Neurasthenia had been a fashionable diagnosis since the late nineteenth century for patients complaining of headaches, ulcers, insomnia and tiredness. These symptoms, it was thought, stemmed from the hectic pace of contemporary urban society. Their radical cause was thought to be an exhaustion of the nervous system. The conventional remedy, ever since neurasthenia had been ‘invented’ as an illness, was complete withdrawal from heavy mental work. This was believed to be still more important than the adoption of a particular diet. In later life, too, some of his doctors diagnosed Lenin as suffering from neurasthenia, and always they asked him to slow down his schedule of political commitment. Few specialists nowadays would accept that a specific illness of neurasthenia exists or that Lenin’s various symptoms resulted from a problem with his central nervous system. But neurasthenia was in fashion at the turn of the century, and Lenin appeared to fit the paradigm of the textbooks. But, even if his specialist had ignored this possibility and instead suggested that Lenin had a cerebrovascular weakness, the treatment regime would have been the same: the permanent, drastic lowering of his workload.
Unfortunately it would have driven him to distraction to decrease his involvement in public affairs. Politics was his life. He acceded to the desirability of taking lengthy holidays, but this called for no change in lifestyle since he had been accustomed to spending the summer in Kokushkino. Otherwise he made no serious adjustment to the way he lived his life. He was the despair of his doctors.
A connection apparently existed between periods of political controversy and bouts of stomach illness, insomnia and headache. But what was the nature of the connection? His health made him agitated; his politics made him agitated. His political style and his medical condition worsened each other. The situation was exacerbated by his growing conviction that he was a man of destiny. The Revolution had to be made fast and deep and Lenin aimed to be its leader. He thought that he was the person who had been called to indoctrinate and guide the anti-tsarist political movement. After his spat with Plekhanov, he regarded no Russian Marxist as being his equal in intellectual and political potential. All this added to his inner tension. He had not yet got used to being isolated and the fact that a friend like Gleb Krzhizhanovski had turned his back on him in 1904 depressed him. If he had not had an unshakeable belief in the righteousness of his cause, he might even have cracked in the early years of emigration while establishing himself in the party leadership. He ‘knew’ he was correct and he would not back down in the face of criticism.
Even his self-belief might not have been enough for him to survive, however, if he had not been able to rely on his family, whose support for him was constant. His mother, sisters and brother gave him the impression that he could do no wrong, and it was rare for Nadezhda Konstantinovna to contradict him in the course of their long marriage. He had a secure framework of daily life. Most of his years as an emigrant were spent in places he found congenial. Paris, where he lived in 1908–12, was the exception; he never took to the French capital. Munich, London and Geneva were the cities that he loved to stay in.
Lenin lived life on his own terms. The golden boy at home and in the gimnazia retained this status in adulthood. His bookishness; his demands on the attention of others; his regimen of regular exercise; his willingness to give advice on subjects from politics through philosophy to medical care: these features were treated as evidence of his genius. Lenin insisted on absolute silence when he was working, and such was his intolerance of distraction that he would not let even himself emit a noise while he worked. Nadezhda Konstantinovna records that he used to move about his study on tiptoe in case he interrupted his train of thought: the cat, when left on its own, was a mouse.28 Lenin just had to have everything in order – whether it was the array of pencils on his desk or the political and economic policies of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party – before he could feel at ease. There was no one else to whom he answered. This may seem strange for a politician who referred to Marx and Engels as figures of authority, but the paradox is only apparent: Lenin felt that only he could read their works aright, even though he did not say or write this expressly until the Great War.
The family took part in politics on his side. As soon as Nadezhda Konstantinovna proved an efficient organiser, Lenin delegated crucial tasks of party correspondence to her. His blood relatives were also important. Dmitri Ilich Ulyanov had been working as an agent of Iskra in 1900–2 and was a delegate to the Second Party Congress. Anna Ilinichna carried messages between Europe and Russia; and both she and her younger sister Maria did the same in later years. The version of Marxism favoured by Anna, Dmitri and Maria was a reflection of his. All of them were arrested together with Dmitri’s wife Antonina in January 1904;29 and when any of them got into trouble with the Russian Ministry of the Interior, their mother uncomplainingly accompanied them into administrative exile.
The emotional and political assistance that Lenin received from his relatives during his personal isolation in 1903–4 was of crucial importance. He never doubted the rightness of his cause. But his touch as a campaigner was still being brought to maturity, and his ‘nerves’ were a chronic irritation. If he had not been able to retreat into this milieu of encouragement, his career would not have prospered quite as it did. To men such as Nikolai Valentinov it did not matter whether Lenin’s behaviour in internal party disputes had been fair by the Party Rules. Valentinov looked up to him as an active, irrepressible leader. He and others liked Lenin’s punchy phrases about turning Russia upside down. They had no worry about his agrarian-socialist affinities. They knew that he admired the notorious Pëtr Tkachëv’s journal Alarm and the proclamations of the still more notorious Sergei Nechaev (whose complicity in murder had caused the Swiss authorities to make a legal exception in 1872 and extradite him to St Petersburg). Lenin recommended his associates to read these materials and learn lessons from them.30 Practically every early Russian Marxist had admired the older generation of agrarian socialists to some degree. They had also had much respect for the Jacobins in the French Revolution. Indeed all the younger members of the Iskra editorial board had once approved of terrorism.
What is more, Lenin’s Marxist admirers could not fail to appreciate his devotion to making a revolution and his practicality as a party chief. And he was a chief with the common touch. When Valentinov arrived penniless in Geneva, Lenin helped him with his part-time job as a barrow-pusher. Valentinov got a commission, but could not fulfil it by himself. Lenin leaned a shoulder to the barrow – and Valentinov never forgot the favour. Nor did other Marxists who arrived from the Russian Empire. Very often it was Lenin who, acting on information coming through to Nadezhda Konstantinovna, met them off the train in Geneva. Lenin took the trouble to interview them, acquainting himself with their personal circumstances and the political situation at home. Lenin had been brought up surrounded by books in large, easeful households, but he was also growing ‘outwards’ as a person and was not too haughty to carry out laborious tasks. Overt pride had been anathematised in the Ulyanov family and, when things needed to be done, they had to be done without fuss. Lenin had not been brought up to manual labour. But he had been educated by his parents to do whatever needed to be done in pursuit of any great cause. For his father, the cause had been Enlightenment, for Lenin it was Revolution, and Enlightenment through Revolution.
Lenin had fewer adherents than he had expected after his victory at the Second Party Congress. When the emigrants of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party split into two factions, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, the activists in the Russian Empire were horrified by the news: few committees and groups were willing to take the road towards schism. The theory of Marxism as expounded by Marx and Engels was that a single class – the proletariat – would undertake the task of introducing communism. It stupefied Russian Marxists that the Marxist movement should be split into two separate organisations. Only a few groups – such as the far-left Marxists in St Petersburg – went along with Lenin’s
divisive methods and policies.
He had even forfeited the sympathy of old friends. He had always been thought unusually hot-headed, but now several associates felt that he had lost all sense of proportion. Among them was Gleb Krzhizhanovski, who hated the prolonged factional struggle. Days after co-opting Lenin to the Central Committee, Krzhizhanovski tried against Lenin’s wishes to reconcile the two factions. He offered to withdraw Lenin’s supporter L. Galperin from the Party Council and to co-opt some of Martov’s Mensheviks to the Central Committee. Lenin was furious, but Krzhizhanovski put it to him bluntly: how could he conceivably be right to hold out for unconditional factional triumph when practically everyone, including his own supporters, thought him incorrect? Krzhizhan-ovski had said everything short of calling him egocentric and irreconcilable – and Krzhizhanovski continued to bristle with indignation about the conversation after the October 1917 Revolution.31 Ceaseless imprecations were made against Lenin. Krzhizhanovski and Noskov were losing patience, and in February 1904 wrote to him formally in the Central Committee’s name: ‘We implore the Old Man to drop his quarrel and start working. We await leaflets, pamphlets and all kinds of advice – which is the best way of calming the nerves and responding to slander.’32
These two sentences show how the relationship between Lenin and his notional equals on the Central Committee had evolved. He was the Old Man, the senior organiser. He was the vital provider of advice. He was the peerless writer–activist. And he had to be treated tactfully: he could not be instructed but only implored: his position of superiority was beyond dispute. But this did not prevent the Central Committee members from drawing his attention to his excessive absorption in questions of internal party authority at the expense of carrying out his vital roles on the party’s behalf. Lenin was taking things too personally, and they were not surprised to hear that he was suffering again from bad ‘nerves’. According to Krzhizhanovski and Noskov, the solution to the party’s problems lay in Lenin agreeing to take himself in hand.
But Lenin pitifully reminded the Central Committee that he was ‘not a machine’ and could not forget the insults from Plekhanov and Martov.33 Yet the Central Committee showed him no sympathy. Although all its eight members were Bolsheviks by spring 1904, only a couple of these stood by Lenin. The rest of the Central Committee felt that the best place for Lenin was not Switzerland but Russia, where they themselves were operating. In May 1904, Noskov arrived in Geneva and, speaking on the Central Committee’s behalf, ordered Lenin to submit to party discipline. Noskov particularly forbade him to campaign for the convocation of a Third Party Congress. The Central Committee wanted to mend the party split and a Congress, if held in the near future, would only deepen animosities. Noskov aimed to halt publication of the savage anti-Menshevik tract One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. But he did not quite have the confidence to carry out his mandate. A compromise was reached allowing the tract to be published and recognising Lenin and Noskov as joint representatives of the Central Committee abroad. Lenin in person had proved a tough negotiator. In formal terms Noskov had surrendered and Lenin was able to go on as before.
This took a great deal out of Lenin. He found it demeaning to have to deal with Noskov; the fact that Noskov thought he was doing the party a favour only made the situation more difficult. Lenin had convinced himself that the entire revolutionary cause was being mis-handled:34
The party in reality had been torn apart, the rule-book had been turned into paper rubbish, the organisation had been spat upon. Only naive bumpkins can yet fail to see this. But to whomever has grasped this it must be clear that the pressure exerted by the Martovites needs to be answered with real pressure (and not with tawdry whimpering about peace and so on). And the application of pressure requires the use of all forces.
From this analysis he would not budge. His willpower was extraordinary, and he deployed it to surmount his own intellectual doubts (few as they were) and the political criticisms of others (which were plentiful).
In the first half of June 1904 Lenin and Nadya decided to take a rest from the internal party warfare. Months earlier he had been cycling in Geneva and had run into the back of a tramcar. He badly gashed his face and for weeks had to walk around with it bandaged up. His other ailments of stomach and head were also intensifying, and the after-effects of the St Anthony’s fire lingered. He very badly needed a holiday. And so he and Nadya gave up their rented Geneva quarters and headed for the mountains with rucksacks on their backs and a copy of the Switzerland Baedeker in hand. They took with them Maria Essen, one of only two Central Committee members still supporting Lenin. The Bolshevik threesome swore to avoid talking about politics ‘so far as was possible’. It was the perfect trip for them. Switzerland was well organised for mountain walkers. The Hotelkeepers’ Association had developed a system whereby a visitor could send a telegram in advance to book a room for the next night, and the Baedeker stated that a really bad hotel or inn was ‘rarely met with’. The telegraph network was the densest in the world. Thus the three of them would be able to have plenty of restorative exercise while being certain that their food and shelter would be of good quality.
First they headed by steamboat for Montreux and visited the castle of Chillon. They did a lot of walking. Lenin’s zeal to push himself to his limits was focussed, for just a while, upon recreation; and he encouraged his companions – his wife and Maria Essen – to keep up with him as they scrambled along the mountain trails. In late July they settled for a while in a pension by the Lac de Bré. It was a very long vacation.
Not until 2 September did they return to Geneva.35 There they rented an apartment a few days later at 91 Rue de Carouge. This was a street of tall, plain tenement buildings with shops and cafés on the ground floor and layers of private residences above them; and it lay at the heart of the area favoured by the city’s political emigrants. The streets around the Rue de Carouge were a little, middle-class Russia. For Lenin it was like coming home. He had returned refreshed for the fray after the longest holiday of his adult life. Without it, quite possibly he would have had a nervous collapse. Only this explains the risk he now took with his political position. He had gone away in the knowledge that Noskov, in his absence, might undermine him further in the Central Committee. He had taken the precaution of transferring his own powers to trusted friends; but none of these had his talent to resist the irresistible. Noskov, moreover, regarded his agreement with Lenin with regret. In July 1904, he got to work in Russia and, by a mixture of persuasion and co-optation, converted the Central Committee to his policy of reuniting the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. A declaration was drawn up to this effect, and Lenin was reprimanded for failing to supply a stream of pamphlets. The Bolshevik-led Central Committee confronted the Bolshevik leader.
When informed of this, Lenin – his physical and mental well-being restored – called a meeting of his few remaining émigré supporters and arranged for them to travel round Russia and put together a so-called Bureau of Committees of the Majority with the purpose of convoking a Third Party Congress. Finance became available through the efforts of the brilliant young Marxist writer Alexander Bogdanov. To put it gently, Lenin was not always very charming towards Bogdanov. If Bogdanov omitted to write a letter on time, Lenin felt free to curse him for his ‘swinishness’. But Lenin kept himself in check, or just about. He could see that a friendly relationship with Bogdanov was necessary if he was to have access to the money and personal support he would need in order to reassert himself. Together with Bogdanov and Anatoli Lunacharski, therefore, he arranged to publish a rival newspaper to Iskra. Its name would be Vperëd (‘Forward’). The first issue appeared on 22 December 1904. To Noskov’s consternation, furthermore, Lenin’s section of the Bolsheviks were able to recruit many adherents in the Russian Empire. There were plenty of Marxists who had read What Is To be Done? and were still keen to back Lenin as potential party leader.
Thus the civil war in the party raged on. Lenin had put together a parallel organisation whi
ch would act as his fighting force against the Mensheviks and indeed against any Bolsheviks who opposed him on the battlefield. It was in this mood that the émigré leadership of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party greeted the New Year in 1905.
10. RUSSIA FROM FAR AND NEAR
1905–1907
There are not always extraordinary people around to take advantage of an extraordinary political situation. Many observers had long predicted a revolutionary crisis in the Russian Empire. Clandestine parties were working for a change of regime and all of them hated the Romanovs; and Lenin had plenty of reason in both ideology and family history to want to overturn the Romanov dynasty.
Huge resentments existed in Imperial society. The Okhrana patrolled the trouble with the limited financial and human resources available to it; the Russian Empire was indeed a police-state in the making. But it was not a state that found it easy to keep its people in check. Poor harvests in the new century had made the peasants restive. The workers as ever resented the absence of organisations through which they might represent their case to employers. Several national groups, especially the Poles, had underground organisations looking for a chance to confront the Russian Imperial government. And a whole range of clandestine political groupings were operating. Not only the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party but also the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries were working to undermine the regime. The Socialist Revolutionaries managed to assassinate the Minister of the Interior, V. K. Pleve, in summer 1904. Even the liberals were becoming active. A Union of Liberation had been formed under the leadership of Pëtr Struve, who by then had broken with Marxism; its main mode of challenge was to hold public banquets and to facilitate the delivery of speeches that obliquely attacked the monarchy. Emperor Nicholas II, who had acceded to the Imperial throne in 1894, was under assault from virtually all sides.
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