Lenin: A biography

The Ulyanovs’ marriage, a union of two mature people, was itself mature, practical, quiet and devoid of either passionate love or emotional upheavals. Unlike her mother, Nadezhda was an obliging, even-tempered and balanced woman. Exceptionally intelligent and hard-working, she at once assumed her rôle as assistant to the man who was working hard, through his writing and contacts, to establish himself as a dominant force in the Russian Marxist revolutionary movement while still in Siberian exile. After the wedding, the couple moved from the house of a certain A.D. Zyryanov to that of a peasant woman called A.P. Petrova. Lenin’s work on his first major book, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, began to make more rapid progress. Between jaunts on the river, hunting and walking in the forest, he consumed a vast amount of economic, philosophical and historical literature, which was sent to order by his mother, Potresov and Pavel Axelrod, a close associate of Plekhanov’s. The first book he read in Shushenskoe was The World Market and the Agricultural Crisis by Alexander Helphand, who wrote under the alias of Parvus, and who would emerge in a far more significant rôle in Lenin’s life in later years.

Nadezhda settled straight away into serving as her husband’s workmate, helping him select material, rewriting passages, listening as he read her some of his chapters, though rarely offering critical comment. They were destined to be childless, though neither apparently ever confided their disappointment to anyone. Perhaps there was a clue in the letter he wrote to his mother from Pskov, having left Shushenskoe and Nadezhda temporarily: ‘Nadya must still rest: the doctor found, as she wrote to me a week ago, that her (woman’s) illness requires sustained treatment and that she must rest for 4–6 weeks (I sent her more money, I got 100 roubles from Vodovozova), as the treatment is going to cost quite a bit.’86 Later, when they were abroad, Nadezhda contracted exophthalmic goitre, or Graves’ Disease, and had to undergo surgery. Lenin, again writing to his mother, reported that ‘Nadya was very poorly, very high temperature and delirium, and it gave me quite a scare’.87 It is worth noting, perhaps, that between them, all of the Ulyanov siblings produced only two children – Dmitri had a son and a daughter, Olga, who is still alive at the time of writing (1994). Nadezhda says nothing about this in her memoirs, although occasionally she allows the pain of her personal unfulfilment to break through when describing the lives of others. She commented, for instance, that Vera Zasulich, with whom she was extremely close and who lived alone, missed not having a family: ‘She had an enormous need for a family. One had only to see how lovingly she played with Dimka’s fair-haired little boy.’88 ‘Dimka’ was Lenin’s brother Dmitri, the sole parent of his generation of Ulyanovs.

Krupskaya’s prominent place in Soviet history is, obviously enough, explained by the fact that she was Lenin’s wife. It might be argued that she also played a part in her own right, as witnessed by the eleven editions of her collected writings on education that were published by 1963. But all of her ideas on Communist education were based on her husband’s comments, and do not merit special attention. Her memoirs, however, do have historical value, especially when she is dealing with Lenin’s last years and his illness. Her notes entitled ‘The last six months of the life of V.I. Lenin’, read together with the memoirs of Lenin’s sister Maria, give the fullest account of that fateful period, and draw aside the veil on many hitherto unknown details, though neither of these women could reveal everything they knew, and their most informative reminiscences remained under lock and key in the Party archives.89

The marriage which began without strong love became closer over the years, but Nadezhda was in effect Lenin’s shadow, her life having meaning only because she was linked to him. When they went abroad, she soon adapted to the leisurely pace her husband set, as the letters Lenin wrote to his mother between 1900 and 1914 indicate: ‘I still follow my summer style of life, walking, swimming and doing nothing’; from Finland he wrote: ‘The rest here is wonderful, swimming, walks, no people around, nothing to do. Having no people around and nothing to do is best of all for me’; from France: ‘We’re going to Brittany for a holiday, probably this Saturday’; from Poland to his mother in Vologda: ‘It’s already spring here: the snow’s all gone, it’s very warm, we go without galoshes, the sun’s shining especially bright above Cracow, it’s hard to think that this is “wet” Cracow. Too bad you and Manyasha [Maria] have to live in that miserable dump!’90

Inessa Armand

The telegram lay on the desk in front of Lenin, but he seemed unable to grasp its message, and had to read it several times: ‘Top priority. To Lenin, Sovnarkom, Moscow. Unable to save Comrade Inessa Armand sick with cholera STOP She died 24 September [1920] STOP Sending body to Moscow signed Nazarov.’91 The shock was all the greater because earlier that very day Ordzhonikidze, his emissary in the Caucasus, had told him that Inessa was fine, when Lenin had asked him to see that she and her son were being taken care of. Nor could he forget that it had been at his insistence that she went to the south for a rest. She had wanted to go to France, but he had dissuaded her. It was so absurd, so senseless. Why hadn’t the doctors been able to help? Why cholera? He was shattered. As Alexandra Kollontai, a senior Bolshevik who knew them both well, said later: ‘He could not survive Inessa Armand. The death of Inessa precipitated the illness which was fatal.’92

Lenin had no close friends. It would be hard to find someone, apart from his mother, for whom he showed greater concern than Inessa Armand. In his last letter to her, around the middle of August 1920, he had written:

Dear friend,

I was sad to learn that you [he addressed her formally as Vy] are overtired and not happy with your work and the people around you (or your colleagues at work). Can’t I do something for you, get you into a sanatorium? I’ll do anything with great pleasure. If you go to France I will, of course, help with that, too: I’m a bit concerned, in fact I’m afraid, I’m really afraid you could get into trouble … They’ll arrest you and keep you there a long time … You must be careful. Wouldn’t it be better to go to Norway (where many of them speak Engish), or Holland? Or Germany as a Frenchwoman, a Russian (or a Canadian?). Best not to go to France where they could put you inside for a long time and are not even likely to exchange you for anyone. Better not go to France.

I’ve had a marvellous holiday, got tanned, didn’t read a line or take a single phone call. The hunting used to be good, but it’s been all ruined. I hear your name everywhere: ‘Things were all right with them here,’ and so on. If you don’t fancy a sanatorium, why not go to the South? To Sergo [Ordzhonikidze] in the Caucasus? Sergo will arrange rest, sunshine, interesting work, he can fix it all up. Think about it.

He signed off conventionally as ‘Yours, Lenin’.93

Lenin had been hearing Inessa’s name everywhere because he was close to the Armand family estate in the village of Yeldigino in Moscow province. What there was to hunt in August is unclear.

On the same day he wrote, as head of the Soviet government: [To whom it may concern] ‘I request that you help in every way possible to arrange the best accommodation and treatment for the writer, Comrade Inessa Fedorovna Armand, and her elder son. I request that you give complete trust and all possible assistance to these Party comrades with whom I am personally acquainted.’94 He also cabled Ordzhonikidze, asking him to put himself out over Inessa’s safety and accommodation in Kislovodsk, and ordered his secretaries to help see her off to the Caucasus. Although Russia was still enduring the civil war, the Bolshevik leadership were accustomed to frequent holidays. Hence Lenin could insist on the fateful trip.

For a decade, since they had met in Paris in 1909, Inessa Armand had occupied an enormous space in the life of a man whose dedication to the Great Idea left little or no room for anything else. She had succeeded in touching chords hidden deep in his near-puritanical heart. He had felt a constant need to be with her, write to her, talk to her. His wife did not stand in their way. As Alexandra Kollontai recalled in the 1920s, in conversation with her colleague at the Soviet legation in Norway, Marcel Body, Krupskaya was ‘au courant’. She knew how closely ‘Lenin was attached to Inessa and many times expressed the intention of leaving’, but Lenin had persuaded her to stay.95

This appears to have been one of those rare triangles in which all three people involved behaved decently. Feelings of attachment and love do not readily lend themselves to rational explanation. If Lenin’s life was filled with the turbulence of politics and revolutionary activity, on the personal level it had been monotonous, flat, boring. Inessa entered his life in emigration like a comet. It is pointless to speculate what it was about her that attracted him. She was extremely beautiful, elegant and full of creative energy, and that was perhaps enough. Also, she was open and passionate about everything she did, whether it was caring for her children or the revolution or the routine Party jobs she was asked to do. She was an exceptional person, emotional, responsive and exciting. For all his old-fashioned views on family life, Lenin was unable to suppress the strong feelings she evoked in him. For the historian, however, it is as difficult to write about feelings as it is to try to convey in words the sound of a symphony.

In her later memoirs, Krupskaya often refers to Inessa, but usually in passing and in another context: ‘Inessa’s entire entourage lived in her house. We lived at the other end of the village and ate with everyone else’; ‘Vladimir Ilyich wrote a speech, Inessa translated it’; ‘all our people in Paris were then feeling strongly drawn to Russia: Inessa, Safarov and others were getting ready to go back’; ‘It was good to be busy in Serenburg. Soon Inessa came to join us’; ‘Our entire life was filled with Party concerns and affairs, more like student life than family life, and we were glad of Inessa.’96 To Krupskaya’s credit, having once decided the tone of her relationship with Inessa, as a Party comrade, she never changed it. Inessa’s presence was an inevitability which she accepted with dignity. Occasionally, she abandons her own conventions and writes in greater detail: ‘For hours we would walk along the leaf-strewn forest lanes. Usually we were in a three-some, Vladimir Ilyich and Inessa and I … Sometimes we would sit on a sunny slope, covered with shrubs. Ilyich would sketch outlines of his speeches, getting the text right, while I learned Italian … Inessa would be sewing a skirt and enjoying the warmth of the autumn sunshine.’97 It was perhaps during such walks that Inessa would talk about her origins, her parents and the dramas in her life.

She was born, according to the register of the 18th arrondissement, in Paris at 2 p.m. on 8 May 1874 at 63, Rue de la Chapelle, and was named Inessa-Elisabeth. She was the daughter of Theodore Stephan, a French opera singer aged twenty-six, and an English-French mother, Nathalie Wild, aged twenty-four, of no profession. Her parents were not married at the time of her birth,98 but they legalized their relationship later at St Mary’s parish church in Stoke Newington, London. Inessa’s father died young, leaving his family of three small daughters penniless. Her mother became a singing teacher in London. The turning point in Inessa’s life was a trip to Moscow in 1879 with her grandmother and aunt, who taught music and French, and who together were capable of giving the girl a good education. The archives tell us little about her life, and the best Russian account so far to emerge is Pavel Podlyashchuk’s Tovarishch Inessa, first published in 1963 and revised with new material in 1987. This has been superseded by Ralph Carter Elwood’s Inessa Armand: Revolutionary and Feminist, published in 1992.

A gifted young woman, fluent in French, Russian and English, and an excellent pianist, Inessa became a governess. She took after her handsome father in looks, attracting the attention of a good many men, and in October 1893, at the age of nineteen, she married Alexander Evgenievich Armand, the son of a wealthy merchant. The wedding took place in the village of Pushkino, outside Moscow, in the presence of members of Moscow’s business élite, to which the Armands themselves belonged.99

Everything seemed as it should in a successful, wealthy family. Inessa had a handsome, good husband, children, trips to the South and abroad. In the course of eight years she gave birth to five children, three boys and two girls. Despite her preoccupation with her family, she managed to read a great deal and was drawn to the social and political writings of Lavrov, Mikhailovsky and Rousseau. By the late 1890s she had also become seriously concerned with feminist issues, an interest she retained all her life. To all appearances, she was living in harmony with her husband, when suddenly, on the eve of the 1905 revolution, she left him, taking the children with her. She had been consumed by passion for another man, her husband’s younger brother Vladimir.

Everyone suffered in this great family drama, yet there were apparently no dreadful scenes, mutual recriminations or arm-twisting. Inessa was exercising her commitment to the principle of ‘free love’. Two weeks before she died in 1920 she would confide to her diary: ‘For romantics, love occupies first place in their lives, it comes before everything else.’100 By this time she had come to see love with different eyes, but she was recalling herself as a younger woman, when her dramatic departure from the marital home shifted her life onto a completely unexpected course.

Her life with the young Vladimir did not last long. Since 1903 she had become involved in illegal propaganda activities on behalf of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in Moscow, and in 1907 she was arrested (for the third time) and exiled to the North above Archangel. Vladimir followed her, but he soon developed tuberculosis and went to Switzerland for treatment. There was, however, no cure to be found, and two weeks after she had fled from exile abroad to join him, at the beginning of 1909, he died.

With the financial help of her ever-tolerant husband, who was also caring for the children, Inessa, now aged thirty-five, enrolled to study economics at the New University in Brussels. In the same year, in Paris, she met Lenin, whose name was well known to her, as a member of the Party since 1903, and thereafter for a decade she occupied a special place in his life, as the voluminous correspondence between them shows. The official version has always insisted that their friendship, although personal, was essentially one of Party comrades, lacking any suggestion of intimacy. Unofficially, it was always believed that Lenin was simply ‘obliged’ to love only Krupskaya, and would never have lowered himself to the rôle of adulterer.*

We have already seen that the Party leadership learned in the 1930s that there was a female acquaintance of Lenin’s in Paris who possessed a number of his intimate letters to her, which she would not consent to have published while Krupskaya was alive. This woman had been receiving a generous pension from the Soviet government, thanks entirely to her earlier friendship with Lenin.

While many of Lenin’s letters to Armand concerning Party matters have been published, those of a more intimate nature appear either to have vanished or to have suffered cuts at the hands of his editors. The following lines were removed from a letter he wrote to her in 1914: ‘Please bring when you come (i.e. bring with you) all our letters (sending them by registered mail is not convenient: a registered letter can easily be opened by friends. And so on … ) Please bring all the letters, come yourself and we’ll talk about it.’102 In this letter Lenin used the familiar form of address, ty. This period was the peak of their friendship, and it is most likely that he wanted Inessa to bring him the letters so he could destroy them. Inessa’s Western biographer, Carter Elwood, is of the opinion that Lenin may have wanted her to bring the letters because they contained potentially embarrassing comments about fellow Bolsheviks.103 Whatever the reason, there can be little doubt that theirs was a uniquely close friendship.

Krupskaya was Lenin’s loyal comrade, his uncomplaining wife and dedicated helper. As well as Graves’ Disease she had a weak heart, which was perhaps one reason why she was childless. The writer Ilya Ehrenburg is reputed to have said: ‘One look at Krupskaya, and you can see that Lenin wasn’t interested in women.’ This was not so. It is quite possible, moreover, that what Ehrenburg found unappealing might have brought Lenin warm comfort. In any event, once Lenin met Inessa, they were virtually inseparable. She followed the Ulyanovs everywhere, always finding lodgings nearby and meeting both Lenin and Krupskaya frequently. She became almost an integral part of their family relations, and, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn has noted perceptively, Krupskaya saw her task as ensuring Lenin’s peace of mind by always giving Inessa a warm and friendly reception.104

Lenin and Inessa shared a deep feeling. They had their secrets, as Inessa herself wrote from Paris in December 1913 in a letter which, naturally, remained hidden in the archives as utterly unsuitable for the Party’s propaganda purposes. The Ulyanovs had been living in Cracow in Austrian Poland since October, remaining there until May 1914. The letter was a very long one, and we reproduce only extracts from it here. She uses the familiar form throughout:

Saturday morning.

My dear, Here I am in Ville Lumière and my first impression is one of disgust. Everything about the place grates – the grey of the streets, the over-dressed women, the accidentally overheard conversations, even the French language … It was sad that Arosa was so temporary, somehow transitory. Arosa was so close to Cracow, while Paris is, well, so final. We have parted, parted, you and I, my dear! And it is so painful. I know, I just feel that you won’t be coming here. As I gazed at the familiar places, I realised all too clearly, as never before, what a large place you occupied in my life, here in Paris, so that all our activity here is tied by a thousand threads to the thought of you. I wasn’t at all in love with you then, though even then I did love you. Even now I would manage without the kisses, if only I could see you, to talk with you occasionally would be such a joy – and it couldn’t cause pain to anyone. Why did I have to give that up? You ask me if I’m angry that it was you who ‘carried out’ the separation. No, I don’t think you did it for yourself.

There was much that was good in Paris in my relations with N.K. [Krupskaya]. In one of our last chats she told me I had become dear and close to her only recently … Only at Longjumeau and then last autumn over the translations and so on. I have become rather accustomed to you. I so loved not just listening to you, but looking at you as you spoke. First of all, your face is so animated, and secondly it was easy for me to look at you because you didn’t notice …

In the last part of the letter, marked ‘Sunday evening’, Inessa writes at length about a forthcoming lecture she is to give, and asks:

When you write to me about business matters, give me some indication of what the KZO [the Committee of Russian Social Democratic Party Organizations Abroad] may talk about and what it may not …

Well, my dear, that’s enough for today, I want to send this off. There was no letter from you yesterday! I’m rather afraid my letters are not reaching you – I sent you three letters (this is the fourth) and a telegram. Is it possible you haven’t received them? I get the most unlikely ideas thinking about it. I’ve also written to N.K., to your brother, and to Zina [Zinaida Lilina, the wife of Zinoviev]. Has nobody received anything? I send you a big kiss.

Your Inessa.105

The tone, eloquence and content of this letter leave little doubt about the nature of Inessa’s feelings. Her remark that she would be satisfied if she could just see Lenin, and that ‘it couldn’t cause pain to anyone’, places a question mark over Lenin’s reasons for leaving Paris in June 1912. Plainly Inessa’s presence in the Ulyanov family orbit had at first met Krupskaya’s natural resistance. The fact that the three-cornered relationship was not a simple one is evidenced by the frequent cuts in the letters made by various Soviet editors, tasked with maintaining Lenin’s purity. Many of these excised parts have simply vanished. Not all of them, however.

Lenin’s letter to Inessa of 13 January 1917, when he was still in Switzerland, was published in volume 49 of the fifth edition of his works. Following the words, ‘Dear friend,’ the following lines were removed: ‘Your latest letters were so full of sadness and evoked such gloomy thoughts in me and aroused such feelings of guilt, that I can’t come to my senses …’106 The letter goes on in the same vein. Plainly, Lenin the puritan found the bond, which went well beyond platonic friendship, a hard one to bear. For Inessa too, accustomed as she was to yielding completely to her emotions, the secrecy and deceit were unbearable.

There are many such cuts in the ‘complete’ works. A week after the above letter, on 23 January 1917, Lenin wrote again:

Dear friend

… Apparently the lack of reply to several of my latest letters indicates – in connection with something else – a certain changed mood, a decision, your situation. At the end of your last letter a word was repeated twice. I went and checked. Nothing. I don’t know what to think, whether you are offended at something or were too distracted by the move or something else … I’m afraid to ask, as I know you don’t like questions, and so I’ve decided to think that you don’t like being questioned and that’s that. So, I’m sorry for [the questions] and won’t repeat them, of course.107

This rigmarole could only be understood by the two people concerned, and plainly they had to take Krupskaya’s presence into consideration.

Lenin’s sojourn in Cracow was terminated on 26 July (8 August) 1914 when he was arrested in Nowy Targ on suspicion of spying. The authorities quickly released him, however, when a number of social democrats, notably Victor Alder in Vienna, but also Feliks Kon and Yakov Ganetsky, interceded, explaining that he was a sworn enemy of tsarism, with which Austria was now at war. Lenin’s two weeks in Austrian police custody became in Soviet historiography an act of vast revolutionary importance, for he was alleged to have spent the time ‘reflecting on the tasks and tactics now facing the Bolshevik Party; talking to imprisoned peasants, giving them legal advice on how to expedite their cases, writing requests and statements for them and so on’.108

The Austrians did not yet realise that Lenin would become their ally. He hated both tsar and Kaiser, but, as he wrote to one of his trusted agents, Alexander Shlyapnikov, in October 1914, ‘tsarism is a hundred times worse than kaiserism’.109 Yet even what they already knew about him prompted the Austrian authorities to cable the Nowy Targ prosecutor to ‘free Vladimir Ulyanov at once’.110 Within a couple of weeks Lenin and Krupskaya were in Zurich and shortly after in Berne, where Lenin was soon reunited with Inessa. According to the official version, he suggested she give lectures, ‘work to unite the left socialist women of different countries’, helped her prepare a publication for women workers, and even ‘criticized her outline of the brochure’, appointed her to take part in the International Socialist Youth Conference, and gave her a host of Party missions to perform. This version does not, however, report that she was a frequent visitor at the Ulyanovs, that they often went for walks together, that she played the piano for Lenin, and that she joined the couple on holiday in Serenburg.