Lenin: A Biography

by Robert John Service

Thus Finland, which had been subjected to Russian Imperial control since 1809, was almost a foreign country without quite being abroad – and the Finnish socialists so detested tsarism that they were willing to lend a hand to almost any of its victims. It was there that the Bolshevik Centre decided to set up its base. Lenin, Nadya, Bogdanov and his wife Natalya would be able to get on with their writing, their organising and their observation of politics from a safe distance. Shortly before he left for Finland, Lenin visited the Sablino dacha rented by his mother. From 20 August 1906 he was at Kuokkala and there he stayed until late November 1907. Otherwise he ventured forth only briefly for important conferences and congresses. He attended meetings in the Finnish towns of Tampere, Terijoki and Viipuri; he also travelled to the Fifth Party Congress in London and to the Congress of the Socialist International in Stuttgart. But he did not venture back into Russia. Little did he know that he would not see St Petersburg again for nearly a decade.

  From beginning to end the Fifth Party Congress was disrupted by rows. Lenin no longer had need of decent relations with the Mensheviks since they had already fulfilled the function of helping him to get the Bolsheviks to put up candidates in the State Duma elections. He repaid them by stating, before the Congress opened in April 1907, that they had prostituted their Marxist principles. They came back at him with denunciations of insincerity. He had talked in favour of the party’s reunification but had created a separate Bolshevik Centre and kept funds out of the hands of the Mensheviks. Disputes exploded throughout the Congress between the two factions: about the peasantry, about Russian liberalism and even about philosophy. But Lenin had a successful Congress. He was assisted by the fact that the various Marxist parties of the borderlands of the Russian Empire attended. The Poles led by Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches had considerable significance and were inclined to favour Lenin’s strategic judgement that the party ought to prefer the other socialist parties, including those of the peasantry, to the Kadets as allies. Menshevism was thwarted. So too were the Bolsheviks such as Bogdanov who continued to resent participation in the State Duma. By parleying with Latvians and Lithuanians as well as Poles, Lenin was able to secure several positions that were to stand him in good stead in future years.

  Even so, he was not elected to the Central Committee. On several counts he had been criticised by the Congress. The question of Bolshevik complicity in armed robberies came up again. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were condemned for their ‘anarchist tendencies’, and it was stated that no further bank raids should take place. But by then Lenin did not care. He was no longer as interested in manoeuvring between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks as in securing hegemony over the Bolshevik faction. And he looked forward to the Stuttgart Congress of the Second Socialist International in good spirits. His delight was unbounded when, partly as a result of his efforts, the International toughened its declaration of hostility to militarism and imperialism with the support of the German Social-Democratic Party. When Rosa Luxemburg advised him that the German Social-Democratic Party would be less committed in practice to anti-militarism and anti-imperialism than he believed, Lenin dismissed her as an obsessive factionalist. He was to regret this in 1914.

  The fifteen months in the rambling wooden rooms of Vaasa were a period of crisis for Russian revolutionaries. Lenin watched the situation from afar as tsarism tightened its grip. To his chagrin, the First State Duma elections were ignored by the Bolsheviks. Nevertheless the peasants voted for candidates who stood for the transfer of agricultural land to the peasantry. The liberals, led by the Kadets, continued to object to the limitations placed by the Basic Law upon the powers of the Duma. The First State Duma had turned out to be a hotbed of opposition to the Romanov monarchy. By then Nicholas II judged that he had the better of the new political parties; he dispersed the Duma and called fresh elections. The Kadets decamped to Viipuri in Finland and called upon Russians to withhold taxes and conscripts until such time as the Imperial government showed respect for the elected representatives of the people.

  Yet the Second Duma too produced an assembly that refused to do a deal with the Emperor. Nicholas II for his part never had respect for the liberals again; he had some lingering hopes for the conservative party of Alexander Guchkov and the so-called Octobrists, who had always wanted to make the limited constitutional reforms work as well as they could, but he soon distrusted Guchkov as well. The man he most relied upon was his Minister of the Interior, Pëtr Stolypin, who used the noose to suppress rural rebellion. Stolypin’s ‘necktie’, as it became known, reduced the countryside to quiescence. Order returned to town and village. Stolypin knew that state coercion would not save the dynasty, and he introduced a series of measures to conserve the tsarist state. Becoming Chairman of the Council of Ministers, he was determined to refashion the Duma by redrawing the electoral law and giving greater parliamentary weight to the gentry. He also began to introduce an agrarian reform aimed at a phasing out of the village land commune and its replacement by a large class of sturdy, independent farmers. For Lenin, this was proof that the Imperial regime was incapable of coming to terms with contemporary capitalism. Stolypin’s measures in the countryside were taking the ‘Prussian path’ instead of the ‘American’ one. What he meant by this was that the gentry landlords remained in positions of authority and dominated the countryside as they did in Prussia. The chance to open up agriculture to those who simply wanted to farm the land – as had happened in the American West in the nineteenth century – had been lost. Now only Revolution could modernise the Russian economy.

  Lenin discussed all this with his fellow lodger in Vaasa. Bogdanov was easily the most brilliant intellectual force inside Bolshevism. He was the only thinker in the faction whose mental capacities outmatched Lenin’s. Bogdanov had never taken to the authoritarianism embodied in Lenin’s ideas. At Vaasa they talked a lot. They could hardly avoid each other: Bogdanov lived on the top floor and passed by the Ulyanovs’ quarters every time he went out into the garden. Increasingly they found themselves at odds about political theory, culture and philosophy. And they disputed immediate policy: Lenin wanted participation in Duma elections, Bogdanov vehemently opposed this. From having been boon comrades in the struggle against the Mensheviks, they became rivals for the leadership of Bolshevism.

  11. THE SECOND EMIGRATION

  1908–1911

  Lenin hoped to go on sheltering in the Grand Duchy of Finland. Although he thought that the political ‘reaction’ would endure several years, he did not intend to move from Kuokkala.1 But the situation was becoming volatile. Pëtr Stolypin, Chairman of the Council of Ministers, carried out a constitutional coup on behalf of Nicholas II in June 1907. This involved the disbandment of the Second Duma and the introduction of new electoral rules so as to produce a Third Duma, later in the year, with more places and greater influence for the landed gentry. Meanwhile the Okhrana redoubled its efforts to catch the revolutionary leaders. Far too many Bolshevik activists had taken a trip to Kuokkala for the Imperial police to be unaware of the general whereabouts of the Bolshevik Centre.

  One day in late November a message came to the Centre’s members that policemen were searching the vicinity. Immediately Lenin packed and headed in the direction of Helsinki, 240 miles away. His attitude was that the commander had to survive even if the officers were captured. Dutifully Nadya remained behind at the dacha with Alexander and Natalya Bogdanov and Iosif Dubrovinski. They spent their time preparing to move the Bolshevik Centre abroad and burned those party files that could not be transported. Nadya, worrying that the police might be suspicious of the fresh pile of ash, organised its hurried burial. Other files were passed for safe-keeping to Finnish Marxists. Then the dacha’s owner rushed round to alert the tenants to the imminence of a police search. In fact the Okhrana was preoccupied by its hunt for a group of Socialist-Revolutionary terrorists and was unaware of the identity of the Vaasa tenants. But the Kuokkala tenants feared the worst. Meanwhile Lenin went to ground at the village of Olgbu outsi
de Helsinki. Party organisers had arranged for him to be given a room at the back of a house belonging to two Finnish sisters, where he settled down to write articles on the agrarian question. Some days later he was joined there by Nadya. By then it was clear that they had to move abroad if they were to avoid arrest.2

  The Bolshevik Centre decided to make for Switzerland; but this was easier said than done. A permanent system of contact with Russia had to be put in place. Nadya was entrusted with such pieces of party business, and she returned to St Petersburg to make the final agreements with activists. Lenin waited in Olgbu as she went about her tasks. Nadya was under great pressure. In particular, she had to secure the efficient transfer of Proletari, the main newspaper published by the Bolsheviks, from Finland to Switzerland; she also had to visit her sick mother Yelizaveta Vasilevna, who at that time was refusing to re-emigrate with her daughter and son-in-law.3

  Lenin had faith in her abilities and feared for his personal security. In her absence in St Petersburg, he decided to re-emigrate and left instructions as to how she could catch him up in Stockholm. Nadya accepted her abandonment with stoicism. Little did she imagine that Lenin, through his insistence on a rapid escape, was putting himself in great danger. The plan was for him to take the ferry from Turku to Stockholm. An ice-cutting ferry steamship plied this route, but Okhrana agents were known to keep watch at the Helsinki rail station and the Turku ferry terminal. Police on the boarding stage were looking out for fleeing Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. The advice to Lenin from Finnish comrades was that he should avoid Turku and travel to the second stage of the ferry’s journey at Nauvo Island twenty miles to the south-west in the Gulf of Bothnia.4 Lenin complied. From Turku he set off by carriage and then made his way by boat to Kuustö Island. Secrecy remained essential and he moved from shelter to shelter by night. From Kuustö he was accompanied not only by a local co-op chairman but also by a friendly Finnish police officer to Lille Meljo Island. This was the penultimate section of the trip. From Lille Meljo he intended to reach Nauvo, where he would board the Stockholm ferry on 12 December.

  The problem was that Lenin would have to go on foot to Nauvo Island and the Finnish comrades for some reason had failed to explain that the ice was not reliably continuous. Indeed the ‘walk’ to Nauvo would necessitate a lot of leaping across the small gaps between ice floes. Nor had Lenin, usually a cautious man, bargained for the fact that his guides across the ice from Lille Meljo to Nauvo would be a pair of local peasants not noted for their sobriety. On the appointed day, as the three walkers set out from Lille Meljo to Nauvo, Lenin was the only one who was not the worse for drink. Midway across the ice, there was a heaving and cracking of the surface, and only by means of a last, desperate lunge did Lenin manage to clamber up on to a solid glacial fragment. ‘Ach,’ he thought, ‘what a stupid way to perish!’5 Death by drowning, for most people, would be tragic and not merely stupid. Only someone who had a glorious future in mind for himself could see the threat as something frivolous.

  Napoleon’s main demand of his marshals was that they should be lucky – and Lenin was extremely lucky in 1907. He boarded the ferry as planned on Nauvo Island and next day arrived in Sweden. Not long afterwards he was joined by Nadya, who by then had cleared up the Bolshevik faction’s business. From there they travelled first to Berlin and then to Geneva. Lenin and Nadya had been suffering from influenza, and Lenin wrote to the writer Maxim Gorki with an oblique request to be invited to stay with him on the island of Capri off the Italian coast near Naples.6 The wish for physical rest was not his sole concern. The return to Geneva, where once he had confidently plotted Revolution in Russia, was too much for him. He groaned to Nadya: ‘I’ve got the feeling that I’ve come here to lie in my grave.’7 He was speaking from the heart: Lenin the revolutionary optimist felt defeated. Would he ever, he must have wondered, get another chance to play a leading role in his native land? Since leaving Switzerland in late 1905 he had spent more time in Finland than in Russia; and in the short time he spent in St Petersburg he had often been in hiding. How was he ever to lead his country to Revolution? To a friend he blurted out his confession: ‘I know Russia so little. Simbirsk, Kazan, Petersburg and that’s about it.’8

  This pool of self-awareness quickly evaporated. Within weeks Lenin was again laying down the policies for Bolsheviks as if his alone was the analysis of Russian state and society that counted. In emigration he revised little in his strategic planning. His conclusion about the revolution of 1905–6 was that the Bolsheviks had had the correct policies. Quite why the Revolution had not succeeded, he did not explain. Lenin stuck to his certainties. The Bolsheviks needed to keep the faith so that they might be ready to improve their political performance for that inevitable future occasion when a revolutionary situation recurred in Russia.

  For a few months Lenin and Nadya stayed in Geneva, first at 17 Rue des Deux Ponts and then at 61 Rue des Maraîchers. Gradually their health improved and their spirits rose. But Bogdanov and the other Bolshevik leaders found Switzerland uncongenial. Lenin disagreed, but he was in no position to prevent the Bolshevik Centre’s decision to decamp to Paris. Dolefully he and Nadya paid their Swiss landlord and journeyed to France in December 1908. Arriving in Paris, Lenin, Nadya and her mother Yelizaveta Vasilevna were joined by Lenin’s sister Maria Ilinichna. The four of them lived together with a fair degree of harmony. It is true that Yelizaveta Vasilevna, while respecting the ‘scientific work of Nadya and the son-in-law’,9 told Lenin what she thought of him, and that she was not always complimentary. Lenin responded in kind. He declared, for example, that the worst punishment for a bigamist was that he acquired two mothers-in-law.10 Yet any tiffs were short lived. Yelizaveta Vasilevna and Vladimir Ilich respected each other and a certain rueful fondness existed between them. One Sunday when she was feeling particularly fed up, Lenin discovered that she had nothing to smoke and went out to buy her a packet of cigarettes despite his aversion to tobacco smoke.11

  For a while the women did the housework without a maid. Lenin as a Central Committee member had a regular income from the party and derived money from his book royalties; and the Bolsheviks had their own separate fund built up from the armed robberies and from legacies. Yekaterina Vasilevna, too, contributed a little to the finances of the ménage. But, hard though they tried, they could not persuade any Frenchwoman to work for them because Russians had the reputation of being demanding and undependable employers. When Mark Yelizarov, Anna Ilinichna’s husband and Lenin’s brother-in-law, visited them after a trip to Japan, he criticised them for doing their own cooking and cleaning; he also could not stand Nadya’s cooking. A bluff, straightforward man, he announced that they simply had to get hold of a maid. Usually his wife Anna objected to his habit of saying the first thing that came into his head.12 But not on this occasion: she had always been tactless in respect of Nadya and did not mind Mark’s snipe at her. Anyway the Ulyanovs accepted his advice and made another attempt to secure domestic assistance. This time they overcame the local Russophobia; the new housekeeper moved in and Nadezhda Konstantinovna’s siege on the stomachs of the Ulyanovs was lifted.13

  Lenin stayed out of any quibbling of this sort. He himself did no cooking in the normal run of things and took no interest in the quality of his food beyond asking whether the ingredients conformed to his medical regimen. Nadya noted, with unintended humour, that ‘he pretty submissively ate everything given to him’.14 This compliance, so rare in Lenin the politician, induced the women in his life to go on ‘mothering’ him. Boyishly he would ask them: ‘Am I allowed to eat this?’ Indeed, several other of his habits were also endearing to them. Yelizaveta Vasilevna was impressed that, each day before starting to write, he took out a duster and buffed up his desk.15

  Not that he ceased being the family’s dominant figure. Lenin had for years been a cycling enthusiast, and from Geneva he had frequently taken Nadezhda Konstantinovna and Maria Ilinichna on mountain rides at weekends. Lenin was the fittes
t of the three. If the women flagged, he would ride in turn alongside each of them and cajole them to keep going. Cycling in the Alps was a growing pastime for tourists, especially the British, Germans and French. His Baedeker for Switzerland noted that the Germans and French took things easy when the gradient became steep and that the custom was to hire a horse, tether the bicycles behind and ride gently uphill by means of equine power. The British would have nothing to do with this namby-pamby method, and it would seem that Lenin, usually a Germanophile, sided with the British on this. Holidays were not holidays for him unless he could push himself hard. Better still if he could push others too, as Nadezhda Konstantinovna and Maria Ilinichna ruefully noted. At night in the village pensions, too, he was still in charge. He refused to let Maria leave anything on her plate, explaining that if she did not eat the entirety of the supper, the innkeeper would halve the portions next evening without reducing the fee.16

  Lenin hated to be done down in the slightest way and bicycles were a matter of persistent concern. When they lived in Paris, he rode daily to the Bibliothèque Nationale. He disliked this library because of the lengthy time he had to wait for the books he ordered, and he was irked further by the need to pay the concierge ten centimes for parking his bike outside. But one day something still worse happened when his beloved bike – that ‘surgical instrument’ of his – was stolen. When Lenin remonstrated with the concierge, however, she boldly retorted that his ten centimes covered only the permission to park and did not constitute a guarantee of security.17

  For once, Lenin had met his match and did not get his money back. On another occasion his protest was more successful. Not long after he had bought a new bike, a nasty incident occurred. In December 1909, while returning from an aeroplane show a dozen miles from central Paris at Juvisy-sur-Orge, he was knocked from the saddle by a motor car and badly bruised. The bike lay in a mangled mess by the roadside. Fortunately there were witnesses and Lenin sought redress through a lawyer. In this he showed the same persistence that he had shown in Syzran in 1892 when prosecuting Arefev the merchant. Marxist zeal also came into play when Lenin found out that the Parisian motorist was a viscount. Lenin, himself a hereditary nobleman, showed no sense of class solidarity and sued for financial compensation.18