Yet, while Lenin was castigating Stalin for a betrayal of internationalist principles, he was quietly being criticised by prominent German communists for the same sin. The history of Germany in the past couple of years had taught Lenin not to exaggerate the independent potential of the German political far left. The German Communist Party had been formed at the very end of 1918, and its hold on the German working class was weak. For this reason it could not be assumed that the Red Army’s arrival in Berlin would be sufficient to touch off a successful socialist insurrection. Lenin had a cunning strategic ploy to hand. According to him, Germany had been reduced to colonial status in all but name by the Treaty of Versailles. It was therefore appropriate for the German Communist Party to seek allies for a war of national liberation from the Anglo-French yoke. Among such allies, none would be more effective than the Freikorps and other military units on the political far right. Such an unholy partnership would have as its objective to overturn Versailles. This would in turn disturb the political equilibrium in the states of the victorious Allies. In the ensuing chaos the German Communist Party would seize its chance to take on the German far right in the continent’s supreme political struggle.
For Lenin, this recommendation was mere common sense. Politicians had to be flexible in pursuit of their strategic objectives. He failed to comprehend the negative response he obtained from the German comrades. He should have done. They had become communists in part because they were copying him. He had turned intransigence into an art form. He had defied all public opinion in his country – conservative and liberal as well as socialist – in his preparations for seizing power in 1917. He had discerned that questions of ideological principle were at stake when his adversaries saw only minor practical matters. He had taught that Marxists should hold fast to Marxist orthodoxy. Now this same Lenin, their revolutionary model, was telling them to link arms not even with fellow socialists but with the proponents of the darkest political reaction.
While all this was happening, a terrible event occurred in Lenin’s personal life. Inessa Armand had returned from her Red Cross mission to France and had fallen ill. Lenin wrote her a note:7
Dear Friend,
Please write a note to say what’s up with you. These are foul times: typhoid, influenza, Spanish ’flu, cholera.
I’ve only just got out of bed and am not going out. Nadya has a temperature of 39° and she’s asked to see you.
What’s your temperature?
Don’t you need something to make yourself better? I really ask you to write frankly.
Get better!
Yours,
Lenin
Despite the chatty style, he preserved an emotional distance by addressing her with the polite Russian vy rather than the familiar ty; and he can hardly have been trying to conduct a secret affair with her because he mentioned that his wife Nadya wanted Inessa to visit her. The ties between Lenin and Inessa were close, but they were not of the same nature as in Paris in 1912. Nadya by contrast seemed to have gained in influence over him. Alexandra Kollontai, whose novel The Love of Worker Bees was an allegory of the Lenin-Nadya-Inessa triangle in Paris in 1911–12, noted in her 1920 diary how ‘he takes great notice of her’.8
As for Lenin, he was bossy towards Inessa but there was an endearing ineffectuality about his efforts. When he wrote again to her, he tried to stop her venturing outside in the cold. He knew that she would ignore his instructions and directed her to tell her children to command her not to go outside in the freezing cold. It was Lenin’s habit to supervise the medical treatment of his associates, but there is no parallel to his detailed intervention in the case of Inessa.
She recovered from this bout of ill health and agreed to act as interpreter at the Second Comintern Congress in July. This was very intensive work and – coming on top of disputes with colleagues such as Alexandra Kollontai – induced a relapse. In truth Inessa was exhausted, and Lenin advised her to go to a sanatorium. He suggested that, if she insisted on going abroad, she should avoid France for fear she might be arrested. In Lenin’s opinion it would be better if she made for Norway or Holland. Better still, he suggested, she might try the Caucasus, and he promised to make dispositions for a pleasant period of care for her there. To cheer her up he mentioned that he had been hunting in the woods near the old Armand estate outside Moscow, and that the peasants had talked nostalgically about the days before 1917 when there had been real ‘order’. Inessa agreed to go to the spa town Kislovodsk in the mountains of the north Caucasus. Lenin gave orders that she and her son Andrei – then a lad of sixteen – should be well looked after. But the area was affected by a cholera epidemic; it also had not yet been pacified by the Red Army. Inadvertently Lenin had sent his former lover into mortal danger. First she caught cholera. Then the order was given for people to be evacuated to Nalchik. Inessa’s health was finally broken, and she perished on 24 September 1920.
Knowing she was dying, she had put down her last thoughts in a presentational notebook given to her at the Comintern Congress. They make for poignant reading. Inessa wrote on 1 September:9
Will this feeling of inner death ever pass away? I’ve reached the point where I find it strange that other people laugh so easily and that they obviously get pleasure from talking. I now laugh and smile almost never because an inner joy induces this in me but because it’s sometimes necessary to smile. I’m also struck by my present indifference to nature. And yet it used to make me tremble so strongly. And how little I’ve now begun to love people. Previously I would approach each person with warm feelings. Now I’m indifferent to everyone. But the main thing is that I’m bored with almost everyone. Hot feelings have remained only for my children and for V.I.
There was only one person she could have referred to as ‘V.I.’, and that was Vladimir Ilich Lenin. Inessa continued:10
It’s as if my heart has died in all other respects. As if, having devoted all my strength and all my passion to V.I. and to the cause of our [political] work, all sources of love and sympathy for people – to whom it once was so rich – have been exhausted. With the exception of V.I. and my children I no longer have any personal relationships with people except purely practical relationships.
Inessa called herself a ‘living corpse’; it was not only cholera but also a broken heart that did for her. Ten days later she contemplated the meaning of her life:11
For romantics, love holds the first place in a person’s life. It’s higher than anything else. And until recently I was far nearer to such a notion than I am now. True, for me love was never the only thing. Alongside love there was public activity. And both in my life and in the past there have been not a few instances where I’ve sacrificed my happiness and my love for the good of the cause. But previously it used to seem that love had a significance equal to that of public activity. Now it’s not like that. The significance of love in comparison with public activity becomes quite small and cannot bear comparison with public activity.
On the point of death, she tried to persuade herself that her work for the Revolution meant more to her than the man she loved.
The matter-of-fact official telegram to Lenin cut him to the quick: ‘It has been impossible to save Comrade Inessa Armand who was ill with cholera. She died on 24 September. We are accompanying the body to Moscow.’12 Lenin had been responsible for her convalescing in the chaotic Caucasus rather than in France, and now she had perished there. It took a fortnight before her body was brought back in a leaden coffin to Moscow. The train arrived in the early hours of 11 October, and the cortège made its way from the railway station after dawn. Lenin and Nadezhda Konstantinovna had been waiting at the station. As the cortège neared the capital’s centre, Lenin was obviously overcome with grief. Nadezhda Konstantinovna understood, and gripped him by the arm to hold him up. No one could forget the pitiful condition of the man. The young Bolshevik Yelizaveta Drabkina watched the horse-drawn hearse and the draped black flag: ‘There was something inexpressibly sad about his droopi
ng shoulders and lowly bent head.’13 Angelica Balabanova had the same impression at the funeral: ‘I never saw such torment; I never saw any human being so completely absorbed by sorrow, by the effort to keep it for himself, to guard it against the attention of others, as if that awareness could have diminished the intensity of his feeling.’14
Lenin did not record his feelings on paper. He had given up many pleasures for ‘the cause’: material comfort, profession, chess, classical music and cycling. He had avoided a permanent association with Inessa: the Revolution for him was always dominant. But he grieved deeply when her corpse was delivered from Nalchik.
By his side were friends and associates who thought that he was never the same again. Some said that he would have lived longer had he not lost Inessa. Shaken he certainly was; yet he had not lost the power of his will. Since 1912 he had accustomed himself to living apart from her. He could also cope with the froideurs of Nadya. Throughout his career he displayed an ability to be undistracted by matters of the heart. Usually it had been his physical health or his polemics that had thrown him off balance. ‘Romance’ did not get in his way, and Inessa’s death did not destroy him. If his external reaction is any guide, he was hurt worse than by any other event since his brother’s execution in 1887. But he quickly recovered. He had an enormous capacity for emotional self-suppression. He loved politics and lived for the political life. He was fixated by the importance of ideas. He was not a robot and did not deny, at least to himself, the benefits of a deep relationship; but personal love – the love of a man for a woman – was secondary to him, and, if politics so demanded, he thought he could survive without it.
Inessa’s funeral was held on 12 October; her corpse was buried alongside other deceased Bolshevik heroes beneath the Kremlin Wall. A fortnight earlier Lenin had faced the Ninth Party Conference. The invasion of Poland had turned into a rout. The economy was a shambles. There were industrial strikes and peasant rebellions, and even in the armed forces there were disturbances. The Bolshevik party was restive, and its internal factions – the Democratic Centralists and the Workers’ Opposition – relished the chance to attack the Politburo behind the closed doors of the Conference. Agreement about what should be party policy was absent. But there was a widespread feeling among Bolsheviks that something had gone terribly wrong in the Soviet state. It was not in Lenin’s nature to walk away from a dispute: he raged to give the critics a taste of their own medicine.
Thus although he straightway confessed that a catastrophe had indeed occurred in Poland, he fudged the question of responsibility. He spoke of the approval given by the Central Committee to the invasion of ‘ethnographically’ Polish territory; and then he admitted that the party leadership had not taken a formal decision on the matter:15
When this resolution was placed before the Central Committee, there was no failure to understand the somewhat awkward character of this resolution in the sense that it appeared impossible to vote against it. How could it be possible to vote against assistance for sovietisation?
The question was rhetorical; it was meant to embarrass an audience of zealots into recognising that they, too, would have voted for the invasion of Poland. But this was a sleight of argument. Lenin had been almost alone in pressing central party colleagues into the invasion; and he now wanted to evade personal responsibility. He deliberately let his analysis wander a bit, too, when he tried to define the mistake that had been made. Was it political or strategic? He addressed the distinction, but avoided giving his conclusion. He also revealed that, on balance, the Central Committee had decided not to set up an enquiry into the military; but again he refrained from explaining why. Throughout the report he touched on sensitive points only glancingly:
We in the Politburo during the Civil War had to decide purely strategic questions – questions that were so purely strategic that we looked at each other with smiles on our faces: how was it that we’d turned into strategists? Among us there were people who had not seen war even from a far distance.
Was this an oblique appeal for sympathy? Certainly no one in the Politburo had less experience of warfare than Lenin. Be that as it may, Lenin was claiming that he had performed pretty well – for a neophyte military planner – against Kolchak, Denikin and Yudenich. But at no point in his report – and this is the crux of the matter – did Lenin implicate himself personally in the disaster outside Warsaw. He acknowledged a mistake only on behalf of the ‘Central Committee’.
Lenin said not a word against the use of ‘revolutionary war’. But steadily he was coming round to the opinion that the Red Army’s bayonets should remain sheathed for the foreseeable future. The logical moment had therefore arrived to reconsider policies in general. The Party Conference, however, gave no opportunity for this. The delegates had come to Moscow not to debate the whole range of options but to give the central party leaders a grilling. The conception and realisation of the Warsaw campaign was the object of harsh criticism. Here Lenin had a lucky break. The rivalry between Trotski and Stalin spilled out into vehement open dispute when Trotski denounced Stalin for misleading the Central Committee about the prospect of military victory. There had been no internal party spat of so personal a nature since the searing disagreements of 1903–4. Politburo member attacked Politburo member. Stalin, bristling at his humiliation, demanded the right of reply. Lenin decided to take sides; perhaps he genuinely agreed with Trotski, but in any case he could see that he was being offered a chance to help pick a scapegoat. The result was an unseemly row. But Lenin emerged unscathed. Indeed by the end of the Conference he was the only Politburo member not to have annoyed a large number of the angry delegates.
The other great dispute was focussed on the party itself. The Democratic Centralists and the Workers’ Opposition condemned the internal practices of party life as bureaucratic and over-centralised. The Workers’ Opposition added that party officialdom had opened a rift between the central leaders and the rank-and-file members and that the working class as a whole had lost faith in the party. Within the Central Committee there were figures who agreed with much of the analysis. Among them was Central Committee Secretary Yevgeni Preobrazhenski. But it was Zinoviev, despite being a very authoritarian leader in Petrograd, who spoke on the Central Committee’s behalf in favour of internal party reform. His sincerity was cast in doubt before the Conference’s exhausted participants agreed to give the central party leaders the benefit of the doubt. Once again Lenin, who was just as responsible as any Politburo member for the objectionable organisational phenomena, escaped without being blamed.
But the question what to do about the country’s condition remained an acute one. To the outside world – and the outside world in this instance included all mortals not belonging to the central leadership of the Bolshevik party and Soviet government – it appeared that Lenin was still keen to adhere to every last detail of the policies developed in the Civil War. This is in many ways true. But the qualification must be added that he was never unidimensional in his planning. He had always wanted to sign treaties with foreign capitalist states as a means of breaking up the international phalanx ranged against Soviet Russia. Kamenev had been in London negotiating a resumption of trade at the very time when the Red Army was moving upon Warsaw. Now that he was balked in Poland, he aimed to develop commercial and diplomatic relations still further. Furthermore, Lenin in spring 1918 had declared that if Russian economic reconstruction could not be undertaken in alliance with a Soviet Germany, it should be attempted with aid from capitalist Germany. He resumed this idea in 1920 and wanted to sign concession agreements with German entrepreneurs, even to the point of granting them land in Russia where they could raise productivity by the introduction of advanced capitalist farming techniques. He also wished to tempt the Nobel oil company back to involvement in oil-extraction in Azerbaijan.
At home, too, he had some modifications he wanted to make. He recognised that violent seizure of grain from peasants by the state authorities was extremely unpopular in t
he countryside; and although he would not accept Trotski’s proposal for a limited reversion to the legal private sale of foodstuffs by the peasantry, he wanted to coax the rural households to sow more grain. For this purpose he contemplated giving material rewards to peasants whose production could be shown to have increased.
This was not a break in the wall of the party’s wartime economic policy; but many fellow Bolshevik leaders in the provinces were aghast. What, they asked, was a proposal for material reward except a backdoor method of reintroducing capitalism? And what on earth did Lenin think he was up to with his welcome for German farmers and industrialists, British timber concessionaires and – worst of all – the Nobel oil company? Had he taken leave of his senses? Could he not see that his various projects, taken together, amounted to an economic Brest-Litovsk? As the year 1920 drew to a close, there was therefore little reason for Lenin to celebrate. He had won the Russian Civil War only to lose the unnecessary Polish–Soviet War. He had become so distracted by military planning that he had ignored unrest in his party; and industrial strikes and peasant revolts were occurring with ever greater intensity across the country. His reputation for careful management of the central political machinery was going into decline. His health, never very good for decades, was decidedly shaky. He had suffered, too, the loss of the woman he had loved, Inessa Armand. And he could not even tell himself at New Year 1921 that the October Revolution had been made secure. On the contrary, honesty permitted him only to say that things were going to get worse before they could conceivably get better.
Lenin: A Biography Page 55