Lenin: A Biography

by Robert John Service

  Next day, after receiving a positive reply from Trotski about the Georgian affair, he asked Volodicheva to deliver the letter to Stalin. Then he dictated yet another letter. This one went to Mdivani and the Georgian communist group:18

  Respected comrades,

  With all my heart I am following your case. I am indignant at the uncouthness of Ordzhonikidze and the indulging of him by Stalin and Dzierżyński. I’ll prepare some notes and a speech for you.

  With respect,

  Lenin

  Little did he know that his entourage, including his wife, decided that the letter to Stalin should not be handed over to its addressee. Already on 5 March Lenin’s physical condition had taken a turn for the worse, and it must be assumed that Nadezhda Konstantinovna was worried lest the dispute with Stalin should finish him off altogether. He had a bad night on 6–7 March, and again lost the use of the extremities of the right side of his body. In the morning, however, Maria Volodicheva decided that she could not disobey Lenin’s wishes for ever; she took the letter across the Kremlin to Stalin. Copies were given, as Lenin had demanded, to Kamenev and Zinoviev.

  Stalin was stupefied: ‘This isn’t Lenin speaking, it’s his illness.’ With some poise and much Georgian pride he wrote back: ‘If my wife were to behave incorrectly and you had to punish her, I would not have considered it my right to intervene. But inasmuch as you insist, I’m willing to apologise to Nadezhda Konstantinovna.’19 Kamenev, however, persuaded him that Lenin would be more offended by such a concession than by the original offence. Stalin rewrote his letter, but not before he had a terrible quarrel over the telephone with Maria Ilinichna. Yet he was sufficiently worried to moderate the words of his response to Lenin.

  Stalin need not have bothered. By that time Lenin was in no condition to read anything. He could not even speak. Nor could he move without being carried. Nadezhda Konstantinovna and Maria Ilinichna took turns at his bedside; the doctors watched with equal anxiety. On 10 March, Lenin suffered an immense spasm. His right side was completely paralysed and he could move his left hand only with the greatest difficulty. He could not sleep, and had awful headaches. Any hope he had of recovery had virtually vanished. Nadezhda Konstantinovna and Maria Ilinichna nursed him, and Nadezhda Konstantinovna had lessons in how to teach people to talk again after a stroke. His will to survive, apart from days when he would gladly have swallowed a cyanide pill if he could, was intact. But he accepted the need to take things gently and to move to the Big House at Gorki. It took two months before the doctors thought him strong enough to be transported. But a vehicle with special springs was got ready and on 15 May 1923 it carried him, under guard, out of the Kremlin to the countryside south of Moscow.

  Stalin had been let off the hook. The Twelfth Party Congress, to which Lenin had hoped to present his political testament, passed with Stalin being able to give the Central Committee report on ‘the national question’. Mdivani and the Georgian communists were defeated. Lenin’s remarks about Stalin in the testament were read out to the heads of delegations, but were not discussed on the floor of the Congress. Trotski failed to rise to the occasion and Kamenev and Zinoviev, worried more that Trotski might make a bid for power than that Stalin might later turn on them, supported the General Secretary. Stalin survived without irreparable damage to his authority and status. He kept the General Secretaryship. Now he had to hope that Lenin would never return to his political career. For Stalin, the signs were propitious.

  Meanwhile Lenin was almost totally incapacitated; and Professor Strumpel, summoned from Germany, reasserted that he was probably suffering from an advanced form of syphilis and that the careful application of arsenic and iodine preparations should be continued.20 Councils of doctors held in March, April and May, however, failed to produce a diagnostic consensus. No specialist could prove his point of view and several of them were in any case still baffled. The pitiful condition of the patient was obvious. British communists had bought and sent Lenin an electric wheelchair from J. A. Carter and Co. in central London. Its operational lever was positioned on the right-hand side, where Lenin had no bodily usage; in any case he refused to use the vehicle and insisted that it should be passed on to a Civil War veteran. He was dressed plainly in a khaki tunic and high-laced walking shoes. But the most he could do was sit with Nadezhda Konstantinovna and wait for her to work out what he was thinking; a few grunts and groans were all he could manage. But the usual thing was for him to say: ‘Here, here, here.’21 She was not always sure what he was trying to say; she had to make an informed guess and carry on the conversations regardless.

  When it all became too much, Nadezhda Konstantinovna collapsed in tears. (Once Lenin had to give her a handkerchief.) Maria Ilinichna, a true Ulyanov, did not let her grief show. To the astonishment of Lenin’s bodyguard Pëtr Pakaln, not once did she sob.22 Yet both women experienced acute strain. After March 1923 Lenin asked first Maria and then Nadya for poison. Maria felt so coerced by him that she had to trick him by offering a phial of quinine. Nadya rejected the requests entirely, as did Lidia Fotieva.23 None of the women could predict how the situation would develop and they had ceased bothering to ask the doctors. It was obvious to both Nadya and Maria that Lenin’s condition baffled contemporary medical science. Maria felt bitter about this. If they knew so little for certain, she very reasonably concluded, they should not have experimented by allowing him back to work in October 1922.24 Nadya, for her part, had accepted his emotional need to stay somehow involved in political activity, but she too scorned the doctors as being next to useless and wrote to friends in Moscow saying that she doubted that there was any hope left for her husband.25

  And yet there were days when he felt a lot better. For example, he discovered that one of the comrades convalescing at Gorki, in the adjacent building, was none other than the man with whom he had debated the merits of Marxism in 1889–90, Alexander Preobrazhenski. Those days at Alakaevka in Samara seemed like a different epoch. Lenin was overjoyed to meet and embrace his old friend, who was suffering from a cardiac ailment. Indeed he refused to leave Preobrazhenski’s quarters that night or the next.26 Slumping down on the bed, he exclaimed: ‘I’m done in!’ A distraught Maria Ilinichna trailed after him for fear that he might collapse.27

  This was in July 1923. Another escapade took place in October, when Lenin suddenly took it into his head to make a trip to the Kremlin. Maria Ilinichna remonstrated with him: ‘Listen, Volodya, they won’t let you into the Kremlin: you haven’t got an entrance card.’ But he only laughed and muttered incomprehensibly.28 His chauffeur Gil brought the Rolls-Royce from the garage behind the Big House and, accompanied by Nadya and Maria, drove Lenin to the capital. As Maria had anticipated, they were not immediately granted entrance through the Kremlin gates. But again Lenin merely laughed. Back he went to his familiar rooms. To the apartment he had shared with Nadezhda Konstantinovna and Maria Ilinichna; to the Central Committee meeting room; and lastly to the Sovnarkom chamber. On the way he asked for particular books to be taken from the shelves, and checked that everything was as it should be in his absence. Just once, when he gazed around the Sovnarkom chamber with its long, green-baize table, did he become disconsolate.29 It was there that he had directed the government through the years of the Civil War and of the early New Economic Policy. The memories unblocked his emotions; for a moment it seemed that he could not continue with the visit. But he recovered. By the time his little tour was over, it was too late to return to Gorki, and Lenin, Nadya and Maria stayed overnight in their old apartment.

  This was the last such jaunt Lenin took outside the Gorki estate. Winter had set in. The countryside was covered in snow, and in the bright, low sun of the early afternoon there was no more wonderful vista in Russia. Miles and miles of leafless birch trees stretched to the horizon. The two miles of dirt road from the rail-stop at the village of Gerasimovka were cleared and relaid so that the doctors could come and go. But generally the peasants, servants, patients and their relatives were isolate
d from the rest of the world. They might just as well have been living at Shushenskoe in Siberian exile. No agricultural work could be done on the collective farm and no building maintenance was possible on the Big House’s exterior. Time stood still.

  Until mid-autumn Nadya had been able to wheel her husband around as they hunted for fungi. Lenin had loved to beat her in spotting them before her. Competitive as ever, he was pleased that he could do some things that others could not.30 But in the last weeks of the year they went out simply to enjoy the panorama across the flat fields. Riding in a horse-drawn sleigh, they were accompanied by Pëtr Pakaln, the medical assistant Vladimir Rukavishnikov or one of the male nurses.31 Some days Lenin was very buoyant, and Nadya wrote a postcard to the Armand children rejoicing that he could ‘walk around independently (with a stick)’.32 The doctors too were pleased with him. Indeed Pëtr Pakaln reported to the Cheka – and indirectly to Stalin in the Party Secretariat – that Lenin ‘felt magnificent’.33 As he had done in the previous winter, ‘Grandad Lenin’ gave orders for a fir tree to be placed in the Big House for a children’s party. Anna Ilinichna’s adopted son Gora Lozgachëv, now a strapping sixteen-year-old, was allowed by Maria Ilinichna to join in the fun with other invited children.34 Lenin also welcomed visits from political associates. Among those who came out for a chat with him were party leaders Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Yevgeni Preobrazhenski.35

  Yet there were many counter-indications about his condition: in November and December 1923 alone he suffered seven collapses.36 Quite what he thought about this is unknown. This was partly a technical problem of oral disability, but he had always kept his own counsel. Nadya, who had been drawn back towards him by his need for her to nurse him, resented this reticence and told Bukharin that it was as if a wall existed between them.37 But she kept on trying to break her way through to him.

  In defiance of the Politburo, she talked to him about politics; but even she dared not agitate him by telling him about a dispute that had erupted in the central party leadership. In autumn 1923 Trotski had published a series of articles, The New Course, in which he criticised the party’s bureaucratic condition and the state’s weak and inefficient control over the economy. A Left Opposition gathered around Trotski. The rest of the Politburo fought back; Stalin, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin stood shoulder to shoulder and organised their followers in Moscow and the provinces to counteract Trotski’s campaign. The ascendant party leadership appealed for unity and loyalty and used every organisational trick in the book to vilify the Left Opposition. All this suited Stalin. Trotski had put himself in the role of the party splitter and could not call upon Lenin to help him out. The rest of the Politburo claimed that Trotski lusted after personal power and wished to wreck the New Economic Policy. At the Thirteenth Party Conference, held in Moscow in January 1924, the Left Opposition went down to a crushing defeat. By then Trotski was away from the field of combat; physical exhaustion had compelled him to take a lengthy rest in Sukhumi on the Abkhazian coast of the Black Sea.

  Nadya knew that this was the very schism that Lenin had predicted in his ‘Letter to the Congress’. She fibbed in order to keep him calm. As she read him her selections from Pravda, she told him that the party had emerged united from the Thirteenth Party Conference. The deceit seemed to work. He ‘felt wonderful’ on 18 January 1924 and next day went out for a ride in the horse-drawn sleigh.38 Bukharin had come out to stay at Gorki for a few days’ rest and to do a bit of writing; he stayed in the building opposite the Big House. Maria Ilinichna bustled around as normal and Nadezhda Konstantinovna went on reading to Lenin. On 20 January there was reason to celebrate: it was a full month since Lenin had had a collapse.

  On 21 January, too, there seemed no cause for concern. Lenin woke up at 10.30 a.m. and went to the bathroom. This was not particularly late for him during his convalescence. But then he announced that he was not feeling well and after drinking half a cup of black coffee he went back to his bed at 11.00 a.m. There he slept. At 3.00 p.m. he felt a little brighter and sipped another half-cup and a bowl of clear soup. Professor Osipov went to the bedroom to make his daily examination of the patient and found nothing especially worrisome. Lenin’s pulse was a trifle fast, but his temperature was normal. His speech was no worse than for some months. But then a crisis began without warning at 5.40 p.m. Lenin, propped up in bed, felt the tremor of an incipient attack. Nausea invaded his entire body. The doctors on duty – Osipov, Förster and Yelistratov – held a hurried consultation, attended by their assistant Vladimir Rukavishnikov. Also present were Nadezhda Konstantinovna and Maria Ilinichna.39 Lenin fell into a coma. He stayed in it much longer than in December 1923, when he had several times been unconscious for twenty minutes. His heartbeat slowed and Maria Ilinichna sent out for some camphor to restore it. This was an emergency.

  Bukharin heard that something was happening and ran across to the Big House to investigate. The guards were in their customary positions around the building. But inside nothing was as normal. The lights were on upstairs and Pakaln, who usually patrolled the ground floor, was nowhere to be seen.40 Bukharin rushed upstairs. There he discovered Pakaln, who wanted to be with Nadezhda Konstantinovna and Maria Ilinichna as Lenin fought for his life. Lenin’s temperature had risen sharply. He tossed and turned in the narrow bed and was covered in sweat. He roared in pain. Bukharin was there for the end at 6.50 p.m.:41

  When I ran into Ilich’s room, full of doctors and stacked with medicines, Ilich let out a last sigh. His face fell back and went terribly white. He let out a wheeze, his hands dropped. Ilich, Ilich was no more.

  The doctors lifted his eyelids to test whether there was still a chance. But there could be only one diagnosis. Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov–Lenin, man of struggle, had breathed his last.

  A telephone call was put through immediately to the Kremlin. The Politburo had made arrangements for such an outcome and all its members except Trotski met in Zinoviev’s Kremlin flat to confer. Kamenev rang Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich to instruct him to go out to Gorki to supervise the disposal of the body. On 22 January, Bonch-Bruevich went out by train to Gerasimovka with Lenin’s sister Anna and brother Dmitri. Next day the coffin was carried through a line of mourning villagers down to the railway station and transported to Moscow. The corpse was laid out in the House of Trade Unions. In the biting cold, mourners moved upon Moscow from the rest of the USSR. Obituaries filled the newspapers. Everyone was gripped by uncertainty as to what would happen next. The Cheka was put on alert in case anti-Bolshevik political groups should attempt something against the regime. A solemn session of the Congress of Soviets was held on 26 January, where speeches were made in commemoration of the late leader. Central Committee leaders took turns in swearing oaths to his ideas and example. ‘We swear to you, comrade Lenin,’ declared Stalin, ‘that we shall not spare our lives in strengthening the union of the working people of the entire world – the Communist International.’

  The funeral took place on 27 January 1924, six days after Lenin’s death. It was the coldest day of the year. The trumpeters had to smear vodka on their instruments to stop their breath freezing on their lips. The crowd on Red Square sang the Internationale as the body of Lenin was brought up from the House of Trade Unions. Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin, Bukharin, Molotov, Tomski, Rudzutak and Dzierżyński held the coffin; Trotski was still in Sukhumi, having been ‘reassured’ by Stalin that he need not return. All business was halted in Moscow. Factory whistles and hooters were sounded. The same scene was repeated elsewhere in the cities, towns and villages of the USSR. Trains were stopped in their tracks. Boats were moored. A vault had been prepared in front of the Kremlin Wall on Red Square. Lenin was lowered into the earth at four o’clock in the afternoon. It was already dark and getting darker.

  LENIN: THE AFTERLIFE

  The dead man did not rest in peace. On the orders of the Politburo, Lenin’s corpse was kept on ice in the central Moscow morgue until scientists had completed the experiments enabling them to embalm
it and put it on permanent display. Although Nadezhda Konstantinovna objected, she was getting used to her reduced authority since she knew that the Politburo decision was not subject to appeal. The decision was definitive: the body of her husband was to be housed in a Red Square mausoleum on the north-eastern side of the Kremlin. The structure would be wooden. (The present marble edifice was constructed in 1930.) The wintry conditions were so harsh that dynamite was needed to blast a hole in the frozen ground. The Bolshevik leadership announced that factory workers had written to the official authorities requesting Lenin’s corporeal conservation and exhibition. This was a blatant political fabrication: the idea came not from factory workers but from the Politburo. Inside the Politburo the prime advocate was none other than Iosif Stalin, who believed that the corpse in the mausoleum would serve as an object of unifying importance for the citizens of the USSR and for the followers of communism around the world.

  The Lenin Mausoleum is now such a cliché of the world’s architecture that it can be hard to understand how bizarre the plan was in 1924. Although the ancient Egyptians embalmed their Pharaohs, they had then sealed them up in wooden cases and locked them in the subterranean chambers of stone pyramids outside Cairo. Lenin, dressed in a dark suit, was to be visible to visitors to Red Square. It is true that the bones of men and women designated as saints by the Russian Orthodox Church had been revered by the faithful; but no saint had been turned into a mannequin for daily public scrutiny. The perceived need for ‘mausoleumisation’ was a measure of the Politburo’s insecurity. Lenin had been the most popular of its members; his Land Decree of 1917 and his New Economic Policy of 1921 were widely admired by fellow citizens. Politburo members wished to deflect some of this aura of esteem towards themselves.