Worn down by Lenin, Plekhanov turned up with his attempt on New Year’s Day 1900. The six editors of Iskra agreed to give themselves a week to study it and propose modifications. They would convene in Lenin’s Schwabing apartment. Plekhanov was getting agitated not merely because he had to travel from Switzerland but also, surely, because he saw that the moment was approaching when he would be made to pay for his haughty treatment of his juniors. If so, he was right. Ulyanov had spent days finding holes to pick in Plekhanov’s draft. Plekhanov had implied that the working class constituted the majority of the Imperial population. Plekhanov’s language was weak: he said ‘discontent’ when he could have said ‘indignation’. This just would not do, and Lenin sent Plekhanov back to Switzerland with the task of doing better next time. The teacher–pupil relationship was being tilted in the opposite direction.33 By agreement they went on amending the draft by post. Lenin wrote out material of his own, making himself responsible for new sections on industrial workers and the agrarian question. Between Munich and Geneva they fired angry letters at each other like bullets.
The whole business took a lot out of Lenin. He had reproved Plekhanov for producing a mere declaration of principles and not the programme suitable for a fighting political party.34 Plekhanov got his own back when Lenin put forward his own amendments and additions. Lenin objected to ‘the deliberately offensive tone of the comments’:35
The author of the comments reminds me of a coach-driver who thinks that good driving requires the more frequent and robust jerking at the horses’ reins. I, of course, am no more than ‘a horse’, just one of several horses being handled by driver Plekhanov; but it can happen that even the most heavily bridled horse can throw an excessively zealous driver.
But the destination was eventually reached. On 1 June 1902 Iskra was at last able to print the agreed draft Party Programme in issue no. 21.
Several of Lenin’s demands were incorporated in the draft. The most decisive was his insistence that direct mention should be made of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’. This term, invented by Marx, referred to the beginning of the second stage of the forthcoming revolutionary process. The first stage would be the overthrow of the Romanov monarchy and the inception of a ‘bourgeois-democratic republic’. The workers would play the leading role at this stage but would not benefit from the capitalist economy, which would concurrently be strengthened. The second stage would involve the seizure of power by the ‘proletariat’ – and this would inaugurate the socialist order in Russia. Following Marx, Plekhanov had included the term in his earliest draft, but because of a misunderstanding with Lenin, he had then excised it. Lenin belligerently demanded its reinstatement, Plekhanov acceded; this was one of his rival’s demands that he could willingly accept. Both agreed that when the time came to establish socialism there should be no guaranteed civic rights for the old ruling classes. Subsequent events were to show that Lenin’s concept of dictatorship was considerably more violent and arbitrary than Plekhanov could imagine in 1902. But for a while they had agreement – or thought they had.
Other changes were also significant. Lenin got Plekhanov to state, against his better judgement, that capitalism was ‘already the dominant mode of production in the Russian Imperial economy’.36 This was a minor concession in words; but the practical implication was that Lenin, by urging that Russia had an advanced capitalist economy, was opening the door to a faster possible movement towards socialism than others such as Plekhanov would approve. Lenin was to use this recognition for precisely that purpose in 1917. Ideology counts.
Nor was this the sole example of a significant insertion by Lenin. Another was his proposal that the party should campaign for the restoration of the land lost from the peasantry’s cultivation through the 1861 Emancipation Edict. This was to occur as soon as the Romanov monarchy was overthrown. He was not calling for all the land to go to the peasants, only the lost parts, amounting to 4 per cent of what they had had before being emancipated. Lenin’s purpose was to increase the party’s attractiveness to the peasantry. He could not, according to conventional Marxist wisdom, propose to turn over all the land to the peasants, whose agricultural methods were thought too backward. Consequently he wanted to offer them a titbit that would draw them to the side of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. He was laughed at for this. Chernov’s Party of Socialist Revolutionaries wanted all the land to be expropriated from traditional gentry and the not-so-traditional farmers. Marxists could hardly compete with the Socialist Revolutionaries. But Lenin wished to lay down at least a bid for peasant support. He was an improviser; he worked by instinct as well as by doctrine. His agrarian project was unconvincing in its own terms, but his intuitive searching was understandable. He wanted the party, when finally it came into existence, to take account of the fact that 85 per cent of subjects of the Russian Empire were peasants.
He suffered a hailstorm of abuse for this manoeuvre. Why, he was asked, was Lenin the doctrinaire so facile about the agrarian question? And how many peasants, knowing that Chernov’s Party of Socialist Revolutionaries wanted all the land to revert to them, would opt for Lenin’s promise of the cut-off strips? At the same time was not Lenin’s wish to indulge peasant opinion yet another sign that the man was not really a Marxist but essentially an agrarian socialist? Thus it came about that, as the Iskra group prepared the ground for the Second Party Congress, it was not Plekhanov but Lenin who attracted most of the attention. In the small world of organised Russian Marxism he became the figure whom everyone either loved or detested. He left hardly anyone neutral towards him.
His manipulation of the arrangements for the Congress intensified this dual attitude. Iskra ‘agents’ – he liked to use this word – were not known for their fairness in handling the selection of delegates to the Congress; his sister Maria, his brother Dmitri and his old friend Gleb Krzhizhanovski were among them: Lenin liked to use activists of proven personal loyalty.37 In trying to ensure that the Iskra group’s projects dominated the proceedings, he strove to keep the number of non-supporters of the newspapers to a minimum. As agents travelled back to Russia, furthermore, they carried What Is to Be Done? and the draft Party Programme. This activity reinforced the impression that the Iskra group were worthy party leaders. Plekhanov, Lenin and Martov – whatever their weaknesses as known to their close associates – seemed to be in a class of their own. Their agents were ruthless organisers, but all of them were willing to lay down their liberty in the defence of the and its campaign to win over the working ‘masses’ to the cause of Marxism and social revolution. Many of them already looked upon Lenin as their leader. With him, they thought, the spark would light the fire.
9. ‘HOLY FIRE’
1902–1904
Lenin and his friends on the editorial board were becoming anxious about the attentions of the Bavarian police and decided to transfer Iskra’s base from Munich. They needed a place where no one would worry about foreign Marxists. The obvious alternative was Switzerland, but the altercations with Plekhanov were fresh in everyone’s mind and the younger editors searched out other options. The decision was taken to try out things in London. The Metropolitan Police were famously unbothered about revolutionaries, even about the few British ones who came to their attention. The postal network was efficient and the cultural facilities – libraries, museums and art galleries – were as good as in any other European city.
And so Lenin and Nadezhda Konstantinovna packed up and left Munich, and, after brief stays in Cologne and Liège, arrived by ferry and train at London’s Victoria Station in April 1902. According to a prepared plan, they took a hansom cab to the St Pancras district where a set of rooms had been rented for them by the Russian emigrant and Iskra supporter Nikolai Alexeev. The apartment was at 30 Holford Square to the south of Pentonville Road. Martov, Potresov and Zasulich meanwhile took up the occupancy of rooms across the Gray’s Inn Road in Sidmouth Street. Alexeev himself lived down the hill from Holford Square in Frederick Street. All
were within a few hundred yards of each other. It was a convenient arrangement since Alexeev had negotiated for Iskra to use the flat-bed printing machine of the Twentieth Century Press in 37a Clerkenwell Green at the end of Farringdon Road. Near by, too, was the British Museum on Great Russell Street. Lenin’s British contacts provided him with a letter of recommendation from I. H. Mitchell, Secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions, which enabled him to register as a reader under the alias of Dr Jacob Richter. On most working days he popped into the Sidmouth Street flat to conduct any necessary business with Martov and then proceeded to the British Museum to conduct his researches beneath the vast glass dome of the Reading Room at desk L13. Whenever publishing day was approaching, he would also visit the printing facilities on Clerkenwell Green.
Lenin’s political activity lay within the Georgian-terraced triangle of Holford Square, Great Russell Street and Clerkenwell Green. He and his fellow editors were satisfied with their environment; they had moved to England not to work with the British labour movement but to concentrate on their own propaganda. For this purpose the St Pancras and Bloomsbury areas were ideal. Lenin grew to like London, ranking it alongside Geneva as his favourite European city. (By contrast, he thought Moscow ‘a foul’ place.)1 In London he was safe from the Okhrana. He had ready access to great libraries, to a reliable printing press and to an efficient communications network. And he could also enjoy his leisure time. Lenin and Nadya visited Hyde Park Corner on Sunday mornings to listen to the open-air speakers. They also amused themselves by jumping on board buses to view the outer districts from the top deck and admire the greenery.
But not everything was to Lenin’s liking. He was affronted by the ménage at Sidmouth Street, which he disparaged as a ‘commune’. This was a revealing use of language. Lenin the Marxist – a believer in the desirability and inevitability of a communist society – was repelled by the idea of a collectivist style of life. ‘Commune’ was a dirty word for him; he preferred the lexicon of order, neatness and obedience. The Bohemian manners of his fellow Iskra editors, he thought, displayed the worst features of the east European intelligentsia:2
Above all, he loved order, which always reigned in his office and his room – and these were in sharp contrast to Martov’s room, for example. There was always the most chaotic disorder at Martov’s: cigarette ends and ash lay all over the place and sugar was mixed up with tobacco so that visitors whom Martov served with tea were squeamish about taking the sugar. It was the same situation in Vera Zasulich’s room.
Loose practices of this sort were prohibited up the hill at 30 Holford Square. Lenin did not exactly ban cigarettes from the premises, but if visitors lit up he frowned meaningfully and opened the windows regardless of the day’s weather. Snow was no deterrent to him.
While Lenin sat in judgement on Martov and Zasulich, his own lifestyle was put under question by his landlady in Holford Square. The redoubtable Mrs Yeo expected him to conform to local custom by putting up curtains, and remonstrated with ‘Dr and Mrs Richter’ until they complied.3 Vladimir and Nadya were not amused. They already felt miffed at the need to go down to the cellar to fetch coal for the fire and water for cooking.4 They disliked English food. Oxtail stew, that culinary delight, so disgusted Lenin that he put his diet into the hands of Nadya – by her own admission, not the best of cooks – and her mother. English stew, English cakes and English deep-fried fish were not the only things to annoy them. Visiting the Seven Sisters Church seven miles north-east of Holford Square, they found English socialists praying to the Lord. Lenin considered that genuine socialism absolutely had to involve atheism. When he became a Marxist, Lenin felt that he had chosen the path of Science and Progress and that Christian socialism was a contradiction in terms. He could hardly find a good word to say about the socialists of England – or indeed about the English in general.
He found an Englishman called Mr Henry Rayment to help him master the country’s language. Despite having translated a book by the Webbs, Lenin had not acquired written or oral fluency in English – and he found Londoners harder to follow than resident Irishmen.5 (There is an unconfirmed suggestion that Lenin spoke with an Irish accent.) In Rayment’s company, he attended political meetings in the East End, where they came across Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. When Rayment was disconcerted by their exotic habits, Lenin thought that his language tutor’s surprise was yet further proof that the English were a ‘closed-in people’.6 Possibly his contact with the East End’s Russian Jews, many of whom were open to ideas of international socialism, restored his faith in ‘European socialist revolution’; and in March 1902 he gave a speech to the Jewish Branch of the Social-Democratic Federation in the New Alexandra Hall.7
Yet in his own way he was just as ‘closed-in’.8 He built a little Russia around himself in St Pancras and Bloomsbury. Early one morning in autumn 1902 there was a knock on his door in Holford Square. The visitor was Lev Trotski, who had escaped from Siberia and wanted to join the Iskra editors in England. Trotski would become as famous as Lenin would in the October 1917 Revolution, but had yet to establish himself as a Marxist leader. He was dying to meet Lenin, but Lenin was still in bed and, being a creature of fixed habits, refused to come into the sitting room until he had finished his ablutions and got himself prepared for the day. It was Nadezhda Konstantinovna who had to pay off the Cockney cab driver and make Trotski a cup of coffee – and not the tea that Mrs Yeo, the English traditionalist, would have prepared for a guest.9 Lenin got up at his usual hour and introduced himself. He and Trotski quickly became friends and Lenin spent time taking him around the tourist spots. The two became so close that Lenin proposed to appoint Trotski, who had literary gifts, as the seventh member of the Iskra editorial board. Plekhanov objected to this. In his eyes, Trotski’s was ‘Lenin’s disciple’ and his co-optation to the board would be tantamount to allocating an additional voting place to Lenin.10
Bad temper returned to the Iskra board meetings as the Second Party Congress drew nearer. In April 1903 it had been decided to shift Iskra’s base from London to Geneva; this meant that Lenin and Plekhanov were seeing each other again. The move was initiated by Martov, who recognised the damage being done by the distance at which Plekhanov had been held. Martov believed that Geneva would offer an opportunity to resume a more comradely approach to affairs.11
Lenin alone voted against the move. He reminded them that Plekhanov had always caused trouble and that this was why Iskra had had to be established outside Switzerland. But nobody would listen, perhaps because the kettle was calling the pot black. Lenin was in despair. ‘The Devil knows’, he exclaimed to Nadya, ‘that nobody has the courage to contradict Plekhanov.’12 His ‘nerves’ started playing him up once more as the arrangements were finalised for the transfer. Then physical symptoms appeared in the form of inflamed chest and spinal nerve-ends; he fell into a fever. Nadya consulted a medical textbook and decided that he must have sciatica. Then she consulted fellow Russian Marxist and St Pancras resident K. M. Takhtarëv, who had trained for some years as a doctor. Takhtarëv agreed with the diagnosis and Nadya bought some iodine and applied it to her husband’s body. The diagnosis was completely wrong and the iodine plunged Lenin into ‘tormenting pain’. In later years it was officially claimed that Lenin could not afford the guinea fee for a consultation with an English doctor.13 But he never stinted in payment for medical attention. The likeliest explanation is that Lenin and his wife were panicking and did not have the presence of mind to question Takhtarëv’s competence.
In late April 1903 they left London for Switzerland, where Lenin had to lie in bed for a further fortnight. By then a correct diagnosis had been obtained. Lenin was suffering from ‘holy fire’, also known as St Anthony’s fire or erysipelas. ‘Holy fire’ is a severe contagious infection of the skin and its underlying tissue, and can prove fatal. Nowadays it is curable by antibiotics. But doctors at the turn of the century could only advise their patients to rest for several weeks until
the disease disappeared. This was what happened to Lenin.14
Meanwhile Plekhanov and Lenin had to find ways of working together. The Congress arrangements had been in the hands of Lenin and the various Iskra agents travelling to and from Russia, and one of the things that Lenin hated about leaving London was the resumed oversight over his own activity. An Organisational Committee for the Congress had been set up in March 1902. It was this committee that gave rulings about which bodies in the Russian Empire and in Europe had the right to send delegates to the Congress. Lenin had already been busy marshalling opinion in the Organisational Committee to secure a preponderance of Iskra supporters at the Congress. Plekhanov examined his activity at close range. Fortunately, however, he concluded that Lenin had done a good job for Iskra. Plekhanov and Lenin concurred on the need to curb any influence that might be wielded at the Congress by either the large Jewish Bund (which disliked the idea of a highly centralised party) or the Geneva newspaper Worker’s Cause (which did not approve of intellectuals deciding everything in the name of the working class). Lenin was ruthless in discovering pretexts to give Congress places to Iskra’s supporters while limiting those given to its opponents. Steadily Plekhanov gave Lenin the freedom of operation he wanted.
Lenin’s methods can be savoured in a letter to an Iskra agent:15
Lenin: A Biography Page 20