Lenin’s position was at the extremity of Russian Marxism. Before reaching Switzerland he had drafted a brief article, ‘The Tasks of Revolutionary Social-Democracy in the European War’. He agreed with Martov that the military conflict in Europe was ‘bourgeois, imperialist, dynastic’, and both he and Martov contended that the German Social-Democratic Party had behaved disgustingly. But Lenin had a preoccupation of his own: ‘From the viewpoint of the working class and the toiling masses of all the peoples of Russia, the lesser evil would be the defeat of the tsarist monarchy.’6 Martov condemned the ‘imperialist’ governments indiscriminately. For Lenin, this was not enough. However conditionally, he wanted Marxists to welcome German success at war with Russia. This was extraordinary for a man who was under no intellectual compulsion to prefer one set of ‘imperialists’ over another.
His language was intemperate. In a notorious phrase he referred to the Russian Imperial armies as ‘Black Hundred gangs’. The Black Hundreds were groups of reactionary thugs who organised pogroms of Jews in the Russian Empire before the war. Now Lenin was casually describing the workers and peasants conscripted into the armed forces as anti-semites. Bolshevism’s strategy of revolution, as formulated by Lenin since 1905, called for a ‘class alliance’ of the working class and the peasantry. Yet from wartime Switzerland he was dismissing both groups in blistering terms. He did not get away with this in meetings he held with fellow Bolshevik emigrants. The first occurred in woods outside Bern so as to avoid giving annoyance to the Swiss authorities, who wanted to keep the country distant from the politics of the war. One of the Bolshevik State Duma deputies, F. N. Samoilov, was present; and when he went back to Russia, he carried with him news of the Bolshevik discussion. Lenin then travelled to address other Bolshevik groups in Geneva and Zurich. When Karpinski encountered him, a row ensued about the contents and language of ‘The Tasks of Revolutionary Social-Democracy in the European War’.
Lenin had to back down, at least a little. He continued to express a preference for Russia to be defeated, but concurrently he insisted that socialists of other countries should likewise campaign for their own respective governments to lose the war. Thereby he displayed a negligible understanding of how wars are fought. Despite claiming to be putting forward ‘scientific’, ‘practical’ policies, he never explained how it would be possible for all the belligerent states simultaneously to go down to defeat. Unconsciously he had omitted to remove the national ingredient of his recommendations. He had always asserted that his ideas had a European nucleus, but he had always been a very Russian European. Whatever was happening in Europe, he wanted Nicholas II and his regime to be trampled down.
Instead he concentrated on urging that the onset of war in Europe had brought the era of European socialist revolution nearer. He had always taken a European perspective on revolutionary strategy. While being bitterly disappointed with the German Social-Democratic Party since August 1914, he did not lose faith in the imminence of capitalism’s demise. The duty of socialist parties was to rally support among the working class for revolutionary political struggle. The fact that most socialist leaders in most countries had ceased to oppose ‘chauvinism’ was neither here nor there: Lenin contended that the conditions were ripe for workers to be turned towards revolution by even quite small groups of determined, experienced revolutionaries such as the Bolsheviks. The European socialist revolution could therefore be brought about in wartime. He introduced a new slogan: European Civil War! Lenin proposed – again without elaborating his idea in any detail – that the urgent assignment was to turn the ‘imperialist war’ into a ‘civil war’ across the continent. The working classes of all European countries should unite in the fight against the concert of the continent’s middle classes. Class struggle, not peace among the classes, was what was needed in that time of war.
His confidence proceeded from calculations he had expressed in a letter to Maxim Gorki in 1913: ‘War between Austria and Russia would be a very useful thing for the revolution (in the whole of eastern Europe), but it’s scarcely likely that Franz Joseph [the Hapsburg Emperor] and Nikolasha [Lenin’s nickname for the Russian Emperor] would grant us this pleasure.’7 The governments of the European great powers had done the improbable: Lenin’s joy was unbounded.
His indifference to the scale of the human suffering was colossal. In this he was not totally unusual; one of the reasons why the war took so long to evoke popular resentment in the combatant counties was that there was little knowledge of conditions on the western and eastern fronts. Not only the generals of both the Allies and the Central Powers but also most ordinary people were unaware that so much carnage was occurring in the name of national defence. Lenin, too, was not closely acquainted with the military situation. But being in neutral Switzerland, where newspaper reports were freer than elsewhere in Europe, he surely understood that this was a war grossly more destructive than others in recent European history. On the trip from Biały Dunajec he had witnessed the Kraków hospitals crammed with soldier casualties. But he did not refer to the subject. Such commentary would have seemed unnecessarily sentimental to him. Nevertheless it is striking that when he talked about ‘war’, ‘struggle’ and ‘conflict’ he was usually referring to factional campaign inside his party rather than to the Great War. Internal Marxist politics remained his obsession.
It is not as if he had no access to writings by fellow Marxists who emphasised the ghastliness of conditions on the two fronts. Many such as Martov and Axelrod understood that the war was like industrialised slaughter and that the moral and political imperative of socialism was to stop it. But Lenin had been unmoved by the Volga famine of 1891–2. He had cared little when the number of casualties had soared in the Russo-Japanese War in 1904–5. Eventually he met a couple of Russian soldiers in Switzerland who told him of their experiences; and he resumed contact by letter with Roman Malinovski after his capture as a soldier in the Russian Imperial armies by the Germans. He had the information. But he ignored it: he was impervious to the wreckage of lives at the front and at home that was being reported.
Lenin maintained this frigidity throughout the Great War; he hated letting what he called ‘sentimentality’ interfere with his political judgement. But this does not mean that he was happy with himself in broader ways. His internal life was frenetic as never before – and he had never been known as a calm fellow. He found it increasingly difficult to stay tranquil when challenged on the logic and practicality of his opinions. He was nervous and bad-tempered days before he was scheduled to give speeches to meetings that would be attended by people who were not Bolsheviks, and was not much more comfortable among members of the Bolshevik faction. The violence of his language shocked even his sister Anna: ‘I’m being terrorised by you: I have a fear of making any incautious sort of expression.’8 Alexander Shlyapnikov, the leader of the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee, told everyone in the faction that Lenin’s treatment of Bolshevik colleagues had gone beyond acceptable bounds.9 Anna Ulyanova agreed. This served only to infuriate Lenin, who brutally retorted that ‘she had never made sense in politics’.10 Anna, usually her brother’s admirer, drew the obvious conclusion that he was no longer entirely in control of himself. Lenin was becoming a little unhinged.
The years of traipsing from one European city to another were taking their toll. After years of declining health, Nadya’s mother died in Bern in March 1915. She had inherited a large sum of money on the death of her sister, and – as Nadya noted – had thereby become a ‘capitalist’.11 Yelizaveta Vasilevna had been one of the few people who had been willing to speak frankly to her son-in-law. But they had got along pretty well and naturally Nadya was stricken with grief.
But what was wearing down Lenin to an even greater extent was the ceaseless writing and organising against every Marxist leader on the face of the continent:12
This, then, is my destiny. One fighting campaign after another – against political imbecilities, vulgarities, opportunism, etc. This has be
en going on since 1893. And this is the reason for the hatred shown by the philistines. Ah well, I still wouldn’t swap this destiny for ‘peace’ with the philistines.
It was a revealing comment. (Significantly, he made it in a private letter to Inessa, the person before whom he had the habit of trying to justify himself.) Even iron Vladimir was capable of self-pity. But this extraordinary outburst must not overshadow the other important aspect: namely that, however much he felt sorry for himself, he still believed he was right in his struggle against what he saw – without a glimmer of doubt – as idiotic, vulgar and opportunist opponents. Yet photographs of him in the Great War show a man who looked older than his age. His haggard features and uncharacteristically puffed-out physique were signs of the turmoil within him. Lenin, the indefatigable pre-war factionalist, was becoming an exhausted force.
But that sense of his correctness saw him through. The moods of depression, bad as they were, were turned inside out as soon as he pondered the political ideas of his rivals; immediately he again became confident and militant. Lenin never questioned his own judgement or motives. He had ascertained the proper revolutionary line for the war. It was the only proper line, and that – in his estimation – ought to be the end of the matter: Marxists of Russia and the rest of Europe were at best misguided if they refused to follow his lead.
Apart from politics, his emotions were engaged only with the few people who were close to him. One was his mother. Her health had been poor for years, and he had been solicitous about her in letters both to her and to his sisters and brother. Her support for his career had been unfailing even though she did not display sympathy with his politics. For her, he and her other children were simply that: her children. Maria Alexandrovna believed they could do no wrong. When they ran into trouble with the authorities, she took their part and, whenever possible, went to live with them in exile. She would have done this for Vladimir if he had let her, but he wanted his freedom. He declined to enable her to accompany him into Siberia in 1897 and to attend his marriage in the following year, and there was never any question of her joining him in emigration. She had enjoyed taking a holiday with him in Brittany in 1903 and journeying across the Baltic to see him in Stockholm in 1910. Unlike his sister Maria, she had not ‘shrieked with pleasure’ on seeing him at last, but she loved him. Her way of showing this was to buy him a blanket and to urge him to eat more: he was much too thin for her liking.13
The warmth between mother and son lasted through to her death at the age of eighty-one in July 1916. When he wrote to Inessa Armand in July 1914 about the ‘two or three women’ to whom he was dedicated, Maria Alexandrovna must have been one of those he had in mind. Naturally the news of her death made him distraught. Yet the Ulyanovs were reluctant to display emotions about personal matters and there is no record that Vladimir was any different on this occasion. But his mother was one of the props he used to cope with all the pressures on him. He could not even attend her funeral. Instead it was her son-in-law Mark Yelizarov and family friend Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich who carried her coffin to her grave in the Lutheran Cemetery in the Volkovo Cemetery in St Petersburg.
In the same years he was also trying to deal with the emotional debris of his relationship with Inessa Armand. Letters continued to pass between them and she helped the Lenins with the arrangements for their trip from Galicia. In the course of the war she had moved from Paris to Switzerland, eventually settling in Les Avants in the mountains above Montreux. Soon, at Lenin’s insistence, she herself shifted house to Bern to be near him. The threesome of previous years – Lenin, Nadya and Inessa – resumed their habit of going for long walks in the countryside together. In Nadya’s recollection, they each had an idiosyncratic way of passing the time when they sat down. While Lenin buffed up the language of his speeches, Nadya taught herself Italian and Inessa did some sewing and read works on feminism.14 Inessa’s mind was exercised in particular by the question of women’s rights. In January 1915 she went off by herself to the mountains, and jotted down the outline of a booklet which she sent to Lenin. Only one aspect prompted a reaction. This was Inessa’s demand for ‘freedom of love’. Lenin sputtered back that such a demand was not a ‘proletarian’ but a ‘bourgeois’ one. He called on her to take note of ‘the objective logic of class relations in matters of love’, and then he signed off in his improbable English: ‘Friendly shake hands!’15
Lenin’s comment took some beating for sheer pomposity. Inessa sensed that the subtext of his criticism was his hostility to the idea that women should be given carte blanche to have affairs any time they wanted. She threw his words back at him, denying any such purpose and claiming that he was confusing ‘freedom of love’ with ‘freedom of adultery’. This stung Lenin into retorting: ‘And so it turns out that I am doing the identifying and that you are setting about scattering and destroying me.’16 It served him right. Lenin had been tactless in his first letter about her draft, and now she was paying him back. Surely she was also avenging herself for his decision to break off their relationship in mid-1912.
But he put up a fight. Inessa had written that ‘even a fleeting passion’ was ‘more poetic and cleaner’ than ‘kisses without love’ between man and wife. Lenin had a biting reply:17
Kisses without love between vulgar spouses are filthy. I agree. These need to be contrasted… with what?… It would seem: kisses with love. But you contrast ‘a fleeting (why a fleeting?) passion (why not love?) – and it comes out logically as if kisses without love (fleeting) are contrasted to marital kisses without love… This is odd.
It would have been odd if indeed Inessa had written about ‘freedom of love’ within the narrow framework of debate described by Lenin. By then, however, Lenin was out to defend himself not only in terms of social principles but also out of loyalty to Nadya. Implicitly he was denying that his marriage had anything ‘filthy’ about it. Nadya and he meant something to each other even though the marriage had gone through rough patches. In arguing against casual sexual pairings, moreover, Lenin was getting a bit of his own back. Inessa had not been known to deprive herself of intimate male companionship in her earlier life. By contrast Lenin was suggesting that a durable commitment was required.
He mastered his feelings to such an extent that he increased the amount of purely practical advice and instruction he felt able to give to Inessa. He no longer addressed her familiarly as ty but more formally as vy. He told her to get a house nearer to other faction members and to stop being such a recluse. It was almost a parental interest that he took in her condition. What, however, should we make of this? Inessa was still in love with him. But we can only guess at his feeling for her. A residue of their relationship must have lingered with him. Otherwise it is hard to understand his pained attempt to justify himself to her and to persuade her that his ideas were believable and honourable. But he also worked to keep her in his faction. In wartime, he was concentrating again on politics. He even wrote dreamily to Inessa herself about how he felt that he was ‘in love’ with Karl Marx. What more could he have done to shake her off emotionally?
Meanwhile he went on trying to win the support of the Bolshevik faction. His two policies on the preferability of Russia’s military defeat and on the need for ‘European Civil War’ lost him plenty of friends abroad. Only Nadezhda Konstantinovna and a few other Bolsheviks, including Zinoviev, stood by him; no one else among the émigrés felt really convinced by him. Often there were scandalous outbursts when he spoke in Swiss cities. On one occasion he took the opportunity to make an attack on Plekhanov in Lausanne in October 1914 by hiding his face at the back of the hall during Plekhanov’s address and then making a blistering attack on him as a ‘chauvinist’ who had parted for ever with Marxism.18 Many of Lenin’s associates were too much in awe of him to reject him entirely. But he was certainly short of friends. What irked him was his negligible influence in the Russian Empire. Galicia had offered him the regular conduit of letters and personal visits, and meetings of central party bodi
es were frequent. Nothing like this happened in Bern. The average letter took several weeks. The eastern front in the Great War cut a line along the north–south axis of the continent. In order to keep the faction abroad in contact with the faction in Russia, a tenuous linkage across Germany and Scandinavia was arranged – and Lenin had to give encouragement to all Bolsheviks so that they might go on working for the revolution.
Bolshevism was not exactly flourishing back in the Russian Empire. One of the reasons for this was that the Okhrana no longer protected leading Bolsheviks from arrest. Bolsheviks were the most bitter enemies not only of the Romanov dynasty but even of the state as a whole. The round-ups of Bolsheviks through the war was relentless. It was also effective. First of all the Bolshevik Duma deputies and their advisers were put on trial. Among the advisers was Lev Kamenev, who angered Lenin by disowning the policy of ‘defeatism’ he had prescribed. Then there were the recurrent arrests of Bolshevik committees and groups in Petrograd (as the capital was renamed because St Petersburg sounded too German) and the provinces. There was the complete prohibition of legal Bolshevik newspapers; difficulties existed for Bolsheviks in getting their articles published in journals and magazines even when oblique critical language was employed. Strikes broke out in large industrial cities in late 1915, but the Okhrana quickly repressed the trouble and pulled a further cohort of Bolshevik activists into prison before dispatching them to Siberia. The Russian Bureau re-established itself in September 1915 under Alexander Shlyapnikov; the other members were G. I. Osipov, E. A. Dunaev and Anna Ulyanova: none of them had previous experience of factional leadership.
Lenin: A Biography Page 31