Lenin: A Biography
Page 28
Outside his family no one got close to him without eventually querying his combative style. But for a while he kept the admiration of the Bolshevik organisers of the next Party Conference. Chief among these was Sergo Ordzhonikidze, who was in charge of the arrangements for the next Party Conference. Ordzhonikidze was a fiery, hard-drinking and industrious Georgian devoted to the cause of Revolution; he despised what he saw as the half-heartedness of the Menshevik revolutionary strategy. No intellectual, he was impatient about establishing clandestine party groups in Russia, overturning tsarism and making the advance towards a socialist society. Lenin was Ordzhonikidze’s hero and Lenin for his part welcomed his admirer as precisely the kind of practical, ruthless organiser that the Bolsheviks needed.
Journeying out from Russia to make contact with the Bolshevik emigrants, Ordzhonikidze agreed with Lenin that something ought to be done to pull the faction together. They proposed to hold a party conference for this purpose. But for a location they decided to avoid cities such as Paris and Geneva where the Russian Marxists lived in colonies. Instead they would seek to hold it in Prague, capital of the Bohemian lands in the east of the Habsburg Empire. The choice was a cunning one. Prague was an awkward destination for travellers from both Russia and France. It was also a place without a colony of Russian Marxists. At the same time it was a place where the police could be relied upon to leave the delegates alone; indeed the Habsburg Empire welcomed almost every kind of revolutionary who wanted to strike tsarism down. Furthermore, the Czech Marxists would definitely give assistance to any conference organised by their Russian comrades. Lenin and Ordzhonikidze would be able to exploit this situation to the advantage of the Bolshevik faction. The few delegates who might arrive in Prague would, with hardly an exception, be Bolsheviks. The proceedings would be secret and would be dominated by Lenin and Ordzhonikidze, who could argue that the Bolsheviks had been the largest of the factions at the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party and therefore had the right to guide party policies with the minimum of concessions to Menshevism.
This calculation proved correct as the Conference delegates assembled in Prague, were greeted warmly by the Czech socialist leadership and were put up in houses around the centre. Proceedings were held in the centre of city. The venue was the Workers’ House in the middle of Hybernska Street, which stretches from the medieval Powder Tower down to a railway station. The Workers’ House, owned by the Czech Social-Democratic Party, was a three-storey building with a large internal courtyard; originally it had been the Kinsky Palace.
Lenin and his comrades made their arrangements for the Conference undisturbed. Although they had sent invitations to a few Mensheviks who sided with Plekhanov, they avoided contact with those other Mensheviks – the great majority of them – who refused to break off relations with the so-called Liquidators. Trotski was infuriated by this and organised a rival party conference in Vienna, and practically all Mensheviks felt that Trotski’s was the meeting that they should attend. The result was that the Prague Conference had only eighteen participants and sixteen of them were Bolsheviks. On reaching Prague, some of these were offended by the discovery that other factions had no representation, and tried to rectify the imbalance by sending out last-minute invitations of their own. Ordzhonikidze saw nothing wrong with their initiative; presumably he calculated that the opponents of the Bolsheviks would be unable reach the Conference in time and in a number sufficient to gain a majority. But Lenin would take no chances and threatened to walk out if the invitations were accepted. This was stupidly excessive even for Lenin. Ordzhonikidze already thought that the fractiousness of ‘the damned emigration’ was ruining the party. Now he discovered that Lenin was the worst offender and joined the other Bolshevik delegates in criticising him personally.
There had been no Bolshevik gathering where Lenin was given so hard a time. The delegates were perplexed by a basic question: if Leninist Bolsheviks agreed with Mensheviks about the importance of legal political activity, why was Lenin still using a megaphone to announce the iniquity of Martov and his fellow Mensheviks? Lenin ducked the question. In truth there was no intellectually respectable answer available.
The Prague Conference at any rate went ahead without additional arrivals and claimed the right to elect a new Central Committee and ordain policies for the entire party. To this large extent Lenin got exactly what he had been after. The new Central Committee was a Bolshevik Central Committee, with the exception of the Menshevik David Shvartsman. As Lenin wished, the Conference also approved the party’s enhanced commitment to taking part in the State Duma and other Russian legal organisations. But Lenin lost a lot of the personal authority he had held. Ordzhonikidze and others wanted power to belong to the leading activists operating in Russia and not in the emigration. This was to be achieved firstly by withdrawing the official recognition of the Committee of the Foreign Organisation as the Central Committee’s adjunct abroad – and it had been through the Committee of the Foreign Organisation, with Inessa Armand as its secretary, that Lenin had exerted heavy influence over both his fellow emigrants and the party as a whole. Secondly, the Conference ruled that the Central Committee’s seven members would include only two émigrés: Lenin and Zinoviev. The centre of gravity in the leadership was about to be shifted away from émigré factional disputes to organisation and propaganda in the Russian Empire.
Yet Ordzhonikidze could not know of other forces at work that would undermine any decisions taken by the Bolsheviks in Prague. The Okhrana saw Lenin as a brilliant potential executor of the task demanded by the Emperor: the disintegration of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. The enhancement of Lenin’s career was the Okhrana’s confidential priority.
The instruments lay easily to hand after the Prague Conference. One of the members of the new Central Committee was the St Petersburg trade union organiser Roman Malinovski. Malinovski was a Bolshevik of working-class origin and was a spell-binding speaker in front of a crowd; he was one of the candidates successfully put up for election to the Fourth State Duma later in 1912. And he was highly regarded by Lenin. The problem was that, unbeknown to Lenin, Malinovski had fallen on hard times and had secretly become a paid agent of the Okhrana. His main task was to remove any obstacles to the schismatic measures proposed by Lenin. Malinovski’s authority among Bolsheviks in Russia rose as the Okhrana arrested the other members of the Central Committee when they returned to Russia. With each arrest, Lenin’s position was likewise enhanced. Co-optation of new members gave him a chance to choose activists whom he had reason to trust. He had not been cowed by Ordzhonikidze at the Conference, and had even managed a laugh when the emigrants’ contribution to the party had been disparaged. ‘I have no fear’. he declared, ‘of factional struggle being condemned.’ He had suffered and surmounted greater setbacks in the past.
Leaving Prague for Paris, Lenin continued his tirades. He had no intention of abiding by the letter or spirit of Ordzhonikidze’s reform of the Bolshevik leadership. Soon, he thought, political life would go on as before, and he wrote to his mother that he was staying put in Paris. Lenin would not be ruled by Conference; he would work to set himself up more solidly as the faction’s dominant figure.
Inside the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party he already had a substantial reputation; indeed he was its most notorious figure. The leaderships of the other Russian political parties, too, were aware of his ideas and activity. All the socialist emigrants were acquainted with him in the Russian colonies of Zurich, Geneva and Paris. German and Polish Marxist leaders were painfully conscious of what he got up to. For them, Lenin was the single greatest obstacle to unity among Russian Marxists. His general significance was also recognised in the form of fifteen biographical entries on him in various Russian encyclopaedias by the time he returned to Russia in 1917.4 But this fame was restricted to a tiny world and certainly did not extend to much of the serious reading public in his country. One of Lenin’s followers in St Petersburg, Mikhail Kedr
ov, valiantly tried to put out a three-volume edition of his collected works, but collected only two hundred subscriptions. Kedrov had a print-run of three thousand but managed to sell only half of the copies by 1912. Disappointed, he sold the remainder as waste paper.5
This is important information that is overlooked by the dozens of scholars who have seen his volumes, examined his ‘texts’ and concluded that Lenin attracted widespread notice in the Russian Empire before the Great War. Most subjects of Nicholas II knew nothing about Lenin. He had made only a little headway since he started to come to public notice in St Petersburg with his writings in the late 1890s. His name, physical appearance and policies were obscure. His writings were little discussed – and were thought unintelligible or excessively intemperate by those who bought his books.
Lenin kept faith in himself because he saw nothing to shake his assumptions. The Russian Empire and the rest of Europe, he thought, were on the brink of Revolution. Another assumption was that social classes, even if they were quiescent for lengthy periods, could quickly rise to the tasks of carrying out Revolution. A third was that it did not matter how small the party of Revolution was before it seized power. The most important thing in Lenin’s eyes was to have a party, however minuscule, of indoctrinated revolutionaries who could spread the word. A fourth assumption was not stated expressly, but indisputably he believed that the cleanest test of a revolutionary was simply whether he or she stuck by Lenin in factional disputes. He was fixed in his ways. He also knew that even the most anti-emigrant Bolsheviks recognised his individual talent and accepted that the emigrants gave continuity to the party despite the Okhrana’s efforts. Emigrants had the intellectual sweep and could write and organise. They maintained the party records; they constituted the party’s collective memory. Despite the exposure of his faults in Prague, few Bolsheviks seriously wanted rid of Lenin.
In spring 1912 he wrote to his mother:6
We’re planning to go off for the summer to Fontenay, outside Paris, and are thinking about a complete move there for the entire year. It’s expensive in Paris: the price for the apartment has been raised, and anyway it will definitely be healthier and quieter in the outskirts. In the next few days I’ll undertake a trip and do a search.
Lenin never wrote about politics to his mother. But in a separate letter to Anna Ilinichna, who was staying with her in Saratov, he noted how much criticism had been aimed at the Conference organisers by the other ‘groups and sub-groups’ in the party. Even fist-fights, he added, had taken place. But by and large he was pleased with the Russian revolutionary scene in France.7
Yet the move to Fontenay was not realised. The main reason was that the Bolshevik Central Committee, despite its depletion by arrests, was carrying out the plan to focus its energies on work in the Russian Empire. An early objective was to found a legal newspaper in St Petersburg. Since 1906 it had been lawful for political parties to operate in Russia and run their own press; the Basic Law, much as it was manipulated by Nicholas II, was never repealed. Of course, the Okhrana closed down newspapers when editors strayed beyond the fixed limits of public expression. It was not allowed, for example, to call for the downfall of the Romanov dynasty or to recommend ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’. But within the limits it was possible to print much that was subversive of the government and its policies. And so revolutionary groups such as the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were able to conduct propaganda in the open. Lenin had campaigned for Bolsheviks to stand in the Duma elections but had been reluctant to advocate the foundation of a legal daily newspaper. Although he did not explain this, he surely disliked any Bolshevik editor other than himself controlling what appeared in the press under the faction’s imprimatur. Yet the new Central Committee had made up its mind and Lenin had to deal with this reality.
On 22 April 1912 the first issue of Pravda appeared. Lenin knew that if he stayed in France he would lose all influence over the Bolsheviks in Russia. If he himself moved back clandestinely to St Petersburg, however, he would eventually be arrested. Sensibly he decided to move as near to the Russian Empire as he could without actually crossing the frontier. Nadezhda Konstantinovna made enquiries about the Austrian-ruled part of Poland, Galicia. The replies were positive. The choice fell upon Kraków. Tensions between the governments in Vienna and St Petersburg meant that Lenin would be safe from extradition. Kraków had 150,000 inhabitants, and of these it is reckoned that as many as 12,000 were political refugees from the Russian Empire. Nearly all the refugees were Polish, but Russians too were among them. The Union of Assistance for Political Prisoners, founded in Kraków, gave material help to new arrivals. Lenin and his associates would also be well placed for communications with St Petersburg. A rail route ran from the Russian capital through to Warsaw and from Warsaw there was a regular service to Kraków. Postal communications were quick. Lenin would be able to provide a foreign base for the Central Committee, receiving visitors and mail from St Petersburg. He had not wanted this transfer but could foresee some practical advantages.
Lenin, Nadya, her mother, Zinoviev, his wife Zinaida Lilina and their little boy Stepan travelled together. Leaving Paris on 4 June, they arrived in Kraków after stopping in Leipzig for a few days. There was no attempt at secretiveness. Lenin’s stay at the Hotel Victoria was announced in the local newspaper Czas; and when Inessa wrote from Paris, she openly addressed her postcards to the Ulyanovs.8 The only difficulty was contact with local socialists. Sergei Bagotski, who belonged to the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, had arranged to meet them on a particular bench in the leafy Planty promenade outside the Jagellonian University’s main building. There were many such benches; the promenade stretched for miles and the Jagellonian University had not one but several principal buildings. In fact Lenin and Nadezhda Konstantinovna sat themselves down punctually on the correct bench and Bagotski was there too. But they failed to recognise each other, and they sat for half an hour before Nadya importuned her neighbour by asking whether his name was Bagotski.9
Had Nadya, perhaps, been even more assertive just a few weeks earlier? There have been suggestions that the move from Paris occurred at her insistence in order to break Lenin’s contact with Inessa. This is scarcely credible. Otherwise it is hard to explain why in summer 1912 Nadya considered sending her own mother to Arcachon, the little holiday resort on the Atlantic coast ten miles south-west of Bordeaux which was favoured by Russian revolutionary emigrants, even though Inessa was likely to be there. Probably there were political reasons why neither Lenin nor Inessa wanted to stay in Paris. The focal point of the Central Committee’s activity had been moved to the Russian Empire at the behest of the Party Conference. Lenin had to have closer contact with St Petersburg and Inessa’s role as secretary to the Committee of the Foreign Organisation was redundant after the abolition of the Committee itself. Inessa and Lenin continued to see each other, moreover, after he moved the main Bolshevik foreign base to Kraków; indeed she stayed with Lenin and Nadya in Kraków before slipping over the frontier to conduct clandestine revolutionary work in Russia in July 1912.
But undoubtedly the close relationship between Inessa and Lenin collapsed around this time. It is clear that it was Lenin who decided to end the relationship and that Inessa was exceedingly distraught. She implored Lenin to reconsider. She told him that the relationship was harming no one; presumably by this she meant Nadya. She was entranced with him and remained so until her death in 1920. But Lenin stayed firm. Things could not go on as before. Even if the rumours about Nadya’s ultimatum are untrue, Lenin must have wondered whether the current emotional complication was permanently sustainable; and after so many years living and working with Nadya, he probably felt that he could humiliate her no longer. Just possibly, and here we are guessing, he may have judged that only one of his two potential partners was a dependable political assistant. Nadya was solid, reliable and hardworking; she had proved her worth. And so the temptation of Inessa had to be rejected and all her pleadings ignored.
By summer 1912 they had found an apartment at 218 Zwierzyniecka Street down the hill and across the river Vistula from the centre of Kraków. One of the helpful Polish comrades, Jakub Hanecki, lived along the road. The house was on the outskirts and Lenin could take walks in the neighbouring fields and hills and go swimming in the Vistula. In the first winter he bought a pair of skates and started skimming around as he had done in his youth in Simbirsk. He frequently also took the train from Kraków to the nearby Tatra Mountains and went scrambling up the rock faces with Sergei Bagotski.