But by November Inessa had gone. In a poignant letter from Paris she wrote to him:21
You and I have split up, we’ve split up, my dear one! I know it, I feel it: you’ll never come here! Looking at the very familiar places, I clearly recognised – as I never did before – what a large place you occupied in my life here in Paris, so that almost all activity here in Paris was tied up by a thousand threads to thoughts of you. At that time I definitely wasn’t in love with you but even then I loved you very much. At the moment I could manage without the kisses: just to see you and to talk with you sometimes would be a pleasure – and this could do no one any harm. What was the reason for depriving me of that? You ask whether I’m angry with you for ‘carrying through’ the break. No, I think that you didn’t do it for your own sake.
These words must surely have referred to an affair of some kind and to Inessa’s judgement that he had finished with her because of his concern for the feelings of Nadya. This was the letter of a rejected lover who believed that her man still felt more deeply for her than for his wife.
Inessa was getting desperate. Playing her last card, she stressed that she cherished Nadya. Her implicit plea to Lenin was that the three of them could live without discomfort or guilt. He turned her down, and in subsequent letters Inessa became more combative towards him as he persisted in staying away from her. In one letter he had remarked that he was on close terms of friendship and respect with very few women. Inessa’s reply accused him of arrogance, alleging that he had stated that only two or three women in his life deserved his respect.
In July 1914, Lenin retorted that she had misconstrued what he had written:
Never, never have I written that I value only three women. Never!!! What I wrote was that my unconditional friendship, absolute respect and trust are dedicated to only two or three women. This is a completely different, utterly and completely different thing.
I hope that we’ll see each other here after the Congress and talk about this.
He was walking a tightrope. He wanted to stay on friendly terms with Inessa and to persuade her that he had behaved properly by her. But this was not all. Lenin also wished to continue to deploy Inessa on important party missions. He had to strike a balance between the emotional and political considerations. While indicating that he had not condescended to her at the end of their affair, Lenin aimed to use her as a subordinate in politics. Having secured her assent to represent the Bolsheviks at the ‘mutual exchange of opinions’ meeting of Russian Marxist factions in Brussels, he deluged her with advice on how to handle the occasion.
A complex of dilemmas faced him in his political life. As Lenin was negotiating with Inessa about the Brussels meeting, he learned that the Bolshevik Duma deputies had fallen into disarray. Roman Malinovski was the cause of it all. In summer 1914 he had cracked under the pressure of his dual allegiance to Bolshevism and the Okhrana, and secretly fled St Petersburg. A few days later he turned up in Galicia. By this time there was public speculation in Russia that Malinovski was a police agent. This would have been an embarrassment at any time for the Bolsheviks. But Lenin, who was only beginning to stabilise his private life and was preoccupied with the financial and political developments in the International Socialist Bureau, reeled from this latest blow.
Malinovski belonged to both the Duma and to the Bolshevik Central Committee; he was the most famous Bolshevik active in the Russian Empire. Malinovski and Lenin had been hand in glove. Lenin’s enemies had always said that he was much too complacent about the kind of people he surrounded himself with. There had been several notorious examples. Taratuta and Andrikanis had deceived young women into marriage for the faction’s pecuniary gain; Kamo had robbed banks for the faction. Lenin had defended them all from criticism, as well he might since he had instigated their shady activity. His criterion of approval was whether or not a person adhered to current Bolshevik policies. He scoffed at anti-Bolsheviks who were horrified by his refusal to assess the moral character of members of his faction. He had often been warned about Malinovski. But he took no precautions. To Lenin, Malinovski appeared to behave exactly as a Lenin-style Bolshevik should. And he was a better organiser and speaker than all the other Duma deputies put together. He could talk the language of ordinary Russian workers. Why, then, distrust him? Weren’t the faction’s enemies just out to cause mischief for Bolshevism?
Even so, Lenin felt obliged to put together a Central Committee commission of enquiry. Although Lenin and Zinoviev were the dominant figures on it, they themselves were subject to scrutiny. In judging Malinovski, they were judging themselves and their past behaviour. In the nature of such situations it was difficult to be sure about the evidence, and Malinovski was adept at turning any evidence inside out. Lenin anyway sympathised with Malinovski, even though the other Bolshevik deputies to the Duma remonstrated that Lenin was treating him far too softly. In a similar unofficial trial in 1906, the Socialist-Revolutionaries had decided that Father Georgi Gapon was a police agent and had hanged him. But Lenin and Zinoviev gave Malinovski the benefit of the doubt. No charge against him could be totally proved and, they concluded, he had to be considered an innocent man.
While this confidential commission was sitting in June, Lenin was losing any vestigial sense of proportion. His distraction from Russian revolutionary possibilities was total. His political intuition – sharp as a razor in 1917 – was extremely blunt in mid-1914. He had no excuse. Living in Habsburg Poland he was in daily receipt of the Russian news. Through June and July there were strikes in St Petersburg against the government as well as against factory owners. Barricades were briefly put up in industrial quarters. There seemed a strong possibility that the Romanov monarchy was about to face a test equal to its experiences in 1905–6. But no guidance was forthcoming from Lenin in Galicia. Nor did he give much attention to the gathering diplomatic crisis among the European great powers that was about to engulf the continent in the catastrophic Great War. Lenin had other things on his mind: Brussels, Kautsky, the Shmidt legacy, Inessa and Malinovski. His priority at the time was to score points in discussions with other leading socialists in the parties of Russia and the rest of Europe. Real war, real famine, real impoverishment were not things of his direct experience – and until he was thrust into daily Russian politics in 1917, he failed to rise to the level of the kind of politician that he aspired to be.
13. FIGHTING FOR DEFEAT
1914–1915
Then it happened: in August 1914 Germany declared war on Russia. This came at the end of weeks of diplomatic threats in Europe following the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo. On 23 July the Habsburg government in Vienna had delivered an ultimatum whose terms were so humiliating as to make it politically impossible for Serbia to comply. When the Russian Imperial government declared support for Serbia, the German government stated that, unless the Russians stood down their forces, Germany would go to war against Russia on the Austrian side. But Russia would not budge. It had endured a series of disputes with Germany and Austria–Hungary in the past half-decade, and Nicholas II’s sense of dynastic and imperial honour induced him to conclude that the time had come to make a stand. Within days, Britain and France announced that they would fight alongside Russia. These three powerful states formed a coalition against three other such states – Germany, Austria–Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. The Great War was under way. Diplomats were staggered by the speed with which international relations had spun out of their expert hands.
In every country, including Russia, several political parties and newspapers were ready to condemn their government for any sign of weakness against the national enemies. Yet most rulers were untroubled by this and in the early stages of the diplomatic crisis had expected that a general military conflict would be avoided. This hope was wrecked in August. Two great coalitions were ranged against each other. Austria–Hungary and Germany faced enemies on two fronts. In the west there wer
e the combined forces of France and Britain, in the east there was Russia.
Lenin’s inattention to the intensifying crisis is unmistakable. His understanding of politics outside his party had always been of a very general kind. He had always disdained to scrutinise the twists and turns of Russian Imperial government policy; in the same fashion he took little interest in international diplomacy’s vicissitudes in summer 1914. His Marxist approach accustomed him to concentrate on the economic and political foundations of regimes, and as a result he had simply become complacent about the personal security he enjoyed in the Habsburg Empire. He was not the only person in Europe to be taken by surprise. But this is the best that may be said of him. Really it did not require much foresight to guess that any war between Russia and Austria would place him in jeopardy. Living in Galicia, he might well be arrested as a Russian agent at the outset of hostilities; and if the Russian Imperial forces were to occupy the region, he would certainly be treated as a traitor.
He saw his mistake when it was already too late. As Russia started to mobilise, the Habsburg police initiated enquiries about foreign residents. Lenin was living only a few miles from the Russian border and had visited the frontier posts. He had written frequently to St Petersburg and opened his home to Russian politicians. He had roamed the mountains near Zakopane and had quizzed the inhabitants of the area about rent-levels, climate, ethnic variety and the best routes from one village to another. He possessed a Browning pistol. Lenin lacked only a swarthy countenance and a black cape to complete the caricature of a Russian spy.
War hysteria affected every Polish city and village, and the Catholic priests in Galicia were preaching that resident Russians were at work poisoning the wells. The fact that Lenin had hitherto been an honoured anti-tsarist emigrant made no difference. The maid employed by Lenin and Nadezhda Konstantinovna invented stories about them which she told to peasant women in Biały Dunajec. It all could easily have ended in violence, perhaps a lynching. Nadezhda Konstantinovna sensibly bribed the maid by paying her off and giving her a free one-way rail ticket to Kraków.1 Yet the local hostility to Russian emigrants was unabated. Things would have been easier for Lenin if he had stayed in Kraków, where the police were more sophisticated than in Biały Dunajec. The problem facing the officer who arrived in the village from Nowy Targ on 7 August (NS) was that he knew that he would be reprimanded if he failed to arrest someone who subsequently proved to be the agent of the Romanovs. A display of bureaucratic zeal was predictable and the officer was bound to see everything in the worst possible light.
A brief search confirmed the officer’s expectations. Among Lenin’s possessions he found extensive notes on contemporary agriculture, including statistical tables. The officer deduced that such material was a coded message for the suspect’s espionage superiors in St Petersburg. The discovery of the Browning pistol further incriminated Lenin. Even the pot of glue was thought peculiar. To the officer it seemed likely that the pot was a bomb. Retrospectively – but only retrospectively – the situation had its amusing side. At the time Lenin and Nadezhda Konstantinovna were scared that the man’s nerves might get the better of him.
In the end it was agreed by the three of them that only Lenin needed to be subjected to further interrogation. Polish courtesy towards women saved Nadezhda Konstantinovna (even though she, a promoter of female emancipation, asked for no favours). The officer planned to take Lenin back to Nowy Targ, nine miles away, but relented after Lenin gave his solemn word that he would not abscond. Lenin would take the train to Nowy Targ next day. As soon as the officer had departed, Lenin hurried to Poronin to look up Sergei Bagotski and Jakub Hanecki, who volunteered to obtain affidavits from fellow Marxists elsewhere in Austria–Hungary to the effect that he was not a spy.2 Meanwhile Lenin sent a telegram asking the Kraków Director of Police to confirm to the Nowy Targ authorities that he had been living in Galicia as a political emigrant, and the Director quickly did as requested. Then Lenin returned to make the final arrangements in Biały Dunajec. By a stroke of luck a Bolshevik, a certain V. A. Tikhomirnov, had just arrived in the village. Lenin offered him accommodation in return for Tikhomirnov giving manly protection to Nadezhda Konstantinovna and her mother.3
On 8 August he went to Nowy Targ, where he was put in prison. While he was being held in cell no. 5, his friends outside were working hard on his behalf. Bagotski and Hanecki were not alone. By some oversight, Grigori Zinoviev had been left alone by the police. This left him free to cycle around the whole area campaigning for Lenin’s release. Sigmund Marek, a Marxist, quickly wrote to the authorities on behalf of Lenin. Telegrams were dispatched by Nadezhda Konstantinovna. Viktor Adler in Vienna and Herman Diamand in Lwów rapidly responded as requested.4 ‘Are you sure’, an Austrian minister asked Adler, ‘that Ulyanov is an enemy of the tsarist government?’ Adler replied: ‘Oh yes, a more sworn enemy than your Excellency!’5 Hanecki and Nadezhda Konstantinovna visited the prisoner regularly in Nowy Targ to cheer him up. They need not have worried unduly. Lenin busied himself talking to fellow prisoners – most of whom were being held for acts of petty criminality – and used his legal training to assist them in preparing their defences. He was a popular figure despite his slender grasp of Polish, being known in the prison as a ‘real bull of a fellow’.
On 19 August Lenin was released and allowed to return to Biały Dunajec. By then it was urgent for him and his associates to leave Galicia. Russian Imperial armies were advancing fast and there was a possibility that Galicia would be occupied. In such a contingency the mercy shown by the Austrians to the leader of Bolshevism would not be repeated. Lenin and Nadezhda Konstantinovna determined to make for neutral Switzerland and they wrote to fellow Marxist Herman Greulich asking him to support their application to resettle there. On 26 August, accompanied by the Zinovievs, they left for Kraków. Permission was obtained for their further trip to Vienna, where Viktor Adler helped them get the necessary documentation for the journey to Switzerland on 3 September (NS).
There had been quite an influx of Russian revolutionaries from the belligerent countries. Lenin wrote to Vladimir Karpinski in September:
It’s said that a new French emigration has now set off for Geneva from Paris, Brussels, etc. Isn’t there an extraordinary price inflation, especially for apartments? And so we’ll have to set ourselves up temporarily: is it possible to find rented rooms (two small ones) on a monthly basis, with use of the kitchen?
Bolshevik associates lent a hand and the Lenins occupied an apartment at 11a Donnerbühlweg in Bern. By then he was extremely angry. Before leaving Galicia he had read in the newspapers that the German Social-Democratic Party’s representatives in the Reichstag had voted war credits to the German government. Lenin was astounded and appalled. To Bagotski he had exclaimed: ‘This is the end of the Second International.’ He was referring to the failure of the German Social-Democratic Party to stick by the resolution of the Stuttgart Congress of the Second Socialist International that socialist parties should do all in their power to prevent their governments from waging war in Europe or elsewhere. Militarism and imperialism had been condemned by the Congress. At the time Lenin had had to exert pressure upon the German Marxists to accede to the resolution during the Congress; but he had never imagined that they would renege on it. Now the German Social-Democratic Party, the most authoritative party of the Second International, had done precisely that.
Lenin’s mood was choleric not least because he had shared the almost universal respect in which the German Social-Democratic Party was held by European Marxists. For all his pride in Russia and in Bolshevism, he had expected ‘the socialist revolution’ in Europe to be led not by Russians like himself but by Germans. He had esteemed Karl Kautsky despite the financial altercations he had had with him. And yet Kautsky, the arbiter of Marxist orthodoxy for Vladimir Lenin, had refused to break with the German Social-Democratic Party over the vote on war credits. For Lenin, this was tantamount to supporting militarism and imperialism. Kautsky had t
herefore to be denounced.
The wartime phenomenon of socialist parties supporting their governments became the norm. Across Germany, Austria, France and the United Kingdom the majority of them took the line that national independence was under threat. Only a few parties held to the Socialist International’s policy of active opposition to war, and Russian parties were prominent among them. Not that all their leaders refused to back the Russian war effort. Several prominent Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries regarded Germany as being bent upon an imperialist aggression that required them to support their Imperial forces even though they detested the Romanov monarchy. Most notably Georgi Plekhanov dropped his struggle against the government and called on patriotic Russian socialists to follow his example. Hundreds of political emigrants in Paris volunteered to fight in the armies of the Allies, and others moved to France to join them. But most of the Bolshevik, Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary leaders stuck to anti-war positions of one sort or another. Some were pacifists. Others did not reject war as such but wished to end this military conflict by means of pressure exerted by socialists of all belligerent countries – and many of these, including the Menshevik Yuli Martov, felt that in Russia’s case this would still have to involve the wartime overthrow of the Romanovs.
Lenin: A Biography Page 30