Lenin: A Biography

by Robert John Service

  I’m really, really delighted to know that you’ve moved the matter of the Organisational Committee quickly forward and have composed it with a membership of six… Take a stricter approach with the Bund! Abroad write as strictly as possible, too (to the Bund and to ‘Worker’s Cause’), reducing the function of the foreign operation to such a minimum as will mean that it can in no way have any significance. The technical side of the Congress you surely can leave to special delegates on your behalf or to your own special agents: don’t entrust this task to anyone else and don’t forget that the average émigré membership is hopeless at conspiracy.

  Here was a consummate manipulator passing on the tricks of the trade to his apprentice.

  The venue chosen for the Congress was the Belgian capital Brussels. Before going there, Lenin took a holiday in Brittany with his mother and his sister Anna. Oddly he did not take Nadezhda Konstantinovna with him. Quite why she stayed in London is unclear. She had made an effort with his family despite the frostiness of Anna Ilinichna in particular. Probably she had too many practical arrangements to make before the Congress met; her time was consumed by the daily arrival of letters from the Russian Empire that needed decoding. Lenin’s mother, however, did not think this an adequate explanation and referred to the ‘various pretexts’ proposed by her daughter-in-law.16 His family retained its frostiness towards his wife and he declined to take sides. As usual he was doing what he wanted to do. On this occasion it suited him to see his mother in Brittany, and he did not mind abandoning his wife in London. By his actions he was making it clear that, if she wanted to live with him, she had to cope with his relatives even when they were not being especially nice to her. He was the dominant partner in the marriage and knew that Nadezhda Krupskaya would continue to fulfil her political duties despite such behaviour on his part.

  Lenin anyway wished to see his mother. He filled his letters to her with advice about trains, hotels and luggage, and told her how much he missed his native region: ‘It would be good to be on the Volga in the summer. How splendidly we travelled along it with you and Anyuta [Anna] in the spring of 1900! Well, if I can’t come to the Volga, the Volga folk have to come here. And there are good places here, albeit of a different kind.’ Lenin genuinely loved his mother. But in going to Brittany he was also trying to escape the disputes in the party that were wrecking his nerves.17 He confessed as much to the unsympathetic Plekhanov. He badly needed a break before the expected rigours of the Congress.

  From Brittany, Lenin went by train directly to Belgium (where he was joined by Nadezhda Konstantinovna). Switzerland was thought unsuitable because the large Marxist émigré colony did not want to draw the attention of the official authorities upon itself. Apartments were found in Brussels where the delegates could stay for what were likely to be lengthy proceedings. The Congress began on 17 July. Yet the Organisational Committee immediately had trouble from the Belgian police after the Okhrana in St Petersburg passed on information about the violent revolutionary purposes of several of the participants. Hurriedly the Congress transferred itself across the English Channel back to London. There the local personal contacts of the Iskra board helped in the search for new premises. When the Congress was reopened five days later on 29 July, the delegates met in the unlikely surroundings of the Brotherhood Church, a Congregationalist chapel run by a committed socialist – the Rev. F. R. Swann – on Southgate Road in north London.18 Lenin had to conquer his distaste at socialists holding their gatherings on a Christian site. In any case the delegates remained edgy about security and adjourned some of the remaining sessions to the English Club on Charlotte Street.

  Angry speeches beset the Congress. Lenin’s manipulations were picked out for censure, and Plekhanov was asked by the delegate Vladimir Akimov to disown him. But Plekhanov refused. ‘Napoleon’, he declared, ‘had a passion for making his marshals divorce their wives; some gave in to him in the matter even though they loved their wives. Comrade Akimov resembles Napoleon in this respect: he desires at any price to divorce me from Lenin.’19 Just as Lenin had once professed that he had been in love with Plekhanov, so Plekhanov now suggested that a kind of marriage existed between them. Both were expressing themselves in innocence of the oeuvre of Sigmund Freud. Unconsciously they were giving a signal of the phenomena that, for most of the time, brought out the greatest passion in them. They lived for their ideas and their political fulfilment.

  Plekhanov, of course, had been disingenuous about his commitment to the ‘marriage’. Before the Congress he had been regularly infuriated by his young consort. But the Congress was not alerted to this, and the record of the Congress organisers – Lenin included – was approved. The proceedings continued to be highly disputatious. Except to aficionados the details were arcane in the extreme. Lenin was not alone in picking apart every practical question as if it were a bomb of great doctrinal significance waiting to explode. Nothing was too trivial for Marxists to examine from the standpoint of its philosophical principles. But the Devil really was in the detail. Even the apparently mundane matter of the position of the Jewish Bund within the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party was dynamite. One reason for this was obvious. The Bund’s delegates represented thousands of members in the western borderlands and no region of the Russian Empire could match this. The Bund contended that the allocation of only five places out of forty-three at the Congress was grossly unfair. But the other delegates turned the argument down flat. The Bund then demanded broad autonomy for itself in the party as a whole. But this, too, was controversial. The Bund recruited members on a specifically ethnic basis, and the Congress did not wish to make an exception for any particular ethnic group.

  The second reason was that several of the Iskra group had a Jewish background: Axelrod, Martov and Trotski. Lenin’s Jewish great-grandfather, old Moshko Blank, had lived in the region where the Bund was now active. Axelrod and the others had turned against everything Jewish. They had become Marxists to escape their religious and ethnic origins and disliked the whole idea of Jewish Marxists such as those of the Bund giving priority to work exclusively among Jews. The Bundists for their part sniffed a degree of anti-semitism at the Congress, and they thought the renegade Jews to be the worst offenders. But the Bund was on a hiding to nothing and its organisational demands were supported by no delegates but its own.

  There followed a discussion of the Party Programme. Lenin was to the fore, and to general surprise – but they didn’t know him yet – he showed finesse in winning the doubters to his side. He made an admission of his polemical excesses. Referring to his booklet, What Is to Be Done?, he stated: ‘Nowadays all of us know that the “Economists” bent the stick in one direction. To straighten the stick it had to be bent in the opposite direction, and this is what I did.’ This was not quite an apology, but it was not the unmitigated arrogance that Iskra’s critics had been led to anticipate. Everything went sweetly for Lenin and Plekhanov: the draft Party Programme with its emphasis on ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ was accepted. The main disagreement was over Lenin’s ideas on the agrarian question. But the Iskra group held firm and the draft was ratified. It must have been tempting for Plekhanov to let Lenin be defeated on those clauses in the Party Programme that had previously divided them. But a deal was a deal. If the Congress was to be controlled, the Iskra group had to stick together. For most of the sessions it did precisely that.

  One difficulty was caused by the Party Rules. Rival proposals were put forward by fellow Iskra editors, Lenin and Martov. Martov had bridled at Lenin’s imperiousness in Munich, London and Geneva. For his own self-respect he had to face up to him at the Congress. Martov wanted a set of Party Rules to restrain the ruthlessness of Lenin and his like.

  The specific rule that brought things to a head related to the qualifications for party membership. The verbal distinctions between Lenin and Martov were microscopic. Lenin wanted a party member to be someone ‘who recognises the Party Programme and supports it by material means and by pers
onal participation in one of the party’s organisations’. For Martov, this was authoritarian excess. Gentler qualifications were needed, and Martov suggested that a party member should be someone ‘who recognises the Party Programme and supports it by material means and by regular personal assistance under the direction of one of the party’s organisations’.20 Martov’s phrase about operating ‘under direction’ was by most criteria more bossy than Lenin’s original. But the subtleties of language were of no concern to Martov and Lenin, and historians have wasted their ink on the semantic contrast. What mattered for both of them was the essence of the matter. Martov wanted a party with members who had scope to express themselves independently of the central leadership; for Lenin, the need was for leadership, leadership and more leadership – and everything else, at least for the present, was to be subordinate to this need.

  Lenin was defeated, by twenty-eight votes to twenty-two. He was disconcerted, but he recovered. Combativeness was second nature to him and his section of the Iskra group. They revelled in being described as the ‘hards’. The barracking of their opponents at the Congress was becoming normal, and some of them took their machismo still further. Alexander Shotman threatened to beat up a fellow ‘hard’ who had defected to Martov’s section. Lenin pulled back Shotman and told him that only ‘fools use fists in a polemic’.21 Nevertheless the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party had acquired a gangsterish aspect. To one of his supporters around this time Lenin put the matter bluntly, although he had his usual difficulty in enunciating his consonants: ‘Politiggs is a diggty business!’ Dirty or not, politics was his profession and he was adept at it already.

  Lenin was admired by his fellow ‘hards’ for the very unpleasantness and harshness of his behaviour at the Congress. Yet the internal division of the Iskra group threw its plans for the future leadership of the party into disarray. Already Lenin had an agenda of his own, and he had revealed it confidentially to Martov. Lenin’s scheme had been to reduce the board of Iskra, which was to become the official central party newspaper, from six members to three. The casualties of the change would be Axelrod, Potresov and Zasulich. Such a manoeuvre, as Martov must have foreseen, would give him and Lenin the whip hand over Plekhanov in any board dispute. But the sight of Lenin behaving with such belligerence at the Congress shook Martov’s faith in him. The snag was that Martov, who was always a defective tactician, had left it too late. Lenin had taken the precaution of assuring Plekhanov that the reason for dropping the others was their scant usefulness in the past. When the Congress discussed the central party bodies, Lenin had his allies lined up to denounce Martov as a hypocrite for trying to carp at his proposals: ‘He knew! He didn’t protest!’22

  Martov had misplayed his hand. By the time all this was being discussed, the composition of the Congress had undergone alteration. The five Bundists and the ‘Economists’ had walked out in protest. These delegates, if they had remained, would have supported Martov against Lenin. If Lenin had been in such a situation, he would have struck a deal to keep potential supporters in the hall. Martov was not so sly. Lenin could argue his case in a Congress whose political balance had been tipped in his favour. The sheep was left in an unguarded fold and the wolf was at the gate.

  Next the ‘hards’ pushed to realise concepts of centralism, discipline and activism. At the apex of the party there was to be a party council. The Council would control a three-person Iskra board and a three-person central committee. The vote on this structure and its personal composition resulted in victory for Lenin and Plekhanov. Acting together, they would run the party; and neither of them worried that the cost of their triumph had been the exodus of the Jewish Bund as well as other groupings. For this reason Lenin redesignated his ‘hards’ as the ‘majoritarians’ (bol’sheviki or Bolsheviks). Always he was a step ahead of his adversaries. When there was a crucial political matter in dispute, he was everyone’s superior in tactical and linguistic inventiveness. He had lost to Martov on the Party Rules: in such a situation, if he had been Martov, he would have dreamed up a triumphal name for his supporters. Martov passed up the chance. Worse than this followed. Martov proceeded to accept the Leninists’ self-description as Bolsheviks and to call his own group the ‘minoritarians’ (men’sheviki or Mensheviks). When the Congress filled the places on the Central Committee and the Iskra board, Martov’s tactical ineptitude became manifest.

  The majority was now held by the supporters of Lenin and Plekhanov. The Central Committee was initially composed of Gleb Krzhizhanovski, V. A. Noskov and F. V. Lengnik; the Iskra board kept only Lenin, Plekhanov and Martov from its previous composition. The ostensible result was the definitive creation of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party with a fixed Party Programme and Party Rules.

  Yet this situation did not long prevail. Plekhanov, reverting to his previous suspicion of Lenin, came to regret that he had supported him at the Congress. The Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, whose creation he had dreamed about for two decades, was being born as Siamese twins who needed to be divided. His depression – one might say, post-natal depression – was such that he confessed to suicidal thoughts. He and Lenin had not stopped arguing since Lenin had come abroad in 1900, and Plekhanov was pushed over the brink at the assembly of the Foreign League of Russian Revolutionary Social-Democracy in Geneva in October 1903. The League had been recognised by the Congress as the official co-ordinating body of all the dozens of émigré party members in Switzerland, France and England. Its sessions in Geneva were the first occasion for the emigrants to draw breath after the schism at the Congress. Martov seized the bull by the horns by making a personal attack on Lenin. In the course of a lengthy speech he revealed that Lenin was disingenuous in forming an alliance with Plekhanov. Before the Congress, Lenin had said to Martov: ‘Don’t you see that, if you and I stick together, we’ll keep Plekhanov permanently in a minority and there’ll be nothing he’ll be able to do about it?’

  Lenin made for the door, slamming it after him. Plekhanov, who had been listening impassively, announced he was willing to step down from Iskra in order to put an end to factional strife. Lenin felt so disarmed that he sent in his own resignation from Iskra and the Party Council. Lenin, the party’s king in the making, banished himself from court. His Bolsheviks became the minority. He had forgotten to ‘keep a stone in his sling’. For the first and last time he had retired from a position of strength. He soon repented his action, and remorse turned to anger as Plekhanov increasingly sided with Martov and the Mensheviks.23

  Yet there was still a stone left at the bottom of the sling. Lenin worked feverishly to inform the Iskra agents about how, in his opinion, he had been tricked into defeat. He wrote his one-sided history of the internal party dispute and published it in May 1904 in the booklet One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. His old companion in the St Petersburg Union of Struggle and in Siberian exile, Gleb Krzhizhanovski, was a member of the newly elected Central Committee. When Krzhizhanovski arrived from Russia in November 1903, Lenin made the simple request that he should co-opt him to membership of the Central Committee. Krzhizhanovski was delighted to agree. Neither he nor Lenin nor any of their close comrades had any time for democratic procedures. If Lenin had been cheated, the swindle had to be turned on its head. Lenin had got his second wind. From this time onwards he turned his cantankerous, dishonest methods into a political art. He never ceased to be interested in perfecting it. Having walked out directly from the Party Council, he would insist on re-entering it as one of the Central Committee’s representatives.

  He wrote up his self-defence in obsessive detail in One Step Forward. His gimnazia training as a collator of data came in handy; so too did his lawyer’s understanding of the opportunities offered by the Party Rules. He did not care a fig for democracy, but he was determined to show how his adversaries had infringed democratic procedures. Once he felt wronged, he assembled every available argument that he had been done down. Lenin, the critic of moral sensitivity in economic and social ana
lysis, put his own sense of moral outrage on display.

  Nevertheless his style in politics placed him under intense strain and, with the opening of the archives on his medical condition, we can now see just how near he came to collapse. As he insisted to friends, he was not ‘a machine’.24 Already in spring 1903 he had suffered from St Anthony’s fire and, although his mental tensions had not produced the illness, they did not help him to recover very quickly. As Nadezhda Konstantinovna witnessed, his ‘nerves’ had been tightened to snapping point before the Second Party Congress. Afterwards they finally burst and Lenin had terrible nights with insomnia and terrible days with migraine. The Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party’s man of iron sometimes returned home to 10 Chemin du Foyer in Geneva, after a day’s work at the Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire or the Société de Lecture, in a state of collapse. If his recurrent ill health had started to affect him only in 1903–4, there might be reason to think that the party’s factional troubles had caused them. But the medical problems had been evident for years. The sole difference was that they were more acute and more frequent than previously. Lenin was determined to sort things out and consulted the latest textbooks. He also sought out the best Swiss doctors. His stomach problem was investigated by a leading specialist and he received a prescription that was somewhat effective, at least for a while.25

  He later told his sister Maria Ilinichna that he lost the prescription.26 This is a curious thing for so meticulous a person. Perhaps he did not want to worry Maria about his general condition, especially if he had told the specialist about his other physical malaises – insomnia, migraine and tiredness – and about his father’s death through a heart attack brought on by cerebral arteriosclerosis. Lenin came out of the consultation a very concerned man. The specialist had told him that his stomach was not the main problem. When Lenin asked him to explain, the answer was curt: ‘It’s the brain.’27 Lenin told no one what the specialist meant. But medical wisdom at that time is likely to have put forward two diagnoses: one would be that Lenin was suffering from ‘neurasthenia’; the other that he had inherited the physical characteristics which had killed his father.