In a rage Lenin withdrew from the editorial board of the Central Committee’s newspaper Social-Democrat. His political obsessiveness usually permitted him to recognise the advantages of emotional restraint, but not always. Lenin sometimes failed to hold the lid on himself and, in these instances, no one else could press it down either. No sooner had he resigned than he regretted his action, and on calm reflection he withdrew his resignation. But then in January 1910 came the long-awaited Central Committee plenum in Paris. This was a real ordeal. The united Central Committee, which included more Bolsheviks than Mensheviks, ordered the Bolshevik Centre to be closed down and the Bolshevik factional monthly Proletari to cease publication. It demanded a switch of the central party leadership’s centre of gravity from Paris to Russia. A Russian Board was created and given the right to act in the Central Committee’s name. The Shmidt monies, obtained by the Bolsheviks without any Menshevik assistance, were to be handed over to the Central Committee and to a group of trustees consisting of the German Marxists Karl Kautsky, Franz Mehring and Clara Zetkin. The defeat of Bogdanov in June 1909 had been undone on a broader level by the Central Committee plenum.
Yet Lenin had recovered his grip; by 1910 he was his ebullient old self. The Marxist leaders in the Russian Empire who criticised him and other émigrés were themselves in disarray. The Okhrana was breaking the local committees with ease. Some Marxists, most of them Mensheviks, were so dispirited that they campaigned for the party to be disbanded and for activists to operate entirely in the legal workers’ movement. These ‘Liquidators’ as Lenin dubbed them were not a majority of the party, but their existence allowed the Bolsheviks to claim that only they could keep up the spirit of Revolution. The Bolshevik leftists, whether they were Recallists or Ultimatumists, had a diminishing appeal to politically inclined factory workers. Lenin sensed that his time might soon come around again.
In an emotional sense his second chance had already arrived. His marriage to Nadya had never involved deep romantic feelings on his part, or indeed hers, and there must have been occasions when other Bolshevik women had a strong appeal for him. Over the years, too, the Graves’s disease had taken its toll on Nadya’s looks. Poor woman! Her eyes protruded and her neck bulged as it tightened its grip. Her weight increased and she had heart palpitations, and both she and Lenin had given up thinking that they would be able to have children. One of the widespread features of Graves’s disease is the infrequency of menstrual periods for female sufferers. Whether this was a problem for Nadezhda Krupskaya is unclear, but it is a distinct possibility. Lenin sympathised and urged her to undergo a surgical operation to try and eliminate the condition. But she refused, no doubt being aware that the operation was neither guaranteed to succeed nor even very safe. She was no longer the vigorous young woman that Lenin had married. She had become dowdy and at forty-one years, in 1910, she looked her age. She had never been vivacious but now she was ponderous and ailing.
Until then, apparently, Lenin resisted sexual temptation. This restraint, if indeed it had been holding since his marriage in Siberia, seems to have broken down in Paris when he became acquainted with Inessa Armand. Everyone knew her simply as Inessa. She was a widow. Her father had been French, her mother English. Inessa had lived in Russia as a child; on growing up, she married Alexander Armand, in whose parents’ family she was training to become a domestic tutor. She had five children, but her marriage became a sham after she started sleeping with her brother-in-law Vladimir Armand. This liaison, however, was short lived: Vladimir died of tuberculosis in 1909. Inessa then moved to western Europe with three of her children (and her husband Alexander continued to support her there financially). She had already been involved in revolutionary activity and been exiled by the Ministry of the Interior to Archangel in the Russian far north, and in Paris she aligned herself with the Bolshevik faction in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. Her fluency in Russian, French and English ensured her a warm welcome.
Inessa Armand was a fine-looking woman in her mid-thirties with long, wavy auburn hair. The pictures in the archives show that she had a beautiful face. When reproduced in Soviet history books, they never did her justice32 – and the thought occurs that the authorities, wishing to downplay speculation about a relationship between her and Lenin, tried to make her seem visually less appealing than she was. She had high, well-defined cheekbones. Her nose was slightly curved and her nostrils were wonderfully flared; her upper lip was slightly protrusive. Her teeth were white and even. She had lustrous, dark eyebrows. And she had kept her figure after having her children. In pictures taken with them as adolescents she looks more like an elder sister than a mother; her appearance was such that the Okhrana agents underestimated her age by several years. Inessa was also vivacious. She liked to ride sidesaddle when she could, and to play Beethoven on the piano. She adored her children, but did not let them get in the way of her wish to enjoy herself. In particular, she had an uninhibited attitude to extramarital relationships.
The relationship between Lenin and Inessa Armand began slowly, and the passion originated on her side. She later wrote eloquently about this to him:33
At that time I was terribly scared of you. The desire existed to see you, but it seemed better to drop dead on the spot than to come into your presence; and when for some reason you popped into N. K. [Krupskaya]’s room, I instantly lost control and behaved like a fool. Only in Longjumeau and in the following autumn in connection with translations and so on did I somewhat get used to you. I so much loved not only to listen to you but also to look at you as you spoke. Firstly, your face is so enlivened and, secondly, it was convenient to watch because you didn’t notice at that time.
In the same letter she added: ‘At that time I definitely wasn’t in love with you, but even then I loved you very much.’34 Soon she fell in love with him. No letter survives to demonstrate that he in his turn fell equally for her, and this has led some writers to conclude that there was no affair.35 But Lenin’s epistolary silence is not surprising. In mid-1914, when the relationship had waned, he asked her to return the correspondence he had sent her;36 it is difficult to imagine that his purpose was other than to destroy the evidence of what had taken place between them.
The associates and acquaintances of the Bolshevik leader took it for granted that the two were having an affair in 1910–12. When the French Marxist Charles Rappoport came upon them talking in a café on the Avenue d’Orléans, he reported that Lenin ‘could not take his Mongolian eyes off this little Frenchwoman’.37 A hint was dropped also by Lidia Fotieva, one of Lenin’s secretaries after the October Revolution, who recalled from her own visits to Lenin’s apartment that Nadya no longer slept in the marital bedroom but in the bedroom of her mother.38 In September 1911, Inessa moved into the Rue Marie-Rose and lived next door to the Lenins at no. 2.
Admittedly, the evidence is circumstantial. But the intensity of the letters they subsequently sent each other makes it unlikely that Lenin was just flirting with Inessa; the probability is that they had had an extramarital affair. A reciprocal passion had obviously existed even if Lenin, unlike Inessa, did not explicitly refer to it in the correspondence. What, though, was the attraction between the two of them? For Lenin, it was probably crucial that Inessa was someone who, as she confided to her last diary, thought that life ought to be lived in the service of some great cause. The Bolshevik vision of revolutionary strategy was exactly such a cause for her. And, of course, she was lively, beautiful and ‘cultured’ in the broadest sense. No wonder Lenin took to her. She in turn left a record as to why she was attracted by him. She adored his lively eyes, his self-belief and his intimidating presence. Even his initial unawareness of her intense interest in him had an appeal to her, but she found him irresistibly fascinating, and she absolutely had to have him.
For a time she surely succeeded. The victim of this process was Nadya, who had dedicated her life to Lenin’s career since their marriage in 1898. She was an enduring soul. Yet she understandably
drew the line at participating in a permanent ménage à trois. The detail of their disagreement was carried to their deaths with them, and rumours sprang up to fill the void. It is said that Nadya wanted to walk out and leave the lovers to their relationship. Lenin was aghast that his marriage might end. A sense of indebtedness to Nadya may have influenced him, and he perhaps also was sorry for her difficulties with Graves’s disease. Possibly, too, his happiness depended on having Inessa without losing Nadya. In Nadya he had a personal secretary and household organiser. Inessa would never be as competent as Nadya at this dual role. She might not even agree to fulfil it at all. And so, according to the rumours, Lenin urged Nadya to change her mind: ‘Stay!’39 And Nadya did as requested, but only after being assured that his passion for Inessa did not exclude Nadezhda from his affections.
Nadya and Inessa felt no hostility for each other, and worked together in the party school a dozen miles to the south of Paris at Longjumeau in late 1911 where the Ulyanovs rented an apartment at 140 La Grande Rue.40 Furthermore, it was a lasting sadness to both Lenin and Nadya that their marriage had produced no children. The presence of Inessa’s offspring in the neighbouring house on Rue Marie-Rose brought delight to the Ulyanov couple, who acted like uncle and aunt to the youngsters not only in Paris but years later in Moscow.
In other ways, too, Lenin enjoyed life to the full. He had been accustomed as an emigrant to swapping apartments pretty frequently as well as moving from country to country. But in the three years after escaping from Finland at the end of 1907 he was a political gypsy, travelling across the middle of Europe from top to bottom giving talks and attending meetings – and, of course, having holidays. Among the major European cities he visited were Berlin, Bern, Brussels, Copenhagen, Geneva, Leipzig, Liège, Lucerne, London, Naples, Nice, Paris, Stuttgart and Zurich. He had plenty of time for relaxation, too, in Breton villages and on Capri. He was learning the knack of balancing his political preoccupation with enjoying a more private lifestyle. He derived great pleasure in August 1910 when he arranged to meet his mother in Stockholm and live together with her for a fortnight (and he cherished the Swedish chequered blanket she bought for him there). The party school he established at Longjumeau also lightened his spirits. He relished the opportunity to give lectures and see the keen Russian working-class pupils whom he could turn into Bolsheviks.
He never eliminated his tendency to fret. There was plenty to push him over the edge: the Shmidt legacy, the bicycle accident and the (not very) philosophical polemic with Bogdanov. But he managed to keep calmer than was usual for him. He travelled, he wrote, he studied, he biked, he listened to music, and especially he enjoyed the company of Inessa Armand.
And he could see a way out of the organisational impasse that had cornered him inside his faction. The Central Committee of the entire Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party met in Paris on 28 May 1911. Lenin attended with some trepidation: he could not expect to exercise any kind of control over its proceedings while Menshevik-conciliating Bolsheviks like A. I. Lyubimov held authority. But the Paris decisions played into his hands. Three bodies were created: the Foreign Organisational Commission, the Russian Organisational Commission and the Technical Commission. The first two were instructed to convoke a party conference. The Mensheviks were reluctant to take part even before Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Lenin’s supporter in the Russian Organisational Commission, presented an ultimatum to the Foreign Organisational Commission to submit itself to the Russian Organisational Commission. At this Leo Jogiches, the Polish representative from the Central Committee, gave up on the party and withdrew. This gave Ordzhonikidze and Lenin a wonderful opportunity. A Bolshevik gathering took place in Paris in December 1911 masquerading as a meeting of representatives of the entire party. The participants, led by Lenin, decided to replace the Foreign Organisational Commission with a Committee of the Foreign Organisation and to empower this new body to hold a party conference.
This émigré flurry taxed the understanding of all but the most obsessive factionalists. What really mattered were not the organisational changes in themselves. No one but a Lenin loyalist could say that he had acted within the spirit of the regulatory framework. But he had got his way. Against every expectation he had suddenly leaped from a lowly position where he was little more than the controversial leader of a sub-faction in the party to a new peak: he was about to hold a party conference at which he would be able to declare that his sub-faction was equivalent to the party as a whole. Then, he anticipated, it would not count for much that other factions continued to exist. Lenin would have the aura of constitutional legitimacy. He would be able to select a new Central Committee and the editorial board of a new party newspaper. Bolshevism would at last become a party. The three years of the second emigration had started in humiliation and were about to culminate in success. Only a factional recidivist such as Lenin could delude himself with such optimism.
12. ALMOST RUSSIA!
1912–1914
Most of the great social theorists in the nineteenth century – Herbert Spencer, Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – were inheritors of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Their understanding of human culture, organisation and behaviour was linked to assumptions about the basic rationality and predictability of people. But they had not had everything their way. Thomas Carlyle had proposed that most people in most societies were capable of rational, purposeful activity only when guided by charismatic leaders. The theologian Søren Kierkegaard and the novelist Fëdor Dostoevski pointed to dark recesses in the motivations of human conduct. By the end of the nineteenth century, Sigmund Freud and other psychologists proposed that the mind has a subconscious capacity inducing people to do things which they do not deliberately contrive. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche rejected the Enlightenment’s commitment to Progress. Like Carlyle, he contended that problems of the human condition could be alleviated, if it was at all possible, only when great men lead their societies and offer themselves as heroic models. Other thinkers, too, highlighted the virtues of individual leadership in counteracting the less attractive features of contemporary industrial society. Among them were the outstanding social theorists Max Weber, Robert Michels, Gaetano Mosca and Gustave Le Bon.
But were their ideas a source for Lenin’s kind of politics? Certainly What Is to Be Done? picked out the crucial role of leadership and Lenin behaved as if the revolutionary cause would be ruined unless he was in charge. He passionately believed his own guidance of the party and the party’s guidance of ‘the masses’ to be indispensable if the Russian labour movement was to adopt the correct political ideas. Lenin gave the impression of sensing a special destiny for himself; Grigori Zinoviev confided that Lenin felt ‘he had been “called”’.1
There is little direct evidence that Lenin paid attention to those contemporary intellectual trends. He hated the way other Marxists such as Alexander Bogdanov, Nikolai Bukharin and Anatoli Lunacharski took up ideas from the fashionable books on philosophy, culture, sociology and economics regardless of whether the contents were congruent with Marxism. Lenin had formed his world-view in the final two decades of the nineteenth century, and no thinker emerged after 1900 whom he admired. He was comfortable about his own fundamental assumptions and did not itch to re-examine them. He had yet to settle his practical policies, and went on changing them nearly until the day he died. But he had a settled intellectual physiognomy. Carlyle, Freud, Kierkegaard, Le Bon, Michels, Nietzsche and Weber were ignored, totally or very nearly, in his works (although he was to keep Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra in his Kremlin book cabinet).2 His preoccupation was to widen and deepen his knowledge of Marx, Engels, Plekhanov and Kautsky. Equipped with references to the works of these admired figures, Lenin could contrive to appear orthodox even while asserting the most unorthodox analysis. He was a brilliant, ruthless disputant, and could always find some justification in the Marxist classics – classics that were far from being homogeneous – for th
e policies of his party. Lenin believed in leadership and was pleased when he was exercising it; and engagement with the general intellectual problems posed by the critics of Marxism would only have distracted him.
But the very fact that he stressed his claim to Marxist orthodoxy gives rise to the suspicion that he lived a secret intellectual life. About his admiration for the Russian agrarian-socialist terrorists there can be no doubt, even though, after the uproar over What Is to Be Done?, he had ceased to mention this in public. But was this secretiveness confined to his fondness for these Russian terrorists?
The answer, probably, is no. After 1917 he was to refer admiringly in correspondence to Machiavelli; the Florentine writer’s justification of the uses of brutality in governance especially appealed to him. Then there was the little bronze statue that he was to keep on his desk in the Kremlin. This was a representation of a monkey examining a human skull and was an obvious sign of Lenin’s fascination with the ideas of Charles Darwin.3 Nothing is more implausible than the notion that when Lenin entered a library he examined only the works of Marxism and economic statistics. In the Great War we know for certain that he picked up and devoured the German philosopher Hegel and the German military theorist Clausewitz – and it can be shown that they left an imprint on his thought. He also returned to his Classical authors, especially Aristotle. From his notebooks we can see that Hegel, Clausewitz and Aristotle helped him to sharpen his interpretation of Marxism and his strategy for Revolution. Perhaps Machiavelli and Darwin did the same for him. Darwin in particular was popular among Marxists, and it would be astonishing if Lenin was unfamiliar with his argument about ‘the survival of the fittest’. Both Machiavelli and Darwin would anyway have been congenial to him, who had detested ‘sentimentality’ in politics and who relished struggle almost as a way of life. If anyone ever was, Lenin was a fighter by nature.
Lenin: A Biography Page 27