On 4 June 1921 the Politburo instructed him to take a month’s holiday,2 and obediently Lenin moved out to Gorki. He had permission to return to Moscow only for a few sessions of the Third Comintern Congress. But the stark reality, which he withheld from all but the inner cabal of the central party leadership, was that he was seriously ill. On 8 July he himself asked for an easing of his workload over the following month.3 The request was granted. On 9 August, his colleagues took the initiative and ordered him to extend his leave. Lenin was frank: ‘I can’t work.’4 Medical examinations followed and the various specialists prescribed a lengthy abstention from work. But Lenin, who until then had been uncharacteristically docile, argued with his doctors and secured their consent to reduce but not eliminate his public activity. He interpreted this irresponsibly. He continued to chair the Politburo, Central Committee and Sovnarkom; he also appeared at the Congress of Soviets in December.
Meanwhile he moved from one former estate mansion to another in the Moscow countryside before settling at Gorki in the ‘Big House’, where rooms were being prepared for him. The Gorki mansion had been built in the eighteenth century at the height of the provincial gentry’s passion for building splendid houses for themselves on their estates. It had been renovated in 1910 by the new owners, General and Mrs Reinbot; it therefore, unlike most such estate houses, already had central heating and electricity. A winter garden had also been added before the Great War. But the architectural beauty had been preserved. The classical façade was graced by six white columns. Inside the rooms had generous high ceilings and comfortable, well-maintained furniture. With its two storeys and spacious rooms it afforded an environment of ease. Outside there were wooded parklands where rabbits were plentiful among the birches. There was also a neat little pond where the old owners had fished. Mushrooms grew abundantly in season. Immediately to the south of the mansion there flowed the river Pakhra. The air around Gorki, which is set on high ground, was clean and tranquil. Lenin had chosen a splendid place for his convalescence.
He was joined at weekends by Nadezhda Konstantinovna and Maria Ilinichna. Determined to establish a working environment for himself, he took their Kremlin housemaid Sasha with him.5 He gave instructions for an additional telephone line to be connected to nearby Podolsk so that he could be sure of instant communication with the Kremlin. The bookcases in the drawing room were stocked with four hundred books for his ready reference – life would not be worth living without books.6 Then Stepan Gil brought out a Rolls-Royce saloon car and stationed it in the garage to the side of the house. This splendid vehicle, gleaming and light-grey, had been had been bought in London on Sovnarkom’s behalf by Foreign Trade People’s Commissar Leonid Krasin. Unfortunately the Rolls-Royce was unusable in the winter months and Lenin permitted it to be adapted for snowy conditions. This involved an act of industrial vandalism. The wheels of the vehicle were removed, and huge skis were fixed to the front of the chassis and caterpillar tracks to the back. This would enable his chauffeur to negotiate the winding path to the sanatorium without getting stuck in snowdrifts. Mr Rolls and Mr Royce would hardly have approved.
Lenin was more fastidious as a resident of the Big House itself. He stopped the servants from removing the dust covers from the furniture since he intended, at the end of his convalescence, to leave things exactly as he had found them. Such restraint was in contrast with his attempt in 1918 to light a fire in the first-floor grate as he had done in London exile in Mrs Yeo’s house in Holford Square.7 The chimneys at Gorki had not been designed for this purpose, and the result was a blaze that would have burned down the mansion if his bodyguards had not moved swiftly to put it out.
On normal days, in any case, Lenin did not like the temperature too warm. He expected his doctors too to be hardy types; the psychiatrist Professor Viktor Osipov was disconcerted to find that Lenin had ordered that the temperature should rise no higher than 15° centigrade.8 But Osipov knew better than to complain: he had only just been released from the custody of the Cheka.9 One day he was about to be tried, and perhaps shot, as a counter-revolutionary agent, the next he was among the chief doctors attending to the Revolution’s leader. Faced with the problem of Lenin’s illness, the Politburo had had to take a more pragmatic approach to suspected ‘enemies of the people’. Only doctors could cure patients; and anyway the evidence against Osipov was flimsy in the extreme. People’s Commissar of Health Nikolai Semashko took advice as to who were the best specialists available. Money was no obstacle to attracting foreigners to join the quest to cure the ailing Lenin. Thus it came about that a group of German professors were invited to join Osipov and other distinguished Russian doctors to diagnose what was wrong and restore him to full physical fitness.
The patient’s workload since 1917 was making itself felt, and he had been foolish in not lowering it drastically in the second half of 1921. Apart from brief periods of convalescence, he had not been able to take the lengthy summer holidays he had enjoyed as an emigrant. His body and mind cried out for a rest. He was becoming frantic, and did not know whom to turn to. His experience with Russian doctors, except for his brother Dmitri, had bred mistrust, and the German doctors fetched at considerable expense by the People’s Commissariat of Health had yet to agree on a diagnosis. (In fact they never did.) And all the time Lenin’s condition was worsening. But one thing hurt him more than any physical pain he was suffering; this was that for the first time in his life he was losing the will to work. He got up some mornings and did not care if he looked at his papers or not.10 This was beyond his understanding. He could scarcely believe it was happening to him. Purposefulness had been one of his cardinal characteristics since childhood. It was an unforgivable sin in the Ulyanov family to fail to get on with one’s appointed tasks. To fail to want to get on with them was not just unforgivable: it was unimaginable.
Lenin’s father Ilya Nikolaevich had driven himself to physical exhaustion while setting up a network of primary schools in Simbirsk province. His brother Alexander omitted to come home for the Christmas vacations from St Petersburg University so as to be able to revise for his biology exams. Nikolai Chernyshevski devoted himself to research on Russian sociology and economics while serving out years of administrative exile in Siberia. Karl Marx wrote volumes of general social theory in London. These heroes of Lenin had worked till they dropped dead. Lenin had been like them. But suddenly, in his fifty-second year, he no longer felt an automatic compulsion to go on working.
No one could explain what was going wrong. He was willing to talk about his listlessness to his doctor brother and to the specialists who tended to him. Listlessness was one of two new problems. But it was not until he had a consultation with Professor Liveri Darkevich on 4 March 1922 that he confided in him about the second. Darkevich, a gifted listener as well as a neuropathologist, elicited from him the statement that for some time he had been suffering from periodic ‘obsessions’. We still do not know the exact content of the obsessions, but clearly Lenin wondered whether he was going mad. They had difficulty in discussing the symptoms in Russian, but in French they could communicate since Lenin was more accustomed to European-language medical textbooks and terminology. He was in the pit of despair. The synthesis of insomnia, headache, heart seizure, listlessness, back pain and obsessiveness had produced a mood of deep pessimism. No one knew about this. He had always been secretive about his illnesses, except when he spoke to family members – and even with them he was not entirely forthcoming. But now, he recognised, something worse was happening to him than he had previously experienced. He was beginning, quietly, to panic and his thoughts turned to suicide.
He was frightened of dying the lingering death of paralysis; and for a long time he had been impressed by the similar decision in favour of self-destruction taken by Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue in 1911.11 For this purpose he turned to the steeliest of his comrades: Stalin. He could not depend on relatives to put aside their emotional ties. Nor would other comrades have the necessary hardness
of heart. But Lenin extracted from Stalin a promise to give him poison at whatever time he should request it. He planned to be ready when, in his judgement, the moment came.12
This, however, he kept secret from the medical professionals whom he consulted in these months; he feared that they would interfere with his scheme. Nevertheless he trusted them with some of his other ruminations. This is not an unusual phenomenon, especially for people who have no religious belief and therefore no priest, minister or equivalent person to whom they can unburden themselves. Lenin, once he had decided he could trust Darkevich, blurted out:13
Every revolutionary, having reached the age of fifty, must be ready to leave for the side of the stage. [I] can no longer continue to work as before; it’s not only hard for [me] to carry out the duties of two people but it’s hard too to do just my own work; [I] don’t have the strength to answer for my own affairs. It’s this loss of working capacity, this fatal loss came up on me unnoticed: I’ve altogether stopped being a working person [rabotnik].
Lenin felt very depressed, saying that ‘his song was sung, his role played out’ and that he must hand on his post to someone else. He was also in intense pain: ‘A night doomed to insomnia is a truly terrible thing when you have to be ready in the morning for work, work, work without end…’14
Maria Ilinichna and the Ulyanovs’ family doctor Professor Gete were present and heard Lenin pour his heart out.15 Lenin’s choice of his sister rather than Nadezhda Konstantinovna to accompany him was significant; the coolness between him and his wife persisted. The consultation went on for four hours, and, when it was over, Darkevich gave his conclusions. He could find no ‘organic disease of the brain’ but rather a cerebral exhaustion. His proposed course of treatment was simple. Lenin needed a rest from intellectual and political work; he should take a break in the Moscow countryside and, if he liked, he could go hunting. He should give no more than one speech per month. Lenin was pleased. The shadow of an early death had passed from him. Maria Ilinichna thanked Darkevich, telling him that her brother had become ‘a totally different person’.16 In refreshed mood he kept up residence in the mansion at Gorki. Occasionally – for he would not keep strictly to Darkevich’s regime – he travelled back to Moscow. His zest was too much for his chauffeur Stepan Gil. Lenin wanted the Rolls-Royce to go faster whether or not there were ruts in the road. Gil obeyed, but drew the line at endangering animal life. Lenin upbraided him for unnecessary ‘reverence’ for roadside chickens. This was yet another of those displays of unfeelingness than caused the official censors to withhold any reference to the conversations between Gil and Lenin for nearly seventy years.
He appeared to be following his doctors’ advice. In 1921 there had been some discussion that Lenin might represent the Soviet government at the international conference planned for the following year at Genoa in northern Italy. Foreign newspapermen were already describing such a trip as an historic occasion. Outside Russia, hardly anyone knew much about Lenin. The British writers H. G. Wells and Bertrand Russell had interviewed him in 1920; their accounts left readers in no doubt that he was an extraordinary man and politician. Several very scurrilous books were also being published on contemporary Russia, and all had sections on Lenin. He was the object of the world’s fascination. Excitement at the possibility of glimpsing him was mounting, and for a while the official authorities in Moscow did nothing to quieten the speculation. Even if he had been fit, however, he was unlikely to have travelled. His own People’s Commissar of Foreign Trade Leonid Krasin warned him that Russian monarchists or Socialist-Revolutionaries might try to assassinate him. Lenin in response wrote from Gorki asking the Politburo to prohibit not only himself but also Trotski and Zinoviev from going. The risks were too great.17
It was decided at the last moment that Georgi Chicherin the Foreign Affairs People’s Commissar would represent the Soviet government. Lenin suspected that the Politburo in his absence might not be aware that Chicherin needed tight control from Moscow. Essentially Lenin had already rejected the possibility of a comprehensive international settlement in Genoa. His reasons were twofold: firstly, he did not want to have his hands tied in relation to internal economic policy, and he knew that this would be the price paid for any deal with the United Kingdom and France; secondly, he had no intention of consolidating the territorial and political arrangements imposed on Europe by the Treaties of Versailles, St Germain and Trianon. To Lenin it seemed obvious that Soviet long-term interests lay in creating divisions among the various capitalist countries. He got the Politburo to order Chicherin to lend priority not to a comprehensive post-war treaty but to a separate commercial and diplomatic treaty with Germany. On 16 April the Soviet delegation under Chicherin obtained what the Politburo wanted when the negotiations with the Germans at Rapallo, nineteen miles from Genoa, yielded a separate treaty. It was a triumph for Leninist diplomatic strategy. The way was clear for trade to be boosted with the other vanquished great power on the continent without ultimately forswearing the possibility of ‘European socialist Revolution’.
Chicherin had jibbed at his instructions and Lenin, with the bad temper that characterised him in these months, suggested that he had gone off his head and needed to be found a place in a lunatic asylum. This proposal was not taken seriously by the Politburo. Lenin frequently suggested that one or other of his comrades should be constrained to take a period of convalescence. To question a comrade’s mental health, however, was of a different order of significance. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that, in offering a long-range diagnosis of poor Chicherin, Lenin was really expressing fears for himself. As he had said to Professor Darkevich, he felt at times that he was going mad.
The negotiations in Genoa and Rapallo were not the sole topic that undammed a torrent of rage from Lenin. He was splenetic about internal politics. Terror, he was still insisting, was integral to state policy. The Soviet regime simply could not afford to abandon it even under the New Economic Policy. Quite the opposite: Lenin asserted that the economic retreat would succeed only if the maximum of political discipline and control was maintained. Ostensibly the secret police was to be restricted in its operations, and the Extraordinary Commission was replaced by the Main Political Administration (GPU). Kamenev was pushing for justice to be meted out on a more formal, open basis. But, as soon as he heard of any potential weakening of the party’s line, Lenin angrily intervened. ‘Bandits’ should be shot on the spot. ‘The speed and force of the repressions’ should be intensified. Any constitutional or legislative reforms should be formulated in such a fashion as to sanction the possibility of the death penalty being applied in cases involving ‘all aspects of activity by Mensheviks, S[ocialist]-R[evolutionaries], etc.’ He gave a warning that the regime should not be ‘caught napping by a second Kronstadt’. The Civil Code, he suggested, should enshrine ‘the essence and justification of terror’.
The peasant rebels of Tambov and elsewhere were still being attacked and quelled by the Red Army. In Georgia, the remnants of national resistance to the communists continued to be forcibly eliminated. Arrests of known officers of the White armies were still being carried out. Repression was conducted in abundance in the lands of ‘Soviet power’. But Lenin wanted the scope widened. In the first months of 1922 he advocated the final eradication of all remaining threats, real or potential, to his state. For Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks he demanded the staging of show trials followed by exemplary severe punishment. For the Russian Orthodox Church hierarchy, or for a substantial section of it, he demanded the same. For other hostile groups he was a little less harsh. But only a little. Anti-Bolshevik figures in the intelligentsia should be exiled or deported; and if Shlyapnikov and the Workers’ Oppositionists in his own party refused to given up their collective criticism of the Politburo, they should be thrown out of the party.
His interventions were extremely ill tempered. Bukharin and Radek on a visit to Berlin saw fit to promise that if Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks were put on
trial they would not be executed. Lenin castigated them in Pravda for having made unnecessary concessions. When he demanded repression, he meant repression. He took an interest in every possible detail. Lists of victims were scrutinised, and his judgements were crudely punitive. A book edited by the Christian socialist philosopher and former Marxist Nikolai Berdyaev was dismissed as the literary front for ‘a White Guard organisation’.18 When he turned his attention to show trials of Orthodox Church bishops and priests, he went further: ‘The greater the number of the representatives of reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in shooting on this premise, the better. It is precisely now that we ought to deliver a lesson to this public so that they won’t dare even think about resistance for several decades.’ This was Lenin writing confidentially on the strategy to be adopted in order that no Soviet citizen should be under the illusion that the communist order might be induced to moderate its ferocious ideology. Alternative ways of organising society had to be extirpated. Non-Bolshevik socialism, religion and intellectual dissent were primary potential agencies for opposition, and Lenin was determined to grind them into the dust.
Lenin: A Biography Page 58