to dominate it. He sensed that Vladimir Ulyanov was a leader on the rise who might soon challenge his supremacy among the Marxist émigrés.
Axelrod had warned Ulyanov to deal tactfully with Plekhanov, and initially Ulyanov complied. He felt a passionate attachment to Plekhanov from whom, he knew, he had obtained so much. When Nadezhda Konstantinovna discussed ‘love’ in her husband’s life, she referred as much to an intellectual partnership as to a broader relationship between a man and a woman.7 But Plekhanov’s ill-disguised demand for a personal despotism was insufferable. For a time Ulyanov and Potresov thought of giving up and returning to Russia to take their chances in clandestine Marxist organisations. Plekhanov had treated them as careerists. Zasulich proposed a compromise whereby Plekhanov would have two votes in any disagreement on the editorial board. Ulyanov and Potresov acceded to this.8 Going home by ferry across the lake, they recognised that they had surrendered for no good reason. In their heart of hearts they – Ulyanov, Martov and Potresov – had expected to be the real editors while Plekhanov and his participants were meant to be mere associates. Ulyanov admitted this in the aide-mémoire he wrote down on notepaper acquired from Steindl’s Wiener-Grand-Cafe.9 So in fact the invitation to Plekhanov had not been a genuine offer of equal collaboration. Ulyanov and the recently arrived émigrés were his rivals and they knew this.10
And so Potresov and Ulyanov decided to locate the newspaper in Munich. Potresov was disgusted at being treated as a ‘careerist’. Ulyanov felt the same:11
I supported these accusations in their entirety. At a stroke it also removed my feeling of ‘being in love’ with Plekhanov, and I resented and was embittered to an incredible extent. Never, never in my life have I related to a particular person with such genuine respect and reverence, vénération; I have behaved before no one with such ‘meekness’ – and never have I felt such a crude kick from behind.
They felt humiliated. Plekhanov had treated them not just as ‘careerists’ but as ‘children’, as ‘pawns’ in a chess-game, ‘silly scoundrels’ and ‘slaves’. The object of his devotion had abused his ‘love’. Ulyanov’s found the whole saga ‘an unworthy thing’.
He confided this to Axelrod (who ‘half sympathised’ with him) and to Zasulich (whose distress made others think she might commit suicide); and for so prim a man this recounting of his feelings – feelings that were not merely political but deeply emotional with a quasi-sexual undertone – was extraordinary. There is nothing like it in anything else that has come down to us. Not even his surviving love letters to Inessa Armand are so unrestrained. The fact that an encounter with Plekhanov had produced this reaction shows that his life’s compass was orientated upon the world of intellectual ideas and revolutionary advance. He could hardly believe that he had fallen out with one of his two living idols. (The other such idol was Kautsky; Lenin did not fall out with him till 1914.) His lengthy account had an unstated subtext: Lenin privately still wondered whether he himself had been the culprit; he did not yet have the full measure of his mature self-confidence. This is why his written version of events continually referred to the similar emotions felt independently by Potresov. Surely, he tried to convince himself, the fault must have been Plekhanov’s if Potresov felt the same way.
Ulyanov was not blameless. Reading between the lines of his account, we can detect that he assumed that the younger generation would run the newspaper. Plekhanov was arrogant and vain, but he had some reason to feel that Ulyanov was likely to try to supplant him as the leader of Russian Marxism. Not being introspective, Ulyanov probably had this expressly in his own mind. But his behaviour told the real story. Anyway he learned what he wanted from his experience. The idol had turned out to be the embodiment of insincerity, deviousness and intrigue. Plekhanov had to be rejected as an unchallengeable mentor. Never again would Ulyanov enter a political relationship with unguarded feelings. In a reference to the Bible’s story of David and Goliath he wrote down his bitter conclusion: ‘And love-inspired youth receives from the object of its love the bitter commandment: it is essential to relate to everyone “without sentimentality”, it is essential to keep a stone in one’s sling.’12
On this disillusioned basis he was willing to go back and treat with Plekhanov on 15 August. Plekhanov again tried to conquer Ulyanov by an hysterical display. At the peak of his performance he shrieked that he was going to retire altogether from public life. Ulyanov and Potresov listened impassively; they had a deal to offer Plekhanov, and he would have to hear them out eventually. When he did, his confidence drained into the sand. The deal was soon done on the terms demanded by Ulyanov and Potresov. Their proposal was for the six prospective editors to publish a collection of their articles as a means of discovering whether they could work together. Only then would they proceed to found the newspaper. Plekhanov agreed. Pitched battle was avoided, and Ulyanov and Potresov had won their war. On 15 August 1900 they left Zurich for Munich.
The trip took several days because they needed to go first to Nuremberg and negotiate with acquaintances in the German Social-Democratic Party. A friendly publishing house had to be found with printers who were literate in the Russian language. A distribution network had to be set up. The financial support promised from Alexandra Kalmykova through the services of Struve had to be secured. At last Ulyanov could concentrate on this great project. He had planned something that would have a practical effect beyond anything dreamed of by the St Petersburg Union of Struggle. The idea had been his, and his too was the responsibility for making it work.
He was also on his own in another way. Correspondence with his family, which had not previously required many precautions, had to be conducted on the premise that any letter might be intercepted at the Russian border. This had not mattered when he had been abroad in 1895. It did in 1900, when he was setting up a newspaper that would have links with clandestine political groups in the Russian Empire. When he wrote from Munich to his mother, he put his address down as Paris and he asked her to send her letters to Herr Franz Modrácêk at ‘Smêcky, Prague, Austria [sic]’.13 He assured her that he had enough bed linen and even enough money. He promised to ‘set about taking his waters so as to cure himself in a more correct manner’.14 The stomach problem had recurred, and he had not been drinking the mineral water prescribed for him. His letters were full of such details. He told Maria Alexandrovna that he had not reached a high enough standard in oral German, and that he swapped conversation lessons with a resident Czech to improve things.15 For the purposes of conspiracy he also pretended to have moved to Prague: although Franz Modrácêk was not a fictional character, he certainly lived in Munich.16
What did Maria Alexandrovna think about this? She may simply have been relieved that her son was out of the reach of the Okhrana. He was not the most assiduous correspondent, but he did keep in touch. He liked to know what his sisters and brother were doing and to give them advice. The Ulyanovs gave each other advice on each other’s lives and problems17 – and Vladimir was more forthright than the rest of them. Yet he was not homesick, even though he lived a ‘pretty solitary’ existence in the absence of Nadya.18
Munich, to be sure, was not Russia; he could not get used to a winter without deep snow and the temperature reminded him of ‘some tawdry autumn’.19 But otherwise he was contented. The new newspaper – to be called Iskra (‘The Spark’) was efficiently typeset, copy-edited and proofread. In late December the first issue of the journal was printed. (The first printers were based in Leipzig 270 miles away in nort
hern Germany.20 So much for the need to have everyone in Munich for reasons of geo-communications!) The style was scholastically Marxist. Readers had not only to be highly literate but also to have a sound knowledge of international contemporary socialist debates. Only a few hundred copies were published and it would take weeks to transport them by various couriers across the German, Austrian and Turkish frontiers. There would only be a dozen issues in 1901. The targeted readership was revolutionary activists who already professed Marxism, and Iskra in truth was less a newspaper than a journal in newspaper-form that was designed to act in lieu of a party central committee. But a start had been made. The next step was to consolidate Iskra and employ it as an organ of propaganda for the holding of a Second Party Congress. Despite the gruelling technical demands of editorial work, Ulyanov addressed this larger task. To his mind there first and foremost had to be a common understanding as to how the party ought to be organised, and he threw himself into composing a booklet on the subject.
Lenin: A Biography Page 18