Lenin: A Biography

by Robert John Service

  Culture and recreation were not the sole attraction of Kraków: Lenin also liked the way it reminded him of home. The peasants who swarmed into the city on market days were recognisable types. And the large Jewish quarter, Kazimierz, could just as easily have been a shetl in the western region of the Russian Empire, as he indicated to his mother:10

  I must also give you my new address exactly. This summer I’ve travelled a very long way from Paris, to Kraków. Almost Russia! The Jews here are like the Russians and the Russian frontier is eight versts [five miles] away (it’s two hours by train from Granica, nine hours from Warsaw); there are bent-nosed women in colourful dresses – it’s just like Russia!

  Nadya did the shopping in Kazimierz because the Jewish butchers’ meat was half the price of their Polish rivals’. She took time to get accustomed to the need to haggle. When she was being overcharged, she had to walk away and wait until the trader called her back. She was also taken aback by the response to her request for meat fillets: ‘The Lord God made the cow with bones, so how can I sell meat without bones.’11

  Lenin did not bother to learn Polish; in emergencies he relied upon gestures and simple Russian phrases. When he spoke to Polish socialists, he used German as the common language. He could find most of the books he needed in the Jagellonian University reading room and correspondence with Russia was easily handled. The flat on Zwierzyniecka Street was just a few minutes by foot from the post office and half an hour from the main railway station. If he felt that he needed to send a particularly secret message to St Petersburg, he could usually arrange for it to be posted across the Russian Imperial border in Lublin. Peasants living within a zone of ten miles on either side of the border could freely travel backwards and forwards so long as they had an identity document, and the Bolsheviks employed individuals to carry the mail for them in this way.12

  Not that Lenin and his friends were the most acute threat to the tsarist monarchy posed from Kraków. The fact that Roman Malinovski was a leading member of the Bolshevik Central Committee meant that the Okhrana knew its most intimate secrets. Subterfuge with coded messages, invisible ink or even the post office in Lublin could not prevent Lenin’s plans from being known. Lenin was unaware of this. But he was also a realist about émigré politics in Kraków. Much the greatest menace to tsarism came not from Russians but from Poles. Jósef Piłsudski’s Left Polish Socialist Party had a substantial presence in the city. His members aimed at the restoration of an independent Polish state. Obviously this objective would have meant the loss to Austria Hungary of its Polish lands, but Viennese confidence at the time was so high that the destabilisation of ‘Russian’ Poland was thought desirable. Piłsudski was accorded immense freedom of action. More or less openly he armed and trained troops in the fields outside Kraków for eventual use against the forces of the Russian Empire. Such was Piłsudski’s hatred of the Romanov monarchy that he was willing to assist virtually any other enemy of tsarism. Thus his men helped with the dispatch of messages to Russia on behalf of the Bolsheviks.

  Meanwhile Lenin and Nadya frequently received visitors from Russia and put them up for the night in their flat. They greeted not only Pravda editorial staff but also the six Bolshevik members of the Fourth State Duma, who took their seats in November 1912. Lenin gave advice on political manoeuvres, on the editorial line and on the contents of Duma speeches. By the end of the year he, Zinoviev and Malinovski were the only three of the Central Committee members elected at the Prague Conference who remained at liberty. Their authority rose accordingly and some of the resentment of Lenin’s factionalist excesses faded.

  So what else did he get up to in these years? One of his regrets was that, although he lived close to the Russian Imperial frontier, he was unable to see any of his relatives. His mother was in fading health and was preoccupied by the twists and turns in the life of her eldest daughter Anna. In 1911 Anna Ilinichna and her husband Mark Yelizarov were staying in Saratov in the Volga region and had read in the papers about Georgi Lozgachëv, a ‘child prodigy’ living in the same town who had precociously taught himself to read Russian and was presently trying to master Church-Slavonic and Hebrew.13 Freckle-faced Georgi, aged six, was from a poor family and there was little prospect that he would receive a decent formal education. When Anna and Mark offered to adopt him, his parents agreed. Georgi (or Gora, as everyone knew him) and his Uncle Volodya were to become chums in 1917. But it was Maria Ilinichna rather than Volodya with whom Anna discussed the desirability of the adoption.14 In truth he might have tried to dissuade her from adopting Gora Lozgachev. For within months she was arrested for revolutionary activity and kept in Saratov Prison. Meanwhile Maria Ilinichna had qualified as a domestic teacher of French, which was her latest attempt to establish herself in a professional career. Dmitri Ilich was working as a doctor in Crimea and enduring the gradual breakdown of his marriage to Antonina. All these dramas were happening not so very distant from Kraków, but Lenin had no influence over them.

  In fact Lenin and Nadya shared Anna Ilinichna’s wish for children. Like many childless couples, they made a fuss of their friends’ children. In Kraków they liked to entertain Stepan Zinoviev (or Stepa, as he was nicknamed) after Lenin had finished work for the day. The two of them ran about the house, clambering over furniture and crawling under the beds. When Stepa’s father or mother complained about the noise, Lenin would have none of it: ‘Stop interfering: we’re playing!’ On another occasion he confided to the Zinovievs: ‘Eh, it’s a pity that we don’t have such a Stepa.’

  But of course Lenin did not let emotional disappointments get in the way of his politics. As soon as he reached Kraków, he strove to assert control over the Bolshevik faction in Russia. Central Committee meetings were held in Galicia; they occurred seven times between November 1912 and the end of 1913.15 There were also consultations with the editorial board of Pravda and with the Bolshevik deputies to the State Duma. But he was now under greater supervision. The Central Committee after the Prague Conference divided its membership between a Russian Bureau and a Foreign Bureau. Lenin and Zinoviev constituted the entirety of the Foreign Bureau, and Nadezhda Konstantinovna served as its secretary. But the Foreign Bureau was not allowed to take over the Central Committee simply by way of regular contact by post and through personal trips from the Russian Empire. Lenin had to behave himself. Policy had to be formulated with the consent of Russian Bureau members. He also had to obtain the consent of the Bolshevik Duma deputies if he was to get them to do what he wanted done in the Duma and outside. Their public prominence in Russian politics outside the party made them an invaluable asset.

  Lenin wanted the six Bolshevik deputies to form a Duma fraction separate from the seven Menshevik deputies. Yet although he saw them from time to time in Kraków, this was not the same as collaborating with them on a daily basis and understanding their problems. Iosif Stalin – a talented Bolshevik organiser from Georgia – was not a man known for his patience, but even he urged that Lenin should ease off and try to win the Bolshevik deputies to his ‘hard policy’ by steady persuasion.16 Initially just one Bolshevik deputy took Lenin’s side and this was Malinovski the Okhrana agent. The Pravda editorial board, too, angered Lenin by turning down forty-seven of the 331 articles he submitted to the newspaper before the outbreak of the Great War.17 He wrote as follows to the editors in St Petersburg: ‘Why did you spike my article on the Italian Congress? It would generally do no damage to give notification about unaccepted articles. This is not at all an excessive request. To write “for the wastepaper basket”, i.e. to write articles that are rejected, is very disagreeable.’ As a young activist in St Petersburg in the mid-1890s Lenin had written some excellent short pieces useful for Marxist propaganda in the factories. But in later years he had ignored the regular requests to write such pieces again. He insisted on writing the lengthy ‘theoretical’ articles and booklets that maintained the polemics with the other fractions of the party; and, to be fair to him, he composed articles for Pravda an
d speeches for the Duma deputies. But he did not like other people setting his work-agenda for him.

  Lenin would have had a harder time if the Okhrana had not been efficient in arresting so many awkward Central Committee members and Pravda editors. One such editor was Iosif Stalin. After the Prague Conference, Stalin had been co-opted to the Central Committee and in autumn 1912 was appointed as Pravda’s chief editor. Lenin had referred to him as ‘the marvellous Georgian’. But, like other leading Bolsheviks, Stalin disliked the harsh and repetitious baiting of the Mensheviks demanded by Lenin for Pravda. Quickly the Okhrana seized Stalin. Then in May 1913, after Stalin’s successor Yakov Sverdlov was also arrested, Miron Chernomazov took over. Chernomazov acted as an obedient Leninist. The reason for this, however, was that Chernomazov was an Okhrana agent and the Okhrana wished Pravda to become more violent in its editorials so that the authorities would have the necessary pretext to close the newspaper down. The result was the recurrent disruption of Pravda’s publication. Lenin, of course, did not know about the Okhrana’s role. The signs were there if only he had been alert, and no doubt he was disabled by not being able to see Chernomazov at work in St Petersburg. Even so, he had been remarkably naive.

  Lenin gained the internal factional policy he craved, but at the price of workers in St Petersburg not being able to read the newspaper regularly. Things were not much better in the State Duma. In November 1913 the Bolshevik deputies at last submitted to Lenin’s arguments in favour of breaking up the joint Bolshevik–Menshevik Duma fraction. They came over to his side mainly because the labour movement was becoming more militant, and yet the Menshevik newspaper Luch was remarkably reticent in its support of strikes. But the split in the Duma had the consequence of involving the Bolshevik deputies in factional disputes that baffled ordinary workers – and to this extent Lenin was responsible for the Bolsheviks in Russia failing to make the fullest political gain from the situation in the factories. He was too much the factional conspirator, too little the national leader.

  Furthermore, he had not abandoned all of his obsessions when he left Paris. He went on pestering the three German trustees of the Shmidt legacy – Karl Kautsky, Franz Mehring and Clara Zetkin – for the transfer of all the moneys to the Central Committee. Kautsky was exasperated by the whole business. Lenin’s intransigence fitted the nineteenth-century stereotype of Russian socialists spending all their time wrangling. It was poppycock for Lenin to claim that the Central Committee was the unchallengeable embodiment of the leadership of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party; and Kautsky and Mehring, after trying to get the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks to compromise with each other, washed their hands of the business. Pleading ill health, they resigned their trusteeship. Thereafter the third trustee Clara Zetkin was given no peace. Lenin wrote a formal letter indicating that unless she restored the monies, she would be subjected to legal proceedings. Having taken expert advice from the Swiss advocate Karl Zraggen, he came to a deal with French socialist activist and Court of Appeal advocate Georges Ducos de la Haille whereby Ducos de la Haille would be paid 5,000 francs if he could conclude the case quickly and satisfactorily for the Bolsheviks.18

  But Monsieur Ducos de la Haille could not work miracles and so Lenin turned to a German advocate, Alfred Kahn. It was all getting out of hand; and Kautsky decided in December 1913 that the International Socialist Bureau in Brussels should take an interest in the extraordinary bitterness of factional conflict in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. Kautsky wanted not only financial but also political disputes to be considered. All this sent Lenin into a frenzy. Any such discussion in the International Socialist Bureau might lead to the loss of the Shmidt monies and to a campaign by European socialists, encouraged by the International Socialist Bureau, for Russian Marxists to reunify their party. Lenin could only play for time. He agreed to Bolshevik participation in a meeting of all the factions in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party with the objective of a ‘mutual exchange of opinions’.

  The person he selected to represent the Bolsheviks in Brussels was none other than Inessa Armand. Inessa had left Kraków in July 1912 to carry out party activity in the Russian Empire. But she was arrested by the Okhrana, and developed tuberculosis after some months in prison. Released on bail, she made a dash to the frontier in August 1913 and looked up Lenin in Galicia.19 By then he was no longer in Kraków. He and Nadya had moved sixty miles southwards to Biały Dunajec on the railway that winds its way towards the winter sports resort Zakopane. Lenin and Nadya rented a large wooden country-house there because Nadya had been advised that her health would benefit from the fresh air of the countryside. They were anyway fed up with urban life and Lenin in particular looked forward to going climbing. Communication with Russia was not going to be drastically slower in Biały Dunajec. The post train from Kraków stopped twice a day at the nearby village of Poronin and usually a letter took only two days to arrive from St Petersburg; and Lenin positively enjoyed walking or cycling to pick up their letters from Poronin. The Lenins signed for an occupancy through to early October, when they returned to Kraków for the winter. They had had so pleasant a time that they repeated the experience in 1914 and took an apartment in Poronin itself.

  Biały Dunajec and Poronin lay in a peaceful area and a very exotic one after the years spent in Switzerland, Italy and France. The residents were not like the Poles of Kraków. Most of them were so-called Guraly. The men wore black, flat-rimmed hats, white shirts and beige trousers. The women had long dresses of the brightest colours. They had dark complexions and a fierce demeanour when approached by strangers. The style of agriculture had been the same for centuries. They kept cows and, in the less hilly areas, grew rye. Their houses had thick, wooden walls. There was no factory for miles, and such handicrafts as existed were devoted to domestic use. Further up the road lay Zakopane, where the thousands of holidaymakers and TB patients who made their way there were providing employment for a number of villagers. There was a growing commercial demand for wooden carvings and lace; the recent completion of the Kraków–Zakopane railway began the process of eroding the area’s isolation – a process that was noticeably incomplete at the end of the twentieth century. ‘It’s a wonderful spot here,’ Lenin wrote to his sister Maria. ‘The air is excellent, at a height of around 700 metres.’20

  Nadya did not immediately take to the area. She found it distasteful to have to bargain with the landlady over the rent. Then they employed a maid who turned out to be incompetent and not very bright. There was also much more rain than in Kraków. The worst thing of all was the decline in her physical condition: the problem with her thyroid gland had led to heart palpitations. Indeed Poronin and the surrounding mountains may have contributed to this. Although she benefited from the wonderfully clean air, Biały Dunajec was so high above sea level that the low atmospheric pressure was bound to affect her weak heart. Evidently the medical advice they had been receiving was not of the best. Anyway, Lenin became convinced that Nadya could not go on as before. In his opinion, she needed to undergo a surgical operation on her goitre, and after a lot of persuasion he obtained her consent to this. In June 1913, he accompanied her to Bern in Switzerland to seek treatment from Professor Theodor Kocher.

  Nadya had previously objected to surgery on the reasonable ground that one in five patients died under the knife from that specific operation. Lenin, however, discovered Kocher, who was the world’s leading researcher and practitioner in the field of thyroid treatment and had reduced the mortality rate to one in two hundred. Then in his early seventies, he was famous around the world after being awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1909. His innovative method was to remove a particular portion of the gland; by 1913 he had performed over five thousand excisions and had effected a complete or partial cure of the condition in many cases. Nowadays doctors would administer effective drugs to such patients, but before the Great War Kocher’s method was the best technique available. Unfortunately he was also expensive. Lenin wrote to the Prav
da editorial board requesting a subsidy, but there is no record of his having received one. He had arranged the trip regardless; Lenin and Nadya lived modestly in most ways, but never stinted in expenditure on holidays, books or health-care. The money could always be found, even though Lenin habitually pleaded poverty in negotiations inside the party.

  In order to reach Bern the Lenins took the train from Kraków from east to west across the empire of the Habsburgs. This was a trip of over seven hundred miles and Vladimir Ilich was angry that Kocher declined to treat his wife immediately. A dispute took place, but Kocher would not yield and Nadya had to wait her turn. She was not looking forward to the operation since Kocher performed it without anaesthetic and was not the most communicative of doctors. But Nadya was stoical. The decision had been taken to have the operation and she had to hope for the best. Lenin was fearful about her prospects, but somehow he managed to keep this from her; he commented that Kocher might have a ‘capricious’ personality but was ‘a wonderful surgeon’. The operation went ahead and, although Nadya ran a high fever, she recovered quickly and there were grounds for thinking that Kocher had cured her. Lenin dutifully spent several days visiting her, but his patience was running out. Kocher gave instructions that Nadya should go off for a fortnight’s recuperation in the nearby Alps. The Lenins rejected this advice, and as soon as she was judged fit for the journey Vladimir Ilich brought his wife back from Switzerland.

  On their return, Nadya got on better with Inessa than she had in Paris. The two women together accompanied Lenin on his walks and fellow Bolsheviks referred to the threesome as ‘the hikers’ party’. An alternative soubriquet was ‘the anti-cinema-ists’ party’. This was a reference to Lenin’s disapproval of the passion of his comrades Kamenev and Zinoviev for going to the cinema and avoiding physical exertion. Since Kamenev and Zinoviev were of Jewish parentage, Lenin jokingly adjusted the name to ‘the anti-semitic party’. (This banter, by the way, indicates what little mind Lenin usually gave to the Jewish ingredient in his own ancestry.) Inessa had lively cultural interests and encouraged Lenin and Nadya to attend Beethoven piano concerts. For Lenin, Beethoven was a treat, for Nadya less so. But this did not matter. The three of them enjoyed their discussions with each other. Lenin read voraciously in the Russian literary classics; a dog-eared copy of Tolstoi’s War and Peace was especially well thumbed. The only snag was that the local bookshops were poorly stocked with Russian books. But this was a quibble. Generally Lenin and his friends were content with the diversions available in Galicia.